by Czerno » Mon Aug 10, 2009 8:35 pm
Neufer : Just curious, does your estimation of the drift take nonlinear [O(t²) and over] terms in account ? Is the recession speed increasing or decreasing by the way ? In any case the variation is very slow at the scale of the age of mankind, maybe even at the scale of the age, and probable lifetime, of the Planet. Makes the coincidence of sizes the more remarkable.
And no, Apodman, with all due respect, you can't seriously put "wandering stars" (Venus and Mercury) in the same bucket as the Sun and the Moon.
@Chris & al : I do not believe in the explicative virtue of the s-c "anthropic principle" BTW, I already posted sometime against that notion. Did you fail to notice the quotes and smileys in my previous post ? I don't really need a lesson in a-priori, conditional, or observed probabilities either - thank you. However I do believe that apparent coincidences need to be examined the more carefully as they seem extraordinary, and this coincidence of angular diameters, as seen from our perspective, is almost to good to be fortuitous. Alright, correlations to, e g, our existence here, are difficult to devise - but don't sweep the idea too fast. Remember the "principle" of the bread that always falls from the table on its buttered side... that looked like nonsense or a philosophical joke, at best, and is very well explained by relations between the fundamental physical constants (which govern gravity, our size hence also the height of tables and the number of half turns the bread slice makes in its fall) ?
Neufer : Just curious, does your estimation of the drift take nonlinear [O(t²) and over] terms in account ? Is the recession speed increasing or decreasing by the way ? In any case the variation is very slow at the scale of the age of mankind, maybe even at the scale of the age, and probable lifetime, of the Planet. Makes the coincidence of sizes the more remarkable.
And no, Apodman, with all due respect, you can't seriously put "wandering stars" (Venus and Mercury) in the same bucket as the Sun and the Moon.
@Chris & al : I do not believe in the explicative virtue of the s-c "anthropic principle" BTW, I already posted sometime against that notion. Did you fail to notice the quotes and smileys in my previous post ? I don't really need a lesson in a-priori, conditional, or observed probabilities either - thank you. However I do believe that apparent coincidences need to be examined the more carefully as they seem extraordinary, and this coincidence of angular diameters, as seen from our perspective, is almost to good to be fortuitous. Alright, correlations to, e g, our existence here, are difficult to devise - but don't sweep the idea too fast. Remember the "principle" of the bread that always falls from the table on its buttered side... that looked like nonsense or a philosophical joke, at best, and is very well explained by relations between the fundamental physical constants (which govern gravity, our size hence also the height of tables and the number of half turns the bread slice makes in its fall) ?