Fifty years ago, Immanuel Velikovsky compiled accounts from many ancient nations that described Venus as a torch-star, a smoking star, a bearded star and having long hair (Greek coma). He claimed that ancient accounts showed that Venus passed close to Earth 3,400 years ago causing catastrophes. Velikovsky’s friend and fellow professor, Albert Einstein, argued that since scientists accurately calculate planetary positions with gravity and inertia, planets cannot radically change position. In this essay, I provide Velikovsky a gravitational reason for accelerating orbits.


More than a century ago, several mathematicians (such as Pierre Laplace) calculated what would happen if gravity did not travel at infinite speed (as in Newton’s formulas). They concluded that it would continuously accelerate all the planets away from the Sun. The effect of a finite speed of gravity would result in a small angular offset behind the instantaneous position of the Sun. This would pull on a planet’s trailing hemisphere more than the leading side causing orbits to gradually open outward.


In 2002 Kopkeikin and Fomalont tested gravity’s speed when the radio quasar QSO J0842+1835 passed within 4' of Jupiter. They used the deflection in the radio signals (in the direction of Jupiter’s motion) detected by radio antennas thousands of kilometers apart to calculate the speed of the gravitational phenomena. They claim that gravity propagates at the speed of light, plus or minus 20 percent. Kopkeikin’s experiment does not require us to know the cause of the gravitational phenomena - only that it propagates at finite speed.


For generations, children played with rolling hoops. With gentle taps of a stick on the back side of the hoop, a child can steer and accelerate it. In the same manner, the effects of a gravitational imbalance on the rotating Earth would accelerate equally both years and days, our orbit and rotation. This propagation delay would not appreciably affect the ratio between days and years even as both kept getting shorter relative to former days (rotations) and years (orbits). As I mentioned in Part 2 of this series, early people looked back on the days of their ancestors as the great time. Jacob typified the thinking of his generation when he stated that his days and years were shorter and worse than those of his fathers.


A finite velocity for the Sun’s gravitational effect would accelerate the outer planets more than the inner ones, since the angular offset would increase with distance. In the eighteenth century, astronomers noticed a logarithmic spacing between sequential planets Mercury to Uranus - except for a missing planet between Mars and Jupiter. Thinking that the sequence could not be random, astronomers began looking for the missing planet. Beginning in 1801, they found thousands of shattered planet pieces orbiting in the same direction and clustered around where the sequence predicted a planet.


We also find progressively increasing distances between the large moons of Uranus and Jupiter, although each orbiting system has a unique geometrical progression. Over the last few years, astronomers have monitored the minute variations in the spectra of nearby star systems and discovered planets seemingly orbiting some stars. The nearby star HD 10180 seems to have at least five planets. The calculated planet distances from this star also follows a logarithmic spacing. The spiral arms in countless galaxies spiral out with logarithmically increasing distances from the core of each galaxy. Spiral structures are found in growing sheep horns, growing snail shells, growing cauliflowers and the spiral shapes of storms and whirlpools. In the latter two cases, the acceleration is inwards. Evidently the direction of an acceleration is not important to produce a spiral shape. In the case of galaxies, we observe the visible history of the universe and the stars clearly accelerated outwards, not inwards.


Logarithmic spirals are also known as equiangular or growth spirals. They are commonly found where things change incrementally and continually. Logarithmic distances between planet orbits suggest accelerations continually affected the solar system. What could cause this? Velikovsky, had he considered the propagation delay of gravity, might have been able to explain the reason to his friend Einstein. He could have said, Einstein - you are partly right! Gravity does not propagate at infinite speed and that is why people a few thousand years ago experienced close planet passages and the shattering of a planet - the whole solar system was smaller then.


In the next essay in this series I will propose a simple cause for the gravitational phenomena using visible evidence from clocks and orbits.

Credit for the graphic of Ceres’s orbit goes to user Orionist from Wikipemedia Commons. It is based on data from JPL and NASA and was released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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This document is under a Creative Commons License by Victor McAllister. What does that mean?
Last modified Septemeber 7, 2011