| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Bill O'Reilly Proves God's Existence - Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||||
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It was pointed out by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and presumably many others, that the the tides are in fact well understood as the gravitational pull of the moon on large bodies of water, and are periodic because the Moon's orbit is periodic, thanks to the conservation of angular momentum. Hopefully it was also pointed out that the Sun goes up and down because the Earth spins at a constant rate, also thanks to the conservation of momentum. But O'Reilly already had an equally sophisticated rebuttal ready:
I'm sure some "pinheads" have now also explained to him that the Moon is widely understood to have "gotten there" after being broken away from the Earth during an impact with a large asteroid early on in it's lifetime, the Sun was formed over millions of years from the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust under gravity, and Mars doesn't have the Moon because, well, that's ridiculous, the moon was formed 36 million miles away as already mentioned, but it does have two moons of it's own which are believed to be asteroids which were "captured" when they approached Mars with the correct velocity and distance to be pulled into orbit by, you guessed it, gravity.
