Re: Challenge to Jim Scotti

Article: <[email protected]> 
Subject: Re: Challenge to Jim Scotti
Date: 25 Apr 1998 17:15:00 GMT

In article <[email protected]> M.C.
Harrison writes:
> It's moving, by inertia, away from the sun and falling, due to 
> gravity, towards it. For a circle, these two movements must 
> cancel out. The lateral motion around the sun represents the 
> speed of orbit, which depends on the kinetic energy of the body
> and determines it's inertial motion away from the sun. An 
> object travelling in a circle will move away at a tangent from
> the centre of the circle as it passes along a line drawn touching
> the circle. A second line drawn through the object and the 
> center will increase in length, unless the object is pulled back 
> towards it. No additional formulae are required, all that is 
> needed is the proposition that an object with no forces acting 
> on it will carry on unchanged, and that an object under the 
> influence of gravity will be accelerated towards the source of the
gravity. 

(Begin ZetaTalk[TM])
All this sounds nice until you start to think about it, which we assume
you are not allowing yourself to do, in deference to your Gods of
Astronomy.  Why do you persist in called a drag an acceleration?  Draw
that triangle we both have drawn to defend our arguments.  How does a
pull BACK toward the sun become a push OUTWARD?  If you use vector
logic, the sum of these two forces is a line increasingly pointed
toward the sun or other gravitational giant.  This is why your orbiting
satellites inevitably have orbital decay and crash to earth. 
INEVITABLE, unless they are pushed back up and given a boost into a new
orbit by little jets sent aloft with them for just such purposes.  

Break the orbit into moments, one describing the situation you have
above.  The second just AFTER an adjustment is made, where the orbiting
object now has a NEW angle of forward thrust, the sum of the two
vectors.  It ALSO has a diminished speed!  Since the vector pulling it
back toward the sun SUBTRACTS from the forward thrust, being in a
backward direction from the forward thrust.  This backward direction
may be slight, in a circle, but exists none the less.  It is
intuitively obvious in a long ellipse.  Since the forward thrust would
thus be degraded, but the gravity pull remains essentially the same,
the orbiting object should start to slow to the point where the gravity
pull is dominant!  
(End ZetaTalk[TM])

In article <[email protected]> M.C.
Harrison writes:
>> If it falls sunward, then why is it moving SIDEWAYS? 
>
> Because if it wasn't moving sideways, it would fall into the sun.
> A satellite in orbit round the earth has to go at a speed which 
> makes it move away from the earth at the same vertical 
> velocity as it is falling towards the earth, and for this to be
> stable it must have a particular orbital speed depending on
> what altitude it is orbitting. 

(Begin ZetaTalk[TM])
What you are saying is that it moves sideways to honor Newtonian
precepts.  You are not allowed to think about what is truly happening
to an orbiting object, and dismiss aligning Newton's formulas up
alongside vector analysis or gravity theories, as this causes
discomfort.  They contradict Newton.  ALL your man made orbits decay. 
ALL.  Your satellites crash to earth, invariably.  What you call stable
orbits, those you CONTROL, put up according to Newton, decay, in the
manner we described.  But still, Newton is a god.  Blasphemy is not
allowed, as Astronomy is as much a religion as it is a science,
apparently.
(End ZetaTalk[TM])