The precession of the equinoxes is an observation that spans back millennia into human’s early origins. Today, a scientific understanding of the precession of the equinox is branching into fields of astrophysics, astronomy, and new fields like archaeoastronomy.
Research has revealed a closer understanding of the ancient calculations of earth’s motion through precession. It is also unveiling new theories on what causes precession of the equinoxes.
Like all scientific concepts, knowledge progresses forward as new evidence emerges. The challenge of the scientific community is to re-evaluate current theories based on multi-disciplinary research and evidence.
It is unveiling new theories of what causes the precession of the equinoxes. In episode 2 of our precession series Steven and Stefan explore causes, and build up to the feature show on CPAK 2019, a conference on ancient knowledge and precession held at Newtown Beach California from October
You can order tickets at now www.cpakonline.com
Here’s the full transcript for this episode:
Steven: [0:00:03] Hey Stefan, how are you doing man?
Stefan: [0:00:05] I’m good. Sorry, I just hiccupped a little bit there. I’m good. I’m really cold.
Steven: [0:00:09] You hiccup a lot actually, like something that is not… I’m not sure… people might have noticed. But you do spend a lot of your time holding like this half-hiccup half-burp thing.
Stefan: [0:00:17] Yeah. I don’t know, I think it’s because I ate too quickly. And also, maybe, I don’t know… maybe I’m doing something wrong in my life, breathing-wise, or whatever it is. I’m quite cold at the moment, that could be it. I’m sitting here in a big jacket and a big beanie, and it’s wintertime. So maybe that’s causing the hiccup.
Steven [0:00:41] We’re recording this very light. And it’s a very big topic we’re touching on today. It’s the second episode of the Precession of the Equinoxes, which will be a three-part series, and the third one will be an interview, which we’ll talk about at the end of the episode, where we’re going to talk to an expert on precession. This is a topic that, it was about two years ago, I think, that I really started to dive into and it’s just such a great scientific area that brings in a lot of different multidisciplinary angles to understand, it brings in history.
Our first episode was talking about what precession is, and how it’s this bigger cycle of stars relative to the rise of the equinoctial sun. And today, we’re going to talk about what causes it.
Stefan: [0:01:47] Yeah, I definitely agree with you on that. It’s a really exciting topic. And I think the fact that it is still being researched today, and there’s still a lot of unanswered questions, and a lot of people that are putting in a lot of effort, trying to work out exactly what’s going on is really exciting. And to be kind of right there with them all, and looking at this and trying to learn as much as we can, it’s been really exciting.
So today, it’s the second part of our Precession podcasts, and we’re going to be talking about what causes precession, and sort of a little bit of the history of how we’ve got to the conclusions that we have, and what current models are in place, what they are saying, and why we think precession is happening.
Steven: [0:02:30] Yeah. Precession of the equinoxes really isn’t something that people think about regularly in day to day life, one, because it’s a very, very long cycle and even to notice it in a lifetime is very difficult. And because it’s the movement of the Zodiac constellations close to a 26,000-year cycle, so in our lifetime, that clock movement of those constellations would really only move barely one degree in like the huge 12-handed clock in the sky. And so you have to wonder, why is it even relevant when there’s such kind of relatively irrelevant amounts of… and we can’t notice it. And how did people understand this? The history of it is quite interesting. It goes back to – we attribute it to Hipparchus in Greece, don’t we?
Stefan: [0:03:28] Yeah. Hipparchus is the first sort of documented person to talk about it, and that was back in 120 BC, or something in that era. He first described this phenomenon of precession as being caused by the earth wobbling on its axis as it revolves around the sun. So it was a completely geocentric idea that it’s all coming from the earth, and it’s the wobble of the earth that’s causing the stars to appear to precess. That nothing is actually moving out there, it’s just us wobbling that’s sort of causing this whole thing.
Steven: [0:04:02] Well, I don’t think Hipparchus, he didn’t talk about the wobble, did he?
Stefan: [0:04:06] He did. He did vaguely, but he didn’t give any kind of descriptions as to what was doing it. He was just kind of noting that it looked like the stars were moving, but it was obviously a wobble of the earth. And that was kind of where he left it, I think.
Steven: [0:04:18] In the geocentric model where you believe that the earth is the center, precession might make sense where it’s just kind of this background movement over a very long period, right?
Stefan: [0:04:28] Yeah. So it’s kind of like the universe revolving around. But it wasn’t until Copernicus came along (I don’t even know what that was), but he was the first one that sort of –
Steven: [0:04:41] The 1600s.
Stefan: [0:04:42] Yeah. He was trying to explain this third motion – so the first motion being the earth spinning on its axis, the second motion being the earth spinning around the sun, and then this third apparent motion, which was the stars seeming to precess behind the equinoctial sun. He was trying to explain what was causing this and he attributed it to the earth wobbling. And it was during this time that the idea of a heliocentric solar system started coming out, so it got people thinking. He didn’t even publish this. I think it was… was it Galileo that –
Steven: [0:05:23] Yeah, a hundred years later…
Stefan: [0:05:27] Copernicus was so terrified of publishing this data that he waited till his deathbed and gave it to Galileo, who then published it a hundred years later? I’m not sure.
Steven: [0:05:37] They were not ready for it yet.
Stefan: [0:05:39] Yeah.
Steven: [0:05:39] Imagine sitting on that all your life!
Stefan: [0:05:41] Because you’d be burned at the cross if you –
Steven: [0:05:42] At the stake…
Stefan: [0:05:43] …burned at the stake [laughs] I’m mixing my metaphors there. But yeah, so this idea that it was a heliocentric universe, it was the earth wobbling causing the precession, that was kind of born, and then from there, people sort of built on top of that, and that’s how we’ve kind of got to where we are today.
Steven: [0:06:03] Yeah, and this is arguably one of the biggest shifts in human consciousness ever to really happen. Arguably. The realization that our planet or the piece of earth we live on is revolving around another huge astronomical body. So, Copernicus, he wrote all this and it’s quite amazing, really. When I look and I’m trying to learn astronomy with our own telescope and everything here, it’s quite daunting. I just boggle at how difficult it is for people that if you have very rudimental tools, or even understanding it. How do you even begin to work these things out? So Copernicus really kind of busted open that whole revolution of, ‘hang on, we’re revolving around the sun’.
It’s a very difficult concept to break, I think, which is why precession is very important. Why it’s really important to see it in that context is that the way we’ve understood this in modern Western society, and we’ll also go back into these ancient references to this as well, which really kind of deepens the mystery, is that it’s taking us through the progression of understanding that earth is revolving in a system called the solar system, and then understanding why the days happen.
So that first movement is rotation. And then the second is that revolution around the sun, which causes the seasons, things that are very fundamental to our lives. But then this third that isn’t so well known, yet he put into these fundamental motions of our planet, as being precession, and he attributed it to this libration or wobbling. I think you really can’t emphasize how important that thought is that Copernicus was having and that he could articulate it by publishing it (he didn’t publish it, Galileo did).
Stefan: [0:08:13] Yeah, and we don’t really have anything, within my lifetime, any sort of frame of reference that could be anywhere near as revolutionary as that idea was. I can’t think of anything as groundbreaking as that would have been during that time.
Steven: [0:08:26] I think towards the end of this we’ll get it. I think that’s why I love this topic so much because I think we are potentially bordering on the revolution in this as we come anyway.
Stefan: [00:08:36] Yeah. Anyway, so after Copernicus, the next person who kind of chimed in on this and tried to explain it was Newton. And he was trying to work out what was exactly causing this wobble. So he started just talking about gravity – it must be gravity, it must be this new force that I’ve discovered that is responsible for this wobble. But as he was talking about this, it was all still within the framework that the sun was at the center and not moving, and that the earth was wobbling but it was wobbling because of the gravity of the other bodies in the solar system acting upon it.
Steven: [00:09:18] Yeah, Newton brought the idea that we live in a clockwork universe that was wound up by the grand clock master and then just spinning perfectly. So he integrated his laws of gravity to explain that. The classic example is him being hit by an apple sitting under a tree on the head. They say that’s not true.
[both laugh]
But his laws of gravity, and laws of force, of motion, and everything else were then being able to be applied to bring in a theory to explain this librational wobble, and that was lunisolar gravity – so the gravity of the sun and the gravity of the moon making the earth wobble in a way that would cause it to have this motion that would cause the 26,000-year cycle. And so this started to bring in a mathematical understanding to what Copernicus was originally describing. But the thing is, there was a lot of issues that kind of popped up from there.
Stefan: [0:10:21] Yeah. Most of the things Newton talked about had to have been changed slightly to accommodate for errors and things like him building off of earlier astronomers who didn’t quite get the mathematics right. But a lot of the things that Newton did talk about haven’t really been changed at all. So with this wobble and this idea of what’s causing precession, we’re still, today, using a model that talks about the sun being still, which is quite an ancient thought that has really been outdated.
Steven: [0:10:58] Yes, let’s back up on that. So what Newton established was there were equations that, via the gravity of the sun and moon, you could calculate the wobble of precession. And so, by using those factors, if this theory is correct, you’d calculate the precessional cycle. But what happened was the equations didn’t work. And it seems strange to be saying Isaac Newton was wrong, but I mean, there is a lot of reference points where Newton’s work has been updated, and he was wrong in some stages. Einstein’s work did, basically, throw out a lot of the ideas that he had and then have updated that obviously with relativity.
We’re going to go into all this stuff. But, on top of that, too, is that in 1749, there were efforts to use more complex aspects of physics; so torque, inertia and elasticity, all these things were unfolding after Newton.
Stefan: [0:12:04] Yeah, because they got the idea that it wasn’t quite right what Newton was saying. So, ‘let’s throw in all these other factors, and that way, we’ll be able to explain precession, what’s causing it. If we put, as you said, elasticity, inertia, torque, all these other inputs into the equation, then the equation will work’. But it’s kind of become a big, convoluted sort of equation that’s all sort of resting on this initial foundation that’s proved to be slightly wrong.
Steven: [0:12:39] It’s kind of good to put that context. Like when I was first reading about this, I don’t have a university degree in astronomy or astrophysics, so it’s a very difficult thing to understand, but when you start to put perspective into it, and I think learning physics like this (I studied physics in my undergraduate degree) but I think learning it with that context is important because you kind of go through the steps that humans go through. And we always add on concepts and add understanding to things when you break problems down like that. This is why this is such a good topic, I think because it goes through historical and then modern scientific and mathematical calculations. It’s a broad spectrum of how the human mind can solve problems, and over time as well.
Stefan: [0:13:33] Yeah, definitely. So what we’re pretty much left with today for the explanation of what causes precession is this idea of a lunisolar model, which is the sun and the moon pulling on the earth as it revolves, creating this sort of wobble, which is mainly due to the fact that the earth isn’t a perfect sphere. It’s slightly flattened on the top and the bottom, so there’s this bulge around the equator, which is about 40-something kilometers, or 20-something miles wider than the height of the earth. So because it’s not a perfect sphere, it has the ability to be tagged upon by these other bodies around it. So gravity sort of does play into this, but it’s still talking about these effects as if the sun is stationary, which goes back to Newton and goes back to this idea that hasn’t really been updated to fit the new advances in astronomy and astrophysics.
It is really interesting, especially when you go through this story. And I think it is really important when you’re an outsider – I’m not an astronomer either – but coming into this from being outside of that discipline, and not being locked into any way of thinking, it kind of opens your mind up to see that there could be other ways. I think this story is really interesting because, as we touched on earlier and we’ll talk about again, it’s not just us talking about this, there’s ancient ideas, and there are other people that have other explanations for what causes precession.
Steven: [0:15:16] Yeah. And so the actual description from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center says, “the cause of precession is the equatorial bulge of the earth, caused by the centrifugal force of the earth’s rotation. That rotation changes the earth from a perfect sphere to a slightly flattened one, thicker across the equator. The attraction of the moon and sun on the bulge is then the nudge which makes the earth precess”. That’s the currently accepted definition, as you said, but then when you’re digging in, it goes back to the essence of Newton’s idea that this was all caused by a wobble and it’s still plagued by the mathematical problems that Newton had. So he couldn’t solve it. It was Jean le Rond d’Alembert in 1749 that put the laws of fluid dynamics, like we said, with torque and inertia, elasticity. It didn’t work.
Today, there’s over 1400 inputs into the equation. And equations, whilst they can make them work because you put the 1400 inputs into, you can bring into some level accuracy. But what they’ve found is that it doesn’t predict very well. And there’s some reasons for that. But we’re sitting in the same problem, and unreliability of the equations does seem to be centered around that we don’t think about or we don’t account for the sun’s motion.
Stefan: [0:16:43] Yeah. And I think that’s really important. That if you put into these mathematical equations, and into these ideas the fact that the sun is potentially moving through the solar system, which we know it is – we know, even all the way up to galaxies, galaxies are in motion – so the idea that our sun is in motion isn’t so farfetched. It seems farfetched when you say things like, ‘oh, Newton was wrong’, or whatever you might say, but when you learn the history of it and then realize that it just hasn’t been updated, then it makes it really interesting.
And so there are quite a few problems with this now quite elaborate equation. Once the idea of the sun moving gets put into it, it does change it quite a bit. I think one of the ones that really struck me was the lunar cycle and the difference between the lunar cycle of 29.5 days that we see, and then that is different to the actual lunar cycle of the moon spinning around the earth, which is only 27 days.
Steven: [0:17:51] Yeah, we haven’t done the episode on the lunar. The lunar calendar is really interesting.
Stefan: [0:17:55] Yeah, it’s fascinating. Basically, if you look at the moon and wait a lunar month for it to appear back in the same spot, it will be showing a different phase of the moon. So there’s a slight change in the amount of time that the lunar month is and the amount of time that the phase appears, which makes sense, if you imagine the sun is moving through space. Then that extra motion could account for the change in the moon’s appearance, which is something that seems to be quite a simple explanation for it, but that’s been quite overlooked. And I think no one’s really put it in the context of this, knowing this story and this history, and I think that’s why this is really important to start talking about it now and to try and put modern research into this new idea that the sun is actually moving.
Steven: [0:18:49] Yeah, and just to go over that, because the lunar calendar is actually quite difficult to get your head around, there’s a couple of episodes we’ll do on this; one on the lunar calendar, the Islamic calendar, and all the lunisolar calendars that calculate the moon phases. So the actual rotational period for the moon to rotate the earth is 27.5 days. But the moon phases we see is roughly 29.3, isn’t it? And so what you described is that whilst the actual rotation, so if you imagine the moon going around the earth, but if the earth is moving to get back to that same spot, it’s going to take a little bit longer. And so for the perspective on earth, we see it as 29.5 days, but actually, the rotation period is 27.5, roughly.
Stefan: [0:19:45] Yeah, we’ll get those numbers together when we do that.
Steven: [0:19:48] Yeah, I think it’s 29.3.
Stefan: [0:19:50] But yeah, the lunar calendar stuff is fascinating, especially knowing that it was so ubiquitous around the world with cultures. That was how you measured a month, through the moon. So I’ve been so interested in learning about that.
Steven: [0:20:02] And we’ll be setting up an interview with a functional medicine expert, who shows how hormones and moon cycles and sleep patterns are all affected by the moon. Nearly every biological system is affected by the moon. And it’s fascinating how we just switched off to this. So the female menstruation cycle, it’s all connected to lunar cycles. And when you don’t understand that, you’re completely disconnected from a fundamental motion that is affecting the tides of the earth. We’ve gone a little bit off track there…
Stefan: [0:20:34] So back to the problems of the current lunisolar theory.
Steven: [0:20:39] Yeah. So what that’s talking about is that there are other motions in play that we’re not calculating. The lunisolar theory says that only the sun and moon will affect and cause this wobble of the background star constellations. And so if that’s the case, then there shouldn’t be any other motions, but we know, for instance, there is a discrepancy in the lunar calendar.
And the other one is the big one you see when you calculate the angular momentum of the solar system. Angular momentum is based on mass and velocity, so the linear angular momentum will just be based around mass and velocity. But when you put things in a cycle, it should be conserved because the movement goes around in a circle, basically. And so what they do when you calculate the angular momentum of our solar system, it’s the sun that has most of the mass. In the standard model that they have, the sun actually has 0.1…
Stefan: [0:21:48] Yeah, in our solar system, the sun has 99.9% of the mass, which is a lot. But it only makes up 0.01 or 0.1% of the angular momentum, which doesn’t make any sense. So within the standard model, it’s actually Jupiter that should have the most angular momentum, but it doesn’t. So that’s why it makes it even more compelling to think that the sun is moving. When you assign motion into the equations, it bumps the sun up to have the amount of angular momentum that it currently shows within the solar system.
Steven: [0:22:29] Yeah, there’s the standard model and what they do is they add (and this is by the Binary Research Institute, which we’ll talk about) and so what they do is when you add in an orbit or movement of the sun to roughly equal the precession of the equinoxes, then the angular momentum is solved for the mass and it looks like a nice linear. It’s difficult to explain the mass but it’s a nice progression of the velocities because the velocities of planets are much higher, but they have a much lower mass. The sun, when you give it motion, it makes sense in terms of angular momentum, but it doesn’t when you don’t have any motion with the sun. So this is another argument against the lunisolar model because if you leave it at zero, it doesn’t explain the wider distribution of momentums in the solar system.
Stefan: [0:23:33] I think it’s really important when you take into account this and then you put in the modern research and the fact of motion, and the mathematical equations and things start to sync up, it really starts to paint quite a strong picture of exactly what’s happening. There are other forms of evidence that show what could possibly be causing precession and the fact that the sun is in motion. One of them is that the rate of precession has actually been speeding up. So at the moment, it’s about 50 arc seconds per year of movement, but throughout the ages, it’s slowly been increasing to this point. It was 40s, and it was 30, as you go back and back and back in time. So something’s changing. And when you think of it as the sun moving, either around another body or moving through space, it makes sense that things would be speeding up.
Steven: [0:24:33] It was in the 19th century that astronomers calculated that the rate of precession was changing, and it threw in problems to the lunisolar theory because it doesn’t explain why that would be happening. So what they actually did was add a constant. This is one of the many additions they made to the lunisolar mass to try and explain that. However, the moon’s moving away slightly, so in that model, they’ve calculated that the moon is slightly moving away from the earth, and its influence should be less. So this doesn’t explain –
Stefan: [0:25:10] So that’s another blow against the lunisolar model.
Steven: [0:25:13] Another heavy blow. But the big thing is that in the short time that we’ve been measuring precession, you have to remember too that we’ve been measuring precession for a very, very small amount of the time of the cycle.
Stefan: [0:25:29] Relative to the cycle…
Steven: [0:25:46] …relative to the cycle itself, yeah. It’s not unusual that we should be at a somewhat rudimental understanding of this. I don’t see why anyone would see this like a problem that we’ve absolutely solved when it was barely 100 years ago that we began thinking about this.
Stefan: [0:25:52] Yeah. And I guess it’s interesting saying, “no one’s really putting it together”, which is fascinating because I feel like a lot of the modern research, when they’re not even talking about what causes precession, the things that they talk about adds to the evidence. I think one of them was when they first got to the edge of our solar system, they discovered that it had a sheer edge. So if you imagine our solar system, instead of being a huge kind of nebula cloud, it’s almost shaped like a bullet with sheer edges, which is quite analogous to it shooting through space, or moving through space, with the sun sort of at the helm of the wheel, moving.
Steven: [0:26:34] Yeah, there’s two bits of evidence; one, the existence of the sheer edge, and so they sent – I can’t remember the name of the satellite – but then they calculated that there was a sheer edge. Then two is the bullet shape, because the sheer edge is one thing, but then the bullet shape suggests movement. And so it tells that we are potentially in a system that is moving based on the sun’s movement. And so they have pretty solid evidence that there is a motion to the sun that we need to be at least thinking about, and really does bring down the idea that lunisolar would explain this background movement. But then when you start thinking about it, it’s like, “well, if we’re moving, of course, the background stars are going to be moving in a certain period as well”.
And actually, just going back to the rate of precession, it’s increasing exponentially as well. And this is a very difficult thing for lunisolar to explain because exponential increases when you start to add constants, it’s very difficult to add a constant to explain an exponential increase.
Stefan: [0:27:44] Yeah. Unless the sun’s blowing up like a balloon and getting more gravity, which I don’t think is happening.
Steven: [0:27:48] Yeah, that’s a good point actually. I wonder if that’s been thought of – whether the mass of the sun is increasing.
Stefan: [0:27:54] I don’t know. That’s another topic, I guess.
Steven: [0:27:59] Yeah. And when you look at how much we’ve discovered the solar system, we’re barely into decades of really understanding some of the finer details of the outer solar system.
Stefan: [0:28:14] Definitely. I think there needs to be a huge shift in our perspective, because coming out of one of the main forms of research is people looking into exoplanets and solar systems outside our own and how they function. And it turns out that they function quite a lot differently to what our does or what we perceive ours to do, which is really important because we thought that ours was the rule and everything else sort of followed ours. But now it turns out that, I think, 90% of stars form as a binary star. So when a star forms, it forms with a twin which revolve around each other, which is something that we never expected because, obviously, we can see one sun in the sky, and we think that’s the way it is everywhere. But the more that we understand it, it is quite new research like exoplanet understanding is quite, as you said, rudimentary.
Stefan: [0:29:10] Well, yeah. And the number of exoplanets itself is just…
Stefan: [0:29:16] What is it, like 200,000 within our galaxy?
Steven: [0:29:20] I think that’s even earth-like, within our galaxy. It’s a mind-blowing amount. It might be 40,000… we’ll do an episode on exoplanets, it’s an interesting topic. There’s an article on the website on that.
But if you think about it, they only just began, in the last couple of decades, to detect planets, and they’re now detecting them at an incredible rate. There’s hundreds of thousands of planets out there and many are earth-like. So basically they’re finding planets in the Goldilocks that is basically in the right kind of conditions with the star to the elements of the planet, to the cycles that potentially has life. That’s one galaxy, and we’re talking billions. The numbers are just staggering, and we’re just at the start of this. But with the solar system, what they began to find was that there were outer planets, Saturn I think it’s almost three times as far from the sun as Neptune, and it’s cycling the sun, like Pluto and so forth, which was stripped of its planet status, wasn’t it?
Stefan: [0:30:38] Yeah, I think it was Mike Brown, who’s one of the head astrophysicists on the planet at the moment studying exoplanets and studying all sorts of things that are outside of our solar system. So it just kind of points to the fact that there’s a lot of interest in trying to understand a different perspective on how solar systems work, and how planets form, and how they move and what causes this motion. And there’s a lot of interest, especially in what’s causing not only precession, but what’s causing this strange movement, as you said, of other planets.
Mike Brown, for some perspective, is the man who killed Pluto. That’s his claim to fame. But they discovered that Pluto itself is tilted at an angle of, I think, 17 degrees. It’s basically being tugged by something. So everyone’s trying to work out what’s tugging on Pluto.
Steven: [0:31:36] It’s kind of hard proof of the 9th or 10th planet, isn’t it?
Stefan: [0:31:38] Yeah, it kind of points to the fact that there’s things going on that we still don’t know. And it all kind of adds to this idea of precession and what causes precession is still quite an early science built on Copernican and Newtonian physics that haven’t really held up to the test of time. And now there’s a lot of people looking into this, trying to solve this riddle.
Steven: [0:32:01] Caltech is currently in search for this body at the moment. So there is an acknowledgment in the astronomical community that we have a motion, that something is affecting the solar system that we were previously unaware of, which would make a lot of sense. And what’s really interesting about this as well is that in the Dynamical Universe theory, if you think about the Milky Way galaxy, we know that we turn in a very wide orbit around the center of the Milky Way universe, which is a black hole. And it’s acknowledged that we have this motion. Just like we orbit the sun, our solar system or group of planets orbits the Milky Way. So that’s another motion.
And so the idea that the lunisolar model has a stationary sun doesn’t make any sense, and it’s been stated by the International Astronomical Union that –
Stefan: [0:33:12] Yeah, it’s kind of been left behind but not acknowledged that it has been. So we’re still describing the wobble and explaining things via the wobble of the earth, whereas it’s kind of been left behind by all this new research, but not really put together in one long story like this.
Just going back to the strangeness and new understanding of how planets work, there was new paper published, trying to explain how planets, they are called white binary stars – so the stars that are in a binary pairing orbiting around each other, but they have very wide orbital paths – and there’s a yet unexplained force. So basically, they have such wide orbits that when they get so far away from each other, the centrifugal force should send them flying out into space like Frisbees, away from each other. But there’s something that brings them back to each other where gravity shouldn’t be strong enough because they’re so far away. There has to be something else that’s acting upon them.
So there’s all these strange things going on out there that we still can’t explain, but the cause of precession is definitely –
Steven: [0:34:27] But it’s tied up in all this. It’s really interesting because it’s tied up in all these areas of science and, like, all this amazing technology that we’re using, the calculations that people make in understanding the astronomical cycles, it just boggles my mind. But it’s amazing, like you say, like the progression that we’re seeing in terms of understanding that. When you really put perspective on it, we are very early in really kind of getting our heads around it.
One really interesting thing, I think that lines up with precession is the tie-up with Milankovitch cycles. Milankovitch cycles are basically geologically measured (it’s roughly the same, about 24,000 years, isn’t it?) so, where we see different changes in geological patterns, and it seems to line up with precession as well, which would then kind of bring us back to that Copernican idea that we’re talking about, the seasonal change.
Stefan: [0:35:31] Yeah, because it becomes one giant season – a season above our normal perspective of what a season is. I think that halfway through the cycle, the southern hemisphere will have winter when it used to have summer and then the other half, it will have summer again. So there will be a time when we’re sitting here in Australia in winter, but at the same time of the year, in whatever it is, 12,000 years or 24,000?
Steven: [0:35:54] Is that within 12,000? Wow!
Stefan: [0:35:56] I think it might be 24,000, actually, I don’t know. I remember reading this a long time ago. But, basically, it talks about seasonal changes that, over long periods of time, change across the planet.
Steven: [0:36:06] And just kind of tying back into some geological stuff that we’ve covered, we’ve seen very vast shifts in conditions on earth that we know have impacted life, for instance, comets hits, extinctions and Milankovitch cycles, really do tie into this stuff. And when you’re talking about a whole shift in seasons, obviously, things potentially don’t change overnight, although there’s some theories that they do, then we’re talking about huge influences on life.
And that’s why I think this precession idea is very important because without understanding the broader perspective of, one, where we’re going, and two, where we came from, how can we possibly know? We talk about global warming and everything today, but we really should understand the broader cycles to be able to really solve issues that we’re facing today.
So what we’re basically touching on here is that the cause of precession is widely not well established yet. And so one theory is that our sun does exist with a binary partner and that there is a larger cycle that our sun rotates around. And we’ve touched on this idea before. But then, in terms of causes of the precession of the equinoxes, it actually fits quite nicely all these problems with lunisolar, if you use a binary model with the sun, which is 80-90% of star systems. So single suns are now more the exception than the rule. So it’s very rare to find a single sun. It doesn’t happen in star [inaudible 0:37:52], they actually born in multiple binaries, and so forth, and, like you said, they have these wide orbits. And so a bigger argument against the binary is that we can’t see it. If we’re in a wide orbit, then you wouldn’t be able to see it.
So the precession and this cycle could be explained that we’re orbiting around the partner and that’s why the background stars move in this way that we have attributed to a local factor. And this goes back to ancient ideas too, and then really the plot thickens.
Stefan: [0:38:27] Yeah, because it all starts coming together and it’s so fascinating and so confusing at the same time. But it was written about in a really interesting book called The Holy Science by Swami Sri Yukteswar, which was written in 1894 or 1892, a long time ago. And he basically, at the start, has this throwaway line that says that precession is due to our sun orbiting its binary partner in a process that takes roughly 24,000 years. And that’s kind of all he said about that, and then continued to write this really fascinating book.
But it’s interesting that precession now we’ve got an understanding that it’s 24-26,000 years, we’ve got an understanding that the sun is in motion, we’ve got this new knowledge that most stars appear in binary systems. There’s a lot of things that start slowly coming together to make you kind of wonder maybe it is a binary partner, which is the kind of Copernican revolution we were talking about before, because it’s huge if it’s true.
Steven: [0:39:38] It’s a complete Copernican revolution. And it really goes back to some of the very root principles of the Human Origin Project and what it’s all about. We talked about Hamlet’s Mill, and these myths and stories, and it all refers to precession. If there was this long standing knowledge of why these astronomical cycles happen, then I think we really need to find that out because it’s a global phenomena that cultures recorded and measured and honored these cycles, and it seems to be important. And if we are in predictable cycles that potentially bring different periods, and this kind of goes into the Yuga cycles, the great golden years, (the Ages), then it’s important for us to know that. Once this topic kind of hit me, I think about this a lot.
But what’s really interesting is that we’re going to be interviewing an expert that’s been really kind of pushing this idea of binary stars, Walter Cruttenden, who is the founder of the Binary Research Institute and he’s the author of the book, Lost Star of Myth and Time, and also the maker of the documentary, the…
Stefan: [0:41:07] I think it’s called The Great Year.
Steven: [0:41:08] Yeah, The Great Year. It’s a great documentary, great book, but it goes into a lot of this science, if you want to really dig into this understanding. He was one of the few people that really pushed this modern understanding and how astronomers are making mistakes in the mathematics and the perspective. But also, he bases his work on The Holy Science as well, so these ancient principles, and all of a sudden we’ve got this story that is just melding across time zones, and it’s amazing.
So I think in two episodes we’ll have an interview with Walter where we’ll be talking about CPAK, which is a conference on precession and ancient knowledge, which will be held on October 4-6 at Newport Beach. You can find out and buy tickets because there’s a lot of great experts that are going to be presenting there. Robert Schoch I think is presenting there, Cruttenden Walter, and a lot of other experts on the sciences that discuss these biggest cycles of time.
Stefan: [0:42:12] Yeah, it’s so exciting having so many people together, discussing and having open conversations, and places where you can ask questions and discuss things. It’s going to be a really exciting time.
And it’s going to be great speaking to Walter as well, because he’s been researching this for a long time. I mean, we’ve only been looking into this for, as you said, around two years or so, and in that time, it’s blown my mind as much as it’s blown yours. And Walter has been deep into this, doing research, talking to experts, building and collating data for 15+ years. It’s really impressive. And it’s so exciting to see that now modern science is catching up to what he’s been talking about, and it’s all sort of coming together.
Steven: [0:42:56] Yeah. And Walter’s work really tips me into this stuff too. For me, in my mind, I need the scientific validation. It’s very difficult for me to just read an ancient story and take it for its word. But you get that understanding, that university-level detail that Walter goes into.
I’m really looking forward to that interview and I’m really looking forward to CPAK because it’s one of the first that we’re going be doing a lot of interviews there. I’ll be talking about the connection between the pineal gland and quantum physics, and also this linking to how the human physiology is potentially connected to precession, because if we think about how the lunar cycles affect hormones in our body, there is a physiological potential that we are maybe connected to within this greater cycle. So it’s really interesting. I’m really looking forward to it.
Stefan: [0:44:02] Yeah, definitely. And it’s something that’s so important that we potentially have forgotten that could be as influential as our night and day cycles. It is a topic that should be at the top of everyone’s list to understand.
Steven: [0:44:15] Yeah, so I highly recommend anyone interested in this topic in the California area to go CPAK online to order tickets because it’s a jam-packed weekend, October 4-6 2019. It’s one of the few conferences I think that really kind of knots into both the science and the ancient philosophies.
Well, I think we’ve covered that. It’s a big topic, right? But I think, what we aim to do in these episodes is really kind of give an overview, keep it interesting, but give enough nuggets of knowledge to keep people want to go into their own research, but also to have a good broader understanding. So if you have any questions or want to dig into the information deeper, you can search the causes of precession of the equinox on humanoriginproject.com, and also the Binary Star thesis, and whether our sun does have a second motion around another planet.
Stefan: [0:45:23] I’m really looking forward to interviewing Walter too, he’s a fascinating guy and his knowledge is so amazing, and he’s so inspiring. He’s one of the guys that really got us into this. So I just want to say a big thanks to you, Walter, and we’re looking forward to chatting to you soon.
Steven: [0:45:38] Looking forward to chatting, Walter. Alright, until next week, man.
Stefan: [0:45:41] Alright, see you soon!
