GLOBEBUSTERS LIVE | Distance to the Sun pt II | S15E010 | 5/17/26

Indexed: 2026-05-18

[00:00:19]Wow. Brow.

[00:00:20]>> All right. Hello and welcome everyone to Globusters season 15, episode 10. Today we're going to be going over a complimentary presentation to Shane G's previous presentation on the distance to the sun. And of course I'm joined by Stone G and Shane G. Welcome gentlemen.

[00:00:38]>> How we doing? How we doing >> everyone?

[00:00:40]>> Just sorting out my camera here, but I don't think it's going to happen.

[00:00:43][laughter] >> And we are hosting the events now live from the Discord server. So if you would like to be a live audience parti participant, the Discord link will be in chat. It it is ethercossosmology.isord or no I'm sorry ether no it's discord.gg/ethercossosmology.

[00:01:02]Sorry I got that backwards. Somebody will put a link in the chat there. Um just join with your with your mic muted and uh we should be good. Then we'll do open Q&A at the end of the prey. So if you want to uh chime in or say something then there will be a time for for that.

[00:01:17]All right. So here we go. We're going to complement Shane's previous presentation here. So the cartel of ratios mistaken for a measurement. So people have been using the distance to the sun or the astronomical unit to define cosmological distances uh and the scale of a universe so on and so forth. And that is all based off of a conceptual model based off of ratios of pi and periodicity meaning just the time it takes for the object to complete a circle.

[00:01:47]And so uh these have been asserted as physically real distances and whatnot.

[00:01:50]So, we're going to take a look at the history of the astronomical unit as it is the backbone of the heliocentric model and all of cosmology in terms of making the heavens physically real in conceptualizing them in terms of distances that we're all familiar with when we traverse links on the ground.

[00:02:07]Okay, so here we go.

[00:02:10]Um, so direct oops, direct quotes will be in gray. um summaries of what the person actually says will be in green and contradictions and other things will be in red and yellow.

[00:02:23]All right. When we look at uh the history here, we start with the AU is not a measurement. It is a number chosen by authority figures over four centuries to make a systems of ratios close on itself. What do I mean by close on itself? Well, depending on what assumptions you make for the observation to determine the distance, you get different distance values. And they need something that returns the same value consistently every time. So, we're going to look at the history of how they tried to determine this this great length [clears throat] um and uh and you know what they had to do to get it to the fixed value, the the accepted value that it is today that defines uh the cosmological model. Um so here so pre1862 the a parallax angle in textbooks all agreed to call the angle of 8.5776 arcsec uh the amount that the so that that that is the amount of solar parallax. So when you go to derive what the uh distance relationship would be as viewed by two observers at different locations on earth to get that parallax angle the distance would come out to be uh 149 million kilometers.

[00:03:38]Okay. So um so no two reductions of the same data ever agree with their uh with their statistical uh air bars that that that they that they would come up with.

[00:03:49]And we'll get into the issues with that as we continue. Um, and then after 1862 when they started using transit methods, um, they got a more self-consistent system and then from there they just ended up fixing it because there was a there was a drift within that that they couldn't quite get right um due to the black teardrop issue that we'll cover as we continue. But, uh, in any case, they needed this to be an exact number every time that could be repeated. And so that that was the significance of that. And then in 2012, they just went ahead and redefined it from a measurement and put it in as a fixed value constant. So it's just this is what it is and it has been declared. So there's no more, oh, I measured it and this is the angle that I got. This is what it is.

[00:04:37]>> [clears throat] >> So every time the cartel had to choose between admitting the AU was a convention and changing its definition, they just changed the definition rather than admitting that it's just a you know a a calculative tool that they're using to uh you know make the model more relatable ra you know they so okay so the pre-raar era so this is going to be before the before they had you know radio transmissions to Venus to bounce off and then uh measure the Doppler shift timing and all that kind of stuff which we'll get into. So this is before that. This is what they were working with before. So Haley in 1716 uh proposed using transits and then excuse me and then newcom used a system of uh analyzing the transit data to he kind of like uh linearized it so to speak reduced it all down so that they could get a consistent number and then they were using that for about 200 years.

[00:05:37]Um so yeah it's just whatever that they happen to agree on and whatever uh waiting or you know whatever however they whatever they decide to do to assign weightings to the observations uh when they do the reductions is how they got them all to agree. But when we look at the data sets none of them you know even observers at the same location don't get the same timing. It's almost as if they're perceiving the event uh you know uh you know independent of the other people like it's their own personal event or something uh based on the timing differences at the same location even.

[00:06:12]So uh so the solar parallax angle math breaks down like this. We have pi with the sun symbol here and that's to represent the solar parallax angle. We have r with the cross with a circle around it which represents earth's equatorial radius. uh we have d which is the distance which is going to be our astronomical unit and then the uh sun and earth glyphs are here so you can remember those um so the big part of the relationship here so if you take the sign of the parallax angle that's equal to the uh ratio of earth's radius to the astronomical unit which gives the distance which is equal to earth's radius over the sign of the parallax angle so you can see that they lead to the same um no matter how you solve it. So once you have that measurement you could theoretically derive what the distance should be. So this is what they were going after and a big part of this starts with the radius value of course like we've always been asserting. So if one were to falsify the radius value then this entire model based off of these distances as being defined as physically real would also collapse. So the the starting backbone of this, you know, goes all the way back to uh, you know, aerosines and all that, but but that but that of course would require you to know the dimensions of Earth beforehand so that you could have an exact distance between Alexandria and S.

[00:07:36]So literally the same circularity and assumptions are being used to facilitate what appears to be a physically meaningful model.

[00:07:46]Okay, so 1776 we're looking at the timing difference between two observers on the on opposite sides of Earth to one another essentially. So basically as far apart as you could get. And then that timing difference would also equate to the parallax difference. So when you multiply that out, the parallactic shift of Venus relative to Earth in arcsec is then going to be uh was it four times the solar parallax. So, the way that you can math all that out, uh, it ends up giving you the, you know, close to the, uh, 93 million miles or the 49 million kilometers that we're all familiar with. [clears throat] So, here he's just kind of talking about the method. And before Haley's method, right, before his method, and she uncovered this in his prey, there was a multitude of different uh, distances that were assumed and whatnot. And they were all kind of just based off of the same thing where you take the perspective equation. And when you assume the radius and angular size relationship, you can uh get different distances. So just by changing Earth's or just by changing what you assume uh the sun's true circumference to be, you know, you can you can change that uh that distance relationship. So that's what they were all working with before.

[00:09:06]So you get instances where um it was like between 1,200 and 7,000 uh earth radiuses. It was just a factor of whatever you needed it to be. So all the calculations that they were doing and how everything worked didn't actually depend on any physical distance for anything. The calculations are all ratio based like I said. Um so the physical distances don't actually matter. It's just a calculated number that comes out of the ratio of pi uh over the periodicity.

[00:09:33]So uh with that like keep that in mind that you know all these distances are quote incorrect yet the rate ascension and destinations and everything used to build the ephemerises and all that stuff was always correct and based off of angles and time. So none of these distances actually actually matter.

[00:09:51]And part of Haley's proposal here is he said that the accuracy of this would be like that there would be a minimum of a two second or I'm sorry there would be a maximum of a two second difference uh between the time in which Venus uh ingresses which is when its full disc is inside of the the solar disc of the sun.

[00:10:12]So like at at that exact time there's going to be a two- second difference when both observers see that and then on the egress when it uh when it's fully out of the solar disc at that at that exact moment there should be like a two second difference between the between the observers as well. So he was saying that to one part in 500 precision that this uh you know for the for the locations given here. So we have H Hudson Bay, Norway, Tahiti, Somatra and um there was one other one that'll be listed in in another slide but um he came up with all of this had the errors for it and then the observers even at even same observers at the same location observed different timings that were different up to 27 seconds from one another which is crazy. And so there was this um there was this effect going on that uh we were doing so good.

[00:11:04]>> Well, now you're clear. That's weird.

[00:11:07]>> Uh let me turn the quality down on Discord and see if that helps a little bit.

[00:11:13]Okay. All right. Inshah we make it through this. Let me know if it keeps happening though and we'll uh we'll decide what to do from there. Okay. So, um, so anyway, there was this black teardrop effect that was occurring that was delaying the timings because they couldn't say for certain when it was exactly separated and inside of the solar disc. So, as the as the two are intersecting and uh crossing over, they're connected by a little bridge of blackness that's like lingering between them. And so, that was uh what the and that time in that separation uh lingering effect would, you know, lasted up to 27 seconds in some cases.

[00:11:50]Okay. So, um Cook and Green, uh you know, of Captain Cook sailed to Tahiti to make these observations uh in 1769 and all that delay stuff that I was just talking about is what happened uh in there.

[00:12:06]And so they're so the whole idea of yeah, we're gonna get two seconds of accuracy out of this is completely gone to an effect that they had no idea uh you know how how that would how that would work. And they they kind of attributed it early to um the atmosphere of Venus. They said that you know that it was some sort of atmospheric effect.

[00:12:28]But then later when they used Mercury transits, Mercury doesn't have an atmosphere and the same the same kind of delay was occurring. So they couldn't really uh you know so anyway they ruled that out and it didn't have anything to do with that. Okay. So here's oh here's a great example of the black teardrop effect here. Oops. So you can kind of kind of see here. Uh just zoom I can't zoom in. Well, in anyway, that's what that's what they were dealing with there. And that caused this timing delay. And that timing delay, of course, is going to dictate the uh parallax angle. So, that timing delay messes with the parallax angle that each observer is going to get, which is going to cause everyone to derive a distance, a different distance to the sun using that transit, which would make the method um what's the word I'm looking for?

[00:13:21]Not not viable. Not not not tenable.

[00:13:24]Untenable to make any defendable claims with what's that?

[00:13:29]>> Would you go with valid?

[00:13:31]>> Yeah, valid.

[00:13:34]Yep. And then so we have these two year we have these uh two data sets here starting with 69 and then and then one in 71 I believe it was u where all the observers get different times and whatnot. So there are different lads, astronomers throughout the throughout the years who did their own reductions of the data to try and determine what the distances would be. And we could see here, you know, determine on what your favorite flavor of waiting, you can get 149.6 million km, 154.5 million km or 143 million km depending on how you do it. Same data, same observations, right?

[00:14:10]different 8% disagreement just based on how you choose to interpret the data to fit it to what to to round it out to what it would give for um um for it to close on itself, right? So that every observation is is consistent with the same distance relationship.

[00:14:29]So there are no independent confirmations here. There's just a choice of whose telescope to trust. I think it would be better said to whose data reduction to trust rather than the telescope because the the telescope all gave different answers.

[00:14:45]So Enoch combines the transits he does.

[00:14:48]So this guy he does his own reduction.

[00:14:51]So these guys were all doing their own reductions and then this guy in 1824 his became the uh premier standard for 100 years. So his method of determining it gives 8.5776 arcsec plus or minus 0 372 arcseconds. Extremely tiny fractions of a fraction uh claimed accuracy here.

[00:15:15]And this was the international standard from 1824 until newcom in 1895.

[00:15:22]and the JPL radar era value still uses the numerically continuous uh results with it uh with the previous so after so newcom basically canonizes this and then uh that's the the modern JPL ephemeris when they did the Venus ranging with radar basically to determine when they should even observe the detection or try to differentiate uh the detection from noise was was dictated by the timing of Venus's position within the ephemeris.

[00:15:53]So in other words, to make the timing ranging measurement meaningful, you have to assume that the ephemeris is completely accurate 100%.

[00:16:04]And we're going to get into the issues with that as well because then there were obviously corrections and integrations that were done to make corrections to that. So the timing always gets adjusted such that it's internally consistent to wherever they say Venus should have been at the time.

[00:16:20]It just it becomes it's it's like it's layered in so many layers of abstractions and ratios of one another that are uh only confirmed by ratioing it by by ratioing it against another ratio that it's just you know it all ties back to the initial radius value.

[00:16:39]So um so here in 1862 this is extremely important because this is how they're going to relate light minutes to the astronomical unit. So we we were told that it takes based on the distance uh eight light minutes for light to leave the surface of the sun and hit uh your ocular on earth.

[00:17:02]And so to get that relationship here full cult in 1862 had done an experiment along with Mickelson where they came to the most accurate determination of the speed of light at that time. Now keep in mind this was uh a little before uh Maxwell had his calculation for the uh for the exact speed. I think that that came in 65 or 68. So that was a little later. So before this for the speed of light they had ROR and now ROR's value was about 224,000 km a second. So that wasn't uh you know the that wasn't it.

[00:17:38]And then Fazo did an experiment using a rotating cog wheel and the flicker rate of a of a returning light beam after uh it traversed 8 kilometers and was reflected back. And so based off of that he came to about I want to say 320,000 off the top of my head. And then what folk Nicholson done did had reduced it down to about 32,000 which is very close to the accepted value of 298 million kilometers uh a second. So getting it to 300,000 km a second was uh was pretty good. So using that ratio uh what he did is he took the aberration angle that Bradley had asserted was occurring. So uh they he so once he has that variable he can backwards solve uh a distance off of that angle and based off of and relating it to the speed of light they then turn um the AU over C into you know the time it takes for light to travel that distance. And then this same exact relationship was done what we found during the Roma research when Lelass had the Lambert uh basically do the same backwards derivation to fit in the what the distance to Jupiter's moon should be. And then so 300 some years later when the lads and I come along and try to derive the speed of light using the full uh cycle of of Jupiter going around the sun in their model. it comes out to be it gives the speed of light for the eclipse timing differences and this is how they related all this this is how it becomes internally consistent to make it uh to combine these two with that so relating the or the earth's orbital speed and that angle that they say you know that all just comes out of watching the sun's periodicity and applying Kepler's laws uh applying all of that allowed them to derive this and relate physical units of distance to the sky um just based off of ratios of the observation itself.

[00:19:47]>> Damn.

[00:19:48]>> So f Yeah. So there's no Venus transit data here. No observations were made.

[00:19:55]This were just taking the constants and the measured value of the of the aberration that Bradley put forward and backwards deriving what the distance would be.

[00:20:08]Um, and then here's where we go over the same situation with Lelass and Damber where he did the same thing with Io's moons, I'm sorry, with Jupiter's moons, uh, in particular, Io, setting the stage for what the aberration and distance would have to be uh, to to get that. So when they say like oh everything in the sky has this amount of aberration well that's because per that distance that they associated to the light minute relative to uh earth's velocity that they put in there to get the angle in the first place which goes back to uh uh uh what was it earth's orbital distance or earth's orbital speed over um over the speed of light like relating all of that together is how all these ratios become uh internally consistent and then it makes it and then it defines that specific 20 arcsecond shift to what they say it is rather than the full trepidation amount because what we found also um thanks to Stone and Shane's previous presentation on here where they where they went over aberration there was trepidation before aberration and trepidation was just the full amount of oscillation that was observed from the north pole you know that full oscillation amount them breaking it up into aberration, mutation and procession is a complete, you know, as viewed from the reference frame that they say is, you know, causing that is quite a claim to to section all that out. But the way that they did it and then made it internally consistent with the AU and the timing differences, they it's it's then thus force canonized as an amount separate from the full oscillation amount. It's kind of uh it's kind of brilliant when you when you think about, you know, how they how they did that.

[00:21:55][snorts] Um they observation.

[00:22:00]>> Yeah, they they took the observation and then just sectioned off what they need to make their model and then divvi up the rest uh to hypothetical stuff. And then what was it that you found about procession? It doesn't it's not even >> that it doesn't happen without oblique torque to the axis of spin. Yeah, I have an update for that too. Maybe maybe today, maybe next week.

[00:22:21]>> But >> yeah, ne I think next week will be will be updates and uh >> but yeah, that's awesome. Look forward to hearing that.

[00:22:34]>> All right, so um let's see here.

[00:22:43]so after they've put everything in uh started to relate the position of Mars instead of uh Venus transits and circularly doing the aberration stuff.

[00:23:01]uh newcom settles on this which is slightly different than the previous value and then this goes on to be what they go with for for basically up until JPL.

[00:23:14]So the whole history of this is just changing by slight amounts right because they can't get because no observer there's no way to observe or direct you know anything that's actually consistent. It's just different ways to reinterpret the same thing or apply a different method to get the same thing, but it still circularly depends on, you know, knowing the exact position and distance as a ratio of Earth's radius for the relationship. So nothing has really changed even though the angular amounts changed the distance, you know, is changing very slightly to this.

[00:23:51]Um there started lagging.

[00:24:16]Um so uh any observation that disagrees with the model in terms of where it should be, they just started introducing things like pertabbation series. And what Shane just found recently was a pertabbation series is really just uh adding another epicycle layer. And it turns out if you add more epicycle layers, you can fix whatever discrepancies you have. Is that about right Shane?

[00:24:43]>> Yeah. Specifically when you're taking say a tomic epicycle uh system which uses an equin at the middle you can say take that out add a perig and apogee. So you're essentially taking what was circular into say slightly ellipse ellipse like right so you're adding two focal points and then from there you can start doing the nested circle motion that would predict everything down to the tenth tenth of a degree. I think the dude who did that was Let's see if I can pronounce his name.

[00:25:11]Nip de [laughter] >> I gave it up immediately. Uh, [laughter] >> go ahead. Spell it. What is it?

[00:25:22]>> Oh, hold on. I put I just put it in Discord chat the PDF. So, Iben L Chatier. It's IBN space a Lyen SA T I R.

[00:25:33]Oh, I've been >> I've been I've been I've been El Shhatier. Anyway, that that he did that like a thousand years after Tommy came along and no one even remembered talked about it. But using that method, you have an empirical observational method to predict planetary motion to an absurd degree.

[00:25:51]>> Is that something that you just incorporated too? Like so like you actually you saw you saw it live?

[00:25:59]>> You mean for the model?

[00:26:02]>> Yeah.

[00:26:04]trying that's [laughter] >> yeah so trying trying to use that to predict say planetary motions they were like all right well the other planetary ephemerises do it this way you know like JPL DE 405 they're supposedly using heliocentric you know mass dynamics and gravity you know gravity mass tracking mass that's how we get the accuracy of those predictions and it's like well no I compared this one that we made which is using say a modified let's say a modified epicycle to a little bit Keplerian. So it's like a Kepleran epicycle prediction method and that using that one we created a new ephemeris starting from what what Mihis did which was his base observation stars and then you incorporate like the brightest stars and all the other the planetary motions are supposed to come from JPL but I over superseded that right to make it all come from this new epicycle/keeper ellipticity prediction ephemeris. So then the ephemeris has its own predictions of planetary motion predicted only by epicycles and then draws on the you know right attention declination of the published star catalog. So it it literally replaced misus didn't need de 405 and maxed their accuracy to a tenth of a degree.

[00:27:14]>> Like Sunzu once said circles be crazy.

[00:27:19][laughter] >> All right. Um, so we got all this information here. We have all these internally consistent units that come out to be what they should be within the model. And then something that I found rather interesting uh doing a recent prey was um that Gerber derived the speed of light from the assumed perihelion procession of Mercury which just comes out of a small tiny angle and then so entering uh Kepleran orbital parameters you know no distances or anything um just literally ratios uh he gets the speed of light and I was like wow that's fascinating because it came out it's ex uh the the main literature or whatever is like they act like it doesn't come out to be exactly the speed of light but it's it's this it comes out to be the speed of light exactly and then so uh Einstein in 1915 using the same equation but rearranging it just instead of solving for C he solves for the angle and assumes and assumes C and so in doing that he derived the angle based off of all that and I was like wow that is crazy because like that must you know that that would imply a a distance relationship to the like that would imply the model is correct with the AU and the distances and all that and uh but you can see how it was formulated like like the the end product of of everything that we just went over would be that so that somebody could come along take an observation plug in uh two two of the three parameters and get exactly what the quote unquote heliocentric model would predict.

[00:28:57]>> What an awesome coincidence. I mean, who could predict that it would take us to the 20th century before we figured that out?

[00:29:05]>> Dude, took a hot minute, but we got there, boys. We're back. We're taking it back. [laughter] So, yeah. Then we we've seen this with what they did with the meter, right? So, uh, they end up instead of having all these different slight discrepancies and drifts in the measurement and all that, they ended up just fixing the the distance to what it to what it has to be to work out for the aberration stuff that was calculated uh, previous. And so, uh, the same way that they did with a meter where it used to be defined as 110 millionth of a of a terrestrial meridian, what they say now is that it's defined by the the how fast the speed of light propagates in 33 or you know 33 nanconds.

[00:29:54]So if you do one over the speed of light, you get uh 0.0000 all the way to 33 nconds. So that relationship to a meter is now like if you multiply that out for a full second that comes out to be a meter. So they didn't they didn't change the definition of it. So to well they they changed the definition of it but they didn't change like what the unit is or whatever. Like it's still the same. You know a meter is still 110 millionth of a terrestrial meridian even though it's been redefined to be one over the speed of light.

[00:30:27]Um so this uh same situation that they did here they just def they just fixed defined it and that's what it is that's the constant value now and that's what they use moving forward um to get everything to be internally consistent otherwise it wouldn't have worked and so there was um a quote here from the sitter when we were reading one of the JPL uh radar measurements they were talking about how Um, all of these astronomical units are defined internally consistently and it's like a self-referential system and you can't really know for sure if any of the constants have any physical meaning which is which is a pretty cool >> mutually reliant.

[00:31:12]>> Yes.

[00:31:13]>> Yes. Yes. They are mutually reliant.

[00:31:16]>> Exactly. So now we're going to enter the radar era here. And this is what Shane primarily covered in his prey going over the uh the measurements specifically how uh and like what Stone pointed out the magnitude in which they would show you for the graphs. It has no scale on it.

[00:31:33]So you can't even det you can't even differentiate how much more the quote unquote real signal was from what the noise was. You just kind of have to interpret it and feel it out and hope that they're correct.

[00:31:44]>> Trust me, bro.

[00:31:45]>> So the math There's no Yeah. And there's no real reason to not include a scale unless you were trying to not let people derive a meaningful conclusion from your measurement.

[00:31:59]So uh so yeah they have this they have these measurements that they say uh you know confirm the distances and whatnot but through the integration to the ephemeris that compares where the position of the planet should be to get the distance for the ranging for the timing for when they should even analyze the signal to see if it's differentiatable from noise is already cooked into the ephemeris or you know is already assuming that the ephemeris is correct. And so whatever they get over their window that that they observe uh over their magnitudeless a uh graph, you know, is uh is going to set the stage.

[00:32:36]And so that's exactly what they did. So this is um one of the primary ones where this gentleman was told that if he didn't get his if he didn't get this measurement then he wasn't going to get his PhD because his thesis was depending on pioneering the method for um for doing this ranging measurement. So he came up with the um with the satellite dish all the equipment all the math to do the analysis etc so on and so forth.

[00:33:05]uh if he didn't get this, he was told that he he wouldn't have a, you know, he wasn't going to get his thesis. So, and then no surprise, guys, he he got the measurement thing. Oh, my god, that was a close one. He got Yeah. And then so uh in here he actually quotes to sitter which I thought was really cool um about the constants having that relationship that are mutually dependent and you can't really have any uh can't really say for sure if they're can't really say for sure if they're actually what they say they are.

[00:33:39]All right. Um, and then there was there was some more uh Venus measurements and those all end up getting integrated into the ephemeris and you know they're they're told that they're correct and then even when I think um what was it?

[00:33:55]Was it Goldstone or was it the other guy? Uh they ended up coming out a couple months after they published their stuff and they said, "Hey, you know what? We were wrong actually." And then uh later on those measurements were reinccorporated. So like they were actually never wrong. Like no one like no one's ever wrong. It's really it's really cool. So here's a here's a artist recreation of what it looks like to show someone a graph with no magnitude and say look if I point right here here's where the echo is. Can you guys see it?

[00:34:25]Can you can you tell?

[00:34:28]>> Crystal clear, dude.

[00:34:33]>> Yeah. So uh so yeah, that's what they were working with there. And this is very reminiscent to the same situation with LIGO where they just have a you know they're just measuring noise and then they have abstract layers that they run through a convolutional neuronet network which is basically just reinterpreting the data trying to make abstract shapes out of it comparing the shapes uh recycling it making sure it didn't make up any shape like just endless iterations of what could be in this noise >> filtering. Oh, you mean like with inertial navigation?

[00:35:09]>> Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And so, uh, with all of that, uh, they're like, "Oh, look, we measured this this, uh, this this the pertabbation of space and time due to two black holes colliding 11 million 11 billion years ago." And it's like, or or did you just do this? Did you just, you know, Oh, shoot. My mic was muted. It turns out, too, a quick note on LIGO, um, there's no way to to determine if this was done or if there was an actual signal or not.

[00:35:53]They have no way of actually knowing.