First of all, the "Targeting Clean-up" was performed by Cassini to put it on a trajectory to release Huygens. It was described, in the article you linked, as follows:

"As planned, a fine tuning of the Cassini trajectory took place on 22 December to place Huygens on its nominal entry trajectory."

Emphasis mine. It's amazing how you can read an article and the only thing you take away from it is one sentence that might leave a door open for you...but only when that one sentence is taken out of context.

Second, Huygens has no engines. It was coasting, with nothing other than Newtonian gravitation to guide it, since it's release 3 weeks ago. And it nailed its entry perfectly. This was a terrific test of gravitation. Newton's Laws passed. Your hypothesis failed.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't know that anyone here has said a variable G is impossible. Personally I think it's certain our understanding of physics is incomplete and that it's possible that G is not a universal constant. What myself and others have repeatedly said is that your variable G hypothesis, like Jerry's, has been shown to be obviously flawed. Just because your hypothesis is wrong doesn't mean someone else won't come along one day with a real scientific hypothesis that improves our understanding of gravity.

Well, that pretty much ends the conversation for me...I'm outta here...

Umm....so what happens during a lunar eclipse. Why doesn't the moon's orbit shift when it's inertia is affected by the reduced solar irradiance?

Heck, I'm not even going to lurk here any more.

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

It's called the Allais Effect

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Caveat Lector. Experimentum summus judex...

Could you elaborate please. When I follow the link's, I find that the Allais Effect is a set of experiments which recorded a change in pendulum rate during a solar eclipse. How does this relate to the moon's orbit during a lunar eclipse.

Good enough for me -!

Huygens landed successfully. Trying to save face by sifting through chute timing and heat data looking for anomalies in the noise only increases the silliness exponentially.

I don't see how we could be off by orders of magnitude in the models and still even point the radio telescopes in the right directions to catch the signal let alone land the thing. Newton is a good driver.

There is no shame in having been mistaken. However, being in denial is another matter.

Ciao!

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Lyford Rome
"Zis is not nuts, zis is super-nuts!"
Mathematician Richard Courant on viewing an Orion test

Now, Jerry, pick one version of your theory and stick to it, please. I was wrong before - it's the G/M(object) ratio that must remain constant, not the product. So if G decreases, M must do so as well, or Kepler's laws wouldn't work. You've stated pretty large deviations as well, so this isn't something that would've gone undetected.

Not terribly unexpected since Jupiter's magnetic field plays havoc with any electronics unfortunate enough to be close to it. The orbits are still predictable, though. However, since you now state that the mass doesn't change, the whole point is moot.

The only trouble with this "evidence" is that your own theory predicts we should detect these effects here as well - if the effects truly are logarithmic in scale, the Earth should still be able to dominate the forces at close distances (see your own quote below, my bolding). And even the GPS satellites don't seem to detect anything except straightforward GR effects.

In physics, it doesn't matter if there's a stronger effect as long as it's predictable - you can still measure smaller influences by accounting for the larger effect. In other words, if there was a distance-dependant component to gravity that we don't know of, it should be detectable regardless of other influences. Ever heard of the superposition principle? The Sun isn't the biggest player by any means either - what about stellar and galactic motions?

Frankly, I couldn't care less what happens to the 'inertial field' or whatever you call it - I'm concerned with what happens to the actual motions. Tell me what happens to the accelerations and I'll listen. (This isn't nitpicking - you're throwing away a whole slew of Newton's terminology along with his laws, so clarification is in order)

Lunatik, does it actually matter whether the orbiting planet is sunlit or not? Consider the case of a planet orbiting a brown dwarf vs a white one with the same mass. Is there a difference?

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"We do not require reality to conform to the expectations of the ignorant"

I listed the thread link because the question is more appropriate there, incase you wanted to follow more on that. But to explain better, the Allais Effect is concentrated on a very small area for a very short time, the actual dark shadow of the eclipse as experienced on Earth. The effect seems to be so small here that it is almost in doubt. We do not know what the same effect would be on the Moon when it is in Earth's total shadow because we never measured for it. It should be more pronounced, hypothetically. Nor is there evidence the Moon's orbit changes in any way, which should not be expected if the orbit is a function of established parameters of gravity and mass for both bodies, though there might be a slight perturbation to how the Moon acts within the shadow. Again, we never measured for it, in the same way we had never before measured for a shifted pole after a massive tsunami, though now we know it happened. There is still much science to be done, some of which will come about incidentally, while some will be sought for. The Huygens mission was sought after, though no anomalies surfaced thus far. Not reason enough to stop looking. :roll:
But I would urge you to pursue this line of reasoning further on the Allais thread, if you're interested in that lunar effect.

Hey Jerry, this turned out to be one heck of a good thread!
Let me know if you get some good data on Tassel's: . The article from which quoted does not present numbers. We need numbers, numbers, numbers###.

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Caveat Lector. Experimentum summus judex...

Yeah, for anyone looking for evidence that his theory is nonsense.

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"Most editorials are written by people that love to argue but got kicked off debate team for not making any sense." -Seanbaby

I'm just hangin' at the Apple Store in Newport Beach, so playing with new Macs. Indeed, theorizing has its taking chances, which in a world without guarantees this is good. Jerry had the guts to put it out there, to ask questions, to venture hypothetical scenarios, and to take either glory or heaps of guffaws from all who read his. I can relate to that. We need to keep asking questions, or else science will remain stuck with the most incredible stories ever told, which even makes children frightened going into physics as a career. Let's get real. Aren't some of today's modern physics really out there? I mean reaallly out there? And we are all supposed to believe them? Get real. That's why it's important to ask questions: to get real. 8)

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Caveat Lector. Experimentum summus judex...

Lunatik wrote:


Yep, really out there. Some of it is even on Titan. :-#

Yes! That's where it's real. I't applied physics. I'm talking about some of the other, non-engineering physics, the fantasy theoretical stuff... you know.. BBT,GRT,SRT,DDT...

Don't know, it depends upon solar irradiance flux. I think what the Allais Effect addressed was where one body blocked another's radiation received. Was it gravitational radiation, electromagnetic radiation, space-time radiation, or other? We really still don't know. Further, not being close to any brown dwarfs with planets, nor white dwarfs with planets, that we can measure, we're guessing as to their dynamics in relation to each other. What about a brown dwarf circling a white dwarf, affected by the radial in-radiating stellar dust from a red giant, all of which is being sucked up by a very massive neutron star? As you can see, we can all be silly too. [-X

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Caveat Lector. Experimentum summus judex...

Are you saying that special relativity is "fantasy"? Do you have a serious alternative?

It's a waste of time people. When your ammunition doesn't actually have to go off then you have an unlimited supply.

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When I am done here I think I will go create something from metal.

Does anybody have any hard numbers to fill in here? I seriously doubt a final velocity of "about 300 km/s" would have been survivable. Unless someone is willing to cough up a descent rate/profile and a final velocity, we do not know diddly squat. It is dam hard to claim victory or admit defeat when all we have is excess temperature for unknown reasons and a picture that looks like a rocky river bed.

In theory the ESA just held another newconference, but I can't find any coverage. Did they do anything other than march out another bunch of pontificating politicians?

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jwj

It's ok not to know.

Jerry, you lost this one, big time.

By your numbers, Huygens was supposed to either crash into Titan or miss it completely (depending on how many times you backpedalled). It not only did neither, but it was right down the middle of the projected trajectory window!

Give it up!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson