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bob b

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ThePhy said:
Bob b at his finest again, offering anything but specific evidence on the subject of the thread.

It should be obvious to all thinking persons that OEJ hung you out to dry regarding the direction of rotation of the planets in the Solar System and the connection with angular momentum. Need I say more?
 

ThePhy

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bob b said:
It should be obvious to all thinking persons that OEJ hung you out to dry regarding the direction of rotation of the planets in the Solar System and the connection with angular momentum. Need I say more?
No, I think not. OEJ who has admitted that astronomy is not his forte found a website that makes a simplified presentation for the public of a complex subject. That is obvioulsy far superior to the graduate-level astronomy textbooks I rely on.

For clarification - yes planets do assume the rotation of the originating cloud. And after that has happened, - what does OEJs website say about them then? Are they forbidden from affecting each other?

Just in case I am not making myself clear, you are demostrably incompetent at simple mathematics, and now at astrophysics as well.
 

bob b

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ThePhy said:
No, I think not. OEJ who has admitted that astronomy is not his forte found a website that makes a simplified presentation for the public of a complex subject. That is obvioulsy far superior to the graduate-level astronomy textbooks I rely on.

For clarification - yes planets do assume the rotation of the originating cloud. And after that has happened, - what does OEJs website say about them then? Are they forbidden from affecting each other?

Just in case I am not making myself clear, you are demostrably [sic] incompetent at simple mathematics, and now at astrophysics as well.

First, I am not immune to making simple mistakes, especially in informal discussions on forums, but then again I was one of the three authors of a novel numerical method that bears our collective names, so the charge regarding my competency in simple mathematics is disingenuous. Apparently your hatred for those who believe that scripture is accurate has clouded your judgment in scientific matters as well as in theology.

And your statement to OEJ that "All your article says is the spin is due to the original angular momentum, and says nothing about any individual planet having to spin in a particular direction" was a misstatement which you reluctantly corrected only now.

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.

The unexpected relatively recent discovery of the retro-spin of Venus has led to speculations concerning the reason for this oddity, which if you were forthcoming you would admit to their highly improbable nature.

Such speculation reminds me of a similar case some years ago when 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.
 
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fool

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bob b said:
but then again I was one of the three authors of a novel numerical method that bears our collective names
I don't supose you could just privately send me a link to that and spare me the hunt?
 

ThePhy

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bob b said:
First, I am not immune to making simple mistakes, especially in informal discussions on forums, but then again I was one of the three authors of a novel numerical method that bears our collective names, so the charge regarding my competency in simple mathematics is disingenuous.
All I have to go by is what you yourself demonstrated in these forums a couple years ago. Since that pathetic demonstration of incompetence in simple algebra, I have seen you do nothing to indicate your real mathematical abilities are above that level.
Apparently your hatred for those who believe that scripture is accurate has clouded your judgment in scientific matters as well as in theology.
A charge you have made before, and never established.
And your statement to OEJ that "All your article says is the spin is due to the original angular momentum, and says nothing about any individual planet having to spin in a particular direction" was a misstatement which you reluctantly corrected only now.
I do apologize. I must remember when talking to kindergarten scientists to use very simple words and don’t assume they have any understanding of science.
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.
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?
The unexpected relatively recent discovery of the retro-spin of Venus has led to speculations concerning the reason for this oddity, which if you were forthcoming you would admit to their highly improbable nature.
Another charge you have levied before but never come forth with the backing data.
Such speculation reminds me of a similar case some years ago when 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.
Source? And -- are you sayng that Sagan was wrong, that indeed such collisions are probable? Collisions like might have given Venus a slight retrograde spin?
 

bob b

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ThePhy said:
All I have to go by is what you yourself demonstrated in these forums a couple years ago. Since that pathetic demonstration of incompetence in simple algebra, I have seen you do nothing to indicate your real mathematical abilities are above that level.A charge you have made before, and never established.I do apologize. I must remember when talking to kindergarten scientists to use very simple words and don’t assume they have any understanding of science. 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?Another charge you have levied before but never come forth with the backing data.Source? And -- are you sayng that Sagan was wrong, that indeed such collisions are probable? Collisions like might have given Venus a slight retrograde spin?

Sagan presented his calculations. I have yet to see yours.
 

ThePhy

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bob b said:
Sagan presented his calculations.
So you say. When I say "source" I am asking if you can provide a primary reference to back what you have just said. So once again, re Sagan's calculations - source?
I have yet to see yours.
I will point out again that it seems that disproving Sagan, which you seem wont to do, would be a distinct step towards proving my side.
 

ThePhy

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From bob b:
The unexpected relatively recent discovery of the retro-spin of Venus has led to speculations concerning the reason for this oddity, which if you were forthcoming you would admit to their highly improbable nature.
From the current issue of Nature:
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.
From bob b:
Such speculation reminds me of a similar case some years ago when 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 .
But we have waited for over 5 weeks for you to back this claim by Sagan with more than just your word.
 

ThePhy

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During Bob Enyart’s recent visit to Seattle he alluded to the type of response he would offer to the OP of this thread. He promised to respond in this thread after he got back to Denver. Rather than address the limited comments he made on the subject when we talked in person, I am anxiously awaiting his more formal reply in this thread.
 

ThePhy

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Next month it will be a year since Bob’s misconstrual of physics was delineated in this thread. A year with no direct response from Bob.

And it has now passed the two month mark since Bob posted that he would be looking at and replying to this thread . And in response to his assertion that he’s “not thinking in geologic or astronomical time frames” in how long it would take him to reply, I fear he is thinking, ala the New Testament promise that Christ would return soon, to give reply no sooner than a couple of millennia from now.

Alas
 

Bob Enyart

Deceased
Staff member
Administrator
Good things come to them that wait...

Good things come to them that wait...

Phy, you're right. I owe you a post. We're moving into our new offices, the BEL Cabin in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains over the next two days.

I'll commit to post my reply this coming week, before 10/27.

Sorry for the delay, and thanks for the reminder!

-Bob
 

ThePhy

New member
Cookies and Conservation Laws

Cookies and Conservation Laws

Belated as it was, yet I appreciate Reverend Enyart’s formal response to this thread , and the refined version..

For what are probably strategy reasons he elected to encapsulate that response in a new thread, rather than append it here as would normally be expected. The strategy I mention is that he managed to barely admit he was wrong, and then followed that by an enormous amount of obfuscatory material, as though that made his scientific nonsense less so. Separating his response from this thread makes that finesse less obvious.

Here is the opening of his response:
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.
Once again the Reverend, like an errant child, is caught with a hand in the cookie jar. And once again true to form, the response is to try to direct attention to anywhere but where that errant hand is. The kid instantly tells mom to “Look at the pretty picture I drew for you in school today”, while trying to innocently sneak his hand out of the jar with the renegade cookie hidden inside. And the Reverend would dearly like us to look away at any perceived weakness in astrophysical theory, but please don’t notice that one of the most fundamental principles in physics is still being crushed in the Reverend’s impulsive grip.

I particularly enjoyed his attributing to me the need to invoke “secondary and tertiary” assumptions, when it is he, not I that is trying having to divert our attention to secondary issues. In this post I address only the Venus - angular momentum issue. I refer the reader to the thread Bob started in response for my reply to the side issues he wants to distract us with.

In considering his response to my OP Bob probably anticipated, and wanted to deflect, my likely answer back to him. So he preemptively says:
ThePhy could have put my brief Venus segment in context with the full argument I’ve repeatedly made over the years in Battle Royale VII against Zakath, in Does God Exist seminars, in my Age of the Earth Debate (which ThePhy attended in person) against a leading geophysicist, and on TV and radio, etc. ThePhy would have taken on a far greater challenge if he had criticized me for truncating my argument (since that could mislead people, especially someone who doesn’t know my whole argument), and then he could have gone on in an attempt to refute my full argument. But he didn’t. Perhaps he will make that attempt here.
The Cookie Jar defense. :Mommy, look at how nice I am to you.” (aka “My full argument”). Let me be perfectly and absolutely clear. When I happened to listen to the BEL program that caused the Abp thread, it was very specifically the nonsense about Venus’s spin and the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum that Bob spouted that prompted me to respond and create this thread. Bob himself summarized his fallacious argument in saying this:
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.
Bob, having been caught with his hand deep inside the scientific cookie jar, is desperate to divert our attention to other astrophysics issues that are less cut and dried.

To be very sure, I just reread my OP in this thread. In it I clearly identified the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum as the specific scientific principle that was being misrepresented. And the Reverend has now directly admitted that he “was wrong”. His belated attempt to caveat that admission by trying to embed it in the context of a larger question – that of the credibility of current theories about how the solar system was formed does nothing to mitigate his demonstration of not understanding of the conservation law in question. And that fundamental misunderstanding of this core principle of physics presents a big problem.

If an astrophysicist actually studying the larger question Bob tries to divert us to – the formation of the solar system – if that astrophysicist were to emulate what the Reverend has done, what would happen? With his fundamentally flawed understanding of angular momentum it would make no difference if he were passionate about clarifying parts of the process of forming a solar system that were not well understood. For him, even the parts of that process that are firmly known would make little sense, since he lacks an understanding of the underlying conservation laws. Bob, having once again failed Freshman physics, wants to argue Graduate level issues.

Bob mentions the 2004 Age-of-the-earth debate. I remind the readers that Reverend Enyart’s opponents in that debate approached that event as an opportunity for Christians of differing ideas to discuss and look at the underlying ideas and try to find common agreement. But Bob came charging out in full battle armor determined to mercilessly hew down those God-mocking apostate heathen old-earthers.

In the OP of this thread I specifically asked if Enyart could find a scientifically qualified person (hopefully a good Christian) who would be willing to go on record as supportive of Enyart’s original claim. (That Venus’s currently observed spin and the theory that the solar system formed from a contracting nebular cloud are mutually exclusive if the momentum conservation laws are true). Later in the thread I extended that invitation to OEJ, and then bob b, and to anyone else. That invitation has sat without takers for nearly a year now. Is DBC bereft of scientifically qualified people who can defend their pastor? Is he the epitome of scientific knowledge in that religious group?

Bob’s desire to turn the conversation from what he actually said about Venus and angular momentum to the Suns angular momentum is shown very clearly when we note that of the 7 numbered questions he asks me to answer NOT A SINGLE ONE is about the OP of this thread. WITHOUT EXCEPTION they are about the sun, not Venus.

So unless Bob has some as yet unrevealed reservoir of technical knowledge that he is willing to present, Bob has suffered a 10 seconds into the first round flat-on-his-back KO on the question of Venus’s abnormal spin violating a conservation law. Get out the smelling salts.

This time the College Dean and the University President need to jointly and personally see if they can get the idea of ABP over to that fundamentalist Denver anachronism.
 
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