The first generation of stars
In the late sixties, as a graduate student at Case, I had the pleasure of taking a seminar and a course from the British astronomer, V. C. Reddish. Reddish revolutionized my view of the role of mathematics in science. Theretofore I thought that all mathematical advancements in science were to be rigorous. That meant that it was slow moving. But Reddish demonstrated how to use approximations as an outline from which to derive the rigor should the conclusions warrant it. That meant not only faster mathematical derivations but also meant that a lot of the work could be done in one's head over the course of months. In the course of his presentation, Reddish presented a theory of star formation (evolutionary, of course,) which solved many of the problems with the current theory. Although published, the theory was totally ignored.
This willful ignorance by the established astronomy marked the start of my disillusionment with pure scientific research. I learned that science is first and foremost a political endeavor and truth and accuracy fall by the wayside. But now, some new developments may force the evolutionists into accepting Reddish's theory.
Alain Omont of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris has found that the quasar BR 1202-0725, with a redshift of 4.69, has an unexpectedly high amount of dust and carbon monoxide surrounding it. According to the evolutionary speculation, the quasar's light left a billion years after the big bang. The problem is that the big bang cannot produce carbon and oxygen in sufficient quantities to account for the observed quantities of CO and dust. So the astronomers conclude that in the first billion years there were already huge galaxies and that a generation of stars have lived and died. This is impossible in current theory but it is precisely what Reddish's theory predicts.
Of course, from a creationist perspective, there was no previous generation of stars and the cosmos was created with the appearance of age.
Lightning and tornadoes
We quote from the abstract:1 “Laboratory experiments showed that
under certain conditions of vorticity the electrical heating produced by a
high-voltage discharge at atmospheric pressure can cause the formation
of a miniature tornado-like vortex. Once it forms, this vortex stabilizes
the electrical discharge along its axis and changes its character from that
of a spark to a high-pressure variety of a glow discharge. Electrical and
dynamic parameters were measured. By relating observations and
measurements made in these experiments to previous work and to
analogous situations in nature, it is concluded that the heating produced
by electrical discharges in a large storm may play a significant role in
forming and maintaining natural tornadoes.”
The Bible tells us that lighting is necessary to produce rain (Job
38:25-26). The above research broadens that and suggests that lightning
may also play a role in the formation of tornadoes. Significantly, people
who have looked up into the middle of a tornado report that the interior is
hollow and that there are many electrical discharge sparks throughout it.
Although the above investigators suggest that the heat generated by the
lightning may influence tornado formation, the broader evidence suggests
that the electrical field in a column of air or along a lightning stroke or
potential lightning bolt's path may itself be responsible for the formation
of a tornado. More research is needed.
Was Hitler a geocentrist?
A couple of times in the last 20 years (the length of time I've been a
geocentrist), I've come upon the claim that Hitler was a geocentrist. Now
the object of this claim is to suggest that if you are a geocentrist you must
also be a Nazi. This is preposterous, but it is not atypical of today's
pseudo-intellectual climate. Besides, Idi Amin and Mao were
heliocentrists: does this make all heliocentrists pedophillic sodomites like
Idi, or communists like Mao? Of course not.
Now comes a new twist to the story. Last April I received a fax
which included a quote by Hitler on the nature of the Copernican revolution.
The source for these comments is Picker's Tischgespräche, or, in
English, Hitler's “Table Talks.” The date of this conversation is June 2,
1942 and the topic is “War: the Mother [literally “birth hour” —Ed.] of
Inventions”:
So, as a rule, the fate of the inventor is always the same. Even the
director who made the epoch observation that one could travel by
steam on rails was ridiculed by the other directors, and so by all experts.
The tragedy of the inventor's fate is that the inventor must
intrude into an order deemed by people to be unchangeable. Furthermore,
it happens that the invention at first unleashes a disorder. Thus
war is the most favorable time to introduce new inventions, since its
very nature is to quickly bring new things into the ebb and flow. The
airplane, for example, developed more in three and a half years of war
than it did in thirty years of peace. One needs only recall that in 1906
there was issued a regulation which proclaimed that an airplane only
had value if it flew 40 kilometers per hour.
Quantized redshifts and geocentricity
For more than 20 years, William Tifft has claimed that galaxy redshifts
seem to cluster around multiples of 37.5 km/sec. Now two British
Astronomers, Bill Napier of Oxford and Bruce Guthrie of the Royal Observatory
at Edinburgh have published the best evidence yet in support of
Tifft's claim. Tifft's work originally involved the huge Coma cluster of
galaxies and originally clustered around a period of 72 km/sec. During
the 1980s Tifft and W. John Cocke examined the radio wavelength
emitted by neutral hydrogen gas in cluster galaxies and found that the actual
preferred frequency was close to half his original value, namely, 36
km/sec.
Napier and Guthrie examined the radial velocities of galaxies in the
local supercluster. The supercluster is a band of galaxy clusters which
spans the sky. It starts with the Virgo cluster and then goes north past the
Coma cluster (which is not a member of the local supercluster) including
the clusters in Canes Venatici and the Big Dipper on towards Lynxus. To
the south from Virgo it extends beyond Centaurus. In the late 1970s I
found evidence which suggested that this supercluster was rotating as a
unit. Napier and Guthrie collected radio observations from 8 different
radio observatories in order to circumvent instrumental errors. They
looked at 97 spiral galaxies with observations each from all 8 observatories.
After translating the speeds to galactocentric reference, they
performed a mathematical procedure called a power spectrum analysis
and found a fundamental frequency of 37.5 km/sec (see figure). The effect
is so strong that there is one chance in 10,000 that it is a chance occurrence.
The referees of Astronomy and Astrophysics, which is the journal to
which Napier and Guthrie submitted their paper, asked them to repeat
their analysis with a set of 117 other members of the supercluster. The
same effect showed up with a probability of 1 in 2,000 that it was an accident.
(Between the two experiments this means that the odds are 1 in
20,000,000 that they would both happen by accidental coincidence.)
Why was the effect not found before? Generally, galaxy velocities
are measured with an error of 10 to 30 km/sec, which is not accurate
enough to reveal the effect. Efforts are now underway to optically examine
these galaxies with high-precision. The effect should show up
much more clearly.
So what are the geocentric implications? There are none directly, although
the effect is also observed, centered on the earth, in neighboring
galaxies. Because these frequencies are found inside galaxy clusters, and
because we do not have any direct estimates for the speed of these
galaxies across the sky (tangential to the line of sight), we cannot ascertain
if this effect is geocentric. Still, the fact that Tifft found the effect in
galaxies in our own group of clusters (a mini-cluster) is a geocentric
result.
There is only one theory which could be made to explain this effect
and that is the “oscillating scalar fields” theory. According to the theory,
such fields which arise from linking the fundamental forces of nature
(akin to the firmament analysis) could provide a form of antigravity on
large scales. Indeed, in my original 1987 paper on the firmament, I observed
that one of the consequences of the firmament's existence is that
Newtonian gravity would break down at large distances, an effect which
could account for the “missing mass” found in galaxies and clusters of
galaxies. Thus there would be no such thing as the mysterious “dark matter"
which has been proposed to explain the missing mass.
The elusive gravitational constant
At last year's American Physical Society meeting, three groups of
physicists from around the world presented new measurements of G, the
gravitational constant. Using a torsion balance apparatus, the three
groups found that their results differed by 0.6% from the commonly accepted
value, an amount 60 times larger than the errors allowed by the
experimental apparatus. This problem is not new, but the cause is unknown.
The experimenters did rule out variable G and position on earth.
Last August, NASA and Stanford University declared that they had
found possible bacterial fossils in a rock from Mars. The rock, designated
ALH84001, was found in 1984 on the land surface of Antarctica
(Allen Hills). Since Antarctica is covered with ice, it is presumed that
any rocks found on the surface of the ice are extraterrestrial, mostly
meteorites. The probability that terrestrial eruptions such as Krakatoa
could toss rocks that far is rejected out of hand.
How does NASA know that this rock is from Mars? It doesn't. The
Viking landers did analyze sample soil from the surface of Mars, mostly
looking for organic molecules, and the “Mars meteorites” react similarly
if subjected to the same chemical tests. I don't know if these tests have
been done on terrestrial volcanic rocks and if so, what the results are.
Nevertheless, the rocks “martian origin” was “recognized” in 1993 and
we present here is what is and what is not known about the alleged fossil
life on Mars.
The carbonate formations are found on the surfaces of cracks inside
the rock. The rock itself weighs 3 pounds (1.9 kg.) and is roughly an 8
inch (20 cm.) cube. The sizes of the objects range from 1/100th to
1/1000th the diameter of a human hair. They resemble fossil bacteria
found on earth but are 100 times smaller than their terrestrial counter
parts. Indeed, they are so small that there is some question as to whether
or not they are big enough to hold genetic material at all. Furthermore,
they lack any sign of the cavities needed by cells to circulate the fluids
necessary to sustain life.
Now in all fairness, NASA and Stanford are very careful not to claim
that these are fossil bacteria, but the implication is made very strongly.
Yet the researchers did not do the chemical analysis which would
demonstrate whether or not the globules and rods are themselves organic.
They did find polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in the sample,
and the claim seems to be based on that plus the presence of iron pyrite
(fool's gold) in the form of magnetite. This is not the first time that both
of these compounds have been found in such a rock. In 1989 a paper in
Nature described organic molecules in a similar “Mars rock.”
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are produced by cells when they
decay. This may seem conclusive, but PAHs are also common in other
meteorites not thought to originate from other planets. Both PAHs and
amino acids were discovered in the Murchison-Murray meteorite about
30 years ago, but although at the time some thought these originated from
contamination by terrestrial material during handling, now both compounds
in the meteorite are thought to be of nonbiological origin. Indeed,
PAHs can also form by inorganic precipitation, so the presence of PAHs
in the rock neither proves nor disproves the biogenic nature of the objects
found in ALH84001.
The fact that the PAHs are found only inside the rock is taken as
evidence that the PAHs originated on Mars. Yet Antarctica is not as
sterile as people believe it to be. The rock's color is black, which would
absorb sunlight and heat to melting any snow falling on it. The water
would penetrate into the surface of the rock and leach out any PAHs on
the surface, giving a PAH distribution as observed. Furthermore,
ultraviolet light also destroys PAHs and of that there is plenty in Antarctica.
Magnetite
is an important marker for biological mineralization, but
the researchers did not show that magnetite is present, as it is in terrestrial
samples, in the walls of the candidate structures. Furthermore, the magnetite
in the rock is found in teardrop shaped crystals, which is extremely
rare on earth. Those bacteria on earth which produce teardrop-shaped
magnetite are extremely large and use them as a compass to find their
way. Not only are the martian objects much, much smaller than those of
earth, but Mars's magnetic field is a five-hundredth the strength of earth's
so that the magnetite would be useless for orientation.
Alternative explanations for the origins of the alleged fossils and
chemicals also exist. Just a month before the NASA announcement,
Ralph Harvey and Harry McSween published a paper in which they
proposed that ALH84001 had been formed in a hot fluid, hotter than 450ø
Celsius, which was rich in carbon dioxide, and which splashed on the
rock as the latter was flung out of its crater. Ian Franchi of the Open
University in Britain, which has a superb meteorite research center, notes
that carbonate spheres grow on rocks left lying around after being
brought in out of the Antarctic cold. He admits that he can't explain why
some of the spheres are cracked.
Finally, the fossil candidates are claimed to be 3.6 billion years old.
Rubidium-Strontium dating of the rock itself yields an “age” of 1.39 billion
years. If the objects are fossils which formed on the rock, then they
should be younger than the rock.
So what do we make of the discovery of “microfossils” on Mars? The
evidence is ridiculously scant. The only reasonable explanation for the
announcement is that NASA tricked Clinton and Congress into continued
funding of planetary exploration. It was purely a sham designed to justify
the budget. Such is not new and it is not restricted to NASA. One can
always tell when a particular budget item is being considered. When the
cancer research budget item is under consideration, the press reports on a
”major breakthrough” which is always “just around the corner.” The
same for GRIDS (gay-related immune deficiency syndrome, now erroneously
called “AIDS”). The phenomenon is just another example of
the United States government's current philosophy of managing by crisis.
1With what difficulty did the dissolution of the Ptolemaic world
image yield to that of Copernicus! Thus collapsed a world view
which had been the foundation of ecclesiastical thinking. To accept
Copernicus then required the highest courage of each individual, as it
forced them into the greatest combat position. Understandably! For
the more single-minded a man or organization thinks, the harder it is
to admit to error; to shake off the intellectual foundation in the light of
new knowledge.
I purposely expanded the above quote an additional paragraph to
show more of the context in which the reference to Ptolemy and Copernicus
occurred. Here Hitler states that the geocentric Ptolemaic model
was an error which the Roman church found difficult to dismiss in favor
of the heliocentric Copernican one. As those two who claimed that Hitler
was a geocentrist did not or were not able to produce a supporting statement,
and as this direct quote supports the contrary notion, we conclude
for what it's worth that Hitler was not a geocentrist.
Bacterial life on Mars?
The results were published in
the August 16, 1996 issue of
Science. The accompanying
electron microscope photos show
globules (see photo at right) and
rods (see cover photo) which superficially
resemble fossils of bacteria
on earth. NASA announced
the story to the press more than a
week before the issue was sent
out. At the time, Congress and
the Clinton administration were
considering NASA's 1997 budget
with a meat cleaver in hand. The
next day both Congress and Clinton
were calling for more
planetary exploration.