Please see attached schematic diagram of some main features of the 179 year cycle of the solar system barycentre. Noting that the 179 year period contains nine Jupiter-Saturn cycles and five Saturn-Neptune cycles, I have presented these as a nine point star and a five point star respectively.

The point of this diagram is to illustrate a major structural framework for the temporality of the solar system. In relation to earth, it is noteworthy that this pattern repeats every 178.9 years with strong regularity, so this picture is in a sense eternal. As previously noted, twelve of these patterns produce a cosmic age. The Saturn-Neptune cycle is like the 'cosmic second', considering the 2147 year long age as a minute.

The whole diagram is not fixed against the stars, but follows the SSB wavelength which moves 1/12 of the zodiac per cycle. To illustrate this movement, Neptune orbit is 164.8 years; 178.9/164.8=1.086; 0.086~=1/12 (>0.0833), so Neptune advances by just over one zodiacal sign between its periodic 179 year conjunctions with Jupiter and Saturn, starting each period in a new sign and covering all signs each age.

On the fortieth anniversary of the Paris Uprising of May 1968, it is interesting to pick a cherry regarding the SSB. Starting a 178.9 year cycle at 0, there are ten such cycles in 1789 years. Looking at the storming of the Bastille as a turning point, it is interesting that the Sorbonne events happened 178.9 years later. 1610, 179 years before, happens to be when Galileo found the moons of Jupiter. This cycle shows these times happened when Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and nearly Uranus were in the same relative positions.

Attached Images

SSB JSN Schematic.GIF (48.5 KB, 11 views)

This entire dataset seems to be cherry picking... Why not something that includes a revolt instead of Galileo finding moons around Jupiter? How about tying in the rise and fall of the Roman Empire or the Greeks or even Galileo's first use of a telescope? Also, hasn't it been 40 years not 20 years since 1968?

Edit: I guess what I'm saying is the Paris uprising, storming of the Bastille and the Sorbonne events are all type of physical upheavals but the finding of the moons by Galileo is not. It just appears to tie the Jupiter/Saturn/Neptune (maybe Uranus) cycles into the hodge-podge of data.

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Yes, as I said, these historic events are just cherry-picked because they are 179 years apart. However, they illustrate how we can use the SSB as a timeline. Setting out detailed events on a timeline would illustrate those which occurred at the same relative point, and enable analysis of order within the hodge-podge. The SSB structure illustrated on my attached picture presents a major solar system cycle, permanently valid with ongoing slow phase change. It is interesting to consider how this periodic rhythm may relate to events on earth, and in relation to the longer age cycle I discussed at Astronomical History . The picture I presented occurs precisely twelve times in each age and 144 times in each great year.
Regarding Galileo and the French Revolution, the connection I would draw is that both were the signal for massive upheaval in cultural directions. Galileo exploded the idea of perfect heavenly spheres and the Jacobins exploded the idea of divine right of kings. Similarly, May 68 envisaged an equivalent scale of change in human consciousness. I am just hanging these events as pegs which may be considered as initial events in successive defined geocosmic periods, as a starting point for a cosmic theory of history, using the 179 year SSB cycle as a framework.

A pretty picture such as yours does nothing to resolve my misgivings about your line of thought. All you are showing is a pattern of motion of the Sun and planets whose period is approximately 1/144 of our best estimate of the precession period. I would wish to see an analysis of many such precessional cycles to see whether or not that ratio might converge on exactly 1/144, or at least librate around it. Since we have no useful observations over more than a small fraction of one precession cycle, we are stuck. In a nutshell, still no compelling reason to suspect any sort of resonant dynamic causality.

The diagram is not just a pretty picture; it is an empirical model of a core structure of time for the solar system. My understanding is that there is unlikely to be significant error in these numbers, as they are based on scientific measurement of the stable periodic orbits of the gas giants. This diagram helps to explain the SSB pulse rate diagram over 1100 years from 2100BC to 1000BC, as over this period the 178.9 year period depicted in the Sun Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune model recurs six times sequentially and about 50 times in overlap. The JSN cycle, the main component of the temporal structure, shifts by about 0.2 years per cycle, or 0.4 degrees.

You suggest the uncertain variability of the precessional speed means this finding of a permanent stable SSB cycle gives no reason to suspect resonant dynamic causality. After looking further into this it appears you are right. To investigate this I have been researching reference material on precessional speed, starting with the Wikipedia page of calculated precession values . This also links to an article on variability of the precessional period with a graph of 13 models of the precession period over 65,000 years. Although the site is astrological, the science of this article looks accurate. This graph shows that by all models the rate of precession is speeding up and the length of the great year is shortening by about 11 years per century. The general precession value was about 4980 arcseconds per century at the time of Christ, compared to the current value of 5029.3 arc seconds. In Great Years, these figures indicate a speeding up over 2000 years from 26024 years in year 0 to 25769 years in 2008.

Translated to the SSB equivalent 179 year period through division by 144, this data shows the precession has speeded up from 179.35 years in year 1500 to 178.95 years 2000. Unfortunately for my theory, this trend is in the opposite direction of the SSB data which showed slowing down from 178.83 to 179.2 years over the same period. However, this absence of immediate resonant dynamic causality does not rule out a resonant relationship entirely. The Wikipedia source above states that “Over longer time periods, that is, millions of years, it appears that precession is quasiperiodic at around 25,700 years; however, it will not remain so. According to Ward, when, in about 1,500 million years, the distance of the Moon, which is continuously increasing from tidal effects, has increased from the current 60.3 to approximately 66.5 Earth radii, resonances from planetary effects will push precession to 49,000 years at first, and then, when the Moon reaches 68 Earth radii in about 2,000 million years, to 69,000 years.”

Given the stability of planetary orbits, it seems the SSB is also periodic around 25,700/144. This relation with precession may be coincidental rather than causal, but the fact remains that two constant weak factors in our environment are in close harmonic relation to each other. There seems to be less science here than I had hoped, but it remains valid to describe the SSB cycle as the house of the age, presenting an empirical cycle dividing the great year.

It is a variation on the polar coordinate theme, illustrating one aspect of the pattern of motions of the Sun and the planets as a function of time.

What is "core structure of time"? Please try to give us a definition that might make sense to a physicist.
I never alleged errors in the orbital periods of the planets. Their momentum will keep them in this pattern for a very long time, subject only to relatively minor and predictable variations due to their mutual gravitational perturbations.You appear to be conceding that there is significant uncertainty in attempting to predict the precessional motion over an entire Great Year, not to mention many of them, with any accuracy.If I am not mistaken, these very long range predictions of trends in the precession rate are the result of computer simulations of the gravitational dynamics that change as the Moon is pushed away by tidal effects. These local changes will have no significant gravitational effect on the motions of the giant planets. By acknowledging them you must be conceding that the current roughly 1/144 ratio is a transient phenomenon. I find that particular number no more remarkable than the fact that the Sun and the Moon have nearly the same angular diameter as seen by our eyes during the present era.

The future resonances to which Ward refers may be long period gravitational pulses that are not apparent from empirical studies over a few centuries, but predictable by means of supercomputer analysis of the gravitational dynamics. My educated guess is that they involve long period variations in the shapes of the planets' orbits as a result of their mutual perturbations. If such a pulse coincides with the frequency of the precession, or a small multiple thereof, it could build up a sizeable disturbance even if its magnitude is slight. This may be analogous to what Jupiter would do to a spacecraft if we were to place it in one of the Kirkwood gaps in the main asteroid belt.My bold. Once again, just numbers, with no compelling evidence of a harmonic in any dynamic sense. Such rhetoric suggests the ancient Pythagorean school of thought, which presumed fundamental importance of numbers in ways which physicists conclude to be unrealistic.Such jargon suggests warmed-over astrology.

To answer this question it is necessary to conceptualise a wholistic framework for the solar system, looking at the system as an organic unity through time. The question then is what are the major regular periodic structures characterizing this system? The behaviour of the centre of mass is an excellent candidate for a measure that will exhibit an integrated unity of the system. Looking at the COM, the 179 year periodicity leaps out as the defining pulse. Carl Smith’s diagram is very similar to an electro cardiogram for the sun, showing pulses at 19.8 and, more precisely, 179 years. In describing this as a core structure of time, I am pushing against the mainstream in two ways, by suggesting our planetary perspective is privileged (ie that the temporal structure of our solar system is core) and by arguing for a wholistic vision of the solar system as a fundamental ontology.
This raises the questions of how transient is the correlation, and how significant is the uncertainty. My prediction, which requires further research to corroborate or falsify, hopefully with readily available data, is that the 1/144 ratio is a long term average, at least for hundreds of thousands and possibly for millions of years. The errors I noted suggest this ratio has had short term variation of up to 0.6% over the last 500 years, but the trend in the 6000 year data has error of much less magnitude. In cosmic terms a thousand years may be the blink of an eye, but it is a long time in human terms, so the 1/12 relation between the SSB and the age has existed quite precisely for all human history. Libration may well be a good model to understand the relation between these two long standing stable rhythmic structures.

Re your comparison with the sun-moon apparent size, any significance for this COM-precession link depends on the speculative claim that the age is a real historical cycle. This is a claim I have previously argued at some length, and which I would say has the scientific status of ‘possible’ rather than ‘persuasive’. Here is a further argument for it. We know that >80% of human DNA is so-called junk. Could it be, given that much of this junk DNA is billions of years old, that apparently useless genes are currently dormant and will become active according to cosmic cycles? Looking at the 25700 year precessional period as entrained to the solar pulse of the COM, could it be possible that genes are adapted to flourish just in one part of this cycle and remain dormant for the rest?
This is a really interesting comment. It gets back to the observation that small harmonic effects can build up strongly when repeated continually over long periods. My claim is that the main significant resonance of these harmonic systems is in the deep ecological cycles of the earth.I agree that much Pythagorean lore is obsolete, but themes such as the Fibonacci number and the number phi indicate areas in which number theory and harmonic cycles are more important, with numbers imbedded in chaotic systems. Regarding harmonic cycles, I see the SSB-precession relation as a possible example of entrainment, but the significant resonance as located in the chaotic systems which have evolved within both of them – the ecological cycles of the earth.

You know Robert, you might actually be on to something here, if you can think of a causal story somehow. How is the 179 day "orbit" of the Solar System's barycenter (SSB) causally tied the precession of the Earth's axis. In other words, something has to be able to exert a torque that can cause the precession to speed up or slow down, and hence control, within limits, the overall rate of precession.

The only planet with that kind of power is Venus. Remember, the Earth might control the rate of rotation of Venus, and so Venus might have a reciprocal effect on the Earth. But the Earth spins much too fast for Earth to turn it's heavier side to Venus every inferior conjunction, as Venus does to the Earth. But still, because of the tilt of the Earth, if the conjunction occurs in when it's summer in the northern hemisphere, Venus will exert a larger force on the northern hemisphere than on southern hemisphere, and vice versa when it's summer down under.

But the hemispheres are not the same: the northern hemisphere is dominated by the Eurasian continental land mass, whereas its antipode, the vast basaltic expanse of the South Pacific. That is, one hemisphere or the other must be "heavier" with respect to Venus (this could probably be cashed out in terms of one of those J_n gravitational moments). Which one I can't say. You'd think maybe the mountainous side would be heavier, but then again, continents float on the basaltic mantle stuff, but there's probably a correct answer.

So somehow the 179 cycle would have to tie into the pentagrammatic resonance between Earth and Venus.

BTW since you read the Bible, you must know what happened to Nimrod, the astrologer.

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It isn't. 99 percent of it is due to the Moon and the Sun, roughly 60 percent of that due to the Moon, 40 percent to the Sun.
Since Venus orbits the Sun, its average inverse distance cubed is comparable to the Sun's, but its mass is about 3 millionths of the Sun's, so the effect is too small to detect.
I can. It is the J₃ moment, which has a value of 0.254x10^-6, compared with 1.1x10^-3 for J₂.

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OK, so there's at least 1% you can't account for; 1% might be enough if the balance of forces happens to be about right.

Venus is only relevant during inferior conjunctions, when it is only 0.3 AU from the Earth. Also there's the rotational resonance between Earth and Venus; but I take it you are probably skeptical in that regard; if so, check out the paper by Zhang & Shen (1987, 328) who say that the retrograde trade winds on Venus exert enough torque on Venus to allow libration around the ideal resonance. Therefore, since Earth can cause effects on Venus, it's not unreasonable to suppose that Venus might cause some effects on Earth.

Could we persuade you to explain to us in laymen's terms terms the significance of J₃ versus J₂ and how they relate to the north versus the south hemispheres?

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin

What is "organic" about this collection of moving objects?
What do you mean by "integrated unity of the system"? Why is this particular quasiperiodic component fundamentally important?

It appears to me that you used "core structure of time" when you meant the structure of a pattern of motion as a function of time, in which time is an independent one-dimensional variable with nothing that I would call "structure". A contrived phrase such as that may look impressive to someone without much of a background in mathematics and science, but it really does not say much of anything.
What does "privileged" mean? What does "temporal structure is core" mean? What does "fundamental ontology" mean?

I see nothing significant about the slight resemblance of Carl's graph to an electrocardiogram. The mention of the latter is just one more piece of clutter, in my opinion.
You can say "quite precisely" until the cows come home, and it will not change my opinion, which is that we have only an approximation.

Anyone can cherry-pick a period of time during which the cycles appears to be almost exactly synchronized, but we still have no means of observing it over even a whole processional cycle, not to mention many of them. We do know that over the very long term the precession rate will change as the Moon is forced outward by tidal interaction, while the motions of the planets will be unaffected by that action. Thus my opinion that any 1/144 ratio is transient in the long run.
That is a digression to the topic of a prior ATM thread that has timed out. Let's stay on the topic of the planetary motions at hand.
Again, please quit digressing to ecology on Planet Earth. The topic at hand is analysis of the motions of the planets, and possible relations among them.

Your mention of Fibonacci numbers and phi may look impressive to a casual reader, but you did not show any application to the topic at hand. Once more, a distracting digression.

Nimrod is the great hunter, Israeli hero, grandson of Noah, great^7 grandpa of Abraham and legendary builder of the tower of Babel. Nimrod fell into the bad books because of the view he was idolatrous, earning the ire of the Hebrew prophets and judges who disliked fatalism and divination because they believed they distracted from the grandeur of creation. Please rest assured, I am in no way seeking to distract from the astronomical grandeur of creation, nor am I suggesting any form of idolatry. The planets are just part of the same isolated physical system as us, so it is scientifically legitimate to investigate ways we may possibly be connected with them, with the SSB cycle a very interesting candidate.

I like your comment on torque, but this is a topic where my scientific understanding is sketchy. Is it possible that the combined torque of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, the planets forming the 179 year (not day!) SSB cycle, are responsible for entraining the period of the precession within defined limits? Could this operate in the same way the shepherd moons entrain rings of Saturn? The F ring is basically held in place by the gravity of Saturn, but is sculpted by the shepherds Prometheus and Pandora. Perhaps the JSN cycle has a similar shepherd sculpting function for the lunisolar precession of the earth? I don’t see the possible relevance of Venus here.

Earth-Venus: 112 cycles = 179.045 years: (179.045-(GY/144))/(GY/144) = 0.0697%

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