Could the earth stop spinning one day??

Since I am being answered by poor and incomplete science by people who don't have a strong knowledge of the material, I really don't feel that bad.

 

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You say that, but how do you know it's poor or incomplete? We may not have the strongest knowledge available, but you can research further, and even submit questions to universities, NASA, and many other physics websites that have actual PhD's in astrodynamics. I've done it. It was research for a test of special relativity for a discussion I was having in the physics forums awhile back. Why so anti-education? It dosen't turn you into a cult-like robot you know.

 

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Incomplete goes without saying and says nothing either way about the speaker. Forgetting the fact that your knowledge is incomplete causes problems. You infer either a lack of education or a lack of proper use of my education when I declare that certain unbelievable things are possible. This is wrong and unnecessary.

I don't think that everyone here has a particularly firm grasp of what has to be proven. If you want to declare something to be impossible you have to prove that case beyond a doubt. With the latest declaration against my theories, you have introduced a heating mechanism that I can't see existing. I have more than a reasonable doubt and then someone wants to dump on my intelligence again.

 

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Sorry to lower the tone of the thread but I'm with Eliza Dolittle on this particular point. I'll butt out now.

 

You have to give them credit for being prepared to try to hit such a small target.

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Cheeky.

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You see, the problem is that what you consider to be a reasonable doubt, is completely unreasonable to the rest of us. This makes it completely valid, after all of this discussion, to question your motives and your intelligence. If you can't see, by basic physics, that the slowing down of the earth by an external gravitational "pull" on a tidal bulge or however you propose to do it must generate enough heat to melt the planet, then your education and/or intelligence is very questionable. Given highschool physics, the stopping of the earth (without immense energy dissipation) in a day is impossible. We have proven it beyond a reasonable doubt.

So, please, please, instruct us on where we have gone wrong in such a simple and fundamental analysis. I would love to know how one goes about transferring all of the rotational momentum of the earth to some other body within a day without destroying the planet, and then subsequently returns it all within that same day. This is physics we're talking about here, not magic, right?

It's time for you to consider that you are the irrational, closed-minded one.

Sincerely and with all due respect,

SL

P.S. If someone would show me a way that this can happen, with solid physics demonstrations, I would be most apologetic and thankful.

 

I'm tempted to weigh in just one more time!

First, the planet is already highly molten. I live (eat, sleep, work, etc.) on a volcano that is daily pouring out molten earth (magma) arising from just a few miles beneath the ultra thin solid crust, and it's been doing that CONTINUOUSLY since circa 1985, or more than 20 years! More than 99.9% of the earth is molten, with only just a thin crust that is not. [And no, I don't believe the earth stopped spinning and started again to become molten!]

Second, the real question that needs to be asked is how the Earth got spinning in the first place! Collisions of planetesimals into planetoids, and finally into a proto-Earth (the 'standard paradigm'), would have no ability to form a spinning Earth (or spinning Mars) at our current fast spin rates (one rotation/24 hours for Earth), as there would be no preferred impact location, neither in latitude nor longitude. It is thus highly unlikely to form bodies that rotate as rapidly as Mars and Earth do, and even more unlikely to have the rotation end up being close to perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic (which is much more perpendicular for Mars than Earth).

For that reason, and many others, the current prevailing paradigm about Earth's formation must be wrong. The alterative gaseous creation paradigm, discussed in my posts on the thread about Pangea in Earth Science discusses that alternative theory in great detail, for those who are interested.

Finally, while it is true that the Earth's angular momentum also entails a huge amount of kinetic energy which would be released if the spin were to be stopped (sending molten Earth into space in every direction!; rather like what probably happened in the Asteroid Belt region billions of years ago), and thus it would be physically impossible to stop Earth's spin without a HUGE disruption tearing apart the planet, Metakron's questioning on the topic, and causing an indepth analysis by many to point out his errors, does not necessarily reflect on his intelligence, but rather his knowledge. He has posted in many other areas where he has demonstrated an equal or superior knowledge to many persons who post excellent science in their fields, and this forum, in my view, should save personal attacks for other arenas. A gentle reminder concerning the information base (or lack thereof) being used to make the queries by the thread posters, going into detail to point our errors of reasoning based on lack of knowledge, should suffice.

Sometimes, I think Metakron posits some of his posts just to see how smart the responders are!

 

You and your friend have failed to prove that such a scenario requires heating or other destruction of the Earth. Your own motive and judgement are questionable if you insist that this is proven.

It is once again time for me to suggest that you think that you can disprove an idea by using whatever it is you can pull out of your backside. Adopting a pose of arrogance is much easier for you than it is to actually prove your case.

The scenario of stopping the rotation of the Earth in one hour requires a deceleration for that hour of four percent of a standard gravity. The weight of anything exposed to that acceleration increases by one twenty-fifth. The pressure at any point in any theoretical static column increases by four percent. That pressure is a very inefficient way to generate heat.

We already have a mechanism for disposing of the kinetic energy, so anything that says it "must" go somewhere else does have to be proven. You can't just snatch it out of the air and say that this overrules that. Not that you won't, you just won't have a good case. Does a planet necessarily generate any significant amount of heat if it slowly deforms over a period of hours? I don't see it. At the same time it seems to be "compressing" one direction, it is decompressing the other. One effect causes heating. The other causes cooling. All you have said is that it has to go somewhere, so it goes the way that your finger is pointing instead of by the known mechanism of transfer of momentum between the two interacting bodies.

 

But it isn't just compression, is it? You are attempting to stop a ball from spinning by applying a deceleration. Basically you are applying an acceleration of 0.04 gravities sideways to the surface of the Earth; this will mean that the direction of vertical will no longer be normal to the surface, but instead at an angle to the surface. As I have said before, this will cause the oceans to tilt, and flow out of their confines to cover the continents. Similar effects would be seen within the Earth, causing laminar flow of the various components of the Earth's crust, mantle and core; this will lead to frictional heating.
As Walter Wagner pointed out, dissipating the Earth's angular momentum in a short while would send molten Earth off in every direction.
I recommend you read an old story by H.G. Wells on this very subject;
The Man who could work Miracles.
Excerpt here
http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Smiracle.htm

Of course Wells had it right; stopping the Earth would convert it into pulp.

 

If anyone's objectivity is in question it is yours. After all, it is no skin off my nose if the Earth could be slowed to a stop by tidal interaction in such a short time with no ill effects, Idon't have a theory to defend that would rely on it being true or not true.

Again, it is you who is adopting the pose of arrogance here.

 

Ok. Where does the kinetic energy go?

It's called physics.

Where does the kinetic energy go?

We do? Please describe. I must have missed it. Or simply repost the description, if that's ok.

 

The outer core is molten; the mantle is solid. The mantle transmits shear waves, which liquids cannot.

 

Yeah, I know that, but only because the pressure is so great it forces it into a quasi-solid state. The point is, it's quite hot. Remove the pressure, and it is back to liquid.

Same thing on Jupiter, etc. The planet is a liquid ball of Hydrogen/Helium on the outer portions (and surrounded by dense gas, which is the part we see), except in the central region, in which the pressure is so great it is presumed solid Hydrogen (surrounding a solid core of iron/nickel/mantle material of some 10,000 miles diameter - quite similar to Earth, etc.)

So, the point being made is how come Earth is a hot liquid (and pressurized hot solid), when conventional theory posits that it was made from an aggregation of cold rocks all colliding together, then melting to form gravitational stratification (denser iron/nickel, surrounded by less dense mantle). Neither accumulated radioactive decay, nor collisional impact heat, can account for the energy necessary to melt cold rock into the present constituency of Earth.

But thanks, Laika, for the technical correction.

 

The problem is that only a very very small percentage of the total tidal force is appled to slowing the Earth (in fact, the total tidal force exerted on the Earth is tens of thousands of time greater than that part which is applied to slowing the Earth. Thus the Earth will undergo tidal forces of hundreds to thousands of standard gs)

The mechanism you mention does not account for all of the Energy, which I have already shown through the math.

You don't see it because it would be against the interest of your theory to see it, not because it does not exist

Talk about pulling something out of your arse! Cooling by expansion only applies to gases, because they provide the energy for the expansion themselves as pressure is lowered.

Besides that, the deformation of the Earth's crust is not due to compression or expansion, but by a flexing of the Earth's crust, and any time you flex or bend a solid, you generate heat through friction.

 

Ebacurum, try employing a better understanding of gravity. The oceans won't keep right on going because they decelerate exactly as much as the land does. Gravity, remember? It pulls on everything equally? This also applies to objects on land. What you will get is a greater tidal bulge, which is exactly what was witnessed. Look at the explanations of tidal bulge from any authoritative source.

 

Janus, when an object is flexed, parts of it experience compression and parts of it experience decompressing or stretching.

PROVE that most of the tidal force becomes heat. Otherwise I have nothing further to say to you.

 

So, I keep forgetting. We're pulling on a huge tidal bulge created by a large passing body, right? Let's pretend this is true. As this body approaches, a tidal bulge is created. A big one. By it's very nature this tidal bulge is essentially underneath the passing body (or slightly ahead of it as in the case of the moon).

So, the required torque comes from the small vector "pull" of the gravity of the body on this tidal bulge as it passes. Here's a nice picture of the situation:

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source: http://www.astronomynotes.com/gravappl/s10.htm

The first thing I notice is that the "body" is in motion and passing the earth. Let's pretend that it is passing verrry slowly in order to give it time to stop the rotation (although orbital dynamics dictate that for this to happen, the "body" would have to be in nearly the same orbit as the earth).

The tidal bulge induced by the moon leads our rotation by about 10 degrees.

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source: http://www.astronomy.ohio- state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Unit4/tides.html

Now, lets figure out how much gravity we would need to stop the earth in an hour.

Let's assume that the bigger tidal bulge would also lead the "body" by 10 degrees, although due to the increased gravity normal to the bulge it would actually lead much less, but this will give us a conservative number.

Let us say the tangential vector force of the moon pulling on the bulge is 1 unit. This currently results in a slowing of 17us per year. This is 1.94 nano-seconds per hour. So, we need to go from 1.9ns to 3600 seconds. That's an increase by a factor of 3600/1.9e-9 = 1.85e12. This means we need to pull 1.85e12 times harder on the bulge than we are (since there's no reason to think any drastically non-linear effects are present). That means we need a body that will provide 1.85e12 more gravity than the moon.

What does this mean?

A body that could cause a tidal bulge such that it could pull hard enough to stop the earth's rotation in one hour would create a differential tidal bulge of about 1.85e12 times its current height of a couple of meters. This of course means the complete tearing-apart of the earth.

Just a note: Remember that it's the gravitational gradient that is important for this phenomenon. That's what tears the planet apart.

So, if you're going to insist that there is a "pull" on the tidal bulge big enough to stop the earth, you also MUST accept the massive, earth-destroying gravitational gradient caused by the "body".

 

Self reflect on your statement here MK.

 

Irrelevant to the topic at hand. This flexing still has a net heating effect.

I already have. Or at the very least the information I provided, along with the laws of thermodynamics, prove it beyond the reasonable doubt of anyone looking at this subject with an objective eye.

The very fact that you do not accept this as sufficient proof just tells me that you would not accept anything as sufficient. You will always have some lame excuse.

This also tell me something else. That you are either as ignorant as some on this board say you are, or you are intellectually dishonest.

Now, ignorance in itself is not such a terrible thing, everyone is ignorant about something to one extent or another. I don't expect a car mechanic to be an expert surgeon, and I don't expect a surgeon to be able to rebuild an engine. But when a person starts to believe that their ignorance is in fact superior knowledge, they have a serious problem.

Intellectual dishonesty is, on the other hand, something to be despised. It means that the person has decided to reject or accept any argument, regardless of its merits, based purely on the fact as to whether it supports their own position or not. They have decided to throw truth out the window if need be to further their agenda.

 

Janus,

Do you not find it interesting and fun to see how MK will respond to even the soundest mathematically supported arguments? I personally have lost any hope that he will ever say "Hey guys, you know, your arguments are correct".

I can't wait to see the response to my gravitational gradient argument...