Quote:
Originally Posted by Robert Tulip
Now Warren, I hope you are not trying to derail my thread. I take no responsibility for the totally irrelevant chart that our dinosauric friend attached. You should look at my attachments, not his. Admittedly there is more brain-strain in the numbers I gave, but they are up for falsification.
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OK, I looked at it. I can
kind of see your ~179 SSB cycle--barely. I'll grant that it's probably the result of the combined gravitation effects of the planets. The spots you point out are local minima--so you could look at the planets in those zones and see if they are pulling at crosspurposes to one another during those times (on average! because the main swings are much larger than the 179 cycle you're trying to look at.
There's no telling your SSB cycle would hold up at scales over hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe try using
GravitySimulator to simulate the Solar System both backwards and forwards in time. I think there's a way in the program to keep track of the barycenter.
But the following is probably a mirage:
Quote:
Jupiter-Saturn: 9 cycles = 178.65 years: 178.65/GY/144-1 = -0.145%
Jupiter-Uranus: 13 cycles = 179.4 years: 179.4/GY/144-1 = 0.27%
Jupiter-Neptune: 14 cycles = 178.9034 years: 178.9034/GY/144-1 = 0.007%
Saturn-Uranus: 4 cycles = 181.1 years: 181.1/GY/144-1 = 1.217 %
Saturn-Neptune: 5 cycles = 179.35 years: 179.35/GY/144-1 = 0.241%
Uranus-Neptune: 1 cycle = 172.7 years: 172.7/GY/144-1 = -3.483%
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Note that the relations with the most cycles tend to have the lowest errors. You go fooling around with integers, you'll drive yourself crazy finding all kinds of resonances every where you turn in the Solar System.
Real resonances require a causal story to be told. I guess the bottom-line question you're looking at is whether the precession of the Earth's axis is in a 1:144 resonance with this barely noticeable cycle nested within cycles of the SSB (solar system barycenter). But why should this be? By your own account account, the length of the 179 year cycle is changing around a lot even at human time scales, so it's difficult to see how this could govern the precession of the Earth's axis or vice versa.
Besides, the precession, as far as I know, has a ready explanation in that the physics of tops and rotating planets is well understood, and doesn't require appeal to outside forces to explain precession of spinning axes.
Sometimes coincidences do in fact happen. Take, for example,
the average geometric progression between consecutive planetary orbits at 55 Cancri are within 0.25% of the natural logarithm base
e. Yet this remarkable agreement is apparently a mere coincidence.