Response by Sam Cox to "Beelzebub's Buried Dog" by Homann (Canada)

Hello!

Most of the "stars" nearest the earth are protostars and are a few times the size of Jupiter. It is completely possible that a "Brown Dwarf" is affecting gravitational interactions in the solar neighborhood. Locating these objects would be of value to science.

My mother told me that "if I took care of the little things, the big things would take care of themselves." Accounting for a previously unaccounted for precession of 43 seconds of arc per century in the orbit of Mercury was one of the experimental verifications which ushered in Einstein's model of the cosmos. Gravitational bending of light from stars as it went by the sun during solar eclipses was another, but at first the precision on those measurements was very bad. Later, improving precision confirmed the Einsteinian effects. Today, Einsteinian effects have been measured to a very high degree of precision, as many as 17 decimal places. A high degree of precision (not necessarily 17 places in all effects!) gives SR, GR and QM their veracity or credibility. Little things, and a high degree of accuracy are important!

However, I view the precession (or wobbling of, as a top slowing down) of the earths axis as a fact. The ancient pyramids were aligned very precisely with the star Thuban, the pole star when they were built. The stars Yildun and Kokab are referred to in historical records as pole stars by the Turks and Arabs. The brightest pole stars in the northern hemisphere are Vega (pole star in 13,000 BC and AD (sorry I missed a few hundred years!). In the southern hemisphere, there is no pole star now, but in the future there will be a procession of them.

The precession of the earths axis is dictated by physical principles. Manned lunar exploration found that the chemical composition of the surface of the moon is identical to the Earths mantle. This led to computer studies which show a very high probability that the moon was created by a glancing impact between the Earth and another planet (possibly Mars, which has an almost identical inclination of its axis to the ecliptic) early in the history of the solar system. This impact, and other "near-misses", believed to be common in the early formation of any planetary system, caused the precession, which is observable and measurable in historic times....even in one lifetime! Precession has small direct effects on the Earths rotation on its axis and revolution about the Sun, but fundamentally, rotation, revolution and precession are separate processes....just as time, space and energy are defined as different qualities in GR.

The Earth is not a good clock, by atomic clock standards anyway. The change in relative positions of both the Sun and moon, the ellipse of the earths orbit itself, the movements of Venus which is astronomically close, Mars and even Jupiter and Saturn, affect the exact period of our day and year. The Author used the star Sirius as a fixed star, but Sirius is only 8.6 light years from the Earth. A better fixed star would have been at least 100 light years away. There is continental drift of several inches a year to contend with and also the Earths tides; not only the oceans, but the land masses themselves. The author lives in Alberta, an area within a few hundred miles of active plate tectonic movement.

Every time the earth rotates, millions upon millions of tons of sea water slide up on the land like disk brakes, impeding its rotation. Much of this energy moves to the moon, which is becoming more distant. In 600-800 million years, ( data from Fred Espenak; NASA, Greenbelt Md; espenak@gsfc.nasa.gov) there will be no more total solar eclipses, only annular. Eventually, if the Sun does not die and consume both Earth and Moon first, the Earth will lose the moon, which would become a planet in its own right. It has been estimated from fossil records that 400 million years ago during Devonian times, an Earth day was considerably shorter than today. The rate of slowing now is reducing, but is still enough to make really accurate time keeping by the Earths rotation impossible. Over short periods, the Earth actually speeds up slightly and then slows down. Its time of rotation against the fixed stars at this time is roughly 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.09 seconds...and slowing.

For readers who are interested, the precession of the Earths axis is easily measured in one lifetime, in fact the axis of the Earth precesses one Degree every 71.6 years...very easy to measure. The figures are as follows: one day= 1/7"; one week=1"; one year, 50.274"; 30 years 25.14' (1950-1980); 71.6 years, one degree; 100 years 1.397 degrees; 2150 years (one sign of the Zodiac) 30 degrees; 25,800 years, 360 degrees.

The author talks about an "Axis Star" which is "orbited by our solar system". It would require a massive body to cause precession, so massive, it would be astronomically close and observable as a binary companion of the Sun. However, I really appreciate this intuition, for in an Einsteinian Hyperspherical Universe frames of reference are not prioritized by the respective increasing masses of heavenly bodies in a given system. Each coordinate location on the 7-D Einsteinian Hypersphere has its own equally valid frame of reference. This prediction of the Geometric universe is experimentally verifiable, and as I recall, some expensive equipment was sent into space this year (1999) to test Einstein once again. I haven't heard the results, but if the Einsteinian prediction was incorrect, the whole world would know about it by now!

My final comment is on "significant" figures: The letter JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory- NASA) sent to Mr. Homann stressed the fact that because of many factors (some of which I have mentioned), most of the places in his mathematical figures are not significant. This means they are not really meaningful, and it is not good science to try to use them. Even seconds of arc in Mercury's orbit are significant, but millionths of seconds of arc? There are just too many factors involved. The problem is much like the one we have in physics when we try to evaluate an eggs coming together and jumping on the table using forces and vectors.

I am impressed with Mr. Homanns interest in Astronomy! Little things are important, and we need to be watchful of experimental deviations from our models of any kind, however seemingly insignificant. If we begin to see a pattern of deviation, it is time to take a hard look at our models and reevaluate them mathematically.

I wish Mr. Homann my best in his personal quest for exactness!

Sincerely,

Sam Cox: College of Micronesia