Re: Before the nonsense breaks out

On Apr 17, 7:36 am, oriel36 <kelleher.ger...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It must be almost a decade since I first showed how clocks are kept
in sync with the axial cycle at 24 hours/360 degrees without requiring
an external reference.

That is true, one does not need an external reference. One can simply
have an accurate clock, keep it running for 365 days, checking for
noon at the beginning and end of that period, and, since the Equation
of Time will approximately cancel out, one can avoid having to use the
stars.

The availibity of Huygen's treatise within the
last few years only confirms what most reasonable people have known
since the emergence of the popular book by Dava Sobel based on the
efforts of a single person (John Harrison) to come up with an
accurate watch to determine longitudes against the celestial sphere
proponents (you are an ancestor of these guys).

You are correct - not a single,solitary person has affirmed the
geometric certainty behind the principles which correlate clocks with
the axial cycle and terrestrial longitude at 24 hours/360 degrees ,I
will grant that it is a bit tricky the way the average 24 hour day
was transfered to axial cycle and by association - axial rotation as a
'constant',but I always put it down to unfamiliarity as there is
nothing really intellectually difficult in how the Equation of Time
creates the 24 hour day from determination of natural noon and then
from there to the axial cycle/longitudes.

It is true it looks like a contradiction. How can 15 degrees of
longitude correlate to an hour exactly, and not an hour less a
fraction, if the Earth has an axial rotation of 23 hours and 56
minutes instead of 24 hours?

But it is not a contradiction. The time of day, although it changes
almost regularly - except for the Equation of Time - in time, is not
directly a matter of time. It is a matter of a geometric angle - when
you are under the Sun, it is noon; when the Sun is under your feet, it
is midnight; when it is on the Eastern horizon, it is 6 AM; when it is
on the western horizon, it is 6 PM.

That is an oversimplification - it works if you are on the Equator at
one of the Equinoxes, of course. I could talk about projecting the
line between you and the center of the Earth on the ecliptic plane to
get the real geometric angle involved, but why get so technical?

The time of the day is the angle between you, the Earth, and the Sun.
And the Earth moves around the Sun in the course of a year, it doesn't
stay still.

Eppur si muove!

And what is the "sidereal time"? It too is geometry - astrological
geometry, you might say - which stars are overhead. Since the stars
don't move once a year like the Earth does around the Sun, over
*time*, the angle of a single place in terms of the Sun and of the
stars will not be in the same relation.

So over 23 hours and 56 minutes and 4 seconds of time, the same angle
with the stars recurs, but not that with the Sun yet, because the
Earth moved around the Sun.

But in any one instantaneous moment of time, the Earth makes no
orbital motion around the Sun, so the relationship between the angle
of the Sun and the angle of the stars is the same all over the Earth.
So 15 degrees of longitude equals both an hour of sidereal time and an
hour of solar time even though they are not equal to each other.

This doesn't contradict Euclid, because 15 degrees equals 15 degrees
equals 15 degrees is all that it is really saying. One object can
move, while another object stands still. One's geometric relation
_over time_ with the moving object will change differently as that one
has to the still object - no matter how one moves oneself.

Local time is a geometrical offset to universal time, and this offset
can be the same for two different kinds of time that flow at different
rates in time, even if they are still defined with the same offset.
But I am afraid that now it is I who has become unclear.

You see the equality in the natural noon cycles
but then you find yourself conjuring up another story to explain that
and on and on it goes.

It is much easier to jettison the whole 'sidereal time' scheme,look
at the 24 hour/360 degree correlation and rework it back into the
Equation of Time and then into heliocentric reasoning .

If it were, somebody else would have seen it.

John Savard
.

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