Orbital Resonance
In the chapter on Catastrophism I talked about some basic principles of Orbital Resonance and how it stabilized our solar system from the Catastrophic era. But I realize many will question this, since this entire subject is generally ignored in government schools. So for those who want to pursue it, here is a brief primer on Celestial Mechanics including the Principles of Orbital Resonance. People tend to think of the movements of planetary bodies similar to the game we played as children, using a rubber ball connected to a long rubber band on a wooden paddle. By swinging it around, you could get the ball to circle your head just like the earth circles the sun - the faster you spun, the more the rubber band stretched, the tighter it got, and the farther out was the ball. Unfortunately, this comparison to celestial mechanics is very poor. In reality, the farther a planet is from the sun, the slower it must go and the weaker is the force attracting it to the sun. So let’s start from scratch.
I must start by defining resonance. In general, it is the interaction between cyclic phenomena at a frequency for which any interference is constructive rather than destructive. It is also the frequency at which an object will vibrate when it is excited (such as by tapping). Pluck a violin string, and it will vibrate at its resonant frequency. When you shorten it with your finger, its resonant frequency is higher. The violin is made to vibrate sympathetically with the sound of the vibrating strings, thus ‘resonating’ with the strings and producing a far richer sound than the strings alone. Theoretically, everything has its own inherent resonant frequency. Tap a glass - the ring you hear is its resonant frequency. If you could continue tapping at precisely that frequency, you would break the glass, as the energy of each tap would add to the intensity of the vibration. That is an example of “constructive interference.”
Now, back to the solar system. You all know about gravity, by which any massive body has an attraction for nearby objects which varies as the inverse square of the distance between the objects. This is a very weak force. It only becomes significant when at least one of the bodies is very massive. (Two people have very little gravitational attraction for each other, but each does have a significant attraction to the earth due to its huge mass.) The sun has an immense mass. Most people think of all the planetary movements as simply the effect of the gravitational attraction of the sun. In most people’s thinking, an orbit is stable when the gravitational force pulling toward the sun equals the centrifugal force away from the sun caused by the planet’s speed. They think that there are no other forces involved, or if there are, they are insignificant. Thus they believe that for any given orbital speed and mass, there is a stable orbital distance. However, there are other forces that complicate the issue.
The sun also has an electrostatic charge, as does each planetary body. Electrostatic attraction (called a coulomb interaction) is stronger than gravitational force, and in fact it has had a more significant part to play in the solar system than most people think. Many scientists believe that planetary bodies are electrically neutral, though they are not. But it is not possible to identify the forces of gravity separate from the coulomb forces without knowing the mass of each object. Coulomb forces behave just like gravitational forces, varying by the inverse square of the distance. So if we assume the coulomb force to be zero we can calculate a mass based on observed ‘gravitational’ attraction and everyone is happy. But in fact, everyone is wrong. The coulomb interaction between planetary bodies at this point in history is small – most of the charge has leaked off and there has been little recharging now that we have a benign system – so our mass calculations are close. But at creation and during the catastrophic era the coulomb interactions between planets were huge. Legends of many cultures record bolts of lightning from the planets, especially Jupiter and Mars.
A third force involved is solar wind, which puts a small but constant force on every planet, directly away from the sun. It also imposes a slight drag on each planet, slowing it down. Yes, you heard right, everything is slowing down and wearing out, just as the 2nd law of Thermodynamics promises it would. Forces of gravity also are slowly decaying, due to the loss of mass of the sun as its fuel is burned.
Space plasma, ether, is spread unevenly throughout the solar system. Again, this imposes a slight drag on planetary motion. It is conductive, draining the electrostatic charges on planetary bodies, and resulting in lightning bolts if the charge gets too high.
One final force that few consider today is due to the interaction of a planet’s magnetic field with the magnetosphere of the sun, which extends out past all the planets (at least it did - it’s been shrinking). This “generating effect” tends to add to a planet’s electrostatic charge. As expected, it comes with a cost – again, it puts a drag on each planet. This drag was significant in the past when planetary magnetic fields were much higher. It was a major factor in orbital decay during the catastrophic era. With each close pass of Mars, Earth’s magnetic field was recharged up to about 30,000 gauss at the equator. But with no recharging it exponentially decayed, and is now down to about half a gauss.
If the God-hating ‘scientists’ actually understood and calculated the decay of all these forces, they would know that the billions of years of planetary stability required for their evolutionary hypothesis are laughably impossible. At our current rate of decay, the system could not have been stable for more than a few tens of thousands of years, and even that is only due to the amazing ‘coincidence’ that some of these decay effects cancel.
These various decays do not precisely cancel, but remarkably enough, for the past 3500 years they have come close, thankfully for our survival on earth. The slight slowing of our orbital speed has roughly matched decreases in gravitation, coulomb interaction, magnetic fields, and solar heat, thus keeping our earth at the precise distance from Sol necessary for life. This is not a ‘lucky chance.’ If you were to compute the probabilities of the earth achieving and remaining in an orbit so precisely balanced for our comfort over all these years, it would prove many orders of magnitude beyond the realm of ‘luck’ or ‘chance.’ This is a ‘God thing.’ If our orbital decay had not been matched by an equivalent decrease in solar heat, magnetic fields, and gravitation/electrostatic attraction, we would have already fried and spiraled into the sun.
God did not create it this way. In the beginning it was all ‘very good.’ The strong coulomb interaction was the primary force holding the system together. The solar winds were balanced between the blue-hot Nyx and the cooler but far more massive yellow-hot Sol, and thus cancelled. There was no space plasma and thus no leakage of the electrostatic charges between the two suns and the earth. Space was a perfect vacuum, a perfect insulator; there was no space dust or debris. Though Sol’s magnetic field was huge, Earth was much farther away and its magnetic field had never been charged by a passing planet, so generating effects were nil. Thus there was no drag; no orbital decay. It was perfect, and could have remained stable for millions of years.
But at the Fall, roughly ten thousand years ago, Nyx went nova. The explosion filled ‘inner space’ with what we call space plasma, or ether, which is slightly conductive. It also filled it with space debris and many billions of planetary bodies, mostly small such as meteoroids, asteroids, and moons. They were all on elliptical orbits, mostly unstable and many threatening Earth. This appendix is my attempt to explain how that catastrophic system has changed to the benign system we now enjoy.
First consider any large body on a catastrophic orbit. As it passes any other large body, there are gravitational stresses which cause earthquakes and rearrange the landscape, with significant heating effects. Eventually these heating effects cause even a frozen planet to become molten so that it forms into a smooth ball. There are also electrostatic and magnetic charging effects, adding to the heating.
Second consider bands or spheres of influence of a large body; all 3 forces (gravitational, electrostatic, and magnetic) can attract smaller bodies to become moons or into collision, effectually clearing out a wide swath of space on either side of a planetary orbit; the more massive the planet, the wider the clear swath. The four gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) together have over 60 moons, and have cleared most of the debris from the breakup of Nyx out of our outer solar system.
Water vapor was a major component released from Nyx. In space, it formed ice moons. During the gravitational stresses of a close planetary pass, the ice shatters, resulting in rings around the major planets. We now know that all of the larger planets have numerous ice rings, which form discrete bands, sometimes with intricate woven or radial banded structure. These beautiful rings are perfect examples of orbital resonance. They cannot re-form into ice moons because there is no magnetic or gravitational attraction. The slight static charge on each crystal causes it to repel every other crystal.
Third consider any body outside of the plane of the ecliptic. It is inherently unstable. Whenever it is above the plane of the ecliptic, all the bodies below it will exert a continual downward pull. Whenever it is below, they will exert a continual upward pull. The net result will be that all planetary bodies will slowly move toward the plane of the ecliptic.
The only possible exception would be a system which started with only one body, which evenly exploded planets into space such that there was no imbalance – no ecliptic plane to begin with. It is barely conceivable that such a system could be stable. But we know that our system started with at least three bodies, earth and two suns (‘luminaries’ in Scripture). Therefore if one body explodes, the other two form the beginnings of an ecliptic plane, to which all fragments of the exploded body must eventually conform. The fact that we have several major planets (as well as numerous asteroids and comets) still outside our ecliptic plane (Venus – 3.4°; Mercury – 7°; Saturn – 2.5°; Pluto – 17°) says that our present system cannot be millions of years old. Distant Pluto’s orbit is so slow (248 years) it simply hasn’t yet had time to conform to the ecliptic plane. Mercury hasn’t either, since it was pulled away from Venus into a very excentric solar orbit in 701 BC.
Fourth consider a planetary body in an elliptical orbit. The solar wind pushes all bodies away from Sol. But the push is greater the closer to Sol a body gets. This tends to round out highly elliptical orbits, as with all planets today except Mercury and Pluto.
Fifth consider the principle of orbital resonance. This is best understood by example. One example is the discrete banding of the electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom. Electron orbits, called shells, only exist in certain places, resulting in a specific element for each electron configuration. Another example is my illustration of tapping the glass to find its resonant frequency. Sing that frequency. If you are Mario Lanza, you can break the glass just by singing. Well, the universe is also in vibration, like a song! Another illustration is the quartz crystal watch. It keeps good time because the crystal vibrates precisely at its resonant frequency, which for quartz is very stable and predictable. It is easy to see (or hear) resonance at work for high frequencies; it is much more difficult to comprehend it at the ultra-low frequencies of planetary orbits.
One good example of low frequency resonance is ‘Galloping Gertie,’ the old suspension bridge across the Tacoma Narrows in Washington State. It was well known for its distressing tendency to oscillate at its characteristic resonant frequency of about 2 seconds when even a modest wind blew across it. It was just a big violin string. A 42 mph wind brought it down in 1940.
But a planet has an orbital frequency on the order of years. Could it resonate? That is hard to see now, because the coulomb interaction is so weak (most of the static has dissipated), the magnetic fields are so weak (nothing is recharging them, either), and the gravity between planets is simply too slight to excite much resonance. The only planets still in resonance with each other are Neptune and Pluto (at 3:2). Also, Jupiter's huge gravitational field still holds its largest three moons and many asteroids in resonance. But during the catastrophic era, when the planets regularly passed close to each other recharging their magnetic and electrostatic fields to exceedingly high levels, orbital resonance was the norm rather than the exception.
To begin with, the breakup of Nyx threw out planetary bodies at random, and of course none were in resonant orbits; all were in unstable, decaying orbits. But as they decayed, they interacted with Earth, the only planet in a stable orbit, and tended to resonate with Earth. I believe Mars was the first to establish itself into a resonant orbit with Earth, with a precise three-to-one year frequency, crossing Earth’s orbit in two places. That eventually changed to a two-to-one resonance after the Flood, when Earth gained a precise 360 day year. By then, the orbits of the outer planets had all decayed to the point where they had also locked into resonance with each other in elliptical orbits.
Their orbital periods were: Earth 360 days, Mars 720 days (1:2), Jupiter 4320 days (1:12), Saturn 10,800 days (1:30), and Uranus 30,240 days (1:84), all based on an Earth day of about 25 of our hours. Neptune may have resonated with Earth at 60,480 days (1:168), but Pluto did not, though it did resonate with Neptune. Around 1451 BC Venus / Mercury also settled into resonance with Earth on a period of 225 days (8:5). This made the close passes and catastrophes of the planets very predictable, down to the day and hour.
This accomplished several things. First, the interaction between the planets was so strong that it basically locked them all together in their orbits. None could decay until the drag on the system exceeded the combined resonant forces of all the planets (or until a non-resonant body interfered). This system was thus perpetuated until 701 BC, when Venus / Mercury battled Mars during its flyby over Earth, and the resonant system unraveled.
The second thing it did was to perpetuate the catastrophic orbits. It was the close pass between planets that recharged their magnetic and electrostatic fields, keeping them tightly linked. Mars, for example, remained in close coupling with Earth in extremely precise orbits for about 4400 years.
The third thing it did, believe it or not, was to work to prevent collisions! Each close pass would tighten up the orbit‘s ellipse, overcoming the forces working to circularize the orbit. There is a rather intricate but very specific ’path of least resistance‘ which defines a resonant orbit for two interacting bodies. Each planetary flyby involved huge stresses, including not only gravitational and heating effects, but also electrostatic and magnetic attraction and repulsion effects which dramatically complicate that path. Consider the two extremes, using Mars and Earth as our examples. If Mars is too far from Earth (as it is now) all those forces are not strong enough to ’excite‘ any resonance. Earth has little effect on Mars, and each is left to find its own decaying orbit around Sol. In the other extreme, if Mars passes too close (assuming it survives as a planet) its orbit will be bent so badly that it will have to find a whole new orbit around Sol, perhaps to try again. In either case, its first pass on that particular orbit is its last!
But somewhere in between those two extremes there is an orbit where all those ’pushes and pulls‘ of all those monumental forces balance each other. It‘s a harmonic relationship, in which the planets are ’in tune‘ with each other. Once that orbit is found, nominal orbital distortions (such as those from other planets or from normal orbital decay) are corrected with each close pass, which basically ’kicks‘ the passing planet back into that precise ’path of least resistance.‘ Then after the first such orbit, unless there is some interference from outside the system, there is no chance of actual collision. Thus you can see how orbital resonance helped save our solar system from an early demise.
Patten’s estimate of the Mars pass on Joshua‘s long day is given on pg 134 of his book Catastrophism and the Old Testament. He shows Mars approaching the night side of Earth at 8:00 AM, 37,000 miles away. By 9:00 AM Mars is nearing Earth‘s orbit, and is 28,000 miles behind Earth. By 10:00 AM Mars is on the sunward side of Earth, 27,000 miles away, its closest approach. At 11:00 it is 48,000 miles away. Mars catches up with Earth by noon but is now 64,000 miles to its sunward side. (My own estimate sets the closest approaches nearer to noon and midnight.)
On its two year catastrophic orbit, Mars averaged only 13.1 miles per second, slower than Earth’s 19.2 miles per second. But remember that its orbit was highly elliptical, speeding up as it approached the sun and slowing down as it moved away from the sun. At the time it crossed Earth’s orbit it was close to its maximum speed of 22.2 miles per second. Also, its distance traveled while inside Earth’s orbit was slightly less than Earth. So it could remain in resonance only if it arrived at Earth’s orbit after Earth passed, and left before Earth arrived.
Mars was not the only planet to resonate with Earth. The best historical example is actually Saturn, known to the ancients as Chronos, the Timekeeper. From 2715 to 701 BC Saturn was on a precise 30 year cycle of close approaches, which could be timed down to the hour with each pass. Jupiter never came as close (thank God), but was close enough to hurl great lightning bolts periodically on its 12 year cycle. Though there were still a lot of space debris and meteoroids cluttering the system, it was still remarkably stable for a very long time. Note that my ‘very long time’ is in thousands of years, certainly not the billion years of stability demanded by the bogus evolutionary hypothesis.
The most recent and well-known resonance came after the Exodus. The Venus / Mercury binary was resonant for many years, in a precise 50 year ‘Jubilee’ cycle. Venus / Mercury was in a lopsided elliptical orbit inside Earth‘s orbit, where it had a barely stable 8:5 relationship with Earth. It came within 4 to 10 million miles for 4 to 5 months every 5 years, slowing to the same speed as Earth when farthest from the sun. It came even closer (within a million miles) each Jubilee. This was a complex orbit, wobbling back and forth (under the influences of the other planets) in a 150 year pattern, so that its 50 year Jubilee close flybys occurred at different times of the year. The pattern began with the first Jubilee pass (at the Exodus in 1451 BC), just before the regular Mars encounter in March. The second Jubilee pass was 50 years later in June, when Mars was far from Earth. 50 years after that, the third Jubilee pass was in October of the prior year, 2 years before the October flyby of Mars on its 30 year cycle. This sequence repeated until 701 BC.
The reason this becomes significant is that we know these Jubilee cycles affected the regular Mars catastrophes. On the first Jubilee, Mars was pulled away a bit, so its March pass rarely caused much damage other than high tides. And on that famous third Jubilee, Mars was pulled away a lot, so much that the normally disastrous pass of Mars (2 years later) became joyfully benign. So the Jubilee cycles became known more for their deliverance from Mars than for ’setting the captives free‘ as God intended.
My hypothesis is that Venus, on its 50 year cycle of close passes, was pulled by Earth very close to the ecliptic plane by about 752 BC. As both Venus and Mars were regularly coming close to Earth, they were bound to interact with each other. Venus and Mars had a big battle on October 30, 752 BC, in which Eris, a moon of Mars, was nearly pulled away. It collided with Earth at Italy at the next close pass of Mars on October 21, 750 BC. From then on, Venus began interacting with Mars every ten years, each threatening to tear the other out of resonance.
On March 1, 701 BC when Venus was near Earth (a ’first Jubilee’), Mars and Venus had a very close encounter. Venus and Mercury bent the orbit of Mars back the wrong way. Instead of crossing Earth‘s orbit well before Earth got there, it actually crossed just after Earth had passed. This threw all four planets into more-circular orbits, ultimately destroying the entire resonant system.
Earth slowed down. Mercury was yanked away from Venus and sent on its own wildly excentric solar orbit. Venus ended up a bit further from the ecliptic plane. Mars and Venus both speeded up. They never crossed Earth’s orbit again, so that they all dropped out of resonance. No one knows if this is also the time that Saturn stopped ‘keeping time’ and Jupiter stopped threatening Earth, but I’m guessing that the entire resonant system unraveled and all the planets were released to form more-circular orbits. Within ten years they had stabilized in orbits very similar to what they are today. In essence, with Mars, Venus, and Earth no longer making close passes, their magnetic and static forces diminished to the point where resonant forces could no longer overcome solar wind and other drag forces; gravity alone is an insufficient force to maintain resonance. All the planets today are out of sync with Earth, and we are slowly spiraling into the sun.
I readily admit this is an unproven and possibly improvable hypothesis. But it does seem to fit all the known facts, the Scriptures, and many of the legends of ancient cultures. I find it a ‘satisfying’ explanation of the fearful worship of the planets in which we know all ancient cultures indulged. It explains the Roman Saturnalia, the Greek battles between the gods, the basis for astrology, even the naming of many things according to the names of the planets and their moons. With this hypothesis, many things fit into place which otherwise were total mysteries.
However, I know God-haters will rant and rave, call me vile names, and tell everyone how ignorant and stupid I am. (I’m OK with that. I just consider the source and chuckle quietly to myself.) But the one thing they will never do, is to look carefully at my hypothesis, tell me where it is wrong, and come up with a better analysis. That is because they don’t have a better analysis. At all costs they must keep these issues out of the public eye. They cannot deal with these issues on a rational, scientific level, because actually confronting them will destroy their ability to fool you into believing in the multi-billion years of a perfectly stable, benign solar system that is required to give any chance for their spontaneous generation and propagation of life from non-life.
Politicians are interesting creatures. They seem completely unable to differentiate between a million, billion, or trillion dollars when they are spending other people’s money. Evolutionists are the same with time, flinging millions and billions of years around as if they really knew.
But real people can see how quickly things decay if left out in the sun and rain. It seems like only a few years before ‘nature’ takes over, bringing our finest works down to the dust. That Second Law of Thermodynamics is at work, slowly but inexorably bringing decay, destruction, and chaos. Even a thousand years is a long time! Not much that man has made can last that long. We have almost no evidence of the advanced cultures from before the Flood. That Second Law is validated constantly before our eyes. Yet in the evolutionist’s mind it was suspended, even reversed, for billions of years while the universe organized itself from a ‘Big Bang’ and all its resulting chaos into the beautiful, intricately designed and marvelously well-balanced structure we see all around us. And this is science?
No, it isn’t. It is religion. It is faith. It is blinding hatred of God and His Laws – a desperate attempt to explain Him away. I submit to you that it takes a whole lot more faith to believe in those billions of years of benign stability to our solar system, than it does to just believe in the God who exists outside our time / space realm and who carefully, lovingly designed and created all the beauty that we see.
Here is the true ‘scientific method.’ Look at all the evidence of both physical and spirit realms. Find a hypothesis that best fits it, as I have done. Then work with it. If my hypothesis breaks down, come up with a better one, that fits all the evidence, as truth always will. You will discover that God and science, honest science, aren’t incompatible at all.
The evolutionist claims to have science in his favor, but it is a lie. True science is observable and repeatable. If you can’t test it and verify it, then it isn’t science, it is faith. Here are a few true scientific principles which the evolutionist cannot accept:
1. The Law of Biogenesis, which affirms that life can never come from non-life. That is obvious, and is becoming more obvious as we learn the awesome complexity of life. But evolutionists must deny it.
2. The First Law of Thermodynamics, which is the conservation of matter/energy. With no God to start it all off, the evolutionist has no way to explain where the matter/energy came from to start their ‘Big Bang.’ Or has the ‘Big Bang’ become their god, creating something out of nothing?!
3. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that entropy (tendency toward chaos) is always increasing. The evolutionist must of course reverse this law and claim that chaos tends toward higher and higher complexity due to ‘natural selection.’ So tell me, how does ‘natural selection’ add any useful new information into the genetic code? Anyone knows that a good program requires a good programmer!
4. The Law of Truth Logic, which states that for anything to be true, it must harmonize known facts. Until all known facts are duly harmonized scientists call it a hypothesis, open to discussion. The theory of evolution is still such a hypothesis, as there are many basic facts which conflict with it, and more are being brought up every day. Yet the evolutionist rejects this law and claims dogmatically that the subject is closed and evolution has been proven.
This all may sound like I despise the evolutionist but that is not true. I love evolutionists, and I will happily debate them – after all, I have more facts on my side! I firmly believe that God loves them too, and that one day they also will bow before Him to acknowledge that His ways are righteous and true altogether, to the glory of the eternal Father. But I just find it rather sad that all these well-educated, brilliant ‘scientists’ are depriving themselves of lives with meaning and hope, are leading others astray, and are destined to be servants in God’s kingdom rather than the leaders He would like them to be.
I know, I can’t prove God, though He certainly can prove Himself to you if you will just ask Him. But if the evolutionist would only open his eyes to the greatness, the vastness, of the Creation and acknowledge that it is much bigger than the tiny realm of observational physical phenomena he plays with every day, maybe he could stop fighting against God. If his faith starts by denying the existence of God, of course all his conclusions will be biased. But if your faith accepts the possibility that ‘God created,’ then everything begins to fit together. Just don’t try to tell me you don’t have any faith! This book was written to encourage the faith of all those with open minds and hearts hungry for truth.
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