Re: Origin of Newton story - Minnesota Technolog?

On Aug 7, 5:33 pm, spintronic <spintro...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I wouldn't give a *** whose story it was.

Truth is truth!

Okay... well, the specific story is clearly false, it is not very
plausible that Isaac Newton had a clockwork model solar system with
planets that no astronomer had ever identified. Hitler, on the other
hand, probably could have gotten access to any planetarium exhibit in
the Third Reich if he so wished, but we don't.know of anyone telling
this story as an explanation of Hitler's Christian faith.

But the essential argument is that the solar system of planets only
makes sense as a deliberately created, designed artifact. Well, let's
see what we've got. A cloud of gas whose own weight has squeezed its
mass mostly into a spherical shape, and initiated nuclear fusion in
the core of the mass - hydrogen and helium, contaminated with
"metals", in this context any element other than hydrogen and helium,
the apparent product of previous gas stars undergoing fusion,
manufacturing the "metals", and finally explosively releasing a
proportion of their material throughout space. Then, some little hot-
centred rocky balls, also deformed into spheroids by their own
gravity, several bearing scars of battering by impacts with many
smaller pieces of space matter. Mercury has craters a lot like the
Moon. Venus has an acidic atmosphere and a ferociously hot surface.
Earth has had at least two historically significant smashes, one
possibly with a former Lagrangian partner body that blew a lot of the
planet's crust into the sky, later to form as the Moon and collect a
skin of craters from smaller rocks, and then, far smaller, the
dinosaur-killer. The latest idea is that something nearly as violent
as Earth's Moon incident happened to the northern hemisphere of Mars,
and, of course, craters. Outside Mars is where most of the swarm of
surviving stray space rocks are found, the asteroids, although they
are everywhere else in the system as well. /Most/ things in orbit end
up hitting Jupiter if they ever go near it, as the largest mass
planet, one per cent the mass of the Sun itself, and the most likely
to pull things in. Saturn has a disc of tiny fragments of space
debris around it. A whole separate fleet of dwarf planets swarm out
beyond Neptune, and beyond /that/ a halo of potential comets, that can
at any time gently tip towards the inner solar system and slide down
to arrive at rocket speed and force. The super-massive outer planets
have a scattering of moons, smashed, crumbling, broken. Objects
rotate while they orbit the Sun, but not neatly upright; the Earth's
rotation is such the the equator line tilts away from the orbital
plane; Uranus alternately points its poles right at the Sun; Venus
turns in the wrong direction.

If a clockmaker supplied you a machine that looked like all of that,
you wouldn't accept it, certainly not show it to friends!

.

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