Is the earth expanding?

No, it applies to your interpretation of slab rollback.

You're wrong. Plain and simple. It's funny that you don't even realize just how wrong you are.

Wrong again, it can, and has been done. The funny thing is that it's accuracy is reliant not only on things like the the earth having a constant radius and mass, but also things like the distribution of the oceans - because it's the oceans that provide the majority of the braking force. So in that respect it adds another layer of confidence to our reconstructions.

I have yet to troll.

No, you have not.
Here is what I said:
"And what I suggested was that ontological parsimony was sufficient grounds to dismiss expanding earth tectonics"
And here is your reply:
"Repeat: The ontological parsimony is not sufficient to refute a theory."
Can you uderstand the difference between what I actually said, and what you're implying/asserting I said?

If the principle of parsimony is useless here, then it is also insufficient to dismiss the standard model of plate tectonics. If it is insufficient to dismiss one, it is insufficient to dismiss both. If it can be used to dismiss one, it can be used to dismiss both. It's that simple. Science doesn't operate according to double standards. Science operates by applying the same standards and principles universally.

Again, you assume that I haven't read Carey's review, eeven though I have directly addressed several of his points that you have not raised (for example his 100km diapiric rise).

I do nno such thing.

What you propose is untestable.
With no mechanism you can not propose an experiment to test your hypothesis. What your proposing is below the work of (for eample) Scalera, who at least made an effort to propose a mechanism.

See above.

You have proposed no mechanism by which the earth grows that can be tested.

You have only asserted that it must do so.

Again, allow me to repeat myself. In order to know what to look for at a subatomic level, you must first propose a mechanism that makes testable predictions. Otherwise, you're not doing science.

Nonsense. I missed no step.
You have the hypothesis - that the earth is expanding by some mechanism.
You claim that this hypothesis is supported by observation, but it is a hypothesis that has no plausable mechanism.
You have no observations, because you haven't carried out any experiments, because you have proposed no mechanism that can be tested.
Every discovery in the history of science - including the serendipitous ones, has been made this way.

I know how science works, and you're not doing it.

You have made no unique falsifiable predictions - even Carey himself said about the Iapetus ocean that (I assume the reconstruction has changed since the '70s) that if the reconstruction was done a certain way, that his 'anomaly' disappeared, and all of the reconstructions of the Iapetus ocean I've looked at are consitent with Carey's description.

 

No.

I'm familiar with Williams' work.
I'm not talking about Williams' work.
I'm talking about other work.
I don't know why you're so obssessed with Williams' work - probably because it means that you can cherry pick it, and present that particular quote out of context.
I'm going to repeat myself.
The modelling of the rate of recession can, and has been done using tidal theory, and we know that it was variable.

Argumentum ad hominem.

And it is on this basis, among others, that I dismiss expanding earth tectonics (there, I said it, yet again).

No, because as I have pointed out - using the Iapetus ocean as an example, our understanding of the past organization of the continents has evolved. Carey's argument regarding the Iapetus ocean appears to be based on a reconstruction that is no longer relevant.

Only according to your toy model - stop presenting supposition as fact.

As opposed to what - the plate tectonics reconstruction that they were once in the Southern Hemisphere?
This assertion of yours does not provide a testable prediction.
Also, your reconstruction makes a provably wrong prediction. Can you figure out what that is?

No. Carey's assertion is bogus in this, nothing has been proven or disporoven by it.

That's what Carey predicted, but you knew that already, being familiar with his work and all that.

No it isn't, it is perfectly reasonable, and there have been several proposed.

Again, you're wrong, but it's also evident you don't seem to have fully understood what I have said.

See, here's the thing, and this is why I say it's crucially important that you provide one - modern Physics, to the best of my recollection does not provide for one. The mantle of the earth is simply not hot enough or dense enough. Even Graviton decay would leave its fingerprint, but it doesn't. There is no evidence, and there is no mechanism to support your assertion.

No, you have a hypothesis, if I'm being generous, that makes no unique testable predictions, that lacks a causal mechanism, isn't backed by measurements that can be made or infered in the last 10,000 years (or 1.2 GA for that matter), and from that you infer that some mechanism must exist, even though you have absolutely no idea what it might be.

Wrong.
Science doesn't just magically manifest answers into a notebook. It requires experimentation to verify predictions made by a hypothesis. Without a hypothesis, no predictions can be made, and nothing can be tested - what you're practicing is more like faith. You're sitting back and claiming "It's irrefutable! Pay no attention to the man behind the mirror! Physics just hasn't caught up with me yet, have faith brothers, a mechanism will emerge!"

I have misrepresented nothing.
I have emphasized the salient portion of the quoted text.

No, that is not what Carrey said.

 

All of which is beside the point, more or less, because we come back to the same basic point.

Irrespective of whether or not you believe that we can predict how many hours are in a year, we can show using tidalites how many days were in a month, and how many days are in a year.

Setting aside, for the moment, your assertion that somehow, as if by magic, this matter which appears in the Earth's mantle adds just enough angular momentum, we come back to this point.

Adding mass to the Earth would cause it to migrate closer to the sun - unless G varies 'just so', or its angular momentum varies 'just so'. This would mean that the year should have been longer (in hours) at some point in the past. This, combined with shorter days would result in more days in each year, and more months in each year. An anomaly that should be detectable, but isn't, and so you predict that, somehow, by physics which is unknown to the physics community, and does not fit within the current paradigm, as well as adding mass to the Earth, it imparts just enough angular momentum to the earth to prevent orbit from migrating.

If the Earth was smaller and lighter than it is today, its days would be much shorter in hours than they are today. Again, irrespective of whether or not you think we can use tidal theory to predict the absolute length of the day, this would result in more days per month, and more days per year than is observed, again, an anomaly that should be measurable, but isn't. So again, you hypothesize, that some how, the matter that is being added to the Earth imparts angular momentum to it in a way that is 'just so' and gives the illusion of constancy.

 

Oh, and seeing as how Florian likes using Williams so much, here's something else he's had to say, in a different paper to the one that Florian insists on using:

So Williams supports my assertion that the validity of the length of the day can be verified (in a couple of different ways it seems), and that the rate of retreat has varied over time.

Elsehwere he has this to say:

So sorry, no Ultra-violet catastrophy for expanding earth tectonics to save us from today.

Addendum:
The point, it seems, that is being missed here, is that the Elatina–Reynella tidalites allow us to reconstruct the moon's orbit about the earth, as it was 620MYA. The tidalites give us Semidiurnal, diurnal, monthly, and annual cycles, as well as the multi year cycle that gives rise to the eclipse cycle.

These periodicities, and their beat rythms allow us to (or in this case allowed Williams) to determine, using Newtonian physics, what the moons orbital parameters must have been. These orbital parameters then allow us to calculate an 'absolute' length of the day in hours, and the mass of the earth. Neither of which allow for an expanding earth that gains mass.

 

I've read Mazumder's reply to Williams' paper before. Frankly, that's 10 minutes of my life I will never get back.

I found Mazumder's paper to be grossly flawed, and factually inaccurate.

For example:

No, they don't.

They know that it formed in the first 10-100 MYA of the Solar system's history eg: Halliday 2008 and you can't defend him by claiming that it's new science that he couldn't have known about, because it was proposed as far back as 1973 by Tera et al that the apollo samples suggested that the impact must have occured at least 3.8-4 GYA.

The rest of what I see there is speculation - for example, the Hulse-Taylor Binary Pulsar allows us to test Relativity - one of the assumptions of which is the constancy of G. One of the Hulse-Taylor Binary Pulsar tells us is that 21,000 years ago, G was the same as it is now - we know this because the system is loosing energy at a rate as if G was the same then as it is now. And that's without delving into tests using Globular clusters and H-R diagrams, helioseimicity experiments, and so on and so forth (the list really is quite extensive) - all of which come to the same conclusion - if G has varied, it's been by 1.5x10[sup]-12[/sup] of its current or less per year for the last 4.5 billion years - in other words, it has varied by no more than 9x10[sup]-23[/sup] m[sup]3[/sup]kg[sup]-1[/sup]s[sup]-2[/sup] per year.

To put that in perspective - G, according to our ability to measure it, and its history, has only increased by 0.8% in the last 620MA, however, if we use the values for Radius given in Maxlow's thesis, the Earth's mass has increased by 3000% over the same time - assuming that the bulk density of the earth has remained constant. So now we require not only G to vary, and the mass of the earth to vary, but the bulk density of the earth to vary in just the right way as to give the appearance of having remained constant.

Oh, and incidentally, you, and Mazumder are wrong about something else - it's a point that I have alluded to several times, which you have thus far chosen to ignore.

Williams' work give us an estimate of the rate of recession for the last 620 MYA, something that we can both agree on, and it's one that is consistent with the other information that we have regarding the moon.
From this, and from Williams' other work (IIRC) we can predict what the length of the moon's semi major axis would/could/should have been 620 MYA. Using only the assumption that the Earth's density has remained constant - an assumption that you have implicitly agreed to - in fact, I believe it was you who suggsted it, we can calculate the absolute time of the orbital period of the moon around the earth, in seconds, and from that calculate the absolute length of the Earths year, month and day.

I'll give Mazumder credit where it's due though, he did get one thing right.

He said:

This can, and has been modeled, on the basis of reconstructions from mainstream plate tectonics, and the results, once again, give good agreement with Williams' work.

 

Of course it's not expanding - especially at the ridiculous rate that florian is claiming. Note that he gives no mechanism for the suggested expansion, and no credible evidence either.

 

The only obsolete theory being advocated here is that of the expanding earth.

It is completely the point.
Mazumder cherry-picked the hypothesis of a young impacted, constructed the straw-man hypothesis that all large impact hypotheses were young impact hypotheses, presented evidence against young impact hypotheses, and stated that because there was no young impact, there was no large impact.

However Mazumders evidence only disproves a young impact, it does not disprove the large impact hypothesis, which originally stated that the impact occured in the first 500 miilion years of Earths history.

What Mazumder did was intellectualy dishonest, I would even go as far as calling it fraudulent.

So you're a uniformitarianist and a gradualist then.

Neither claim is baseless, you simply deny, or do not understand the evidence that has been presented.

Are you suggesting that the Earth's density was less in the past than it is now?

If you mean that we can use it to calculate the mean rate of recession 620 MYA and compare it to the mean rate of recession now, than hat is all I have ever said.

Strawman hypothesis, Cherry picking.

What I said, in full, was this:

It does not require an assumption about the absolute length of the year. I was talking about a calulation of the absolute length of the month, in seconds, from first principles, based on knowlege of specific lunar orbital parameters, that can be infered from a combination of modelling and observation, from which can be infered the absolute length of a day and a year (in seconds).

Do try to keep up.

 

It's not a fallacy.

Reviews which are substantially flawed in a variety of ways.

Irrelevant to the point that I was making.

Baloney.
The impact hypothesis is based on more than just the water content, and the rest of what you've had to say is simply wrong.
Alberto Saak had this to say

So the presence of water, at levels comparable to that found in magmas on Earth, contrary to your assertions, provides another piece of supporting evidence.

Right, and I suppose you think Alvarez was wrong as well?

Argumentum ad hominem.
But it's worse than that, I would go as far as calling this name calling.

Mazumder prooved nothing. He cherrypicked his evidence, and presented a strawman argument.

I didn't ask you to quantify it, I asked you to qualify it, are you suggesting that you can't even do that - say whether the earths density has increased or decreased over time?

Wrong.
You just don't understand the physics involved in the calculation.
And you're wrong about Williams' work as well - you do know that he has published more than one paper on the subject, don't you?

 

I've already elaborated on one example.

Baloney - he cherry picked a hypothesis, and constructed a strawman argument, then claimed to have disproved the mainstream hypothesis, even though the hypothesis he cherrypicked wasn't nev

Right, it raises questions, and?

Every scientific discovery raises questions. Raising questions doesn't refute a theory, refuting the theory refutes the theory.

No it doesn't - your cherry picking, and building strawman arguments base don that cherrypicking.

Fourth paragraph from the bottom. Go back and re-read it, it says exactly what I said it says.

Something you and Mazumder could learn a thing or two about. The worst you've done is prove that my interpretation of of what Saal had to say was wrong.

Saal said that the volatile content of lunar magma was comparable to that of MORB - I presumed that by that he meant that he expected this as a consequence of the large impact hypothesis. In retrospect, it seems I may have been mistaken in this interpretation, in that he could equally have meant that he expected the high concentration based on what was found in the bulk sample, and outgassing models. My mistake.

I'm impressed - you've dredged up a thread, from a different forum, from two years ago, cherry picked a post, and presented it without context. And you've done precisely the same thing that the person in the post you linked to has done. To the other. Meh. I so, over there I did something foolish. I let the derision and scorn heaped upon me by pseudoscientists get to me, and started dishing it back to them, something which they did not like.

But tell me, do you condone an individual threatening a newborn infant with death, just because I said something that individual didn't like? Because that was what was being discussed (among other things) in that thread.

I am definitively interested in science.
You're the one cherry picking posts from other fora and presenting them as ad-hominem arguments not me.

You're avoiding addressing the issues that have been raised, and you've resorted to trolling.