Enyart Needs to Take Counsel From Augustine
Enyart Needs to Take Counsel From Augustine
Dear Reverend Bob Enyart, I am sure you have heard the counsel given of old from Saint Augustine:
It is a disgraceful and a dangerous thing for one without the faith to hear a Christian talking nonsense on these topics while trying to give the meaning of scripture.
Sometimes Reverends, instead of accepting wise counsel, so dislike the counsel-giver that they do the very opposite of what the wisdom in the counsel would commend.
It was my understanding that you were going to respond directly to the issues I raised in the Abp thread. As your OP in this thread shows, you have chosen to dramatically expand the discussion beyond what I identified as the focus of the Abp thread. For that reason in the Abp thread I have posted
my response to that small portion of your OP that was responsive to the Abp issue.
In the OP of this thread, you drift to the same issues at several places, so I have done some reordering of your ideas to consolidated your points into consistent subjects. In looking over your posting, I see these major ideas:
1) Agreeing on the Rules of Engagement
2) The Abp issue (Venus’ retrograde spin and the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum. My response to most of this idea is in my recent post in the Abp thread)
3) Sagan’s opinions about the likelihood of planetary collisions
4) Newton as a prime authority
5) The Formation of the Solar System from a Condensing Gas Cloud
6) The Sun’s Angular Momentum
7) Science Education
You itemize a list of questions for my response. The answers I give below, most in the form of rather lengthy technical discussions. I will likewise ask specific questions of you.
1) the Social Niceties
Enyart said:
Phy, I enjoyed our meeting on Pier 56 at Elliot’s Oyster House! Thanks for that, and for the interesting article you gave me on Stellar Rotation Rates published in the Astrophysics Journal, July 2006, which shows that scientists are abandoning the solar wind braking hypothesis, and now they’re really groping in the dark. Regarding our family vacation, as always, it had a science theme to it, and my time with you added a valuable dimension. We had a very civil yet robust discussion of our disagreements. People waiting to check out at the grocery store are more polite to one another than drivers in rush hour traffic, for there’s more personal contact in the check-out line; and on an Internet forum, there’s even less personal connection than between drivers in traffic. While posting on TOL, we can’t even see one another’s eyes! Thus, a robust attack of someone’s position easily degrades into caustic insult. Phy, I will argue my position without insult. Of course, at times the truth is insulting. But I don’t expect this should to be one of those times.
Whoa, Nelly! I love this coming from someone who maintains literally hundreds of hours of recordings on a website, a significant portion of which are laced with a full-frontal ridiculing of parts of science. Many times I have heard you invoke the most disparaging terms stopping just short of outright profanity against the scientists you oppose. For mercy I will refrain from taking the next dozen full pages in this post listing direct quotes from your own recordings in which I as a scientist am told I am an intellectually crippled dishonest stumbling God-hating fool. I can’t imagine that you are mentally excluding me when you heap your ridicule on scientists who support the ideas you are mocking. Above in the midst of your salutary paragraph you choose to embed an unabashed dig against science (“abandoning … really groping in the dark”). This shows the vacuity of your pretend “Let’s all be nice” plea.
There is a wise saying that I doubt is in the Bible, but it should be. It says you shouldn’t say anything about someone behind their back that you wouldn’t say to their face. So in that spirit, when I recently went to the Seattle waterfront to meet with you, I knew full well that I was going to meet with a blithering scientific ditz. I saw a blithering scientific ditz waving at me to get my attention by Elliots, I shook the ditz’s hand, and spent a couple hours in conversation with the blithering scientific ditz. Finally, after saying goodbye to you after having just reconfirmed that you are absolutely a blithering scientific ditz, I drove home reminiscing about how much I had enjoyed the time. I’m not a psychologist, so don’t ask me how I can feel a personal liking for someone who has a passion for desecrating aspects of science and denigrating its practitioners.
So I agree that our meeting was enjoyable and yet without pretense. We both understood our respective positions going in. It is a wonderful thing that evolution has equipped us with the ability to actually enjoy some relaxing time contending with a good friend who you simultaneously consider to be a blithering idiot. If you weren’t the affable outgoing person you are, I wouldn’t be able to stand you. But I like you.
But my liking you is seriously compromised by my sincere belief that you, just like many of your Creationist co-conspirators, dishonor Christian ideals by your twisting of fact. I would be more amenable to a serious try at providing answers to you if I felt that you were serious about learning what science really says and how it works. If I were to ask you directly if you have such interest in understanding science, I have no doubt you would strongly say yes. But your actions overwhelm your words. Were you interested enough to research an abundant literature that shows Moslem scholars from many centuries ago knew more about geography than you did when you foolishly mocked them for the way they pointed their prayer rugs? Were you concerned enough to see if the stars in Orion’s belt were really gravitationally bound before you mindlessly parroted that misinformation? Did you even bother to see what your favorite creationist science author, Walt Brown, had to say about Jupiter’s moon Io before you polluted the airwaves with misinformation directly in opposition to Walt’s position? The list goes one and on- repeatedly ridiculing the Hubble Deep Field without the foggiest idea of what you were really saying – holding Newton up (as you do once again in this thread) as the best authority on solar system formation, while silently ignoring Lord Kelvin’s ideas that contravened Newton’s – you produced a set of lectures on Creation that drastically misrepresent the consensus of the physics community on the origins of the Universe – etc. The evidence is abundant and clear that when you see something in science that you do not like, you have no standards about accepting and promulgating any pseudoscientific opposing drivel you can find.
When it comes to science you are a friendly but unprincipled Christian liar. That opinion is mine, but one that I have supported by showing your repeated distortion of scientific ideas. Clear enough? Good, now on to the specifics of this thread. Part of your response in the OP of this thread was expected, since you lightly alluded to it when we visited together recently. Some is new to me.
2) Enyart’s Abp Defeat
From Reverend Enyart:
ThePhy criticized me for stating that based on the law of the conservation of angular momentum, Venus and Uranus “cannot be spinning backwards if they coalesced off a spinning cloud… They can’t be spinning backwards.”
I was wrong. That is, I was wrong to leave the rest of my argument unstated (an argument I make repeatedly), that retrograde rotation of Venus, et. al., undermines the condensing gas cloud hypothesis because the law of conservation of angular momentum yields the prediction that the Sun and planets would be spinning quite differently than they are, unless one makes unsubstantiated, extraordinary secondary and tertiary assumptions.
I note how quickly you try to deflect from your Venus nonsense by running to an argument that you feel much safer hiding under - questions about the Sun. Now go back and reread your own dialogue in the OP of the Abp thread and see if your dialogue used the sun’s rotation to show the supposed scientific angular momentum anomaly for Venus.
You already conceded losing the game on what I was addressing in the Abp thread when you admitted you were “wrong”. You are being duplicitous by immediately trying to camouflage your error by saying that it is not wrong in the context of other issues in the formation of the Solar System. Here again are your exact words from that show:
Now if that were true – here is what we would find … everything should be spinning in the same direction. There is a law to that effect called the Conservation of Angular Momentum. Things are spinning and they keep spinning. If you have a merry-go-round spinning and you put a basketball on it, and the merry-go-round is spinning, the basketball will end up spinning. And if the basketball flies off the merry-go-round, it will be going in generally the same direction and will be spinning in the same direction as the merry-go-round was spinning.
It’s the Conservation of Angular Momentum. Well there is a problem for the atheists who believe in the big bang. The problem is this -- It’s that Venus is spinning backwards.
No matter how many layers of sugar you put on that - no matter how many issues you think there are in the sun’s rotation, no matter how many letters Newton authored – the claim you make there is scientifically hogwash.
TP - Q1 - If you were right and the sun’s rotation was inexplicable – would that constitute one iota of truth to saying that the Venus’s retrograde spin violates the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum?
TP – Q2 - If Newton had spent the last half of his life testifying against the Solar System coming from a condensing cloud, would that constitute one iota of truth for claiming that the Venus’s retrograde spin violates the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum?
Numbering Piers
Phy, I enjoyed our meeting on Pier 56 at Elliot’s Oyster House! Thanks for that, and for the interesting article you gave me on Stellar Rotation Rates published in the Astrophysics Journal, July 2006, which seems to indicate that scientists are abandoning the solar wind braking hypothesis, and now they’re really groping in the dark.
I don’t keep track of Pier numbers, I just know where Elliott’s is. And let me admit to my ignorance here on the solar wind hypothesis you allude to as a solar braking mechanism. Can you provide primary reference to technical literature where that is discussed?
I recall you saying something like “you scientists don’t know what you are talking about” on the drive to your hotel in Seattle. Presented with a peer-reviewed article from a superb scientific source, your response was “Pooh, pooh, you guys haven’t got every any idea of what you are talking about.” This was the result of what technical analysis on your part? A 20 second look by you, a rank amateur in science, at an article whose technical content is directed to a scientific readership with degrees in astrophysics. I really hoped in the few weeks you have had that article you would have come up with something more technically substantive.
3) Enyart gets Saganized
From Reverend Enyart:
Now, moving on from the spinning naturalist’s problem with the sedentary Sun, the orbits of Venus and Uranus are highly consistent with the orbits of the other planets (in plane and circularity). ThePhy claims that subsequent to their formation, collisions reversed their rotations. At least Darwinists can fantasize over trillions of interacting organisms on a relatively tiny Earth. Contrariwise, the enormously larger solar system has a miniscule number of large bodies energetic enough to whack a planet backward. I’m making the same point that Bob B remembers Carl Sagan making in 1974 at a symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):
Originally Posted by bob b
Carl Sagan publicly mocked the idea that collisions and near collisions of large bodies in the Solar system could have occurred when he claimed that they were so improbable as to be absurd. He even presented his calculations which presumed to demonstrate this absurdity during one of his public lectures. Have people who currently worship Sagan forgotten this episode? I haven't.
And later in the post:
(And as with abiogenesis, natural selection will not help here, either.) Yet the scientific community ignores the Sagan approach of attempting to quantify the probability of such “just so” collisions, even though the theory requires atheists to defend the relatively common phenomena of retrograde rotations.
I appreciate you giving some hint as to where this claim about Sagan might be confirmed. I pointedly asked bob b for a source, and he chose instead to go silent on the issue.
I am interested in what source you drew your information on this from. If you would share that, it would be appreciated. Anyway, you have tossed the ball in my end of the court on this issue. So rather than try to finesse the ball back to your end, let me drive down the middle. In 1974 the AAAS Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco from 24 Feb to 1 Mar. In addition, there was a Regional Meeting from 24 to 27 Apr in Laramie Wyoming. I have access to the papers from these meetings, and in some cases, already have the papers in my personal library.
I can’t help but be suspicious that the claims you are attributing to Sagan trace to one rather unusual session at the 1974 Annual AAAS Meeting in San Fran. This session is a classic in science, and it involved just the type of issues that a creationist would dearly embrace. It was the face to face confrontation between Immanuel Velikovsky and real scientists. One of Velikovsky’s books was titled “Worlds in Collision”. As its title implies, it deals with the near-approach of a planetary sized body to the earth. Part of Velikovsky’s theme is that such a near collision can be used to explain some Old Testament miracles.
I don’t know if the Velikovsky meeting was the source of your claim, since you have only given me the year in which Sagan presented at the AAAS. I will instead do what you and bob b have not done and move beyond second-hand hear-say as to what Sagan believed. In speaking about the early solar system here is a small sample of what Sagan actually said (Sagan said this in response to Velikovsky):
There is nothing absurd in the possibility of cosmic collisions. … Collisions and catastrophism are part and parcel of modern astronomy, and have been for many centuries. … For example, in the early history of the solar system, when there were probably many more objects about than there are now – including objects in very eccentric orbits – collisions may have been frequent. … In the 4.5 billion year history of the solar system, many collisions must have occurred.
The papers Carl Sagan presented at AAAS symposia are kept in their archives, available online. I also invite you to note the similarity of what Sagan really said and what the paper in Nature magazine recently said (quoted later in this post). Since the sentiment that Sagan expresses in my quotes from him are in direct opposition to what you and bob b claim he said, then:
TP – Q3 - Which is the specific paper or source from Carl Sagan that supports what you and bob b say about Sagan’s ideas on collisions?
4) Lord Kelvin cooks Sir Isaac
From the Reverend:
Isaac Newton, who in brilliance conceived of universal gravity, rejected Descartes’ notion that the Sun and planets formed naturally from a condensing, swirling gas cloud. In a letter to a Mr. Bentley, along with several mathematical proofs, he wrote of this nebula hypothesis that:
Originally Posted by Isaac Newton
"The Cartesian hypothesis [of a condensing nebula]… can have no place in my system and is plainly erroneous."
Newton also said that no natural cause could have organized the solar system, but rather:
…this must have been the effect of counsel [intelligent design]. Nor is there any natural cause which could give the planets those just degrees of velocity, in proportion to their distance from the Sun and other central bodies, which were requisite to make them move in such concentric orbs about those bodies.
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I know of no reason [for the motion of the planets] but because the Author of the system thought it convenient.
These excerpts, from Newton’s Four Letters to Richard Bentley, can be found in Milton K. Munitz (ed.), Theories of the Universe (1957), p. 212.
This “Newton said” argument is so weak as to show desperation rather than good evidence. To start with, I would refer the readers to
this thread in this forum where I have dealt with this.
Were you aware that Newton invoked God’s supernatural intervention in planetary orbits to a degree that no scientist supports anymore? Newton knew that the planets not only were attracted to the sun, but also to each other. Over time, as they periodically approached and receded from each other, Newton’s calculations showed that their orbits would be perturbed more and more. This was not seen, so in emulation of your approach, Newton’s conclusion was that God was continuously involved in fudging the orbits to keep them stable. It was a later physicist who realized the mathematical approach Newton had taken to look at the orbital perturbations was not the right one. When the correct mathematics was applied, God lost his job as divine orbit fudger.
Newton did not know about electromagnetism; nor did he know of the retrograde rotation of Venus, Uranus, and half a dozen moons; and neither did he know that the Sun has virtually none of the spin it should have if Descartes’ gas cloud hypothesis had been correct. If he had possessed this additional knowledge, he would have intensified his argument against a condensing nebula theory. So, in the intervening centuries since, the relevant stunning scientific discoveries have powerfully reinforced Isaac Newton’s theological, intuitive, scientific, and mathematical refutation of the natural formation of the solar system.
Retrograde rotation I deal with later. As to:
the relevant stunning scientific discoveries have powerfully reinforced Isaac Newton’s theological, intuitive, scientific, and mathematical refutation of the natural formation of the solar system
The part of this statement that is not true starts with the word “the” at the beginning and ends with the word “system”. To be specific, please show us, or at least give us a credible source for showing that Newton offered a “mathematical refutation of the natural formation of the solar system.” As to theological opinions, I have already shown that he invoked God to solve an orbital problem that later was found to have no need of divine intervention. It is pure obstinacy to have to grasp on to ideas held by Newton when they were based on only a small fraction of the mathematical and astronomical knowledge available today. And it a blatant lie to say that “stunning scientific discoveries” have reinforced Newton’s ideas on this. A significant portion of the peer-reviewed literature in astrophysics is in direct opposition to this, and the cumulative evidence of thousands of such papers is directly contrary to your claim.
So in conclusion – as I have said in other places – Lord Kelvin, a Bible believing Christian, built his understanding of physics on both mathematics and astrophysical data not even conceived of at Newton’s time. And Lord Kelvin several times presented in great detail his scientific arguments for the earth forming millions of years ago from a condensing cloud.
TP – Q4 - On what scientific basis do you choose to side with Newton over the vastly more technically prepared Lord Kelvin?
Next, I shine a little more light on how you are stretching the truth to divert our attention from Venus to the Sun.
Is 99% a little little, or a big little?
Phy, in your thread on this, you quoted BobB in one of the last posts, saying:
Originally Posted by bob b
As any beginning astronomy text would explain, obviously angular momentum would cause any objects which were formed from within a rotating cloud to spin in the same direction of that cloud, as all in the Solar System do, with a handful of notable exceptions like Venus.
And you replied:
Originally Posted by ThePhy
Ah, but with the subsequent 5 billion years of interactions and collisions, don’t you think maybe the initial rotations might be a little changed by now?
A little? How about the Sun losing 99% of it’s supposed initial rotational energy? A little? Wild assumptions are needed to dump the Sun’s angular momentum, or to transfer it to the planets. That’s not a little! That’s almost everything. One of the greatest and most broad observations of the solar system is the distribution of its angular momentum. And that distribution, including the retrograde rotations of Venus and Uranus, is virtually the opposite of the prediction from a condensing nebula.
I notice the masterful slight of hand. You ridicule the phrase “A little”, which was specifically referring to Venus, but then sneak in issues about the Sun, not Venus, to try to carry your point. In sales that is called bait-and-switch, and is considered a trademark of a shoddy retailer.
In bringing up the missing “99%” rotational energy of the sun, you gloss over 2 issues:
Issue 1) I see what I would like to attribute to a slip of the pen on your part. You refer to the issue of the Sun losing “99% of its supposed rotational energy”. Later within the same paragraph you say it is the sun’s “angular momentum” that was dumped. Was this casual switching from talking about “energy” to “angular momentum” accidental, or does it indicate that you do not know that energy and momentum are very different animals? Under direct questioning, as I have here, I am sure you would (will) admit to a scribal error in substituting the word “energy” in place of the phrase “angular momentum”, since they are not at all synonymous. But equally important is whether or not you really have an adequate grasp on what these terms mean in the scientific world. Most people have a rough mental image of what “energy” means, and probably a less firm conception of what “momentum” is. But then add in the complicating factor of rotating motion like we have here, and now the correct concepts are “rotational energy” and “angular momentum”. Do you know when one is to be used, and not the other? Or how they are related to each other? If not, the best you can do is echo the ideas you find others offering on these issues, and as we shall see later in this post, this ignorance can open the door to some very wrong conclusions.
TP- Q5 – Do you know the difference between rotational energy and angular momentum?
Issue 2) The second issue is that to make your point that my use of the phrase “A little” is disingenuous, you highlight what appears to be a very big anomaly – the missing 99% of the sun’s angular momentum. To substantiate what I am about to say, let me not allude to vague principles, but supply actual values. The point at issue – is the missing 99% of the Suns’ angular momentum a credible reason to mock my “A little” when talking about Venus? If we make the adequate approximation that the sun is a ball of uniform density, and Venus is also, then for each we can compute their “moment of inertia” (which is useful in computing the angular momentum and the rotational energy). For each the moment of inertia is (2/5)*M*R*R, where M is the mass (of the body we are talking about) and R is the radius of that body. So to compare the moment of inertia of the Sun and Venus, we can divide one by the other, and (algebra not shown), the ratio of the Sun’s Moment of Inertia to that of Venus is in the ratio of (Msun * Rsun * Rsun)/(Mvenus * Rvenus * Rvenus). Actual values, Msun = 2*10^30 kg, Rsun = 700,000 km, Mvenus = 5*10^24 kg, Rvenus = 7,000 km. So the ratio of the Sun’s moment of inertia to that of Venus’s is 4 BILLION to ONE. Any physicists reading this are invited to carry the computations on into actual angular momentum values, but the point is clear. Even with the 99% anomaly you are agonizing over, I am speaking of something less than a 10-millionth of what you picked to compare it too. Yup, compared to the Sun, definitely “a little” (little, little).
Now it is time to turn to the meatier parts of your post – the issues of solar system formation and the sun’s rotation.
5) Solar System Formation
Reverend Enyart says:
…the prediction that the Sun and planets would be spinning quite differently than they are, unless one makes unsubstantiated, extraordinary secondary and tertiary assumptions
The focus of your OP turns almost exclusively to dealing with the “Sun” part of this statement (again dodging the need to defend the planets part). But since you included the word “planets” in the above, let’s dispose of that specific part of the issue. You claim that science has to use “unsubstantiated, extraordinary secondary and tertiary assumptions.” Note you don’t list a single one of those assumptions, nor to provide a single justification for them being unsubstantiated or extraordinary. And it packs more emotional punch if you vaguely allude to not only secondary assumptions - but heaven forbid - tertiary ones.
Contrary to the expectations of a solar system which condensed from a spinning gas cloud, we have half a dozen moons, Venus, and Uranus spinning in the opposite direction of that supposed cloud, and our Sun is missing about 99%, or nearly all of the rotational energy it should possess (as compared to the planets, which contain mostly all of the system’s angular momentum).
Let me rephrase the first part of your claim more truthfully. “Contrary to the expectations of a solar system which condensed from a (perfectly uniform) spinning gas cloud (whose internal structure is so astoundingly smooth as to preclude any local gravitational gradients) …” The way you chose to word it is so Pollyanna as to remind me of Children’s Bible stories where because God is good and created everything then nowhere is there ever going to be any strife or unhappiness. To explain unhappiness in God’s perfect creation you must have to introduce “unsubstantiated, extraordinary secondary and tertiary assumptions.” Or you can talk about the real world, where people contend with one another, and condensing solar systems are violent places of interactions.
I have already given answer to the Venus and Uranus issue you mention, and add a little more later in this post. On the part talking about the Sun, I have to fault you again for playing free and loose with scientific terms. The sun is not missing 99% of its rotational energy, it is missing 99% of its angular momentum. Apples and oranges (though maybe ditz’s don’t know that difference). Physicists could have chosen to talk about how much rotational energy the sun should have had, but doesn’t, but instead you see the anomaly always spoken of in terms of angular momentum. There is good reason for this, but I can’t give away all of our dirty little trade secrets.
I will do what you have chosen not to - address specifics about the things that might affect orbits and spins. A good deal of that answer I have already addressed
in post 10 of the Abp thread, when I answered an insightful question from sentientsynth. Then later in the Abp thread I posted a relevant observation from a scientific peer-reviewed journal, Nature. I repeat that here:
Terrestrial planet formation is believed to have concluded in our Solar System with about 10 million to 100 million years of giant impacts, where hundreds of Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos acquired random velocities through gravitational encounters and resonances with one another and with Jupiter.
Combining that with my answer to sentientsynth makes the observation that at least some of the planets have irregular spin about as amazing as hearing that there is an occasional wreck on a jam-packed freeway.
Since you opened the door, it’s time to walk in. Let’s look at the orbital motions – all of them. You believe the Sun and planets have the motions they do because that is the motion given to them by God in the recent past. I can’t refute that, nor can anyone else. But in spite of you wanting science to include your particular belief in God’s miracles in its range of acceptable explanations, in fact insulating science from all supernatural explanations helps isolate it from having to pick which unprovable claims to assimilate.
How to Compress a Ball Into a Pancake
So what does science really say about what we should see if the solar system resulted from the condensation of a rotating nebular cloud? One prediction is that the collapse should be much more extreme in the directions parallel to the axis of rotation than perpendicular to it. What am I talking about? The simplest way to show this is by the use of vectors, but since Fundamentalist Christian intellectual giants like bob b have shown they failed freshman vector analysis, I will avoid such. So without introducing vectors, let’s compare this to something more mundane. Think of the cloud as a slowly rotating diffuse blob of dust and gas. There may be internal motion, local swirls, etc, but overall the cloud rotates about an axis.
Think of this cloud as composed of a bunch of flat disks of uniform thickness, similar to phonograph records, that are stacked with their holes lining up on the axis of rotation. The disks cutting through the center of the blob are the farthest across (but all disks are of equal thickness), and the disks get shorter across as we approach the ends of the blob. The separation between one disk and the next is purely a matter of measurement, and there is no physical boundary between them. From a distance, the disks would appear as (in fact are) the original rotating blob.
Now think of what happens to every piece of dust or gas in one of these disks. As per Newton, it feels a gravitational tug from every other piece of dust in the blob. Now look at just the gravity from the other particles in its own disk - there are more particles on the side towards the center than on the side away from the center. So it will feel a net gravitational force towards the axis. But if you look at the rotation of the disk as the blob rotates, the particle also feels a force called the centrifugal force (for nit-pickers, a pseudo force in a Newtonian frame). This force counters the net gravitational force towards the axis. And any shrinkage of the disk towards the axis will result in a increase in the gravitational tug (because the particle is closer to the other particles attracting it) and a countering increase in the opposing centrifugal force, because the disk will be rotating faster (think spinning figure skater drawing in her arms).
But now look at the gravity experienced by that same particle due to the other particles in the disk above and below it. If the disk it is in is near the “top” of the blob, there will be fewer other particles above than below. As a result, it will feel a net gravitational tug down, towards the wide central disk. But for this gravitational force there is no countering centrifugal force, since centrifugal force only acts to push away from the axis of rotation.
Thus each disk will be constrained from shrinking by the counterbalancing gravity and centrifugal forces, but will be uniformly attracted to collapse down towards the “central disk”. The net result is that to the extent that gravity is not cancelled by other forces (such as thermal pressure) the blob will slowly flatten into essentially a single disk of much higher density than the original diffuse cloud. It will appear now similar to a thick disk, still rotating about the original axis. With the exception of the still present local swirls, the great predominance of motion will be this rotation.
And now the importance of the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum takes center stage. As locally dense spots in the thickened disk collapse even further to form planets, they will carry their part of the angular momentum with them. The angular momentum in this nascent planet will show up in two ways, its motion about the sun, and its own rotation.
Here is the significant part that I want to emphasize. Barring significant interactions with other planets, the rotation of the planet and its orbit must rotate in such a way as to preserve its portion of the original angular momentum, and this rotation direction must be the same as every other planet formed out of that collapsing cloud. This is a pretty restrictive set of conditions.
Of all the billions of random orbital directions and planetary spin directions that might be envisioned, physics says that there must a strong preference for one single axis for all of these motions.
Planets in the Pancake
Is this what is really seen? Yes, this fact became so obvious in the early studies of astronomy that the “flattened disk” directions were given a name – it’s called the ecliptic plane. Look at any good mechanical solar system model, where the planets circle the sun on the end of long rods, and moons circle the planets on shorter rods. They all lie almost in the same plane, and all travel around the sun in the same direction. If you look at their rotation, it too is in the right direction. Oops, except for those that Enyart wants to keep our focus on, Venus and Uranus. What happened to them?
While solar systems are condensing, big local clumps of matter condense into big planets. Little clumps make little planets. But these clumps also exert gravitational forces on each other. Planets that are condensing (or have completed condensing) close to the Sun move rather fast in their orbits, as physics dictates that they must. Each planet’s orbital period is unique, determined by the details of its distance from the Sun and the shape of its orbit. So as they move around the sun, they are each subject to a complicated pattern of gravitational tugs from their companions as they approach and separate.
One result of this interplay is that the very early solar system was much more populated with renegade small (small by planetary standards, yet billions of tons by man’s measurements) bodies being gravitationally thrown about by their relatively monstrous big brothers – the planets that we see today. These monstrous billiard balls that occasioned the night sky in the early solar system sometimes had their orbits adjusted just right for an actual collision with a planet. The article from nature that I quote from above is speaking of what happened then.
Once again, I refer the reader to my post to sentientsynth in the Abp thread (and that you acknowledge) where I deal with the magnitude of the energies involved in significantly changing a planets rotational angular momentum as compared to changing its orbital angular momentum. In fact it is the rotational part of the angular momentum that evidences the most deviation from a purely antiseptic solar system. The angular momentum in the rotations of Venus, Uranus, and the moons is a peanut player compared to the angular momentum of the orbits they occupy. Of all the planets Pluto alone (yeah I know Pluto got demoted recently) seems to have undergone a severe enough gravitational interaction to move its orbit somewhat out of the ecliptic plane.
Now if we take your position on the orbits and spin of the planets, could God have decided to cause them all to orbit in the same plane, and to also align their spin axis perpendicular to that plane? I guess He could. But out of the billions of random combinations of possible orbits and spin directions, why would He select exactly the same pattern that the laws of physics demand if just nature did the job? Nature demands one consistent pattern for planetary angular momentum, and God has the freedom of billions of patterns open to Him. And which one is the one that we see? The one nature is constrained to (or that God by perverse fiat chose to impose).
TP – Q6 – Is God constrained somehow to arranging the orbits of the planets into a single plane, when there are billions of other arrangements that he could have just as well have chosen from?
6) Why the Slow Spin of the Sun?
And now we come to the other of your arguments – the missing angular momentum of the sun.
Phy, in Seattle, you asked me, “but what was Newton unaware of that we’ve since discovered?” And I answered, “electromagnetism.” And you said, “right.” True, Newton did not know about electro-magnetism, and you hope that somewhere within this field you can find the brakes that stopped the Sun. So to defend the condensing nebula theory while conserving angular momentum, you need a braking mechanism to apply massive torque to stop the Sun from turning. This massive redistribution of spin must occur while leaving the inner and outer planets with their proportions of spin. And because the Sun is so far from the nearest stars and galaxies, these have a negligible gravitational and electro-magnetic effect on the Sun, and will provide no significant field for the Sun’s supposed brakes to grab a hold of. So this braking mechanism must function in virtually empty space otherwise dominated by the very sun which is to be slowed, in an electromagnetic field generated by the very same spinning Sun, and amidst its own system, which would be spinning per the mother nebula’s spin, within which this braking mechanism is now supposed to torque the Sun to a comparable stop
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Phy, to continue your defense of the condensing nebula theory while conserving angular momentum, not only do you need a braking mechanism in empty space dominated by the very spinning Sun you hope to torque to a virtual stop, you also need multiple “just so” collisions within the vastness of the solar system, between a tiny number of bodies that have sufficient energy to do the job. Yes, less energy would be required to alter a planet’s rotation than to change it’s orbit. But still the aftermath of those collisions must leave the planets with nearly circular orbits (extremely low eccentricities, all except Mercury), including Venus and Uranus. And after the “just so” collisions that alter the prograde rotations of Venus and Uranus to retrograde, all the planets remain in essentially the same plane as the orbit of the Earth, including Venus and Uranus, while maintaining their low eccentricities. And of course “just so” not only means collisions, for the majority of random collisions, even with sufficient energy, would not reverse a planet’s rotation. And regardless of how unlikely all this is, this extremely improbable scenario cannot happen just once, but it must happen twice, to one-fourth (two of eight) of the planets. And also, four percent of the moons (6 of 162) must be hit “just so” to reverse their rotations from the initial spin of the supposed nebula.
I hope the technical arguments you offer in this are of your own thinking, else you are admitting to scavenging ideas from some pretty unqualified sources. I say this because the technical mismash of nonsense in this is classic. Take this:
This massive redistribution of spin must occur while leaving the inner and outer planets with their proportions of spin
Contrary to your misconstrual of the facts, it is not the spins of the planets that are at issue. As a competent physicist could easily show (and in fact I already did, in the response I gave to sentientsynth in the Abp thread), the angular momentum tied up in planetary spins is miniscule when compared to that tied up in orbital motion. You are chasing a mouse in your church while an elephant is rampaging inside.
And because the Sun is so far from the nearest stars and galaxies, these have a negligible gravitational and electro-magnetic effect on the Sun, and will provide no significant field for the Sun’s supposed brakes to grab a hold of.
And since I am aware of a grand total of zero scientists who maintain that either gravitational or electromagnetic interaction with extra-solar systems is a primary contributor, this accrues as pure nonsense originating with you.
So this braking mechanism must function in virtually empty space otherwise dominated by the very sun which is to be slowed, in an electromagnetic field generated by the very same spinning Sun, and amidst its own system, which would be spinning per the mother nebula’s spin, within which this braking mechanism is now supposed to torque the Sun to a comparable stop.
Quite a mouthful there, but informative nonetheless. Here you are trying to highlight the fallacy of the sun’s braking mechanism operating in empty space. But if you honestly understood some of the things you have already said in this post, you would see why this aspect of your argument is baloney. In fact the sun is not having to brake in empty space. Instead it is, to use your own words from earlier,
the planets, which contain mostly all of the system’s angular momentum
Catch that? It’s not an empty space issue at all, it’s an unequal distribution of angular momentum based on the comparison of how much mass the sun ended up with and how much the planets ended up with. The sun, with the great majority of the mass in the solar system, ends up with a very small part of the angular momentum. The sun interacted with the planets, not empty space. It helps if you first understand accurately what the real problem is before you pretend to be an authority on it.
Now that we know what the real problem is, we can do like a religious fanatic and claim that “God did it”, or we can see if science has same insights. There are a couple of pertinent observations. First is that we only know of two categories of forces that act on large bodies over great distances. One is gravity, and the other is electromagnetism.
Since matter is by nature almost electrically neutral, frequently in massive astrophysical phenomena gravity is the cause. But for explaining a massive transfer of angular momentum, gravity has some real drawbacks. The biggest one is that gravity is a central force, meaning it acts along the line connecting the two objects. Without getting into science too deep for most readers, suffice it to say that gravity is usually very inefficient at transferring momentum. Probably the place it has been most successful at momentum exchange is in the tidal locking of the moons.
Turning our attention to the other force we have, we ask if electromagnetism is a rational candidate? Could it supply the strength of coupling needed to stop the sun’s rotation by moving its angular momentum to the satellites of the sun?
Our instinct says no, based on our observations that no known electromagnetic coupling in the solar system is currently seen that would even come close to what is needed. But our solar system today is incredibly different than it was in its formative years. And this presents a problem. Since our solar system has been out of its formative phase for billions of years, we don’t see the requisite electromagnetic interactions going on locally. But other Solar Systems that are still in their infancy, even the nearest ones, are so distant as to be essentially invisible in enough detail to study. Only in the last few years have telescopes and instrumentation been able to gather data that can help guide the theory. One of the technical papers I gave you related to this.
Since we know that our Sun has an anomalously small angular momentum, we want to know if our solar system is exceptional in this regard. So a study was done that looked at a number of developing solar systems. And the observed result is that it is not just here that the Sun is rotating slower than a simple model would suggest, but that seems to be the norm. Whatever happened “here” in our early solar system seems to also be happening in those other solar systems.
So the slow spin of the central star seems to be a rule rather than the exception, and the only known force that is a likely candidate for the underlying physics is electromagnetism. That is certainly a far cry from saying we know the details. But I see no difference between this and numerous other scientific issues that were equally puzzling when first observed, but have now relinquished their secrets.
I could at his point draw on some very technical elements of this electromagnetic explanation that are being looked at. For example, in other threads I have discussed Jupiter’s moon Io. Between Jupiter and Io, at a distance of over 200,000 miles, there is a astounding flow of electricity of many hundreds of billions of watts. This is with Io and Jupiter already condensed into compact bodies. In the early days of the solar system, when the sun was still relatively diffuse, but had just reached the thermonuclear ignition temperature, what might have been the magnitude of the current flows involved, and how far out did the created magnetic lines of force reach?
I attended a lecture by Werner Von Braun in the Huntsville, Alabama Space Center in the late 1960s. In that lecture he described his involvement in supplying a rocket that was used to carry the US’s only space-detonated nuclear bomb to its detonation altitude. To make a long story short, from on board a ship beneath the explosion he observed what seemed to be an immense expanding life form spreading across the sky. It was the plasma created by the atomic blast, being captured by and trying to distort the lines of the earth’s magnetic field. Slowly it thinned into a long north and south filament and gradually dimmed out as the puny magnetic field of the earth was able to constrain the force of a nuclear blast. Multiply that kind of electromagnetic coupling by a billion times for a hundred million years, and even the rotation of the Sun is a candidate for massive alteration.
BE-SolarSpin-Q1: True or False: The standard explanation for the natural formation of the solar system from a condensing nebula predicts that the Sun would have about 99% of the angular momentum, however, the reality is nearly the exact opposite of the prediction of the theory.
I can’t dissuade you from mocking science for lack of the final answer, just as your predecessors had equal right to mock man’s lack of understanding of gravity, earthquakes, disease, comets, eclipses, volcanoes, storms, etc. etc. As shown above, your refuge is in saying that science doesn’t know, but not in showing that science is wrong. In those cases where you unwisely chose to show scientific mistakes, it turns out that the real culprit is your own incompetence in the field.
I am struck by this dramatic difference in how science and Creationists view the same problem. The Creationist feels that problems science can’t answer testify to not only science’s limitations, but somehow falsify a massive amount of scientifically secure understandings already in place. In contrast, problems like the Sun’s angular momentum are viewed in science as opportunities for extending our understanding of how nature works.
7) Education Angst
The standard theories of our solar system and planet formation are in such difficulty, that alternatives are being considered, concluding for example that the planets did not form as a result of condensing gas. (Naturalism can’t explain our own moon, let alone planet formation, star formation, whether stars or galaxies form first, how galactic super structures form faster than gravity could allow over billions of years, etc.) Yet millions of public school students go through a dozen years of atheistic science curricula and learn of the condensing nebula without being given a clue of the overwhelming contrary evidence, of retrograde rotation of planets, moons, and the Sun that supposedly lost its spin. My brief Venus segment is a teeny attempt to correct this massive evolutionary bias that has led to hundreds of millions of misinformed secondary students worldwide, and millions more college graduates mislead by their atheistic science education to assume that the Sun, planets and moons all behave in ways predicted by the “accepted” nebula theory. Again, my program segment was an attempt, abbreviated as it was, to expose this colossal failure of the atheist camp to own up to some of their theory’s wild assumptions and MAJOR weaknesses.
(Of course, if we're going to allow baseless secondary and tertiary assumptions to bring the nebula theory into compliance with the law of angular momentum, then we'd have to consider SETI implications. Perhaps an alien ship used a tractor beam to alter the spin of Venus, Uranus, some moons, and the Sun to their current state, with the ship absorbing the transferred angular momentum.)
I see little need to feed your appetite for discrediting science education as a way to glorify your God. Nor am I tempted by invoking aliens. And contrary to your inaccurate claims above, we have had for several years very good candidate models for explaining the voids and walls in space.
Hey Phy, IMAGINE THIS: Imagine your reaction if the situation were reversed! If creationism were the model that predicted a Sun with 99% angular momentum, and planets with 1%, and then scientists measured the momentum, YOU WOULD BE TAKING A MAJOR FIT laughing to high heaven that the creationists reject plain science, because THE SUN IS NOT SPINNING AS THEY PREDICT, and THEY ARE IGNORING the MOST BASIC OF SCIENTIFIC LAWS and the MOST BROAD SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATIONS.
But you atheists don’t get that laugh, do you? Yet when the most broad predictions of the “accepted” theory of natural formation of the solar system find themselves squarely opposed to what scientists actually observe, even regarding this issue, atheists still accuse us Creationists of being uninformed and denying science. Go figure.
Sorry, but the treatment of persecution complexes are not my specialty.
Phy, here is what I counsel you to do. I’ll put it in the form of questions to you. You should readily and wholeheartedly admit that each of the following are True:
BE-SolarSpin-Q1: True or False: The standard explanation for the natural formation of the solar system from a condensing nebula predicts that the Sun would have about 99% of the angular momentum, however, the reality is nearly the exact opposite of this prediction of the theory.
BE-SolarSpin-Q2: True or False: The actual angular momentum of the solar system is apparently in extreme conflict with the prediction of the standard formation theory.
And since my radio show is designed in part to expose defects in our education system:
BE-SolarSpin-Q3: True or False: America’s atheistic science education leaves millions of students in ignorance of the fact that the actual angular momentum of the solar system is apparently in extreme conflict with the prediction of the standard formation theory.
BE-SolarSpin-Q4: True or False: There is no call from TOL evolutionists, atheists, big bangers, nor from the secular scientific community generally, to correct this enormous failure of our education system, by openly teaching students that the actual angular momentum of the solar system is apparently in extreme conflict with the prediction of the standard formation theory.
BE-SolarSpin-Q5: True or False: With all the advances of modern science, the factual observations made in the last centuries have added significant weight to Newton’s refutation of the standard formation theory.
BE-SolarSpin-Q6: True or False: With all the advances since Newton, science offers no demonstrable force that could transfer the angular momentum of the Sun to the planets.
BE-SolarSpin-Q7: True or False: The retrograde rotations of Venus, Uranus, and six moons, and the Sun devoid of almost all of it’s expected angular momentum, taken together, are significant evidence against the standard condensing-nebula explanation of the formation of the solar system.
Phy, you could sooner put your shoulder to the Sun to stop it from turning, than to stop the heavens from declaring the glory of God! Thanks for welcoming us back from our family vacation.
-Bob Enyart
The answers to most of the questions above have been covered in my post.
I haven’t tried the pushing the Sun with my shoulder idea. Will look into it.
As to your qualms about science education (Q3 and Q4) that sounds like a cry for help coming from your own demonstrated lack of science understanding. Seek first to learn science, and then yours will be the power to teach it. If you are not even going to find out what science really says about things, and then you accuse science of dishonesty, where is the real failing? “I don’t know, and I’m not going to find the real facts, and therefore I demand that science teach that God did it.” That is good logic?
Every time I hear you on your program telling how Newton rejected the origin of solar system from a cloud, I listen carefully to see if you are honest enough with your listeners to tell about Lord Kelvin’s stance on the matter. Nary a word. And you are concerned about a truthful science education?
“Genesis – Creation” a good teaching tool? What does it say about the options for creating the universe? “Eternal God, or eternal matter.” That’s it. And that is a monstrous mockery not even close to what science says. And you are concerned about a truthful science education?
When we recently met in Seattle I placed a large color picture of HDF in front of you, and asked that you point to any specific galaxy in that photo and tell me its distance. What happened? You have repeatedly ballyhooed your triumph over NASA regarding HDF on your Bob Enyart Live radio show, yet with someone who knows a bit about HDF sitting in front of you, you could not point out a single Galaxy in the photo and defend your claim. When I mentioned that the red-shift data needed to be used in conjunction with the photo, you said it would be nice if NASA would provide that kind of filtering. And so I turned a page or so into the book and showed you the exact kind of picture you needed, and your commentary on the HDF issue came to a screeching train wreck. And you are concerned about a truthful science education?
Your favorite scientist Walt Brown disagrees with you on why Io is hot, but I have yet to hear you admit that on your radio show. And you are concerned about a truthful science education?
Want a bunch more examples of the quality of “science education” that comes from you, Mr. Spiritual Educator? You have a church whose membership is not very sophisticated in science, and a similar listening audience. They like your style, and trust you. That is your living, and you feed them what works. If I am wrong, then enlist their help in these discussions. Don Daley stood by your side in the 2004 Age-of-the-earth debate, and is a High School science teacher. Isn’t he willing to put his scientific credentials on the line and come on these boards and back your technical claims?
Sincerely,
Your science bete noire
ThePhy
