On Friday, March 17, 2023 at 4:37:30 PM UTC-6, Gerald Kelleher wrote:
The analogy I often use is that the nose of a person's body represents roughly
where the North pole is relative to the orbital plane ( a person's midriff) is so
the ecliptic pole as a surface reference is the top of a person's head.
The Polaris effect is an orbital feature as the person's nose always faces in the same direction as they walk/orbit around a central object representing the
central Sun. If a ball is used to represent the Sun, the distance between the nose and the surface of the ball will be different at opposite ends of an orbit.
This represents a circle the nose must go through as a person walks around the ball in a specific way while keeping their nose orientated to the same spot.
RA/Dec, or clockwork solar system modelling, makes Polaris a daily rotational feature, so everything goes astray from this point onwards.
Just as the Earth's North Pole points in the direction of Polaris, the north ecliptic pole, I see, points
in (or at least very near to) the direction of the Cat's Eye Nebula, NGC 6543. So at least the ecliptic
pole has a location in the sky, even though it can be anywhere on the Arctic Circle on Earth.
As for the substance of your posting, it is hard for me to comment on its merits.
The Earth's rotation is such that it is on an axis that is aligned with the direction from
the Sun to a spot near Polaris. That's a fact about the Earth's rotation.
It's also a fact about the Earth's orbit, in a sense, that the Earth's rotation doesn't precess
once a year - for example, the Earth isn't in a perpetual Winter solstice, with the Earth's
axis always pointing 23 1/2 degrees away from the Sun! But the reason for *that* is because
*angular momentum is conserved*; that is, the same laws apply to the Earth as apply to
a spinning top - so that is _still_ not only a fact about the Earth's rotation, but, worse yet,
it's rank Newtonianism!
At least, it smells bad to you.
Sadly, at least from your viewpoint, the educational system has done such a good job
of indoctrinating young people with Newtonianism that your objectons, whatever they
are, end up being basically incomprehensible to everyone else.
Or has it? The state of education, at least in some parts of the United States, is
so parlous that a large number of people grow up ignorant of very basic facts about science, geography, and a number of other people. Witness the increasing popularity of the idea that the Earth is flat. Therefore, I can't completely rule out
the possibility of some... articulate and persuasive individual... taking up your
ideas and starting a new mass movement, no doubt starting by means of a few videos on YouTube.
On which Donald Trump's account has just been re-instated, in related news.
Thankfuly, this disaster has not yet happened, and we have not yet been treated to videos explaining why the Moon does not rotate. (Or haven't we? I haven't exactly _searched_ for such videos...)
John Savard
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