This is for Scorpion, who presented what he thinks is the "proof" that there's a missing day, and that NASA scientists discovered it.
Scorpion, it's all nonsense. NASA scientists never discovered a "missing day." It's all a hoax.
Below I've provided a comment from NASA, and one from another web site.
The following was cut and pasted from a NASA web page; the URL is http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry//ask/a11497.html
Did a NASA computer scientist discover a 'missing day' in a program used to calculate the positions of the planets, as forecast in the Bible?
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This is one of those 'myths' that has been circulating around since about 1860 or so. The answer is a flat NO!!
For more information about this idea and its many re-tellings in the last 100 years visit the Urban Legends web site, and a second page by Answering Islam which discusses this 'christian legend' from a slightly different point of view.
The original version of this story dates from the 1800's when an un-named astronomer was quoted as having discovered a missing 23hour 20 minute time period during some 'calculation'. With the advent of computers, this story was upgraded in the 1960's to a 'NASA Computer Scientist' doing an ephemeris of the planets in the solar system. The basic idea is completely preposterous because, as the Urban Legends web site points out so well, you cannot uncover a interfering event with a mathematical model based on things behaving the same way back then as they do right now vis a vis celestial mechanics. If the information is not built-in to the equations at the start of the calculation, an unexpected interferring event cannot be uncovered by such a procedure.
There are many other 'urban legends' out there including the one that Carl Sagan ever said 'billions and billions' during his Cosmos series. We tend to believe things that sound plausible, and since virtually no one except scientists understand astronomy, in a country where the average person does not understand why we have seasons, it is easy to see how farfetched ideas can take root so easily!!
End NASA comment.
Here's another web site which discusses this urban legend. I've cut and pasted from the URL
http://www.urbanlegends.com/science/missing_day.html
:
: FOUND MISSING DAY
: I have read that space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland, have discovered
: the missing day of long ago. Can you enlarge?
:
: We understand from a magazine article that space scientists in America were
: checking the positions of sun, moon and planets both 100 years and 1000
: years from now. This information was necessary to plan the trajectories of
: satellities and other space vehicles to avoid the danger of collisions. The
: scientists ran computer measurements back and forth over the centuries but
: discovered something was wrong either with the information fed into the
: computers or with the results when compared with the calculated standards.
: The computers were checked for accuracy but they still showed that a day
: was missing. One of the team remembered the story in the book of Joshua
: (chapters 9 and 10) in the Bible which tells of Joshua coming to the rescue
: of Gibeon (?) and asking God to make the sun stand still. The space team
: checked the computer going back to the time of Joshua and found the elapsed
: time that was missing was 23 hours and 20 minutes, not a whole day but as
: the Bible account states "about a whole day". This left a disparity of 40
: minutes. Again the Bible student came to the resuce remembering another
: occasion when Hezekiah, on his death bed, was visited by the prophet Isiah
: who told him God was going to heal him. Hezekiah asked for a sign and was
: given the choice of the sun going forward or backward 10 degrees. Ten
: degrees is exactly 40 minutes. Adding this to the 23 hours and 20 minutes
: in Joshua makes up the missing 24 hours.
:
:This sounds like one of those National Enquirer type "beat-ups". Any-one care
:to comment, pass judgement, provide further information?
This story has been circulating in its NASA version at least since the 1960s, largely due to its promulgation by one Harold Hill, who says that he was present at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center when the above events allegedly took place. NASA denies that this ever occurred, and Hill, the former president of the Curtis Engine Company of Baltimore, was involved in diesel engine operations at Goddard and had no involvement with any computer operations. The story predates Hill's NASA version, and goes back to Charles A. L. Totten's _Joshua's Long Day and the Dial of Ahaz: A Scientific Vindication_ (1890). Hill published his version in Harold Hill, as told to Irene Burk Harrell, _How to Live Like a King's Kid_, 1974, Logos International. (Logos International was a Christian publisher with no qualms about publishing phony testimonies--it also published Mike Warnke's _The Satan Seller_, Michael Esses' _Michael, Michael, Why Do You Hate Me?_, and Fernand Navarra's _Noah's Ark--I Touched It_, all of which have been debunked.)
For a detailed account of the "missing day" story, see:
Brunvand, Jan Harold (1984) _The Choking Doberman and Other "New" Urban Legends_, W. W. Norton and Company, pp. 198-199.
--- (1991) "The Missing Day in Time," paper presented at the annual conference of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), Berkeley, California, May 4.
Loftin, Robert W. (1991) "Origin of the Myth About a Missing Day in Time," _Skeptical Inquirer_ vol. 15, no. 4, Summer, pp. 350-351.
McIver, Tom (1986) "Ancient Tales and Space-Age Myths of Creationist Evangelism," _Skeptical Inquirer_ vol. 10, no. 3, Spring, pp. 258-276.
Jim Lippard [email protected]
Dept. of Philosophy [email protected]
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
http://members.aol.com/jalw/joseph_alward.html
