Thursday, July 25, 2013

The Rebbe Was Wrong - Really!

I received an email from a fan of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, defending the position that the sun goes around the Earth. The Lubavitcher Rebbe was not only a Young Earth Creationist, but a Geocentrist as well. For the sake of this blog, I will ignore all of the nonsense that was used to rationalize why the Rebbe was "right", including the misuse of "special relativity". The key sentence that got to me was this:
What recommends heliocentrism (plus the sun's, galaxy's, etc... motions) is the elegence of the model and its ability to more easily get more correct answers. Not right vs wrong.
Yes, this person believes that the idea that the sun goes around the Earth is not wrong, it's just the viewing the sun in the center allows one to get correct answers more easily. To him, they are both the same, and easily switchable.

So I decided to put this one to bed and I responded as follows (I am providing some graphics here that were not in the original response since the text-only email list that I was one did not permit it, and visuals always help. Also, anything with a "Note:" prefix is something I added here to make it more clear to the blog reader, or to make a calculation change, since I had originally composed this reply just before bed and pressed SEND without reviewing what I wrote.)



Dear ___,
 
Geocentrists incorrectly hold a Solar system that looks like this:
 

 
(Note: geocentrists also ignore the fact that Mars and Venus cannot skim across the face of the sun, and hence, there will be many millions of miles of gap on either side - 129 million in the case of Mars, and 67 million miles in the case of Venus.)

If you were not aware of it, one of our telescopes, NASA's Casinni Satellite was sent towards the sun. Its purpose was to slingshot back past the Earth as it head towards Saturn, using the gravitation of other objects to do this, with the sun always behind.
 
 
It has been heading away from the sun on a slight curve for several years. The sun keeps retreating. The sun has never gotten closer as it's instruments measures visual and other forms of light. (NASA would be really interested to know that the sun bobs and weaves).

 Last year, as it was approaching Saturn, it took a shot of Venus passing before the sun, a sun that Cassini had left behind. That doesn't play out well for the geocentric view where Venus is always between the earth and the sun.
 
 
Look up the speeds of Venus to see the problem.
(Note: from the geocentrist view, the sun is spinning around the Earth at 10,000 MPH, caught in the gravity of this smaller object, and must get around the Earth in 365 days, making it faster than Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and so forth. In fact, from the point of view of the geocentrist, Saturn spins around the Earth at 1/30th of the speed of the sun. This would mean that in one Saturn year, the Sun would bob back and forth as a mean distance of 96,000,000 miles 30 times, something that the sunlight monitoring units on the space probes would have noticed. From the view of the much slower Saturn, the 1-million mile diameter sun would always be growing as it advances 96 million miles and shrinking as it goes away 96 million miles.
Look at the Geocentric graphic posted above, once more, to see the problem)

A few days ago Cassini's cameras looked back at us from Saturn and took a photo of our pale blue dot (Earth).

Now, according to the Geocentrist view, the sun takes 365 days to go around the earth, and Saturn, that slow gas ball, takes 10,832 days to go around the Earth. Or, from a Geocentric view, during the 2 years from Jupiter to Saturn, the sun was 96-million miles closer and then 96-million miles further from Jupiter and Saturn, doing this 29 times! Hence my "bob and weave" mention. 
(Note: My brain was obviously frazzled at that point. To be honest, in the 2 Earth-year period it would have only bobbed back and forth two times. It would have done 29 or 30 throughout a single Saturn year. But while the number of times is incorrect, the fact that it does it at all, in this case, twice, creates the same problem).
 
Saturn was chosen because of its specific distance from the sun WHICH DOES NOT CHANGE in order to measure solar affects upon the rings.
(Note: yes, I know of the minor elliptical orbit delta, but that doesn't cause a problem like a 96,000,000 mile delta!)
 
In a geocentric view, this is impossible. NASA would have noticed.
(Note: To clarify, what I meant was that it is impossible, in a geocentric view, to have a satellite positioned near Saturn for any length of time without the sun growing and shrinking by 96,000,000 miles. Those collecting data on the illumination on Saturn's rings would have noticed.)

Finally, here is the simple math that most Geocentrists ignore:

The sun is HUGE in comparison to the Earth, about 109x as big. This means that from the geocentrist view, Mars is not really about 34 million miles from the earth as the NASA scientists plan. Mars needs to be further from the sun than the Earth is (Mars is cooler), but since the sun is in between the Earth and Mars, Mars is, in reality ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY MILLION MILES AWAY from the Earth, based on the Geocentric view, which means that the rover would not have taken about a year to get there, but MORE THAN FOUR YEARS.
 
But it didn't. And the Cassini would still be nowhere near Saturn, but it is.
(Note, after having my morning cup of coffee, I realized that 130-million is too small of a number. It would, in reality, not be 96m (the millions of miles between the sun and the Earth) plus 34m (the heliocentric millions of miles between Mars and the Earth), making it 130m. Since Mars needs to be at least 129m from the sun in order to have its current cooler environment, and since the sun has a diameter of about .9m (we will round it up to 1), the real calculation for the geocentric model is 96m plus 1m plus 129m, which totals to 226 million miles, and not the 130,000,000 miles that I originally noted. This would, of course, increase the trip to Mars by nearly 60% (for a geocentrist) for a total of about 6 years, while, as we all know, it took less than one year, based on a heliocentric model of only 34 million miles, which is our reality. Notice this is nearly 1000% difference in distances. The reality of less than a year of travel confirms the reality of a heliocentric system. Even though my numbers have changed, they only changed to make it worse for those who agree with the Lubavitcher Rebbe.)
 
Yes, before there were telescopes and spaceships, one might have had a valid discussion concerning relativism in a solar cosmology. But that was hundreds of years ago

But there will always be holdouts: http://theflatearthsociety.org
 
UPDATE
 
The group discussing this came up with some interesting possibilities:
"...it's not "wrong" to assert...that (as Chazal believed) the universe revolves around the Earth. It's just not a very productive way to calculate anything. "
So it's not wrong to think that the sun revolves around the Earth, it just isn't productive. An interesting view!
">> The sun rises daily, not annually. Each were thought to revolve around the earth roughly daily: the sun was actually daily, the moon was roughly daily, plus a one month epicycle. "
In other words, the stationary earth at a 23.5 degree tilt will have a change of seasons every 6 hours. How nice! Now you can sleep through your least favorite season!

I finally asked anyone who believes in this to please draw me a picture of our solar system, just up until Jupiter, to show a design that will actually work, maintaining the same distances of the planets to the sun and the planets to the Earth that we know exist.

Somehow, I don't think anything useful will come from this.
 

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