ERGS BY ANY OTHER NAME ARE STILL AN EMBARRASSMENT

The omniscient God of Western civilization, as revealed in His inerrant text delivered to nomadic shepherds compromising the dry land ecology of the Sinai Desert some three millennia past, unaccountably put the Earth at the center of the solar system rather than assuming a Copernican perspective. He also omitted asteroids, comets, the occasional meteoroid, a few planets, cosmic rays, cosmic background radiation, galaxies, quasars, and Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams. His confluence throughout the substance of His Heaven would nominally dispose Him to a less parochial View, don't you think? Nevertheless, let us turn to Joshua 10:12-14, wherein God stops the sun in the sky so those same nomadic shepherds, now militant imperialists, do not get their collective butts smeared by the opposition as Sabbath falls and they must put down their weapons or face the wrath of a jealous, if somewhat muddled, deity.

Ignoring for a moment the sciolism of the sun indeed orbiting the Earth, let us cancel the rotational energy of the Earth to put the approach of that notable Friday evening on hold.

We turn to Section 14 of The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 85th Edition, a little support from high school kinematics, and a table of unit conversions. Remembering that rotational energy of an object, say planet Earth, is one half the product of its moment of inertia and the square of its angular velocity, we plug in the numbers to find that pinning the sun in the sky merely requires the worldwide deletion of 2.15x10³⁶ ergs, or their addition in counterpoint. We assume an identical addition to get things moving again after the Chosen People's victory.

Ergs are hard to grasp and exponentials are worse. Convert energy to matter, e=mc², to get 2.38 billion metric tons of rotational energy. Hmmmm.... Taken in granite, that is the whole of the five boroughs of New York City excavated to a depth of three feet. Leaving it as ergs, that is the total energy the Earth receives from the sun over a period of 39,760 years. One might suspect that there would have been repercussions, fore and aft, and perceptible felicitous displeasure re the tidal coupling of the Moon to the oceans. Remember the Moon? Were I God I would have served the Canaanites with an unlawful detainer and opted for cardiovascular infarcts or cerebrovascular hemorrhages, possibly global inguinal hernias (just for fun).

If we add rotational energy in counterpoint rather than removing it there is the phenomenon of heating, about 17 calories for each gram of everything (equal to twice the rotational energy). I presume that an afternoon's planetary temperature rise of 14 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit, average planetary density and specific heat nearly cancel) would have provoked some historically notable prolonged discomfort - and erupting volcanoes, in abundance.

Taking the inerrant Word at face value, stopping the Sun in its "orbit around the Earth" comes in at the usual (mv²)/2 for an equilibrium trajectory at 92.9 million miles. You can push and shove ellipses versus circles, but whatever rationalizations chip at the coefficient the exponential hovering above the ten hangs tight: 8.8x10⁴⁵ ergs, or New York excavated to a depth of not three feet, but sixteen times the mass of the asteroid Ceres or 13% of the mass of the Moon. You would core the Earth and still be well short of mass/energy, requiring a like quarry for Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia... plus Somalia, Cuba, Madagascar... and the Vatican City to trim the decimals. I suspect that the Chinese would have noticed the unfolding brouhaha and recorded it as they did the supernova birth of the Crab Nebula which lit their skies even at high noon. The Central Americans also took note.

There is no corresponding event in European histories. Europe basked under God's autocracy during the Dark Ages, AD 476 to about AD 1000. The Crab sypernova had the temerity to shatter the unchanging, perfect heavens in AD 1054. In a fine anticipation of thoughtcrime, the event was purged from the minds of the laity and uncreated in the annals of the One True Church. Given an interesting coincidence in dates, heavenly arrival and cultural departure, one suspects the eradication was less than perfect.

Ridicule is cheaply come by. Whenever revelation is brought forth I caution the reader to beware: One who wishes to gainsay the intricacies of physical theory need only substitute a more robust interpretation that is not contradicted by observation. You may require official certification to believe, but nobody needs a license to think.

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