The Earth is FIXED in Space

[Niamh]

I respect your opinion. But it's an opinion you've been given by powerful, hugely financed corporations. For decades. Whose interests are far above those of ordinary men and women.

what do corporations have to do with astronomy and astrophysics? Nothing.

I would think that a thread devoted to dinosaurs would be more appropriate.

Ah Dinosaurs! I cant help but think of Bill Hicks skit on Dinosaurs!

[The Atheist]

Actually, while some may use that claim, I do not. I affirm that they WERE on the ark. However, this is not the place for this discussion.

Just in case you're not joking, here it is!

[Hurricane]

You showed me a ten minute clip of a what? Sixty minute video? The timestamps aren't visible, and the only context given is from the narrator. I don't buy it. From an article debunking Bart Sibrel's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon":

Sibrel attempts to describe to the viewers of his documentary what is going on inside the darkened Command Module while the crew was attempting to give the TV viewers back the best possible view of earth with the primitive handheld color TV camera carried aboard Apollo 11. The problem with his explanation is basically that he does not know what he is talking about. Sibrel may know a lot about current video editing and production technology, but he does not have expertise about Apollo. In order to provide 1969 TV viewers back on earth with the best possible view of our planet from space, it was necessary to eliminate the glaring reflected light and direct sunlight that was streaming into the spacecraft and interfering with the shot. The official Apollo 11 mission documentation from 1969 contains astronaut Michael Collins' own discussion of these lighting problems and the difficulties he experienced with the window shades in the Apollo spacecraft. Unfortunately for Bart Sibrel, he is obviously unaware of astronaut Mike Collins documented statements. The astronauts shuttered most of the capsule windows with special shades that blocked most of the glaring direct and reflected sunlight coming off of the bright, shiny Lunar Module which was docked in close proximity to the location of the windows.

Anyways, you're kind of missing the big picture: how could an entire government agency, employing thousands of people, employing thousands more people for production of very specialized equipment, successfully have everybody keep their mouth shut that it was a fraud for forty years? Especially considering the level of fame/money a NASA employee would get for "exposing a hoax", I don't buy it. NASA is a very political organization and alliances change, and people get fired for dumb reasons, yet no "disgruntled employee" has come forward to bilge on the moon landings, or any of the Apollo missions. We didn't land on the moon once, we did it several times. So are you saying each time we did this, we made this insane, elaborate hoax? Why? By your logic, we already "did it" once, why keep doing it unless we were actually going to the moon?
I know engineers, all too many of them (I go to an engineering school that, coincidentally enough, has produced more astronauts than any other undergraduate institution). They love to pick things apart and see how they work to minute levels of detail. They love to explain things and find mistakes and tell you why every single decision was made in building/designing a certain thing. I find it hard to believe that no respected astronautical or aeronautical engineers have done peer-reviewed, thorough reports on this "hoax."
Scanning a list of "prominent" moon hoax advocates, I see a very small number of engineers. There's one nuclear engineer (not aero or astro), a couple Russians (who used bad math), a couple "self taught engineering buffs" (yeah, great credentials), and one guy who worked in admin (a librarian, specifically) of one of the companies that produced the F-1 rocket engine. The rest are TV types or tin-hat conspiracy buffs with no scientific background. For a contrast, pretty much every other engineer educated in the last forty years believes it's possible to land on the moon and that we did it.
The easiest way to get people to believe you is to do what you've told them, whether that's picking up groceries or landing on the moon, and the simplest answer is usually the correct one. Why does it look like we went to be moon? Oh, I dunno. Maybe because we did.

I'm sorry this is so long, but it really makes me annoyed when people dismiss all of this as a hoax. Hundreds of thousands of people gave so much for this effort, and a not insignificant amount of people died in horrible accidents. The story of the moon landings and Mercury/Gemini/Apollo Missions is one of, yes, bureaucracy, red tape, and headaches, but also of thousands of people, brilliant science and engineering, all combining to sling a few heroic men towards the moon, something that had been nothing but fantasy for thousands of years and representing some of the best of humanity.

[kevinthediltz]

I have another question to add to my clicker which is at 7 at the moment.....

What causes everything to rotate around the earth? Us crazy educated people would claim that the force that ties all objects together (called gravity !) causes the planets to rotate around the sun, the sun to rotate around in the milky way, and so on. The more mass the object has, the more force it pulls in. So my question is..... How and why does such a relitively small planet such as the earth cause the whole of the universe to spin around it? Including stars and solar systems billions of miles away? Considering the further an object gets away from another object the force of gravity drops EXPONENTIALLY.... Hmmm? Oh and why is the moon so special that it gets a rotation of roughly 28 hours where as everything else is about 24 hours? That will bring my clicker to 9. Oh and as you say "LOL" Quote: I do not ignore questions. Hrumph!

[MarkBastable]

And still the clock is ticking. When do we finally get a straight Yes or No to the two questions you have promised to answer ? Here they are for the third time -

Q1. Does your model suggest the land of America is rotating from West to East around 900 miles an hour during the 5 hours or so a plane takes to cross from Miami to Los Angeles and a plane headed in the opposite direction at the same speed from Los Angeles to Miami ? (A total change of around 4,500 miles). Give or take for head winds etc. Please give a simple Yes or No please ?

and -

Q2. Do you accept that the actual distance between Miami (Florida) and Los Angeles (California) is around 2348 miles (3778 kilometres) ? Yes or No please ?

And here are mine.

Q1. Do you accept that the earth is approximately spherical?

Q2. Do you accept that the stars - the movement of which you cite in your opening post - are many light years away?


I'll answer yes or no to yours, if you will then answer yes or no to mine - without any intervening discussion, prevarication, qualification or general LOLing all over the shop.

[prendrelemick]

Can I mention the solar wind yet? Or Geostationary orbiting satellites? Or do I have to get in line?

[kiki1982]

You can mention whatevr you want, only you'll never get an answer as answering these nasty questions that doesn't suit him.

[Lokasenna]

A scientist friend sent me this...

Another demonstration of Earth's orbital motion is the aberration of starlight. Astronomical observations and celestial mechanics indicate that Earth should have a 16-19 mi/sec (25-30 km/sec) orbital velocity around the solar system's center which continuously changes its direction due to the gravitational effect of the Sun. James Bradley's (1693-1762) attempt to determine the parallaxes of stars starting in 1725 with a telescope rigidly fixed in a chimney soon found that the apparent positions of the stars shifted along elliptical paths. These ellipses were 90° out of phase with the parallax ellipse for a nearby star on a distant background that is expected to be produced by Earth's motion around the Sun. Moreover the ellipses' semi-major axes were always 20.5", with no variation from the different distances of the stars. These same size ellipses were soon understood to be the yearly paths of the aberrations of the apparent positions of the stars caused by the addition of Earth's constantly changing orbital velocity to the vacuum velocity of the light arriving from the stars (whose true positions are at the centers of the aberrational ellipses). These ellipses show that Earth does indeed have the expected orbital velocity around the solar system's center of mass.

Final proof of the heliocentric theory for the solar system came in 1838, when F.W. Bessel (1784-1846) determined the first firm trigonometric parallax for the two stars of 61 Cygni (Gliese 820). Their parallax (difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points) ellipses were consistent with orbital motion of Earth around the Sun.

Well, I'm no scientist, but I know plenty of people who are, and this seems to sway them!

[Musicology]

No more theories. Here are some more facts. Here is a photograph of the sky and stars above the North Pole. Taken with an 8 hour 'time lapse' camera.

Television Studio

''We better censor this ! Our corporate sponsor will not be happy''

!

- Pause -

(Nervous rustling of papers)

- Margarine Advertisement - Cornflakes Advertisement -

- Pause -

'Welcome back (nervous voice) - sorry for the interruption - and now some golf news.... '.

(Seems some of those stars near the North Pole are completing their orbits within 8 hours !! These are remarkable paths traced by stars as they swarm around the North Pole over a period of only about eight hours ! As the nearest bright star to the Pole, Polaris appears as the small bright crescent in the center of the image. An image that can be taken by anyone.

(Similar time-lapse images - almost 3,000 of them - have been taken all over the world of different parts of the night sky).

Not good news for the 'rotating Earth' theory, is it ? Any explanation ? Try this one. The Earth is NOT rotating. It is fixed and at rest in space. The stars beyond the Earth's atmosphere are moving. And so is the Sun.

[Babbalanja]

Am I the only one who notices that Robert keeps hammering away at his pet factoid and ignores the questions people have asked him? That is, doesn't anyone else think it's relevant that faraway stars would have to be moving at completely impossible speeds to orbit a fixed Earth daily? And the question Kiki brought up is the nail in the fixed-Earth coffin: what other model of our solar system could explain and predict the moon's current set of phases? If what we call moonlight is merely the Sun's light reflected off the moon, the Sun couldn't conceivably be orbiting a fixed Earth daily. End of story.

But I daresay Robert is doing the exact same thing here as in his Mozart thread: foisting his weird theories on amateurs and bullying and insulting them when they try to engage him. Why isn't he making these claims on a board for astronomers or physicists, pray tell? Perhaps because it's easier to stymie discussion with weird factoids when he's talking to laymen?

Disgraceful.

Regards,

Istvan

[Hurricane]

No more theories. Here are some more facts. Here is a photograph of the sky and stars above the North Pole. Taken with an 8 hour 'time lapse' camera.

Television Studio

''We better censor this ! Our corporate sponsor will not be happy''

!

- Pause -

(Nervous rustling of papers)

- Margarine Advertisement - Cornflakes Advertisement -

- Pause -

'Welcome back (nervous voice) - sorry for the interruption - and now some golf news.... '.

(Seems some of those stars near the North Pole are completing their orbits within 8 hours !! These are remarkable paths traced by stars as they swarm around the North Pole over a period of only about eight hours ! As the nearest bright star to the Pole, Polaris appears as the small bright crescent in the center of the image. An image that can be taken by anyone.

How does this prove anything? The earth is spinning, so of course the stars appear to move. The stars and our sun do move as well, but at such an incredibly slow speed (one rotation around the center of the galaxy per 200 million years) it's hard for the human eye to tell. The motion of, for example, the moon is seen clearly because it's orbit only takes around twenty-seven days. Unless any of us live to 200 million, it's a little harder to tell their motion.
Also, do really believe that there's some sort of sinister corporate astrophysics agenda that seeks to quash the inconvenient "truth" of Geo-centrism? Because that's patently silly.

For an explanation from an astrophysicist, see here:
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/as...rs/970518.html

The entire site has some really interesting information on the motion of stars and planets in general. But since it's from NASA, I'm sure it's part of the evil astrophysics lobby. Oh well.

The Earth is NOT rotating. It is fixed and at rest in space.

False. Also, I'm interested if you have a response to my post on the Apollo program.

[Musicology]

Babbalaja,

Welcome aboard Copernican Airways Flight 007. From Los Angeles to Miami. Here is some flight data.

1. We will be taking off in 10 minutes.

2. The Earth below us will be rotating (as usual) from West to East. At a speed close to 900 miles an hour.

3. Thus, Miami will actually be travelling at 900 mph and headed AWAY from us at the time we get into the air pointed at it. Our speed will be around half of this rotation speed. At best. Miami itself will be rotated with the rest of the Earth (of course !!) but you will eventually see your destination the next day appear beneath us coming from behind and we will arrive there in Miami when that city finally appears under us.

4. Those who are flying here to Los Angeles from Miami will however arrive here in less than 3 hours from now. Because they have the advantage of the Earth rotating towards their plane at over 900 miles per hour during their flight. So they finish their flight today and you finish yours tomorrow.

5. We apologise for this inconvenience but sleeping bags have been provided.

Enjoy your flight !!!

Am I the only one who notices that Robert keeps hammering away at his pet factoid and ignores the questions people have asked him? That is, doesn't anyone else think it's relevant that faraway stars would have to be moving at completely impossible speeds to orbit a fixed Earth daily? And the question Kiki brought up is the nail in the fixed-Earth coffin: what other model of our solar system could explain and predict the moon's current set of phases? If what we call moonlight is merely the Sun's light reflected off the moon, the Sun couldn't conceivably be orbiting a fixed Earth daily. End of story.

But I daresay Robert is doing the exact same thing here as in his Mozart thread: foisting his weird theories on amateurs and bullying and insulting them when they try to engage him. Why isn't he making these claims on a board for astronomers or physicists, pray tell? Perhaps because it's easier to stymie discussion with weird factoids when he's talking to laymen?

Disgraceful.

Regards,

Istvan

[Babbalanja]

Unwillingness to address the moon's phases duly noted.

Regards,

Istvan

[Musicology]

You will pardon me with dealing with the basic issues first of the fixed Earth, without which other issues such as the moon's phases can hardly be discussed, let alone agreed about. But make a thread and we can get to them too.

Regards

Unwillingness to address the moon's phases duly noted.

Regards,

Istvan

[Babbalanja]

You will pardon me with dealing with the basic issues first of the fixed Earth, without which other issues such as the moon's phases can hardly be discussed, let alone agreed about. But make a thread and we can get to them too.

Regards

If the Earth is fixed, the moon and the Sun both orbit the Earth. Thus, this issue is crucial to your theory of a fixed Earth. The moon appears to orbit the Earth monthly while the Sun appears to orbit Earth daily. But if this were true, we would expect the moon to go through its phases nightly. Why doesn't it?

It's called disconfirming evidence. You won't deal with it.

Regards,

Istvan