Does the Earth spin/rotate about it's axis?

orpheus · **#2481** by **orpheus** » May 22, 2012 12:13 pm

campermon wrote:
questioner121 wrote:

Take for example a room full of people, each person has an average body temperature of 37 degrees. If you add more and more people in the room does the temperature exceed 37 degrees?

No. But the sum of the thermal energy would increase.

You need to read up on what temperature is measure of.

Which is why a drop of water in a roaring fire will evaporate quickly (rather than putting out the flames), while a lit match dipped into a cool bathtub will be extinguished (rather than boil the water).

At least that's the example I remember from when this was explained to me.

Spearthrower · **#2482** by **Spearthrower** » May 22, 2012 1:49 pm

Jayjay4547 wrote:Its a bit creepy that even down a mine, using a gyro theodolite, you can tell that you are on a rotating body and what the direction of the spin-axis is. And yet some people insist that other perceptions like beauty and God are "of course" just arbitrary figments of the mind.

Are you admitting that you discern no distinction between these 2 claims?

The first, even if under near total restriction of our usual senses, that observable, reproducible evidence can produce no other answer than the fact that the Earth is rotating.

And the second, that the ten million gods, and hundreds of millions of various supernatural beings that have been manufactured by humans over tens of thousands of years, must be true - even while being completely contradictory - because people attest to them without providing any such type of evidence that would immediately corroborate such a claim?

If you don't understand the difference there, Jayjay - let me know, and I will walk you through it as many times as you need.

tolman · **#2483** by **tolman** » May 22, 2012 2:16 pm

Jayjay4547 wrote:Its a bit creepy that even down a mine, using a gyro theodolite, you can tell that you are on a rotating body and what the direction of the spin-axis is. And yet some people insist that other perceptions like beauty and God are "of course" just arbitrary figments of the mind.

Actually, in addition to 'just' being a bit problematic there, as addressed above, 'arbitrary' is somewhat misleading as well, since a great many synthetic internal concepts aren't really 'arbitrary' in the true sense of the word.

Concepts are often moulded around clearly non-arbitrary features in human mental landscapes, features which have some degree of consistency across people - were there no kind of shared aesthetic appreciation, albeit one with a significant learned component, then talking about beauty would seem difficult.
Likewise, gods seem to be quite understandably created to fill particular niches, being used as devices to explain things that people (rulers, 'wise ones' ,or parents) don't understand, parent figures who are hoped might answer appeals in times of need, or authority figures who are supposed to keep some kind of order (if not obviously now, then at least to maintain 'fairness' in the long run as a result of making judgements at some Big Scary Future Time of Reckoning) and/or who are claimed to want things to be done in a particular way, allowing the creation of rules with an automatic prohibition against questioning or asking for rational explanations.

Therefore the characteristics of gods are far from arbitrary, even in the eyes of many people who don't believe in the existence of gods.

z8000783 · **#2484** by **z8000783** » May 22, 2012 4:21 pm

Jayjay4547 wrote:Its a bit creepy that even down a mine, using a gyro theodolite, you can tell that you are on a rotating body and what the direction of the spin-axis is. And yet some people insist that other perceptions like beauty and God are "of course" just arbitrary figments of the mind.

Do you have an example of how specifically you have detected beauty and God in a way that we both might agree upon?

John

hackenslash · **#2485** by **hackenslash** » May 22, 2012 7:03 pm

Jayjay4547 wrote:Its a bit creepy that even down a mine, using a gyro theodolite, you can tell that you are on a rotating body and what the direction of the spin-axis is. And yet some people insist that other perceptions like beauty and God are "of course" just arbitrary figments of the mind.

Jayjay4547 · **#2486** by **Jayjay4547** » May 23, 2012 7:51 am

[b]

theropod wrote:
Jayjay4547 wrote:Its a bit creepy that even down a mine, using a gyro theodolite, you can tell that you are on a rotating body and what the direction of the spin-axis is. And yet some people insist that other perceptions like beauty and God are "of course" just arbitrary figments of the mind.

Perceptions? The theodolite measures a physical effect and returns empirical evidence. What instrumentation have you employed to detect beauty and God, and which returns empirical evidence?

As I understand it the world can be divided into one part we can experiment with, measure and in a sense own. That part is the realm of your empirical evidence. There is another part that we can’t experiment with and that in a sense owns us. Near the border line are things like nations and biomes. God is our word for the pole of what we can’t experiment with. So we can’t use an instrument to detect God – but God might still exist. I’m questioning the assumption by others that God doesn't and that everything people say about God is made up.

Maybe I can express the significance of the inertial frame a bit differently, as evidence of anisotrophy in the world independent of mankind. There can be direction, progress and beauty in the world beyond us that we struggle towards with failure and even contradiction.

tolman wrote:
Surely, 'just' is the problem word there, depending on whether one takes it as meaning 'solely' or 'merely', and on whether one hopes to be able to insist that some particular god (but, typically, very much not all gods) actually exists other than in the human mind despite a lack of grown-up evidence, and have other people feeling more or less obliged to agree even when they have different opinions.

No, I’m not insisting on some particular god. Different perceptions of God are differently accessible to different people.

tolman wrote:
Actually, in addition to 'just' being a bit problematic there, as addressed above, 'arbitrary' is somewhat misleading as well, since a great many synthetic internal concepts aren't really 'arbitrary' in the true sense of the word.

Concepts are often moulded around clearly non-arbitrary features in human mental landscapes, features which have some degree of consistency across people - were there no kind of shared aesthetic appreciation, albeit one with a significant learned component, then talking about beauty would seem difficult.
Likewise, gods seem to be quite understandably created to fill particular niches, being used as devices to explain things that people (rulers, 'wise ones' ,or parents) don't understand, parent figures who are hoped might answer appeals in times of need, or authority figures who are supposed to keep some kind of order (if not obviously now, then at least to maintain 'fairness' in the long run as a result of making judgements at some Big Scary Future Time of Reckoning) and/or who are claimed to want things to be done in a particular way, allowing the creation of rules with an automatic prohibition against questioning or asking for rational explanations.

Therefore the characteristics of gods are far from arbitrary, even in the eyes of many people who don't believe in the existence of gods

I agree societies have often visualised gods as like known authority figures. And authority figures have claimed to be like gods. We use the material we have to paint the floor and ceiling. There might well be fairness on the long run. The world is beautiful enough for that and fairness is beautiful.

Spearthrower · **#2487** by **Spearthrower** » May 23, 2012 8:49 am

Jayjay4547 wrote:

As I understand it the world can be divided into one part we can experiment with, measure and in a sense own. That part is the realm of your empirical evidence. There is another part that we can’t experiment with and that in a sense owns us. Near the border line are things like nations and biomes. God is our word for the pole of what we can’t experiment with. So we can’t use an instrument to detect God – but God might still exist. I’m questioning the assumption by others that God doesn't and that everything people say about God is made up.

When you say 'understand' it, how have you garnered this comprehension if it is outside the realm of empirical evidence? Why is it that a god, who supposedly made the universe and interacts with it, is not empirically detectable, and worse, is simply asserted to exist by people who claim knowledge - how did they come by this knowledge? How is it that all these different cultures over the millenia have all claimed knowledge of the supernatural, yet none of these accounts corroborate each other?

I think you're building a castle on a cloud.

z8000783 · **#2488** by **z8000783** » May 23, 2012 8:50 am

Jayjay4547 wrote:No, I’m not insisting on some particular god. Different perceptions of God are differently accessible to different people.

How would you know that they actually perceiving God compared with, say having hallucinations, being deluded or just plain mistaken?

John

tolman · **#2489** by **tolman** » May 23, 2012 9:19 am

Jayjay4547 wrote:As I understand it the world can be divided into one part we can experiment with, measure and in a sense own. That part is the realm of your empirical evidence. There is another part that we can’t experiment with and that in a sense owns us. Near the border line are things like nations and biomes. God is our word for the pole of what we can’t experiment with. So we can’t use an instrument to detect God – but God might still exist. I’m questioning the assumption by others that God doesn't and that everything people say about God is made up.

Surely, the 'division' typically hasn't been a rigid one between two quite different kinds of things, but a practical/historical one, between things we have managed to understand/explain so far, and things we haven't, with the 'god/gods' being a mental gap-filler?
Except that in the minds of many believers, (or at least the minds of many relatively naive believers in the early/unsophisticated guy-with-white-beard-on-a-cloud stage of religious understanding), their gods are still responsible for all manner of stuff that we actually do understand, where there is no need for a gap-filler.

You might well argue that there are some things that can never be experimented on, but I'm not sure how many of the pushiest believers would be prepared to see their god relegated to only operating in regard to those things.
Absent some radical change in religious teaching to the masses, many are still going to want to believe/claim/pretend not merely that their god exists, but that it does all kinds of stuff for which there would be evidence, but for which there isn't evidence.

Shrunk · **#2490** by **Shrunk** » May 23, 2012 10:09 am

Once again, a theist makes the claim "God is something beyond human understanding and knowledge, and I am now going to expound as nauseum about all the many things I understand and know about God."

The_Metatron · **#2491** by **The_Metatron** » May 23, 2012 10:29 am

hackenslash wrote:
Jayjay4547 wrote:Its a bit creepy that even down a mine, using a gyro theodolite, you can tell that you are on a rotating body and what the direction of the spin-axis is. And yet some people insist that other perceptions like beauty and God are "of course" just arbitrary figments of the mind.

The little kid gets it.

mraltair · **#2492** by **mraltair** » May 23, 2012 11:08 am

This thread was a nice, scientific debate using facts and measurements, no reason to taint it with opinion.

Shrunk wrote:Once again, a theist makes the claim "God is something beyond human understanding and knowledge, and I am now going to expound as nauseum about all the many things I understand and know about God."

I think you can either be a theist or have a sense of irony not both.

Jayjay4547 · **#2493** by **Jayjay4547** » May 23, 2012 11:19 am

questioner121 wrote:Take for example a room full of people, each person has an average body temperature of 37 degrees. If you add more and more people in the room does the temperature exceed 37 degrees?
In the same way, if a mass has a certain gravitational force, does the resultant/collective gravitational force increase?

Seems to me, the room is a heat sink and each person dumps to it. As you add more people, in the limit they become one biomass that is generating heat- and the heat sink role is taken by the walls, roof and floor of the room. If the boundaries form an insulator then the heat in the room would increase beyond 37 degrees. Details like oxygen etc left out.

That's a poor excuse for bludging off your thread. Ill move off now.

Xeno · **#2494** by **Xeno** » May 23, 2012 11:45 am

Jayjay4547 wrote: We use the material we have to paint the floor and ceiling. There might well be fairness on the long run. The world is beautiful enough for that and fairness is beautiful.

Ooooh! A deepity!

Now what?

Dudely · **#2495** by **Dudely** » May 23, 2012 1:08 pm

Jayjay4547 wrote:[b]
theropod wrote:
Jayjay4547 wrote:Its a bit creepy that even down a mine, using a gyro theodolite, you can tell that you are on a rotating body and what the direction of the spin-axis is. And yet some people insist that other perceptions like beauty and God are "of course" just arbitrary figments of the mind.

Perceptions? The theodolite measures a physical effect and returns empirical evidence. What instrumentation have you employed to detect beauty and God, and which returns empirical evidence?

As I understand it the world can be divided into one part we can experiment with, measure and in a sense own. That part is the realm of your empirical evidence. There is another part that we can’t experiment with and that in a sense owns us. Near the border line are things like nations and biomes. God is our word for the pole of what we can’t experiment with. So we can’t use an instrument to detect God – but God might still exist.

What happens when we invent a new instrument that lets us experiment and measure something we couldn't before (think telescope)? Does god become "smaller"?

Jayjay4547 wrote:
I’m questioning the assumption by others that God doesn't and that everything people say about God is made up

I would too, if I ever saw someone say that. Usually, however, they are responding to a specific statement which can be judged on its own merits. Without fail every time anyone has said anything about god it has either been proven to be made up or cannot be proven either way. Will it ALWAYS be true that it's made up? Who knows. But that is a different argument, and one I cannot find in this thread.

lucek · **#2496** by **lucek** » May 23, 2012 6:07 pm

questioner121 wrote:
GrahamH wrote:
Another way to think of it is that the gravitational forces are maximum as the centre of mass, but in balance. The resultant gravitational force is zero because a strong force acting on all the atoms of your body from beneath your feet is matched by an equal force acting on all your atoms from above your head (and in every direction).

The pressure at the centre is huge because there is a pyramid of rock more than six thousand kilometres high weighing down on the centre from every direction. Most of the mass of such a pyramid is not at the centre and feels a significant net downward force. Since rock is incompressible the gravitational force on each atom pushes on the atoms below.

Sorry for being so slow on understanding this. I appreciate the patience of you all (I mean that). One of the things I can't get my head around is how the resultant gravitational force is increased as mass increases.

Take for example a room full of people, each person has an average body temperature of 37 degrees. If you add more and more people in the room does the temperature exceed 37 degrees?
In the same way, if a mass has a certain gravitational force, does the resultant/collective gravitational force increase?

Hope that makes sense.

Dosen't follow. Heat is a quantity of kinetic energy. Gravity is a force.

Jayjay4547 · **#2497** by **Jayjay4547** » May 25, 2012 8:27 am

Dudely wrote:
What happens when we invent a new instrument that lets us experiment and measure something we couldn't before (think telescope)? Does god become "smaller"?

Ive pasted a reply in the topic "Absolute directions in the world"
thanks

Jayjay4547 · **#2498** by **Jayjay4547** » May 25, 2012 8:46 am

z8000783 wrote:
Jayjay4547 wrote:No, I’m not insisting on some particular god. Different perceptions of God are differently accessible to different people.

How would you know that they actually perceiving God compared with, say having hallucinations, being deluded or just plain mistaken?

John

I have posted a reply in the topic "Absolute directions in the world", thanks

questioner121 · **#2499** by **questioner121** » Feb 17, 2014 5:50 pm

To Cali,

The earth rotates around the barycentre of the earth and moon. My question is does this affects the orbit of the satellites around the earth?

z8000783 · **#2500** by **z8000783** » Feb 17, 2014 6:04 pm

Did it really take you 2 years to come up with that question?

John

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