{"id":2016,"date":"2013-01-22T20:27:53","date_gmt":"2013-01-23T01:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/?p=2016"},"modified":"2013-01-22T20:27:53","modified_gmt":"2013-01-23T01:27:53","slug":"vortex-garbage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/22\/vortex-garbage\/","title":{"rendered":"Vortex Garbage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> A reader who saw my earlier post on the <a href=\"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2012\/06\/03\/numeric-pareidolia-and-vortex-math\/\">Vortex math talk<\/a> at a TEDx conference sent me a link to an absolutely dreadful video that features some more crackpottery about the magic of vortices.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The helical model - our solar system is a vortex\" width=\"625\" height=\"352\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0jHsq36_NTU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p> It says:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The old heliocentric model of our solar system,<br \/>\nplanets rotating around the sun, is not only boring,<br \/>\nbut also incorrect.<\/p>\n<p> Our solar system moves through space at 70,000km\/hr.<br \/>\nNow picture this instead: <\/p>\n<p> <em>(Image of the sun with a rocket\/comet trail propelling<br \/>\nit through space, with the planets swirling around it.)<\/em>\n<\/p>\n<p> The sun is like a comet, dragging the planets in its wake.<br \/>\nCan you say &#8220;vortex&#8221;?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p> The science of this is terrible. The sun is not a rocket. It does not propel itself through space.  It does not have a tail.  It does not leave a significant &#8220;wake&#8221;. (There is interstellar material, and the sun moving through it does perturb it, but it&#8217;s not a wake: the interstellar material <em>is orbiting the galactic center just like the sun<\/em>. Gravitational effects do cause pertubations, but it&#8217;s not like a boat moving through still water, producing a wake.) Even if you stretch the definition of &#8220;wake&#8221;, the sun certainly does not leave a wake large enough to &#8220;drag&#8221; the planets. In fact, if you actually look at the solar system, the plane the ecliptic &#8211; the plane where the planets orbit the sun &#8211; is at a roughly 60 degree angle to the galactic ecliptic. If planetary orbits were a drag effect, then you would expect the orbits to be perpendicular to the galactic ecliptic. But they aren&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p> If you look at it mathematically, it&#8217;s even worse. The video claims to be  making a distinction between the &#8220;old heliocentric&#8221; model of the solar system, and their new &#8220;vortex&#8221; model. But in fact, mathematically, <em>they&#8217;re exactly the same thing<\/em>. Look at it from a heliocentric point of view, and you&#8217;ve got the heliocentric model. Look at the <em>exact same system<\/em> from point that&#8217;s not moving relative to galactic center, and you get the vortex. They&#8217;re the same thing. The only difference is how you look at it.<\/p>\n<p> And that&#8217;s just the start of the rubbish. Once they get past their description of their &#8220;vortex&#8221; model, they go right into the woo. Vortex is life! Vortex is sprirituality! Oy.<\/p>\n<p> If you follow their link to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.djsadhu.com\/the-helical-model-vortex-solar-system-animation\/\">their website<\/a>, it gets even sillier, and you can start to see just how utterly clueless the author of this actually is:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>(In reference to a NASA image showing the interstellar &#8220;wind&#8221; and the heliopause)<\/em><\/p>\n<p> Think about this for a minute. In this diagram it seems the Solar System travel to the left. When the Earth is also traveling to the left (for half a year) it must go faster than the Sun. Then in the second half of the year, it travels in a \u201crelative opposite direction\u201d so it must go slower than the Sun. Then, after completing one orbit, it must increase speed to overtake the Sun in half a year. And this would go for all the planets. Just like any point you draw on a frisbee will not have a constant speed, neither will any planet.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p> See, it&#8217;s a problem that the planets aren&#8217;t moving at a constant speed. They speed up and slow down! Oh, the horror! The explanation is that they&#8217;re caught by the sun&#8217;s wake! So they speed up when they get dragged, until they pass the sun (how does being dragged by the sun ever make them faster than the sun? Who knows!), and then they&#8217;re not being dragged anymore, so they slow down.<\/p>\n<p> This is ignorance of physics and of the entire concept of frame of reference and symmetry that is absolutely epic.<\/p>\n<p> There&#8217;s quite a bit more nonsense, but that&#8217;s all I can stomach this evening. Feel free to point out more in the comments!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A reader who saw my earlier post on the Vortex math talk at a TEDx conference sent me a link to an absolutely dreadful video that features some more crackpottery about the magic of vortices. It says: The old heliocentric model of our solar system, planets rotating around the sun, is not only boring, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-physics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-ww","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}