JustAPerspective t1_j63vchz wrote
Reply to comment by Sharlinator in Earth's inner core may be slowing down, but “Nothing cataclysmic is happening,” says Hrvoje Tkalcic, a geophysicist at Australian National University. “The inner core is now more in sync with the rest of the planet than a decade ago when it was spinning a bit faster.” by clayt6
>It’s not a “magnetic engine” in any relevant sense.
Preposterous. Relevance is a matter of perspective; your prerequisite appears to be something along the lines of "if it ain't human-made it ain't real"?
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>It’s a huge rotating ball of iron and nickel and conservation of angular momentum is a thing! Truly ludicrous amounts of momentum would have to be transferred somewhere else for it to stop rotating.
...humans think.
See, until the 1960s, the existence of the core-as-a-core wasn't known. So the "obvious reality" you're assuming is younger than television.
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>(Now, to be fair, a mechanism does exist that slowly bleeds off Earth’s rotational momentum, and has done so for billions of years: the moon and its tidal forces. In the far future Earth would become tidally locked with the moon, and rotate very slowly, if the sun didn’t become a red giant first.)
Yes, that's how an engine operates on a timescale different from the ones humans focus on. You came that closet to getting the idea.
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> But somehow only slowing down the core? That would require magic.)
Magic is, by definition, merely reality: Magic is defined as a "supernatural force which influences reality" and "supernatural" merely means "attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature" - and the "laws of nature" were written by humans who do not know everything.
See the one constant limitation here? Human understanding.
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>Anyway, my use of “absolutely” should be taken in the context of the discussion, just like everything else.
No - your use of a word will be taken at face value - the only use words have in true information exchange. If you are unable to use the words accurately or sincerely, that's your concern to manage.
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