ADMIN NOTICE (Simon Shack) - December 4, 2015: This thread only contains the initial musings and thought processes which, starting back in late 2012, motivated me to embark into the admittedly 'madly-ambitious' endeavor to try and answer and resolve (at least for myself!) the many questions posed by the universally-accepted heliocentric, Copernican /Keplerian solar system model. Naturally, many of my initial, tentative theories had to be discarded as I went along my 'astronomical learning curve' - yet all errors were made in earnest and certainly were never meant to confuse, mystify or disinform. I am locking this thread indefinitely (yet will keep it posted 'for the historical record') to avoid confusion with my upcoming, far more developed cosmic model (provisionally named "TYCHOS") which, I dare say, has satisfactorily resolved all of the major problems with the Copernican model which, as I will thoroughly demonstrate, is not only problematic - but downright impossible.
THE "SSSS"
The Earth rotates around its own axis - but not around the Sun.
A new perspective of our planet's place in the skies - by Simon Shack, July 2013
Preamble
It would appear that Mother Earth does not, after all, circle the Sun at the fantastic speed of 108.000km/h - as we are told. I will try my very best to expound my audaciously-named "Simon Shack Solar System" in a simple manner - and hopefully be able to illustrate it with sufficient clarity. Yes, I have had the unmitigated gall to look into our solar system and to question Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and all - but as you will see – I have done so while duly respecting the most empirically sound and solid observations acquired throughout the times.
Abstract
I submit a revised model of the solar system wherein the Earth rotates around its own axis (at a fixed / constant rate) but does not orbit around the sun. Instead, it circles in a far smaller orbit perpendicular (or almost so) to the sun's ecliptic. This model provides a number of logical resolutions to empirically observed celestial motions and interactions - some of which are dubiously 'explained' by the classic heliocentric model, from the Analemma ‘phenomenon’ to the puzzling, non-uniform rate of the seasonal solar declination. It is proposed that the never-accounted-for (in conventional astronomy) LATERAL drift of the Earth versus the sun is at the root of all erroneous interpretations of Earth’s spatial motion.
Here is an illustration of the main concept of my SSSS:
Fooled by the CLOCKS
The ‘Equation of Time’, a man-computed convention around which our clocks are calibrated, has caused several flawed conclusions - as it has made our clocks tick 4 minutes a day faster than the sidereal day (the time it takes for our stars to revolve around the Earth). This error adds up to a monthly 2-hour lag with respect to the speed of the stars' revolution. Moreover, it has led to the erroneous assumption of Earth’s motion in space - and its alleged 1billion-km-long orbit around the sun – at the mind-boggling speed of 30km/s or 108.000km/h. To be sure, no such speeds have ever been corroborated by experimental data – such as the famous, near-null results of the Michelson-Morley tentative earth speed measurements. In fact, if only our clocks had been calibrated around the 4-minutes shorter sidereal day (23h56min), far less confusion would have arised - as this would have made it obvious that Earth is almost stationary vis-à-vis the stars throughout the year(s).
The "PHANTOM DAY" - February 29
Instead, by ‘running fast’ by about 4min each day, and thus ‘over-counting’ by about 2 hours (4min X 30days=120min) each month, our clocks may well have fooled our astronomers into concluding that the Earth must move around in space at great speed - due to this 'unfortunate' error which causes an exaggerated, apparent discrepancy/ parallax between the Sun and the stars. Now, this monthly, 2-hour error adds up to an annual "over-reading" by our clocks (of our Earth's yearly revolution) of as many as 24 hours. Yet, we are also told that the actual time it takes Earth "to revolve around the Sun" is 365 days+6hours. So this would seem to bring down our clocks' error to 'only' 18 hours. We therefore have an extra day accounted for ... minus 6 hours! Are those 6 hours perhaps the basis for the Gregorian calendar’s puzzling "phantom day" (February 29), the so-called “leap year” occurring every four years? Food for thought. Now, you the reader may ask: "what issues do you, Simon, have with our established, heliocentric solar system model? Doesn't everything match up quite nicely? Earth rotating & orbiting around the Sun, etc?" Well, no. Here are a few things which have long baffled me:
The breathtaking ORBITAL SPEEDS
A widely accepted scientific dogma is that our universe is some sort of supersonic highway of incredibly fast-moving planets and stars. Just as an example, you may wish to check out this wiki link, which ends with this final, extraordinary sentence: "Total earth speed through space is about: 516 miles/second (830 km/s); 1,860,000 miles/hour (2,990,000 km/h)". Yes folks - that's almost 3 million km/h. Picture that for a second. Then, step back down to Earth and try matching these outlandish figures with what you see in the sky at night, with your own eyes: a perfectly placid, stable and static 'canvas' of countless, interlocked constellations drifting by above our heads, year after year, century after century. Yet, we are asked to believe that our system is hurtling across space at the unimaginable speed of 3million km/h.
The “WOBBLING” Earth
Earth's supposed inclination and orbit around the sun - as of the Copernican theory:
Threre are two major problems I have with the concept that our planet would 'wobble' back around its polar axis as it circles around its purported 1billion km journey around the Sun. The first is that we have a star called ‘Polaris’ stuck right above our North polar circle and it doesn’t seem to move very much - if at all (we will see about the 26.000-year precession later). Let me just mention that I am writing this exposé in the most ‘reader-friendly’ manner possible, intentionally avoiding to cite tons of referential, academic/scientific material - which I have indeed delved into. So rest assured that, as the un-credentialed “layman-astronomer” that I am, a fair amount of homework has been done.
Here's another illustration of my SSSS - just to show how the seasons would work in this system:
The ANALEMMA
The 'Analemma' is something which any photographer armed with a clock-watch can catch on film given due patience and dedication. See, if you put a camera on a tripod for a full year and take a picture of the sun (once every week or so, at the exact same time of day) you will end up with this pretty 8-shaped figure called "the ANALEMMA":
Now, you've got to ask yourself: WHAT exactly makes the sun go up and down - AND sideways – as seen in the above ANALEMMA image, during the course of a year? Here we have a classic animated illustration of our solar system which we have all been taught at school, with Earth's supposed orbit around the sun - showing that 'axial tilt' (the Copernican model) :
Does it seem at all possible to you that this motion would cause the tall, 8-shaped ANALEMMA to occur - from the visual frame reference of an observer on Earth? Perhaps the tilt / wobble of the Earth would account for some of it, but what about the LATERAL displacements of the sun that the ANALEMMA shows? (Official explanation: " 1. The Earth is tilted on its axis 23.5° in relation to the plane of its orbit around the sun. 2. The Earth does not orbit the sun in a circle, but in an ellipse." http://www.analemma.com/Pages/framesPage.html ) Well, our Earth's orbit's eccentricity is said to be in the order of 0.0167% or so - not much of an ellipse you could say, yet Kepler’s law assures us that this would cause the Earth’s orbital speed to fluctuate back and forth, from winter to summer…
In any case, I fail to see how any of this would cause the spectacular ANALEMMA-shape. Absurdly enough, it is also academically acknowledged that the Analemma is the result of the Equation of Time (EOT) - or in other words, a mere illusion. It is, in fact, a man-made ‘time-twist’ concocted in order to artificially allow our clocks to tick at a uniform rate, in an effort to counter a pesky and still to this day unexplained “phenomenon” which has baffled everyone for millennia: the bizarre fact that the sun’s motion in the sky, as clocked by a sundial, appears to accelerate and decelerate by as much as 30minutes across the seasons (approx +16 minutes and -14 minutes between the solstices!) As it is, my SSSS proposes to resolve this conundrum once and for all.
Now, and before we go any further, please know that the ANALEMMA used to be printed on all the desktop globes of yesteryear. Yet, for some unfathomable reason, no modern desktop globes features the ANALEMMA anymore. One has to wonder: why would that be? Is the Analemma a taboo subject nowadays?
But let's get on and see how our planet may be spinning in front of the Sun - according to my best observations and deductions. Please stay with me - as we get into the thick of it. I know, this is a long read, but it's the result of many months of vigorous, sleepless head-scratching - admittedly interspersed with many cruel yet sobering ‘back-to-the-drawing board’ moments. I guess that re-designing our “long-established” solar system must come with its fair share of blood, sweat and tears! However, don’t get me wrong: I am not in any way claiming to have wrapped it all up - but I do hope my efforts will serve to the good cause of re-opening the long dormant debate as to precisely how our universe spins about.
The ANALEMMA in the SSSS model
We may intuitively figure how the Analemma would occur in the SSSS model: it would appear to be the logical result of the parallax effect caused by the up/down and sideways drift of the Earth versus the Sun:
Imagine our 'JOE' standing at the Equator (at the opposite, sunlit side of Earth) as he snaps a picture of the Sun at noon - twice a month for a full year. What he will record SHOULD be what we see in Fig. 2: as he travels upwards and towards his right between June and September (A), the Sun will appear to drift downwards and towards his left. As he descends from December to March (C), the Sun will appear to drift upwards - and towards his right. Get the drift? Well, the problem was to make a clock which would tick at a variable rate, ergo, at a gradually accelerating and decelerating rate. Sure, it may be done today - but no one knew how to do it 500 years ago.
At this point, dear reader, you really need to read this Wikipedia page about "THE EQUATION OF TIME": Let me just quote selected excerpts of it:
Well, OF COURSE sundials are the most accurate clocks! That is, if the persons marking with numbers the shadows projected on the dial have any clue of what they are doing - and why the shadows progress at variable rates of time, something which probably has never been understood. Sundials simply reflect sunlight which, as far as I know, is the light cast on this Earth by our Sun, so how can anyone say that they are inaccurate? If sundials were not quite accurate - neither would the shadows that our bodies project on the ground! You cannot beat the maths of Mother Nature."The right time was essentially defined as that which was shown by a sundial. When good mechanical clocks were introduced, except near four dates a year they did not agree with sundials, so the equation of time was used to "correct" their readings to obtain sundial time. Some clocks, called equation clocks, included an internal mechanism to perform this "correction"."
"The equation of time was used historically to set clocks. Between the invention of accurate clocks in 1656 and the advent of commercial time distribution services around 1900, one of two common land-based ways to set clocks was by observing the sun's transit across the meridian — the moment the sun passed overhead, the clock was set to noon and offset by the number of minutes given by the equation of time for that date."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time
Let's see now how our Sun's declination (its apparent elevation as seen from Earth) gets recorded by our modern measuring tools. Here follows a diagram illustrating the seasonal motion of the Sun from the vantage point of Libreville (the capital of Gabon) - which lies smack under the Equator. As you will see, the available data clearly supports the basic premise of the SSSS – insofar as the sunlight angles would intuitively behave within its system:
source > NOAA: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/solcalc/
Remarkable, isn’t it? Now, let's just return to the ANALEMMA issue for a minute. As it is, the actual "ZERO POINTS" chosen by the EQUATION OF TIME to represent the solstices and equinoxes happen to be slightly offset from these exact points - for some reason that we will discuss at another time. By "ZERO POINTS", it is assumed that those are the days when the all-important, two pairs of solstices & equinoxes occur. When consulting available online calculators and such, you will see that that the points which the EQUATION OF TIME equates as "zero" are generally stated as : December25, April15, June13 and September1.
I will now ask you to go to this fascinating, animated Planetarium website: http://neave.com/planetarium/
Firstly, do this experiment: choose any constellation that you like - and get familiar with its shape. Then, click on the month-to-month function. For instance: go from February21 to March 21. As you are at March21, click back the time by 2hours. You will see the exact same constellation returning at the exact same position. This is because the sidereal day lasts about 4min less than the solar time (as tweaked by the EQUATION OF TIME). The same will occur if you go forward two months from Feb21 to Apr21 - and click back 4 hours. Go forward three months - and click back 6 hours from that. And so on and so forth. The exact same constellation will always reappear at its former position. Next, set the time to noon on any date, place the sun in the middle of your screen - then click on the month button and hold it continuously: you will see the 8-shaped 'Analemma' magically being traced by the sun's trajectory. Of course, this is because that Planetarium website's software - as any other clock-based platform - is based on the universally established yet arbitrarily defined, man-made Equation of TIme .
Our clocks have been foolishly calibrated around our most nearby 'star' - the Sun - with all the parallax problems that this entailed. Our clocks should have ideally been calibrated around the far more reliable frame-reference of our distant, star-studded firmament. How distant are the stars and the Sun, you may ask? I don't know - but I do question the official data on these matters. Back in ancient ages, Aristarchus of Samos calculated that the moon's diameter was 3474km. That's pretty damn close to our modern times' figure of 4300km - so good ol' Aristarchus must have known what he was doing! Well, it so happens that he also extrapolated from the very same set of trigonometric calculations that the Sun is 2,4million km away from us. Now, THAT is dramatically different from the "150million km" figure that modern science is claiming. Yet, who are we to believe? Have you calculated the Sun-Earth distance for yourself? I certainly haven't - and would have no idea how to do so.
All comments on my SSSS are warmly welcome. I hope we can enter a new era of understanding our beloved Mother Earth's presence in the skies - as a planet blessed with a tranquil and steady little orbit - basking under its ideal sunlight in a comfortable corner of the universe.