@Irving Chubbie: I see the sun here every day, you should move!

@Gus Sheridan: Hi Gus-how’s the crack in Barcelona.

@Boutros Boutros-Ghali: Typical :(

@Honeybadger197: tis too fcekn cold, hail, stormy, windy around ‘ere!

@Chucky Arlaw: Don’t mind Gerald, he happily lives in his own little world of pseudoscience and bull droppings

@Gerald Kelleher: You are some gowl. Bet you think there are secret Nazi bases up on the dark side?
And “recent ‘laws of nature’ upstarts”? You do understand that thousands of years of perspectives basically means “ever changing”.
World is flat? Nope.
Sun rotates around the earth? Nope.
Earth rests on the back of a turtle, and turtles all the way down? Nope.

@Larissa Caroline Nikolaus: This is for people who can think for themselves so if you want to make a nuisance of yourself then be my guest however there are others who are beginning to bypass the empirical dummies and go back in history to discover how astronomers really thought on subjects like the moon, including Kepler or the people who built Newgrange and Knowth.

One of the loveliest works on the moon was by the Roman Plutarch which sparkles with intelligence and how they dealt with the motions of celestial objects, especially trading the above/below for the more creative and productive perspectives which went on to the discovery of the solar system.

. “And, finally, in what sense, and in reference to what thing is Earth said to be ‘intermediate?’ For the universe is infinite; now that which is infinite hath neither beginning nor limit, so it does not belong to it to possess a middle: for infinity is the deprivation of limits. But he who makes out Earth to be the middle not of the universe, but of the world, is ridiculous for his simplicity if he does not reflect that the ‘world’ itself is liable to the very same objections: for the universe hath not left a middle place for it also, but it is borne along without house or home in the boundless vacuum, towards nothing cognate to itself; perhaps it has found out for itself some other cause for remaining fixed, and so has stood still, but certainly not owing to the nature of its position. And it is allowable for one to conjecture alike with respect to Earth and with respect to the moon, that by some contrary soul and nature they are [actuated, the consequence of the diversity being] differences, the former remaining stationary here, the latter moving along. But apart from these considerations, see whether a certain important fact has not escaped their notice. For if whatsoever space, and whatever thing exists away from the center of Earth, is the ‘above,’ then no part of Earth is ‘below,’ but Earth herself and the things upon Earth; and, in a word, everybody standing around or investing the center, become the ‘above;’ whilst ‘below’ is one sole thing, that incorporeal point, which has the duty of counterbalancing the whole constitution of the world; if, indeed, the ‘below’ is by its nature opposed to the ‘above.’ And this is not the only absurdity in the argument, but it also does away with the cause through which all ponderous bodies gravitate in this direction, and tend downwards: for there is no mark below towards which they move: for the incorporeal point is not likely (nor do they pretend it is) to exert so much force as to draw down all objects to itself, and keep them together around itself. But yet, it is proved unreasonable, and repugnant to facts, to suppose the ‘above’ of the world to be a whole, but the ‘below’ an incorporeal and indefinite limit: whereas that course is consistent with reason, to say, as we do, that the space is large and possessed of width, and is defined by the ‘above’ and the ‘below’ of locality.” Plutarch

http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Moon.html

I trust people to make sense of this in the way it was originally meant showing people were genuinely interested in what causes the phases, what the moon was made of, why objects move the way they did and all the things that were jettisoned for theoretical junk.

@Gerald Kelleher: Just one thing. You mock climatologists when they use the greenhouse analogy for climate change. You say they’re idiots for attempting to scale up the idea of a greenhouse w.r.t the planets atmosphere but yet you are doing the exact same thing here with your kitchen table and the earth/moon relationship. Hmmmm.

@Gary: Newtonian gravity is also mocked via the apple falling from the tree analogy and well renowned and respected scientists are idiots for scaling this also. Pointing at tables and roundabouts seems to be some sort of hobby of sorts, even if the analogy makes absolutely no sense when you really think about it (sadly I’ve wasted my own time think of all the flaws in the pointing at things analogy). For some reason I always think of this though https://imgur.com/gallery/fnY5F

@Gary: I am impressed that you were paying attention however there is no cause and effect involved here as it is a straightforward judgment you and everyone else uses when they drive their cars or walk in the street. If you watch a car going around a roundabout you see the same side face the centre of the roundabout as it goes around it in much the same way as the moon travels around the Earth and shows the same face to us. It wouldn’t matter if the moon was 10,000 miles or a million miles from the Earth, the judgment would be the same as is the motion.

Newton was trying to promote cause and effect and that is where overreaching analogies come in whether it is the fall of an apple equating directly to planetary orbital motion or things like trying to scale a common greenhouse up to the Earth’s atmosphere to promote a conclusion that carbon dioxide accounts for any and every weather event.

Take your time using your own judgment of motion along with analogies , moon’s phases, why we see the same face and images to draw the only conclusion possible. The English are prone to listening to bluffers as the recent Brexit referendum demonstrates at the expense of common sense and this happened in the late 17th century universities.

@John Boy: Look, the followers of Newton admitted they hadn’t a clue how he goes from universal attraction of objects to orbital motion of planets within the framework of astronomy, its methods and insights. Astronomical observations that were designed for straightforward judgments become mixed up with speculative notions of mathematical theorists so that even the judgment of the moon’s orbital motion doesn’t survive as a fact .

Unlike the bluffing of his followers, Newton was systematic about the way he proposed to scale up analogies for his idea on attraction with astronomical judgments and boy did he have fun conjuring up perspectives that are at variance with the original discoveries. If any of you are following a man who thinks the moon spins because he misread a description of Kepler, then you can bet that this is only the beginning of a theoretical nightmare.

@Gerald Kelleher: I have a better experiment for you. You don’t even need to stand up for it. Just place a coin on that table of yours and with your index finger, without ever turning your wrist, draw a circle around the coin. Is your finger facing the coin with the same side? Of course not, because such action requires it to spin around its axis. The Moon does face the Earth with the same side because, unlike your finger, it can and it does spin around its own axis.