Last week I worked the column around a magazine that specialized in IPOs (identifiable protruding objects), so this week I thought I'd jump to an amazing comment I found in one devoted to UFOs. The author of the piece is apparently serving a year as a correspondent at the South Pole, and the article in question is simply clearing up a bunch of misconceptions people have about life at in the Antarctic. He in no way is expressing any scientific opinion, just explaining how some things really work. The only problem is, I've seen the particular misconception he's clearing up many times before and I've also seen the explanations he gives, and both, quite frankly, have always floored me.
The myth he's clearing up is that the blood will run to your head and you'll be thrown off the world if you stand on the South Pole. This is, pretty clearly, a misconception that could only be produced by someone you had no conception of how the Earth rotates in space. When we stand on the equator, we are traveling at about 1,000 mps. As we move towards the pole, the circumference of the Earth becomes smaller, and our rate of speed diminishes. When we reach the poles, and we are standing on them, we are not traveling at any speed, we are merely turning in a very slow circle, one that takes 24 hours to complete. We're still going about 67,000 mph as the Earth orbits the sun. Where we are on the surface has nothing to do with that speed.
But I want to reiterate, underline, make perfectly clear, that we travel with the Earth's rotation, and the speed of that travel is determined by the circumference of the Earth at the place we're standing. If we round the circumference at the equator off to 25,000 miles, then we are traveling 25,000 miles in a 24-hour period. If the circumference of the Earth where we are standing is 16,000 miles, we are traveling 16,000 miles in a 24-hour period. Dividing the circumference by the hours, we find at the equator, we're traveling at 1,042 mph while at the 16,000-mile circumference point, we're traveling at 667 mph. When we get to the pole, we are traveling at zero mph. We are standing still turning in a circle at the rate of one full turn every 24 hours. If we're fit, which we'd have to be to get to the South Pole in the first place, we might have a 30" waste, so we could say we were traveling at one and a quarter inch per hour, but we sure aren't traveling fast enough to get the blood rushing to our head. This myth, in fact, might be the result of the same stupidity that makes the ice age so easy to sell. The North Pole is up there and therefore all that ice can climb over the mountains simply because it is falling down the side of the Earth. The South Pole is down there, so you'll be upside down and the blood will rush to our head. As for flying off, when gravity has diminished to the point that it can no longer hold the oceans on its surface, those oceans, to the extent they haven't migrated to the poles in the form of ice and snow, will congregate at the equator and depart the Earth as a result of the centrifugal force of the planet's rotation.
Which brings us to the clarification of the myth, that it would be the centrifugal force at the pole that would cause us to fly off the planet. The definition of centrifugal force is pretty standard, so I'll just quote one: The apparent force, equal and opposite to the centripetal force, drawing a rotating body away from the center of rotation, caused by the inertia of the body. With the equator rotating at 25,000 miles every 24 hours and the poles not rotating at all, just turning, it's hard to see how this misconception ever occurred. The correspondent very wisely points out something, though, and that something opens up the actual discussion topic of this column. Correctly noting that the centrifugal force of the Earth's rotation is strongest at the equator, he says that the centrifugal force of the Earth does have an affect on the poles. It pulls the Earth's atmosphere towards the equator, resulting in the polar atmosphere being thinner.
The correspondent then claims that the Earth's rotation has a bigger affect on thick air, and thus doesn't affect the Antarctic air, which we can let pass because he then concludes correctly that the ice sheet covering Antarctica is two miles thick, so the atmosphere at this height is extremely thin.
What is left hanging, and it's okay in an informal article such as this, is what happens to the atmosphere once it is drawn to the equator? Does it just stay there, robbing the Antarctic of its thick air? Meteorologists answer no, and in fact, their model of the movement of the Earth's atmosphere, collected meticulously from actual observation, is that the atmosphere is two giant circular flows, one north, the other south. The air rises at the equator and flows north and south. The air from the North and South Poles returns to the equator beneath the air traveling above it to the Poles.
Meteorology is an empirical science that wasn't recognized as such for many years. The movement of ground air was important, but its forecasting was haphazard at best until air travel required a more precise model of airflow. Still, meteorology had difficulty getting recognized as a science, not so much because its predictions were usually wrong (and still are) but because it had no mathematical basis. The definition of science to an empiricist is mathematics, and any field that didn't employ them simply wasn't a science.
Meteorology faced another barrier, this one seemingly insurmountable. As emphasized above, the Earth is turning, and as it does so, it's carrying us along at the speed it's turning. However, we aren't aware of the speed for one simple reason, the atmosphere is turning at the same speed we are, give or take a few miles per hour, and this means the air at the equator is moving at about a 1,000 mph while the air at the Poles is not moving at all. The air in between these points is moving at whatever speed the circumference of the Earth is at that point is moving. The air moving toward the Poles starts out at about a 1,000 mph and ends up at 0 mph, while the atmosphere returning beneath it starts out at 0 mph and ends up traveling at about 1,000 mph. You do the math. Don't bother, it's quite simple, the air that is moving toward the Poles has to slow down, the air moving back down to the equator from the Poles has to speed up.
But, and this is the most beautiful but in empirical science, the Earth was formed out of a swirling mass of gas some 5 billion years ago, and all of it's motion was imparted to it by this wonderful swirling mass of gas. Any friction would slow the Earth down, and it wouldn't rotate at all. Thus, the Earth can't be in friction with anything. That means to the poor meteorologist that the rotation of the Earth can have no affect whatsoever on the atmosphere, that it's movement is the result of events occurring in the atmosphere and has nothing to do with contact with the surface of the Earth.
Any contact with the surface of the Earth would be a violation of mass/gravity, and thus the ultimate sin against the founding principle of the empirical religion. See columns 16-05 and 10-16. So we have air we know is moving down close to the Earth beneath the air moving toward the poles, and we know by mathematically measuring it that it is speeding up. But that's not the only part of the story that puts meteorologists into a mindless bind from which all the absurd models created by the most sophisticated (and expensive) computer technology can produce will never be able to extradite it. This part of the story is also mathematically verifiable. It never ceases to amaze me how an empirical science, who's claim to validity is based on mathematics, produces concepts, turns those concepts into laws, then ignores the measurements of reality when they conflict with its made up laws.
The atmosphere is traveling toward the Poles over areas of the Earth with decreasing circumferences. Although it is traveling several miles up, we'll use the Earth's circumference to measure the increasingly confining spaces the atmosphere is moving into. When the atmosphere begins its journey to the poles, the circumference is 25,000 miles. What is combined with circumference to determine volume? That's a simple mathematical answer, radius. Rounding off, we can say the radius of the Earth at the equator is 4,000 miles. The radius of the Earth at the pole is also about 4,000 miles. However, we aren't measuring the radius of the Earth, we are measuring the radius of the circumference to its center as the circumference of the atmosphere moving to the Poles decreases. This means drawing an imaginary line between the poles, and measuring from the surface to the line. Thus, at the equator, it might be 4,000 miles, but further north it would be 3,000 miles, then 2,000 miles until it reached the Pole, at which point it would be zero.
The area the atmosphere has to occupy is getting smaller and smaller the further toward the Poles it moves. Not only is the atmosphere being forced into a smaller area, it is doing so when it is traveling faster than the Earth beneath it. Both the Earth and the atmosphere are traveling in the same direction, from west to east, but the further toward the Poles the atmosphere is moving, the slower the Earth is traveling from west to east. What's the obvious result? As the atmosphere is moving into smaller areas, it is forced down into the atmosphere beneath it, and this atmosphere is traveling at the same from east to west as the Earth at any point on the Earth's surface. Thus, the faster moving air is forced down into the slower moving air. As clouds form (see column 37-05), they are still moving faster than the surface of the Earth and that's why the clouds move from west to east faster than the surface of the Earth is moving. It also explains the Jet Stream, which flows much more rapidly than the Earth beneath it.
Meteorology could figured all this out, including the obvious fact that friction with the surface of the Earth is what causes the atmosphere, once it is forced down, and, through intermixing, sometimes in violent ways, with the slower atmosphere heading back to the equator, produces the weather so difficult to predict (satellite tracking is not predicting, its just more accurate forecasting), if it weren't for the obvious fact that the notion friction with the Earth speeds up the returning atmosphere is fiction. It has to be fiction because, according to empirical science, the Earth has been spinning frictionlessly in space for 5 billion years. The fact that it's spinning is proof that its surface does not produce friction with the atmosphere. Ergo, meteorology could not explain reality by using factual reality to explain what is obviously happening. It is a science, or at least it seeks to be a science, and to be a science, become a respected member of the empirical community instead of just a bunch of mystical forecasters, it had to conform to the empirical code of laws, the basic one being gravity is a property of and proportional to mass, and that law is based on the known fact the Earth has been spinning frictionlessly in space for 5 billion years.
Meteorology therefore did a slight of hand trick that forced empirical science to accept it as a member in good standing of the delusional. A well-known effect in physics is the Coriolis Effect. It's an effect, the result of the Earth's west to east spin. It has to be accounted for when launching a rocket. If the rocket is launched due north, it's landing point will be the east of its departure point because it was traveling east at the same speed the Earth was moving at that point, but as it moves north, the Earth's speed is lessening, which means it, like the clouds moving north, travel in a west to east direction faster than the Earth. This is not a force, it is an effect, and was clearly labeled as such in dictionaries as late as the sixties when it was expressly said to not be a force (because meteorologists were turning it into a force). In today's dictionaries, it's a force.
How did this happen? Regardless of meteorology's status as a predictive operation with no sound results, the discovery of the Jet Stream and the satellite pictures of clouds moving faster than the Earth was moving, required some sort of answer be hoked up and the obvious answer, the one discussed in this column, was unacceptable, so a rote piece of nonsense that could be mindlessly repeated by the semiliterate (at least to the subject matter) had to be found. Empirical science was now faced with an obvious question for which it had no answer, and in cases such as this, any answer is better than no answer. The first thing empirical science does to support its nonsense is credential the people professing it. The question dealt with the atmosphere, so, viola, meteorology became a credentialed empirical science.
As to the answer, that was simple. The Coriolis Effect was not an effect, it was a force, and thus it now is the Coriolis Force that powers the Jet Stream and moves the clouds east. See how easy the shell game is? When we have a bunch of practiced shamans moving the shells, we haven't a prayer, and of course, if we happen to pick the right shell, the shamans have a bunch of goons to take your winnings back (see column 12-06).
So obvious reality, the circulating atmosphere, its slowing down and speeding up, has to be left out of the billion dollar models of the weather meteorologists produce, and in its place, a nonexistent force is plugged in to screw up the entire process. That's on top of the major problem, that because it is not in the public eye, empirical science hasn't had to make up a fiction about how heat is transported in the atmosphere, probably as important, if not more important, than the friction of the Earth with the atmosphere.
What do I predict the Earth's future to be? Obviously, water from the equators is precipitated out at the Poles, which are becoming ice sheets as the planet cools in the zero temperature of space. I suspect, as gravity lessens with the cooling, the atmosphere will become thinner as more and more of it drifts off into space. The overall result will be less atmosphere participating in the Pole to equator rotation, less weather, and less and less food. But that's the New Ice Age (empirical mantra in the mid-70s, or global warming empirical mantra today).
In the meantime, we'll remain as dumb as bunnies populating in a field where all the carrots are slowly vanishing.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com