The death of Marinov

Stefan Marinov, a friend of the Association for Biblical Astronomy, committed suicide by jumping off the Graz University building late September. Because the University has hushed it up, the reason for his suicide is not known for certain, but it may have been related to budget cuts. About ten years ago Marinov threatened self-immolation if the British science magazine Nature would not publish his experimental results on free energy. It did publish with a note that he was wont to make such threats. Marinov was a staunch anti-relativist and political dissident, exiled from his native Bulgaria for his anti-relativity experiments.

Marinov attended the first Conference on Absolutes and Geocentricity which was held in Cleveland in 1978. During the early 1980s he submitted several articles published in the Biblical Astronomer which was then called the Bulletin of the Tychonian Society. He wrote several volumes on physics under the title The Thorny Way of Truth as well as a voluminous physics text. He was friendly to geocentricity and pointed out that the Hubble expansion of the universe is inherently geocentric. Unfortunately, he believed in the basic goodness of humanity. Had he believed the Scriptures he would not have looked to suicide as a way to make this a better world. He will be missed.

Has the vapor canopy been found?

In last issue's “Panorama,” under the title “The rain of snowballs,” we reported on the flux of “interplanetary snowballs spraying earth's upper atmosphere.” These snowballs average the size of a house and hit the earth's atmosphere at about 30 per minute. It is suspected that there is some relationship between these icy objects and comets, although so far no one has shown that there are any rocky or metallic objects accompanying the snowballs. As the snowballs sublimate on impact with the earth's atmosphere, they leave areas of water vapor some 15-25 miles in diameter. In that report we noted he implications for a young universe in the very presence of such objects. One would expect that encounters with the sun and planets would have swept the solar system clean of all but an occasional snowball.

Now that these objects have been detected, researchers are jumping on the bandwagon trying to discover more about them. On page 117 of the August 23, 1997 issue of Science News, R. Monastersky reported on the findings of Robert Conway of the Naval Research Laboratory of Washington, D.C. Conway and his colleagues used one of the space shuttle satellites to measure hydroxyl (OH) in the range from 20 to 60 miles (35 to 100 kilometers) above the earth. Because ultraviolet light from the sun splits the water molecules into hydrogen and hydroxyl at those altitudes, the hydroxyl abundance is most likely a measure of the amount of water vapor.

Conway's Middle Atmosphere High Resolution Spectrograph Investigation (MAHRSI) “revealed a layer with a surprising abundance of hydroxyl in the upper mesosphere above the Arctic, at altitudes of 60 to 80 km.” (36 to 48 miles). Such a hydroxyl abundance anomaly was also detected by a MAHRSI shuttle flight in 1994, but at that time the data were questioned.

Conway's observations support Louis Frank's snowball theory. Frank's theory is based on observations made by the Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE) which has been in orbit for 6 years. That equipment measures water vapor directly by looking at the sun as it rises and sets behind the earth. Although the researchers had not looked at the water abundance in the mesosphere, expecting any amount of water there to be below the limit of reliable detection, when they did look at the region earlier this year they found that at 45 miles (75 km.) there was 50% more water than expected. Furthermore, the water seemed concentrated in the polar regions during summertime.

Of course Frank's theory is still controversial, but allow me to add two things to the mix. First, the ozone hole, so much touted by ecologists as the reason why we should use more expensive and deadly refrigerants, appears only during polar summers. Second, water vapor in general and hydroxyl radicals in particular are fatal to ozone. May we speculate that as the cometary water falls to earth in the polar regions, it destroys the ozone as it falls through that layer? And now, why do these comets prefer to fall at the (north?) pole?

By the way, the influx of comets is not enough to fill the oceans even in evolutionary time scales.

The genius of Tesla?

The figure of Nicolai Tesla looms great among the amateur scientists who see a conspiracy in every pronouncement of science. True, there are way too many politically correct claims, such as global warming and the ozone hole, which are designed not for the truth but for “crisis management" purposes (to have people give up some of their rights in order to avert a so-called crisis), but such is hardly the case for Tesla. Frankly, I've never been able to make sense of most of Tesla's latter works, and none of his theoretical work. He did tinker with electromagnetics and he did invent some fascinating devices such as the Tesla coil, but of his latter works the elements of theory and even fact are missing.

Now an email message from Juergen Heinzerling to the Fortean Times casts some light on the matter. Of Tesla's later works he wrote:

… His notes and patent applications are so incomplete that a number of his inventions … are not properly understood today. Most of the current rumours abut Tesla are based solely on speeches made long after his last large-scale scientific venture, the Wardenclyffe project.

With the advent of theoretical physicists and mathematicians like Albert Einstein, Tesla's purely practical talents went out of fashion. Shortly after World War I, he didn't even operate a permanent laboratory. His torrent of patent applications slowed to a trickle and he acted mainly as a public figure, announcing gradiose projects at champagne parties without ever realising them. This is interpreted as the result of a conspiracy to suppress his world-shaking inventions by cutting his funding; however, he managed to keep up his bon vivant lifestyle till his death.

A great showman with talents bordering on those of a stage magician, Tesla very probably knew that he couldn't compete with the likes of Einstein, Bohr and von Neumann, lacking as he did their theoretical background. His situation was reflected by an event from his own past, when he had won the Niagara AC/DC war over the illiterate tinkerer Edison by a few scraps of theory he did know; but unlike Edison, who even went so far as to invent the electric chair as a public relations device against Tesla's concept of alternating current, Tesla was intelligent enough to realise that he had lost. So he kept his mouth shut, spent his time feeding pigeons and enjoying himself in the Players Club for the rest of his life. And every year or so, he an nounced the impending introduction of a world-shaking invention, without investing even a minimum of time in its realisation.

One could muse that these were the mad ravings of a loser, but to honour the great man I suggest an alternative solution: his wild ideas were a subtle hoax, hatched with his old friend Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain. Tesla admired Twain for his writing and humour, and the idea of scaring the new model army of theoretical scientists by announcing non-existent scientific inventions could just be the type of scam Tesla and Twain might have cooked up during a jolly candlelight dinner in a posh New York club.¹