urban legends of the coriolis effect

In manu tua, Domine omnes fines terrae.

La terre et toute son etendue est, Seigneur, sous votre puissance.

Coriolis Effect

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what is not true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true,” but the old Coriolis effect has its own odd mix ad modum. Also the subject of myth, urban legend, and many errors, including heliocentrism, some have imagined that it causes hurricanes and typhoons to change their direction of spin at the Equator, and that because of it water goes down the drain in the Southern Hemisphere in the opposite direction from water down the drain in the Northern Hemisphere. However, these stories simply are not so.

Hurricanes and typhoons do not change their direction of spin at the Equator, and water goes down the drain only as according to the design of the drain, not because of any Coriolis effect. It does not affect either of these, and the dogs in Siberia are so fast because the trees are miles apart, not anything to do with NASA. In fact, the effect is too insignificant to be noticeable when a person walks, drives, or rides a bicycle any distance. Nobody can notice it riding a horse and carriage, a motorcycle, a bus, or a train across town, or across the country, or across any distance near or far. And as it does not affect any of these, it does not affect crop dusters and never any barn stormers. In fact, this supposed thing from a supposedly spinning Earth did not affect any aircraft at all from the earliest development of aviation, and it has not affected any since, even down to today.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, somewhere the desert hides a well and a lost golf ball, and all aviation navigation has always been based on a fixed-Earth assumption. The only things taken into account there are wind currents, weather, pressure patterns, altitude, fuel, latitude, and longitude. The Coriolis effect is never taken into account in any navigation of planes, trains, drones, automobiles, or helicopters, or in targeting work with missiles, artillery, satellites, or whatever projectiles. The Germans have built the biggest artillery guns in history, like Big Bertha in WW I, and Gustav in WW II, and in none of their longest range bombardments did they ever allow for it in any of the calculations.

As Mumbly used to say, "c'est n'importe quoi, le vent est shambolique." Dive bombers and the Stukas, AC-130 gunships, and attack or rescue helicopters have never taken any recon of any supposed Coriolis effect from the supposed motion of the Earth for any missions from beginning to end. Like all the people and poor sods on the ground, they have never seen the Earth spinning on its axis either. It was never seen in all these things or cargo and certified letter transport, which have always been accomplished based on simple fixed-Earth coordinates and an effectively real fixed-Earth assumption. For success and reliability on any venture by land, air, or sea, it has been an accurate enough detail, time and time again, that the Earth is not moving.

Yet a Coriolis effect or something twisted and circular is clearly at work in Foucault’s pendulum, but not because of any rotation of the Earth. It comes from something funny in the pendulum’s design, like a little magnetized gyroscoped setting hidden away inside the Judeo-Masonic bob.

Not to be surprised by such dialectics and machinations, however, since contradictions, triangulations, and social intrigue go this way and that way, something is wrong with the picture in New York and Paris, where the plane of oscillation of Foucault's pendulum gradually moves around clockwise, like all other Foucault pendulums in the Northern Hemisphere. Yet all hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere spin counter-clockwise, like Hurricane Irene that hit New York in 2011, while the Foucault pendulum at the UN of the 40^th parallel was going clockwise, in the opposite direction.

Because of the Earth’s supposed counter-clockwise rotation in space,  viewed from above the North Pole, the Foucault pendulums in New York and Paris, for example, are designed to go around clockwise. And this clockwise movement of the pendulum is the supposed indication that the Earth is spinning away beneath the bob. In the Southern Hemisphere, the situation is reversed, and a Foucault pendulum in Argentina or South Africa will go counter-clockwise, because of the Earth’s supposed clockwise rotation, when viewed from below the South Pole.

A strange thing about the arrangements in these exhibits then is the reversal between the pendulums and hurricanes and typhoons. Hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere spin counter-clockwise, and typhoons in the Southern Hemisphere spin clockwise. These major storm systems are consistently going in the opposite direction of their respective Foucualt pendulums, north and south, and confounding the supposed natural science p’s and q’s of heliocentrism, and the Coriolis effect, all over, hic et ubique terrarum.

Understanding it has been said that on Earth all free moving objects, including masses of air, are subject to the Coriolis effect, as a result of the Earth’s spinning rotations, then cyclones and global winds, therefore, have also been imagined to have their patterns as a result of Coriolis forces at work in them too, resulting from the supposed rotations of the Earth. But the notion is contradicted by the counter-clockwise rotation of hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere and the clockwise ones of typhoons in the Southern Hemisphere, especially regarding Foucault. This simple fact begins to uncover that these major weather systems are directly contradicting the Foucault pendulum's swings and the idea that there is a Coriolis effect at work in them too, as much as the weather, and resulting from theoretical rotations of the Earth.

For starters then, between the Foucault pendulums and hurricanes and typhoons, the Coriolis effect as a global doctrine of air is going to shambles in opposite directions. Yet as Rumplestiltskins said, "when you can spin straw into gold, price is never a problem." They can afford anything.

The simple fact, however, is that the tropics, geothermal processes and air temperatures, dryness and moisture, and pressure patterns, determine weather formations across the Earth, not any Coriolis effect from the Earth supposedly wheeling around in space. The wind can blow from any of eight cardinal directions at any time, and whatever patterns of deflection are there are from volume of prevailing temperature and pressure. The Trade Winds would come closest to resembling a would-be Coriolis effect, from rotations of the Earth, if there were any; but they are directly contradicted in this by the Equatorial Doldrums and Sub-Tropical Ridges. Tornadoes also annihilate the idea of a Coriolis effect from any rotations of the Earth -- since like art galleries, they can spin and go either way, mysteriously, wherever they are.

Still, many people are erroneously taught to imagine that on Earth all free moving objects, including masses of air, are subject to the Coriolis effect, as a result of the Earth orbiting the sun. An academic description of the Coriolis effect first appeared in an 1835 paper by Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, in connection with a theory of water wheels and billiards, and also in the tidal equations of Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1778. Gaspard’s paper was titled “Mathematical Theory of the Game of Billiards”, or “On the Equations of Relative Motion of Systems of Bodies”. This work dealt with issues of spin, friction, and collision in rotating pool tables and various frames of reference, and added a new expression like “kinetic energy” to describe what is now known as the force of Coriolis.

However, the ways in which billiard balls, water wheels, and bodies of water move are the same as always and ever was. Thus the Coriolis effect was not anything new to nature, but in the case of heliocentrism, with time, it became inflated far out of context, when inappropriately applied to cosmology, since the limited effects in question are about spin and deflection of moving objects in space, when they are in motion in a rotating frame of reference. For generalization, if the rotation in the reference frame is clockwise, the deflection is viewed going to the left from the point of origin. That is a clockwise rotation can produce a deflection to the left in another moving object or current that comes into contact with it.

If the rotation in the reference frame is counter-clockwise, the deflection is viewed going to the right from the point of origin. A counter-clockwise rotation can produce a deflection to the rigth in another moving object or current that comes into contact with it.

A funny thing about the Foucault pendulum's concept is that as the pendulum moves about, but the Earth does not, the pendulum can begin to exhibit its own peculiar Coriolis effect, while the Earth does not. If a round table were placed underneath the pendulum, on a smooth glasslike surface, and it was made to turn in the same direction as the pendulum bob itself goes around the circle, the turning round table would begin to generate its own little Coriolis effect, even if minisucle, while the Earth still does not. Test it with ping pong balls rolled from contact with the table of rotation, and watch them be deflected a la Coriolis. Even if the effect is much diminished by slowness, how absurd and abrupt to see a slowly turning table, that mimics the Foucault pendulum, have a slight Coriolis effect like a rotating pool table would, while the massive body of the Earth, which is supposedly hurtling around the cosmos at astronomically massive velocities, exhibits none.