Comets

[uniface]

Long and interesting.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/14568 ... Connection

[uniface]

More
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Abstract: Mankind's essentially untroubled state of mind in the presence of comets during the last two centuries has been fortified by the overall relative brevity of cometary apparitions and the calculated infrequency of cometary encounters with planets.

During the course of the Space Age, however, the fact of cometary splitting has also become increasingly secure and there is growing appreciation of the fact that mankind's state of mind can never be altogether relaxed. Indeed a watershed in the modern perception of cometary facts has evidently been reached with the most recent and devastating example of cometary splitting, that of the fragmen­tation of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 and its subsequent bombardment of planet Jupiter.

Thus there is a recognized tendency now amongst comets, especially those in short-period orbits, due to the occasionally excessive effects of solar irradia­tion, planetary tides and small body impacts, which gives rise to individual swarms of cometary debris, and it is the resulting repeated penetration of such dispersed swarms by our planet which apparently increases the danger to mankind from time to time.

The danger comprises global coolings, atmospheric pollution and super-Tunguska events, the cometary debris being responsible for both high-level dust insertions and low-level multimegaton explosions in the Earth's atmosphere along with a generally enhanced fireball flux.

Historically, the presence of such danger was drawn to mankind's attention by the observed bombardments over several decades due to "blazing stars threatening the world with famine, plague and war; to princes death; to kingdoms many curses; to all estates many losses; to herdsmen rot; to ploughmen hapless seasons; to sailors storms; to cities civil treasons."

The sense of cosmic destiny aroused by these bombardments evidently involved degrees of fatalism and public anxiety which were deplored by both eccle­siastical authorities and secular administrations with the result that acknowledged dispensers of prognosis and mitigation who endorsed the adverse implications of 'blazing stars' (astrologers, soothsayers etc.) were commonly impugned and cen­sured.

Nowadays, of course, we are able to recognise that the Earth's environment is not only one of essentially uniformitarian calm, as formerly assumed, but one that is also interrupted by 'punctuational crises', each crisis being the sequence of events which arises due to the fragmentation of an individual comet whose orbit intersects the Earth's. That even modest crises can arouse apprehension is known through the circumstances of the nineteenth century break-up of Comet Biela.

Indeed it seems that these crises are rather frequently characterized by relatively violent (paradigm shifting) transmutations of human society such as were originally proposed by Spengler and Toynbee more than sixty years ago on the basis of historical analysis alone.

It would appear, then, that the historical fear of comets which has been with us since the foundation of civilization, far from be­ing the reflection of an astrological perception of the cosmos which was deranged and therefore abandoned, has a perfectly rational basis in occasional cometary fragmentation events. Such events recur and evidently have quite serious impli­cations for society and government today.

Thus when cosmic danger returns and there is growing awareness of the fact, we find that society is capable of becoming uncontrollably convulsed as 'enlightenment' spreads. A revival of millenarian ex­pectations under these circumstances, for example, is not so much an underlying consequence but a deviant manifestation of the violent turmoil into which society falls, often to revolutionary effect.

http://www.sott.net/article/147270-The- ... vilization

[uniface]

And a third. Starts slow but covers some interesting considerations.

Everybody fixates, it seems, on impact craters. But the real damage they do is to the collective human psyche. An this and the previous two point out.

FWIW
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http://www.sott.net/article/147339-Wars ... nd-Witches

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi uniface -

Ah yes, Signs of The Times and Laura. Her name is something of an inside joke among the impact community; in her reivew of "Man and Impact in the Americas", she took up all of the review space with a simple paraphrasing of the intro to the book.

One thing I've learned from this is that you have no control of what others later make of your work. Most people avoid this lesson, as they are aleady dead, but my stroke has given me certain unique experiences, and this is one of them.

While kalopiin thinks he has all the secrets of the universe, Laura proudly declares that she has them already:

"According to Laura Knight-Jadczyk, the mysteries of the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Temple refer to a particular, very advanced “technology” – with the aim, for example, of teleportation and changing between space-time dimensions – a secret and sacred science of which only a few great “Initiates” have remained custodians. Christ Jesus was the surest guarantor of this precious legacy, and, although it might displease Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code), the genealogical lineage of the “Sangréal” (the “Sang Royal” or “Holy Blood”), is not at all as he believes it to be!"

It would be a lot of fun to hear the two of them "debate" the matter.

[E.P. Grondine]

Another very funny thing is to watch bad science quickly taken up by these folks. Look at the following video in which Richard Muller and NASA's David Morrison's Nemesis Hypothesis is used to promote impending doom, from which only Laura can save us:

http://www.sott.net/article/142651-Some ... -Way-Comes

And of course, you want to waste your life and cash in helping her with this important task.
You do want to make something of your lifel, don't you? Don't you want to be a "special" bearer of the "Truth"?

Small problem: After several hundred million dollars, NASA's WISE mission proved definitively that Morrison's Nemesis did not exist. Other small problem: NASA has not fired Morrison yet.

[uniface]

A good friend, years ago, was a political science prof who did side gigs like consulting to / managing gubernatorial & congressional campaigns.

One interesting thing I picked up from hanging out with him was that, politically, endorsements were an exceedingly poor idea. The reason was that the likelihood of picking up second-hand support from another was slender, but every enemy the endorser had would now be your enemy as well (guilt by association).

While I don't doubt you could make a strong case for your perspective, unless you're operating with the same prescient certainty you accuse those with whom you disagree of (in which case the argument is a pure Official-Big-Deal vs. Stinky-Old-Poopy-Head scenerio) (and citing someone's general shortcomings as if they invalidated their specific insights comes pretty close), I don't see (perhaps my shortcoming) where your approach invalidates or "debunks" the mass-psychological effects of unusual events in the heavens -- effects long noted by people like Spengler, Velikovsky et al., which are solidly founded in history.

IOW, her grandmother might wear combat boots but she seems to be raising an important point that, as I started by pointing out, is still routinely overlooked unless it's "quantifiable" (like the temperature drop that wiped out the pecan crop).

There is more to Medicine than urine analysis. (Wilhelm Reich).

Thank you very little, Voltaire & Co.

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi uniface -

Low brow determinist that I am, I tend to stick with the science of recent impact events, rather than the spiritual aspects of catastrophes.

Everyone now a days seems to be looking for some kind of "spiritual" technology that is going to make everything alright in their lives. Myself, I'm feeling like Brian in Monty Python's "The Life of Brian".

Once again, I am not a spiritual guide, but instead rely on others for that. I can warn of some frauds and cconfused individuals, though.

Impact science is not a "sacred science", as defined by Steve Hasan in his book "Combatting Cult Mind Control".
(An excellent read/reference work.)
Laura's attempts to turn it into one with herself as its "guru" are really pretty hilarious.

I intentionally never read Velikovsky. Those interested in him I point to Leroy Ellenberger.

By the way, I have made mistakes in my work in impact science, but I do try to correct them when I discover them.

If I ever discover the historical basis for "Moses", I'll be sure to try to share that with you.
As it is, it would be nice to be able to try to do more work on Middle Bronze Age Mediterranean chronology,
and the identity of the "Hyksos" is an interesting question as well.

Speaking about making mistakes,
another strange co-incidence" Morrison is a key member of Sceptical Inquirer.
I'd like to see that he has a whole lot more time for dealing with people like Laura.

[uniface]

"When you taste, you know." (A useful axiom, in my view. If someone asks what cinnamon tastes like, your only viable option is to hand him some. Some matters simply don't usefully reduce to words).

FWIW, one thing I've come to taste and know over the years is the truth of an observation Idries Shah made to the effect that people are only capable of so much rationality. When they try to exceed their inherent rationality limit (attempting to live up to what the self-styled "Enlightenment" ideal), their irrationality begins to remind me of Steve Martin with the arrow through his head -- as obvious to others as it is unsuspected.

Over-exuberant "rationality" imperceptibly slips into belief (preceding post). And, like Steve with the arrow, it is never apparent to the believer himself.

When Roger Bacon started the "Scientific Method" ball rolling, he passed along the Empirical approach he got from his Islamic predecessors well enough, but omitted the other half of it -- an omission that has disfigured it ever since : the necessity of periodic detachment for the sake of maintaining perspective.

From an strictly empirical-logical standpoint, meat is food, and people are meat. Considering this one in the round is so second-nature that failing to do it in others isn't noticed. But it should be.

Only through the synthesis of multiple perspectives does something approaching the truth of any matter emerge. Notice how consistently (and stridently) all varieties of fanaticism insist that their own, single perspective is THE TRUTH, as Marxism does on the axioms of Marx. Disrupt this closed system, deny it the exclusivity it demands, and the pseudo-certainty of it evaporates.

"If the wind always blows from the same direction the trees grow crooked."

I think (having read Velikovsky with an open mind 35+ years ago, I know) that if you would trouble yourself to become even minimally acquainted with what he "saw" concerning celestial mechanics (comets included) back in the 1950s, and came to appreciate both how astonishingly ahead of his time's paradigm he was and the nature of the shameful treatment he received at the hands of the "scientific" mafia, the single perspective on him that now suffices you would no longer satisfy you as at all adequate.

Requesting your indulgence then for five minutes of your attention :

In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky culminated decades of research with a book titled Worlds in Collision that "proposes that many myths and traditions of ancient peoples and cultures are based on actual events." His approach was interdisciplinary, a rarity in the 20th century, taking into account astronomy, physics, chemistry, psychology, ancient history, and comparative mythology.

He noted, for example, that Venus, the second brightest object in the night sky, was not mentioned by the earliest astronomers. He proposed that the planet was a newcomer to our solar system, a comet, appearing in historical times with an irregular orbit that caused catastrophic events on our own planet.

Coming in close contact with the Earth, the latter's rotation altered, making it appear that The Sun had stood still, a phenomenon reported on in the Book of Josue. What has come to be known as Joshua's Long Day is corroborated by the texts of the ancient Chinese, Japanese, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Mayans; the East Asians reporting a extremely long sunset, the Mexicans reporting an extremely long sunrise.

Immanuel Velikovsky was too eminent a scholar to be dismissed outright as a kook, and he counted some respected people among his friends. (See The Einstein-Velikovsky Correspondence). Nevertheless, his Catastrophism was rejected outright by a scientific establishment that couldn't stomach an interdisciplinary challenge to its dogmatic Uniformitarianism, even after Velikovsky's predictions about the temperature of Venus and radio activity from Jupiter were proven true.

Prof. Stove notes the book "became the target of nearly universal abuse and derision" and "[t]he professional scientists' campaign against Worlds in Collision began well before the book appeared" and resulted in, among other things, its author being "rigorously excluded from access to learned journals for his replies," "the sacking of the Senior Editor of Macmillan responsible for accepting the Velikovsky manuscript," "the sacking of the director of the famous Hayden Planetarium in New York, because he proposed to take Velikovsky seriously enough to mount a display about the theory," and "Macmillan finally cav[ing] in, and prevailed on Velikovsky to let them transfer their best-selling property to a competitor, Doubleday, which, as it has no textbook division, is not susceptible to professorial blackmail."

Prof. Stove also "mention[s] some of the more startling pieces of evidence that have come to light since Velikovsky published." It was he who gave "altogether novel importance to electrical and magnetic forces in the solar system" and who "said that the earth must have a magnetosphere much stronger, and extending much further into space, than anyone else believed possible." He also "predict[ed] that Jupiter would be found to be a radio source, long before the astonished radio-astronomers found it so." Most interesting was what he said about the second planet:

According to Velikovsky, there were all over the world, as folklore alleges, rains of burning pitch. This, among other things, led him to assert in 1950 that the clouds of Venus must be very rich in petroleum gas. All contemporary knowledge of the chemistry of the planet's clouds was flatly against it. Yet it has turned out to be so. If you think this is a bit creepy, you have heard nothing yet.

According to Velikovsky in 1950, Venus must still be very hot, because of the circumstances of its recent birth and subsequent career. The astronomers had long "known" that it was cool, and as late as 1959 accepted estimates of its temperature, such as 59 degrees centigrade, were still being revised slightly downward. Yet it has turned out that the planet has a surface temperature around 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

This would be hard enough to reconcile with any "uniformitarian" theory which requires a common origin for all the planets. But worse was to come. For Mariner II put it beyond doubt that the rotation of Venus is retrograde — that is, while it revolves in the same direction as that in which all the other planets both revolve and rotate, it rotates in the contrary sense! No doubt ad hoc amendments will be tried, to fit this fact into conventional theories of the origin of the planets (just as desperate ad hoc amendments to a "greenhouse" theory are still being made to account for the temperature); but this one will test their ingenuity, that is certain.

Say what you will of Velikovskian cosmology, more scientists themselves are questioning whether it is right to dismiss outright celestial events as described in ancient texts, as this article suggests — The Odyssey astronomically accurate? And exciting news just today that the largest planet of our solar system "snared a passing comet in the middle of the last century, eventually releasing it 12 years later," rings a Velikovskian bell — Jupiter had temporary moon for 12 years.

Whatever conclusions one may come to on this matter, it raises interesting questions about the tyrannical conformity of thought that plagues not only the scientific but also the economic and political spheres as well. Are not proponents of the Austrian School of Economics similarly marginalized by the academic cartel, as are advocates the traditional United States non-interventionism by the political cartel? Alternative medicine's long history of suppression by the American Medical Association is also a parallel.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/snyder-joshu ... a21.1.html

In 1953 while addressing graduate students at Princeton University, Velikovsky suggested two further testable phenomena: that the Earth's magnetic field reaches as far out into space as the Moon's orbit and is responsible for the vibratory or rocking movements of the moon. And he suggested that the planet Jupiter (from which he said the Venus-comet had originated) radiates in the radio frequency range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

These predictions were taken by scientists of the 1950s as being tantamount to proof of Velikovsky's ignorance, insanity or both. Harlow Shapley refused to become involved in any experimental research to confirm his ideas. When, for instance, it was suggested that Shapley might use the Harvard observatory to search for evidence of hydrocarbons in the Venusian atmosphere. Shapley replied that he wasn't interested in Velikovsky's 'sensational claims' because they violate the laws of mechanics and 'if Dr Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy'.

Within little more than a decade of publication, 'all' of Velikovsky's key predictions were confirmed by experiment. The 'Mariner' spacecraft of 1963 determined by experiment that the surface temperature of Venus is in the region of 800 degrees Fahrenheit and that the planet's fifteen-mile thick atmosphere is composed of heavy hydrocarbon molecules and possibly more complex organic compounds as well.

In April 1955, Drs. B. F. Burke and K. L. Franklin announced to the American Astronomical Society their accidental discovery of radio noise broadcast by Jupiter. In 1962, the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and the Goldstone Tracking Station in southern California announced that radiometric observations showed Venus to have a slow retrograde motion. In the same year, the 'Explorer' satellite detected the Earth's magnetic field at a distance of at least twenty-two Earth radii, while in 1965 it was reported that the tail extends 'at least as far as the moon'. (3)

Considering that the main thrust of science's attack on Velikovsky was a personal attack on his integrity, the behavior of some of his most vociferous critics in the scientific community makes interesting reading. In August 1963, 'Harper's Magazine' which had carried the original announcement of Velikovsky's theories, now did a retrospective piece pointing out how all his main predictions had been borne out. The author of both articles, Eric Larrabee, made a reference which drew a thunderous response from Donald Menzel, director of Harvard College Observatory. At the height of the controversy a decade earlier, Menzel had tried to shoot Velikovsky down by calculating that for his astronomical theory to be right, the Sun would have to have a surface potential of 10 billion billion volts. Obviously, said Menzel, this is impossible so Velikovsky must be wrong. By an extraordinary chance, in 1960, V. A. Bailey, emeritus professor of physics at Sydney University (who knew nothing of the Velikovsky controversy) claimed to have discovered that the Sun is electrically charged and has a surface potential of 10 billion billion volts - exactly the value calculated by Menzel.

Feeling that Bailey's discovery made him look foolish, Menzel now sent off a strongly worded response to 'Harper's' and a letter to Bailey in Australia asking him to revoke his theory of the electric charge on the Sun as it was assisting the enemy. According to Ralph Juergens:

Professor Bailey, taking exception to the idea that his own work should be abandoned to accomodate the anti-Velikovsky forces, prepared an article in rebuttal to Menzel's piece and submitted it to 'Harper's' for publication in the same issue with Menzel's. Bailey had discovered a simple arithmetical error in Menzel's calculations, which invalidated his argument.

It is equally interesting to see how the Harvard astronomer dealt with the fact that most of Velikovsky's predictions had been confirmed. On the radio emissions from Jupiter, he wrote that, since most scientists do not accept Velikovsky's theory then it follows that 'any seeming verification of Velikovsky's prediction is pure chance'. As far as the high surface temperature of Venus is concerned, Menzel argued that 'hot is only a relative term'. Later in the article he referred back to this statement saying 'I have already disposed of the question of the temperature of Venus'. Actually, in 1950, Menzel had estimated the temperature of Venus to be about 120 degrees Fahrenheit when it is really more like 800 degrees. On the extent of the Earth's magnetic field, Menzel wrote that Velikovsky 'said it would extend as far as the moon; actually the field suddenly breaks off at a distance of several earth diameters'. In fact, Menzel was wrong; the field had been detected as extending at least twenty-two Earth radii a year earlier by the 'Explorer' satellite.

To their credit, a few scientists did support Velikovsky against the climate of hysteria and intimidation including Princeton's Professor H. H. Hess, who was later chairman of the National Academy of Science's space board. In 1962, Princeton physicist Valentin Bargmann and Columbia astronomer Lloyd Motz wrote a joint letter to the editor of 'Science' magazine calling attention to Velikovsky's priority in predicting Venus's high surface temperature, Jupiter's radio emissions and the great extent of the Earth's magnetosphere, but 'Science's' editor Dr Philip Abelson, was not interested in Velikovsky. Instead, he printed a letter from science fiction writer Paul Anderson satirising Velikovsky on the grounds that science fiction writers and hoaxers also made fantastic predictions that were sometimes verified. When the editor of 'Horizon' magazine wrote to Abelson protesting at the exclusion of an article by Velikovsky, Abelson replied:

Velikovsky is a controversial figure. Many of the ideas that he expressed are not accepted by serious students of earth science. Since my prejudices happen to agree with this majority, I strained my sense of fair play to accept the letter by Bargmann and Motz, and thought that the books were nicely balanced with the rejoinder of Anderson.

'Scientific American' showed that it had not moved on editorially since it ridiculed the Wright Brothers fifty years earlier. The magazine had refused to carry advertising for 'Worlds in Collision' {Forwarded by Einstein I believe} and in 1956 it carried a strongly critical article by physicist Harrison Brown."

One of the reasons for this is the fact that Velikovsky's Egyptian chronologies directly refute Biblical history. In fact he destroys the whole time or calendrical premises of most history and shows how it is based on three pillars of ignorance. Errors accepted in one branch of academics are picked up by others and the whole fiasco is a 'house of cards' with propaganda in mind. When I found his book 'Peoples of the Sea' it was in the fiction section of my local library while the other stories and theories which have been proven false over and over again, are in the reference or science sections.

http://brainmeta.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6542

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi Uniface -

I am E. P. Grondine, and you have earned a few minutes of my time due to your own wonderfulness.
That being the case, why are you wasting those minutes bringing up Velikovsky?
Why are you wasting those minutes bringing up the delusions of his "believers"

If you want to talk about Velikovsky, talk with Leroy, as he knew him and worked with him, and can tell you anything you want to know.

Oner reason why my first book was "Man and Impac in the AMERICAS" was because Velikovksy had not written on it.
I also intended to conciously ignore Velikovesky 's "work" for "Man and Impact in the Ancient Near East".

People like Morrison are quite capable of dealing with nonsense like Velikovsky's.
I mysefl could run his nonsense back to Johanes Radloff, and from then on, through all of Velikovsky's plagiarisms,
but I am not interested in the slightest in him.

Talk with Leroy, if you want to. Its his specialty.

[uniface]

Thank you for your response, EP.

It baffles me.

This is not even like a re-play of the Refomation -- it IS a replay of it.

The value of someone's work still depends on whether or not he's on our side ? On whether or not he believes the way we do ?

It just never changes.

The man made a number of specific predictions. Which, at the time, sounded like absolute lunacy -- so totally at odds with Newtonian Celestial Mechanics that they struck believers in it as positively offensive.

Yet prediction after prediction has been subsequently proven correct as technology's advanced.

And this doesn't matter ?

Who flipping cares about the Soap Opera aspect of it ? It's a distraction from the core issue.

"Don't listen to him -- he's a damned Protestant/Papist/Jew/Agnostic/Crip/Blood/Vegetarian/Global Warmist/Metrosexual/Republican/Steeler Fan !"

If that's going to be the bottom line, we has truly met the enemy and he is us.

Isn't Science supposed to be (Jack Webb voice) "Just the facts, Ma'am" ?

[uniface]

I "get it" that Velikovsky and his adherents are Stinky Old Poopy Heads.

But where facts are at issue, is this all that's involved ?

I'm not a lost dog looking for someone to follow. I'm trying to understand this.

Especially why & how, after the shameful debacle of the Establishment's behavior toward him during his lifetime, its basic attitude doesn't seem to have changed one whit since.

[E.P. Grondine]

Yet prediction after prediction has been subsequently proven correct as technology's advanced.

Talk with Leroy about V., uni.

Isn't Science supposed to be (Jack Webb voice) "Just the facts, Ma'am" ?

Yes. But "science" is a human activity, and not done separately from people.

[E.P. Grondine]

While searching for information on the subject I learned of a cult/religious group formed in the late 1950's - early 1960's as a result of Velikocsky's writings. The "Earth Society, was devoted to saving the Earth from comets and wandering planets.

It appears that lacking technological solutions, the fear (and fears are subject to displacement activities) led to a cult/religious response. I am hoping that the current availability of technologies to handle the impact hazard will prevent such behaviors now, but there are a lot of people who make money off of running these cons.

The history of this group is likely to be interesting. I hope to talk with Leroy about it soon.