At 05:36 PM 12/14/2012, John Berry wrote:
I have read this before.
Surely the answer could be established (if not by any other means)
by studying the rate of acceleration and deceleration of rising and
falling objects in video on the moon.
Besides the bunny hoping astronautics there are various other
things, the trajectory of the sand kicked up by the lunar buggy if
it can be seen clearly enough.
So it should be easy albeit it does require someone with some
mathematical skill which I don't have.
The problem is that the Great Fake Moon Landing Conspiracy would
surely have slowed those videos down appropriately. To truly resolve
this, aside from making a knee-jerk assumption as to who is wearing a
tin-foil hat, I suggest looking at pre-NASA estimations of the Moon's
mass. There is a plot of these at page 66 of the review that I cited.
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/2002Obs...122...61H/0000061.000.html
Essentially, the Earth/Moon mass ratio had settled, through the use
of increasingly accurate techniques, at about 81 by 1880. (And before
that, there were mixed results, between about 80 and almost 90. Not
much less. Because we also know the size of the Moon, we can then
calculate the gravity ratio.
Notice: the "neutral point" is a *calculation* that falls out from
the distance between the Earth and Moon and the mass ratio. That
neutral point is not an observation. If anyone spoke about a neutral
point, they were using calculations, either made themselves or by
someone else. Trying to estimate the Moon's mass, and thus the
gravity, from where the neutral point is located is backwards.
Yes, the videos should enable an extimate of gravity at the Moon's
surface. All we need to know is the apogee height, and how long it
took. If light objects accelerate as rapidy as heavy ones (like dust
vs spacesuited men), that indicates a vacuum.
But a skillful fake video is certainly not beyond the capacity of a
well-funded organization. Hence the reliance I'm suggesting on prior sources.
Of course, the paper cited above is hosted on the SAO/NASA
Astrophysics Data System (ADS). So one who believes in the conspiracy
could then assert that this is all nonsense.
Except it can be checked. The paper is thoroughly referenced to old
sources. Someone who believes in the conspiracy now has a splendid
opportunity to prove it. Just look up those sources. If they are all
missing, OMG!
One of the problems with a paranoid theory is that one can take each
piece of evidence and demonstrate that it is entirely bogus, that the
real evidence, relating to the issue raised, points in the other
direction. But the theorist has developed ten reasons for believing
the theory, and if you shoot one down, why, they remain confident.
After all, there are nine other reasons. And if you go through this
with another "reason," they same thing happens, only there is a
peculiar phenomenon. They don't remember what they don't understand,
that's actually normal. So at this pint they once again have the
comfort of nine other reasons. Not eight. The number does not decline.
I once went through this process with the fellow who "discovered" the
so-called "miracle of the nineteen in the Qur'an. He had an
idiosyncratic belief that the direction of Mecca was southerly from
Tucson. (He made a big deal out of it, for him, that nearly everyone
else was praying in a northerly direction was a proof of how astray
they were.) He had ten arguments. I went through them all, and each
time -- the guy actually was not stupid -- he granted that his
argument was defective. When we came to the end, he trotted out one
more argument: God had told him.
This, actually, led to his assassination. Long story. Totally
unnecessary, except he really did believe what he'd invented, and ...
God had told him he was right. Tough to answer that argument, eh?
Years later, his followers were still using those defective
arguments, and, of course they believed that God had told him.
Personally, I wonder why God would use defective arguments, why God
would need to argue at all. Of course, God did not give him the
arguments, he made them up, and we don't actually know what God
actually said to him (if anything). Maybe he misunderstood!
