[geocentrism] Re: Negative parallax
- From: "Dr. Neville Jones" <ntj005@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 13:56:17 +0100 (BST)
Dear All,
I have only just read this response from Alan Griffin's brother regarding the
very high proportion of negative parallax values in certain catalogues.
If we accept that statistical, or measurement, error is not the primary cause
of these negative values, then we are left with two possibilities: either the
whole catalogue is rubbish, or a significant number of actual parallax
observations are really negative.
Personally, I would find it "perverse" to propound the former, which reminds me
of Eddington discarding 60% of his eclipse observations because they did not
fit in with his preconceived notion that Einstein's general relativity needed
to be "proved."
This leaves us with the second possibility, that a very high percentage (46%)
are, in all likelihood, really negative. The question then is, "why are they
negative?" Any takers?
I think, though, that we can all see why anyone who is desperate to defend a
heliocentric model would be a little touchy about this little-known fact
concerning a phenomenon that is widely circulated as being "proof" of the
system they support.
Neville.
Alan Griffin <ajg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 24 Jul, Dr. Neville Jones wrote:
>
> Now, having digressed over there, could we have a response to the
> negative parallax issue, since you hold parallax as some sort of "proof"
> of the World's alleged yearly orbit about the Sun, please?
I asked my brother, and here is his reply!:
Dear Alan,
The Tycho catalogue is a sort-of adjunct to the Hipparcos catalogue -
they were made from data obtained at the same time by different
instruments on the same satellite, and are jointly called 'The Hipparcos
and Tycho Catalogues'. The principal *astrometric* catalogue is the
Hipparcos one; the Tycho catalogue was mainly intended for photometry,
although the people who worked up the results did reduce the astrometric
data from it as well. Your correspondent is merely being perverse in
looking at parallaxes in the Tycho catalogue instead of in the Hipparcos
one. The Tycho astrometry was not accurate enough to determine parallaxes
usefully for any but rather nearby stars. The standard errors of the
Tycho parallaxes are in most cases much larger than the parallaxes
themselves, so many of them appear to be negative. You will notice,
though, that there is still a majority that are positive. If the numbers
cited by your correspondent were merely random, they would follow Poisson
statistics and each of them would therefore have a statistical error equal
to the square root of the number itself. The difference between them
would have a statistical error equal to the quadratic sum of the errors of
the two numbers, and could be found more conveniently as the square root
of the sum of the numbers. The difference is 48657 and its standard error
is the square root of 572,857 which is 726. So there is a preponderance
of positive values at a level of significance corresponding to 67 standard
deviations, which would be a great deal more than enough to convince any
reasonable person - and that comes from the very data that your
correspondent is using to deny significance. Of course, if he looked at
the Hipparcos catalogue, where the errors are smaller than most of the
parallaxes, he would find a very different situation. You could direct
him, in particular, to Figures 3.2.7 and 3.2.8, where the numbers of
parallaxes are plotted against parallax in 1-millisecond bins.
Best wishes,
Roger
"There is this great difference between the works of men and the works of God,
that the same minute and searching investigation, which
displays the defects and imperfections of the one, brings out also the beauties
of the other." - Alexander Hislop, "The Two Babylons."
Website www.midclyth.supanet.com
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