More About the Watery Comets

 

In the last couple of Panorama issues but one, we’ve looked at the dis­covery that hundreds to thousands of house-sized water-rich comets hit the earth every day.  Recently the European Space Agency’s Infrared Space Observatory took a look at the concentration of water vapor in the atmospheres of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.  The amount of water vapor in their atmospheres is a thousandth that in the earth’s.  Since comets are assumed to originate outside the planetary system, theory requires that these outer planets have more water vapor than the earth.  Indeed, these planets exhibit a ten-thousandth the amount of water vapor expected.  Hmmm, let’s see.  One ten-thousandth of 5 billion years is 500,000 years; and given the uncertainty in the amount of comets hitting the earth and their assumed distribution in space, and the abundance measures of ISO is uncertain readily by a factor of 10, the 500,000 years can easily stretch down to 5,000 years or, particularly, the 6,000 years since the creation.  So if these house-sized comets are distributed throughout the solar sys­tem, which I doubt, then the amount of water vapor in the atmospheres of the outer planets is consistent with a 6,000-year old age for the cosmos.  What about remnants on the moon? 

In December more doubt was cast on the small comet observations.  The instruments in the lab, looking at nothing except their own noise, “detected” similar dots in their view.  Frank is sticking by his guns, however, but given the absolute fact that the observations don’t fit the theory of a billions-of-years-old solar system, can there be any doubt that the existence of these objects will be denied until one of them destroys a space shuttle?  (Don’t look for that to happen anytime soon, according to Frank they break up long before getting that close to the earth.)  We’ll keep you posted. 

 

The Cosmological Constant and the Firmament

 

In a paper which appeared in the November 24 issue of Physical Review Letters, Steven Carlip of the University of California at Davis found that the process of separating nuclear (regular) matter from the su­perdense firmament vastly increases the number of “states” (possibilities) that space can assume.  The equations describing the process are like those of thermodynamics (the study of heat flow), with temperature re­placed by the cosmological constant (a force which “pushes” atoms apart).  The greater the number of possible “states,” the colder space be­comes.  (Each state would receive an share of the energy.)

The firmament is tremendously hot, billions of billions of times hotter than any portion of any type of star, real or imagined.[1]  Carlip’s analysis is a plausible explanation of how the heat of the firmament can be sup­pressed.  The firmament itself, through some unknown process, obscures the infinite light (heat) of God so that we are not consumed thereby.  At least one mathematician has observed that the medium making up the firmament’s particles must have all the properties of God. 

Now the cosmological constant is a gravitational phenomenon, ac­cording to Carlip’s approach, and we find here a relationship between gravity and thermodynamics.  Specifically, the increased number of states which would be necessary to describe the physical properties of the created universe relates to entropy.  If each state is equally likely (possible), entropy is maximized.  Gravity occurs when the states are not equally likely, that is, when there is some order or structure imposed on a locality, such as the order inherent in the grouping of atoms making up the earth. 

 

Were the Stars Closer to Earth Before the Flood?

 

The following is an example of what happens to a man’s mind when he reverts to the non-existent “original autographs” to force his pet theory into the unwilling Scriptures.

The canopy theories (that the earth was once surrounded by a canopy of water vapor, or liquid water, or water ice,) die hard.  There is no direct evidence that such a canopy ever existed.  Many try to equate it with the Bible’s firmament, but this interpretation ignores the fact that the Bible records that the stars were created inside the firmament (Gen. 1:17). 

For years Carl Baugh of the Creation Evidence Museum has promoted the speculation that the Bible is wrong when it says that the stars are inside the firmament.  He believes that their light was amplified by the canopy’s ice in a laser-type amplification, and that this is what God actually meant to say in Genesis 1 but didn’t have the wits or means to say so clearly.  Now it turns out that for water, steam, or ice; a maser, not a laser, is the correct “amplifier.”  The problem for Baugh’s theory is that such would boost the star’s microwave radiation (the same as found in microwave ovens), not the visible light.  This mysterious “amplification,” which supposedly brightened the light of the pre-flood stars, is even said to have played music, audible to the creatures in earth, and is thus related to be the Greek notion of the music of the spheres.  All in all, the speculation tries to conform the Bible to the Greek crystalline spheres model.  It takes a real twist of Scripture for this “laser” action of star light to be the “correct interpretation” of the placing of the stars in the firmament in Genesis 1:15 & especially verse 17.

Now comes the latest twist to the fable.  2 Samuel 22 and Psalm 18 are basically the same song.  They relate the words that David said to the Lord on the day that he was delivered out of the hand of his enemies (the Philistines) and Saul.  When Baugh comes to 2 Samuel 22:5 (which is the same as Psalm 18:4) — “...the floods of ungodly men made me afraid,” he reads into that the flood of Noah: and when the Scripture says “He bowed the heavens” (2 Sam. 22:10 which is also Ps. 18:9), Baugh takes this to “indicate that God stretched out the heavens in mercy to the earth’s inhabitants who would populate the earth after the Flood.”[2]  In other words, Baugh claims that the stars were much closer to the earth before the flood.

Baugh couples this speculation to a story in the June 1990 issue of Astronomy magazine (p. 10), in which galaxy walls—N.B. walls of galaxies, not stars—are reported to lay in seven layers.  Baugh has taken this report, (which has lost much of its evidence in the last three years as more data has come in,) and concludes that before the flood the seven “layers” would give a three-dimensional (3-D) effect to the stars to human observers. 

Now, as the canopy would have been at least 50 miles above the earth, there would not be any three-dimensional effect noticeable to human observers.  The human eye can resolve down to about one minute of arc, and given that the eyes are about three inches apart, all 3-D effects disappear beyond a distance of about 0.1 kilometer (340 feet).  Baugh persists in the opinion that the stars must have been much closer to the earth before the Flood, and that they were so close that the human eye could discern the constellations in three dimensions.  Now if Baugh wanted to be really Biblical and yet keep his theory, why not have the stars located in the canopy before the flood?  After all, that is what Genesis 1:17 says....

 

Galileo and the Leaning Tower Revisited

 

The following was contributed by John Byl regarding Aristotle’s claim that heavier bodies fall to earth faster than light ones.

Did Galileo actually do the experiment of dropping two balls from the tower of Pisa in 1643? This is not certain. What is certain is that this ex­periment was done already in 1586 by the Dutch engineer Simon Stevin (1546-1620), who writes:[3]

 

The experiment against Aristotle is this: let us take (as I have done in company with the learned H. Jan Cornets de Groot...) two leaden balls, one ten times greater in weight than the other, which allow to fall together from the height of thirty feet upon a board or something from which a sound is clearly given out, and it shall appear that the lightest does not take ten times longer to fall than the heaviest, but that they appear as a single sensation of sound. The same, in fact, also occurs with two bodies of equal size, but in ten-fold ratio of weight.

 

Stevin, by the way, was also an ardent defender of Copernicus.

E. J. Dijksterhuis[4] states that already in the 6th century A.D. Philoponus, on the strength of experiment, had denied the correctness of Aristotle’s formula.

 

Space Probes Confirm a Geocentric Prediction

 

In 1918 two papers were published which applied relativity to a rotat­ing shells of distant matter and a disk of matter respectively.  The former was by Thirring and the latter paper by Lense and Thirring.  A translation of the papers is reproduced in the Geocentric Papers which is published by the Association for Biblical Astronomy and which is described on the back cover of this issue.  Lense and Thirring concluded that if the universe is geocentric, that the orbits of satellites near the earth should rotate ever so slowly.  This is because the earth’s gravity pulls against the gravity of the starry, daily-rotating universe.  In a press release dated March 27, 1998, Douglas Isbell and Lynn Chandler announced that this slight effect, called frame dragging, has finally been detected. 

It is, of course, a shame for a heliocentrist to admit that the effect was first postulated by physicists who decided to test relativity by using what amounts to a geocentric model to see if it predicted the same behavior for a satellite as does the heliocentric model.  They did find the Lense-Thirring effect, as the phenomenon is also called, from their implicitly geocentric model, which effect had not been predicted heliocentrically.  Since it makes perfect sense, the effect is now not only heralded as heliocentric but even as proof of relativity.  The report states:

“Researchers believe they have detected the effect by precisely measuring shifts in the orbits of two Earth-orbiting laser-ranging satel­lites, the Laser Geodynamics Satellite I (LAGEOS I), a NASA spacecraft, and LAGEOS II, a joint NASA/Italian Space Agency (ASI) spacecraft. The research, which is reported in the current edition of the journal Science, is the first direct measurement of a bizarre effect called “frame dragging.”  The team was led by Dr. Ignazio Ciufolini of the Na­tional Research Council of Italy and the Aerospace Department of the University of Rome, and Dr. Erricos Pavlis of the Joint Center for Earth System Technology, a research collaboration between NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. ...

     “We found that the plane of the orbits of LAGEOS I and II were shifted about six feet (two meters) per year in the direction of the Earth’s rotation,” Pavlis said.  “This is about 10 percent greater than what is pre­dicted by general relativity, which is within our margin of error of plus or minus 20 percent. Later measurements by Gravity Probe B, a NASA spacecraft scheduled to be launched in 2000, should reduce this error margin to less than one percent.  This promises to tell us much more about the physics involved.

“... The frame-dragging effect was first derived using general relativity by Austrian physicists Joseph Lense and Hans Thirring in 1918.  Known as the Lense-Thirring effect, it was previously observed by the team of Ciufolini using the LAGEOS satellites and has recently been ob­served around distant celestial objects with intense gravitational fields, such as black holes and neutron stars.  The new research around Earth is the first direct detection and measurement of this phenomenon.

“... Dr. John Ries, an expert in satellite geodesy at the University of Texas at Austin, cautions that it is very challenging to remove the much larger effects of tidal changes and small zonal influences in the Earth’s gravitational field, so that estimating the possible errors in the measure­ment of the Lense-Thirring effect is itself uncertain.”

Note that the report fails to tell us that the Lense-Thirring effect was predicted by a geocentric model of relativity.

 

 

The Twist in Space

 

Every few years some observation raises the question of whether or not the universe rotates.  In 1982, for example, Paul Birch[5] reported that the plane of polarization (the plane in which light and radio waves “bob up and down”) of light from distant galaxies seems to depend on the direction one looks.  Birch’s conclusion was ridiculed at the time, but the data still stand.  The latest flap came about as the result of a paper by Nodland and Ralston entitled “Indication of Anisotropy in Electromag­netic Propagation Over Cosmological Distances” which appeared in the 21 April, 1997 issue of Physical Review Letters, (pp. 3043-3046). 

Now it turns out that Birch’s observation again stands alone.  The Nodland and Ralston observations have been demonstrated due to a statistical artifact.  It is not a real effect.  And that is just as well, as the observed twist was roughly 100 times larger than Birch’s.  Birch derived a rotational period of roughly one hundred trillion (1014) years.  In a 1988[6] paper I derived a theoretical rotational period for the universe of 1017 (100 quadrillion) years but which, given the great uncertainty in the mean density of the universe, could be as little as 1015 (one quadrillion) years, close enough to Birch’s period.  The discredited observations give a much faster rotation and so a much shorter period. 

 

More on Marinov’s Death

 

The following came via e-mail from Professor P. T. Pappas, Markopulioti 28, Athens 11744, Greece.  E-mail pappasp@ibm.net.  I have not edited this except for omission of one paragraph (denoted by ellipses) and I left off about two pages at the very end.  I will forward then entire account, unedited, to anyone who requests it.  Or the reader may connect to http://www.padrak.com/ine/PAPPAS_SM.html on the Web.

 

On 18 to 20 of August, I and Dr. Paul LaViolette visited the city of Graz to investigate the accident.  We visited the University of Graz at the back of the Bibliotheque at Universitatsplatz 2, A 8010-Graz, where Stefan Marinov presumably jumped off from the top of the four level outside emergency staircase to the street. According to the librarian only one student saw Stefan actually jumping off. The name of the student is not known to us. The body of Stefan was found lying on the street below the staircase by Professor Ernst Ebermann. Stefan was not bleeding and initially Professor Ebermann thought he was sleeping there. He was still alive.

Stefan left no cry or cries. The ambulance was called and Stefan died on his way to the Hospital. The bicycle with which Stefan presumably ar­rived there, is still there, locked and unnoticed (at least up to 19/9/1997). No body else noticed the accident, except first the assumed student and later Professor Ebermann 031 36 61637, 0316-380 5605, fax 0316-381255, and perhaps a few other people later.

According to Professor Ebermann, a brightly visible fluorescent spot, about the same size and in the same exact position with the body, was left on the asphalt of the street, for 3 days, after the removal of the body, without an apparent cause for the spot, or without being due to any bleed­ing of blood or another liquid coming from Stefan’s body.

The Police has made no official announcement today. Apparently, they did not investigate the case obviously in depth, since the bike is still by the place of accident, locked and unnoticed. The apartment of Stefan is sealed by the police and nobody is allowed to enter, except for his son Marin Marinov who entered for a brief time on 6 or 7 of August 1997. His belongings were not allowed to be taken and are still sealed there.

Stefan left various letters typed over his typewriter and bearing his

signature. In a particular letter, he was asking me to be notified im­mediately and a few others. The police never made the notification to any body.

The authorities of Graz refuse any value for the letters and to his last

will, for it bears only one signature without witnesses. The case of Stefan Marinov and his letters were given to the city Advocate: Dr Egbert Sprenger, Joanneuming 11, A-8010 Graz, tel: +43-316 828991-0.

In the morning of 19/8/1997, we, together with Mr. Jeorg Deisting fax/phone +43-316-464023 visited the offices of the city advocate Dr E. Sprenger. The said case and letters were there, but, we were refused of any information. We strongly protested against the refusal, but, even­tually, we had to leave without getting any information.

The son of Stefan Marinov, Marin Marinov (+359 88 520840, +359 2 988 5246, fax +359 2 988 52 84, zamminister@online.bg) is currently Deputy Minister of Industry of Bulgaria and is in a delicate situation with respect to the death of his father.

No one knew or was told about the intended and assumed suicide of Stefan Marinov, even his brother who talked to him on the phone one hour before Stefan’s death.  Stefan had visited his son in Bulgaria 20 days before, myself in Athens 15 days before, had written a letter to me 3 days before, and had written letters to various other people, making appoint­ments or suggesting various future collaborations (to Professor Selleri for example). 10 days before Stefan’s death, Stefan had made a Hotel reser­vation for me and himself for an International Physics Conference to take place in Koln, Germany, on August 25, 1997.

...

Adopting the Police explanation that Dr Stefan Marinov killed him­self, on July 15, 1997, jumping from the University of Graz Bibliotheque (Library) building, I would like to ask: Why there was no official press or news release?  I was the first to inform his son, Marin Marinov, two weeks later, on 31/7/1997 in Sophia for the death of his father who asked me a similar question. “Why the police still did not inform me, for two weeks, after the death of my father?”

Stefan Marinov was known all over the world, half of the citizens of city of Graz knew him. Stefan Marinov’s death, jumping off a public building, should have been the first news for the city of Graz, for half the people there will now look for Stefan and many more from all over the world. Is it true that there is no press release in this case for the city of Graz? Does it look like a cover up? Even, Mr Deisting who first informed us, found out accidentally about Stefan’s death from the librarian on 25/7/1997.

Stefan had attempted unsuccessfully to kill himself in the past, in Paris, in an attempt to make a protest against scientific censorship and the indifference of the scientific community.

Assuming that Stefan had chosen for himself, a public building, as the Library of the University of Graz, instead of his own high elevated bal­cony, apparently he did so for the same protest, however, not particularly for the University of Graz. He did so to protest against all universities and position-occupying, indifferent-for-the-truth scientists and salary receiv­ing professors.

The authorities of the University, knowing Stefan and his continuous efforts to answer unanswered scientific questions for the last 20 years, apparently managed to cancel an annoying press conference or press release by the police, which they thought would have caused students all over the world to ask more questions which their Professors could not answer and Editors would not publish, like the lists of questions and problems Stefan used to send and never got an answer - other than the typical “Professor’s” answer: “I am not a Specialist”, “Do not get me involved”, “I have no time...”, quoting only the most recent responses to his questions, just one month before his Last Protest.

 

The Face On Mars Poses for a Portrait

 

In issue No. 83 (1998. Vol. 8, pg. 5.) we printed an article entitled “The Monuments on Mars?” which concluded that the Martian “pyramids” in the Cydonia region were actually volcanic cones or moun­tains, and we presented an analysis suggesting that the “face” was an ex­ploded volcano.  Earlier this year (1998), the NASA satellite now orbit­ing Mars was placed into a new orbit which orbit took it further north and south from Mars’s equator.  One of the reasons for that change in orbits was to take a closer look at the Cydonia region of Mars where the mys­terious “face on Mars” was photographed in the 1970s. 

NASA has released the latest photos of the face and Hoagland, the chief promoter of the superstition that ancient civilizations left an occult message for mankind in the pyramids of Mars, is screaming fraud!  His claim is that NASA “overcorrected” the photos.  (The complete series from raw image to fully processed image may be found on-line at NASA’s Viking web site.)  I see, if processing supports the superstition, then it is acceptable and properly done; but if it doesn’t support Hoagland, then there is something amiss with the processing.  Do I really need to point out that his evolutionary nonsense has netted millions of dollars in sales for Hoagland?  Unfortunately, the new photos will not put a real dent in his cash flow.  The American public is of all the peoples in the world the most gullible.  Now there will be yet another conspiracy theory to develop, and another “great cover up.”  Unfortunately for mankind, too many of these hoaxes—and Hoagland’s speculation is a hoax—will obscure real conspiracies.  So here’s the photo, which I’ve enhanced even more than NASA.  (Note the volcanic cone at its center.)