This is one full issue. I have about 100 pages of articles, letters, criticisms of all taints, notes and quotes to present. I wish we could put it all in one issue. I will, however, include a “Readers' Forum.” It's been some time since we had one and some questions have been waiting for some time. There are some other letters which will have to wait an issue or two because of the length of the response. Most notable of these are the responses to the small universe critique. I'm not avoiding the issue, just swamped with other work.

The main article is a reprint from the October 1994 issue of Chalcedon Report. I had composed a response myself for inclusion in this issue, but there is not much I can add to Martin Selbrede's comprehensive report, so I decided to shelve it. It is reproduced here in total with Chalcedon's permission, which maintains the copyright. The long technical response referred to at the end of Martin's article is about two-thirds done. Eventually we hope to distribute it.

In this issue we also present an article entitled “Journey to Mizar.” It is primarily of interest to the amateur astronomers among our readers, but many others may enjoy the view of the second star from the end of the Big Dipper. The article is an excerpt of a book about the astronomical objects in the constellation of the Big Dipper. The 80-page book is available to Biblical Astronomer readers at a special price of $12 (regularly $15, foreign orders add $4.00 and pay in cash or cheques drawn on U.S. banks). Although the price may seem high, it represents a great deal of work, especially art work. See the box on page 34 for the address.

Announcements

We are making Martin Selbrede's excellent video tape, Geocentricity, available for $25 postpaid. We can only supply it in American VHS format. The tape is roughly two hours long. At the end is an animation showing the geocentric model for the retrograde motion of the planets.

Richard Elmendorf has done a tremendous amount of research on the Foucault Pendulum and has published it in an illustrated 84-page monograph entitled Heliocentric Humbug! A critical investigation of the Foucault Pendulum. Although the casual reader may get the impression that Dick Elmendorf thinks the Foucault pendulum to be a forgery, such is not his claim. After all, the pendulum twists the way it does because of the relative rotation of earth and stars, so it should work the same way in both geocentric and heliocentric universes. Other than that minor detail, this is a magnificent piece of work. We'd like to make this available through the Association for Biblical Astronomy but currently it may be ordered for $5 from the Pittsburgh Creation Society, P.O. Box 267, Bairdford, PA 15006, U.S.A. Please add appropriate postage (about $2.50 should cover postage, and shipping envelope, I think). At $5 it's a steal. It can't cost much less to make.

One personal note about Dick's work. He writes that most Foucault pendulums are not free-swinging, that they are damped and are constrained to swing in a plane. Without such damping the bob tends to start tracing out an ellipse which makes it hard to see the precession. In the mid-seventies I started a detailed analysis of the Foucault pendulum and found that the bob settle into an elliptical path. At that point I gave up on the analysis, thinking I was doing something wrong or missing something. I should know better. I can remember several such discouragements as an undergraduate astrophysics major. There would be derivations I could not understand or follow. Over the years enough of them have proven to be wrong until I now suspect that all the derivations I had trouble with in college were wrong in the first place.

In the next issue I defend one of the subjects I did understand: quantum mechanics. But not just quantum mechanics for quantum mechanics sake. In quantum mechanics most (if not all) branches of knowledge come together. Theology, epistemology, linguistics, physics, philosophy and other sundry fields all find their foundations in truth, and quantum mechanics has something to say about “true theories.” Find out about a theory of theories and why many creationists can't find anything good to say about quantum mechanics.