When
Newton was faced with explaining what made the planets orbit the sun, he couldn't!
He therefore left it up to God to keep the planets moving. Although Newton didn't
bother grappling with the question of what made the Earth rotate, Laplace, in
trying to eliminate God as the cause of planetary orbiting, used the notion
that the planets condensed out of a swirling mass of gas to explain both orbiting
and rotation. Today, the conservation of motion in closed systems has been added
to obscure the fact that we have no better explanation for planetary orbiting
and rotation than Newton's God!In our ignorance of what causes the planets to orbit and rotate, we have used historical forces, forces which are not subject to direct analysis, to explain planetary movement.
If historical forces are causing the Earth to rotate, then anything that would cause friction with the Earth's surface would cause it to slow down.
Because the atmosphere hasn't slowed the Earth down, the argument goes, it can't be causing friction with the surface of the Earth.
This, of course, is absurd, requiring the notion that the particles of air that make up the atmosphere were put in motion as a result of the historical swirling mass of gas!
Absurdity, however, has not precluded slavishly applying the assumption of Newton's historic momentum to the atmosphere in current attempts to explain the weather, obscuring explanations of how the weather really works!
The author, using the atom modeled in Atoms, Stars and Minds: Synthesizing an Elementary Particle That Comprehends Itself, explains how the winds originate from the movement of air masses between the equator and the poles, and shows how heat is transferred by the interaction of oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the air masses as they move the atoms through the environment to produce the weather.