Astronomy…
So many things in the universe work out just perfectly. For example the during an eclipse, the penumbra just barely covers the moon. Things like gravity always move uniformly in three directions. A year is always the same length, the moon’s period is always the same. There are many more subtle examples that I don’t want to list here.
My question is (and I am going to assume that some sort of God made the universe), with all of these other things working out perfectly, why doesn’t the # of moon orbits in a year work out evenly. Let me explain.
The moon orbits the earth in like 29.5 days (the number varies depending on your source) . Yet a year is 365.25 days. 365.25/29.5 (/28) will never be a whole #. This doesn’t make sense. It would seem that God would make this more exact and perfect. The Egyptians used to have a calender with months that corresponded to the moon (at least for religion). They new this wasn’t right (they used a different calendar for economic things). One of the jobs of the pharaoh was to add an extra month in every 3-4 years to keep the calendars aligned.
You would think that with all the other majesty of the universe, the moon with orbit with the a consistency that would work to give use perfect months. Oh well.
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Just to prove how much I care:
. Actually, in my opinion, the moon shows how imperfect everything is. I mean… sure the moon’s period stays the same, but relative to what? If it’s relative to just the Earth, one period is a sidereal month. But relative to the sun too, the moon has more to travel to catch up to where it was before… that’s a synodic month. It looks nice and purty, but the numbers are all screwy. And that’s the beauty of it! It’d be a little too suspicious if all the universal constants and such were integers…
Nothing is perfect… if you’re talking about a solar eclipse, 60% of the time, the moon appears too small to cover the whole sun… so it’s annular. And 40% of the time it’s too big… Even if it was the right size, the valleys on the moon would make it obvious that it’s not perfect, look up Bailey’s beads :] As for lunar eclipses, they always seem perfect because the Earth is much bigger – as you may already know
Regarding your “It would seem that God would make this more exact and perfect” comment – indeed it would! So what does that suggest?
Anyway, signing off to finish homework. Just thought I’d enlighten you there… love the posts. Keep them coming ^_^