All Gyre and No Gimbals

All Gyre and No Gimbals

Once upon a time in Christ Church, Oxford, Charles Dodgson wrote about slithy toves.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Jabberwocky is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll and included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The book tells of Alice’s adventures within the back-to-front world of a looking glass.




A glossary of terms provides some clues as to who these slithy toves are.

Brillig means four o’clock in the afternoon

Slithy means lithe and slimy.

Tove are something like badgers, they’re something like lizards, and they’re something like corkscrews.

Gyre means to go round and round like a gyroscope.

Gimble is the setting for spinning objects such as gyroscopes.

Wabe means the grass plot around a sundial called a ‘wa-be’ because it “goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it”.

Mimsy is flimsy and miserable.

In explanatory book notes Carroll describes it further as “an extinct kind of Parrot.

Mome is short for ‘from home’, meaning that they’d lost their way.

Rath is a species of land turtle.

Outgrabe is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle.


Therefore, the slithy toves are slimy, miserable, grey haired, nocturnal [like badgers], gather around sundials and live off cheese [from the Moon].

“The Moon is made of green cheese” is a statement referring to a fanciful belief that the Moon is composed of cheese.

In its original formulation as a proverb and metaphor for credulity with roots in fable, this refers to the perception of a simpleton who sees a reflection of the Moon in water and mistakes it for a round cheese wheel.

These slithy toves are associated with shabby, extinct [dodo like] birds [flights of fancy] that gather around sundials [with the slithy toves] and are whistling [in the dark of a winter evening] because they have completely lost their way.

Relating to the extinct and perpetually bungling Dodo bird.


In other words, the mathematician and logician Charles Dodgson is informing his readers that the miserable, slimy astronomers have shabby arcane theories that are whistling and whining in the dark because they are based upon a gimble that gyres whilst resting upon turtles.

Which means the Jabberwock is [by the end of the poem] the headless [and therefore mindless] arcane academic anachronism called Astronomy which is all noise and no substance because it’s the spawn of mathematical alchemy [i.e. Newtonian Gravity].


Taking ‘jabber’ in its ordinary acceptation of ‘excited and voluble discussion’, this would give the meaning of ‘the result of much excited and voluble discussion’…”

Unfortunately, successive generations of mathematicians have abandoned the scientific method and have only succeeded in turning Kepler’s Gold Standard into Fool’s Gold.

Understanding how this mathematical alchemy is performed requires a basic understanding of a very simple technique [used in solving equations] that allows the mathematician to “add, subtract, multiply, or divide both sides of the equation by the same number”.

The gimble problem Charles Dodgson alludes to is [primarily] the static mindset that is insidiously instilled into the observer by the gloriously misleading Globe that spins in a [single] static gimble [aka gimbal].



This static mindset is best overcome by mounting [or imagining] a Globe in a set of three gimbals.







This inner gimbal has two degrees of rotational freedom.

The axle of the spinning wheel defines the spin axis.



Additionally, it is important to remember that the Earth [like any other rigid body in three-dimensional space] has six degrees of freedom and that Astronomers [and Astrophysicists et al] must explain all the forces that drive [or restrict] movement for all of these six degrees of freedom if they claim to have a comprehensive and coherent theory.

Six degrees of freedom (6DoF) refers to the freedom of movement of a rigid body in three-dimensional space.

Six degrees of freedom

Currently, the mainstream likes to define and limit these six degrees of freedom to:
a) A [roughly] 2.5° Axial Tilt cycle over [about] 41,040 years.
b) A [roughly] circular [aka gyre] Axial Precession cycle over [about] 26,000 years.







Unsurprisingly, neither of these mainstream theories reflect reality.



Axial Tilt – Game Over


Precession exhibits a secular decrease due to tidal dissipation from 59″/a to 45″/a (a = annum = Julian year) during the 500 million year period centered on the present.

Finally, Charles Dodgson’s reference to turtles invokes the age old question of what exactly does keep the Earth propped up [and in position] because the mainstream analogies [of globe, gyroscope and spinning top] are only valid when they are resting upon a supporting surface.

Axial precession is similar to the precession of a spinning top.

In both cases, the applied force is due to gravity.



“Turtles all the way down” is a jocular expression of the infinite regress problem in cosmology posed by the “unmoved mover” paradox.

The metaphor in the anecdote represents a popular notion of the myth that Earth is actually flat and is supported on the back of a World Turtle, which itself is propped up by a chain of larger and larger turtles.

Questioning what the final turtle might be standing on, the anecdote humorously concludes that it is “turtles all the way down”.

Bronze land turtles

The earliest known version of the story in its “turtle” form appeared in 1854, in a transcript of remarks by preacher Joseph Frederick Berg addressed to Joseph Barker:




(Vehement and vociferous applause.)

“Second Evening: Remarks of Rev. Dr. Berg”[3]

Unless you believe in the impossible [i.e. perpetual motion] it is difficult to imagine [huge understatement] how:

1) Newtonian gravity has managed to keep the Solar System coherently spiralling through space for the last 4.567 billion years [so they say] as the Sun hurtles through space at 370 kilometres per hour.


It formed approximately 4.567 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud.

≈ 20 km/s (relative to average velocity of other stars in stellar eighbourhood)

The general direction of the Sun’s galactic motion is towards the star Vega in the constellation of Lyra at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center.

Inner Solar System Spiral


This is impossible to ever achieve because of friction and other sources of energy loss.

2) Newtonian gravity has failed to collapse the Solar System or the [totally delusional] mainstream invention called the Oort Cloud during the last 4.567 billion [odd] years.

oort cloud destruction derby

Overall, astronomers have been working very hard and very creatively [for over sixty years] to maintain the myth of the Oort Cloud.

However, the Voyager 1 spacecraft appears to be providing astronomy with a reality check because at a distance of only 122 AU [from the Sun] the spacecraft appears to be leaving the solar system.

Personally, I find the “literary nonsense” penned by Charles Dodgson more coherent than the “literary nonsense” written by the disciples of Newtonian gravity.

Gallery | This entry was posted in Astrophysics, Earth, Gravity, History, Inventions and Deceptions, Solar System. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to All Gyre and No Gimbals

  1. Elfin says:

    Looks like there’s a Sirius omission:

    Sirius Transit Data 1988 to 2007 Comparison to Precession

    Mr. Homann concludes below that:
    “These observations clearly indicate that the so-called ‘precession of the earth’ is NOT a scientific fact, and that the Sirius system has a noticeable gravitational influence on our solar system.”

  2. Pingback: Gravest Gravity | Louis Hissink's Crazy World

  3. Pingback: Solar Rotation – Formula Fantasies | MalagaBay

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