Scientific errors in the Bible

I'm new here - so Hi! I have been an amateur astronomer for years, and have read a lot on history of astronomy, though in a piecemeal fashion. The big proofs for a heliocentric solar system were all worked out well before 1900 - annual parallax of stars, aberration of starlight, the excellent fit of observed planetary orbits to simple elliptical orbits around the sun (instead of several nested epicycles if you're geocentric.) But a pretty good clincher is: how many space probes have been sent outside the Moon-Earth system now? A hundred? 150? A lot, anyway, and with perfectly astonishing accuracy, like close enough to orbit a twenty-mile asteroid for months, 100 million miles from here. Can you really imagine that this could have been accomplished with the wrong model for how things orbit each other?

The earth-sun system can be said to orbit around its barycenter, a point nearly at the middle of the sun:
http://spaceplace.jpl.nasa.gov/barycntr.htm
The sun is about 330,000 times the mass of the earth, so it's a pretty fair bowling ball to the ping-pong ball that's us. Mr Fortenberry, try Stellar Distances - Parallax to see your first evidence that the geocentric model is false.

Ooh! Ooh! I've figured out how to make parallax work in a geogentric system! The sun orbits the Earth, once per year. All the stars (at least those within a few hundred light years of us) then just have to describe little circles the size of the Sun's orbit around some nondescript point in space!
Do you folks think this is ad hoc enough to make it onto one of the really good YEC sites, like Walt Brown's?

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Please provide an explanation for the eliptical orbits of the planets.

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Oh please... Kepler and Newton put this in bed about three centuries ago! That's how everything orbits!

Has this factoid from the Bible come up yet?
Leviticus chapters 13 and 14 go into considerable detail on the detection and cure of leprosy. Lev 13:49 and 14:37, in particular, describe cloth and houses that "have the plague:" it causes a reddish or greenish color in the fabric or the plaster. Has Mycobacterium leprae ever been grown in culture, on cloth, plaster, or even agar-agar, and shown to cause "hollow strakes, greenish or reddish?" And has sprinkling of bird blood in an earthern vessel over running water been subjected to double-blind studies for treatment of leprosy?

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Could you please provide an explanation for the elliptical orbits of the planets?

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As has been said two or three times now, an elliptical orbit is what you would expect. Gravity works in such a way (inverse square law, and all that Newton stuff) that ALL orbits are conic sections: circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola. These differ mathematically only in their eccentricity: exactly zero, between zero and one, exactly one, and greater than one, respectively. I would venture to say that a true, really, honest-injun circular or parabolic orbit has yet to be found in all the universe: when orbital mechanics will allow any value, why stick with 0.000000000000000000000000? And the earth's eccentricity varies quite noticeably over time, anyway: this year it goes from 0.016725 to 0.016715 before August even gets here!
If you vary "exactly zero" at all, it ain't a circle any longer. An orbit that was truly circular would be a temporary freak occurence.[This message has been edited by Coragyps, 01-05-2003]

Their eccentricities as of 2003.0, or of some other epoch? They change continuously, you know. And what difference does it make exactly what Uranus's orbital eccentricity is anyway??

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don't stoop so low as to think that you have the right to act like you know what the bible means.

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Hi, Laboo! Is that really what you meant to say? Who's supposed to interpret what it does mean for us, if not us ourselves?

For w fortenberry, from Roy Bishop's article on "Orbital Motion" in the Observer's Handbook 2003 of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada:
"According to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, gravitation is not a mysterious force that one mass exerts upon a distant mass; gravitation is the geometry (non-Euclidean) of the 4-dimensional spacetime within which we and the stars exist. Golf balls (if air friction is ignored), satellites, planets, and stars follow geodesics, the straightest possible, force-free paths through a spacetime whose geometry is shaped by mass-energy. The difficulty in intellectually grasping a non-Euclidean spacetime originates with us. Common sense is inadequate. This is not surprising, given that our common sense is based on the Euclidean, 3-dimensional geometry of straight lines, rectangles, and spheres we learned in the crib by age 2."

Errrm...Annual parallax? Aberration of starlight? We've only known about these since the 1830's though....

Agreed. We could be in a geocentric universe, but I would prefer that Geodesic work out the math to explain the simultaneous parallactic motion of the tens of thousands of stars from the Hipparcos database in one.

But geocentrism isn't a reasonable or rational view of reality, just an attempt to "save the phenomenon." The Sun has about 330,000 times the mass of the Earth. Newton's laws of gravity and Kepler's of orbital motion are very good approximations to how masses interact, and much better approximations are available if you want them. Suit yourself, Geodesic, as to which mathematical treatment you like, but I don't think the Voyager probes could have made their grand tours under a geocentric model using 1970's computers.
And let's not even start on the relative masses of the Sun and the Milky Way's central concentration of mass, or that mass relative to the Virgo Supercluster, or Virgo relative to the Great Attractor...

As I said before, Geodesic, suit yourself. But I would still like to see the mathematical model that accounts for annual parallax for all stars for which it has been measured in a geocentric universe. And after you produce that, how about a physical mechanism to make them all wobble like that?[This message has been edited by Coragyps, 08-03-2003]