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Originally Posted by Fortis
I believe that you have misunderstood the key part of the work by Lorentz. It does mean that the evolution of the system is sensitive to initial conditions, but what it doesn't mean is that you can ignore the gross conditions. To use the popular image, to predict the weather x days in advance you may need to consider the beating of the wings of a butterfly on the other side of the earth, but you also need to consider the effects due to thermal forcing of the atmosphere nearby. In the gravitational context, the effects due to the motion of individual people swamp the effects due to any of the more distant planets.
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This discussion addresses the key problem of mechanism. My claim is that there are cosmic cycles in history. To support this, the following quote from Mugaliens in RTomes current thread
Explaining Planetary Alignments Relationship to the Sunspot Cycle is highly instructive
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Originally Posted by mugaliens
As I hear you explain this, this is what I get (hope you don't mind me summing things up): 1. It's not that planetary alignments cause sunspots through tidal forces. 2. It's a certain resonance involving planetary alignments, with a periodicity of around 10.5 years. 3. The resonance differs depending on how many planets are aligned, where, when, etc. 4. In effect, they're "ringing the sun's bell." 5. If the resonance is in tune with the sun's current frequency, it adds to it's ringing, producing more eddies in the sun which lead to more sunspots (solar maximums). If it's out of tune, it well quell it's ringing (less eddies, less sunspots --> Maunder Minimum). If this is what you're saying, I get it, and agree it's very theoretically possible. I also hear you're saying this can apply to planets with non-solid cores, and that the general level of volcanic activity can also be affected by the same "ringing" effect involving planetary resonance. I liken this effect to shaking a small flagpole. If you're pushing and pulling just ahead of it's natural resonance, it's flexing back and forth increasess. If you're oscillations are out of tune with the flagpoles, it dampens the flexing, eventually bringing it to a stop. It doesn't take much effort to cause a significant effect. Just well-timed input oscillations over a long time. Years ago, back in college (and for whatever unknown reason...) I began some input oscillations with a light post, causing it to flex back and forth. This sucker was large and designed to withstand winds upwards of 200 mph. But after about a minute of input, it was flexing back and forth so much that it broke! <duck and run...> I never thought THAT would happen. But it proved a point: very small, well-timed inputs to any system which can "vibrate" and increase those vibrations to the point where it can have catostrauphic results. And again, to summarize, it's not that planetary alignment causes tidal forces which cause sunspots. It's that when the resonance of tidal forces due to many peaks and troughs of planetary alignments match a natural resonance within the sun, it starts ringing it like a bell (or flexing it back and forth like a lightpost), and that's what causes sunspots, affects the liquid innards of other planets, etc.
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This idea of cycles as producing a ringing bell is precisely what I am arguing for as the mechanism. RTomes made an extremely interesting follow up comment at #38, “The timing of the actual peaks in the sunspot cycle do not match those in the planets displacement of the solar interior. This is to be expected with the discovery of resonance, which means that in effect the
sun has a memory, and that different cycles will have different lag periods according to their distance from the resonant period. Building a model of this is required, and this is really a job for a solar physicist.”
In effect I am arguing that the earth has a similar memory to the sun, coded in to human genes and culture, even karmic in its scope.
To further illustrate how the mechanism I am claiming illustrates sensitive dependency, the excellent RTomes thread
Harmonics Theory provides numerous examples. One that I wish to draw on here is from #22, referring to
http://ray.tomes.biz/b2/index.php/a/2007/06/28/p149 which shows that clouds on Jupiter naturally form a 72 point circle. Here we have a model for the sort of mechanism I am claiming for precession, a cycle in nature resulting from long term stable oscillation of a dynamic system.
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Presumably you mean that we have evolved to be sensitive to this cycle. You have yet to explain why this should happen. Please can you explain what adaptive advantage there would be for an organism to be synchronised to these cycles?
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My view is that these cycles simply find their way into everything contained within them. If we are adapted, we ‘ring the bell’ of the cosmos, if not we are out of tune with nature. In the stoic tradition, freedom is the recognition of necessity, and I am arguing that cosmic cycles are a central feature of necessity. I see the adaptive advantage in the interpretation I presented at
Precessional Cosmology, specifically Post #28
Precessional Cosmology where I explain my own vision of the structure of time. I suggest there that, due to the current position of the precessional cycle, our planet is evolving from a phase where belief was dominant to a new phase where knowledge will be dominant. Hence, in terms of adaptation, behaviours that are in tune with knowledge rather than belief are likely to be increasingly aligned to this cosmic framework.
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I would also like to know how you avoid confirmation bias in your analysis.
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Yes this is a good question, and the material on Rome and China that I have presented could well be skewed by my objective of showing that precession structures history. However, I think the mathematics of the claim makes sense, so the inductive material corroborates the deductive hypothesis.