Re: Oriel36 - I am very disappointed!

On Nov 10, 2:51 am, ukastronomy <martin_piers_nichol...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I asked you to explain the changing maximum height that the sun
reaches above the horizon throughout the year. Such changes can
observed regardless of latitude.

I'm not sure that he has a theory that can fail.

A lot of what he is saying is even sort of right.

He is right in saying that the Earth doesn't bob back and forth over
the course of a year, that it doesn't have a variable axial
inclination.

He is right in saying that the seasons are the result of two motions
of the Earth - one of these is the Earth's rotation on its axis, the
other is its annual revolution around the Sun.

Where he is horribly, horribly wrong is:

- in not accepting that the seasons are the result of the Earth's
_fixed_ axial orientation, not strictly perpendicular to the ecliptic,
and the Earth being on either one side of the Sun or the other over
the course of the year;

- in not accepting that the period of the Earth's rotation on its axis
is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds.

What he has never stated - what he positively *refuses* to state
openly - is just what he thinks the Solar System is doing instead of
what everyone else knows it is doing.

It appears to me that he has misunderstood what Newton has written,
and what conventional modern astronomy has claimed. As a result, he
believes Newton, and today's astronomers following him, include in
their picture of the Solar System certain elements which are
_genuinely_ physically absurd.

Because he is fixed in his views, and because he positively refuses to
enter into debate concerning the logical consequences of his previous
statements, and he is uncomfortable with mathematics, it is very
difficult to make progress toward either resolving his
misunderstanding, or even to find out precisely what his criticisms of
modern astronomy are.

In his opinion, we should just be able to *look* at those photographs
of the seasonal cycle of Uranus, or read the original words of Kepler
and Huyghens, and see the truth ourselves, just as he does.

I'm afraid that a memorable phrase by Enrico Fermi applies; he is not
_even_ wrong.

John Savard
.

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