An Exploration Of Planetary Orbital Geometry (part 1)
Many appreciate the sun has an impact on climate but what about the planets? In this series I fashion a tin foil hat and go rummaging in phase space
Back in my old government laboratory a few decades ago we used the term ‘blue skies’ to describe any research that was highly speculative, wild and potentially wacko. Being government suits we didn’t have much time for that sort of thing and recipients of the modest internal grants that were available were generally treated with suspicion. Tea room talk always kicked-off with, “but why do you want to study that?”, quickly followed by, “isn’t that going to be a spectacular waste of your time?” As a recipient of such a grant for three years running I avoided the tea room and quietly undertook my work behind a closed office door. Nobody knew what I was doing, and even my line manager only had a vague idea. What made matters worse is that my final report was classified as confidential, which meant it collected dust in a locked filing cabinet.
Today I’m going to launch another blue skies project but this time I’m going to share my results as well as spend a great deal of time in the tea room! The original idea is not mine and merely floated into my conscious awareness after a climate-flavoured contact mentioned the possibility of a planetary aspect to climate change: they’d noticed a correspondence between the positioning of the gas giants and certain long-term swings in ocean currents, jet streams and the weather. I liked the idea but couldn’t see how I could follow through with statistical jiggery-pokery until a few days ago.
I guess what had put my mind into the right gear was all this spectral analysis stuff. As I sat fiddling in my studio I realised I could convert planetary orbits into waveforms representing angular phase over time. These could then be combined to produce time series data representing the dance of the planets over the period, say, 1850 – 2022.
The key to this is phase space and Wiki offers a smashing little entry that can be found here. Phase space might sound like a scary concept but all we are doing is turning something that goes up and down (an oscillator) into something that goes round and round. Put the concept into reverse gear and we can turn something that goes round and round into something that goes up and down.