(May 3, 2015 at 9:36 pm)Rhondazvous Wrote: I find that people who don't believe the Bible know a lot more about it and about Christian history than those who do believe it.
I would refine your statement by dividing the believers into two groups: the "thinking" and the "ignorant." You can see the handiwork of the "ignorant" on Conservapedia. For a glimpse at how the "thinking" view things, see The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Augmented 3rd ed., Oxford U. Press, 2007. While mostly Christians, the editors don't have to buy a literal Moses authorship of the Pentateuch and they well realize that Joshua and his motionless sun & mood are a legend. They provide notes on the structure and redaction of biblical texts, and how the texts fit in with the Hebrew culture as far as this can be known.
(May 3, 2015 at 10:14 pm)Jenny A Wrote:(May 3, 2015 at 8:18 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Actually, if you rotate the rest of the solar system around the earth's axis of rotation, it could be made to appear as if the sun stood still without stopping the rotation of the earth.
...the solar system would have to travel awful fast to make the trip. [T]hat would have the sun traveling at a little over 3% of the speed of light. Should the sun travel around us, we'd fall in.
This gets into the complicated issue of reference frames. In physics all motion is relative, so it doesn't matter whether you think of a rotating earth in a stationary reference frame or a stationary earth in a rotating reference frame. In either of these frames the relative speed of sun and earth is simply the 30 km/sec we expect from the earth's orbital situation. The only thing that's going 3% of the speed of light is the imaginary axes of the rotating frame at that distance. If you extend them out far enough, they appear to go faster than light in violation of Einstein's Special Relativity.
James Callaghan explains in The Geometry of Spacetime: An Introduction to Special & General Relativity (Springer, 2000, §4.1, pp. 152-153): There are equations that convert coordinates between the stationary and rotating frames. Rulers measuring length in the transverse direction are foreshortened by a Lorentz transformation when converting. This eliminates the huge apparent speeds.
As far as the orbital motion goes, again it doesn't matter which body moves around which: it's relative motion that counts, and earth is in free fall in either case. The orbit is a conic section, for earth a nearly circular ellipse. As long as we have that 30 km/sec transverse component, we don't fall straight into the sun.
Feel free to correct me on any of these matters if I'm wrong; I'm not expert at this stuff.
(May 4, 2015 at 2:11 am)Alex K Wrote: I think we should all agree that I am not a cutting edge lactating bull sitter...
Lacerating? Or milk?
Other News: Now that the banno button has been pushed, the thread and its slavery will die. However we do have our own forms of exploiting human labor which have replaced slavery. We buy computers assembled by workers in poor countries who make $1 an hour and get no healthcare. While people in an employment relationship are technically free to go, in practice they may find it difficult to do so as they are dependent on steady wages and cognizant that any who quit jobs or complain about working conditions won't get the good references they need. I agree we've progressed beyond slavery, but that has little to do with our high and mighty morals showing up much better than those of ancient peoples. We have an industrial economy that obviates the need for slave labor, and the development of this economy, not compassion, was what led to slavery's abolition.
