I guess since the facts are against the Geocentrists, they have nothing better to argue.
James Philips (link): Please allow me to make the following observation. I note that generally those who seek to counter (not necessarily including yourself) John Martin and others who hold to the geocentric model of the universe on various blogsites (and sometimes websites) do so with a certain and peculiar viciousness. Such viciousness (maliciousness?) includes sarcasm to the nth degree and various gratuitous ad hominem attacks such as questioning the sanity or asserting the insanity of those who would even question the heliocentric model. This common type of rottweiler/pit bull seemingly fanatical kind of response to those who simply disagree with or question the heliocentric model certainly leaves one to wonder why the degree of viciousness.
To James Philips:
As for my viciousness (maliciousness), why would anyone in their right mind listen to 'knowledge' which does not come from some actual accomplishment in the field they are claiming? Would you accept medical advice from an actor or other non-medical professional? There are plenty of people that do that and worse (see What's the Harm?), and they can pay a high price for ignorance.
If you convince someone that a toxin is not poisonous, and they take a dose of the toxin and die, who is morally responsible for the death? You? Or do you just claim that it was their choice and go on your merry way?
Real lives depend on the proper computation of spacecraft trajectories, and not just the lives of astronauts (more below). The Geocentrists have offered nothing but rhetorical games to back their claims - nothing of the rigor required by science and engineering beyond a word game to relabel the mathematics.
If Geocentrists want to essentially claim 1+1=3 with no evidence other than their say-so, and they are doing it in such a way that OTHERS will pay the price of Geocentrist ignorance, then Geocentrists are in no position to complain about the level of disrespect they are given.
My goal is that no one pays for Geocentrists' ignorance except the Geocentrists who are propagating (and a number of them are profiting) from spreading the ignorance.
James Phillips (link): “One thing is certain: the lives and careers of a good number of individuals in the scientific community are strongly tied to an ironclad maintenance of the heliocentric model.“
Indeed. And not just in the scientific community...
There are the lives of astronauts who must be able to trust their navigation. Where's those geocentric navigation algorithms for them to compute their trajectories? Haven't seen one yet, and suspect I never will. So no Geocentists will be traveling beyond the Earth.
There are also the lives of people on Earth depending on earth and space weather forecasting that requires satellites in space. Global communications depends on satellite technology. If you don't know where your satellite is, you'll have a heck of a time getting the data back from it.
YOUR life is better because of the heliocentric model, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
If someone wants to pontificate Geocentrist nonsense, then I suggest they move to a undeveloped country which does not have these advantages, where their ignorance will be welcomed and they can do less harm. Otherwise they just look like hypocrites, reaping advantages of a technology that they clearly have no clue how it actually works. Others who do know how it works will reap the benefits of better-paying jobs and other economic advantages.
Choose that route, and you'll have to give up your computer, your GPS-enabled cell-phone, any satellite-TV or similar service. Since modern weather forecast simulations are initialized and checked using data from orbiting satellites, you'll have to give up using long-range weather forecasts. If you get energy from any main power grids, the safety of those grids from eruptive solar phenomena is monitored by a fleet of solar-observing satellites, such as ACE, GeoTail, SOHO, STEREO (YouTube: Sentinels of the Heliosphere). And these are just the first order benefits. I could go on about the spin-off benefits of the supporting technologies that were developed to achieve these capabilities.
Give up heliocentrism, and everyone in a modern society loses. You lose as well, regardless of whether you are willing to believe it, or admit it.
But then, history is full examples of societies that fell from their pinnacle due to their collective dogmatic acceptance of some ignorance.
7 comments:
Urrrrp.
I expect Phillips is having a massive case of indigestion as he tries to swallow your post.
Tom, your point about Geocentric calculations I made to John Martin on Tweb several years ago..posted the equation to calculate the height of a geocentric satellite and asked "How do you do that ?" Got a lot of hand waving, but JM runs away from the hard questions.
The rocket is on the launch pad ..how much fuel ? Where to point ? Simple question..but if I were an astronaut, please don't ask JM or Sungenis etc. !!
Jim S
Thanks for the blog !
Dr. Bridgman,
Thanks for pulling up and highlighting my comment of June 8th. I figured it had been long forgotten. I am glad that apparently it stirred something up within you to start this thread. Please allow me to respond to your assertions and counter assertions.
B: As for my viciousness (maliciousness), why would anyone in their right mind listen to 'knowledge' which does not come from some actual accomplishment in the field they are claiming?
JP: But Dr. Bridgman, the knowledge posted on your blog by geocentrists (and others!) challenging you has come from peer reviewed and published scientific papers. What are you so afraid of?
B: Would you accept medical advice from an actor or other non-medical professional?
JP: I think the best medical professionals agree that it is always wise to seek a second or even a third opinion, and that is what we shall do here, in a moment, and we shall request our second opinion from Dr. Einstein if you don't mind (or, frankly, even if you do).
But it does seem as if you are suggesting here that truth is determined by academic credential. Surely you must admit that the whole history of scientific advancement shows us the fallacy of your implication above. In fact, if we think about it, every single scientific discovery begins life as the act of one single mind, advancing an hypothesis in direct contradiction to the established wisdom of the rest of the scientific establishment, doesn't it?
It is apparent that you want us to shut up and accept your word.
I submit this is hardly an authentic expression of the honest scientific mindset.
Are your readers not ashamed of you, since you are a teacher? And how unfortunate are your students if they are indoctrinated in this way, instead of being invited to work through these questions carefully and honestly.
B: There are plenty of people that do that and worse (see What's the Harm?), and they can pay a high price for ignorance.
JP: But Dr. Bridgman, there is nothing in your link which addresses the question of whether heliocentrism has been scientifically proven. In fact, in a moment, we are going to allow Dr. Einstein to teach you that it has not been.
It is well known that you censor the comments of geocentrists such as Dr. Robert Bennett and Rick DeLano, who have already pointed out the key fallacy embedded in your article here; that is, you assert that only the heliocentric reference frame is scientifically valid, when even Dr. Einstein and his scientific heirs insist it is not.
B: If you convince someone that a toxin is not poisonous, and they take a dose of the toxin and die, who is morally responsible for the death? You? Or do you just claim that it was their choice and go on your merry way?
JP: Why, that would be *you*, Dr. Bridgeman. But please allow a geocentrist to apply the remedy.
TO BE CONT.
James Phillips
CONT.
B: Real lives depend on the proper computation of spacecraft trajectories, and not just the lives of astronauts (more below). The Geocentrists have offered nothing but rhetorical games to back their claims - nothing of the rigor required by science and engineering beyond a word game to relabel the mathematics.
JP: Balderdash. The mathematics have been rigorously worked out and published nearly a century ago, in order to make mathematically precise the expression of Relativity's *foundational* postulate, that there exists no "best" referencer frame.
Here, as you have previously been provided, is the relevant quote from Dr. Einstein himself:
"The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS [coordinate system] could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, 'the sun is at rest and the earth moves', or 'the sun moves and the earth is at rest', would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS [coordinate systems]."
---"The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta, Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, New York, Simon and Schuster 1938, 1966 p.212
Einstein is quoted again on this score, by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler: “If one rotates the shell *relative to the fixed stars* about an axis going through its center, a Coriolis force arises in the interior of the shell, *that is, the plane of a Foucault pendulum is dragged around*”--Albert Einstein, cited in “Gravitation”, Misner Thorne and Wheeler pp. 544-545.
And here, if the mathematically minded wish to delve more deeply, is an excerpt from the paper which *does the math*, using the Einstein field equations, to show that the heliocentric frame is *not* the only frame in which these equations can be solved to explain the forces we observe acting here in our local, Earth-based frame (designated by K') in the excerpt
“One need not view the existence of such centrifugal forces as originating from the motion of K’; one could just as well account for them as resulting from the average rotational effect of distant, detectable masses as evidenced in the vicinity of K’, whereby K’ is treated as being at rest.” --Albert Einstein, quoted in Hans Thirring, “On the Effect of Distant Rotating Masses in Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation”, Physikalische Zeitschrift 22, 29, 1921
B: If Geocentrists want to essentially claim 1+1=3 with no evidence other than their say-so, and they are doing it in such a way that OTHERS will pay the price of Geocentrist ignorance, then Geocentrists are in no position to complain about the level of disrespect they are given.
JP: It appears that you are the one with the math problem here, Doctor Bridgeman, unless of course you have discovered an error in Thirring's paper? I think not, since if you had, you would have published it in a peer-reviewed journal and probably won a Nobel Prize for your trouble (after all, we see how eagerly certain partisans would dearly love to be able to disprove geocentrism mathematically).
Instead you continue to embarrass your students with blunders, for which even poor geocentrists are able to demonstrate the remedy.
B: My goal is that no one pays for Geocentrists' ignorance except the Geocentrists who are propagating (and a number of them are profiting) from spreading the ignorance.
JP: So far, Doctor, the geocentrists are propagating peer reviewed science, and you are explicitly contradicting it. It would seem you ought at least explain to us what mathematical proof you have found that Thirring and Einstein are wrong......
Oh.
That's right.
You can't.
You haven't found one.
TO BE CONT.
CONT.
B: [Quoting JP: "James Phillips (link): “One thing is certain: the lives and careers of a good number of individuals in the scientific community are strongly tied to an ironclad maintenance of the heliocentric model.“]
Indeed. And not just in the scientific community...
There are the lives of astronauts who must be able to trust their navigation. Where's those geocentric navigation algorithms for them to compute their trajectories? Haven't seen one yet, and suspect I never will. So no Geocentists will be traveling beyond the Earth.
JP: But wait a minute, Dr. Bridgman. Isn't it true that GPS uses a geocentric reference frame?
Why, it certainly is: ttp://www.satsleuth.com/GPS_ECEF_Datum_transformation.htm
In fact, it has been shown by Wang and Hatch that all of the JPL software used for GPS and deerp space satellite navigation does "the entire calculation" in the Earth-centered inertial (ECI) frame:
"…NavCom Technology, Inc. has licensed software developed by the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) which, because of historical reasons, does the entire computation in the ECI frame. Because of some discrepancies between our standard earth-centered earth-fixed solution results and the JPL results, we investigated the input parameters to the solution very carefully. The measured and theoretical ranges computed in the two different frames agreed precisely, indicating that the Sagnac correction had been applied in each frame."--Ruyong Wang and Ronald R. Hatch, Conducting a Crucial Experiment of the Constancy of the Speed of Light Using GPS, ION GPS 58th Annual Meeting / CIGTF 21st Guidance Test Symposium, 2002, p. 500.
So, Dr. Bridgman, it seems that *real engineers* writing *real software* for *real spacecraft* in fact use the very earth-centered frames you insist cannot be correct.
See how important it can be to get a second opinion, Doctor Bridgeman?
Well, I could continue on mano a mano with all the rest of your comments, but if anyone reading all that I've responded to still wants to keep a closed mind on the question of geocentrism there's perhaps not too much else to say at this point.
The greatest scientists have approached the great scientific paradigms of their day with an open mind, not a closed one. Truth be known, even the greatest ones today have not closed their mind to geocentrism even if many of them may be pre-disposed due to atheistic inclinations to reject it out of hand!
If we have a better world today as Dr. Bridgman talks about it is due at least in part to the fact that the great scientists retain an open mind not a closed one. This is a simple fact which should not even be necessary to point out.
James Phillips
Dr. Bridgman:
You say "Real lives depend on the proper computation of spacecraft trajectories, and not just the lives of astronauts (more below)."
This is true. But aren't the original data from which the orbits are pertubated largely from geocentric observations? This is an exercise in coordinate transformations.
Granted having the sun as the dominant gravitational body for a solar system model for an excursion to several planets is the simplest mathematical case (at least until you approach a planet in whcih case you would likely want to transform to a planetary coordinate system), just as having Jupiter as the dominant gravitational body for a Jupiter moons excursion makes the most sense.
This does not mean the sun is the center of the universe (nor Jupiter in the second case).
Both cases make engineering sense, but do not necassarily constitute cosmology.
It is not heliocentrism that we owe so much too, but rather good engineering and technology.
To Mark:
Using your argument, I assume you agree that Sungenis' claims of a non-moving, non-rotating Earth is nonsense?
We now get coordinates from non-geocentric frames as well since so many observations are done from satellites all over the solar system (see Geocentrism: Ubiquitous Aberrations).
Where does good engineering and good technology come from? Good science. (see Cosmos in Your Pocket). Compare the pre-Newton (>3000 years) engineering accomplishments to the post-Newton (<400 years) engineering accomplishments when we realized the universe behaved in mathematically regular ways.
Do you know how many of the equations in the engineering texts come from Newton's laws and other fundamental physics principles? Undergraduate physics students learn how many of those equations are derived from more fundamental science. It's funny how many engineers just blindly accept these equations while denying much of the science behind them.
James Phillips' comments have far too many problems to respond in a comment thread. They will be addressed in a future post. Until then, comments in these post are closed.
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