Gab@StFerdinandIII - https://unstabbinated.substack.com/
Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion...
Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death
“If we inquire of astronomers what is the distance of the Sun from the Earth, we shall find their answers so widely different that we shall be left in utter uncertainty.” Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) — Dutch Physicist and Astronomer
Huygens knew that despite centuries of mathematical claims, different astronomical methods yielded wildly contradictory values for solar parallax and distance, ranging from Ptolemy’s ancient 1,200 Earth radii, namely 1200 x 4000 miles or 4.800.000 up to 9 or 10 millions of miles, even to Kepler the Conniver’s 50 million. He recognized that these values relied heavily on unproven geometric assumptions rather than direct, indisputable visual evidence.
“The distance of the Sun from the Earth is so great, and the angle of its parallax so very small, that it can never be determined by any other method than that of observing the transit of Venus over the Sun’s disk.” Sir Edmond Halley (1656–1742) English Astronomer and Mathematician
Ed was right - sort of. The ‘parallax’ or angle of change is key and this is so small it is almost undetectable. In his 1716 paper presented to the Royal Society (A New Method of Determining the Parallax of the Sun), Halley admitted that all direct observations and standard geometric methods used up to that time were inherently incapable of proving the Sun’s true distance. Even using Venus as the ingress/egress transit point of reference as Ed demands, was wrong (see below). Give Ed 50%.
Halley supported Newton – financially and with observations. Indeed without Halley, Newton’s work ‘Principia’ would never have been published. Edmond was not a ‘denier’, a ‘fringe theorist’. Eddie was firmly in the mainstream of 17th century natural philosophy (later called ‘science’).
Huygens on the other hand was viewed by Newton and the English ‘Royal Society of (‘the’) Science’ as an enemy of Newtonianism, a man who had to be effaced. Huygens dared to contradict and disprove Newton’s billiard ball theory of light and matter. He also supported and confirmed an aether. Anathema for the Newtonian evangelists.
Both men, literate, experimental engineers, with high sentience and common sense, knew that any interpolation of the Sun’s distance from this planet is entirely arbitrary and, as usual, falls back into rather tautological assumptions and designs.
We have discussed this previously in a few posts and it goes to the fetid, dark heart of Copernican theology and gospel. More here
Harold Aspden (1927–2011) was a Cambridge-educated electrical engineer, patent lawyer, and former IBM patent director, who spent decades developing one of the most mechanically detailed, alternative classical physics frameworks of the late 20th century.
Aspden’s theory is well built and incorporates most of the features utilised by other aetheric theorems of the past century.
This is why we highlight his theory.
Harold’s model unfortunately is insufficient, and bows too low and too often in the direction of the Standard Model.
Aspden was philosophically aligned with the Standard Model but he was not an atheist – he was a deistic creationist. However, Harold fully accepted both heliocentricity and the physical axial rotation and orbital motion of the Earth - without endeavouring to prove either.
In summary Aspden’s framework was a direct attempt to replace both Einstein’s General Relativity and modern Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) with a purely mechanical, electromagnetic aether.
Aspden’s cubic lattice model, its core mechanics, its theoretical triumphs, and its fatal engineering/physical roadblocks are discussed below. More here
To sell the scam, you need to market the panic.
As the 1990s rolled toward 2000 the global public was told that human civilisation was held together by the most tenuous of algorithmic threads. It was close to ending. Forget the Black Death of the 14th century. The presage to the parousia was the “Year 2000 problem” (Y2K), premised on a two-digit year convention utilised in legacy COBOL date fields.
The COBOL date field issue was marketed not as a routine software deprecation and maintenance task, but as an impending systemic apocalypse. Governments and enterprises poured hundreds of billions of dollars into consultancy contracts, vendor remediation, and crisis planning amid warnings of crashing airliners, dark power grids, and collapsing financial systems. The media did a Viking beserker. The money for the media was in the apocalyptic narrative. You remember.
Yet, when midnight struck on 1 January 2000, nations that spent virtually nothing on remediation, such as Russia and Italy, experienced the exact same uneventful transition as nations that depleted public treasuries. The author knows this being located in Russia on January 1 2000. Nothing happened. Not. A. Damn. Thing.
So, back to critical thinking. What happened? Why did the world buy into yet another scam? What were and are the technical realities of legacy COBOL architectures? What really transpired from the industrial mechanics of the panic, and the lucrative commercial nexus that transformed routine string-handling routines into an unprecedented IT consultancy windfall? More here.