From what I have seen no threat level to worry about. Warren has been very helpful with questions in the past and provided an amazing warning. I am running a Milky Way set of numbers for Boinc and do not want to upset that program either.

The big number and the way it is determined has so far been the focus of most of the talk. What I found interesting is that there is the 0.1 year change in the length of the cycle. Wouldn't that indicate that there is energy being removed from the system just as the increasing distance to the moon likewise indicates energy being removed from the system?

Have to go, the cat is insisting on typing again. Quite frustrating

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"Nature is obliged to let reality determine its laws, whereas mathematics is under no such constraint."

Some numbers have errors, some are precise. Where my numbers have errors these errors are not relevant to my SSB argument. The figures I gave for the number of each outer planetary pairs are imprecise as these are just derived from a formula and can be readily corrected. Any correction will only improve the accuracy and precision of my argument. The numbers I gave for the trend line of the barycentre wave formation moving average are very precise. To obtain these I used a spreadsheet with JPL data and found the dates of all main stationary points from 1500 to 2099. This produces the clear trend line in my chart showing the slowing of the SSB from 178.83 to 178.92 years per cycle. I have already explained this method, and can answer further specific questions on it. The error bars on the outer planet cycles do not affect my claims. For example, we know J-S = 178.7, J-N=178.9, U-N=172, etc as per my last post. The point I was making with regard to these numbers is that the main SSB beat, 178.9 years, is 0.2 years greater than the J-S cycle, and this is to be expected as an integrated solar result of all the other pairings which are just above 179 years. No way, these errors do not work through in my answer. To repeat, my 178.92 year moving average is derived from precise JPL Horizons data, not from measurements of the cycles of the outer planets. I am deriving the SSB average figure from JPL data, not from this beat frequency. It would be aligned to it though. 25765 is from the current Wikipedia great year article. You often see a range of numbers from 25,700 up to 26,000, but the wiki says 25765 is “the actual length”. My point was that I have previously seen precise calculation of 25764, and this error is in line with my observation that the SSB rate has slowed over the last few years from 25764/144 to 25765/144. The Wikipedia article cites A.L. Berger; Obliquity & precession for the last 5 million years; Astronomy & astrophysics 51 (1976), 127 for the claim that “the precessional speed is increasing currently, and therefore the period is decreasing. Numerical simulations of the solar system over a period of millions of years give a period of 257 centuries." My data show the SSB period is also decreasing. I would like to get data to check if the rate change I found is the same as the great year rate change. Are any readers able to assist?
This figure for C is not used to derive the SSB data, and is only relevant as I explained above. SSB and GY data is accurate. Sorry, I left the brackets out – should be 178.65/(GY/144)-1 = -0.145%. When I checked this again just now I got -0.149%, the difference of 0.004% being due to my previously using extra unshown decimals in the 178.65 figure. In any case, this level of accuracy is not relevant to the basic SSB claim. Thanks Tusenfem for checking. As I have explained here the only error you found in my presentation was that I wrote 178.65/GY/144-1 = -0.145% instead of 178.65/(GY/144)-1 = -0.145%. The observed accurate slowing in the SSB remains, and as noted here, I expect to be in line with the findings of A.L. Berger; Obliquity & precession for the last 5 million years; Astronomy & astrophysics 51.

I've changed the image source for the chart to a local upload and sent a nastygram to ImageShack as to why I won't be using them anymore after about four years of dependable service. The chart is as relevant as anything you've provided, plus I didn't extend the gas prices beyond the "cents" place.

The only thing "dinosauric" about this thread is the abundance of astrology and numerology, both of which should have gone extinct a long time ago.

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I earlier posted these dates:
Group 1
1516.133; 1524.336; 1532.985; 1544.294; 1554.71; 1563.611; 1573.275; 1585.111; 1593.833; 1601.366; 1610; 1611.836; 1616.982; 1625.253; 1632.63; 1639.613; 1646.391; 1650.713; 1656.272; 1664.307; 1671.81; 1678.955;

Group 2
1694.861; 1703.272; 1712.138; 1722.036; 1733.441; 1742.157; 1751.527; 1764.339; 1772.579; 1780.052; 1787.746; 1791.377; 1796.149; 1804.272; 1811.433; 1818.605; 1825.519; 1829.691; 1835.097; 1843.261; 1850.883; 1858.264;

Group 3
1873.568; 1882.275; 1891.127; 1900.441; 1912.324; 1920.904; 1929.694; 1943.863; 1951.383; 1958.772; 1966.302; 1970.506; 1975.202; 1983.238; 1990.313; 1997.649; 2004.821; 2008.667; 2013.855; 2022.122; 2030.063; 2037.839;

Part Group 4
2052.103; 2061.291; 2069.996; 2079.458; 2091.219; 2099.444;

These are from JPL and by my calculation are the exact dates at which the SSB – Position of Sun distance is at maximum or minimum. You can check this. The moving average between these periods – precise and exact – shows slowing from group 1 to group 4 of 0.1 years from 178.82 to 178.92 with a clear close trend as shown here.

A further point. http://www.perceptions.couk.com/imgs/spin3.gif is a mathematical empirical diagram of precession of the equinox. Hitherto the 1/12 division shown has been considered arbitrary, without astrophysical correlation. My demonstration here that the SSB period is precisely 1/12 of the precessional sign period of 2147 years provides a quantitative basis to study this diagram as an empirical model of the structure of time.

Your use of the term "exact dates" appears to divulge a misunderstanding of precision and accuracy. Sorry, but nothing outside of pure math is exact. Once actual data are introduced into math, so are inaccuracy and imprecision. It's part of the baggage that data bring with them."precisely 1/12" to how many places? If it's less than an ∞ number of places, then it's not "precisely".

Throwing around terms like "exact", "precisely", etc., may impress those who aren't that well-versed in science and statistics, but for those of us who are, well, better luck next time.

It might help to revisit the scientific method. Determining a conclusion and then making sure the data support that conclusion isn't how it works. Just the opposite in fact. Any experiment where the data exactly match the preconcluded results indicates that the data have been "massaged" a bit here and there.

On the other hand the scientific method isn't used by practitioners of astrology and numerology for obvious reasons.

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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:

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.

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Fitting a three-parameter curve of uncertain form to ten points with three exceptions certainly brings one to the far edge of the known world. -- Bradley Ephron

I have been studying the solar system barycentre data from the
5 day interval SSB ephemeris for the full 6000 years covered by the NASA JPL Horizons Online Ephemeris. It is a 30MB text file compressed as a 12MB ZIP file. I extracted to excel with 438309 dates showing Longitude, Radius (Sun=1), Angular Momentum and Torque for each. For my purpose I am just using the radius to analyse wave trends in the distance from the centre of mass to the position of the sun.

From this data I have charted the 179 year wave pattern from 3000BC to 0 so far. There is a clearly defined wave shape with 178.9 year average frequency throughout. My calculations for the period 2000BC to 1000BC find an average period between similar wave turning points of 178.99124 years, slightly longer than the apparent long term average. In this thousand year subset I found about 136 instances of this wave length in the SSB cycle. These instances have standard deviation 0.44 years and one third have frequency >178.9 and <179.1.

This pattern appears to be a major constant of the solar system, in that the cycles of the centre of mass provide an integrated gravitational picture of the shape of the solar system overall. Charting the data, many simple patterns leap out, for example in repeated patterns slightly shorter or longer than average wave length but with clear defined ~179 year periodicity.

My underlying question here is the effect of the SSB cycle on earth. As I have noted previously, and as is confirmed in study of the 6000 year JPL series, this SSB wave structure corresponds precisely to what is known as ‘the houses of the age,’ ie the 1/12 x 1/12 division of the 25765 year long precession of the equinox. It is hard, for me at least, to imagine that life on earth could have evolved in the midst of this intricate gravitational pattern and not reflect it in any way.

How can you find 136 instances of a 179 year wave length within 1,000 years?!? At most, there can only be 5 such instances (1,000/179 = ~5.6). Therefore, your 136 instances are not independent samples. I want to see the standard deviation for a sample size of 5. Also, you are picking out your "instances" by eye, aren't you? If so, it's quite likely you are introducing bias, as you have an axe to grind. Nothing wrong with grinding axes, per se, but you need a statistical technique that can pick out these "turning points" automatically. I don't see that yet.

Yeah, but it's even harder for practically everyone else to imagine how such tiny and noisy gravitational patterns could possibly have any effect at all on life on Earth. That's the problem with astrology in general: there's no scientific theory about how tiny, noisy gravitational anomalies caused by distant planets can have causal effects on life on Earth. Since there's no scientific explanation for astrology, astrologers are forced to revert to seemingly (to us scientific materialists) crazy, New Age, spiritual explanations. However, the mere fact that there's no scientific explanation for a phenomenon doesn't imply that New Age explanations for it are true.

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Fitting a three-parameter curve of uncertain form to ten points with three exceptions certainly brings one to the far edge of the known world. -- Bradley Ephron

Oh please, not even JPL will give you values without error.
It clearly shows you have no idea about math and significance.
And the page you link to is NOT JPL, it is a EU/PU promoting website, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

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Optimism does not change the laws of physics. (T'Pol)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. (Dao De Jing 27)
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Martin ( http://www.geocities.com/DrMartinV )

Very well said Warren!

It was hard for me to accept the fact that when working with planet alignments and correlations that until I had some real physics behind the causes it was just astrology.

(still looking....)

Jim

One example of a very strange resonance in the Solar System is the apparent rotational resonance of Venus with the Earth--something that was completely unknown to millenia of astrologers until its discovery by science in the 1960's. Yet, surprisingly, I have yet to hear an astrologer mention it: I would have guessed that there must be some sort of astrological significance to the fact that Venus presents her backside to the Earth every time she passes us.

But is it a real resonance? At first, scientists were in that phase that Robert's apparently in--it's just too good to not be true. Then people did some calculations and found out that the relation is just a little too far off the ideal resonance for Venus to be librating. But then some Chinese scientists did some more calculations and suggested that if you take into account the torque exerted by Venus' prevailing winds, then it might very well be librating around the ideal. And there the matter stands. So who know? But at least there's a scientific story to be told. It may very well be a false story, but at least it's there. But for 99.9% of astrology, there just isn't any scientific story to be told at all.

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Fitting a three-parameter curve of uncertain form to ten points with three exceptions certainly brings one to the far edge of the known world. -- Bradley Ephron

Hi Warren. If you look at my OP chart, you will see yellow bars indicating the 179 year pattern. The main apparent wavelength of the chart is about 20 years, but if you actually look at it, you will see that all the turning points are in a 179 year phase. This applies to the 18 J-S turning points and also to other subsidiary points in each cycle. Hence we do not have a simple 179 year wavelength for the SSB, but a complex 19.8 year wavelength that follows repeating shape every nine waves. It is this 19.8 year period which I used to calculated the 136 points between 2000BC and 1000BC, at both peak and trough and the secondary points. This is 100% physics data crunching, although I am working fast and would appreciate if others could check my work. It is not by eye, but by mathematical formula: in a spreadsheet I put all dates in column A and radii in column B, then by formula in column C: =if(b2>b1,1,0) and column D: =if(c2=c1,a2,0) will return the exact turning point dates from JPL. I am only sharpening my ax in the way Abraham Lincoln did, in order the better to cut when I use it. I am not introducing bias, if you study the mathematics I have presented it is entirely objective and true.
This is a broader question/comment and I will return to it when I post graphs of the patterns over six thousand years of data.

Error in the JPL SSB data is not significant for the use I am making of it. Are you suggesting the data I have given is inaccurate? Your aspersions on the webpage host are ad hominem unless you claim the data is untrustworthy.

I cannot answer for NASA JPL's small uncertainties beyond acknowledging that in theory they may increase as a square of the time away from present further constrained by the ephemeris being a 'best fit' to past observations that deteriorate in both quantity and quality the further one goes back in time, bit I did upload the file Robert linked to and I emailed him the URL so he could access it.

For the record, the plasmaresources.com domain name is owned by my brother David who has generously allowed me to upload stuff in a directory there that I do not otherwise have server space for, and yes his website does promote EU/PU ideas, however that fact has no relevance whatsoever to this thread.

The file linked to is a 6000 yr ephemeris of selected Solar System Barycentre (SSB) quantities based on NASA JPL Horizons Online Ephemeris results that I put together using a simple program I wrote in THINK Pascal (TP) that loads the JPL results and calculates things such as angular momentum and torque (both in the ecliptic plane) and dumps selected quantities as tab separated columns in a plain text file.

The formulae used for the calculated values in my simple program are approximations that are good enough for an exploratory look at the SSB data, while the TP 80-bit maths means that any numerical errors introduced are far smaller than JPL errors and those in the approximation formulae used so can be safely ignored, but both the formulae and the method used could probably be improved on for precision work. Further details available on request.

Any errors beyond what JPL has built in to their ephemeris are due to my having made mistakes somewhere, so use it at your own discretion - and if anyone finds any mistakes, please let me know and I will see what I can do to fix it.

My interest here is in the complex motion of the Solar System Barycentre (SSB), which shows some remarkable periodicities on various timescales, including ~179 years. To illustrate, here is some graphs of the SSB plotted once a year for the full 6000 year span of the ephemeris showing what appears to be various periodicities in the envelope patterns:





This graph shows the SSB ecliptic plane Angular Momentum (AM) plotted once a month from 1620 to 2180 aligned as 3 overlapping segments to show the 179y cycle most easily discerned from spikes where AM briefly falls through zero identified by the red arrows:


Note both the similarity of the 3 aligned cycle curves and the subtle differences between each of them showing slow phase evolution over much longer periods.

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Carl Smith
The land of Oz

Warren: I discussed this earth Venus syzygy here. My Venus empirical Pythagorean pentagram diagram is here. It is off-topic, but I am really surprised that you claim this cycle was unknown until the 1960s as it underpinned ancient observation of the Lucifer cycle of exactly five appearances every eight years for the Morning Star. I would be interested in information, as mentioned by RTomes, on the Venus-Earth-Jupiter syzygy. This site says these syzygies occur in bursts, separated each by 594 days. However, I can't see how it might affect the SSB claims in this thread as Earth and Venus have only tiny effect on the SSB-POS radius.