[meteorite-list] Venus May Have Once Had A Moon

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Oct 12 21:51:54 2006
Message-ID: <004d01c6ee6a$2490eee0$0348e146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi,

    T. C. van Flandern, 20 years at the Naval Observatory,
is now just plain "Tom" van Flandern, Mayor of a prosperous
little village out in the Nutcake Fringe Suburbs of the Universe:
http://metaresearch.org/home.asp
    Yes, read about the Exploded Planet (it's not uncommon
for planets to explode, he says)! Read why Einstein, Big
Bang Theory, and other scientific myths are so wrongheaded
and confused! Read how gravitons heat up the elysium! And,
of course, there are the obligatory Faces on Mars, Cydonia
Cities...

    "Tom" is brilliant, well-trained, can whop you upside the
head with a metric tensor field fast as can be, and is utterly
wrong-headed... I think. He proposes Lorenzian Relativity
instead of Einsteinian Relativity; he believes in the Luminiferous
Ether, that the asteroid zone came from an exploded planet,
that planets formed by fission from lumps of Sun instead of
accreting (just as the Moon fissioned from the Earth). It's
this last theory that is why he needs Mercury to be an escaped
satellite of Venus, by the way. Oddly, a great many of his
beliefs are the scientific norm for, say, 1898.

    At his best, he bores in on things that are, at least conceptually
and philosophically, sore points. What is the propagation speed
of gravity? And what does that even mean? Spooky "action at
a distance" is still not popular with some, unless you just like
being quantum crazy.
    Classical celestial mechanics, Newton's theory of gravity,
not quantum mechanics, is the source of "spooky action at a
distance." And Newton didn't like his own overwhelming
proof of it one bit: "That one body may act upon another
at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of
any thing else, by and through which their action and force
may be conveyed from one to the other, is to me so great
an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical
matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it."
Yet, Newton proved it...
    You say you just raised your hand to scratch your head
when you read that? Well, you moved your hand (a mass),
thereby producing a change in your gravitational field. Your
action changes that field, not only in your neighborhood,
but instantaneously throughout the whole universe. The
effect, if detectable, is instantaneously felt on the moon,
on the sun, in every galaxy 10 billion light years away...
Just as one of a pair of spin-linked photons "knows"
if its twin is flipped over, even if it's on the other side
of the Universe, so quantum theory tells us. "Spooky"
hardly covers it.

    Clever arguments for crazy conclusions abound. It's
a condition that people like theoretical celestial dynamicists
(van Flandern, for example) seem have a weakness for,
or a higher risk of catching. It's why I wasn't happy with
dynamicists defining "what is a planet?"

    If you find his paper on Mercury as Venus's satellite,
read it with a double dose of caution.


Sterling K. Webb
---------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "tett" <tett_at_rogers.com>
To: <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>; "Philip R. Burns"
<pib_at_pibburns.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 6:14 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Venus May Have Once Had A Moon


> Pib and List,
>
> Pib kindly wrote:
> "Here is the reference:
>
> T.C. Van Flandern and R.S. Harrington (1976), "A dynamical investigation
> of the conjecture that Mercury is an escaped satellite of Venus", _Icarus_
> vol. 28, pp. 435-440."
>
> I tired to find a copy on line but could only scare up an abstract.
>
> Anyone have this article available?
>
> Cheers,
>
> tett
>
>
>
>
> I searched for a copy of the article but can only find an abstract on
> line.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Philip R. Burns" <pib_at_pibburns.com>
> To: <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 5:35 PM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Venus May Have Once Had A Moon
>
>
>> At 04:12 PM 10/11/2006, Philip R. Burns wrote:
>>>At 02:57 PM 10/11/2006, Rob McCafferty wrote:
>>>
>>>>If log angular momentum is plotted vs log Mass, all
>>>>planets fit nicely on a line except Venus and Mercury
>>>>(Earth/moon system needs to be combined).
>>>>Now since angular momentum is a conserved quantity, it
>>>>matters not one jot how far a planet and its moon
>>>>drift apart. Combine the angular momentum of Venus and
>>>>Mercury and they slot nicely on the line like all the
>>>>others.
>>>>If some accuse me of favouring an idea which is too
>>>>neat, I'd accuse the author of this article of this
>>>>article of over-thinking a problem. The peculiar
>>>>rotation of venus is rather nicely explained by it
>>>>losing a moon, especially one as big as Mercury.
>>>
>>>I believe the late Robert Harrington (d. 1993) of the U. S. Naval
>>>Observatory proposed many years ago that Mercury was an escaped moon of
>>>Venus. I don't have the reference to hand, but it shouldn't be too hard
>>>to find.
>>
>> Here is the reference:
>>
>> T.C. Van Flandern and R.S. Harrington (1976), "A dynamical investigation
>> of the conjecture that Mercury is an escaped satellite of Venus",
>> _Icarus_ vol. 28, pp. 435-440.
>>
>>
>> -- Philip R. "Pib" Burns
>> pib_at_pibburns.com
>> http://www.pibburns.com/
>>
Received on Thu 12 Oct 2006 09:51:46 PM PDT