|
|
|
|
The Old Mansion's History
The manufacture of a major product, perhaps an airplane, is an entirely different business than is the business of the manufacture of its components. The various components to, say, a Boeing 747, will be older than is the airplane itself. Those thousands of components will have a wide range ages, from a few weeks to several years.
The Solar System is a collection primarily of planets, nine of them. But there also is an assortment of some twenty to thirty planet satellites, depending on the criteria used. Many of them are badly battered with craters, as are Mercury and Mars.
There is a belt of asteroids which measures about 100,000,000 miles high, and 100,000,000 miles wide, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The known number exceeds 3,000. There is a family of 80 or 90 icy short term comets, plus a couple dozen meteor streams. All of these had some kind of origin, and as it turns out, usually a catastrophic origin.
Man wants to know where he came from, and how his species got here. And he is interested in knowing the conditions of ancient survival and even ancient migrations. The primary search is how our planet, and its satellite, the Moon, got here, and when.
Evidence we marshal indicates that the planets were captured; they were not formed of some sort of "afterbirth" extruded from the Sun's mass. This process was set in motion, allegedly, some 4.0 to 4.6 billions of years ago. In this context to a gradualist astronomer or geologist, one million years is "recent".
The evidence we have found and are about to present in our 70-storied skyscraper has led us to a very different conclusion. It is that all of the planets, with the possible exception of Pluto, were captured "recently". Picking any number of years is "faith" and not science. We need get no more specific than "recent."
To a historian, a hundred thousand years, or a million, is a long time ago, but to a traditional gradualist astronomer, or to a gradualist geologist, such a time span is very minimal, and is usually too recent to be considered within their system. Thus it is their system of thought, not the integrity of the gradualists, which we challenge with our evidence, and with our logic. The development of the 250-year old Nebular Hypothesis needs critical attention.
The Original Nebular Hypothesis (1734)
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 - 1772)
The conditions of the birth of an idea are important in assessing its worth. The location was Stockholm, Sweden. The year was 1734. The language of publication was not Swedish; it was Latin. The title was Prodromus Philosophiae Ratiocinantis de Infinito de Causa Finali Creationis. This was the first important book on cosmology since the era of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Isaac Newton. It was published just seven years after Newton's death (1727).
Swedenborg originally was an engineer, who, early on, changed his emphasis to being an author on an encyclopedia of science, in Swedish. He always liked to rub elbows with the rich or the famous.
In 1711-1712, at the ripe old age of 23, he undertook one of his several trips abroad. Science was his passion. Rubbing elbows with the famous Isaac Newton was his goal.
London and then Cambridge were his first stops. Newton had lately conceived of calculus in mathematics, and had conceived of the nature of gravity, embodied in his three laws of motion. But, for whatever reason, the now famous Newton was not available. Newton was now in London and was director of the national mint.
But, Edmund Halley was available. Halley was a close friend of Newton, and had financed Newton's great Principia, in itself a claim to scientific fame. But Halley was also an astronomer with some rather creative thought. Swedenborg stayed at the Halley home as a guest for four or five weeks early in 1712. This visit to Halley is important because we think it was at Halley's home, amid reflective conversations with Halley (1656-1742), where the idea of the Nebular Hypothesis was first conceived.
Halley had spent a year and a half on the island of St. Helena, cataloging the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. He was the first to publish a map of the prevailing winds of the globe. He was the first to make a complete observation of the transit of Mercury across the face of the Sun.
When he was 24, Halley began studying a study of the timing and the location of the orbits of medieval comets. By 1682, he came to a startling conclusion. Four historical comets had appeared in the same trajectory across the skies of Europe. Their years were 1456, 1531, 1607 and 1682. Before he was thirty years old, Halley announced that all four sightings were of one and the same comet.
This particular comet, Halley claimed, had a period of 75 or 76 years. It would reappear in 1758 or 1759. Halley's hope, and request was that when it would reappear, it would be named after an Englishman. It was first discovered returning on Christmas Day, 1758. French astronomers, not English, insisted that the comet be named after Halley. It was.
During those delicious breakfasts of pancakes, eggs and bacon during February, 1712, at the Halley home, intriguing questions were asked about comets, and especially, about their gaseous, reflective, arched tails. Halley had the best answers of anyone in that era. If those breakfasts were delicious, the conversations must have been fascinating to the young Swede.
Swedenborg returned, having failed to visit Newton and also William Whiston, whose catastrophist ideas were supported in part by Halley. Whiston, also a mathematician and a friend of Newton and Halley, had written New Theory of the Earth in 1696. Later, he would write Astronomical Principles of Religion, and would translate the works of Josephus into English.
Swedenborg returned to Sweden, and began dreaming about the possibilities that the Sun also, once, had possessed a gaseous cometary tail. Swedenborg did not understand that the Sun's immense gravity rapidly recalls all materials extruded in solar flares, sunspots, prominences and filaments. This is regardless of the velocity of the flaring plasmas. The Sun's mass is equal to 332,950 Earth masses. And its gravity is commensurate.
The young Swede imagined that the Sun could be a source of planetary materials. In space those materials would be distributed, would cool and condense, and might collide. And if they collided at velocities of 25,000 to l00,00 mph, they would stick and agglomerate rather than ricochet. Those materials would gather rather than disperse in space. The gathering planets would somehow gain spin rates because there the spin rates were. His assumptions were all mistaken. He was, basically, just guessing and dreaming.
Swedenborg mulled over this hunch during the next 22 years, as his career as a scientific editor in Swedish proceeded. Finally, he wrote up his hypothesis, not in his native Swedish, a provincial language, but in Latin. In that era Latin was more of a universal language of science.
Within a few years after this publication, Swedenborg began having trances and publishing his dreams. One of his trances produced the information that men on Jupiter and Saturn had confirmed with Swedenborg that his hypothesis was correct. Also men on places further distant, yet to be discovered, had participated in his trance. It is important to understand Swedenborg's career as a mystic to appraise his hunch about the Solar System's origin.
On Sunday, July 19, 1759, while among a group of people in Goteborg, Swedenborg fell into a trance. In the trance, he saw Stockholm burning. City fires were serious matters in those days before running water; a fire could burn down an entire city.
Three days later, news came by pony express to Goteborg that indeed Stockholm had experienced a big fire; moreover it turned out that the fire was stopped two houses from Swedenborg's residence. For the Swede, this was just the beginning of famous trances.
In 1762, while conducting a public seance, Swedenborg had a vision of a young Russian nobleman, Peter II, grandson of Peter the Great and heir apparent. In the vision, Peter II was being strangled in a prison cell.
In fact, two weeks later news came from St. Petersburg that Peter II indeed had been strangled in prison. It was just before he was to be released, and to be married to his betrothed. Now, another would rule and produce the next heir to the Russian throne. Stockholm was in a state of wonder about one of their most famous citizens.
There was the occasion of the widow de Marteville's silver service. She was presented with a bill for over 25,000 guilders for a silver service which, she knew, her husband had paid before his death. In questioning the veracity of the bill, she also questioned the integrity of the goldsmith. But she could not find the receipt. She appealed to Swedenborg for help.
After another trance, Swedenborg told her that her late husband had indeed appeared to him in a dream, telling him where in the house the missing receipt of payment was located, in her husband's English bureau. Surrounded by witnesses, she looked in the bureau and indeed found the receipt. The goldsmith's reputation dropped to a new low, while Swedenborg's fame reached a new high.
Then there was the Case of the Queen's Jewels. Some of the queen's jewels were missing. A servant girl in the court was suspected. Like the widow de Marteville, the queen appealed to Swedenborg for help. The Swedish psychic went into another trance.
In the trance Swedenborg saw the jewels in a secret compartment of a certain drawer in a cabinet in the palace. Amid a group of viewers, the cabinet was searched; a secret compartment was found in a drawer, and indeed the missing queen's jewels were found. The servant was exonerated and Swedenborg's standing rose to a new high in Stockholm.
Finally there was the Case of the Grandfather's Clock. Swedenborg had his detractors, including church men. Along with his fame, he was the butt of numerous witticisms. One evening a group of men, perhaps gathering for a men's meeting, began to joke in an unflattering way about Swedenborg.
Suddenly Swedenborg entered, and sized up the doubters and their unflattering humor. Promptly he stated that one among their number would die the very next morning. His "prophecy" sent an immediate chill throughout the group.
The next morning, the various ones in the group began checking on each other. Indeed it was found that one of their number had died. In addition, according to the dead man's servant, the old gentleman's clock had stopped on the very minute of the owner's death. On one hand, many Swedes began to reassess their thoughts and their jokes. On the other hand, this true story is the origin of the ditty about the grandfather's clock that stopped the moment the old man died.
In Swedenborg's Nebular Hypothesis, what was the mechanism for the Sun to throw out solar material to form the Sun's ancient tail? Swedenborg's answer was simple; it was the Sun's rotation.
It is now known that the Sun has multiple rotations of its photosphere depending on latitude. Rotation in the photosphere is most rapid at the equator, being a the rate of once every 26.8 days. This is only 3.7% as fast as the Earth's spin rate.
On the other hand, an object on the Earth's equator is rotating at a velocity of about l,050 mph. A sun spot or a flare on the Sun's equator rotates at a velocity of about 4,230 mph. The Sun usually is thought to be rotating slowly, but what is the standard measure for the speed of rotation?
It is all relative to how fast is "fast" and by what measure is "slow" determined. However, even given the Sun's rotational velocity at its apparent surface, the photosphere, that velocity is nothing compared to the Sun's gravity. Spicules rise 12,000 miles above the Sun's photosphere but there isn't even a remote possibility of escape from that immense gravity. Gradualistic astronomers realized this long ago, and have made a variety of attempts to justify other methods than the cometary tail the Sun did not have, for the existence of the planets.
The Revised Nebular Hypothesis–Revision #1
Swedenborg's debatable "fame" and "Nebular Hypothesis" spread to academic institutions. His idea quickly spread especially to those cities on the shores of the Baltic Sea - Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Konigsburg, Copenhagen, Rostock, Lübeck, Riga, Danzig, etc. Our next scene is at Konigsburg, at that time in East Prussia. Konigsburg, a port city, also in Lutheran territory, was 300 miles south of Stockholm.
Kant was from a city where Pietism was deeply rooted. He studied theology and the classics, but his first two loves were physical geography and mathematics. (He never married). At the University of Konigsberg, he became a semi-militant liberal, rejecting the Old Testament as good history as well as good theology. He became a tutor, twice having been rejected at the University.
Kant liked Swedenborg's gradualistic, mechanistic approach to Solar System origin, but he was not thrilled with the Swede's trances. He was a tutor for the family of Count Kayserling in 1755. Fifteen years later he was admitted to the faculty at the University of Konigsburg.
Swedenborg cut out everything having to do with seances with men on Jupiter, Saturn and elsewhere. The balance, including the mechanism of centrifugal force he kept. Thus sanitized, Kant perpetuated the idea of the Nebular Hypothesis. It was the year 1755. The language was German. The title of his cosmology was General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens. Kant continued to be comfortable with the Swede's mechanism (centrifugal force), now recognized as impossible.
The late 18th century was an era of rapidly growing scientific endeavor, industrial endeavor, and humanistic endeavor. Secret societies were spreading rapidly in Germany, France and elsewhere. They targeted especially academia and the wealthy. In Germany the Society of the Illuminati are an example; in France the Jacobins are an example.
Instead of dusting off the Old Testament accounts, he dusted off Swedenborg's idea, and other secret society principles and ideas. He was comfortable where anti-clericalism dominated. His idea "proved" that the Long Day of Joshua was an impossibility and Noah's Flood was nonsense. The Earth's experience had been one of gradualism for billions of years.
This was 60 years before gyroscopes began to be studied in a scientific way, including the effects of torques thereon. Kant's year of publishing, 1755, was 212 years before Mariner photographed the surface of Mars. The crust of Mars, an airless planet, astonishingly, displayed effects of a ravaging flood broadly across its Eastern Hemisphere, atmosphere or no planetary atmosphere.
Kant went on to found the German school of rationalism with his publications in the l770's, l780's and l790'. He became the "George Washington" of the concept described as "skepticism". But we are skeptical of this professional skeptic. Simple calculations of energy and angular momentum in the late l9th and early 20th century era showed the Nebular Hypothesis, whether Kant's or Swedenborg's, was fatally flawed. (If we become skeptics of the Skeptics, what are we?)
The Revised Nebular Hypothesis–Revision #2
Pierre Simon Laplace (1749 - 1827)
Laplace was the brilliant son of a poor farmer. His education in Paris was financed by some wealthy neighbors. He was an excellent student in mathematics. At the age of 24, he presented a paper to the Academy of Sciences in Paris on the invariability of the planetary mean motions.
It seems Laplace was attracted to the humanism of the Jacobins and to the upheavals of the French Revolution. He was also attracted to Kant's theory of the origin of the Solar System. In 1794, he was working to develop Kant's theory in a mathematical sense. It would become the famous "Exposition du Systeme du Monde" in 1796, at the height of the French Revolution.
Meanwhile, a great many aristocrats, clergy and wealthy entrepreneurs were being sent to the guillotine. France's greatest scientist, Antoine Lavoisier, was being accused by Marat and sent to the guillotine as Laplace worked out Kant's theory.
Planetary catastrophists question the assumptions of Swedenborg, Kant and Laplace, doubting that any solar material at all was incorporated into any of the planets. But Press and Siever question his mathematics also:
For the next hundred years, Laplace's mathematical endorsement of Kant's hypothesis carried the aura of authenticity. Toward the end of the l9th century, and following that, various defects were detected and discussed. For instance, the planets contain the great majority of our Solar System's angular momentum. It is impossible that this angular momentum could have been supplied by gases from the Sun.
The Revised Nebular Hypothesis
George Darwin, son of the more famous Charles Darwin, proposed "The Evolutionary Tidal Theory" in 1881. By then it was recognized by astronomers that the Sun had immense flares and spicules. In fact, flares do flame out as high as 25,000 miles from the Sun but never escape.
George Darwin proposed that a passing star, on a near collision course with the Sun, pulled out much gaseous material from the Sun. Then, that passing star disappeared into the oblivion of deep space. It is an interesting theory, and is not without meritorious aspects. However, he maintained the fiction that the Sun was the source of the materials which cooled, condensed and accreted into planets.
One of the lesser problems with this theory is that if a star passed by 4 billion years ago, if it was luminous it could still be seen and identified with modern telescopes. No such body has been identified in the Milky Way. Other larger objections were seized upon and developed by subsequent astronomers or geologists.
Chamberlin (1843 - 1928) and Moulton (1872 - 1952)
Thomas Chamberlin and Forest Moulton proposed their "Planetesimal Hypothesis" in 1902 in Chicago. Chamberlin, a particularly observant geologist, came to doubt the concept that the Earth originally was a hot gas which gradually cooled. On this topic he exchanged ideas with an astronomer, Moulton. This team demonstrated that if the Earth was white hot and molten, it could not retain gases with molecular weights such as water vapor, oxygen and nitrogen.
They revised George Darwin's idea. They suggested that an intruding star passed so close as to cause violent eruptions of matter from the Sun. That matter cooled into small "chunks" which they called "planetesimals". Small and cold, the larger planetesimals collided with yet smaller chunks but they did not ricochet. They were bound, and increased in mass. Ultimately with enough accretions, and planetesimals, the planets were formed and grew.
Neither George Darwin or Chamberlin and Moulton objected to a four billion year time span for the Earth to be formed. Neither objected to its formation in the present location, 93,000,000 miles from the Sun. None objected to the idea that the Sun provided the "afterbirth" material from which the planets ultimately were formed.
Press and Siever have some interesting commentary on the approach of Chamberlin and Moulton (and by extension, of George Darwin).
More problems continued to surface. He published The Dynamical Theory of Gases (1904) and Theoretical Mechanics (1906). Jeans put his finger on another general problem. The outer planets are larger, far larger than are the inner ones. For instance, Jupiter is 5,750 X as massive as Mercury, 2,958 X as massive as Mars, 390 x Venus and 319 x the Earth. Saturn is 30% of Jupiter's mass. Neptune is 5.4% of the mass of Jupiter. Understanding where Jupiter came from is a key issue in Solar System cosmology.
Jeans' version is that a large star, many times more massive than the Sun, passed within several billions of miles of the Sun. (Neptune is 3 billion miles from the Sun). That massive star pulled material out of the Sun and stretched it as far as Uranus and Neptune. It was a 3-billion mile cigar-shaped filament of solar plasma. This filament was wider and thicker in the middle, where the biggest of the planets formed.
At such a distance, if large enough, a large passing star possibly might capture the Sun and create a binary system. But it could not distend the Sun as he envisioned. Notice that Jeans continued the tradition of assuming that material pulled out of the Sun provides the basic building blocks for the planets. Notice that he has no problem with the 4 billion year time frame.
The Sun contains 99.86% of all of the mass in the solar system. The nine planets together contain 0.14%.
But, it turns out that the Sun contains only 1.9% of the total angular momentum in the Solar System. Jupiter contains 59.6%. Saturn has 24.4%. (This information was well known in the time of Laplace, 100 years earlier).
So it is that identified problems with the Nebular Hypothesis, any version, have increased and this trend continues to this very year (1995)
Russell was vexed with the Nebular Hypothesis. He desired to avoid the difficulties that continued to arise. He studied the Milky Way and other galaxies. Pairs of stars, called "binaries" are common in the Milky Way. Our Sun's nearest star is a binary, a three-body binary. The inner two, some 4 light years distant, are Alpha and Beta Centauri. An outer one, revolving around the inner pair, is Proxima Centauri.
Russell felt that if a third star approached an inner two in conflict, the Sun and a Visitor, this third star could satisfy the requirement of angular momentum as well as the problem of mass distribution.
R. A. Lyttleton, in 1938, endeavored to improve on Russell's idea. Lyttleton proposed that the Sun originally had a binary partner, a small companion, which was broken up by a third body, a passing star. These collision theories in general became increasingly improbable as more tampering was done. This lack was exacerbated by the fact that Lyttleton presented several variations of his model.
The cosmology of Hannes Alfven is typical of gradualism during the last half of the 20th century. In l976, he proposed an even more complicated, five-stage process of Solar System accretion. In his system, Alfven begins with the latest stage, # 1, and proceeds to the earliest stage, # 5. In our list below, we reverse Alfven's order and cast it into the more common format, beginning with the oldest age.
4. Next comes the emplacement of gases and dust to form a medium around magnetized central bodies in the regions where the planet and satellite groups later accreted.
3. Grains must have moved in Kepler orbits around the Sun and around the protoplanets. In this way there was a transfer of angular momentum from these primary bodies to the surrounding medium. This stage of Solar System evolution must have happened preceding the vital process of accretion.
2. The accretion of condensed grains, moving in Kepler orbits, to form planetesimals, which by continuing accretion, continue to grow in size. These planetesimals are the embryonic precursors of the planets found today in the Solar System. By selecting an accretional process, he attempts to reconstruct the chemical and dynamic properties of the early population grains.
1. Mostly recently - during the last three to four billion years according to Alfven, a slow evolution of the primeval planets, satellites and asteroids occurred, which produced the present state of the bodies of the Solar System. By studying the latest phase of planet evolution, post accretional events, he prepares a basis to reconstruct earlier stages.
Alfven's theory may indeed sound profound but it isn't. First, to open, he doesn't understand what causes planetary magnetic fields, as shall be demonstrated in a later chapter. Pre-planetary magnetic fields are basic to his theory, but are in fact fictional.
Second, he hypothesizes that grains and gases will tend to accrete. No. The opposite is true. The fact is they will tend to spread and disperse. The diffusion of molecules and grains of ice in cometary tails are an illustration of this well-established principle.
Tiny grains, if they were to collide at velocities of 105,000 mph (Mercury's orbit) or 12,100 mph (Neptune's orbit) would have the tendency to crack, break and ricochet, and then, once again, to disperse. The asteroid belt, now 100,000,000 miles high and wide, and expanding, is an illustration of this same principle.
In a later chapter, we shall present the evidence that the asteroid belt is the result of planetary catastrophism, the fragmenting of a smaller planet on the Roche Limit of a larger planet.
Third, there are three, perhaps four levels of evidence to demonstrate that the Sun has experienced at least one, and possibly more novas since Mercury was captured. Alfven ignores all three or four levels of evidence.
Fourth, nature's behavior, even when complex, can almost always be described in simple terms. In science, this principle is known as "Occam's Razor". His famous dictum was "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitem". (Issues ought not to be multiplied except out of necessity).
Bluntly stated, when two competing hypotheses are presented to explain a phenomenon, almost always, the simplest hypothesis of the two is the correct one. Alfven's theory is merely one complicated layer of hypothesis without evidence laid upon another, five layers in all, which in their sum, explain nothing.
The depth and breadth of evidence in our Solar System indicates that the planets were delivered to the Sun, and were properly captured, and recently (as Alfven measures time). When a student studies this evidence, he is at that threshold where he realizes Alfven's explanation will be understood for what it is, palaver, petty palaver.
Alfven does not understand why some planets have magnetic fields and others have little or none. He does not understand why there are three pairs of rapid spin rates among our planets. He does not understand why both the Earth and Mars have virtually identical spin axis tilts, both hovering around 22.5°. Alfven does not understand how, where or when the asteroids were formed.
He does not understand why Mars has 93% of its craters in one hemisphere and 7% in the other. He does not understand when, how or why airless Mars had a flood in its Eastern Hemisphere. He does not understand why the Earth's geomagnetic field is decaying 4.5% per century, (half life 1,350 years).
He does not realize that the Earth's orbital semi-major axis is perpendicular to Jupiter's, nor why this is important. He does not understand when, how or why Mars arrived at its modern orbit. He does not understand why Venus has such a low eccentricity in its orbit. He does not understand why, when or how Mercury got its broad plains of lava.
These are basic nuts and bolts involved in the marshaling of our Solar System. Once these are understood, Alfven's analysis and palaver will be recognized for what it is, the latest gradualistic venture into Alice's wonderland.
Occam's Razor has been mentioned, and its call for simplicity in science. William Ockham (1280-1349) was a Franciscan theologian who called for precise, brief, clear logic. His run-ins with the Pope are legend. His career is a study in the problems of non-conformists wanting solid answers versus a self-satisfied authority. His thought and writings are a part of the birth pangs of modern science.
Press and Siever assess the record of 20th century cosmology accurately, as follows:
Press and Siever continue:
We detect some basic problems in the "inbreeding mentality". From Swedenborg to Alfven, across a span of 250 years, modern era cosmologists all have made the following questionable assumptions. First, they all ASSUME that the planets were formed within three billion miles of the Sun, and mostly, within one billion miles (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn).
In the remote regions our Solar System, or beyond, is where the planets and their satellites were born, out beyond Pluto, half way to the nearer stars, there is something over 200 cubic light years of space.
Judging by the crater counts on Mercury, Callisto, Rhea, Iapetus and the Moon, among other bodies, there must be an abundance of debris - fragments out there as well as smaller Moon-size bodies and even other planets with their satellite systems.
Secondly, until Alfven they all have assumed that the Solar System requires some 4 billion years or more to process and to sort out solar filaments or plasma materials into the present planetary conditions. On the other hand, perhaps, if given a capture and delivery model, as to time for sorting things out, "recently" suffices.
Thirdly, the gradualist cosmologists ALL ASSUME THAT "the present is the key to the past" (to cite a famous phrase coined by a famous l9th century geologist, a pioneer gradualist, Hutton). Indeed our study finds the opposite to be the case. Our research indicates "the evidence for past catastrophes in our Solar System is the key to understanding the present Earth history". And Mars history. And Venus history.
There is a list of ten or twelve basic nuts and bolts of our Solar System which need to be carefully and clearly explained. The gradualists, so far as we are aware, have yet to face these issues and provide any solid solutions.
Thirteen Issues Facing Modern Cosmologists
It requires temperatures of 3,000° F. to liquefy silicon dioxide and other components in its crust. Mercury is now thought to be a solid planet, rock solid and presumably still cold throughout. There are no volcanic cones on Mercury because there are no internal lava pressures. So how, then, did these broad basalt plains and partly melted down crater rims come to be? Why?
2. THE BACKWARD ROTATION OF VENUS. Venus, like Mercury, rotates very slowly, but Venus alone among the planets rotates backward (retrograde). Its backward rotation period is 243 days. Why doesn't Venus rotate rapidly like Mars and the Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune and Uranus? And since it rotates, why slowly, and why in the backward mode, Why??
3. THE EARTH'S CAPTURE OF THE MOON. The Earth obviously has captured the Moon. But, with velocities in the range of 66,000 mph or more, it is impossible for the Earth to capture the Moon this close to the Sun. But there it is. Why?
4. THE FLOOD OF MARS. Mars is virtually airless. Its atmospheric pressure is about one hundredth that of the Earth. It has a little neon and carbon dioxide but no water vapor. Yet, it has had a wild, roaring flood in its Eastern Hemisphere, where rivers rampaged at velocities up to 40 mph. But the longest of these rivers is only 450 miles, and one had a width of 40 miles wide, only half as wide as the mouth of the Amazon. Since Mars has had a sudden flood, how did it happen, and when?
5. THE LOCATION OF THE ASTEROID BELT. The asteroids average perihelion is about 225,000,000 miles from the Sun. They have dispersed over time into an asteroid zone 100,000,000 miles deep and 100,000,000 miles wide. Did a former planet fragment into 100,000++ pieces? Why? When?
6. THE TWIN TILTS. Mars has a spin axis tilt of 23.59° and the nearby Earth has a spin axis tilt of 23.44°. Is this slight difference of a fraction of a degree a coincidence? Or shouldn't we accept "coincidence" any longer as an answer? Why do these two planets, one ours, have twin tilts?
7. THE THREE SETS OF TWIN SPINS. As previously mentioned, there are three handsome pairs of spin rates in our Solar System. They are the Mars-Earth pair, the Jupiter-Saturn pair and the Neptune-Uranus pair. Why should our Solar System feature spin rates in pairs? And three times? And are there any more pairs somewhere?
8. PERPENDICULARISM IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM. The semi-major orbit axis of the Earth's orbit "happens" to be perpendicular with the semi-major orbit axis of Jupiter. Are we to believe this is just another coincidence? Or are we beyond accepting "coincidence" as a logical answer? Perpendicular alignments of semi-major axes are typical of bodies in 3:1 or 6:1 orbital resonance. Parallel alignments are typical if the resonance is 2:1 or 3:2. The Earth's semi-major axis of its orbit is perpendicular to Jupiter's. Why? Coincidence?
9. 360 - DAY ANCIENT CALENDARS. More than a dozen ancient calendars from five continents all featured years of 360 days. These included calendars of the Incas, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Chaldeans, the Indo-Aryans of India, the Persians, the Chinese, etc. The ancients worked hard at astronomy. They were perceptive observers. They could count very accurately.
What does this mean in relation to the Earth's distance from the Sun? What does this mean as to the Earth's spin rate?
10. MOON DUST. If the Moon has been acquiring dust from space for 4 billion years, at the present rate of acquisition, dust on the Moon should average 250 feet deep or more. It has some dust, but hardly one hundredth of the amount the gradualists should expect. Is this an evidence of a sudden change in the Moon's environment, and in its location in the cosmos?
11. THE ECLIPTIC PLANE. All eight of the inner planets, Pluto excepted, are located on one single plane. In astronomy this plane is called "the ecliptic plane". When the Moon is precisely on this plane between the Sun and the Earth, an eclipse occurs. Why are the planets not dispersed on a half dozen or more planes? This plane looks like a delivery route, a delivery route from deep space.
12. THE SUN'S SHRINKAGE. For some 150 years, the Greenwich Observatory in London has been measuring and recording the Sun's diameter. Both diameters, the latitudinal one and the longitudinal one, have been recorded annually. The data shows the Sun has been shrinking about 120 feet per day. Annualized the solar shrinkage is 8.3 miles per year.
Two million years like this and the asteroid Icarus would be swallowed up. Four million years like this and Mercury would be engulfed by the Sun. Eight million years of such steady gradualism would doom Venus. And in 400,000,000 years Neptune would be swallowed up in a fiery scene. Clearly "the present is not the key to the past." Clearly something has happened to the Sun, and in astronomically recent times.
13. THE SUN'S NON-UNIFORM SPIN. The Sun's photosphere at the Sun's equator rotates 5.2% faster than at 30° latitude, 14.9% faster than the photosphere at 60° latitude, and 18.6% faster at the Sun's 75th latitude, in both hemispheres.
This is a strange, non-uniform spin rate. Possibly, it is a clue that the Sun acquired its spin, and from an external source. Perhaps the answer to this strange spin condition might, at the same time, answer the question about the Sun's daily shrinkage. The Sun's spin rate at its equator is l75 miles per hour. This is as far as a typical geologist can hike in forty-four hours. The Earth's equatorial spin rate, by comparison, is 1035 mph.
There have been only two cosmologies to choose from for the last two centuries. They have been ex nihilo creation (sometimes called fiat creation by theologians) and the offspringís of the Swedenborg-Kant thesis, the Nebular Hypothesis.
Ex nihilo creationists of late have freely criticized the shortcomings of gradualistic mechanics and claims, and choosing carefully, often criticize correctly. But they suppose, infer, imply and conclude that the only alternative cosmology is their ex nihilo creationism.
To our Solar System, usually they pay little attention to astronomical details. And, interestingly, we find they pay equally as little attention to catastrophic cosmology as is set forth in the Book of Job in their own Bible.
They proceed to torture scientific data in order to justify their literal interpretation of translations of selected verses of the Bible. Perhaps their premise is equally as false as is the gradualist premise they criticize. More data is forthcoming on this topic, all included in our 70-story skyscraper.
These are more than a dozen solid nuts and bolts issues in our Solar System that have not been addressed, yet need to be addressed. Any young physicist or astronomer ought to expect some good, solid answers to these dozen or more questions about the development of our Solar System. Alfven of the l970's has the wrong perspective. Lyttleton of the l930's had an inadequate approach, as did Russell, Jeans, Chamberlin of the l900's, Moulton, G. Darwin and others. Are these twelve or ump-teen conditions in our Solar System that difficult to explain?
The accretion principle, to which Alfven appeals, is impossible where a planet or a grain of dust has an orbiting velocity of 116,000 mph like Mercury does. Or a velocity of 12,100 mph like that of Neptune.
But for the slow velocities that must occur at a distance of .02 to .05 of a light year from the Sun, there, accretion makes sense. Thus our quarrel is not with the process of accretion itself. It is with the widespread assumption that it was a HIGH VELOCITY ENVIRONMENT in which accretion occurred.
Such a fast zone for accretion, where the planets now are located, is made by Alfven, and all other gradualist cosmologists of whom we are aware. The ex nihilists may be the exception, but they are not cosmologists in a scientific sense.
What is said about the proper region for accretion also applies to the Earth's capture of the Moon, and to the acquisition of spins, twin spins in each case, by the Uranus-Neptune pair, the Jupiter-Saturn pair and the Mars-Earth pair. What is said about the proper region for accretion also applies to where the acquisition of craters occurred by the Moon, Mercury, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Titan, etc.
Acquisition in deep space, 1,000 to 2,000 a.u. from the Sun makes better sense, along with delivery to the Sun's doorstep by Little Brother. If our thesis is valid, Little Brother will return, and at that time will reorganize the Inner Solar System once again. A future torching for Mercury's crust is on schedule, to say nothing of creating another nova of the Sun.
F2 Op. cit., p. 11.
F3 Op. cit., p. 13.
The Recent Organization of The Solar System by
Patten & Windsor
<http://www.creationism.org/patten/PattenRecOrgSolSys/>
|
|
|
|
|
