Interbane wrote:This is nice analysis Interbane, but the long term cycles are in fact not random, and are strongly cyclical and repetitive.
The diagrams in my paper of the solar system barycentre prove this point.
Thanks Robert, I enjoy discussing ideas with you.
Yes, likewise. This material can be analysed from an evolutionary mathematical perspective, with an empirical framework. As you know, I am interested to assess theology against evolution, looking towards a possible reconciliation between reason and faith rather than focussing on conflict.
I understand that the long term cycles have a pattern.
This is actually quite a significant point, in that the pattern of long term cycles I describe has not previously been seen, in terms of linking Neptune to Earth’s temporal cycle.
What I meant by spikes of gravity is that during the course of any given day, gravity is shifting (not really shifting, but you understand what I mean, I hope) nonstop in response to orbiting celestial bodies.
Looking at the
wiki page on tides, you can see the Moon makes almost 2/3 of the earth’s tide, and the sun almost all the remainder. When moon and sun are together we get spring tides, and when they are orthogonal (at right angles) we get small (neap) tides. These are monthly cycles of gravity.
When the moon aligns or even gets in the same region of space as any given planet, gravity spikes slightly in that direction.
The combination of effects of two bodies can be plotted as a combination of sine curves, with period equal to the orbital period of the planet and amplitude equal to the gravitational effect by Newton’s inverse square formula. So ‘spiking’ is not quite the correct term. The fluctuation in gravity for the solar system as a whole can be seen in the chart in my paper of the solar system centre of mass.
I would be interested to see what difference there is in gravitational pull toward the center of the galaxy versus away from the center.
None. It is too far away. If Neptune causes a nanometre of tide the galactic core might cause something like an atom of gravity. You can calculate this easily from estimates for the
four million sun mass of the galactic core and the distance of 26,000 light years.
We are towards the outskirts of our galaxy, so the bulk of matter and thus gravitational pull from our galaxy would come from a distinct direction.
Remember, if the solar system out to Neptune was a quarter dollar, the next star, Alpha Centauri, would be 100 yards away and the galaxy would be about the size of the USA 48 states. Gravity declines as the square of the distance, so the solar system is a very distinct gravitational unit. No gravity outside the solar system has effect even remotely comparable to Neptune, small as its gravity on earth is. Everything else is just too far away.
Also, when the moon is in the same region of space as the sun, there is a much larger spike.
Yes, this relation between moon and sun forms the rhythm of spring tides and neap tides.
The celestial bodies don't have to be aligned to elicit a larger gravitational pull, they merely have to be close, in roughly the same region in the sky.
Combined gravity of any two planets follows a sinusoidal pattern, peaking when they are together and cancelling each other when they are opposite. However, tides work a bit differently, in that they peak when sun and moon are either together (new Moon) or opposite (full Moon), and are smallest at the first and third quarters.
The variances between different proximities of celestial bodies in these regions would produce different strengths of spikes and at different times.
Yes, exactly, and this is what is measured and quantified in my paper, in terms of the solar system as a whole.
If they are perfectly aligned, there would be a slightly larger spike.
For example, when Jupiter and Saturn are aligned the solar system centre of mass is pulled towards them, although the balance of mass is not the same thing as gravity.
This slightly larger spike is nothing compared to the influence of the moon and all the millions of variations of strengths of pull it would have as it is positioned in the same region as other bodies over time.
I explained before that if the lunar tide is one metre, the Neptune spike is a nanometre. This means Saturn effect on earth tides would be 0.2 microns and Jupiter 6 microns. The point about these tiny cycles is that their rate of change is very slow, whereas the moon shifts every month. So there are overlapping cycles, big short cycles caused by the moon and sun, and imperceptible long term cycles caused by the planets, reflecting the pattern of the centre of mass.
This is what I mean by random.
No, planetary movement is not random, it is cyclic.
We home in on the tangible, the easily seen and statistically significant event of perfect alignment, but that doesn't mean gravity isn't continually fluctuating nonstop even when celestial bodies aren't aligned, but are merely in the same region.
Conjunctions are like gravitational nodes. This is a fair description, because the combined effect of two planets gradually increases to a maximum at the turning point of the conjunction and then gradually decreases.
The number of different gravitational pulls incorporating no other celestial bodies but the moon, the sun, and Venus alone would be statistically massive.
Yes, and these functions can readily be plotted as graphs showing the combined effects over time. The mathematics for this is quite easy, as shown in the op-art diagram in my paper of the combined gravity at the sun of the gas giants.
Being the most gravitationally influential, the variations in gravity from these three are easily enough to drown out any exceptionally minor fluctuations that occur over longer periods but are rhythmic.
Your term ‘drown out’ is not relevant to the astronomy here. If the planetary effects on earth are real and rhythmic, it stands to reason that there would be real tidal effects from the planets, albeit tiny. The ocean has 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water. If for argument sake we say the moon moves the whole ocean, then the volume of water moved twice each day by Jupiter is in the order of 6000 cubic kilometres. Yes, this is ‘drowned out’ for practical purposes, but that does not affect the question whether these effects have deep evolutionary harmony.
They would be lost in the gravitational cacophony of not only far more frequent spikes, but also far stronger spikes.
True to a large extent, but it remains the case that we do not know if harmony with planetary cycles could have an evolutionary effect on the earth. How I conceptualise this is that over the extremely long period of evolution, the rhythms of the whole solar system produced a distinct imprint upon the climate of the earth, a source code if you like, that meant that different points of the cycle have different phenotypes. Admittedly the evidence for this is very weak, but it remains coherent as a logic of evolution.
If you're wanting to form a hypothesis on the influence of gravitational fluctuations on life, the best starting point is not the alignment of celestial bodies, but on an actual measurement of the largest spikes which are also rhythmic.
That has already been done by Frank Brown, a professor of biology in Illinois who did amazing gravitational experiments in the 1950s on rats, mussels and hamsters, proving clearly that each of these organisms have a sense of gravity able to detect the position of the moon with no other sensory inputs.
Here is a summary I wrote of Brown’s work a few years ago
An extraordinary chapter in The Cosmic Clocks discusses the empirical research of Frank A. Brown Jr., Morrison Professor of Biology at Northwestern University, Illinois. Brown conducted a series of laboratory experiments in which various animals were deprived of any external stimulus to measure the response of their body clocks.
“A rat was kept for months in a closed cage with constant light, temperature and pressure. There was no way for the rat to know if it was night or day, whether the moon was above or below the horizon. When Brown and Terracini recorded the rat’s physical activity, they found clear peaks in activity corresponding to the moon’s position: the rat was more active during the hours in which the moon was below the horizon, and quietest when it was above the horizon… The above experiment has been duplicated and confirmed.” (cited by Gauquelin, p.85, from ‘Exogenous Timing of Rat Spontaneous Activity Periods” Proceedings of the Society of Experimental Biological Medicine, CI, No 3 (1959) 457).
How can this be explained? There is a clear evolutionary adaptive advantage for a rat to be active when the moon is down in order to avoid predators who hunt by sight. Given the lack of sensory stimulus in the experimental conditions, it appears the rat senses the position of the moon in an unknown way – either by a ‘tidal’ sense of the moon’s gravity or some magnetic influence. My postulate is that the rat’s DNA, having evolved within the moon’s constant orbit and having been circled by the moon some fifty billion times since the dawn of life, is attuned to the rhythm of the moon. The alternative hypothesis, that it is solely an internal clock within the rat, is refuted by the next experiments:
“Brown was recording the activity of hamsters… At first the rodents synchronized their activity with the rising and setting of the sun, which was probably their natural rhythm before they had been confined to their cages. Then, suddenly, the 24 hour rhythm changed to a new, slightly longer rhythm, one that lasted 24 hours 50 minutes. This period corresponds exactly to the length of the lunar day… Their pattern of activity switched through the study, first following one and then the other of the two celestial bodies – without their ever knowing the position of either in the darkness of their experimental lodgings.” (cited by Gauquelin, p.85, Propensity for Lunar Periodicity in Hamsters, op cit, CXX (1965) 792)
Here we have a further extraordinary example of how the tides of the ocean caused by the moon also exist within a mammal – and presumably would also exist in humans.
My final example:
“Brown had some live oysters sent in closed, darkened containers from Long Island Sound to his laboratory in Evanston, 1000 miles from the sea… At first the oysters kept to their natural rhythm, opening and closing themselves to the rhythm of the tides washing Long Island Sound. But after about 15 days Brown noticed that a slippage in the rhythm had occurred. The oysters now opened up at the time the tide would have flooded Evanston, had the town been on the seashore – ie when the moon passed over the local meridian. The oysters had abandoned their rhythm tied to actual tides and responded to an exclusively lunar rhythm.” (cited from ‘Persistent Activity Rhythms in the Oyster’, American Journal of Physiology, CLXVII 1954, 510).
These three examples illustrate how animals are adapted to the gravitational rhythms of the moon. Brown notes that “definite hostility met anyone who as much as suggested that one might search for subtle celestial influences” (Gauquelin p. ii). Gauquelin (p86) says Brown offers an explanation that the rhythms are external, with these three experiments taken together showing that internal clocks of the organisms were not sufficient to obtain the observed results.
My hypothesis, to be expanded in a next post, is that similar subtle relationships can be theorized for the planets, based on complex system themes such as turbulence, fractal geometry, attractors and sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
The way I see it is that Brown’s proof of a gravitational sense can be extrapolated to much finer unconscious gravitational sense of longer systemic cycles.
What I mean is that there should be experiments that are blind to the sky, so to speak.
Yes, that is what Brown did.
They look at nothing but gravitational fluctuations and any correlating adaptations that may exist.
When all factors are controlled, rodents shift between a 24 hour day and a 25 hour day, wobbling between the lunar and solar days, with no other input but gravity.
My intuition tells me you'll find no correlations weaker than a certain strength.
The material in my paper is largely below the threshold of observable correlation, although a good example of attempts to find correlations between the cycles of the gas giants and events on earth can be found in
Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas.
Even then, the adaptations would most likely be in response to tidal movements rather than the gravitational fluctuations themselves.
Rats resting when the moon is up has an adaptive rationale in that predators see by the moon. However, it seems the rats can tell if the moon is up even in closed laboratory conditions. They must sense its gravity.
There's also the question of whether it's evolutionarily advantageous at all to 'adapt' to gravitational fluctuations.
Every point of variation in an environment can become subject of genetic variation. Planetary alignments are regular repeating points of environmental variation. The compensating factor for their tiny effect is their immense longevity (since before life evolved) and exact regularity (predictable by current methods for thousands of years). Over the longer time frame the planets keep the same patterns with slow drift, so the Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune cycle I describe has definitely been stable for millions of years at least.
I can't see any advantage.
It is well attested in biology that factors in an ecosystem are inter-related in a complex web of life which is highly sensitive to initial conditions. The planets contribute to the regular gravitational rhythm of complexity on earth. Along the lines of the butterfly effect in chaos theory, we can’t rule out adaptive advantage over the billions of years of microbial life for those organisms which aligned to these small cosmic energies. Although I have to say the evidence is weak. I would like to do a study of planting by the moon when I get my algae factory going. The work has simply not been done in a large scale and systematic way to detect planetary effects, other than Gauquelin’s work which did find major statistical correlations for the main planets and human horoscopes.
If organisms are looking for synchrony of some sort, lunar gravity stands front and center as the rhythm of choice.
Cosmic rhythms are not chosen but given. Yes the lunar and solar rhythms are immense, but that does not mean other rhythms are nothing.
I see no advantage to synchronizing with weaker gravitational fluctuations.
In my paper, I suggest that the Great Year follows the same rhythmic cycle as the annual cycle of the seasons in reverse, in a pattern that is directly reinforced by the cycles of the gas giants. This means we are now getting to the end of the Age of Pisces and nearing the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. If we assume the time of Christ is the dawn of the Age of Pisces, then the dawn of the Age of Aquarius is about 140-170 years in the future, given the 2147 year cycle of the Ages.
This can be interpreted as a framework for mythology, especially regarding the shift from the traditional Piscean themes, interpreted as compassionate mystical belief, arguably a spiritual ideal of the last two millennia, towards the emerging Aquarian themes of innovative humanitarian knowledge. These attributes are simply the traditional thematic archetypes for these signs. This conception of a cusp turning point in human identity between Ages seems to me compatible with the inner teachings of the Bible, where as I have shown this stellar framework is very present.
These themes attached to the Ages are an imaginative rendering of the symbols attached to ‘gravitational fluctuations’. I believe the themes themselves are descriptions of monthly divisions within the annual seasonal cycle for Pisces in February-March and Aquarius in January-February. I flag in my paper a research program to investigate this twelve-fold rhythm.
What would the advantage be?
In the case of the shift through the Ages and through the twelve JSN houses, the advantage as I see it is that sketching a theory of history based on the deep alignment between culture and planetary cycles seems to me a very productive enterprise. I am especially focussed on innovative humanitarian knowledge as a key ethical goal for the planet, with the implicit critique of compassionate mystical belief as a governing theme for an age that is now passing. We see this debate every day in the clash between worldviews based on belief and those based on knowledge. My assessment is that the worldviews based on belief still have the upper hand, but the view of knowledge is slowly emerging towards a cusp point.
How would it help the selfish gene?
Apart from the human example just given, how I have imagined this in terms of the selfish gene is that there may be slow cycles at the microbial level which track planetary patterns as a structuring framework for the extended phenotype.
The only thing that comes to mind is that perhaps some celestial cycles correlate to solar flares or some other tangible phenomenon, so act as a warning system to hide.
I think planetary effects, if they exist, are far more subtle and subconscious than anything tangible. We see this principle in adaptation all the time, where a subtle difference between two environments allows expression of genetic variation.
The best way to picture what I'm getting at is to imagine a nonstop racket of raindrops outside your window. The rhythmic falling of one small lone drop of water as it drips repetitively once an hour from a leaf on a tree would go completely unnoticed.
No, that example is wrong. It is correct in orders of magnitude, but wrong in that rain is random while planets are regular. If the raindrop had fallen with precise regularity for four billion years, and if the rest of the rain obeyed a series of exact recurring patterns, then the analogy would hold. But in this case of cosmic order, the regularity of the planetary cycles would mean the single dew drop in the shining sea (by analogy to conjunction cycle) would have a cumulative and hence real signal.
This is even more the case if we imagine the influence of the moon as a gallon of water splashing rhythmically overtop your full-to-the-brim gutters once every couple seconds.
The moon has orbited the earth about fifty billion times, every time the same, with defined regular patterns against the rest of the solar system.
I think you're zeroing in on the statistical significance of alignment and ignoring the actual tangible influence this alignment has.
The tangible influence is speculative, but as I explain in my paper, it provides a coherent astronomical framework for the Biblical theory of time. It also explains the temporal structure of the solar system in terms of the centre of mass, which is a real scientific finding.
We've evolved to be pattern seekers, and this is most definitely a pattern.
The ancient repetitive nature of the cycle of the stars has been the foremost pattern in religion, built deeply into the timing for Easter and Christmas which are both primarily cosmic festivals in their origin and underlying purpose.
Claiming that this pattern influences us in an evolutionary manner is a separate issue, and suggests your following the trail of bread crumbs in reverse order.
The trail can be followed deductively, formulating the mathematical logic of the structure of time, or inductively, seeking correlations in observation. Both are needed.
However, there is a physical match between the story of the stars and the story of Christianity, and the question can be asked how far this match is natural and how much is it artificial or cultural.
How would a match between celestial cycles and the bible be natural as opposed to observed then documented? I don't understand what you mean by classifying them as natural here.
Very good point. The question, for me, is whether the concept of the shift from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius is a construction or a discovery. I argue it is primarily a discovery, but one that requires mythic construction. There is a natural ‘spirit of the age’ or zeitgeist which gradually shifts to become more or less amenable to different ways of thinking, so ideas that are before their time simply cannot be understood by others. If the Great Year of the earth has a real cyclic pattern, in terms of the Vedic theory of cycles of light and dark mirroring the daily and annual cycles, then it makes sense to explore the Bible as also reflecting this natural cycle.
Are you suggesting that these cycles were 'divined' without knowledge of their actual existence, then written into text?
With the Great Year and the Zodiacal Ages, my view is that these were in fact central to ancient mystery cults, but were considered as secret, and so were easily suppressed by Christian bigotry. With the Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune 179 year cycle, this was, I suggest, known simply as the 1/12 fraction of the Age, and as part of the cycle of Yggdrasil, without knowledge that Neptune provided a real physical modulation for it.
Perhaps god whispered the workings of the heavens into our ancestor’s ears, then they wrote it down, only to then discover that god's word actually corresponded as they observed the heavens? Parsimony applies here.
Yes, we should not multiply unnecessary entities. I am not talking about any imaginary entities, just noting the congruence between the Biblical theory of time and the main actual structures of our solar system.
The likely explanation is that our ancestors observed how the heavens operate, and littered their text with their findings.
Yes, but this is a very important point regarding the construction of the Bible, in that it appears there was political conflict between those who wished to emphasise a cosmic vision and the historic victors who did not. I suspect that if the politics had been more Gnostic instead of orthodox then the litter of planets through the texts would have been much thicker.
The helix shape of DNA is the same in geometric terms as the four dimensional space-time model of the solar system, except that the nodes of the planetary helixes are inter-temporal rather than simultaneous.
How is that anything more than analogous? The purpose of an analogy is that there are similarities.
Okay, I just wanted to emphasise that it is a very good analogy which has not previously been studied.
Explaining the similarities in greater detail does not make the relationship more than an analogy.
Actually, that is not certain. It may be that there is an intrinsic linkage between the helical shape of DNA and the helical shape of the solar system.
In any case, what would the relationship be? I can't even go out on a limb to guess, there's nothing here but analogous similarities.
This fractal helix cosmology is of course quite speculative. As I noted in my paper, we can similarly speculate that the twelve particles of the carbon nucleus provide a foundation for twelve-fold cycles to appear within carboniferous life. Similarly, but coming from the other direction, the solar system is helical and all life within it is helical, so I apply the old ‘as above so below’ axiom from Thoth and Newton to speculate that this is a prime example of how everything is connected.
