MOON AND TIDES.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 52, 2 March 1929, Page 1 (Supplement)

MOON AND TIDES.

A FALLACY OF SCIENTISTS * WHOLE THEORY WRONG. (By V. G. LENTON.) To one who has been on friendly terms with some of the most eminent men of science, and who has had the opportunity of discussing scientific questions with many great savants, it does not seem at all preposterous to suggest that our leading lights, in many cases, seem to cherish absolute fallacies, and hold them as tenets of their faith. One such fallacy relates to the tides. As a nation of sailors, we all claim to know what are the tides, and we all believe that their ebb and flow coincide with certain phases in conjunction with the sun, earth and moon. Not so very long ago, Sir Oliver Lioflge, in order to stress a point 7n ravour of Sir George Darwin's theory of the earth's retardation, insisted again that the moan was the main cause of tides, and that they acted as a brake on the revolution of our globe on its axis. Now, is that really a fact? I claim that the whole theory of the moon causing the tide is a fallacy! It was first suggested, 24 centuries ago, by Demoerites, the Athenean philosopher, and *ince then it has been accepted as gospel truth. Yet, no one seems to be willing to explain why the tides should, in the Atlantic, coincide with the moon's movement around the earth —with a difference of three and a-half hours —and why, in the Pacific Ocean, they should last twice as long. On the Atlantic we have twelve-hour tides; on the Pacific they last twentyfour hours. There are no tides, or small ones only, in the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean Sea, but the fact has been observed of light tidal effects on the Great Lakes of America, and even on the Geneva Lake. Hoon and Atmosphere. To explain the tides, scientists tell us that the attraction of the moon raises the water in oceans about three feet, and lets it fall again. If that were so, there woruld be such a rush of •waters and such a current as would render navigation impossible. And then, if the moon's attraction does raise the water, why does it not disturb and raise the atmosphere, the air we breathe, considering that the air's specific weight is one-thousandth of that of water? I

Elie de Bourmont, the French scientist, some sixty years ago suggested that the moon waß, toy periods, responsible for the greater prevalence of dry and' wet seasons. He explained that the moon rises more or less on our horizon by regular periods, and that when low on the horizon we had a dry season; when hign, we had a wet season. This seemed plausible, but meteorological studies since that time have centralised on the cyclone and anti-cyclone theories, and scientists have dropped de Bourmont's suggestion.

Now, the French scientist may have been right or wrong, but he did one thing; he called attention to the fact that the attraction of the moon influenced atmosphere to a certain extent, to such a slight extent as to cause a concentration of clouds in certain regions. In that case, if the moon's attraction on the air is so slight, how can it raise the waters of the oceans in order to cause the tides?

There is another point. Our oceans follow the curvature of the earth; at all points the level of the sea is at the same distance from the centre of the earth. The greatest depth of the -ocean represents not more than one thousandth part of the radius. The Himalaya Mountains, on a globe of four feet in diameter, would represent on an accurate scale about the height of one twenty-fifth of an inch. The greatest depths of the sea do not exceed this proportion. How can the mass of ocean waters —so small compared to that of the earth—act as a brake on the centrifugal speed of a body, the average specific weight of which is about twice that of water? Reasoning in that manner, it becomes obvious that the ocean waters cannot retard the earth's movement, and that the moon cannot attract them to cause the tides. The moon could not move a cloud in our atmosphere were it not for the effects of heat radiation from the earth. Merely a Ripple. The tides, as a matter of fact, arc merely a ripple, of gigantic size, but only a ripple, such as these raised in a pond, when a stone is thrown therein. And the cause of the ripple is centrifugal force' of the earth itself. This explains why engineers who have attempted to capture the power of the tides, have always failed to do so; there is no power! there is no force! The tide is a molecular transmission in a highly elastic body, of the effect of centrifugal force on the deepest layers of water in the oceans. Those deep waters, by the effect of pressure, are at a constant temperature, and thereby cannot expand. They act like a hard core on the more elastic waters that surround them, and that transmit the pressure xeoaived, repeatedly, as in

regular spasms, and these spasms must be regular, Tor one fundamental reason: because they arc controlled as by a pendulum action. Place yourself, in thought, at the centre of the world, and the pendulum action of tides will be clear to you. This explains why the Atlantic has twelve hour tides and the Pacific Ocean twentyfour hour tides. The relative width or extent of those oceans being as two to one in dimensions, the swing of the pendulum, of the molecular displacements, of the ripple, is twice as long in one ocean as in the other! There is a distinct proof of this. In 1963, an earthquake in Peru gave rise to a tidal wave, and it happened that, at the same time, a naval officer observed in Tahiti, several enormous waves rising to about forty feet and extending over live miles. The shock originated in Peru had been transmitted through the water of the Pacific Ocean in seven hours, at a speed of 4.50 miles an hour. The same shock was observed in Sydney. N.S.W., the same day, when the speed had been reduced to 250 miles an hour. The shock was also felt in .lamaica. in the Atlantic Ocean, by a tidal wave in the rivers. When scientists discuss the tides they apparently forget that Sir Isaac Newton, when laying down the law of universal gravitation, especially insisted on the action of the attraction force and the centrifugal force. Nowadays our savants insist only on the attraction force, leaving the centrifugal force aside. But it will be readily understood tha% at solstices, for instance, when the earth is at its nearest to the sun, or at periods when the moon is nearest the earth, the seasons of equinoxical tides, or the regular fortnightly succession of neap and high tides, are not only and exclusively caused by the greater attraction of the s«n or of the moon. If there is an equilibrium of forces—without which our relative positions in space would not be maintained— it stands to reason that the centrifugal force must in some way counteract the greater attraction. That is why the tides rise higher at certain periods!