Re: Is the Hills' flood possible?

Hi Phil,

PTM:
 
>I totally agree with you that we should not appeal to ad hoc miracles to make our
Bible
>interpretations work. I think we should limit the miracles to the ones the Bible
itself
>mentions. But here the Bible does mention the wind-miracle:

GRM: Phil, if it takes one miracle to make the flood happen, then it is meaningless
to use all this science and math to try to prove that the flood happened. I have
argued with YECs about this for years. Once you bring a miracle in, you have thrown
out naturalism and there is no reason to be scientific. It would just be better to
simply say, “The mesopotamian flood was a miracle” and leave it at that rather than
try to have a pseudo-scientific appearance.

>>>This wasn't just the typical, balmy Mesopotamian breeze, otherwise it would have
been unremarkable. It was remarkable enough to attribute it to God's **special**
concern for Noah.
 
As soon as we start to prove whether the flood would "work" or not (i.e., would
leave the correct deposits, tip the ark,...) then we are filling in details to the
bare text of the Bible and building a model around what the text says. I don't see
anything wrong with Alan putting extraordinary winds into his model. It is
supported by the text. He has no need to prove that these winds are typical for
the region or that they don't violate the coriolos force. God could simply move
the center of the storm so that the curving winds always move the ark in the
correct direction. This sort of model is not ad hoc in any way, since the text
says that God sent the wind FOR NOAH.<<<<

Fine, but if the wind is miraculous, maybe it was extra dense, maybe it had the
ability to fly noah and company to the north. Maybe all sorts of things. The
point is, bring a miracle in and you have left science behind and there is no
reason for all that mathematical alchemy.

 
>>>Of course I'm not saying Alan's model is correct or that I personally like it
the best, but I
>am saying that critiquing the wind details in his model is not valid, IMO.<<<

Of course it is worth critiquing. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have figured out that
wind is a miracle which gets you around the Coriollis force. Is there a miracle
available to avoid every physical difficulty? I noted that 4mph is the speed of
rivers NOT in flood stage. I used to walk along the Dee River in Aberdeen,
Scotland. I walk probably 3.5 miles per hour (short legs). But the river when it
was in the summer and going slowly, still could outpace me. When it rained an
exceptional amount, I doubt I could have kept up with the river by running.

So, do we have another miracle to avoid having a faster water velocity than Hill
uses? (the faster the water velocity, the more miraculous the wind must be). Or do
we use the wind to slow down the water—which effectively makes water speed
miraculous as well?

 
PTM:
 
>I stand corrected. You are right. I did the calcs and, although the cosine term
does
>decrease the area, the bouyancy term increases it at a greater rate so the net
area goes up
>as you stated. I was wrong about that.

GRM: This is something I like about you. You do this when some problem is pointed
out. Thanks for being that kind of person.
 
PTM:Nevertheless the ark does not tip over, because the same bouyancy term also
puts a >countertorque on the ark. You know that if you push one end of a canoe
down into the
>water and then let go, it pops back up. That is the torque from the water.
Imagine rolling
>an ark that has a 75 foot width, not the mere 10 feet of a canoe. The torque (per
length of >boat) is outrageous when the width is 75 feet, and vastly more than a
100 mph wind can
>supply. I did the calculations, and an ark like Alan describes will tip only 2.4
degrees in the
>kind of wind he assumes. It will NOT roll over. We should stop discussing this
unless
>someone can produce calculations that show I made a mistake.

I would be willing to bet that your calculations assume something that probably
wouldn’t match reality. The Hill’s claim to have a million pounds of water on
board (but, of course they actually need more water but we will ignore that). I
bet your calculations don’t take into account the fact that as the ark tilts, the
center of bouancy and the center of gravity moves because the water re-distributes
in the tank. Since the Hills don’t say what floor of the ark they put the water
on, it is hard to do a calculation that they can’t wiggle out of. But let me
illustrate the point.

-------------------------
|.......................|
|.......................|
|.......................|
|-----------------------|
|.......................|
|..........C............|
|^^^^^^^water^^^^^^^^^^^|
|-----------------------|
|.......................|
|.......................|
|..........B............|
-------------------------

Where C is the approximate center of gravity and B is the approximate location of
the center of buoyancy.

...../\
..../..\
.../../.\
../../...\
./../..../\
/../..../..\
\./...C/.../
.\^^^^^^^^/
..\../B../^^^^^^^^water level of the flood^^^^^^^
...\/.../
....\../
.....\/

The righting arm force might not be as big as you think! The same thing will
happen to the food, the animals etc, unless it is in very well fixed compartments.

PTM:
 
>>>>I don't have the paper. I saw an early version that Carol had sent me when I e-
mailed her with questions about her view on the flood. I can't find any V^2 and
V^3 in my copy so I don't know if it is correct or not.
 
However, V^2 does typically show up in forces because this the dynamic pressure of
the gas (when multiplied by rho, the gas density) and V^3 also does typically show
up in forces because it is the drag force (when multiplied by a shape-dependent
parameter with the appropriate units). <<<<

I did mis-speak, I wrote forces when I meant work. He has wind work (which is a
frictional force equal to 1/2 density x a dimensionless constant times velocity
squared x the surface area.

But he has what he calls ‘viscuswork’ which is the water friction, as 1/2 times
drag coefficient x vesquared time v times the surface area. Since these are both
frictional work energies they should have the same units and the form of the
equation should be identical. There is nothing different between the two forces
generating the work other than the densities of the fluid doing the work and the
coefficients of friction.

He also has lift work which is simply mgh so this tells you what that he is
calculating work.

Then he says windwork = viscous work + liftwork. Well Viscous work isn’t the same
units. It can’t be if it has a different equation form from windwork!.

 
>>>>The next step in a scientific process would be for someone to replicate Alan's
work and either confirm it or dispute it. Or we could ask Alan for the
mathematical details and try to analyze it in better detail. Speculations about
his work aren't that useful at this point. <<<<

Unit errors are not speculation. Go look at the equations in the back of his
paper. Maybe he has a typo but he needs to say that and prove that it isn’t a typo.

>>>>Personally, I don't think it's the most important thing to worry about.
Whether the ark went to Ararat or the southern Zagros isn't as important as the
question of the extent of the flood: regional or merely a river flood. That
latter question is far more important.<<<<

Any error that invalidates the work is worth worrying about.

>>>PTM: I have no problem with fewer animals.
 
I can't remember how much of your model I read, but I have read parts of it. I
studied your web pages some number of years ago.<<<<
I don’t have a problem either with fewer animals, but, they didn’t do that and all
one can do is follow the logical conclusions of their work to see if it was well
thought out or not. I don’t think it was. They obviously didn’t see how much water
and food these animals can eat. I used an animal of what they said was the average
size. If you make the animals smaller but carry the same weight, they will eat a
higher percentage of their body weight daily, and that would exasperate the problem.

 
>>>>glennmorton@entouch.net writes:
But I do know that other flood theories all violate physics (as does the Hill's
theory) and I know that it too doesn't have evidence for it in the form of
widespresd flood sediment up river where the current river can't cut them out.

PTM:
 
I think this is your strongest argument against a regional mesopotamian flood and
hasn't been addressed quantitatively by your opponents. I think that is where the
most work needs to be done to either quantitatively confirm what you are saying or
else confirm what Carol Hill has said, or possibly somewhere in between<<<<<

GRM: Carol knows of this problem because she has a section on it, but reading her
section she doesn’t bother to tell anyone where the flood sediments are. I guess
she hoped no one would notice the lack of a real answer.

 
To David Siemans you wrote:

>>>>Dave, this is not true. In your earlier post you showed that the area (and
hence wind torque) increase as it tips. But saying that this proves the ark will
tip is a one-sided equation.
 
The other side of the equation is the restoration force from the water. We all
know that as you tip a rectangular boat in the water then there is a restoration
torque from the water, because one side of the boat is being pushed deeper than the
opposite side. I did the calculations and it turns out that in a 50 mph wind
broadside Alan Hill's boat will tip the ark a grand total of only 0.6 degrees. In
a 100 mph wind it is 2.4 degrees. A boat like the one described by Alan Hill will
NOT tip over when broadside by winds of the magnitude that he calculates.
 
So let's stop discussing the ark tipping. This is NOT a valid critique of Alan's
paper.<<<<

Why do you want to stop discussion? Until you show that you are using a movable
center of gravity and a moveable center of buoancy, your calculations may not be
valid under real world conditions. The FPSO of Thunderhorse field in the Gulf of
Mexico almost sank because water in the ballast tanks moved to other tanks during a
hurricane. Somehow excess water got into the ballast tanks and then it puddled up
on one side. See

http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=11305

This is what one needs to consider when deciding whether or not the ark will roll.
Since you can’t nail a million pounds of water down unless the tank is completely
full, at some point it will begin to affect the center of gravity and bouancy. I
have no doubt that BPs engineers had thought that it couldn't list that high
either, but they didn't think about water puddling up on one side of the facility.
Received on Fri Jun 9 11:28:34 2006