[meteorite-list] Venus May Have Once Had A Moon

Fri Oct 13 07:24:39 EDT 2006

Sterling,

Thank you for your "grain of salt" for me to take into consideration when 
reviewing Tom's treatise on planetary issues.  Yes, a double dose of caution 
is needed.

His arguments that gravity has a speed can be convincing at first blush but 
one needs to consider the law of conservation of matter.  Since matter can't 
be created and is always "here" then the gravity associated with this matter 
is always here and conserved.  No experiment can ever be conducted which 
demonstrates a speed of gravity since that would require instantaneous new 
mass to be presented to another object.  Lift your hand to move some mass in 
place will just transfer it along with it's gravitational pull.  Yes, I did 
some head scratching.  Now if mass could be created then perhaps there would 
be a lag time before other bodies would feel it's presence but the imbalance 
created by this new arrival would surely lead to catastrophe for our 
universe. Another Big Bang?

And, his few questions on gravitational speed (Sun-Jupiter orbit, photon 
paths, eclipse timing) are not very convincing and can, I believe, be 
explained by the warping of space theories.  I seriously doubt, though, that 
I could argue this with Tom and I am sure he could easily "whop me upside 
the head with a metric tensor field fast as can be".

And... how in heck can he have a problem with action at a distance? 
Gravity, magnetism and my wife yelling at me to turn down the tunes are all 
prime examples of action at a distance.  Plus, I don't think our beloved 
meteorites would have made it here if it weren't for the earth's action at a 
distance on these little fellows.  Now this email is meteorite related.

All that said, I think his gravitational arguments are worth considering 
because they do reveal how mysterious and fantastic some of our physical 
laws really are.  Now do I dare read Tom's notes on Lorentzian relativity?

Cheers and Thanks for your fun email and please forgive me if most of what I 
just said was a just re-hash of what you tried to tell me.

tett

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
To: "tett" <tett at rogers.com>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>; "Philip 
R. Burns" <pib at pibburns.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 9:51 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Venus May Have Once Had A Moon

> Hi,
>
>    T. C. van Flandern, 20 years at the Naval Observatory,
> is now just plain "Tom" van Flandern, Mayor of a prosperous
> little village out in the Nutcake Fringe Suburbs of the Universe:
> http://metaresearch.org/home.asp
>    Yes, read about the Exploded Planet (it's not uncommon
> for planets to explode, he says)! Read why Einstein, Big
> Bang Theory, and other scientific myths are so wrongheaded
> and confused! Read how gravitons heat up the elysium! And,
> of course, there are the obligatory Faces on Mars, Cydonia
> Cities...
>
>    "Tom" is brilliant, well-trained, can whop you upside the
> head with a metric tensor field fast as can be, and is utterly
> wrong-headed... I think. He proposes Lorenzian Relativity
> instead of Einsteinian Relativity; he believes in the Luminiferous
> Ether, that the asteroid zone came from an exploded planet,
> that planets formed by fission from lumps of Sun instead of
> accreting (just as the Moon fissioned from the Earth). It's
> this last theory that is why he needs Mercury to be an escaped
> satellite of Venus, by the way. Oddly, a great many of his
> beliefs are the scientific norm for, say, 1898.
>
>    At his best, he bores in on things that are, at least conceptually
> and philosophically, sore points. What is the propagation speed
> of gravity? And what does that even mean? Spooky "action at
> a distance" is still not popular with some, unless you just like
> being quantum crazy.
>    Classical celestial mechanics, Newton's theory of gravity,
> not quantum mechanics, is the source of "spooky action at a
> distance." And Newton didn't like his own overwhelming
> proof of it one bit: "That one body may act upon another
> at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of
> any thing else, by and through which their action and force
> may be conveyed from one to the other, is to me so great
> an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical
> matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it."
> Yet, Newton proved it...
>    You say you just raised your hand to scratch your head
> when you read that? Well, you moved your hand (a mass),
> thereby producing a change in your gravitational field. Your
> action changes that field, not only in your neighborhood,
> but instantaneously throughout the whole universe. The
> effect, if detectable, is instantaneously felt on the moon,
> on the sun, in every galaxy 10 billion light years away...
> Just as one of a pair of spin-linked photons "knows"
> if its twin is flipped over, even if it's on the other side
> of the Universe, so quantum theory tells us. "Spooky"
> hardly covers it.
>
>    Clever arguments for crazy conclusions abound. It's
> a condition that people like theoretical celestial dynamicists
> (van Flandern, for example) seem have a weakness for,
> or a higher risk of catching. It's why I wasn't happy with
> dynamicists defining "what is a planet?"
>
>    If you find his paper on Mercury as Venus's satellite,
> read it with a double dose of caution.
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "tett" <tett at rogers.com>
> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>; "Philip R. Burns" 
> <pib at pibburns.com>
> Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 6:14 PM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Venus May Have Once Had A Moon
>
>
>> Pib and List,
>>
>> Pib kindly wrote:
>> "Here is the reference:
>>
>> T.C. Van Flandern and R.S. Harrington (1976), "A dynamical investigation 
>> of the conjecture that Mercury is an escaped satellite of Venus", 
>> _Icarus_ vol. 28, pp. 435-440."
>>
>> I tired to find a copy on line but could only scare up an abstract.
>>
>> Anyone have this article available?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> tett
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I searched for a copy of the article but can only find an abstract on 
>> line.
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: "Philip R. Burns" <pib at pibburns.com>
>> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
>> Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 5:35 PM
>> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Venus May Have Once Had A Moon
>>
>>
>>> At 04:12 PM 10/11/2006, Philip R. Burns wrote:
>>>>At 02:57 PM 10/11/2006, Rob McCafferty wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>If log angular momentum is plotted vs log Mass, all
>>>>>planets fit nicely on a line except Venus and Mercury
>>>>>(Earth/moon system needs to be combined).
>>>>>Now since angular momentum is a conserved quantity, it
>>>>>matters not one jot how far a planet and its moon
>>>>>drift apart. Combine the angular momentum of Venus and
>>>>>Mercury and they slot nicely on the line like all the
>>>>>others.
>>>>>If some accuse me of favouring an idea which is too
>>>>>neat, I'd accuse the author of this article of this
>>>>>article of over-thinking a problem. The peculiar
>>>>>rotation of venus is rather nicely explained by it
>>>>>losing a moon, especially one as big as Mercury.
>>>>
>>>>I believe the late Robert Harrington (d. 1993) of the U. S. Naval 
>>>>Observatory proposed many years ago that Mercury was an escaped moon of 
>>>>Venus.  I don't have the reference to hand, but it shouldn't be too hard 
>>>>to find.
>>>
>>> Here is the reference:
>>>
>>> T.C. Van Flandern and R.S. Harrington (1976), "A dynamical investigation 
>>> of the conjecture that Mercury is an escaped satellite of Venus", 
>>> _Icarus_ vol. 28, pp. 435-440.
>>>
>>>
>>> -- Philip R. "Pib" Burns
>>>    pib at pibburns.com
>>>    http://www.pibburns.com/
>>>
>
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