EnjoyItClem

As planets migrate toward their sun, what changes do they undergo? Do they: shrink or expand; heat up or cool off; get gassier or wetter or dryer; get more radioactive or less radioactive; get brighter or darker; move higher or lower; spin faster or slower; tilt forwards or backwards? Is it a different tale for a gas giant, a terrestrial planet, and an asteroid belt? Or is it the same for each? I want the story at the peak of the bell curve, please.

First off: Those who toe an imaginary line between physics and chemistry ought not to reply to my posts at all. Saying this isn't about sides is just like a giant army telling a rogue horde to f*ck off. 1. "...little of the heat of the earth is due to gravity contraction, mostly it's from heat left over from the planet's formation, the decay of radioactive elements (quite small), and the freezing of the inner core. It's still hot now because the core doesn't loose much heat..." All of this is agreeable, and naturally has little to do with what I said. You sidestepped my offer entirely and then said several facts in an argumentative tone as if I were trying to contend with fact. I will not return the favor. Here is where you went wrong: Gravity plays a pivotal role in the shape of the planets *and* their orbital paths, as well as in maintaining the shape of the sun (corona included) itself. 2. I mean volatile as in predominantly gaseous and teeming with activity. I mean 1000+ km/hour winds. I mean cyclones the size of continents. I mean air so full of debris it's practically liquid. I mean relative to the bland goings-on at Mercury or on the surface of the moon, the gas giants are where the part is clearly at. 3. "Jupiter the largest planet in the solar system is not massive enough to start deuterium burning, which is the coldest type of nuclear burning, which is what powers the sun." Deuterium! I couldn't remember that word for the life of me. Thank you thank you. But back on topic: 4. "they are also not collapsing so are not radiating that way... There may be slight endothermic reaction on the surface but I somehow doubt that'd even have a measurable effect from earth. If I'm wrong can you cite evidence?" Whoa, whoa, whoa. But CLEARLY Uranus is having a dramatic effect on earth in so many ways, I can't even find the words to begin an argument! Kidding. I never said that, or anything remotely like it. I said planets behave similarly, being planets under the influence of a common sun and all, but I didn't say their behavior was interactive. 5. "The light from the sun is due to main sequence Hydrogen burning, it is a physical nuclear effect not a chemical reaction." Chemistry has nothing to do with main sequence Hydrogen burning. Only physics. For that matter, nothing that ever happens has anything to do with Chemistry. Lightning. Bunsen burners. That type of burning is completely reserved for physics. Heat produced by chemical reactions, that's physics too. Alright, like I said, I'm not going to stoop to your level of mean-ness. That's right. I said it. You're mean. Really mean. I'm going to stop here and let you deal with these 5 points before I continue. Perhaps you'll see how swiftly you spiraled out of control of your understanding of my understanding of your understanding. And then you'll be like "sorry man, let's just be cool about this from now on but still talk about it." We can at least PRETEND to be friends. <3

i'm not gonna take a side, but i'm gonna proffer a mechanism in favor of expansion: all heavenly bodies, earth included, are by definition chemical reactions kept in check by the same mechanism keeping their forms spherical and their orbits round: gravity. lesser reactions--earth, mercury, moons, asteroids--are clearly 'shelled,' so-called because inside they are, in many cases, relatively molten and highly active. the gas giants are allowed to be more volatile due to their great distance from the sun, and even from one another, and, as a result, they have much more active surfaces and can even produce their own chemical light (which pales, however, in comparison to the chemical sunlight which illuminates these bodies. we've all seen a weak lightbulb turned on outside in broad daylight, and it looks like it's not even on.) in truth, the sun produces light wholly accounted for by chemistry, so it's not a laborious stretch of the imagination to understand how the deeply active surface of venus could also produce some (relatively invisible) light of its own. earth's lightning is a good example of even a lesser satellite's ability to produce it's own light, so long as we agree that a bolt of lightning is not a species of sunlight. all the planets formed from dust and gas and debris in the midst of a sun (or BIGGER form of dust and gas a debris in the midst of a BIGGER BIGGER form we hardly know jack about) which kept them round and spinning. even our sun orbits a greater mass at the center of the galaxy, (as previously parenthetically mentioned). The rocky debris that formed the planets could not always have been rocky. it too was once gaseous. anyone who's taken chemistry 101 knows how that process works, and also knows that pressure is just as important as temperature in condensation. the sun provides a gripload of vacuum pressure in the form of gravity. this extremely low pressure would freeze the surface of anything near it by expanding its constituents (imagine making ice at room temperature just by putting water in a vacuum; it's the same principle). the mass of a satellite provides its shape in much the same way a blob of water in a NASA space shuttle assumes an orb. a cluster of mass in a vacuum will tend toward itself as efficiently as possible. the greater the mass gets, the greater the implosive force of gravity, the likelier the insides will liquify. the theorized expanding earth need not be called hollow in much the same way a bubble need not be hollow in order to be called a bubble. consider a bubble of oil in water, ballooned by oil. consider a soap bubble, ballooned by air. there is no "emptiness" or "hollowness" in a bubble. bear in mind our approximations of the composition of the earth are simplifications, brilliant estimates based on MOUNTAINS of data, open-armed submissive to correction. we didn't have to rewrite the rulebook when we discovered the solid-state dominating where we thought there to be liquid on the underbelly of our crust. thanks to scientific method, our system is immune to crippling blunder. don't fear the wrongness, gents. it won't hurt. not ever.

you guys just loooove an argument. did i really need to say "some resistance to change in science vs some change in science"? is the "some" really necessary? no, it's redundant, but yes, it would have kept you from being able to claim that i said what you thought i meant. in the world of science beyond this forum--preceding and precluding it--there *must* be a system of conservation that operates opposite the onslaught of demand for change. many of the battlehardened brains on this forum, the ones with posts in the thousands, clearly represent the former for reasons so just and logical that i'm not going to waste the two minutes it would take any idiot to elaborate. neither side is wrong-headed in its efforts. what many of you gents are doing is defending plate tectonics, right? that's a conservative goal, if only by definition. plate tectonics is the dominant geohistoric paradigm, supported by an enormous amount of evidence in much the same way a bigger city is supported by a bigger army, and you find yourselves defending the castle. that's conservation. meanwhile, a handful of boys are trying to usurp your power. it's a laughable effort in most cases, if not a little snarky, and at it's worst it only helps to amplify a sense of nationalism inside the castle walls. the more resistance you feel, the more togetherness you feel, the more triggerhappy both sides become. the louder either side gets, the more obvious the politics become. step outside the din for a moment, any of you, and see what i mean. just because your castle is perfectly able to withstand centuries of humble resistance the likes of neal adams doesn't mean it's right in doing so. the right attitude to have, the attitude that einstein and da vinci and descartes all had, is to welcome "lunacy" and embrace barefaced the fact that anyone could be wrong at any moment, like a time bomb or a bouncing betty. a king so confident in his castle's supremacy should welcome adversarial dialogue even within his castle walls--no, *especially* within his castle walls--for the most confident are the ones who are, in the best of reigns, most humble. but just because none of you is humble doesn't mean all of you shouldn't be. i submit this terrible post as Exhibit B for my case.

Change vs. Resistance to Change = Politics. Change in science vs. Resistance to change in science = Politics in science. I would like to submit this thread as evidence. As a sort of thought experiment: pretend a force called matter acts opposite to gravity. For reasons tied to human language, it is practically inconceivable for matter to be a force and not, well, "mass." Figuring out whether or not this theory even operates in the confines of physics is a lesson in reductio ad absurdum, because exploring a universe where forces act only on other forces would be like trying to tell a story without nouns. Mass is the stuff of nouns, damn it, as are our heroes and villains; clearly, no story would be complete without them. Einstein himself once pondered the consequences of a nounless universe. What happens to a story when the timeline itself is... all-inclusive? Friend and intellecutal contemporary, David Bohm, once famously insisted that there are no such things as nouns, and that we need to move beyond the religious assertion that something can have a static state. As he explains, everything is constantly changing--particularly on the quantum level--so a broom *here* in time is similar, but different, from a broom *there* in time. Rather than calling it a broom, one should respect its flux and address it as an instance of "brooming." Here my earlier statement regarding the real impossibility of nounless storytelling begins to make more sense. Human minds (and all others, it would seem) just can't handle it. Try forming a complete sentence without nouns! Fail. Then try again! Then fail again. And so on, until you are ready to understand that mathematics is the only language not necessarily inhibited by syntax. Mathematical constants such as "4" are always "4" and thus can be viewed as a sort of hybrid noun-verb. What's the difference between a ceaseless, immutable action and a true noun? Nothing. (At least not conceptually speaking; but when it comes to mathematics, I think we'll all agree that concepts are as perfect as the concept of "perfect" gets. ) A mass has gravity. That's how we say it, at least those of us that enjoy its simple elegance. But Einstein and Bohm knew there was something intrinsically wrong with that simplicity, that when something "has" a trait, it implies that there is another something to compare it to, a thing without that particular trait. On that all-inclusive timeline, if something *always* has something else, then why bother calling them two different things? If a golf ball always has dimples, why bother saying a golf ball has dimples? Because myriad things other than golf balls have dimples. Cheeks. Hail-damage. Planets, even, if you want to think strangely. So is there something other than mass that has gravity? Or, so to speak, does anything else have "dimples"? Well. That's quite a question. By definition--whether you approach it from the "mass"-having side of things or the "gravity"-having side of things--it would seem the answer is no. The two are defined as mutually inclusive. What's important is understanding that the letter "m" is a sort of constant. It always means mass, and can only equal zero conceptually (as in the mass difference at any given moment between an object and itself). Gravity is a constant inward force. Mass, then, can be viewed as a constant outward force, if not for any reason other than resilient opposition in the face of its own relentless gravity. Complications have arisen that attempt to assign mass to the concept of a graviton. This is like trying to apply mass to fire. As a matter of fact, following the same steps, it's exactly the same task. The truth is always dichotomous. For every fact there is a single counterpoint with 100% equal validity. Acknowledging this logical bilateralness is what a physicist would call aimless. To a logician, on the other hand, it would be called wisdom. One cannot predict the future, but, using patterns and probabilities, one can estimate it just fine. Imagine growing up in a monochromatic room where everything was in shades of green. Now imagine one day finding the door, and it leads into a room where everything is in shades of red. Were someone to ask you, how would you discern the red room from your green homeroom? How do you describe red in terms of green? As different. That's roughly where the logic ends. It's logic. No one would disagree with you. But there it ends. In truth, we like to see ourselves as different from verbs. As evidence I cite Descartes saying "I am." What 'am?' A noun. A noun is. "What" is. "I" is. Syntax is. Thus we see this other room, this red room called verbs, and all we can pretty much say about how a noun and a verb are different is: they're different. How are matter and force different? They're just different, that's how. This is starting to feel like an Apple Jacks commercial, so I'll move on. To call matter the naturally occurring force opposite gravity makes sense only in a world without nouns. Math. Thus it is not a disagreement between you and I if you insist that mass exists, that nouns are mandatory, so long as we both speak mathematics. If, however, you would contend that mass is subservient to force, that a lower-case m with a vector arrow drawn over it is blasphemy, then you are no longer speaking math with me, and you are no longer making sense. Relative to the sun, consider where the gas giants are and where the solid-state planets are. The difference is enormous, but in both cases, (very slightly) ever-decreasing. In essence, don't make the now-common mistake of assuming causality when considering the density of a planet in relation to its heliocentric attitude. Very likely, the two attributes weigh upon one another bilaterally. (Cheers to the word "bilateral" making two appearances in just a single post!) Is this relevant to the expanding earth theory? Yep. Does it confirm it? Of course not. Does it deny it? Not yet. As usual, the rift that seems the deepest between the two theories of Expanding Earth and Modern Tectonics is a definitional one. Perhaps a Venn Diagram is in order?

iNow: the best i can do is to apologize and keep my head about it.

Hmm, those are good questions. First off: sorry guys. Please forgive the time it'll take me to figure out how the discussions in this forum really operate. I do intend to stick around, and I don't plan on being anybody's nuisance. I'll arrest this topic for now. Sound good? Sounds good to me.

I appreciate your doubt, guys, cause it definitely shows that you're considering my angle. But alright, back to it. [Pops knuckles] 1. In producing a persuasive argument, the optimum strategy is to first side with the assumption you wish to debunk. Start, for instance, by assuming gravity and magnetism are indiscernible. Then set up a model using this idea, building up from scratch. You know what the overall picture should look like in the end, so it's not a terribly demanding task. However! Don't just put it in terms that the average student could understand. Put it in terms that are actually enjoyable to read. Creativity keeps you from thinking recklessly. Don't worry about me keeping up. Worry about all the folks you might be turning off to this ancient and fascinating topic. 2. Gravity was long ago defined as an attractive force between masses. Thus, any force that is not an attractive force between masses is not considered gravity. Equally important is the opposite possibility, which no one here has really touched on, that perhaps I am not against gravity. Is it true that any interaction between two masses that is not both attractive and repulsive would not be considered magnetism? Is it AS true? Is it less true? Is it more true? Don't pretend you know where I'm at on this, guys. I'm stubbornly open-minded. 3. Do look over that list of topics I recommended. I'm concerned that you guys haven't considered the depth of the question, yourselves. When I say open up to "outside analogy," I mean open up to those analogous concepts outside of physics; the more lenses through which you can view a dilemma, the more efficient your understanding will be. Analogy is not just a powerful thinking device, it's thought itself. Don't be afraid to beat yourselves up over this! See if you can come back with an analogy like: "if this were the case, then surgeons wouldn't be able to perform [such and such a task]," or "then philosophy would have to abandon [such and such a notion]." Physics loves company. 4. Speaking of which, I can't help but raise an eyebrow at Klaynos' signature. You guys are evidently used to having pseudo-philosophers come in here and make trouble just for the sake of trouble, but hopefully that hasn't kept you from studying philosophy inside and out? Right? Bear in mind, many of the most important minds in science *also* contributed to/borrowed from philosophy! Many call philosophy the metric system of understanding. As I like to put it, philosophy is just the glossary section at the end of the Human Knowledge Anthology; its sole purpose is to define concepts in universal terms and thus pave the way for analogy, kind of like the z-score in statistics. For every physical concept, there is a philosophical implication. Failure to comply with this norm does not occur. I don't condone bickering between philosophy and physics, like some civil war over human understanding, but the two factions do need to engage in constant dialog. (This's not to say I've come here to hurl philosophy at you. Just cause I'm not for you doesn't mean I'm against you. This is a science forum in the summer time, so no heart here is lacking in earnest dorkiness.) 5. Seriously, now, no one read Harold and the Purple Crayon?

Klaynos: You won't find reports of purple crayons not being purple, because if the crayon is not purple, it's not called a purple crayon. Speaking of which, when was the last time you read Harold And The Purple Crayon? I miss that book. I know I used to have it around here, somewhere... Sorry, anyway, this is getting fun.

Bear in mind you ought not to *use* your precepts to *explain* your precepts. The reason historians have to feign ignorance of cause and effect when documenting historical events is not just to skirt bias. Klaynos: Good start, I think. It's hard to be sure when you employ vague terminology. I don't want this discussion to get too philosophical, but there are rules even physicists must follow when it comes to definitional logic. Mr Skeptic: Same goes for you. Only... in a funnier way. I'd love to see you defend the perspective you've taken, because you seem to know the fundamental difference between a Tootsie Roll and a human being, whereas I'm a little uncertain. I know they look, feel, taste, sound and smell different, usually, but beyond sensory input...? ajb: You seem a little on the fence. Cognizance of existing theories is important, but why not just make a forward assertion? If I can offer a tip: outside analogy is traditionally the best way around writer's block. Also, ease off the shorthand, cause for this to be a discussion we need to keep it elaborative. Finally, who said gravity is solely attractive? Or far more importantly: why did he say it, and when? swansont: Your experiment missed the point. No pun intended. Explore how a thing can exist while including free space, or even relatively free space such as "volume" versus "solid mass." Take a look at David Bohm's early contributions to this discussion; I think you'll like what you see. I'm not here to make everyone tear down his/her notion of fact. I'm here to make everyone want to tear down his/her notion of fact. We are getting smart, and dichotomous truths are no longer permissible; there is a vital need for philosophical insight and creative thought as well as scientific confidence. In other words, let's kick some ass, everybody. In a true dialog, opposing ideas work toward a common goal.

Howdy. This topic should just always be up for discussion, and I'm more than ready to keep it difficult: Why distinguish gravitation from magnetism? You may wish to contemplate some or all of these helpful concepts/persons while outlining your platform: Occam's Razor; hyperbolic geometry; Viswanath's constant; logic and rules; equinoctial cycles; the explanatory gap and epistemology; David Bohm; Friedrick Nietzsche; spherical close-packing; creativity; the autism spectrum; quantum mechanics; Leonardo da Vinci; phi; linguistics; microbiology; cosmology; Maxwell's equations; and/or that which inspires you. I'm waiting.