What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Speaker Johnson
Pinging you on January 6 Tapes

Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?

We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)

Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)

A Political Statement

One of my stock jokes is to say, as I head off to the bathroom or washroom or restroom, “I’m going to go make a political statement.”

It certainly seems like urinating is a good way to make a statement about the YSM, and defecating works for politicians. Or the other way around is good too, though “#1” just never seems emphatic enough.

Maybe “#1” is just being polite, and “#2” is telling the fixtures what you really think.

Anyhow, I pretty much do plan to be polite to RINOs that electioneer or fundraise. I’ll tell them, Sorry, but I need to GO Pee…

Language Warning

In the next piece I had to discuss a particular topic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t discuss it without naming it. Therefore I apologize in advance for having to do so, and apologize to anyone offended by the sight of the name.

RINO McDaniel

RINO McDaniel continues to infest the GOP. But RINO McDaniel isn’t the problem.

Let me be crystal clear on this, RINO McDaniel is a lower-than-whale-shit, piss guzzling ratfucking shit eating traitorous rancid syphillitic cunt. Her worth as a human being is substantially less than zero, any oxygen sucked into her lungs is wasted, and it would be, no matter what job she had.

I fear I haven’t been clear enough, but that will have to suffice.

But she is not the problem…or rather, she would not be a problem were it not for others. She’d still be as I have described, but we wouldn’t know who she is and would not care, because she could do no damage. She’d just be anonymous human refuse.

No, the real problem is the fact that a majority of the 168 top GOP people voted for her. And now that has happened five times so they cannot claim they didn’t know what she was.

In spite of the fact that under her “leadership” the party has deliberately sabotaged the will of its base, has deliberately refused to challenge blatant election fraud, had gone out of its way to ensure certain candidates do not get nominated, has diverted donor money to namby-pamby candidates who have all the electoral appeal of a puddle of dog vomit…and in general has done nothing whatsoever to help fix the problems that plague America.

However that last is to be expected; I cannot expect anyone who IS the problem to help FIX the problem.

RINO McDaniel would be powerless without an entire party leadership of the same mind as her. They want this dismal performance; they want to ignore the party base.

If she were to drop dead this instant, it would solve nothing as someone just like her would be elected by those same pustulous people.

According to Charlie Kirk, about 55 people voted against her, 10-12 wanted something different but were too chickenshit to do the right thing, and roughly 100 people voted for her enthusiastically, and even had the unmitigated gall to complain to Kirk about US. Fuck ’em. Rusty 12 gauge bore brushes would be too good for these arrogant pricks and cunts.

Every single one of those hundred is just as bad as she is. In other words, they are all worse than I described at the beginning of this piece. And no doubt those people in turn have people who supported them to be state party chairs and whateveritis they call the other two people from each state and territory who were voting.

It’s time to face up to the fact that the Republican party is effectively owned by the shit-eating RINOs. We’ve got more work to do, a lot more work, to make the GOP an instrument for the restoration of the United States of America. And that’s in addition to cleaning up our elections.

There’s no point in cleaning up elections just to elect ratfucking RINOs.

OK, hopefully now you will have some inkling of my true attitude towards RINOs. Sorry that words were inadequate to give you the full picture.

The Real Fascist is His Fraudulency Joe Biden*

*Or whoever has his hand rammed up that meat puppet’s ass.

Brandon (which I will use as a term for whoever is the power behind the Porcelain Throne) has thrown down the gauntlet…but in a way where most of America will never see it. The networks didn’t carry his tirade. CNN air brushed it (or whatever you call editing the red background) for its five viewers (who aren’t trapped in airports).

Luckily for me I live in Colorado, and therefore, despite my best efforts, I probably didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

Of course, for this purpose who I actually did try to vote for will be essential, and they undoubtedly know.

Come and get us, asswipes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h6ZZ28QtX4

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Small Government?

Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.

This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.

No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.

World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.

So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.

Political Science In Summation

It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).

A Few Things We Cannot Blame on His Fraudulency

I am pretty sure Joe Biden had nothing whatsoever to do with the 30 Years War that ran from 1618-1648 and probably killed about a third of the people then living in what is now Germany.

Nor did he cause the collapse of either Roman empire (Western, 476 CE, Eastern 1453 CE). Nor the ignominious failure of most of the Crusades. Nor the collapse of Bronze Age civilization around 1200 BCE (including the collapse of the Minoans and the blowup of Santorini).

However, my utter lack of ability to imagine how he could possibly be responsible for these things is not a valid argument against them, so I await correction if appropriate.

His Truth?

Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.

I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.

But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.

Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.

But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

(Paper) Spot Prices

Kitco “Ask” prices. Last week:

Gold $2,014.20
Silver $23.49
Platinum $915.00
Palladium $972.00
Rhodium $4,850.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $2,036.30
Silver $23.01
Platinum $909.00
Palladium $956.00
Rhodium $5,000.00

Gold continues to recover from the big dip it took a week and a half ago. Everything else seems to be struggling. Friday was an up day for everything, but silver, platinum and palladium are all down since last week.

Mercury

Uh, no. I meant:

That looks an awful lot like the Moon, doesn’t it?

Well, it’s not. This is a photograph of Mercury, taken by the MESSENGER probe in 2008. (Apparently the message to be delivered had to be shouted; the probe’s name is spelled in ALL CAPS.)

Mercury is covered in craters, indicating it’s had a long, violent past with lots of meteor impacts. So has every other body in the solar system, but in the case of larger planets, various things erase the old craters (in our case, erosion and plate tectonics–none of our ocean floors, for instance, are more than 300 million years old). We see signs here of the “late heavy bombardment” four billion years ago. So it’s going to be pretty desolate looking up close.

To us here on Earth Mercury appears as a white point of light low in the sky at sunset or sunrise, close to the Sun. This diagram comparing the geometry of Venus and Mercury’s orbits (as seen from here on Earth) shows many of the reasons why:

Not only is Mercury constrained to be close to the Sun because of its orbit, but if the plane of its orbit is tilted at an oblique angle to the horizon, it’s going to set that much sooner, so that even when Mercury is at “maximum elongation” (farthest from the sun as seen from Earth), you don’t have much time to look at it. Add to this the fact that you’re looking sideways through Earth’s atmosphere, which is going to be very turbulent right after sunset…and it’s hard to see anything worthwhile from Earth based observatories. Those “maximum elongations” occur on average every 115.8 days. Mercury orbits the Sun in 88 days, but Earth is moving too and so it takes another 28 days or so for Mercury to “lap” the Earth. That same interval must elapse between elongations (where Mercury is about a quarter lap behind Earth), too.

Also, in a telescope, Mercury will exhibit phases like the Moon does, being a “half moon” at elongations, a crescent just before (or after) it laps us, and full (but small because of the greater distance) when it’s near the opposite side of the sun. (The diagram shows this too.) It was Galileo’s telescopic observations of Mercury and Venus’s phases that proved that Venus and Mercury orbit the Sun and not the Earth.

Because Mercury sometimes appeared in the morning sky, just before sunrise, and sometimes in the evening sky, just after sunset, it took a while for us to twig that both occurrences were the same object. The Greeks had figured it out by about 350 BCE. (I can almost imagine the old jokes about how these two things were never seen in the same place at the same time…)

Putting an orbiter around Mercury was quite an achievement. In terms of “delta V”, the change in velocity we need to impart to a spacecraft to get it where we want to go, a flyby of Mercury is more difficult than a flyby of Neptune. Delta V directly affects the size and power of the rocket needed. For instance, imagine two spacecraft, one double the mass of the other, going on the same mission. They both have to have the same delta v, but (as one likely intuits) the heavier one will require twice as much rocket fuel. This is in part why NASA and other space agencies shave milligrams off of spacecraft any way they can. The bigger reason, though, comes in when you imagine two identical-mass spacecraft going on two different missions, one with twice the delta-v of the other. Let’s say one of them has a delta v of 30 km/sec and the other has a delta v of 15 km/sec. In this case your intuition fails you. The higher delta-v mission doesn’t require twice the fuel, it requires much more than that. Why? Because for that 30 km/sec mission, the first 15 km/sec of delta v doesn’t just occur to the probe, but to all the fuel it needs to take with it to do the last 15 km/sec of delta v. And we already know what the last 15 km/second takes–the bigass rocket it took to send the other mission on its way! As you can imagine, taking another kilogram off the weight of that payload reduces the fuel required by a lot.

So–excuse that digression, but it’s the fundamental bugbear of space travel–getting to Mercury is hard. Why?

Let’s compare it to going to Jupiter. Jupiter is much further away than Mercury. At closest approach Jupiter is 4.2 AUs away. Mercury is 0.6 AUs away, seven times closer. [And if you don’t recall, an AU–astronomical unit–is our solar system “yardstick” and is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, roughly 150 million kilometers/93 million miles.]

To make the trip to either planet, you must first break free of Earth’s gravity. That’s the same in both cases, 12.6 km/sec. At that point your spacecraft is in orbit about the Sun, but it’s likely to be an orbit rather similar to Earth’s orbit. From this point, things diverge. To go to Jupiter, and just fly by, you need 3.36 km/sec more. To fly by Neptune, you need 5.39 km/sec instead.

To go inwards, to Venus and Mercury, you have to slow the spacecraft down relative to the Sun, so that the other side of its orbit gets closer to the Sun than we are. Which means we must work against Earth’s orbital motion. In the most extreme case, if we want to drop something into the Sun, we must cancel the entire orbital motion of the Earth, (and that’s after breaking free of Earth’s gravity to begin with). Mercury is not that bad, but merely to intercept it takes an additional 8.65 km/sec, compared to the 5.39 km/second to go to Neptune.

Add to this the fact that we don’t just want to fly by Mercury, but go into orbit around it. Add 1.22 km/second for that.

Our total is 12.6 + 8.65 + 1.22 = 22.47 km/sec (check me I did that in my head). New Horizons only needed 16 km/sec to go to Pluto.

We couldn’t do that without cheating, or rather by getting clever. We made no less than six gravity assists, which cost no fuel but require precise timing, to put MESSENGER into orbit around Mercury. The total mileage of the trip was 7.9 billion kilometers–further than a straight line to Pluto, about 53 AUs.

In the comments here https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/45617/why-is-it-easier-to-escape-the-solar-system-than-get-to-mercury-or-the-sun is a “subway map.”

Start at the bottom and add up numbers to see how hard it is to get to various bodies of the solar system, on intercept (flyby), or into orbit, or to actually land. (And the same applies in the reverse direction, if you want a round trip from landing, back to Earth.) Look at how much it takes to “land” on Jupiter (not that there’s anything to land on)! 45 km/sec just for the last step, to drop out of Jovian orbit! That alone blows everything we’ve ever done in the past out of the water.

But enough talk of going there, how about we look at the planet itself?

Well, sure but let’s sneak up on it.

That diagram I just pasted in shows a key attribute of Mercury, but it’s a bit obscured. The planets’ orbits are shown at a bit of an oblique angle, making them look elliptical, but notice that in the case of Earth (blue) and Venus (cyan) the Sun is at the center of the drawn ellipses. Since the Sun must be at one of the two foci of a planet’s orbit, that tells you those orbits are actually pretty close to circular and they only look like ellipses because of perspective. But the Sun is visibly off center in the Mercury ellipse…which means it’s still an obvious ellipse even when not seen at an oblique angle.

Here’s a face-on diagram, which also includes Mars:

Mercury’s orbit still looks pretty circular, but you can see it’s just a tiny bit flattened along a line running from 1 to 7 o’clock. But the big tell is that the Sun is off center by an obvious amount, indicating the two foci of that ellipse are actually pretty far apart. Venus, on the other hand is almost perfectly centered on the Sun (it has the most circular orbit of any planet). Earth is a bit off center, Mars is more so. But Mercury is in the most eccentric orbit of any planet, and that has consequences.

Mercury zips around the Sun in 88 Earth days, and its closest/furthest approaches to the Sun are 0.3075 AU and 0.4667 AU, in other words at its farthest it’s over 50 percent further away from the Sun. Its average orbital speed is 47.36 km/sec (compare to Earth’s 29.7 km/sec or so). But it’s going to move considerably more slowly at aphelion (farthest distance from the sun) and considerably faster at perihelion (closest distance to the sun), 39.1 km/sec and 58.65 km/sec respectively. This might seem kind of boring, but it is going to matter.

Mercury itself is the smallest of the 8 currently-recognized planets in our solar system, its mass is 0.055 that of Earth (barely more than 1/20th) and its diameter is 4,480 km (compare to Earth at 12,700 km). In fact there are moons in our solar system that are bigger than Mercury.

We could not measure the mass of Mercury very accurately at all until we could send a spacecraft (Mariner 10, in the mid 1970s) on a flyby and measure how much the spacecraft’s trajectory bent as it flew by. That’s because Mercury doesn’t have any natural satellites (at least none big enough that we’ve been able to detect them). A natural satellite would give us the mass of the planet instantly and accurately based on its distance from the planet and its orbital period. Before spacecraft, we knew Neptune’s mass far better than we knew Mercury’s mass.

But once we knew Mercury’s mass, we could compute its average density (mass divided by volume), and that’s 5.427 grams per cubic centimeter. (Water is 1.0, generic rocks are about 3, iron is close to 8.) Earth’s is slightly higher at 5.513. These numbers tell us right off the bat that both planets contain a lot of metal in them, and both have cores of iron. But actually, Mercury is more impressive than Earth despite the numbers. Because in both cases, the planet’s innards are compressed under the weight of the outer layers (is “outtards” a word?). Earth, being almost 20 times more massive, is going to be a lot more compressed deep inside than is Mercury. So if, in spite of much more compression Earth is just barely more dense on average than Mercury, that tells you that Mercury’s iron core is much bigger, in comparison to the planet, than is Earth’s.

And we know some of that iron is molten, because Mercury has a magnetic field.

If you look at this diagram, the molten outer core of Mercury is much thicker, comparatively speaking, than our is, and the rocky mantle is thinner.

And also just like with diagram’s of Earth’s magnetic field, you’ll see that the solar wind gets deflected by the magnetic field. So people on the surface of Mercury wouldn’t be getting pelted by that kind of radiation.

But that’s poor consolation. It’s a shitty place to be for other reasons.

Mercury has very little atmosphere. And that’s largely because it’s hot. No surprise given how much closer to the Sun it is. But them, because it doesn’t have an atmosphere, there’s nothing to insulate the dark or nighttime side, so the nighttime side of Mercury can get quite cool. At the equator, Mercury can reach 427 °C in the daytime, but it cools to -173 °C at nighttime. At 85 °N latitude, it’s a still-intolerable 107°C in daytime and -193 °C at night. The average temperatures at these two places, 67 and -73 °C, almost seem tolerable by comparison. I don’t have info for any other latitudes, but there must be one in the middle somewhere with an average of 20 °C or so, room temperature to us Earthlings.

And that could be useful. Imagine being in a place on Mercury just a bit after sunset, before it has cooled off too much. If you could just move around enough to always be “just after sunset” or “just before sunrise” you might be able to build a base without busting the national budget just running the climate control.

That sounds a lot harder than it is, because Mercury rotates very slowly.

[OK…”tidal effects” time! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!]

Astronomers who managed to see something on Mercury were pretty confident it was tidally locked to the Sun…i.e., it always kept the same side facing the Sun, just like the Moon keeps the same side facing Earth. It turns out that that wasn’t true, but looked that way, because by coincidence every time they could observe Mercury well enough to get some hint of surface markings, it sure enough did have the same orientation to us and the Sun.

How does this happen? How do tidal effects cause this sort of thing?

Imagine the Sun off the bottom of that diagram, and some planet being pulled out of shape by the Sun’s tidal effects on the planet. The planet gets ever so slightly ellipsoidal (rugby ball shaped), but it’s cocked. The Sun will actually tug on the bulge closest to it, trying to force it to “line up.” The effect is to slow the planet’s rotation down, so that the bulge has time to settle directly in line with the Sun. And indeed if you look at our Moon (for comparison) it tends to be bulged on a line towards/away from Earth. Tidal effects pin that in place.

The problem was when they did the calculations, the Sun’s effect on Mercury shouldn’t be as strong as the Earth’s effect on the moon. So the real answer is that Mercury ends up being partially locked to the Sun.

With the Earth and the Moon, someone looking at the system from a “God’s Eye View” would see that the Moon rotates, relative to the stars, exactly as fast as it orbits the Earth. The net effect is the Moon rotates just fast enough that it always presents the same side to Earth.

Looking at Mercury, it actually rotates 1 1/2 times every time it goes around the Sun. So, at perihelion (closest approach to the Sun), Mercury will present one side to the Sun. The next time it’s at perihelion, it presents the opposite side to the Sun. Then the next time, it’s presenting the original side once again.

Here’s a diagram, showing two orbits of Mercury around the Sun, starting at 6 o’clock (position 1, arrow pointing to the Sun, it’s “noon”) and moving counter-clockwise (always counterclockwise!). At position 4 (half an orbit later), the arrow has gone through 3/4 of a turn compared to you, but compared to the Sun, it’s only now gone throug 1/4 of a turn and now it’s sunset there. Another half orbit, position 7, and the arrow has gone 1 1/2 times around (to you) but the arrow is now at midnight, pointing away from the Sun, for the first time since we started this. Another orbit, and the arrow spins 1 1/2 times (to you) or 1/2 of a time (as seen from the Sun, and we’re back at position 1.

This is a very stark example of the difference between a sidereal day (a rotation relative to the stars; 360 degrees in absolute terms), versus a synodic day (a rotation as seen from the Sun). The sidereal day is 56.6 earth days, the synodic day is 176 days, three times as long.

So Mercury is rotating a little too fast, still, to be tidally locked, or is it? By most scientists’ reckoning, this is actually a form of tidal lock–otherwise it’d be one heck of a coincidence!

Remember when I said that Mercury’s much higher than average speed near perihelion would matter? It matters here. It so happens that at that part of its orbit–and this is the part with the strongest tidal effect because it’s closest to the Sun–Mercury is moving at about the right speed to keep the same face towards the sun…for a while. What you’d see if you were standing at that red arrow is the Sun slowly climbing into the sky…but as it got near the meridian it would seem to slow down, stop, and hang there for much longer than you’d expect, and then it would speed up again and eventually set. The tidal effect is strongest when Mercury is closest to the Sun, and at that time it fakes a full-on tidal lock!

More info on tidal locking here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking (I barely scratched the surface).

56.6 days (relative to the stars) is a pretty slow rotation period, and Mercury is tiny. It turns out that its rotation speed at the equator is 10.892 kph or 6.8 mph. A long distance runner could conceivably run fast enough for quite some time, to get the stars to stand still from his point of view. But it’s far more interesting to try to keep up with the Sun (or keep ahead of it). But that’s easier; the sun on average seems to move 1/3 has fast as the stars.

So you can imagine a base, mounted on some sort of motorized platform doing less than 2 1/2 miles an hour on average, staying just ahead of the rising sun or just behind the setting sun. As long as it doesn’t break down, you’re in good shape.

But it’d be expensive to try. And who’s going to trust a motor under such harsh conditions, tens of millions of miles away from the repair shop?

That highly elliptical orbit of Mercury has one other consequence, one that affected us. If you draw a line through that ellipse the long way, that’s the “line of apsides” (the line from aphelion to perihelion). If there were only the Sun and Mercury in the solar system, that line should never move, according to Newton’s theory of Gravitation. However, there are other planets, and they do tug, slightly, on Mercury. That’s enough to shift the line of apsides slowly.

And this is indeed what we see. Measuring carefully, every century the line of apsides turns 574.1 arc-seconds in a century. (An arc-second is 1/3600th of a degree of arc.) That’s very slow, but it’s not zero.

In 1859, French astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier did the math. Exactly how much should the planets be mucking with Mercury’s line of apsides? He included the effects of all of the other planets, and the Sun’s equatorial bulge, and got an answer of 531.63 arc-seconds per century.

There was a 43.5 arc-second discrepancy.

Le Verrier had successfully predicted the existence of Neptune thirteen years earlier, by noting that Uranus’ orbital motion was being perturbed, first speeding up as it catches up to Neptune and is pulled on by it, then slowing down after it laps Neptune and is tugged back by it. This was a major triumph for the theory of gravitation; an effect that seemed “off” which should have made the theory doubtful, had actually been used to make a good prediction, making the theory stronger.

But what this means is that Le Verrier had a hammer, a very good one, and this problem with Mercury looked like another nail.

Le Verrier predicted that there was a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury, that would cause the line of apsides to move another 43.5 arc-seconds per century. This planet would be very close to the Sun, obviously, and very hot. The natural name for this given the Graeco-Roman mythological theme for planet names, was Vulcan after the god of the forge (Hephaestus to the Greeks). No, nothing to do with the Star Trek Vulcans. (In fact, this confusion got highlighted in one of the original Star Trek series’ episodes, where Spock has to explain to a 20th century Air Force officer that he’s not from that Vulcan.)

Astronomers looked in vain for Vulcan. It has never been seen, and almost certainly does not exist.

Fast forward to 1915 and a certain obscure scientist by the name of Albert Einstein is trying to work out an improved theory of gravitation. For it to make sense it had to resemble Newtonian gravitation under all normal circumstances, and only be different with extremely strong gravitational fields, stronger than anything we’d yet encountered.

But it turns out there’s a border case: close to the Sun, gravity is strong, just strong enough that the difference between Newton’s theory and Einstein’s idea might have a slight effect.

Einstein decided to see what the motion of Mercury would be like under his theory, as compared to Newton.

And he got a 43 1/2 arcsecond per century difference. When he got that answer, he later said, it was the happiest moment of his life. He had a possible explanation for that nagging problem of Mercury’s line of apsides! This was a very strong tell that he was on the right track. It would take more work to prove it, but that didn’t take long…four years in fact. (I tell that story elsewhere.)

So there you have it: Mercury in ancient lore, Mercury as a charred, bombarded cinder of a world, the solar system’s most extreme and slowest rotisserie, and Mercury as an object that helped open the door to our modern understanding of physics.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!