Hé All,

In the previous discussion Pompeii in the middle Ages?, Byrd wrote:

Also, I've never heard of the "Delta T problem", and when I look for it in conjunction with the moon, I don't see that scientists have any such problem listed that they're observing or worrying about. Is this a real conundrum, or simply a "discovery" by someone who doesn't actually know much about physics (as the sites I see based on calendrical items seem to be) and don't know much about orbital mechanics.

So you don't know much about orbital mechanics?
Well you are in good company, for most historians don't have a clue either.

But Fomenko is a brilliant mathematician (he really is!!) and knows how to deal with celestial mechanics. Alas, he doesn't have a clue when it comes to history (although he thinks he does).

Now about the "Delta-T problem", maybe it is more my own terminology than it is an accepted scientific one. I'll try to explain what it is all about.

The standard for our quantity 'time' is (or better was*) related to the rotation of the earth.
The mechanics of the Earth-Moon(-Sun) system are very complicated and still not fully understood by science.
Gravitational and non-gravitational forces are acting within the system. Non-gravitational forces like tidal friction can not be quantified good enough. The existing theories of tidal friction are still inadequate.

Observations of the rotation of the earth have shown that earth is slowing down (at the same time the rotation of the Moon is accelerating).

Delta-T is defined as the difference between Terrestrial Dynamic Time and Universal Time (Delta-T = TDT – UT) and as such is a measure of the rotation of the Earth.
If Earth’s rotation would be uniform, than Delta-T would be a constant. But it is not!

Now how do we know how fast the Earth rotated in let’s say 1758 or in 1832?

To measure the rotation of the Earth we need accurate observations of solar and lunar eclipses and star occultations. These accurate observations are available approximately from 1600 onwards, since the invention of the telescope.
But we need to go much further back in time to get a clear picture.
For this reason scientists have studied hundreds of ancient eclipses and occultations in early Chinese, European and Arabic records.

The study by Robert R. Newton during the early 1970’s was the most recent one around the time Fomenko started to formulate his theory and he relied heavily on this study.

From his analyses R.R. Newton concluded that some behaviour of the celestial system before ca. 700 CE seemed to be different from the present.

Newton’s proposal to solve the problem was a hypothetical ‘square wave’ in the accelerations that lasted from about 700 to 1300 CE. (During that timeperiod the accelerations differed from those before and after by a factor 5). ^)

Fomenko came up with a whole different explanation of the data. He claimed that all dating before 1300 CE must be seriously wrong!

As far as the physics are concerned this is a valid proposal! It solves the detected problem.
But the next thing is: how do you prove it right!

This is were the pseudoscience begins, because he has to turn over a lot of what is known about the history of antiquity and the Middle Ages!

To do so he heavily leans on complicated statistics to show that all dynasties / kinglists from the antiquities and Middle Ages really are reflections of later ones.

The statistics are formidable! (Like I said before: he is a brilliant mathematician.)
But he seems to mess around a lot with the datasets: ignoring rulers, combining rulers into one, reversing the sequence of rulers and such.

And he has to claim that almost all of the ancient records are falsifications and he denies the validity of dating methods such as C14 and dendrochonology.

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As I compiled this explanation mostly from memory, it is possible that not everything is quite correct. If someone spotted mistakes, he is wholeheartedly invited to suggest corrections!

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Regards,
Jeff

*) Sometime during the 1950's the unit of time became officially related to certain atomic qualities and we use atomic clocks keep our time.

^) I don’t think Newton’s ideas were generally accepted at that time.


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Science: An orderly arrangement of what at the moment seem to be facts.
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