As Tom Trinko asked me to post such an admission on the blog with our discussion, I must on my part admit I was tired and irritated and forgot to or even neglected adding an explanation which would have helped him, perhaps.
But before going into it, I will ask you first to consider these two statements by him:
- His Quote from St Augustine, in context (with my highlights):
- By the way Augustine clearly condemns Sungennis's misuse of the Bible—and endorsements by saints for geocentrism— when Augustine says:
" Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1.7]Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol 2
- His admission:
- I Tom Trinko have not really been spending too much effort refuting Hans for the simple reason that life is too short to spend the time necessary to refute every point raised by someone who knows nothing of what they are talking about.
As such I apologize for not having spent the time to explain in detail why Hans is wrong.
So, was it hard or easy for him to prove me wrong according to what, along with even non-Christians, he knows, and that from experience? The issue he took a stand on and did not convince me in was geostationary satellites.
Obviously it is not like proving a Biblical or would be Biblical flat earthist* wrong by appealing to journeys made by the thousands. It is not as if denial of thousands of calculations based on Heliocentric assumptions were the same thing as thousands of journeys taken together proving the Round Earth geography even without assumptions. And here it shows. When Tom Trinko cannot prove his point, he thinks life is too short for him to get into detail and he resorts to making assumptions about who of us who is ignorant - and exaggerated such.
But this does not mean I have a right finally to omit my improvment of the discussion, though it comes, for reasons of fatigue and irritation, after the discussion is already over.
Here it is.
I am not sure Tom Trinko has read Lord of the Rings. I have.
At the near end there is a scene in which Elrond and Gandalf and Sam and Frodo go off in ships, in the Grey Havens. At a certain point, the "bent road" of earth's "now" round surface (here: of water, of the sea, of the Atlantic) starts sinking below the ships, and the ships go on straight forward.
I do not think this scene happened. But it is an interesting model - like so much else in fiction, when it is worth reading.
Supposing it had happened, restating it in terms of physics would imply that the ships were unaffected by earth's gravity.** Not unaffected by gravity directly and therefore light, therefore indirectly affected by the gravity as heavier air pushed them up, since air was affected by gravity, no, rather unaffected by gravity either way. Meaning the speed westward they took while sailing was the vector - in Newtonian terms - of their trajectory after leaving the curved water surface behind too.
This means their trajectory is a great model for any trajectory of any object getting either due east or due west without gravity.
But this in its turn means that such a vector by the fact of being straight east or straight west is obliquely up, in the tangential way. And this in its turn means that this is the direct effect of the inertial vector of a satellite too, as long as you do not mix in gravity.
This means, that just as for the ships to have, in Tolkien's fiction, stayed on the bent road of the real surface of the sea, they would have needed gravity, so also, for a satellite to orbit anywhere, rather than take off tangentially, it needs gravity. This means that gravity is involved when satellite stays same height, since the eastward vector is involved in a potentially tangential raising of its height.
I might be adding a scan of this, showing a comparison where satellite would be going if obeying only eastward vector and where it actually goes, obeying also gravity. I have already drawn it.
And this remains true when the daily turning of whatever turns daily geographically cancels the orbital angle. For this I have not yet drawn any diagram. Whether it is thus geographically cancelled because the locations on earth are turning eastward same speed (Heliocentric model) or the aether which is turning westward same speed (Geocentric model as I take it along with aether) - this cancelling of motion considered in relation to localities is another matter yet.
This means that the real discussion that is worthwhile is whether aether can conceivably be non-vectorial in its movement, and yet cause atoms or agglomerations of such moving with aether to be vectorial in their movements along with the aether.
That aether needs be non-vectorial is, since if aether simply was a westward vector at any point, though turning by its attachment to earth, the westward vector of the aether and the eastward vector of the satellite would be cancelling, and gravity would be only relevant vector left, thus pulling geostationary satellite down. But if aether is non-vectorial, its movement is cancelling the local movement of the satellite as relative to earth, but at same time the satellite is really moving eastward through the aether, just as the aether is moving westward with it, so that the vectors have a due result of same height and real orbit, namely through aether.
On the other hand, why one might think aether would be vectorial to a Geocentric believing it, when aether turns westward, so do equatorials winds and oceanic currents.
This Tom Trinko refused to discuss. Life is short and I known really nothing about the universe and so on. Which does not dispense me from making reflections about it.
I would say that it is possible the uppermost atoms and molecules moving in the aether and with the aether westward do so without being vectorial either in themselves or in relation to the aether. But should an atom or molecule under it - directly, as it is not the case, or really indirectly, as is the case - attached to earth collide with its westward movement, the atom or molecule or whatever other body it may be, would immediately be vectorial in relation to the less moving, more earth attached of the two bodies. And the fact that there are infinitesimal intermediates between uppermost waters in the universe and the surface of earth which is attached to a non-moving and non-turning centre, does not very much interefere with the principle, only modify it in detail.
For we do know that winds of passage and equatorial streams in the Oceans are really vectorial. Even if the turning of the aether that causes their turning is not. But this problem, to Tom Trinko was uninteresting detail compared to the conception that an eastward vector would not be tangential and therefore would not be an upward vector.
And even this was not interesting enough to him to defend in detail against my presumably dishonest reasonings (and therefore normally easily exposed reasonings) about vectors being tangential when they are horizontal.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
[V Dim. après Pentecôte]
V:th Sunday after Pentecost
13-VII-2014
*I think "Biblical" means either denying the modern geography as well as cosmography or accepting a round earth with the geography: I can as round-earthist point to the four corners, not forming a flat, but a so called non-Euclidian rectangle, whereas the most up to date maps of flat earth society with North Pole in Centre and South Polehaving become a rim seem more three cornered than four cornered to me, and thus un-Biblical.
** Tolkien's choice of the words "bent road" for the trajectories normally affected by gravity and straight road for the one not so affected, may imply he was thinking in terms of an Einsteinian model of gravitation, where gravity bends (or curves) space.
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