NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/talk/origins/16611

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-23 | 2.3 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!fedfil!news
From: [e-mail] (news)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Yet Another Saturn Myth Variant
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 23 Jan 93 14:34:46 GMT
References: <[e-mail]^<[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: HTE
Lines: 41

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Timothy Y. Chow) writes:

^In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Paul) writes:
^<Unfortunately, Ted has never played with an electromagnet.  Say one is hanging
^<from your ceiling, and you stick a hunk of metal to it.  Pull the metal away
^<about an inch, let it go, and it will jump right back up, defeating gravity.
^<This might even work at a foot away.  But, get it a couple of feet away, and
^<it will fall.  Why?  Gravity is much stronger than any known force _at a
^<distance_!  For Ted's explanation to work, there would have to be an
^<incredibly large "electro-magnetic" force at work, more powerful than any
^<now-known force.

^Gravity and electrostatic attraction both obey a 1/r^2 law, so to say that
^"Gravity is much stronger than any known force _at a distance_" is
^outrageously misleading, if not downright false.  What you really want to
^talk about is susceptibility/mass or charge/mass ratios of typical objects,
^because this is what decides whether gravitational or electromagnetic
^effects will dominate.
^
^The reason gravity dominates in astronomy is not because electromagnetic
^forces are "weaker" than gravity at large distances, but because most
^astronomical bodies have very little charge or magenetization compared to
^their mass.
^--

I assume that this may not have been the case prior to the flood and the
accompanying catastrophes.  It is known for instance that Etrurean pottery
often shows magnetism imparted from the earth's field which is far
greater than the earth's field could impart now.  Put the earth in the center
of two electromagnetic stars, a small binary such as Saturn/Jupiter in
which the partners had unequal electromagnetic fields, and the earth might
take up residence at the point at which all forces balanced, which I'd
assume would be closer to one of the two stars than to the other.  The
gravitational pull would certainly be uneven.



--
Ted Holden
HTE