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Is the Earth growing?

Submitted by Michael Nystrom on Wed, 03/23/2011 - 22:17
in

I thought I had seen all the interesting & unorthodox theories on the internet, but I stumbled across this one the other night via Clif High's Half Past Human.

http://www.youtube.com/wa...

There's a Wikipedia page on it, too. Expanding Earth Hypothesis

Here's Clif High's take on it.

FYI mainly, because it is interesting.


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Joη's picture

but there are records!

Submitted by Joη on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 14:29.

in the rocks! In the current location of the planets! In the amount of measurable sun radiation the different parts of the Earth currently have, and most especially, in the moon swishing all the ocean water around every day (since the oceans rained down), creating friction on Earth, slowing its spin.

The Earth used to revolve faster (meaning a slightly shorter day, meaning more days in the year) and was slightly closer to the Sun when the dinosaurs were around, and all this data points to that.

This thread may help explain the number of ways we can determine how the Earth's been acting without having to rely on unreliable human records:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=446514

—

"You underestimate the character of man." | "So be off now, and set about it."

I'm aware of most of those methods. But most if not all of them

Submitted by samadamscw on Fri, 03/25/2011 - 22:27.

require some really big assumptions as to what is variable and what is negligibly variable. (there are no true constants)

If the call on a relative constant was wrong, say, the rate of decay of Carbon-14, then most of our dating would be WAY off at a certain point.

This is just one example. I'm sure one could find potential whammies of holes in any system that isn't an actual written record with its own not so secret decoder ring.

Sure, we've devised and used these systems to some success. But they don't disprove such a theory as Adams' because they are not definitive, they themselves make assumptions that if wrong, will completely FAIL to standup to Adams' tests.

So yes, these methods work for us now. But that doesn't mean things always worked this way. So they cannot be used to disprove something where the acceptance of their assumptions is critical to them being accepted.

Basically, you can't use an assumption to disprove a theory that itself, challenges the assumption. It would be like repeating an argument as an answer to a reply.

Joη's picture

are you suggesting

Submitted by Joη on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 02:17.

all assumptions inherent to all known evidence against your idea are false? Such a set of coincidences would be too curious for me.

—

"You underestimate the character of man." | "So be off now, and set about it."

Thanks for posting this

Submitted by ron_is_for_real on Wed, 03/23/2011 - 22:46.

I hadn't seen this yet, but I saw a previous article by Cliff which discussed the expanding planet model in the context of 2012 catastrophe and was fascinated by it, and a little freaked out too.

http://www.halfpasthuman.com/aintwhatitusedtobe.html

This makes sense

Submitted by yankee on Wed, 03/23/2011 - 22:49.

This is a subject that never made sense to me.