Kicking the Sacred Cow: 
Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the 
Impermissible 
James P. Hogan 


Copyright © 2004 by James P. Hogan 

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any 
form. 

A Baen Books Original 

Baen Publishing Enterprises 

P.O. Box 1403 
Riverdale, NY 10471 
www.baen.com 
ISBN: 0-7434-8828-8 

Cover art by Allan Pollack 

First printing, July 2004 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
Hogan, James P 
Kicking the sacred cow : questioning the unquestionable and thinking the 
impermissible / by James P. Hogan. 

p. cm. 
Includes bibliographical references. 
ISBN 0-7434-8828-8 (HC) 
1. Science I. Title. 
Q158.5.H65 2004 
500--dc22 
2004009764 
Distributed by Simon & Schuster 
1230 Avenue of the Americas 
New York, NY 10020 


Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH 
Printed in the United States of America 


DEDICATION 

To Halton Arp, Peter Duesberg— 
and all other scientists of integrity who followed where the evidence pointed, and stood by their 
convictions. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


The help and advice of the following people is gratefully acknowledged—for generously giving their 
time in describing their work and answering questions; providing invaluable material without which the 
book would not have been possible; giving more of their time to reading, criticizing, and offering 
suggestions; and in some cases for the plain, simple moral support of wanting to see it finished. A few 
words at the front never seems enough to repay this kind of cooperation. 

The help and advice of the following people is gratefully acknowledged—for generously giving their 
time in describing their work and answering questions; providing invaluable material without which the 
book would not have been possible; giving more of their time to reading, criticizing, and offering 
suggestions; and in some cases for the plain, simple moral support of wanting to see it finished. A few 
words at the front never seems enough to repay this kind of cooperation. 

Introduction 


Engineering and the Truth Fairies 

Science really doesn't exist. Scientific beliefs are either proved wrong, or else they 
quickly become engineering. Everything else is untested speculation. —JPH 

My interest in science began at an early age, as a boy growing up in postwar England. One of my 
older sisters, Grace—I was the baby by a large gap in a family with four children, two boys and two girls 
—was married to a former Royal Air Force radio and electronics technician called Don. He was one of 
the practical kind that people described as "good with his hands," capable of fixing anything, it seemed. 
The shelves, additions to the house, and other things that he created out of wood were always true and 
square, with the pieces fitting perfectly. He would restore pieces of machinery that he had come across 
rusting in the local tip, and assemble a pile of electrical parts and a coil wound on a cardboard custard 
container into a working radio. I spent long summer and Christmas vacations at Grace and Don's, 
learning the art of using and taking care of tools ("The job's not finished until they're cleaned and put 


away" was one of his maxims), planning the work through ("Measure twice; cut once" was another), and 
talking with people across the world via some piece of equipment that he'd found in a yard sale and 
refurbished. Kids today take such things for granted, but there was no e-mail then. Computers were 
unheard of. Don would never pass by a screw or a bolt lying on the roadside that might be useful for 
something one day. His children once told me ruefully that they never got to play with their presents on 
Christmas Day because the paint was never dry. 

away" was one of his maxims), planning the work through ("Measure twice; cut once" was another), and 
talking with people across the world via some piece of equipment that he'd found in a yard sale and 
refurbished. Kids today take such things for granted, but there was no e-mail then. Computers were 
unheard of. Don would never pass by a screw or a bolt lying on the roadside that might be useful for 
something one day. His children once told me ruefully that they never got to play with their presents on 
Christmas Day because the paint was never dry. 

I would describe science as formalized common sense. We all know how easily true believers can 
delude themselves into seeing what they want to see, and even appearances reported accurately are not 
always to be relied upon. (My older brother was something of a card sharp, so there was nothing 
particularly strange in the idea of things sometimes not being what they seemed.) What singled science 
out was its recognition of objective reality: that whatever is true will remain true, regardless of how 
passionately someone might wish things to be otherwise, or how many others might be induced to share 
in that persuasion. A simple and obvious enough precept, one would have thought. Yet every other 
belief system, even when professing commitment to the impartial search for truth, acted otherwise when 
it came to recruiting a constituency. And hence, it seemed, followed most of the world's squabbles and 
problems. 

So it was natural enough for me to pursue a career in the Royal Aircraft Establishment, 
Farnborough—a few miles from where Grace and Don lived—after passing the requisite three days of 
qualifying examinations, as a student of electrical, mechanical, and aeronautical engineering. On 
completion of the general course I went on to specialize in electronics. Later, I moved from design to 
sales, then into computers, and ended up working with scientists and engineers across-the-board in just 
about every discipline and area of application. Seeing the way they went about things confirmed the 
impressions I'd been forming since those boyhood days of working with Don. 

The problems that the world had been getting itself into all through history would all be solved 
straightforwardly once people came around to seeing things the right way. Wars were fought over 
religions, economic resources, or political rivalries. Well, science showed that men made gods, not vice 
versa. Sufficiently advanced technologies could produce plenty of resources for everybody, and once 
those two areas were taken care of, what was there left to create political rivalries over? Then we could 
be on our way to the stars and concern ourselves with things that were truly interesting. 

When I turned to writing in the mid seventies—initially as a result of an office bet, then going 
full-time when I discovered I liked it—a theme of hard science-fiction with an upbeat note came 
naturally. I was accused (is that the right word?) of reinventing the genre of the fifties and sixties from the 
ground up, which was probably true to a large degree, since I had read very little of it, having come into 
the field from a direction diametrically opposed to that of most writers. The picture of science that I 
carried into those early stories reflected the idealization of intellectual purity that textbooks and 
popularizers portray. Impartial research motivated by the pursuit of knowledge assembles facts, which 


theories are then constructed to explain. The theories are tested by rigorous experiment; if the predicted 
results are not observed, the theories are modified accordingly, without prejudice, or abandoned. 
Although the ideal can seldom be achieved in practice, free inquiry and open debate will detect and 
correct the errors that human frailty makes inevitable. As a result, we move steadily through successively 
closer approximations toward the Truth. 

theories are then constructed to explain. The theories are tested by rigorous experiment; if the predicted 
results are not observed, the theories are modified accordingly, without prejudice, or abandoned. 
Although the ideal can seldom be achieved in practice, free inquiry and open debate will detect and 
correct the errors that human frailty makes inevitable. As a result, we move steadily through successively 
closer approximations toward the Truth. 

I quickly discovered that this was so in other fields too. Atmospheric scientists whom I knew 
deplored the things being said about ozone holes. Chemists scoffed at the hysteria over carcinogens. A 
curious thing I noticed, however, was that specialists quick to denounce the misinformation and 
sensationalized reporting concerning their own field would accept uncritically what the same information 
sources and media said with regard to other fields. Nuclear engineers exasperated by the scares about 
radiation nevertheless believed that lakes formed in some of the most acidic rock on the continent had 
been denuded of fish (that had never lived there) by acid rain; climatologists who pointed out that nothing 
could be happening to the ozone layer since surface ultraviolet was not increasing signed petitions to ban 
DDT; biologists who knew that bird populations had thrived during the DDT years showed up to picket 
nuclear plants; and so it went on. Clearly, other factors could outweigh the objective criteria that are 
supposed to be capable of deciding a purely scientific question. 

Browsing in a library one day, I came across a creationist book arguing that the fossil record 
showed the precise opposite of what evolutionary theory predicts. I had never had reason to be anything 
but a staunch supporter of Darwinism, since that was all I'd been exposed to, and everyone knew the 
creationists were strange anyway. But I checked the book out and took it home, thinking it would be 
good for a laugh. Now, I didn't buy their Scriptural account of how it all began, and I still don't. But 
contrary to the ridicule and derision that I'd been accustomed to hearing, to my own surprise I found the 
evidence that they presented for finding huge problems with the Darwinian theory to be solid and 
persuasive. So, such being my bent, I ordered more books from them out of curiosity to look a bit more 
deeply into what they have to say. Things got more interesting when I brought my findings up with 
various biologists whom I knew. While some would fly into a peculiar mix of apoplexy and fury at the 
mere mention of the subject—a distinctly unscientific reaction, it seemed—others would confide 
privately that they agreed with a lot of it; but things like pressures of the peer group, the politics of 
academia, and simple career considerations meant that they didn't talk about it. I was astonished. This 
was the late-twentieth-century West, not sixteenth-century Spain. 

Shortly afterward, I met Peter Duesberg, one of the nation's leading molecular biologists, tipped by 
many to be in line for a Nobel Prize, suddenly professionally ostracized and defunded for openly 
challenging the mainstream dogma on AIDS. What was most disturbing about it after talking with him 
and his associates and reading their papers was that what they were saying made sense; the official party 
line didn't. Another person I got to know was the late Petr Beckmann, professor emeritus of electrical 
engineering, whose electrical interpretation of the phenomena conventionally explained by the Einstein 
Relativity Theory (ERT) is equally compatible with all the experimental results obtained to date, simpler 
in its assumptions, and more powerful predictively—but it is ignored by the physics community. I talked 
to an astrophysicist in NASA who believed that Halton Arp—excommunicated from American 
astronomy for presenting evidence contradicting the accepted interpretation of the cosmic redshifts that 


the Big Bang theory rests on—was "onto something." But he would never say so in public, nor sign his 
name to anything to that effect on paper. His job would be on the line, just as Arp's had been. 

the Big Bang theory rests on—was "onto something." But he would never say so in public, nor sign his 
name to anything to that effect on paper. His job would be on the line, just as Arp's had been. 

This book is not concerned with cranks or simple die-hards, who are entitled to their foibles and 
come as part of life's pattern. Rather, it looks at instances of present-day orthodoxies tenaciously 
defending beliefs in the face of what would appear to be verified fact and plain logic, or doggedly closing 
eyes and minds to ideas whose time has surely come. In short, where scientific authority seems to be 
functioning more in the role of religion protecting doctrine and putting down heresy than championing the 
spirit of the free inquiry that science should be. 

The factors bringing this about are various. Massive growth of government funding and the 
direction of science since World War II have produced symbiotic institutions which, like the medieval 
European Church, sell out to the political power structure as purveyors of received truth in return for 
protection, patronage, and prestige. Sometimes vested commercial interests call the tune. In areas where 
passions run high, ideology and prejudice find it easy to prevail over objectivity. Academic turf, like any 
other, is defended against usurpers and outside invasion. Some readily trade the anonymity and drudgery 
of the laboratory for visibility as celebrities in the public limelight. Peer pressure, professional image, and 
the simple reluctance to admit that one was wrong can produce the same effects at the collective level as 
they do on individuals. 

I used to say sometimes in flippant moments that science was the only area of human activity in 
which it actually matters whether or not what one believes is actually true. Nowadays, I'm not so sure. It 
seems frequently to be the case that the cohesiveness that promotes survival is fostered just as effectively 
by shared belief systems within the social-political structures of science, whether those beliefs be true or 
not. What practical difference does it make to the daily routine and budget of the typical workaday 
scientist, after all, if the code that directs the formation and behavior of the self-assembling cat wrote 
itself out of random processes or was somehow inspired by a Cosmic Programmer, or if the universe 
really did dance out of the head of a pin? Scientific truth can apparently be an elusive thing when you try 
to pin it down, like the Irish fairies. 

So today, I reserve the aphorism for engineering. You can fool yourself if you want, and you can 
fool as many as will follow for as long as you can get away with it. But you can't fool reality. If your 
design is wrong, your plane won't fly. Engineers don't have the time or the inclination for highfalutin' 
theories. In fact, over-elaborate theories that try to reach too far, I'm beginning to suspect, might be the 
biggest single menace affecting science. Maybe that's why I find that the protagonists of the later books 
that I've written, now that I look back at them and think about it, have tended to be engineers. 

ONE 
Humanistic Religion 
The Rush to Embrace Darwinism 



I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable 

I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable 

—Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology, 

Oxford University 

History will judge neo-Darwinism a minor twentieth-century religious sect within 
the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology. 

— Lynn Margulis, professor of biology, 
University of Massachusetts 
Science, Religion, and Logic 

Science and religion are both ways of arriving at beliefs regarding things that are true of the world. 
What distinguishes one from the other? The most common answer would probably be that religion 
derives its teaching from some kind of supreme authority, however communicated, which must not be 
questioned or challenged, whereas science builds its world picture on the available facts as it finds them, 
without any prior commitment to ideas of how things ought to be. 

This is pretty much in accord with our experience of life, to be sure. But I would submit that, rather 
than being the primary differentiating quality in itself, it comes about as a consequence of something more 
fundamental. The difference lies in the relationship between the things that are believed and the reasons 
for believing them. With a religion, the belief structure comes first as an article of faith, and whatever the 
recognized authority decrees is accepted as being true. Questioning such truth is not permitted. Science 
begins by finding out what's true as impartially as can be managed, which means accepting what we find 
whether we like it or not, and the belief structure follows as the best picture that can be made as to the 
reasons for it all. In this case, questioning a currently held truth is not only permissible but encouraged, 
and when necessary the belief structure is modified accordingly. Defined in that way, the terms 
encompass more than the kinds of things that go on in the neighborhood church or a research laboratory, 
and take on relevance to just about all aspects of human belief and behavior. Thus, not walking under 
ladders because it brings bad luck (belief in principle, first; action judged as bad, second) is "religious"; 
doing the same thing to avoid becoming a victim of a dropped hammer or splashed paint (perceiving the 
world, first; deciding there's a risk, second) is "scientific." 

Of course, this isn't to say that scientific thinking never proceeds according to preexisting systems 
of rules. The above two paths to belief reflect, in a sense, the principles of deductive and inductive logic. 
Deduction begins with a set of premises that are taken to be incontestably true, and by applying rules of 
inference derives the consequences that must necessarily follow. The same inference rules can be applied 
again to the conclusions to generate a second level of conclusions, and the procedure carried on as far 
as one wants. Geometry is a good example, where a set of initial postulates considered to be 
self-evident (Euclid's five, for example) is operated on by the rules of logic to produce theorems, which 
in turn yield further theorems, and so on. A deductive system cannot originate new knowledge. It can 
only reveal what was implicit in the assumptions. All the shelves of geometry textbooks simply make 
explicit what was implied by the choice of axioms. Neither can deduction prove anything to be true. It 
demonstrates merely that certain conclusions necessarily follow from what was assumed. If it's assumed 
that all crows are black, and given that Charlie is a crow, then we may conclude that Charlie is black. 

So deduction takes us from a general rule to a particular truth. Induction is the inverse process, of 
inferring the general rule from a limited number of particular instances. From observing what's true of 
part of the world, we try to guess on the basis of intuition and experience—in other words, to 
"generalize"—what's probably true of all of it. "Every crow I've seen has been black, and the more of 
them I see, the more confident I get that they're all black." However, inductive conclusions can never be 
proved to be true in the rigorous way that deductions can be shown to follow from their premises. 
Proving that all crows are black would require every crow that exists to be checked, and it could never 
be said with certainty that this had been done. One disconfirming instance, on the other hand—a white 


crow—would be sufficient to prove the theory false. 

crow—would be sufficient to prove the theory false. 

Deduction operates within the limits set by the assumptions. Induction goes beyond the 
observations, from the known to the unknown, which is what genuine innovation in the sense of acquiring 
new knowledge must do. Without it, how could new assertions about the world we live in ever be 
made? On the other hand, assertions based merely on conjecture or apparent regularities and 
coincidences—otherwise known as superstition—are of little use without some means of testing them 
against actuality. This is where deduction comes in—figuring out what consequences should follow in 
particular instances if our general belief is correct. This enables ways to be devised for determining 
whether or not they in fact do, which of course forms the basis of the scientific experimental method. 

Darwinism and the New Order 


The Triumph of the Enlightenment 

Scientific method played the central role in bringing about the revolutionary world view ushered in 
by such names as Roger Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, which by the time of the seventeenth-century 
"Age of Enlightenment" had triumphed as the guiding philosophy of Western intellectual culture. No 
longer was permissible Truth constrained by interpretation of the Scriptures, readings of Aristotle and the 
classics, or logical premises handed down from the medieval Scholastics. Unencumbered by dogma and 
preconceptions of how reality had to be, Science was free to follow wherever the evidence led and 
uncover what it would. Its successes were spectacular indeed. The heavenly bodies that had awed the 
ancients and been regarded by them as deities were revealed as no different from the matter that makes 
up the familiar world, moved by the same forces. Mysteries of motion and form, winds and tides, heat 
and light were equally reduced to interplays of mindless, mechanical processes accessible to reason and 
predictable by calculation. The divine hand whose workings had once been invoked to explain just about 
everything that happened was no longer necessary. Neither, it seemed to many, were the traditional 
forms of authority that presented themselves as interpreters of its will and purpose. The one big 
exception was that nobody had any better answers to explain the baffling behavior of living things or 
where they could have come from. 

The Original in "Origins": Something for Everyone 

A widely held view is that Charles Darwin changed the world by realizing that life could appear and 
diversify by evolution. This isn't really the way it was, or the reason he caused so much excitement. The 
notion of life appearing spontaneously through some natural process was not in itself new, being found in 
such places as the Babylonian creation epic,Enuma Elish , and ancient Chinese teachings that insects 
come from nothing on the leaves of plants. Ideas of progressive development are expressed in the 
philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, while Amaximander of Miletus (550 b.c.) held that life had 
originated by material processes out of sea slime—in some ways anticipating modern notions of a 
prebiotic soup. Empedocles of Ionia (450 b.c.) proposed a selection-driven process to account for 
adaptive complexity, in which all kinds of monstrosities were produced from the chance appearance of 
various combinations of body parts, human and animal, out of which only those exhibiting an inner 
harmony conducive to life were preserved and went on to multiply. The line continues down through 
such names as Hume, who speculated that the random juggling of matter must eventually produce 
ordered forms adapted to their environment; Lamarck, with his comprehensive theory of evolution by 


the inheritance of characteristics acquired through the striving of the parents during life; to Charles 
Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who studied the similarities of anatomy between species and 
speculated on common ancestry as the reason. 

the inheritance of characteristics acquired through the striving of the parents during life; to Charles 
Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who studied the similarities of anatomy between species and 
speculated on common ancestry as the reason. 

None of the ingredients was especially new. But in bringing together his synthesis of ideas that had 
all been around for some time, Darwin provided for the first time a plausible, intellectually acceptable 
naturalistic and materialist explanation for the phenomenon of life at a time when many converging 
interests were desperately seeking one. Enlightenment thinkers, heady with the successes of the physical 
sciences, relished the opportunity to finish the job by expelling the last vestiges of supernatural agency 
from their world picture. The various factions of the new political power arising out of commerce and 
manufacturing found common ground from which to challenge the legitimacy of traditional authority 
rooted in land and Church, while at the same time, ironically, the nobility, witnessing the specter of 
militant socialist revolution threatening to sweep Europe, took refuge in the doctrine of slow, 
imperceptible change as the natural way of things. Meanwhile, the forces of exploitation and imperialism, 
long straining against the leash of moral restraint, were freed by the reassurance that extermination of the 
weak by the strong, and domination as the reward for excellence were better for all in the long run. 

There was something in it for everyone. Apart from the old order fighting a rearguard action, the 
doctrine of competitive survival, improvement, and growth was broadly embraced as the driving 
principle of all progress—the Victorian ideal—and vigorously publicized and promoted. Science 
replaced the priesthood in cultural authority, no longer merely serving the throne but as supreme 
interpreter of the laws by which empires and fortunes flourish or vanish. Darwin's biographer, Gertrude 
Himmelfarb, wrote that the theory could only have originated in laissez-faire England, because "Only 
there could Darwin have blandly assumed that the basic unit was the individual, the basic instinct 
self-interest, and the basic activity struggle."1 

A Cultural Monopoly 


Since then the theory has become established as a primary guiding influence on deciding social 
values and shaping relationships among individuals and organizations. Its impact extends across all 
institutions and facets of modern society, including philosophy, economics, politics, science, education, 
and religion. Its advocates pronounce it to be no longer theory but incontestable fact, attested to by all 
save the simple-minded or willfully obtuse. According to Daniel Dennett, Director of the Center for 
Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and a staunch proponent of Darwinism, "To put it bluntly but fairly, 
anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is 
simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant."2 

And from Oxford University's professor of zoology, Richard Dawkins, one of the most vigorous 
and uncompromising popularizers of Darwinism today: "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet 
somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, 
but I'd rather not consider that)."3 

Dennett also expresses reservations about the suitability of anyone denying Darwinism to raise 


children.children.

Like the majority of people in our culture, I suppose, I grew up accepting the Darwinian picture 
unquestioningly because the monopoly treatment accorded by the education system and the scientific 
media offered no alternative, and the authority images that I trusted at the time told me there wasn't one. 
And nothing much had happened to change that by the time of my own earlier writings. The dispute 
between Hunt and Danchekker inInherit the Stars5 isn't over whether or not the human race evolved, 
but where it happened. And eleven years later I was still militantly defending the theory.6 By that time, 
however, my faith in many of the things that "everyone knows" was being eroded as a result of getting to 
know various people with specialized knowledge in various fields, who, in ways I found persuasive, 
provided other sides to many public issues, but which the public weren't hearing. Before long I found 
myself questioning and checking just about everything I thought I knew. 

Sweeping Claims—and Reservations 

As far as I recall, doubts about evolution as it was taught began with my becoming skeptical that 
natural selection was capable of doing everything that it was supposed to. There's no question that it 
happens, to be sure, and that it has its effects. In fact, the process of natural selection was well known to 
naturalists before Darwin's day, when the dominant belief was in Divine Creation. It was seen, however, 
as a conservative force, keeping organisms true to type and stable within limits by culling out extremes. 
Darwin's bold suggestion was to make it the engine of innovation. Observation of the progressive 
changes brought about by the artificial selection applied in animal and plant breeding led him—a pigeon 
breeder himself—to propose the same mechanism, taken further, as the means for transforming one 
species into another, and ultimately to something else entirely. 

But on rereadingOrigin , I developed the uneasy feeling of watching fancy flying away from reality, 
as it is all too apt to do when not held down by the nails of evidence. The changes that were fact and 
discussed in great detail were all relatively minor, while the major transitions that constituted the force 
and substance of the theory were entirely speculative. No concrete proof could be shown that even one 
instance of the vast transformations that the theory claimed to explain had actually happened. And the 
same pattern holds true of all the texts I consulted that are offered today. Once the fixation on survival to 
the exclusion of all else sets in, a little imagination can always suggest a way in which any feature being 
considered "might" have conferred some advantage. Dull coloring provides camouflage to aid predators 
or protect prey, while bright coloring attracts mates. Longer beaks reach more grubs and insects; shorter 
beaks crack tougher seeds. Natural selection can explain anything or its opposite. But how do you test if 
indeed the fittest survive, when by definition whatever survives is the "fittest"? 

By Scaffolding to the Moon 

All breeders know there are limits beyond which further changes in a characteristic can't be 
pushed, and fundamental innovations that can never be induced to any degree. Some varieties of sheep 
are bred to have a small head and small legs, but this can't be carried to the point where they reduce to 
the scale of a rat. You can breed a larger variety of carnation or a black horse, but not a horse with 
wings. A given genome can support a certain amount of variation, giving it a range of adaptation to 
alterations in circumstances—surely to be expected for an organism to be at all viable in changeable 
environments. But no amount of selecting and crossing horses will produce wings if the genes for 
growing them aren't there. As Darwin himself had found with pigeons, when extremes are crossed at 
their limit, they either become nonviable or revert abruptly to the original stock. 


7But there wasn't a single fact to support the belief that variation could be 


taken beyond what had been achieved, either, and surely it was on this side that the burden of proof lay. 

taken beyond what had been achieved, either, and surely it was on this side that the burden of proof lay. 

Rocks of Ages—The Fossil Record 


Very well, if neither the undisputed variations that are observed today, nor laboratory attempts to 
extend and accelerate them provide support for the kind of plasticity that evolution requires, what 
evidence can we find that it nevertheless happened in the past? There is only one place to look for solid 
testimony to what actually happened, as opposed to all the theorizing and excursions of imagination: the 
fossil record. Even if the origin of life was a one-time, nonrepeatable occurrence, the manner in which it 
took place should still yield characteristic patterns that can be predicted and tested. 

Slow-Motion Miracles—The Doctrine of Gradualism 

Transforming a fish into a giraffe or a dinosaur into an eagle involves a lot more than simply 
switching a piece at a time as can be done with Lego block constructions. Whole systems of parts have 
to all work together. The acquisition of wolf-size teeth doesn't do much for the improvement of a 
predator if it still has rat-size jaws to fit them in. But bigger jaws are no good without stronger muscles to 
close them and a bigger head to anchor the muscles. Stronger muscles need a larger blood supply, which 
needs a heavier-duty circulatory system, which in turn requires upgrades in the respiratory department, 
and so it goes. For all these to all come about together in just the right amounts—like randomly changing 
the parts of a refrigerator and ending up with a washing machine—would be tantamount to miraculous, 
which was precisely what the whole theory was intended to get away from. 




This was exactly what Darwin's theory needed. Following the same principles, the changes in living 
organisms would take place imperceptibly slowly over huge spans of time, enabling all the parts to adapt 
and accommodate to each other smoothly and gradually. "As natural selection acts solely by 
accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modifications; it 
can act only by short and slow steps."8 Hence, enormous numbers of steps are needed to get from things 
like invertebrates protected by external shells to vertebrates with all their hard parts inside, or from a 
bear- or cowlike quadruped to a whale. It follows that the intermediates marking the progress over the 
millions of years leading up to the present should vastly outnumber the final forms seen today, and have 
left evidence of their passing accordingly. This too was acknowledged freely throughoutOrigin and in 


fact provided one of the theory's strongest predictions. For example: 

fact provided one of the theory's strongest predictions. For example: 

differences not greater than we see between the natural and domestic varieties of the 

same species at the present day; and these parent species, now generally extinct, have in 

turn been similarly connected with more ancient forms; and so on backwards, always 

converging to the common ancestor of every great class. So that the number of 

intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been 

inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, such have lived upon the earth."9 

Life's Upside-Down Tree: The First Failed Prediction 

The theory predicted not merely that transitional forms would be found, but implied that the 
complete record would consistmainly of transitionals; what we think of as fixed species would turn out 
to be just arbitrary—way stations in a process of continual change. Hence, what we should find is a 
treelike branching structure following the lines of descent from a comparatively few ancient ancestors of 
the major groups, radiating outward from a well-represented trunk and limb formation laid down through 
the bulk of geological time as new orders and classes appear, to a profusion of twigs showing the 
diversity reached in the most recent times. In fact, this describes exactly the depictions of the "Tree of 
Life" elaborately developed and embellished in Victorian treatises on the wondrous new theory and 
familiar to museum visitors and anyone conversant with textbooks in use up to quite recent times. 

But such depictions figure less prominently in the books that are produced today—or more 
commonly are omitted altogether. The reason is that the story actually told by the fossils in the rocks is 
the complete opposite. The Victorians' inspiration must have stemmed mainly from enthusiasm and 
conviction once theyknew what the answer had to be. Species, and all the successively higher groups 
composed of species—genus, family, order, class, phylum—appear abruptly, fully differentiated and 
specialized, in sudden epochs of innovation just as the catastrophists had always said, without any 
intermediates leading up to them or linking them together. The most remarkable thing about them is their 
stability thereafter—they remain looking pretty much the same all the way down to the present day, or 
else they become extinct. Furthermore, the patterns seen after the appearance of a new population are 
not of divergence from a few ancestral types, but once again the opposite of what such a theory 
predicted. Diversity was most pronounced early on, becoming less, not greater with time as selection 
operated in the way previously maintained, weeding out the less suited. So compared to what we would 
expect to find, the tree is nonexistent where it should be in the greatest evidence, and what does exist is 
upside down. 

Darwin and his supporters were well aware of this problem from the ample records compiled by 
their predecessors. In fact, the most formidable opponents of the theory were not clergymen but fossil 
experts. Even Lyell had difficulty in accepting his own ideas of gradualism applied to biology, familiar as 
he was with the hitherto undisputed catastrophist interpretation. But ideological fervor carried the day, 
and the generally agreed answer was that the fossil record as revealed at the time was incomplete. Now 
that the fossil collectors knew what to look for, nobody had any doubt that the required confirming 
evidence would quickly follow in plenitude. In other words, the view being promoted even then was a 
defense against the evidence that existed, driven by prior conviction that the real facts had to be other 
than what they seemed. 

Well, the jury is now in, and the short answer is that the picture after a century and a half of 
assiduous searching is, if anything, worse now than it was then. Various ad hoc reasons and speculations 
have been put forward as to why, of course. These include the theory that most of the history of life 
consists of long periods of stasis during which change was too slow to be discernible, separated by 
bursts of change that happened too quickly to have left anything in the way of traces ("punctuated 


equilibrium"); that the soft parts that weren't preserved did the evolving while the hard parts stayed the 
same ("mosaic evolution"); that fossilization is too rare an occurrence to leave a reliable record; and a 
host of others. But the fact remains that if evolution means the gradual transformation of one kind of 
organism into another, the outstanding feature of the fossil record is its absence of evidence for evolution. 
Elaborate gymnastics to explain away failed predictions are almost always a sign of a theory in trouble. 
Luther Sunderland describes this as a carefully guarded "trade secret" of evolutionary theorists and refers 
to it as "Darwin's Enigma" in his book of the same name, which reports interviews conducted during the 
course of a year with officials of five natural history museums containing some of the largest fossil 
collections in the world.
equilibrium"); that the soft parts that weren't preserved did the evolving while the hard parts stayed the 
same ("mosaic evolution"); that fossilization is too rare an occurrence to leave a reliable record; and a 
host of others. But the fact remains that if evolution means the gradual transformation of one kind of 
organism into another, the outstanding feature of the fossil record is its absence of evidence for evolution. 
Elaborate gymnastics to explain away failed predictions are almost always a sign of a theory in trouble. 
Luther Sunderland describes this as a carefully guarded "trade secret" of evolutionary theorists and refers 
to it as "Darwin's Enigma" in his book of the same name, which reports interviews conducted during the 
course of a year with officials of five natural history museums containing some of the largest fossil 
collections in the world.

The plea of incompleteness of the fossil record is no longer tenable. Exhaustive exploration of the 
strata of all continents and across the ocean bottoms has uncovered formations containing hundreds of 
billions of fossils. The world's museums are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 species. Their 
adequacy as a record may be judged from estimates of the percentage of known, living forms that are 
also found as fossils. They suggest that the story that gets preserved is much more complete than many 
people think. Of the 43 living orders of terrestrial vertebrates, 42, or over 97 percent are found as 
fossils. Of the 329 families of terrestrial vertebrates the figure is 79 percent, and when birds (which tend 
to fossilize poorly) are excluded, 87 percent.11What the record shows is clustered variations around the 
same basic designs over and over again, already complex and specialized, with no lines of improvement 
before or links in between. Forms once thought to have been descended from others turn out have been 
already in existence at the time of the ancestors that supposedly gave rise to them. On average, a species 
persists fundamentally unchanged for over a million years before disappearing—which again happens 
largely in periodic mass extinctions rather than by the gradual replacement of the ancestral stock in the 
way that gradualism requires. This makes nonsense of the proposition we're given that the bat and the 
whale evolved from a common mammalian ancestor in a little over 10 million years, which would allow 
at the most ten to fifteen "chronospecies" (a segment of the fossil record judged to have changed so little 
as to have remained a single species) aligned end to end to effect the transitions.12 

Flights of Fancy: The Birds Controversy 

It goes without saying that the failure to find connecting lines and transitional forms hasn't been from 
want of trying. The effort has been sustained and intensive. Anything even remotely suggesting a 
candidate receives wide acclaim and publicity. One of the most well-known examples isArchaeopteryx 
, a mainly birdlike creature with fully developed feathers and a wishbone, but also a number of skeletal 
features such as toothed jaws, claws on its wings, and a bony, lizardlike tail that at first suggest kinship 
with a small dinosaur calledCompsognathus and prompted T. H. Huxley to propose originally that birds 
were descended from dinosaurs. Presented to the world in 1861, two years after the publication of 
Origin , in Upper Jurassic limestones in Bavaria conventionally dated at 150 million years, its discovery 
couldn't have been better timed to encourage the acceptance of Darwinism and discredit skeptics. 
Harvard's Ernst Mayr, who has been referred to as the "Dean of Evolution," declared it to be "the almost 
perfect link between reptiles and birds," while a paleontologist is quoted as calling it a "holy relic . . . The 
First Bird."13 

Yet the consensus among paleontologists seems to be that there are too many basic structural 
differences for modern birds to be descended fromArchaeopteryx . At best it could be an early 
member of a totally extinct group of birds. On the other hand, there is far from a consensus as to what 
might have beenits ancestors. The two evolutionary theories as to how flight might have originated are 
"trees down," according to which it all began with exaggerated leaps leading to parachuting and gliding 
by four-legged climbers; and "ground up," where wings developed from the insect-catching forelimbs of 
two-legged runners and jumpers. Four-legged reptiles appear in the fossil record well before 
Archaeopteryx and thus qualify as possible ancestors by the generally accepted chronology, while the 
two-legged types with the features that would more be expected of a line leading to birds don't show up 


until much later. 

until much later. 

The peculiar mix of features found inArchaeopteryx is not particularly conclusive of anything in 
itself. In the embryonic stage some living birds have more tail vertebrae thanArchaeopteryx , which later 
fuse. One authority states that the only basic difference from the tail arrangement of modern swans is that 
the caudal vertebrae are greatly elongated, but that doesn't make a reptile.14There are birds today such 
as the Venezuelan hoatzin, the South African touraco, and the ostrich that have claws.Archaeopteryx 
had teeth, whereas modern birds don't, but many ancient birds did. Today, some fish have teeth while 
others don't, some amphibians have teeth and others don't, and some mammals have teeth but others 
don't. It's not a convincing mark of reptilian ancestry. I doubt if many humans would accept that the 
possession of teeth is a throwback to a primitive, reptilian trait. 

So how solid, really, is the case forArchaeopteryx being unimpeachable proof of reptile-to-bird 
transition, as opposed to a peculiar mixture of features from different classes that happened upon a 
fortunate combination that endured in the way of the duck-billed platypus, but which isn't a transition 
toward anything in the Darwinian sense (unless remains unearthed a million years from now are 
interpreted as showing that mammals evolved from ducks)? Perhaps the fairest word comes from 
Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, no champion of Darwinism, who agrees that regardless of the 
details, theArchaeopteryx specimens could still provide important clues as to how birds evolved. "[W]e 
therefore have a possible bird ancestor rather than a certain one," he grants, " . . . on the whole, a point 
for the Darwinists."15But he then goes on to comment, "Persons who come to the fossil evidence as 
convinced Darwinists will see a stunning confirmation, but skeptics will see only a lonely exception to a 
consistent pattern of fossil disconfirmation." It was Darwin himself who prophesied that incontestable 
examples would be "inconceivably great." 

Lines of Horses 

The other example that everyone will be familiar with from museum displays and textbooks is the 
famous "horse series," showing with what appears to be incontrovertible clarity the 65-million-year 
progression from a fox-sized ungulate of the lower Eocene to the modern-day horse. The increase in size 
is accompanied by the steady reduction of the foreleg toes from four to one, and the development of 
relatively plain leaf-browsing teeth into high-crowned grazing ones. Again, this turns out to be a topic on 
which the story that scientists affirm when closing ranks before the media and the public can be very 
different from that admitted off the record or behind closed doors.16 

The first form of the series originated from the bone collections of Yale professor of paleontology 

O. C. Marsh and his rival Edward Cope, and was arranged by the director of the American Museum of 
Natural History (AMNH), Henry Fairfield Osborn, in 1874. It contained just four members, beginning 
with the four-toedEohippus , or "dawn horse," and passing through a couple of three-toed specimens to 

the single-toedEquus of modern times, but that was sufficient for Marsh to declare that "the line of 
descent appears to have been direct and the remains now known supply every important form." More 
specimens were worked into the system and the lineage filled in to culminate in a display put on by the 
AMNH in 1905 that was widely photographed and reproduced to find its way as a standard inclusion in 
textbooks for generations afterward. By that time it was already becoming apparent to professionals that 
the real picture was more complicated and far from conclusive. But it was one of those things that once 
rooted, takes on a life of its own. 

the single-toedEquus of modern times, but that was sufficient for Marsh to declare that "the line of 
descent appears to have been direct and the remains now known supply every important form." More 
specimens were worked into the system and the lineage filled in to culminate in a display put on by the 
AMNH in 1905 that was widely photographed and reproduced to find its way as a standard inclusion in 
textbooks for generations afterward. By that time it was already becoming apparent to professionals that 
the real picture was more complicated and far from conclusive. But it was one of those things that once 
rooted, takes on a life of its own. 
17 

Later finds and comparisons quickly replaced the original impressive linear progression into a 
tangled bushlike structure of branches from assumed common ancestors, most of which led to extinction. 
The validity of assigning the root genus,Eohippus , to the horse series at all had been challenged from 
the beginning. It looks nothing like a horse but was the name given to the North American animal forming 
the first of Osborn's original sequence. Subsequently, it was judged to be identical to a European genus 
already discovered by the British anatomist and paleontologist, Robert Owen, and named 
Hyracotherium on account of its similarities in morphology and habitat to theHyrax running around alive 
and well in the African bush today, still equipped with four fore-toes and three hind ones, and more 
closely related to tapirs and rhinoceroses than anything horselike. SinceHyracotherium predated the 
North American discovery, then by the normally observed customEohippus is not the valid name. But 
the suggestiveness has kept it entrenched in conventional horse-series lore. Noteworthy, however, is that 
Hyracotherium is no longer included in the display at Chicago's Museum of Natural History. 

In the profusion of side branches, the signs of relentless progress so aptly discerned by Victorians 
disappear in contradictions. In some lines, size increases only to reduce again. Even with living horses, 
the range in size from the tiny American miniature ponies to the huge English shires and Belgian warhorse 
breeds is as great as that collected from the fossil record.Hyracotherium has 18 pairs of ribs, the next 
creature shown after it has 19, then there is a jump to 15, and finally a reversion back to 18 withEquus . 
Nowhere in the world are fossils of the full series as constructed found in successive strata. The series 
charted in school books comes mainly from the New World but includes Old World specimens where 


the eye of those doing the arranging considered it justified. In places where successive examples do 
occur together, such as the John Day formation in Oregon, both the three-toed and one-toed varieties 
that remain if the doubtfulHyracotherium is ignored are found at the same geological levels. And even 
more remarkable on the question of toes, of which so much is made when presenting the conventional 
story, is that the corresponding succession of ungulates in South America again shows distinctive 
groupings of full three-toed, three-toed with reduced lateral toes, and single-toed varieties, but the trend 
is in the reverse direction, i.e., from older single-toed to later three-toed. Presumably this was brought 
about by the same forces of natural selection that produced precisely the opposite in North America. 

the eye of those doing the arranging considered it justified. In places where successive examples do 
occur together, such as the John Day formation in Oregon, both the three-toed and one-toed varieties 
that remain if the doubtfulHyracotherium is ignored are found at the same geological levels. And even 
more remarkable on the question of toes, of which so much is made when presenting the conventional 
story, is that the corresponding succession of ungulates in South America again shows distinctive 
groupings of full three-toed, three-toed with reduced lateral toes, and single-toed varieties, but the trend 
is in the reverse direction, i.e., from older single-toed to later three-toed. Presumably this was brought 
about by the same forces of natural selection that produced precisely the opposite in North America. 

The perfection and complexity seen in the adaptations of living things are so striking that even 
among the evolutionists in Darwin's day there was a strong, if not predominant belief that the process 
had to be directed either by supernatural guidance or the imperative of some yet-to-be identified force 
within the organisms themselves. (After all, if the result of evolution was to cultivate superiority and 
excellence, who could doubt that the ultimate goal at the end of it all was to produce eminent Victorians?) 

The view that some inner force was driving the evolutionary processes toward preordained goals 
was known as "orthogenesis" and became popular among paleontologists because of trends in the fossil 
record that it seemed to explain—the horse series being one of the most notable. This didn't sit well with 
the commitment to materialism a priori that dominated evolutionary philosophy, however, since to many 
it smacked of an underlying supernatural guidance one step removed from outright creationism. To 
provide a purely materialist source of innovation, Darwin maintained that some random agent of variation 
had to exist, even though at the time he had no idea what it was. A source of variety of that kind would 
be expected to show a radiating pattern of trial-and-error variants with most attempts failing and dying 
out, rather than the linear progression of an inner directive that knew where it was going. Hence, in an 
ironic kind of way, it has been the efforts of the Darwinians, particularly since the 1950s, that have 
contributed most to replacing the old linear picture of the horse series with the tree structure in their 
campaign to refute notions of orthogenesis. 

But even if such a tree were to be reconstructed with surety, it wouldn't prove anything one way or 
the other; the introduction of an element of randomness is by no means inconsistent with a process's 
being generally directed. The real point is that the pattern was constructed to promote acceptance of a 
preexisting ideology, rather than from empirical evidence. Darwin's stated desire was to place science on 
a foundation of materialistic philosophy; in other words, the first commitment was to the battle of ideas. 
Richard Dawkins, in the opening of his bookThe Blind Watchmaker , defines biology as "the study of 
complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."18The possibility that 
the suggestion of design might be anything more, and that appearances might actually mean what they 
say is excluded as the starting premise: "I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian 
worldviewhappens to be true, but that it is the only known theory thatcould , in principle, solve the 
mystery of our existence." The claim of a truth that must be so "in principle" denotes argument based on 
a philosophical assumption. This is not science, which builds its arguments from facts. The necessary 
conclusions are imposed on the evidence, not inferred from it. 

Left to themselves, the facts tell yet again the ubiquitous story of an initial variety of forms leading to 
variations about a diminishing number of lines that either disappear or persist to the present time looking 
much the same as they always did. And at the end of it all, even the changes that are claimed to be 
demonstrated through the succession are really quite trivial adjustments when seen against the 
background of equine architecture as a whole. Yet we are told that they took sixty-five million years to 
accomplish. If this is so, then what room is there for the vastly more complex transitions between forms 
utterly unlike one another, of which the evidence shows not a hint? 

Anything, Everything, and Its Opposite: 



Natural Selection 


Dissent in the Ranks: Logical Fallacy and Tautology 


Norman Macbeth's concise yet lucid survey of the subject,Darwin Retried , began when he used 
some idle time while convalescing in Switzerland to read a volume of essays commemorating the 1959 
centenary ofOrigin 's publication. His conclusion after the several years of further research that his first 
impressions prompted was that "in brief, classical Darwinism is no longer considered valid by qualified 
biologists."19They just weren't telling the public. One of the most startling things Macbeth discovered was 
that while natural selection figured almost as a required credo on all the lists of factors cited in the 
experts' writings as contributing to evolution, the importance they assigned to it ranged from its being "the 
only effective agency," according to Julian Huxley, to virtually irrelevant in the opinions of others—even 
though it was just this that formed the substantive part of the title to Darwin's book. 

The reason for this backing off from what started out as the hallmark of the theory is that while 
mechanisms showing the effectiveness of natural selection can be readily constructed in imaginative 
speculations, any actual example of the process in action in the real world proceeds invisibly. Early 
Darwinians were carried away into concluding that every aspect of an animal down to the number of its 
spots or bristles was shaped by natural selection and thus was "adaptive," i.e., relevant to survival. 
Purporting to explain how the selective value of a particular, possibly trivial characteristic arose became 
something of a game among the enthusiasts, leading to such wild flights of just-so-story fancy and absurd 
reasoning that the more serious-minded gave up trying to account for the specifics, which were 
observable, while retaining undiminished faith in the principle, which wasn't. 

Put another way, it was claimed that natural selection worked because the results said to follow 
from it were evident all around. But this is the logical fallacy of saying that because A implies B, B must 
imply A. If it rained this morning, the grass will necessarily be wet. But finding the grass wet doesn't 
mean necessarily that it rained. The sprinklers may have been on; the kids could have been playing with 
the hose; a passing UFO might have vented a coolant tank, and so on. Confirming the deductions from a 
theory only lends support to the theory when they can be shown to follow from it uniquely, as opposed 
to being equally consistent with rival theories. If only naturalistic explanations are allowed by the ground 
rules, then that condition is satisfied automatically since no explanation other than natural selection, even 
with its problems, has been offered that comes even close to being plausible. But being awarded the 
prize through default after all other contenders have been disqualified is hardly an impressive 
performance. 

The Darwinists' reaction to this entanglement was to move away from the original ideas of struggle 
and survival, and redefine evolution in terms of visible consequences, namely that animals with certain 
features did well and increased in numbers, others declined, while yet others again seemed to stay the 
same. Although perpetuating the same shaky logic, this had the benefit of making the theory synonymous 
with facts that couldn't be denied, without the burden of explaining exactly how and why they came 
about, which had been the original intention. In the general retreat from what Darwinism used to mean, 
"evolution" became a matter of the mathematics of gene flows and population dynamics, in a word 
differential reproduction , in the course of which "natural selection" takes on the broader meaning of 
being simply anything that brings it about.20So evolution is defined as change brought about by natural 
selection, where natural selection, through a massive circularity, arrives back at being anything that 
produces change. What Macbeth finds staggering in this is the ease with which the leaders of the field 
not only accept such tautologies blithely as inherent in their belief system, but are unable to see anything 
improper in tautological reasoning or the meaninglessness of any conclusions drawn from it.21 

Moth Myths. The Crowning Proof? 

A consequence of such illogic is that simple facts which practically define themselves become 
celebrated as profound revelations of great explanatory power. Take as an example the case of the 


British peppered moth, cited in virtually all the textbooks as a perfect demonstration of "industrial 
melanism" and praised excitedly as living proof of evolution in action before our eyes. In summary, the 
standard version of the story describes a species of moth found in the British Midlands that were 
predominantly light-colored in earlier times but underwent a population shift in which a dark strain 
became dominant when the industrial revolution arrived and tree trunks in the moths' habitat were 
darkened by smoke and air pollution. Then, when cleaner air resulted from the changes and legislation in 
modern times and the trees lightened again, the moth population reverted to its previous balance. The 
explanation given is that the moths depend on their coloring as camouflage to protect them from 
predatory birds. When the tree barks were light, the lighter-colored variety of moths was favored, with 
darker barks the darker moths did better, and the changing conditions were faithfully mirrored in the 
population statistics. Indeed, all exactly in keeping with the expectations of "evolution" as now 
understood. 

British peppered moth, cited in virtually all the textbooks as a perfect demonstration of "industrial 
melanism" and praised excitedly as living proof of evolution in action before our eyes. In summary, the 
standard version of the story describes a species of moth found in the British Midlands that were 
predominantly light-colored in earlier times but underwent a population shift in which a dark strain 
became dominant when the industrial revolution arrived and tree trunks in the moths' habitat were 
darkened by smoke and air pollution. Then, when cleaner air resulted from the changes and legislation in 
modern times and the trees lightened again, the moth population reverted to its previous balance. The 
explanation given is that the moths depend on their coloring as camouflage to protect them from 
predatory birds. When the tree barks were light, the lighter-colored variety of moths was favored, with 
darker barks the darker moths did better, and the changing conditions were faithfully mirrored in the 
population statistics. Indeed, all exactly in keeping with the expectations of "evolution" as now 
understood. 
22 

But even if the facts were as presented, what would it all add up to, really? Light moths do better 
against a light background, whereas dark moths do better against a dark background. This is the 
Earth-shattering outcome after a century and a half of intensive work by some of the best-known names 
in science developing a theory that changed the world? Both light strains and dark strains of moth were 
already present from the beginning. Nothing changed or mutated; nothing genetically new came into 
existence. If we're told that of a hundred soldiers sent into a jungle wearing jungle camouflage garb along 
with a hundred in arctic whites, more of the former were still around a week later, are we supposed to 
conclude that one kind "evolved" into another, or that anything happened that wouldn't have been 
obvious to common sense? 

If that's what we're told "evolution" in the now-accepted use of the word means, then so be it. But 
now we'll need a different word to explain how moths came into existence in the first place. Yet along 
with such examples asArchaeopteryx and the horse series, the peppered moth is offered as proof that 
sets the theory on such incontestable grounds that to question it is evidence of being dim-witted or 
malicious. While other sciences have progressed from sailing clippers to spaceships, Morse telegraph to 
satellite nets, steam engines to nuclear reactors, these constitute the best evidence that can be mustered 
after a hundred and fifty years. 

The Origin of Originality? 
Genetics and Mutation 


Recombination: Answering the Wrong Question 

Natural selection in itself originates nothing. It can only select out of what is already present to be 
selected from. In order to be the driving engine of evolution, it needs a source of new raw material to be 
tested and either preserved for further experimentation or rejected. Much is written about genetic 
transposition and recombination—the insertion, deletion, and duplication of the genes carried by the 
chromosomes, and their rearrangement into new permutations. And it is true that an enormous variety of 
altered programs for directing the form that an organism will assume can be produced in this way—far 
greater than could ever be realized in an actual population. Lee Spetner, a former MIT physicist and 
information scientist who has studied the mathematics of evolution for forty years, calculates that the 
number of possible variations that could occur in a typical mammalian genome to be in the order of one 
followed by 24 million zeros.23(Yes, I did get that right. Not 24 orders of magnitude; 24million orders of 


magnitude.) Of this, the fraction that could be stored in a population of a million, a billion, ten billion, or a 
hundred billion individuals—it really doesn't make much difference—is so close to zero as to be 
negligible. And indeed this is a huge source of potential variety. But the attention it gets is misleading, 
since it's the same sleight of hand we saw before of presenting lots of discussion and examples of 
adaptive variations that nobody doubts, and assuming evolutionary transitions to be just more of the 
same. The part that's assumed is precisely what the exercise is supposed to be proving. For all that's 
going on, despite the stupendous number of combinations it can come up with, is reshuffling the genes 
that already make up the genome of the species in question. Recombination is a very real and abundant 
phenomenon, taking place through sexual mixing whenever a mating occurs and well able to account for 
the variation that we see—it's theoretically possible for two siblings to be formed from exactly 
complementary gametes (the half set of parental genes carried by a sperm or egg cell) from each parent, 
and thus to not share one gene in common. But it can't work beyond the species level, where 
inconceivably greater numbers of transitions are supposed to have happened, that we don't see. 

magnitude.) Of this, the fraction that could be stored in a population of a million, a billion, ten billion, or a 
hundred billion individuals—it really doesn't make much difference—is so close to zero as to be 
negligible. And indeed this is a huge source of potential variety. But the attention it gets is misleading, 
since it's the same sleight of hand we saw before of presenting lots of discussion and examples of 
adaptive variations that nobody doubts, and assuming evolutionary transitions to be just more of the 
same. The part that's assumed is precisely what the exercise is supposed to be proving. For all that's 
going on, despite the stupendous number of combinations it can come up with, is reshuffling the genes 
that already make up the genome of the species in question. Recombination is a very real and abundant 
phenomenon, taking place through sexual mixing whenever a mating occurs and well able to account for 
the variation that we see—it's theoretically possible for two siblings to be formed from exactly 
complementary gametes (the half set of parental genes carried by a sperm or egg cell) from each parent, 
and thus to not share one gene in common. But it can't work beyond the species level, where 
inconceivably greater numbers of transitions are supposed to have happened, that we don't see. 

The source of original variation that Darwin sought was eventually identified as the mechanism of 
genetic mutation deduced from Mendel's studies of heredity, which was incorporated into Darwinian 
theory in what became known in the 1930s as the neo-Darwinian synthesis. By the 1940s the nucleic 
acid DNA was known to be the carrier of hereditary information, and in 1953 James Watson and 
Francis Crick determined the molecule's double-helix structure with its "cross-rungs" of nucleotide base 
pairs that carry the genetic program. This program is capable of being misread or altered, leading the 
molecular biologist Jacques Monod, director of the Pasteur Institute, to declare in 1970 that "the 
mechanism of Darwinism is at last securely founded."24Let's take a deeper look, then, at what was 
securely founded. 

An Automated Manufacturing City 

Sequences of DNA base pairs—complementary arrangements of atoms that bridge the gap 
between the molecule's two "backbones" like the steps of a helical staircase—encode the instructions 
that direct the cellular protein-manufacturing machinery to produce the structural materials for building 
the organism's tissues, as well as molecules like hormones and enzymes to regulate its functioning. The 
operations that take place in every cell of the body are stupefyingly complex, embodying such concepts 

as realtime feedback control, centralized databanks, error-checking and correcting, redundancy coding, 
distributed processing, remote sensing, prefabrication and modular assembly, and backup systems that 
are found in our most advanced automated factories. Michael Denton describes it as a miniature city: 

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must 
magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and 
resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. 
What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive 
design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes 
of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow 
in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world 
of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly 
organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter 
of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to 
assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical 
chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which 
we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of 
the DNA molecules. . . . We would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all 
sorts of robot-like machines. We would notice that the simplest of the functional 
components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly complex pieces of 
molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand atoms arranged in 


highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would wonder even more as we 

highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would wonder even more as we 

particularly when we realized that, despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and 

chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine—that is one single 

functional protein molecule—would be completely beyond our capacity at present and 

will probably not be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century."25 

And this whole vast, mind-boggling operation can replicate itself in its entirety in a matter of hours. 
When this happens through the cell dividing into two daughter cells, the double-stranded DNA control 
tapes come apart like a zipper, each half forming the template for constructing a complete copy of the 
original DNA molecule for each of the newly forming cells. Although the copying process is monitored 
by error-detection mechanisms that surpass anything so far achieved in our electronic data processing, 
copying errors do occasionally happen. Also, errors can happen spontaneously or be induced in existing 
DNA by such agents as mutagenic chemicals and ionizing radiation. Once again the mechanism for 
repairing this kind of damage is phenomenally efficient—if it were not, such being the ravages of the 
natural environment, no fetus would ever remain viable long enough to be born—but at the end of the 
day, some errors creep through to become part of the genome written into the DNA. If the cell that an 
error occurs in happens to be a germ cell (sperm or egg), the error will be heritable and appear in all the 
cells of the offspring it's passed on to. About 10 percent of human DNA actually codes for structural 
and regulatory proteins; the function of the rest is not known. If the inherited copying error is contained 
in that 10 percent, it could (the code is highly redundant; for example, several code elements frequently 
specify the same protein, so that mutating one into another doesn't alter anything) be expressed as some 
physical or behavioral change. 

The Blind Gunman: A Long, Hard Look at the Odds 

Such "point mutations" of DNA are the sole source of innovation that the neo-Darwinian theory 
permits to account for all life's diversity. The theory posits the accumulation of tiny, insensible fluctuations 
to bring about all major change, since large variations would cause too much dislocation to be viable. 
They must occur frequently enough for evolution to have taken place in the time available; but if they 
occur too frequently no two generations would be the same, and no "species" as the basis of 
reproducing populations could exist. The key issue, therefore, is therate at which the mutations that the 
theory rests on take place. More specifically, the rate of favorable mutations conferring some adaptive 
benefit, since harmful ones obviously contribute nothing as far as progress toward something better is 
concerned. 

And here things run into trouble straight away, for beneficial mutations practically never happen. 
Let's take some of the well-known mutations that have been cataloged in studies of genetic diseases as 
examples. 

All body cells need a certain amount of cholesterol for their membranes. It is supplied in packages 
of cholesterol and certain fats manufactured by the liver and circulated via the cardiovascular system. 
Too much of it in circulation, however, results in degeneration and narrowing of the large and 
medium-size arteries. Cholesterol supply is regulated by receptor proteins embedded in the membrane 
wall that admit the packages into the cell and send signals back to the liver when more is needed. The 
gene that controls the assembly of this receptor protein from 772 amino acids is on chromosome 19 and 
consists of about 45,000 base pairs. Over 350 mutations of it have been described in the literature. 
Every one of them is deleterious, producing some form of disease, frequently fatal. Not one is beneficial. 

Another example is the genetic disease cystic fibrosis that causes damage to the lungs, digestive 
system, and in males the sperm tract. Again this traces to mutations of a gene coding for a 
transmembrane protein, this time consisting of 1,480 amino acids and regulating chloride ion transport 
into the cell. The controlling gene, called CFTR, has 250,000 base pairs to carry its instructions, of 
which over 200 mutations are at present known, producing conditions that range from severe lung 
infections leading to early deaths among children, to lesser diseases such as chronic pancreatitis and male 


infertility. No beneficial results have ever been observed. 

infertility. No beneficial results have ever been observed. 

The mutation rates per nucleotide that Spetner gives from experimental observations are between 

0.1 and 10 per billion transcriptions for bacteria and 0.01 to 1 per billion for other organisms, giving a 
geometric mean of 1 per billion.26He quotes G. Ledyard Stebbins, one of the architects of the 
neo-Darwinian theory, as estimating 500 successive steps, each step representing a beneficial change, to 
change one species into another. To compute the probability of producing a new species, the next item 
required would be the fraction of mutations that are beneficial. However, the only answer here is that 
nobody knows for sure that they occur at all, because none has ever been observed. The guesses found 
here and there in the evolutionary literature turn out to be just that—postulated as a hypothetical 
necessity for the theory to stand. (Objection: What about bacteria mutating to antibiotic-resistant strains? 
A well-documented fact. Answer: It can't be considered meaningful in any evolutionary sense. We'll see 
why later.) 
But let's follow Spetner and take it that a potentially beneficial mutation is available at each of the 
500 steps, and that it spreads into the population. The first is a pretty strong assumption to make, and 
there's no evidence for it. The second implies multiple cases of the mutation appearing at each step, since 
a single occurrence is far more likely to be swamped by the gene pool of the general population and 
disappear. Further, we assume that the favorable mutation that exists and survives to spread at every 
step is dominant, meaning that it will be expressed even if occurring on only one of the two parental 
chromosomes carrying that gene. Otherwise it would be recessive, meaning that it would have to occur 
simultaneously in a male and a female, who would then need to find each other and mate. 

Even with these assumptions, which all help to oil the theory along, the chance that the postulated 
mutation will appear and survive in one step of the chain works out at around 1 in 300,000, which is less 
than that of flipping 18 coins and having them all come up heads. For the comparable thing to happen 
through all 500 steps, the number becomes one with more than 2,700 zeros. 

Let's slow down for a moment to reflect on what that means. Consider the probability of flipping 
150 coins and having them all come up heads. The event has a chance of 1 in 2150of happening, which 
works out at about 1 in 1045(1 followed by 45 zeros, or 45 orders of magnitude). This means that on 
average you'd have to flip 150 coins 1045times before you see all heads. If you were superfast and could 
flip 150 coins, count them, and pick them up again all in one second you couldn't do it in a lifetime. Even 
a thousand people continuing nonstop for a hundred years would only get through 3 trillion flips, i.e., 3 x 
1012—still a long, long way from 1045. 

So let's try simulating it on a circuit chip that can perform each flip of 150 coins in a trillionth of a 
second. Now build a supercomputer from a billion of these chips and then set a fleet of 10 billion such 
supercomputers to the task . . . and they should be getting there after somewhere around 3 million years. 
Well, the odds that we're talking about, of producing just one new species even with favorable 
assumptions all the way down the line, is over two thousand orders of magnitudemore improbable than 
that. 

But it Happened! Science or Faith? 

This is typical of the kinds of odds you run into everywhere with the idea that life originated and 
developed by accumulated chance. Spetner calculates odds of 1 in 600 orders of magnitude against the 
occurrence of any instance of "convergent evolution," which is invoked repeatedly by evolutionists to 
explain physical similarities that by no stretch of the imagination can be attributed to common ancestry. 
The British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle gives as 5 in 1019the probability that one protein could have 
evolved randomly from prebiotic chemicals, and for the 200,000 proteins found in the human body, a 
number with 40,000 zeros.27The French scientist Lecomte de Nouy computed the time needed to form a 


single protein in a volume the size of the Earth as 10single protein in a volume the size of the Earth as 10years.28These difficulties were already apparent by 
the mid sixties. In 1967 a symposium was held at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia to debate them, 
with a dazzling array of fifty-two attendees from the ranks of the leading evolutionary biologists and 
skeptical mathematicians. Numbers of the foregoing kind were produced and analyzed. The biologists 
had no answers other than to assert, somewhat acrimoniously from the reports, that the mathematicians 
had gotten their science backward: Evolutionhad occurred, and therefore the mathematical problems in 
explaining it had to be only apparent. The job of the mathematicians, in other words, was not to assess 
the plausibility of a theory but to rubber-stamp an already incontestable truth. 

Life as Information Processing 


Evolution Means Accumulating Information 

The cell can be likened to a specialized computer that executes the DNA program and expresses 
the information contained in it. Cats, dogs, horses, andArchaeopteryxes don't really evolve, of course, 
but live their spans and die still being genetically pretty much the same as they were when born. What 
evolves, according to the theory, is the package of genetic information that gets passed down from 
generation to generation, accumulating and preserving beneficial innovations as it goes. The species that 
exists at a given time is a snapshot of the genome expressing itself as it stands at the point it has reached 
in accumulating information down the line of descent from the earliest ancestor. Although the process 
may be rapid at times and slow at others, every mutation that contributes to the process adds something 
on average. This is another way of saying that to count as a meaningful evolutionary step, a mutation 
must add some information to the genome. If it doesn't, it contributes nothing to the building up of 
information that the evolution of life is said to be. 

No mutation that added information to a genome has ever been observed to occur, either naturally 
or in the laboratory. This is the crucial requirement that disqualifies all the examples that have been 
presented in scientific papers, reproduced in textbooks, and hyped in the popular media as "evolution in 
action." We already saw that the case of the peppered moth involves no genetic innovation; what it 
demonstrates is an already built-in adaptation capacity, not evolution. This isn't to say that mutations 
never confer survival benefits in some circumstances. Such occurrences are rare, but they do happen. 
However, every one that has been studied turns out to be the result of information being lost from a 
genome, not gained by it. So what's going on in such situations is just part of the normal process of 
existing organisms shuffling and jostling in their own peculiar ways for a better place in the sun, but not 
turning into something new. 

Bacterial Immunity Claims: A False Information Economy 

A frequently cited example is that of bacteria gaining resistance to streptomycin and some other 
mycin drugs, which they are indeed able to do by a single-point mutation. The drug molecule works by 
attaching to a matching site on a ribosome (protein-maker) of the bacterium, rather like a key fitting into 
a lock, and interfering with its operation. The ribosome strings the wrong amino acids together, 
producing proteins that don't work, as a result of which the bacterium is unable to grow, divide, or 
propagate, and is wiped out. Mammalian ribosomes don't have similar matching sites for the drug to 
attach to, so only the bacteria are affected, making such drugs useful as antibiotics. However, several 
mutations of the bacterial genome are possible that render the drug's action ineffective. In a population 
where one of them occurs, it will be selected naturally to yield a resistant strain which in the presence of 
the antibiotic indeed has a survival benefit. 

But the "benefit" thus acquired turns out to be a bit like gaining immunity to tooth decay by losing 
your teeth. Every one of the resistance-conferring mutations does so by altering one part or another of 
the ribosome "lock" in such a way that the drug's molecular "key" will no longer match. This is another 
way of saying that the specific set of lock parts that enables the key fit is replaced by one of several 
randomly determined alternative sets that it won't fit. The significant point is that a single, unique state is 


necessary to bring about the first condition, "key fits," whereas any one of a number of states is sufficient 
to produce the second condition, "key doesn't fit." Thinking of it as a combination lock, only one 
combination of all digits will satisfy the first condition, but altering any digit (or more) meets the second. 
This makes a numberless specific —such as by changing 17365 to 173X5, where X can be any digit. 
Loss of specificity means aloss of information. The same applies to pests becoming resistant to 
insecticides such as DDT. Although a survival benefit may be acquired in certain circumstances, the 
mutant strains invariably show impairment in more general areas, such as by slowed metabolism or 
sluggish behavior. Hence, they turn out to be not "super species" at all, as the media love to 
sensationalize, but genetic degenerates which if the artificial conditions were taken away would rapidly 
be replaced by the more all-round-rugged wild types. 

necessary to bring about the first condition, "key fits," whereas any one of a number of states is sufficient 
to produce the second condition, "key doesn't fit." Thinking of it as a combination lock, only one 
combination of all digits will satisfy the first condition, but altering any digit (or more) meets the second. 
This makes a numberless specific —such as by changing 17365 to 173X5, where X can be any digit. 
Loss of specificity means aloss of information. The same applies to pests becoming resistant to 
insecticides such as DDT. Although a survival benefit may be acquired in certain circumstances, the 
mutant strains invariably show impairment in more general areas, such as by slowed metabolism or 
sluggish behavior. Hence, they turn out to be not "super species" at all, as the media love to 
sensationalize, but genetic degenerates which if the artificial conditions were taken away would rapidly 
be replaced by the more all-round-rugged wild types. 

Neither can it do so through transactions that break even. Some bacteria can become resistant 
through infection by a virus carrying a gene for resistance that the virus picked up from a naturally 
resistant variety. Some insects seem to get their uncannily effective camouflage by somehow having 
acquired the same color-patterning genes as are possessed by the plants they settle on.29Similar results 
can also be achieved artificially by genetic engineering procedures for transferring pieces of DNA from 
one organism to another. Although it is true that information is added to the recipient genomes in such 
cases, there is no gain for life as a whole in the sense of a new genetic program being written. The 
program to direct the process in question was already in existence, imported from somewhere else. 
Counting it as contributing to the evolution of life would be like expecting an economy to grow by having 
everyone take in everyone else's laundry. For an economy to grow, wealth must be created somewhere. 
And as we've seen, considerations of the probabilities involved, limitations of the proposed mechanisms, 
and all the evidence available, say that theories basing large-scale evolution on chance don't work. 

More Bacteria Tales: Directed Mutation 

Cases of adaptations occurring not through selection of random changes but being directed by cues 
in the environment have been reported for over a century.30But since any suggestion of nonrandom 
variation goes against the prevailing beliefs of mainstream biology, they have largely been ignored. Take, 
for example, the backup feeding system that the laboratory staple bacteriumE. coli is able to conjure up 
on demand.31 

The normal form ofE.coli lives on the milk sugar lactose and possesses a set of digestive enzymes 
tailored to metabolize it. A defective strain can be produced that lacks the crucial first enzyme of the set, 
and hence cannot utilize lactose. However, it can be raised in an alternative nutrient. An interesting thing 
now happens when lactose is introduced into the alternative nutrient. Two independent mutations to the 
bacterium's genome are possible which together enable the missing first step to be performed in 
metabolizing lactose. Neither mutation is any use by itself, and the chances of both happening together is 
calculated to be vanishingly small at 10-18. For the population size in a typical experiment, this translates 
into the average waiting time for both mutations to happen together by chance being around a hundred 
thousand years. In fact, dozens of instances are found after just a few days.But only when lactose is 
present in the nutrient solution . In other words, what's clearly indicated in experiments of this kind— 
and many have been described in the literature32—is that the environment itself triggers precisely the 
mutations that the organism needs in order to exploit what's available. 

And So, Back to Finches 

The forms of adult animal bone-muscle systems are influenced to a large degree by the forces that 
act on them while they are growing. Jaws and teeth have to bear the forces exerted when the animal 
chews its food, and these forces will depend in strength and direction on the kind of food the animal 


eats. The adult form of jaws and teeth that develops in many rodents, for example, can vary over wide 
ranges with changes in diet, brought about possibly by environmental factors or through a new habit 
spreading culturally through a population. If the new conditions or behavior become established, the 
result can be a permanent change in the expressed phenotype of the animal. 

eats. The adult form of jaws and teeth that develops in many rodents, for example, can vary over wide 
ranges with changes in diet, brought about possibly by environmental factors or through a new habit 
spreading culturally through a population. If the new conditions or behavior become established, the 
result can be a permanent change in the expressed phenotype of the animal. 
33Clearly this wasn't the result of randomly 
occurring mutations being naturally selected over many generations. The capacity to switch from one 
form to another was already present in the genetic program, and the program was switched to the 
appropriate mode by environmental signals. The ironic aspect of this example, of course, is that 
observations of precisely this type of variety in beak forms among finches of the Galapagos Islands led 
Darwin to the notion that he was witnessing the beginnings of new species. 

Confronting the Unthinkable 

By the above, if a population of rodents, say, or maybe horses, were to shift their diet abruptly, the 
phenotype would change abruptly even though the genotype does not. The fossil record would show 
abrupt changes in tooth and bone structure, even though there had been no mutation and no selection. 
Yet the evolution read into the fossil record is inferred largely from bones and teeth. In his reconstruction 
of the story of horse evolution, Simpson tells that when the great forests gave way to grassy plains, 
Mesohippus evolved intoMerychippus , developing high-crowned teeth through random mutation and 
selection, for "It is not likely to be a coincidence that at the same time grass became common, as judged 
by fossil grass seeds in the rocks."34 

It may indeed have been no coincidence. But neither does it have to be a result of the mechanism 
that Simpson assumes. If these kinds of changes in fossils were cued by altered environments acting on 
the developing organisms, then what has been identified as clear examples of evolution could have come 
about without genetic modification being involved, and with random mutation and selection playing no 
role at all. 

Should this really be so strange? After all, at various levels above the genetic, from temperature 
regulation and damage repair to fighting or fleeing, organisms exhibit an array of mechanisms for sensing 
their environment and adjusting their response to it. The suggestion here is that the principle of sensing 
and control extends down also to the genetic level, where genes can be turned on and off to activate 
already-existing program modules, enabling an organism to live efficiently through short-term changes in 
its environment. Nothing in the genome changes. The program isset up for the right adaptive changes in 
the phenotype to occur when they are needed. 

The problem for Darwinism, and maybe the reason why suggestions of directed evolution are so 
fiercely resisted, is that if there was trouble enough explaining the complexity of genetic programs before, 
this makes it immeasurably worse. For now we're implying a genome that consists not only of all the 
directions for constructing and operating the self-assembling horse, but also all the variations that can be 
called up according to circumstances, along with all the reference information to interpret the 
environmental cues and alter the production specification accordingly. Fred Hoyle once observed that 
the chances of life having arisen spontaneously on Earth were about on a par with those of a whirlwind 
blowing through a junkyard containing all the pieces of a 747 lying scattered in disarray, and producing 
an assembled aircraft ready to fly. What we're talking about now is a junkyard containing parts for the 
complete range of Boeing civil airliners, and a whirlwind selecting and building just the model that's best 
suited to the current situation of cost-performance economics and projected travel demands. 

Intelligence at Work? The Crux of It All 


So finally we arrive at the reason why the subject is not just a scientific issue but has become such a 
battle of political, moral, and philosophic passions. At the root of it all, only two possibilities exist: Either 
there is some kind of intelligence at work behind what's going on, or there is not. This has nothing to do 
with the world's being six thousand years old or six billion. A comparatively young world—in the sense 
of the surface we observe today—is compatible with unguided Catastrophist theories of planetary 
history, while many who are of a religious persuasion accept orthodox evolution as God's way of 
working. What's at the heart of it is naturalism and materialism versus belief in a creative intelligence of 
some kind. Either these programs which defy human comprehension in their effectiveness and complexity 
wrote themselves accidentally out of mindless matter acting randomly; or something wrote them for a 
reason. There is no third alternative. 

So finally we arrive at the reason why the subject is not just a scientific issue but has become such a 
battle of political, moral, and philosophic passions. At the root of it all, only two possibilities exist: Either 
there is some kind of intelligence at work behind what's going on, or there is not. This has nothing to do 
with the world's being six thousand years old or six billion. A comparatively young world—in the sense 
of the surface we observe today—is compatible with unguided Catastrophist theories of planetary 
history, while many who are of a religious persuasion accept orthodox evolution as God's way of 
working. What's at the heart of it is naturalism and materialism versus belief in a creative intelligence of 
some kind. Either these programs which defy human comprehension in their effectiveness and complexity 
wrote themselves accidentally out of mindless matter acting randomly; or something wrote them for a 
reason. There is no third alternative. 

At the time Darwin formulated his original theory, nothing was known of the mechanism of heredity 
or the internal structures of the organic cell. The cell was known to possess a dark nucleus, but the inner 
workings were pretty much a "black box," imagined to be a simple unit of living matter, and with most of 
the interesting things taking place at higher levels of organization. With the further development of 
sciences leading to the molecular biology that we see today, this picture has been dramatically shattered 
and the cell revealed as the stupendous automated factory of molecular machines that we glimpsed in 
Michael Denton's description earlier. The complexity that has been revealed in the last twenty years or 
so of molecular biochemistry is of an order that dwarfs anything even remotely imagined before then. 

These findings prompted Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in 
Pennsylvania, to write what has become an immensely popular and controversial book,Darwin's Black 
Box ,35in which he describes systems ranging from the rotary bearings of the cilia that propel mobile cells, 
to vision, the energy metabolism, and the immune system, which he arguescannot have come into 
existence by any process of evolution from something simpler. His basis for this assertion is the property 
they all share, of exhibiting what he terms "irreducible complexity." The defining feature is that every one 
of the components forming such a system is essential for its operation. Take any of them away, and the 
system is not merely degraded in some way but totally incapable of functioning in any way at all. Hence, 
Behe maintains, such systems cannot have arisen from anything simpler, because nothing simpler— 
whatever was supposed to have existed before the final component was added—could have done 
anything; and if it didn't do anything, it couldn't have been selected for any kind of improvement. You 
either have to have the whole thing—which no variation of evolution or any other natural process could 
bring into existence in one step—or nothing. 

The example he offers to illustrate the principle is the common mousetrap. It consists of five 
components: a catch plate on which the bait is mounted; a holding bar that sets and restrains the 
hammer; a spring to provide the hammer with lethal force; and a platform for mounting them all on and 
keeping them in place. Every piece is essential. Without any one, nothing can work. Hence, it has to be 
built as a complete, functioning unit. It couldn't assume its final form by the addition of any component to 
a simpler model that was less efficient. 

An example of reduced complexity would be a large house built up by additions and extensions 
from an initial one-room shack. The improvements could be removed in reverse order without loss of the 
essential function it provides, though the rendering of that function would be reduced in quality and 
degree. 

Here, from Behe's book, are the opening lines of a section that sketches the process of vision at the 
biochemical level. Nobody has been able to offer even a speculation as to how the system could function 
at all if even one of its molecular cogs were removed. 

When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis 
-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds [a picosecond is about the time light takes 


to cross the width of a human hair] totrans -retinal. The change in the shape of the 
retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein rhodopsin, to which the 
retinal is tightly bound. The protein's metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called 
metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before 
bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called 
GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a 
molecule called GTP binds to transducin. 

to cross the width of a human hair] totrans -retinal. The change in the shape of the 
retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein rhodopsin, to which the 
retinal is tightly bound. The protein's metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called 
metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before 
bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called 
GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a 
molecule called GTP binds to transducin. 

Trans-retinal eventually falls off rhodopsin and must be reconverted to 11-cis 
-retinal and again bound by rhodopsin to get back to the starting point for another visual 
cycle. To accomplish this,trans -retinal is first chemically modified by an enzyme called 
trans -retinol—a form containing two more hydrogen atoms. A second enzyme then 
converts the molecule to 11-cis-retinol. Finally, a third enzyme removes the previously 
added hydrogen atoms to form 11-cis-retinal, a cycle is complete.36 

The retinal site is now ready to receive its next photon. 

Behe gives similarly comprehensive accounts of such mechanisms as blood clotting and the 
intracellular transport system, where the functions of all the components and their interaction with the 
whole are known in detail, and contends that only purposeful ordering can explain them. In comparison, 
vague, less precisely definable factors such as anatomical similarities, growth of embryos, bird lineages, 
or the forms of horses become obsolete and irrelevant, more suited to discussion in Victorian drawing 

rooms. 

The response from the evolutionists to these kinds of revelations has been almost complete silence. 
In a survey of thirty textbooks of biochemistry that Behe conducted, out of a total of 145,000 index 
entries, just 138 referred to evolution. Thirteen of the textbooks made no mention of the subject at all. 
As Behe notes, "No one at Harvard University, no one at the National Institutes of Health, no member 
of the National Academy of Sciences, no Nobel prize winner—no one at all can give a detailed account 
of how the cilium, or vision, or blood clotting, or any other complex biochemical process might have 
developed in a Darwinian fashion."37 

Behe unhesitatingly sees design as the straightforward conclusion that follows from the evidence 
itself—not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. He likens those who refuse to see it to detectives 
crawling around a body lying crushed flat and examining the floor with magnifying glasses for clues, while 
all the time ignoring the elephant standing next to the body—because they have been told to "get their 
man." In the same way, Behe contends, mainstream science remains doggedly blind to the obvious 
because it has fixated on finding only naturalistic answers. The simplest and most obvious reason why 
living systems should show over and over again all the signs of having been designed—is that they were. 

Acknowledging the Alternative: Intelligent Design 

Others whom we have mentioned, such as Denton, Hoyle, Spetner, express similar sentiments—not 
through any prior convictions but purely from considerations of the scientific evidence. Interest in 
intelligent design has been spreading in recent years to include not just scientists but also mathematicians, 
information theoreticians, philosophers, and others dissatisfied with the Darwinian theory or opposed to 
the materialism that it implies. Not surprisingly, it attracts those with religious interpretations too, 
including fundamentalists who insist on a literal acceptance of Genesis. But it would be a mistake to 
characterize the whole movement by one constituent group with extreme views in a direction that isn't 
really relevant, as many of its opponents try to do—in the same way that it would be to belittle the notion 
of extraterrestrial intelligence because UFO abduction believers happen to subscribe to it. As Phillip 
Johnson says, "ID is a big tent" that accommodates many diverse acts. All that's asserted is that the 


evidence indicates a creative intelligence of some kind. In itself, the evidence says nothing about the 
nature of such an intelligence nor what its purpose, competence, state of mind, or inclination to achieve 
what we think it should, might be. 

evidence indicates a creative intelligence of some kind. In itself, the evidence says nothing about the 
nature of such an intelligence nor what its purpose, competence, state of mind, or inclination to achieve 
what we think it should, might be. 

Those who are persuaded by religious interpretations insist on the need for a perfect God to hand 
down the absolute moral standards which they see as the purpose in creating the world—and then go 
into all kinds of intellectual convolutions trying to explain why the world clearly isn't perfect. I simply 
think that if such an intelligence exists it would do things for its reasons not ours, and I don't pretend to 
know what they might be—although I could offer some possibilities. An analogy that I sometimes use is 
to imagine the characters in a role-playing game getting complex enough to become aware that they 
were in an environment they hadn't created, and which they figure couldn't have created itself. Their 
attempts to explain the reason for it all could only be framed in terms of the world that they know, that 
involves things like finding treasures and killing monsters. They could have no concept of a software 
writer creating the game to meet a specification and hold down a job in a company that has a budget to 
meet, and so on. 

I sometimes hear the remark that living things don't look like the products of design. True enough, 
they don't look very much like the things we're accustomed to producing. But it seems to me that anyone 
capable of getting self-assembling protein systems to do the work would find better things to do than 
spend their existence bolting things together in factories. Considering the chaotically multiplying 
possibilities confronting the development of modules of genetic code turned loose across a range of 
wildly varying environments to make what they can of themselves, what astounds me is that they manage 
as well as they do. 

These are all valid enough questions to ask, and we could spend the rest of the book speculating 
about them. But they belong in such realms of inquiry as theology and philosophy, not science. 

Is Design Detectable? 

How confident can we be that design is in fact the necessary explanation, as opposed to some 
perhaps unknown natural process—purely from the evidence? In other words, how do you detect 
design? When it comes to nonliving objects or arrangements of things, we distinguish without hesitation 
between the results of design and of natural processes: a hexagonal, threaded nut found among pebbles 
on a beach; the Mount Rushmore monument as opposed to a naturally weathered and eroded rock 
formation; a sand castle on a beach, distinguished from mounds heaped by the tide. Exactly what is it 
that we are able to latch on to? If we can identify what we do, could we apply it to judging biological 
systems? William Dembski, who holds doctorates in mathematics and philosophy from the Universities 
of Chicago and Illinois, has tackled the task of setting out formally the criterion by which design is 
detected.38His analysis boils down to meeting three basic conditions. 

The first is what Dembski terms "contingency": that the system being considered must be 
compatible with the physics of the situation but not required by it. This excludes results that follow 


automatically and couldn't be any other way. Socrates, for example, believed that the cycles of light and 
darkness, or the progressions of the seasons pointed toward design. But what else could follow day 
except night? What could come after cold but warming, or after drought other than rain? 

automatically and couldn't be any other way. Socrates, for example, believed that the cycles of light and 
darkness, or the progressions of the seasons pointed toward design. But what else could follow day 
except night? What could come after cold but warming, or after drought other than rain? 

But complexity in itself isn't sufficient. This is the point that people whom I sometimes hear from— 
and others writing in books, who should know better—miss when they argue that the information 
content of a genome is nothing remarkable, since there's just as much information in a pile of sand. It's 
true that spelling out the position and orientation of every sand grain to construct a given pile of sand 
would require a phenomenal amount of information. In fact it would be a maximum for the number of 
components involved, for there's no way of expressing a set of random numbers in any shorter form such 
as a formula or the way a computer program of a few lines of code could be set up to generate, say, all 
the even numbers up to ten billion. But the only thing the numbers would be good for is to reconstruct 
thatspecific pile of sand. But the specificity means nothing, since for the purposes served by a pile of 
sand on the ground, one pile is as good as another and so you might as well save all the bother and use a 
shovel. But the same can't be said of the sequences of DNA base pairs in a genome. 

Suppose someone comes across a line of Scrabble tiles reading METHINKS IT IS LIKE A 
WEASEL, with spaces where indicated. Asked to bet money, nobody would wager that it was the 
result of the cat knocking them out of the box or wind gusting through the open window. Yet it's not the 
improbability of the arrangement that forces this conclusion. The sequence is precisely no more or no 
less probable than any other of twenty-eight letters and spaces. So what is it? The typical answer, after 
some chin stroking and a frown, is that it "means something." But what does that mean? This is what 
Dembski was possibly the first to recognize and spell out formally. What we apprehend is that the 
arrangement, while not only highly improbable,specifies a pattern that is intelligible by a convention 
separate from the mere physical description. Knowledge of this convention—Dembski calls this "side 
information"—enables the arrangement to be constructed independently of merely following physical 
directions. In this case the independent information is knowledge of the English language, Shakespeare, 
and awareness of a line spoken by Hamlet. Dembski's term for this third condition is "specificity," which 
leads to "specified complexity" as the defining feature of an intelligently contrived arrangement. 

Specifying a pattern recognizable in English enables the message to be encoded independently of 
Scrabble tiles, for example into highly improbable configurations of ink on paper, electron impacts on a 
screen, magnetic dots on a VHS sound track, or modulations in a radio signal. Michael Behe's 
irreducible complexity is a special case of specified complexity, where the highly improbable 
organizations of the systems he describes specify independent patterns in the form of unique, intricate 
biological processes that the components involved, like the parts of a watch, could not perform if 
organized in any other way. 

Philosophers' Fruit-Machine Fallacy 

A process that Richard Dawkins terms "cumulative complexity" is frequently put forward as 
showing that Darwinian processes are perfectly capable of producing such results. An example is 
illustrated in the form of a contrived analogy given by the philosopher Elliott Sober that uses the same 
phrase above fromHamlet .39The letters are written on the edges of randomly spun disks, one occupying 
each position of the target sentence like the wheels of a slot machine. When a wheel happens to come 
up with its correct letter it is frozen thereafter until the sentence is complete. Ergo, it is claimed, pure 
randomness and selection can achieve the required result surprisingly rapidly. The idea apparently comes 
from Richard Dawkins and seems to have captured the imagination of philosophers such as Michael 
Ruse and Daniel Dennett, who also promote it vigorously. 


But their enthusiasm is hard to understand, for the model shows theopposite of what it purports to. 
Who is deciding which disks to freeze, and why? What the analogy demonstrates is an intelligence 
directing the assembly of a complex system toward a preordained target already constructed 
independently of the mechanics by other means—in this case the creativity of Shakespeare. Yet the 
whole aim of Darwinism was to produce anon teleological explanation of life, i.e., one in which purpose 
played no role. Hence, either these advocates don't understand their own theory, or they fail to register 
that they've disproved their assumptions. 

But their enthusiasm is hard to understand, for the model shows theopposite of what it purports to. 
Who is deciding which disks to freeze, and why? What the analogy demonstrates is an intelligence 
directing the assembly of a complex system toward a preordained target already constructed 
independently of the mechanics by other means—in this case the creativity of Shakespeare. Yet the 
whole aim of Darwinism was to produce anon teleological explanation of life, i.e., one in which purpose 
played no role. Hence, either these advocates don't understand their own theory, or they fail to register 
that they've disproved their assumptions. 

Given that little if anything in life is perfect, how confident could we be in a test using these 
principles to detect the signature of intelligence in nature? As with a medical test it can err in two ways: 
by giving a "false positive," indicating design when there isn't any, or a "false negative," by failing to detect 
design when it was actually present. 

We live with false negatives all the time. When the information available is simply insufficient to 
decide—a rock balanced precariously on another; a couple of Scrabble tiles that happen to spell IT or 
SO—our tendency is to favor chance, since the improbabilities are not so high as to rule it out, but we're 
sometimes wrong. Such instances are specific, yes, but not complex enough to prove design. Intelligence 
can also mimic natural processes, causing us to let pass as meaningless something encrypted in an 
unrecognized code or to accept as an accident what had been set up to appear as such when in fact it 
was arson or a murder. Although we have entire professions devoted to detecting such false negatives, 
such as police detectives, forensic scientists, and insurance claim investigators, we can get by with 
imperfection. 

False positives are another thing entirely. A test that can discern design where there is none is like 
reading information into entrails, tea leaves, or flights of birds that isn't there, which makes the test totally 
useless. Hence, a useful test needs to be heavily biased toward making false negatives, rejecting 
everything where there's the slightest doubt and claiming a positive only when the evidence is 
overwhelming. Thinking of it as a net, we'd rather it let any number of false negatives slip through. But if 
it catches something, we want to be sure that it's a real positive. How sure can we be? 

What the criterion of specified complexity is saying is that once the improbabilities of a situation 
become too vast (2728possible combinations of the Scrabble example above), and the specification too 
tight (one line from Hamlet), chance is eliminated as a plausible cause, and design is indicated. Just 
where is the cutoff where chance becomes unacceptable? The French mathematician Emile Borel 
proposed 10-50as a universal probability bound below which chance could be precluded—in other 
words aspecified event as improbable as this could not be attributed to chance.40This is equivalent to 
saying it can be expressed in 166 bits of information. How so? Well, Imagine a binary decision tree, 
where the option at each branch point is to go left or right. The first choice can be designated by "0" or 
"1," which is another way of saying it encodes one bit of information. Since each branch leads to a 
similar decision point, the number of branches at the next level will be four, encoded by two bits: 00, 01, 
10, and 11. By the time the tree gets to 166 levels, it will have sprouted 1050branches. The information 
to specify the path from the starting point to any one of the terminal points increases by one bit for each 
decision and hence can be expressed as a binary number of 166 bits. 


-150. That's 100 zeros more stringent than 
the limit beyond which Borel said chance can be discounted. This translates into 500 bits of information.41 
According to Dembski's criterion, specified information of greater than 500 bits cannot be considered as 
having come about via chance processes. The bacterial cilium that Behe presents as one of his cases of 
irreducible complexity is a whiplike rotary paddle used for propulsion, driven by an intricate molecular 
machine that includes an acid-powered engine, stator housing, O-rings, bushings, and a drive shaft, and 
is built from over 40 interacting proteins, every one of them essential. Its complex specified information is 
well above 500 bits. So are those of all the other cases Behe gives. And we've already come across 
improbabilities that are way beyond this bound, such as Fred Hoyle's figure for the likelihood of the full 
complement of human proteins arising through chance, or Lee Spetner's for speciation and convergence. 
Many other examples could be cited. 

But those who commit a priori to a philosophy that says the universe consists of nothing but matter 
and motionmust accept evolution. The worldview that they have stated as fact leaves no alternative. 
Things like fossils, genetics, probabilities, and complexity have no real bearing apart from a need for 
being somehow interpreted to fit, because the issue has already been decided independently of any 
evidence. 

So, to repeat what we said above, either mindless, inanimate matter has the capacity to organize 
itself purposelessly into the things we've been talking about, or some kind of intelligence caused it to be 
organized. Now let's go back to the question posed right at the beginning. Based on what we see today, 
which belief system constrains permissible answers only to those permitted by a prespecified dogma, 
and which simply follows the evidence, without prejudice, to wherever it seems to be leading? Which, in 
other words, is the religion, and which is the science? 

Some defenders of the Darwinist view evade the issue by defining science as the study of 
naturalistic, materialistic phenomena and the search for answers to all things only in those terms. But 
what if the simple reality is that some questions don't have answers in those terms? One response is that 
science could only be enriched by abandoning that restrictive philosophy and opening its horizons in the 
way the spirit of free inquiry was supposed to. The alternative could be unfortunate. For in taking such a 
position, science could end up excluding itself from what could well be some of the most important 
questions confronting us. 

Section Notes 

1 Himmelfarb, 1962 
2 Dennett, 1995, p. 46 
3New York Times , April 9, 1989, Sec 7, p. 34 



4 Dennett, 1995, pp. 515–516 

4 Dennett, 1995, pp. 515–516 

6 Hogan, 1988 

7 Darwin, 1859, p.184 

8 The Origin of Species,1872, 6thedition, John Murry, 
London, p. 468 

9The Origin of Species , 1872, 6thedition, John Murray, 
London, p. 309 

10 Sunderland, 1998 

11 Denton, 1985, p. 190 

12 Johnson, Phillip, 1991, p.51 

13 Wells, 2000, Chapter 6 

14 Sunderland, 1998, p. 86 

15 Johnson, 1991, p. 79 

16 See, for example, Sunderland, 1998, p. 94 

17 Stanley, 1979, p. 39 

18 Dawkins, 1986, p. 1 

19 Macbeth, 1971, p. 5 

20 According to Simpson, "anything tending to produce 

systematic, heritable change in populations between one 

generation and the next." Quoted in Macbeth, 1971, p. 48 

21 Macbeth, 1971, p. 48 

22 See Wells, 2000, Chapter 7 for more details and a 
discussion on the implications of needing to falsify 
textbooks when we're assured that the evidence for 
evolution is "overwhelming." A full account of the story 
is available online at the Nature Institute, 
http://www.netfuture.org/ni/misc/pub/moth.html 

23 Spetner, 1997, p. 63 

24 Judson, 1979, p. 217 

25 Denton, 1985, pp. 328–29 

26 Spetner, 1997, p. 92 

27 Hoyle, 1983, pp. 12–17 

28 Sunderland, 1996, p. 152 

29 Hoyle, 1983, Chapter 5 

30 For examples of reviews see Ho and Saunders, 1979; Cook, 1977; Rosen and 
Buth, 1980 

31 Original research reported in Hall, 1982 

32 See Spetner, 1997, Chapter 7 for more examples 

33 Spetner, 1997, p. 204 

34 Simpson, 1951, p. 173 

35 Behe, 1996 

36 Behe, 1996, p. 20 

37 Behe, 1996. p. 187 

38 Dembski 1998, 1999, 2002 

39 Sober, 1993 

40 Borel, 1962, p. 28 


41 Dembski, 1998, Section 6.5 

41 Dembski, 1998, Section 6.5 
O 
Of Bangs and Braids Cosmology's 
Mathematical Abstractions 


It's impossible that the Big Bang is wrong. 

—Joseph Silk, astrophysicist 

Can we count on conventional science always choosing the incorrect alternative between 

two possibilities? I would vote yes, because the important problems usually require a 

change in paradigm, which is forbidden to conventional science. 

—Halton Arp, observational astronomer 

Mathematical Worlds— 
and This Other One 


Mathematics is purely deductive. When something is said to be mathematically "proved," it means 
that the conclusion follows rigorously and necessarily from the axioms. Of itself, a mathematical system 
can't show anything as being "true" in the sense of describing the real world. All the shelves of volumes 
serve simply to make explicit what was contained in the assumptions. If some mathematical procedures 
happen to approximate the behavior of certain real-world phenomena over certain ranges sufficiently 
closely to allow useful predictions to be made, then obviously that can be of immense benefit in gaining a 
better understanding of the world and applying that knowledge to practical ends. But the only measure 
of if, and if so to what degree, a mathematical process does in fact describe reality can be actual 
observation. Reality is in no way obligated to mimic formal systems of symbol manipulation devised by 
humans. 

Cosmologies as Mirrors 


Advocates of this or that political philosophy will sometimes point to a selected example of animal 
behavior as a "natural" model that is supposed to tell us something about humans—even if their rivals 
come up with a different model exemplifying the opposite. I've never understood why people take much 
notice of things like this. Whether some kinds of ape are social and "democratic," while others are 
hierarchical and "authoritarian" has to do with apes, and that's all. It's not relevant to the organizing of 
human societies. In a similar kind of way, the prevailing cosmological models adopted by societies 
throughout history—the kind of universe they believe they live in, and how it originated—tend to mirror 
the political, social, and religious fashion of the times. 

Universes in which gods judged the affairs of humans were purpose-built and had beginnings. 
Hence, the Greek Olympians with their creation epics and thunderbolts, and mankind cast in a tragedy 
role, heroic only in powers to endure whatever fate inflicted. These also tend to be times of stagnation or 
decline, when the cosmos too is seen as running downhill from a state of initial perfection toward ruin 
that humans are powerless to avert. Redemption is earned by appeasing the supernatural in such forms 
as the God of Genesis and of the Christendom that held sway over Europe from the fall of the Roman 
Empire to the stirring of the Renaissance. 

But in times of growth and confidence in human ability to build better tomorrows, the universe too 
evolves of itself, by its own internal powers of self-organization and improvement. Thoughts turn away 


from afterlives and retribution, and to things of the here and now, and the material. The gods, if they exist 
at all, are at best remote, preoccupied with their own concerns, and the cosmos is conceived as having 
existed indefinitely, affording time for all the variety and complexity of form to have come about through 
the operation of unguided natural forces. Thus, with Rome ruling over the known world, Lucretius 
expounded the atomism of Epicurus, in which accidental configurations of matter generated all of 
sensible physical reality and the diversity of living things. A millennium later, effectively the same 
philosophy reappeared in modern guise as the infinite machine set up by Newton and Laplace to turn the 
epochal wheels for Lyell and Darwin. True, Newton maintained a religious faith that he tried to reconcile 
with the emerging scientific outlook; but the cosmos that he discovered had no real need of a creator, 
and God was reduced to a kind of caretaker on the payroll, intervening occasionally to tweak perturbed 
orbits and keep the Grand Plan on track as it unfolded. 

from afterlives and retribution, and to things of the here and now, and the material. The gods, if they exist 
at all, are at best remote, preoccupied with their own concerns, and the cosmos is conceived as having 
existed indefinitely, affording time for all the variety and complexity of form to have come about through 
the operation of unguided natural forces. Thus, with Rome ruling over the known world, Lucretius 
expounded the atomism of Epicurus, in which accidental configurations of matter generated all of 
sensible physical reality and the diversity of living things. A millennium later, effectively the same 
philosophy reappeared in modern guise as the infinite machine set up by Newton and Laplace to turn the 
epochal wheels for Lyell and Darwin. True, Newton maintained a religious faith that he tried to reconcile 
with the emerging scientific outlook; but the cosmos that he discovered had no real need of a creator, 
and God was reduced to a kind of caretaker on the payroll, intervening occasionally to tweak perturbed 
orbits and keep the Grand Plan on track as it unfolded. 

That world and its vision self-destructed in the trenches of 1914–18. From the aftermath emerged 
a world of political disillusionment, roller-coaster economics, and shattered faith in human nature. 
Mankind and the universe, it seemed, were in need of some external help again. 

Matters of Gravity: Relativity's Universes 


In 1917, two years after developing the general relativity theory (GRT), Albert Einstein formulated 
a concept of a finite, static universe, into which he introduced the purely hypothetical quantity that he 
termed the "cosmological constant," a repulsive force increasing with the distance between two objects 
in the way that the centrifugal force in a rotating body increases with radius. This was necessary to 
prevent a static universe from collapsing under its own gravitation. (Isaac Newton was aware of the 
problem and proposed an infinite universe for that reason.) But the solution was unstable, in that the 
slightest expansion would increase the repulsive force and decrease gravity, resulting in runaway 
expansion, while conversely the slightest contraction would lead to total collapse. 

Soon afterward, the Dutch astronomer, Willem de Sitter, found a solution to Einstein's equations 
that described an expanding universe, and the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann found 
another. Einstein's static picture, it turned out, was one of three special cases among an infinity of 
possible solutions, some expanding, some contracting. Yet despite the excitement and publicity that the 
General Theory had aroused—publication of Einstein's special relativity theory in 1905 had made 
comparatively little impact; his Nobel Prize of that year was awarded for a paper on the photoelectric 
effect—the subject remained confined to the circle of probably not more than a dozen or so specialists 
who had mastered its intricacies until well into the 1920s. Then the possible significance began being 
recognized of observational data that had been accumulating since 1913, when the astronomer V. M. 
Slipher (who, as is often the case in instances like this, was looking for something else) inferred from 
redshifts of the spectra of about a dozen galaxies in the vicinity of our own that the galaxies were moving 
away at speeds ranging up to a million miles per hour. 

An Aside on Spectra and Redshifts 

A spectrum is the range of wavelengths over which the energy carried by a wave motion such as 
light, radio, sound, disturbances on a water surface, is distributed. Most people are familiar with the 
visible part of the Sun's spectrum, ranging from red at the low-frequency end to violet at the 
high-frequency end, obtained by separating white sunlight into its component wavelengths by means of a 
prism. This is an example of a continuous, or "broadband" spectrum, containing energy at all wavelengths 


in the range. Alternatively, the energy may be concentrated in just a few narrow bands within the range. 

in the range. Alternatively, the energy may be concentrated in just a few narrow bands within the range. 
Changes in the energy states of atoms are accompanied by the emission or absorption of radiation. 
In either case, the energy transfers occur at precise wavelength values that show as "lines," whose 
strength and spacings form patterns—"line spectra"—characteristic of different atomic types. Emission 
spectra consist of bright lines at the wavelengths of the emitted energy. Absorption spectra show as dark 
lines marking the wavelengths at which energy is absorbed from a background source—for example, of 
atoms in the gas surrounding a star, which absorb certain wavelengths of the light passing through. From 
the line spectra found for different elements in laboratories on Earth, the elements present in the spectra 
from stars and other astronomical objects can be identified. 

A "redshifted" spectrum means that the whole pattern is displaced from its normal position toward 
the red—longer wavelength—end. In other words, all the lines of the various atomic spectra are 
observed to lie at longer wavelength values than the "normal" values measured on Earth. A situation that 
would bring this about would be one where the number of waves generated in a given time were 
stretched across more intervening space than they "normally" would be. This occurs when the source of 
the waves is receding. The opposite state of affairs applies when the source is approaching and the 
wavelengths get compressed, in which case spectra are "blue-shifted." Such alteration of wavelength due 
to relative motion between the source and receiver is the famous Doppler shift.43Textbooks invariably 
cite train whistles as an example at this point, so I won't. 


A Universe in the Red and Lemaître's Primeval Atom 

By 1924 the reports of redshifts from various observers had grown sufficiently for Carl Wirtz, a 
German astronomer, to note a correlation between the amounts of galactic redshift and their optical 
faintness, which was tentatively taken as a measure of distance. The American astronomer Edwin 
Hubble had recently developed a new method for measuring galactic distances using the known 
brightnesses of certain peculiar variable stars, and along with his assistant, Milton Humason, conducted a 


systematic review of the data using the 60-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in 
California, and later the 100-inch—the world's largest at that time. In 1929 they announced what is now 
known as Hubble's Law: that the redshift of galaxies increases steadily with distance. Although Hubble 
himself always seemed to have reservations, the shift was rapidly accepted as a Doppler effect by the 
scientific world at large, along with the startling implication that not only is the universe expanding, but 
that the parts of it that lie farthest away are receding the fastest. 

systematic review of the data using the 60-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in 
California, and later the 100-inch—the world's largest at that time. In 1929 they announced what is now 
known as Hubble's Law: that the redshift of galaxies increases steadily with distance. Although Hubble 
himself always seemed to have reservations, the shift was rapidly accepted as a Doppler effect by the 
scientific world at large, along with the startling implication that not only is the universe expanding, but 
that the parts of it that lie farthest away are receding the fastest. 

This first version of a Big Bang cosmology was not generally accepted. The only actual evidence 
offered was the existence of cosmic rays arriving at high energies from all directions in space, which 
Lemaître argued could not come from any source visible today and must be a leftover product of the 
primordial breakdown. But this was disputed on the grounds that other processes were known which 
were capable of providing the required energy, and this proved correct. Cosmic-ray particles were later 
shown to be accelerated by electromagnetic forces in interstellar space. The theory was also criticized 
on the grounds of its model of stellar evolution based on a hypothetical process of direct 
matter-to-energy annihilation, since nuclear fusion had become the preferred candidate for explaining the 
energy output of stars, and Willem de Sitter showed that it was not necessary to assume GRT solutions 
involving a singularity. Further, the gloomy inevitability of a heat death was rejected as not being 
necessarily so, since whatever might seem true of the second law locally, nothing was known of its 
applicability to the universe as a whole. Maybe the world was deciding that the period that had brought 
about such events as the Somme, Verdun, and the end of Tsarist Russia had been an aberration, and 
was recovering from its pessimism. Possibly it's significant, then, that the resurrection of the Big Bang 
idea came immediately following World War II. 

After the Bomb: The Birth of the Bang 


Gamow's Nuclear Pressure-Cooker 

In 1946, Russian-born George Gamow, who had worked on the theory of nuclear synthesis in the 
1930s and been involved in the Manhattan Project, conjectured that if an atomic bomb could, in a 
fraction of a millionth of a second, create elements detectable at the test site in the desert years later, 
then perhaps an explosion on a colossal scale could have produced the elements making up the universe 
as we know it. Given high enough temperatures, the range of atomic nuclei found in nature could be built 
up through a succession starting with hydrogen, the lightest, which consists of one proton. Analysis of 


astronomical spectra showed the universe to consist of around 75 percent hydrogen, 24 percent helium, 
and the rest a mix continuing on through lithium, beryllium, boron and so on of the various heavier 
elements. Although all of the latter put together formed just a trace in comparison to the amount of 
hydrogen and helium, earlier attempts at constructing a theoretical model had predicted far less than was 
observed—the discrepancy being in the order of ten orders of magnitude in the case of intermediate 
mass elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, and getting rapidly worse (in fact, exponentially) 
beyond those. 

astronomical spectra showed the universe to consist of around 75 percent hydrogen, 24 percent helium, 
and the rest a mix continuing on through lithium, beryllium, boron and so on of the various heavier 
elements. Although all of the latter put together formed just a trace in comparison to the amount of 
hydrogen and helium, earlier attempts at constructing a theoretical model had predicted far less than was 
observed—the discrepancy being in the order of ten orders of magnitude in the case of intermediate 
mass elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, and getting rapidly worse (in fact, exponentially) 
beyond those. 

Unlike Lemaître's earlier proposal, the Gamow theory was well received by the scientific 
community, particularly the new generation of physicists versed in nuclear technicalities, and became 
widely popularized. Einstein had envisaged a universe that was finite in space but curved and hence 
unbounded, as the surface of a sphere is in three dimensions. The prevailing model now became one that 
was also finite in time. Although cloaked in the language of particle physics and quantum mechanics, the 
return to what was essentially a medieval worldview was complete, raising again all the metaphysical 
questions about what had come before the Bang. If space and time themselves had come into existence 
along with all the matter and energy of the universe as some theorists maintained, where had it all come 
from? If the explosion had suddenly come about from a state that had endured for some indefinite period 
previously, what had triggered it? It seemed to be a one-time event. By the early 1950s, estimates of the 
total amount of mass in the universe appeared to rule out the solutions in which it oscillated between 
expansion and contraction. There wasn't enough to provide sufficient gravity to halt the expansion, which 
therefore seemed destined to continue forever. What the source of the energy might have been to drive 
such an expansion—exceeding all the gravitational energy contained in the universe—was also an 
unsolved problem. 

Hoyle and Supernovas as "Little Bang" Element Factories 

Difficulties for the theory mounted when the British astronomer Fred Hoyle showed that the unique 
conditions of a Big Bang were not necessary to account for the abundance of heavy elements; processes 
that are observable today could do the job. It was accepted by then that stars burned by converting 
hydrogen to helium, which can take place at temperatures as low as 10 million degrees—attainable in a 
star's core. Reactions beyond helium require higher temperatures, which Gamow had believed stars 
couldn't achieve. However, the immense outward pressure of fusion radiation balanced the star's 
tendency to fall inward under its own gravity. When the hydrogen fuel was used up, its conversion to 
helium would cease, upsetting the balance and allowing the star to collapse. The gravitational energy 
released in the collapse would heat the core further, eventually reaching the billion degrees necessary to 
initiate the fusion of helium nuclei into carbon, with other elements appearing through neutron capture 
along the lines Gamow had proposed. A new phase of radiation production would ensue, arresting the 
collapse and bringing the star into a new equilibrium until the helium was exhausted. At that point another 
cycle would repeat in which oxygen could be manufactured, and so on through to iron, in the middle of 
the range of elements, which is as far as the fusion process can go. Elements heavier than iron would 
come about in the huge supernova explosions that would occur following the further collapse of highly 
massive stars at the end of their nuclear burning phase—"little bangs" capable of supplying all the 
material required for the universe without need of any primordial event to stock it up from the beginning. 

This model also accounted for the observational evidence that stars varied in their makeup of 
elements, which was difficult to explain if they all came from the same Big Bang plasma. (It also followed 


that any star or planet containing elements heavier than iron—our Sun, the Earth, indeed the whole Solar 
System, for example—must have formed from the debris of an exploded star from an earlier generation 
of stars.) Well, the images of starving postwar Europe, shattered German cities, Stalingrad, and 
Hiroshima were fading. The fifties were staid and prosperous, and confidence in the future was returning. 
Maybe it was time to rethink cosmology again. 

that any star or planet containing elements heavier than iron—our Sun, the Earth, indeed the whole Solar 
System, for example—must have formed from the debris of an exploded star from an earlier generation 
of stars.) Well, the images of starving postwar Europe, shattered German cities, Stalingrad, and 
Hiroshima were fading. The fifties were staid and prosperous, and confidence in the future was returning. 
Maybe it was time to rethink cosmology again. 

Sure enough, Fred Hoyle, having dethroned the Big Bang as the only mechanism capable of 
producing heavy elements, went on, with Thomas Gold and Herman Bondi, to propose an alternative 
that would replace it completely. The Hubble redshift was still accepted by most as showing that the 
universe we see is expanding away in all directions to the limits of observation. But suppose, Hoyle and 
his colleagues argued, that instead of this being the result of a one-time event, destined to die away into 
darkness and emptiness as the galaxies recede away from each other, new matter is all the time coming 
into existence at a sufficient rate to keep the overall density of the universe the same. Thus, as old 
galaxies disappear beyond the remote visibility "horizon" and are lost, new matter being created diffusely 
through all of space would be coming together to form new galaxies, resulting in a universe populated by 
a whole range of ages—analogous to a forest consisting of all forms of trees, from young saplings to 
aging giants. 

The rate of creation of new matter necessary to sustain this situation worked out at one hydrogen 
atom per year in a cube of volume measuring a hundred meters along a side, which would be utterly 
undetectable. Hence, the theory was not based on any hard observational data. Its sole justification was 
philosophical. The long-accepted "cosmological principle" asserted that, taken at a large-enough scale, 
the universe looked the same anywhere and in any direction. The Hoyle-Bondi-Gold approach 
introduced a "perfect cosmological principle" extending to time also, making the universe unchanging. It 
became known, therefore, as the steady-state theory. 

The steady-state model had its problems too. One in particular was that surveys of the more distant 
galaxies, and hence ones seen from an earlier epoch because of the delay in their light reaching Earth, 
showed progressively more radio sources; hence the universe hadn't looked the same at all times, and so 
the principle of its maintaining a steady, unvarying state was violated. But it attracted a lot of scientists 
away from the Big Bang fold. The two major theories continued to rival each other, each with its 
adherents and opponents. And so things remained through into the sixties. 

Then, in 1965, two scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, 
after several months of measurement and double-checking, confirmed a faint glow of radiation emanating 
evenly from every direction in the heavens with a frequency spectrum corresponding to a temperature of 
2.7ºK.44This was widely acclaimed and publicized as settling the issue in favor of the Big Bang theory. 

The Cosmic Background Radiation: News but Nothing New 

Big Bang had been wrestling with the problem of where the energy came from to drive the 
expansion of the "open" universe that earlier observations had seemed to indicate—a universe that would 
continue expanding indefinitely due to there being too little gravitating mass to check it. Well, suppose 
the estimates were light, and the universe was in fact just "closed"—meaning that the amount of mass 
was just enough to eventually halt the expansion, at which point everything would all start falling in on 
itself again, recovering the energy that had been expended in driving the expansion. This would simplify 
things considerably, making it possible to consider an oscillating model again, in which the current Bang 
figures as simply the latest of an indeterminate number of cycles. Also, it did away with all the 
metaphysics of asking who put the match to whatever blew up, and what had been going on before. 

A group at Princeton looked into the question of whether such a universe could produce the 
observed amount of helium, which was still one of Big Bang's strong points. (Steady state had gotten the 
abundance of heavier elements about right but was still having trouble accounting for all the helium.) They 
found that it could. With the conditions adjusted to match the observed figure for helium, expansion 


would have cooled the radiation of the original fireball to a diffuse background pervading all of space 
that should still be detectable—at a temperature of 30would have cooled the radiation of the original fireball to a diffuse background pervading all of space 
that should still be detectable—at a temperature of 30K.45Gamow's collaborators, Ralph Alpher and 
Robert Herman, in their original version had calculated 5ºK for the temperature resulting from the 
expansion alone, which they stated would be increased by the energy production of stars, and a later 
publication of Gamow's put the figure at 50ºK.46 

The story is generally repeated that the discovery of the 2.7ºK microwave background radiation 
confirmed precisely a prediction of the Big Bang theory. In fact, the figures predicted were an order of 
magnitude higher. We're told that those models were based on an idealized density somewhat higher 
than that actually reported by observation, and (mumble-mumble, shuffle-shuffle) it's not really too far off 
when you allow for the uncertainties. In any case, the Big Bang proponents maintained, the diffuseness of 
this radiation across space, emanating from no discernible source, meant that it could only be a relic of 
the original explosion. 

It's difficult to follow the insistence on why this had to be so. A basic principle of physics is that a 
structure that emits wave energy at a given frequency (or wavelength) will also absorb energy at the 
same frequency—a tuning fork, for example, is set ringing by the same tone that it sounds when struck. 
An object in thermal equilibrium with—i.e., that has reached the same temperature as—its surroundings 
will emit the same spectrum of radiation that it absorbs. Every temperature has a characteristic spectrum, 
and an ideal, perfectly black body absorbing and reradiating totally is said to be a "blackbody" radiator 
at that temperature. The formula relating the total radiant energy emitted by a blackbody to its 
temperature was found experimentally by Joseph Stefan in 1879 and derived theoretically by Ludwig 
Boltzmann in 1889. Thus, given the energy density of a volume, it was possible to calculate its 
temperature. 

Many studies had applied these principles to estimating the temperature of "space." These included 
Guillaume (1896), who obtained a figure of 5º–6ºK, based on the radiative output of stars; Eddington 
(1926), 3.18ºK; Regener (1933), 2.8ºK, allowing also for the cosmic ray flux; Nernst (1938), 0.75ºK; 
Herzberg (1941), 2.3ºK; Finlay-Freundlich (1953 and 1954), using a "tired light" model for the redshift 
(light losing energy due to some static process not involving expansion), 1.9ºK to 6ºK.47Max Born, 
discussing this last result in 1954, and the proposal that the mechanism responsible for "tiring" the light en 
route might be photon-photon interactions, concluded that the "secondary photons" generated to carry 
away the small energy loss suffered at each interaction would be in the radar range. The significant thing 
about all these results is that they were based on a static, nonexpanding universe, yet consistently give 
figures closer to the one that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson eventually measured than any of the 
much-lauded predictions derived from Big Bang models. 

Furthermore, the discrepancy was worse than it appeared. The amount of energy in a radiation 
field is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature, which means that the measured background 
field wasthousands of times less than was required by the theory. Translated into the amount of mass 
implied, this measurement made the universe even more diffuse than Gamow's original, nonoscillating 
model, not denser, and so the problem that oscillation had been intended to solve—where the energy 
driving the expansion had come from—became worse instead of better. 

An oscillating model was clearly ruled out. But with some modifications to the gravity equations— 
justified by no other reason than that they forced an agreement with the measured radiation temperature 
—the open-universe version could be preserved, and at the same time made to yield abundances for 
helium, deuterium, and lithium which again were close to those observed. The problem of what energy 
source propelled this endless expansion was still present—in fact exacerbated—but quietly forgotten. 
Excited science reporters had a story, and theNew York Times carried the front-page headline signals 
imply a big bang universe. 

Resting upon three pillars of evidence—the Hubble redshifts, light-element abundance, and the 
existence of the cosmic background radiation—Big Bang triumphed and became what is today the 
accepted standard cosmological model. 


Quasar and Smoothness Enigmas: 
Enter, the Mathematicians. 

Quasar and Smoothness Enigmas: 
Enter, the Mathematicians. 

But in fact, serious disagreements were developing between these idealized realms of thought and 
what astronomers surveying reality were actually finding. For one thing, despite all the publicity it had 
been accorded as providing the "clincher," there was still a problem with the background radiation. 
Although the equations could be made to agree with the observed temperature, the observed value itself 
was just too uniform—everywhere. An exploding ball of symmetrically distributed energy and particles 
doesn't form itself into the grossly uneven distribution of clustered matter and empty voids that we see. It 
simply expands as a "gas" of separating particles becoming progressively more rarified and less likely to 
interact with each other to form into anything. To produce the galaxies and clusters of galaxies that are 
observed, some initial unevenness would have to be present in the initial fireball to provide the focal 
points where condensing matter clouds would gravitate together and grow. Such irregularities should 
have left their imprint as hot spots on the background radiation field, but it wasn't there. Observation 
showed the field to be smooth in every direction to less than a part in ten thousand, and every version of 
the theory required several times that amount. (And even then, how do galaxies manage to collide in a 
universe where they're supposed to be rushing apart?) 

Another way of stating this was that the universe didn't contain enough matter to have provided the 
gravitation for galaxies to form in the time available. There needed to be a hundred times more of it than 
observation could account for. But it couldn't simply be ordinary matter lurking among or between the 
galaxies in some invisible form, because the abundance of elements also depended critically on density, 
and increasing density a hundredfold would upset one of the other predictions that the Big Bang rested 
on, producing far too much helium and not enough deuterium and lithium. So another form of matter— 
"dark matter"—was assumed to be there with the required peculiar properties, and the cosmologists 
turned to the particle physicists, who had been rearing their own zoo of exotic mathematical creations, 
for entities that might fill the role. Candidates included heavy neutrinos, axions, a catch-all termed 
"weakly interacting massive particles," or "WIMPS," photinos, strings, superstrings, quark nuggets, none 
of which had been observed, but had emerged from attempts at formulating unified field theories. The 
one possibility that was seemingly impermissible to consider was that the reason why the "missing mass" 
was missing might be that it wasn't there. 

Finally, to deal with the smoothness problem and the related "flatness" problem, the notion of 
"inflation" was introduced, whereby the universe began in a superfast expansion phase of doubling in size 
every 10-35seconds until 10-33seconds after the beginning, at which point it consisted of regions flung far 
apart but identical in properties as a result of having been all born together, whereupon the inflation 
suddenly ceased and the relatively sluggish Big Bang rate of expansion took over and has been 


proceeding ever since. 

proceeding ever since. 
-12seconds, is about the time light would take to cross the width of a 
human hair. If we represent a picosecond by the distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri (4.3 
light-years), then, on the same scale, 10-35seconds would measure around half a micron, or a quarter the 
width of a typical bacterium—far below the resolving power of the human eye. Fine-tuning of these 
mathematical models reached such extremes that the value of a crucial number expressed as a part in 
fifty-eight decimal places at an instant some 10-43seconds into the age of the universe made the difference 
between its collapsing or dispersing in less than a second. 

But theory had already dispersed out of sight from reality anyway. By the second half of the 1980s, 
cosmic structures were being discovered and mapped that could never have come into being since the 
time of the Big Bang, whatever the inhomogeneities at the beginning or fast footwork in the first few 
moments to smooth out the background picture. The roughly spherical, 
ten-million-or-so-light-year-diameter clusters of galaxies themselves turned out to be concentrated in 
ribbonlike agglomerations termed superclusters, snaking through space for perhaps several hundred 
million light-years, separated by comparatively empty voids. And then the superclusters were found to 
be aligned to form planes, stacked in turn as if forming parts of still larger structures—vast sheets and 
"walls" extending for billions of light-years, in places across a quarter of the observable universe. The 
problem for Big Bang is that relative to the sizes of these immense structures, the component units that 
form them are moving too slowly for these regularities to have formed in the time available. In the case of 
the largest void and shell pattern identified, 150 billion light-years would have been needed at least— 
eight times the longest that Big Bang allows. New ad-hoc patches made their appearance: light had 
slowed down, so things had progressed further than we were aware; another form of inflation had 
accelerated the formation of the larger, early structures, which had then been slowed down by 
hypothetical forces invented for the purpose. But tenacious resistance persisted to any suggestion that 
the theory could be in trouble. 

Yet the groundwork for an alternative picture that perhaps explains all the anomalies in terms of 
familiar, observable processes had been laid in the 1930s. 

The Plasma Universe 


Hannes Alfvén, the Pioneer: Cosmic Cyclotrons. 

Hannes Alfvén studied the new field of nuclear physics at the University of Uppsala, in Sweden, 
and received his doctorate in 1934. Some of his first research work was on cosmic rays, which Lemaître 
had wrongly attributed to debris from the primeval atom in his first version of a Big Bang theory. 
Although such renowned names as America's Robert Millikan and Britain's Sir James Jeans were still 
ascribing them to some kind of nuclear fission or fusion, Alfvén followed the line of the Norwegian 
experimental scientist Kristian Birkeland in proposing electromagnetic processes. This set the tone of 
what would characterize his approach to science through life: reliance on observation in the laboratory as 
a better guide to understanding the real world than deduction from theory, and a readiness to question 
received wisdom and challenge the authority of prestigious scientists. 

That decade had seen the development of the cyclotron accelerator for charged particles, which 
uses an electric field to get them up to speed and a magnetic field to confine them in circular paths. 
(Electrical dynamics are such that a particle moving through a magnetic field experiences a force at right 
angles to the direction of motion—like that of a ship's rudder.) It had been established that the Sun 
possesses a magnetic field, which seemed likely to be the case with other stars also. A binary system of 
two stars orbiting each other—of which there are many—could form, Alfvén theorized, the components 
of a gigantic natural cyclotron capable of accelerating particles of the surrounding plasma to the kinds of 
energies measured for cosmic rays. This would also explain why they arrived equally from all directions, 


until then taken as indicating that their source lay outside the galaxy. The streams of high-energy particles 
would form huge electrical currents flowing through space—Alfvén estimated them to be typically in the 
order of a billion amperes—which would generate magnetic fields traversing the galaxy. These in turn 
would react back on the cosmic ray particles, sending them into all manner of curving and spiraling 
paths, with the result that those happening to arrive at the Earth could appear to have come from 
anywhere. 

until then taken as indicating that their source lay outside the galaxy. The streams of high-energy particles 
would form huge electrical currents flowing through space—Alfvén estimated them to be typically in the 
order of a billion amperes—which would generate magnetic fields traversing the galaxy. These in turn 
would react back on the cosmic ray particles, sending them into all manner of curving and spiraling 
paths, with the result that those happening to arrive at the Earth could appear to have come from 
anywhere. 

Alfvén next applied these concepts to the aurora, which had also interested Birkeland, and 
explained the effect as the result of plasma currents from the Sun being deflected to the Earth's poles by 
its magnetic field, where they produce displays of light by ionizing atoms in the upper atmosphere. (The 
same process takes place in a neon tube, where the applied voltage creates an ionizing current through a 
gas. The gas atoms absorb energy from the current and reemit it as visible light.) Although 
noncontroversial today, this was again resisted for a long time by a mathematically indoctrinated 
orthodoxy who thought of space in terms of an idealized vacuum and refused to accept that it could 
conduct electricity. Alfvén used mathematics more in the mode of an engineer—as a tool for quantifying 
and understanding better what is observed, not as something to determine what reality is allowed to be. 
On one occasion, in a visit to Alfvén's home in Sweden, the Cambridge theoretician Sydney Chapman, 
who had steadfastly opposed Alfvén's views and declined to debate them, refused to go down to the 
basement to observe a model that Alfvén had constructed in the hope of swaying him. Alfvén 
commented, "It was beneath his dignity as a mathematician to look at a piece of laboratory apparatus!"48 

The tradition of the professors who wouldn't look through Galileo's telescope was alive and well, it 
seemed. It wasn't until the mid 1960s that satellites began detecting the highly localized incoming currents 
in the auroral zones that proved Alfvén to have been correct. 

The Solar System as a Faraday Generator 

But Alfvén was already turning to larger things. The currents that produced the aurora led back to 
the Sun, where the rotating vortexes that appear as sunspots act as generators in the Sun's magnetic 
field, accelerating plasma particles outward in flares and prominences that can cause displays extending 
for hundreds of thousands of miles above the surface. According to the conventional picture of how the 
Solar System had formed, which went back to Pierre-Simon Laplace, the Sun and planets condensed 
out of a spinning disk of gas and dust as it contracted under gravity. But there were two problems with 
this. The first was that as a rotating body contracts it speeds up (conservation of angular momentum), 
and calculation showed that the outwardly directed centrifugal force would balance any further collapse 
long before the core region became dense enough to form a star. To reach the form it is in today, 
Laplace's disk needed to get rid of the greater part of the angular momentum it had started out with—in 
fact, about 99.9 percent of it. Second, of the amount that remained, most ought to have ended up 
concentrated in the Sun, causing it to rotate in something like thirteen hours instead of the twenty-eight 
days that is found. In fact, most of the angular momentum in the Solar System lies with the planets—75 
percent of it in Jupiter, 27 percent Saturn, 1 percent distributed among the remaining rubble—leaving 
only 2 percent in the Sun itself. How, then, did the bulk of the angular momentum get transferred to 
where it is? 

If the central region, rotating faster as it contracts, develops a magnetic field, the field will sweep 


through the surrounding cloud of plasma, inducing currents to flow inward toward the core. Because the 
currents are in a magnetic field, they will experience a force accelerating the plasma in the direction of the 
rotation, in other words, transferring angular momentum from the central region, allowing it to collapse 
further. Following the field lines, the currents will complete a return path back via the proto-Sun, the 
effect there being to slow its rotation. A metal disk rotated in a magnetic field shows the same effect and 
is known as a homopolar generator. Michael Faraday demonstrated it in the middle of the nineteenth 
century. 

through the surrounding cloud of plasma, inducing currents to flow inward toward the core. Because the 
currents are in a magnetic field, they will experience a force accelerating the plasma in the direction of the 
rotation, in other words, transferring angular momentum from the central region, allowing it to collapse 
further. Following the field lines, the currents will complete a return path back via the proto-Sun, the 
effect there being to slow its rotation. A metal disk rotated in a magnetic field shows the same effect and 
is known as a homopolar generator. Michael Faraday demonstrated it in the middle of the nineteenth 
century. 

Two parallel wires carrying currents flowing in the same direction experience a force that draws 
them together. If the conducting medium is a plasma rather than wires, the plasma will tend to pull itself 
together into filaments. But the movement of charged plasma particles toward each other also constitutes 
a current that generates its own magnetic field, with the result that the filaments tend to twist around each 
other like the braided strands of a thread. These filamentary structures are seen clearly in laboratory 
plasma discharges, solar prominences, and the shimmering draperies of the aurora, kinking and writhing 
unpredictably under their own internally generated fields, as fusion researchers trying to contain plasmas 
have learned to their consternation. This braiding repeats on a larger scale like threads twisting to form 
ropes, creating inhomogeneity and complexity as an inherent tendency of plasma structures. 

This mechanism also accounted for the origin of the angular momentum of a planetary system, 
which straightforward collapse under gravitation had never really been able to explain. Any two forces 
that are not in alignment and not directed in parallel in the same direction, applied to a rigid object, will 
cause it to rotate about some center, and are said to possess "torque," or turning moment, about that 
point. Two bodies moving along the lines of action of those forces possess angular momentum about that 
point, even though they are traveling in straight lines. This can be seen with two skaters approaching 
each other on paths that are slightly offset. If they link arms as they pass, they will go into a spin about 
each other; angular momentum has to be conserved, and so it must have been there all along. In a 
plasma made up of particles of differing masses such as electrons and protons, a magnetic field will 
accelerate the masses at different rates, concentrating them into polarized regions of opposite charge. 
When two current filaments are pulled together under their mutual interaction, the forces acting are not 
center-to-center but offset, like the courses of the skaters. This is what causes filaments to twist around 
each other and braid into more complex forms. 

By the sixties Alfvén was proposing this as the basis of the formation of the entire Solar System. It 
was generally rejected on the grounds that electrical currents could not be supported in such plasmas. 
Ironically, the reason that was given went back to work on solar electrodynamics that Alfvén himself and 
a few colleagues had done during the early years of World War II, in which Sweden remained neutral. 
For an electrical current to flow, there must be an electric field maintaining a voltage difference to drive 
it, in the same way that for a water current to flow, a pipe must have a gradient to maintain a pressure 
difference. But, it was argued, a conducting plasma would short out any electric field that tried to form, 
preventing any voltage difference from developing, and so no current could be driven. 

This does come close to being true in the Sun, and the success of Alfvén's own theory in 
representing solar phenomena was used as justification for treating all plasma models the same way. 
Alfvén tried to point out that the limitation on electric fields only applied todense plasmas, but it was in 
vain. Whereas before his ideas had been opposed on the grounds of space being a mathematically 
idealized insulator, now the criticism was that he couldn't be right because the space he described was 
assumed to be a perfect conductor. Nevertheless, his earlier work had been so thoroughly vindicated, 
providing much of what became standard reference material for plasma work, that in 1970 Alfvén was 
awarded a Nobel Prize, particular mention being made of the very theory whose limitations he had been 
trying to get the physics community to appreciate. He probably made history by being the only recipient 
of the prize to criticize, at the award ceremony, the reasons for which his own work was being 
recognized. "But it is only the plasma that does not understand how beautiful the theories are," he said, 


"and absolutely refuses to obey them.""and absolutely refuses to obey them."

Space probes pushing out to Jupiter, Saturn, then Uranus through the end of the seventies and into 
the eighties confirmed the whole system of magnetic fields, ionization belts, and twisting plasma currents 
that Alfvén had theorized. This time the initial proponent of the ideas that led to it all was not overlooked. 
The vast plasma circuits extending across space are known today as Birkeland currents. 

Solar System to Galaxy 

After spending a short while by invitation in the Soviet Union, in 1967 Alfvén moved to the U.S.A. 
and settled in San Diego. Electrical forces, not gravity, he was by now convinced, had been the primary 
influence in shaping the Solar System. Gravitation became a significant factor only later, when the natural 
tendency of plasmas to organize coherent structures out of a diffuse medium at much faster rates had 
already produced higher-density regions—the "clumpiness" that Big Bang cosmologists had been unable 
to bring about by means of gravity alone. Only when matter cooled sufficiently for electrically neutral 
atoms to form could objects like planets arise that moved essentially in response to gravity alone and 
which allowed the familiar celestial dynamics that worked well enough within the local neighborhood of 
the Solar System. But local behavior couldn't be extrapolated to describe a universe existing 99 percent 
in the form of plasma in stars at temperatures of millions of degrees or charged particles streaming 
through space. 

Wasn't the disk-shaped galaxy little more than scaled-up Solar-System geometry? A proto-galaxy 
rotating in an intergalactic magnetic field would generate electric fields in the same way, which in turn 
would produce filamentary currents flowing inward through the galactic plane to the center, and then up 
along the rotational axis to loop back in a return path reentering around the rim. As in the case of the 
Solar System, the self-"pinching" effect would compress these currents into twisting vortexes sweeping 
around the galaxy like immense fan blades and gathering the matter together into high-density regions 
along which proto-stars would form as subvortexes. However, it will be a long time yet before 
man-made probes are able to venture out into the galactic disk with instruments to test such theories. 

Peratt's Models and Simulations: Galaxies in the Laboratory 

Encouragement came, nevertheless, from a different direction. In 1979, Anthony Peratt, who had 
been a graduate student of Alfvén's ten years previously, was working with the aerospace defense 
contractor Maxwell Laboratories on a device called Blackjack V, which generated enormous pulses of 
electrical power—10 trillion watts!—to vaporize wires into filaments of plasma, producing intense bursts 
of X rays. The purpose was to simulate the effects of the electromagnetic pulse produced by a hydrogen 
bomb on electronics and other equipment. High-speed photographs showed the filaments of plasma 
moving toward each other under the attraction of their magnetic fields, and then wrapping around each 
other in tight spiral forms strikingly suggestive of familiar astronomical pictures of galaxies. Computer 
simulations of plasma interactions that Peratt performed later at the Los Alamos National Laboratory 
duplicated with uncanny faithfulness the features of all known galaxy types. By varying the parameters of 
the simulations, Peratt was able to match the result with every one of the pictures shown in Halton Arp's 
Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and guess with confidence just what electromagnetic forces were shaping 
the galaxies. 

These simulations also suggested a possible answer to another mystery that astronomers had been 
debating for a long time. In a galaxy held together purely by gravity, the velocity of the component stars 
about the center as it rotates should decrease with distance from it—as with the Solar System, in which 
the outer planets move more slowly in their orbits around the Sun. Observations, however, show that the 
speeds of stars orbiting the galactic center remain fairly constant regardless of distance. This is just what 
the simulations showed would be expected of an electrically formed galaxy, where the spiral arms form 
coherent structures that trail back like the cords of a gigantic Weed Eater, moving with the same velocity 
along their whole length. Conventional theory had been forced to postulate an invisible halo of the 
strange gravitating but otherwise noninteracting dark matter surrounding a galaxy— there for no other 


reason than to produce the desired effect. But with electromagnetic forces, behaving not peculiarly but in 
just the way they are observed to on Earth, the effect emerges naturally. 

reason than to produce the desired effect. But with electromagnetic forces, behaving not peculiarly but in 
just the way they are observed to on Earth, the effect emerges naturally. 

The most intense X-ray emission in the Blackjack V plasmas came from center of the spiral form. 
This was evocative of the high-energy bursts from galactic centers that cosmologists were trying to 
explain in terms of black holes and other exotic concepts. Blackjack V didn't use black holes. But there 
was a way in which sudden explosive releases of energy could come about from purely electrical causes 
—the same that sometimes cause the plug of an appliance to spark when it's pulled out of a wall socket. 

An electric field that drives currents and accelerates particles in a cyclotron, a neon light, or a TV 
tube is produced by a changing magnetic field (in other words, not by a steady one). A magnetic field 
accompanies an electric current. In the late fifties, Alfvén had been called in by the Swedish power 
company ASEA to investigate a problem they were having with explosions in mercury arc rectifiers used 
in the transmission grid. The rectifiers used a low-pressure mercury vapor cell containing a 
current-carrying plasma. It turned out that under certain conditions the ions and electrons forming the 
plasma could separate in a positive-feedback process that created a rapidly widening gap in the plasma, 
interrupting the current. The fall in the magnetic field that the current had been supporting generated an 
electric field that built up a high voltage, accelerating the electrons to the point where the ensuing heat 
caused an explosion. 

Alfvén's work had shown that analogous effects involving suddenly collapsing magnetic fields could 
also operate at larger scales to produce such results as solar flares. The energy released in such an event 
is nonlocal in that it derives not just from the conditions pertaining at the point where the current break 
occurs, but from the magnetic field sustained around the entire circuit. The energy stored in a galactic 
circuit thousands of light-years long and carrying ten million trillions of amperes can be a staggering 1057 
ergs—as much energy as a typical galaxy generates in 30 million years. The electric fields produced by 
that kind of release could accelerate electrons to enormous velocities, approaching that of light. 
Accelerated charges radiate electromagnetic waves. Black-hole-density concentrations of gravity are not 
necessary to generate jets of radio brilliance that can be heard on the far side of the universe. 

Eric Lerner and the Plasma Focus 

Peratt published his findings in a small astronomy journal,Astrophysics and Space Science, in 
1983,50and the following year in the more widely read amateur magazineSky and Telescope .51Little 
reaction came from mainstream astrophysicists. Then, toward the end of 1984, he was contacted by 
Eric J. Lerner, a theoretician who had been pursuing a parallel line of thought, though not within the 
recognized establishment. Lerner's interest in the subject had been stimulated at an early age by an 
illustration in an astronomy book of all the trains that would be needed to haul the billions of tons of coal 
whose burning would equal the Sun's output in one second. He studied physics at Columbia University 
and the University of Maryland, with an emphasis on nuclear fusion, and in the mid seventies formed an 
association with Winston Bostick, who was working on an approach to controlled fusion known as the 
plasma focus. Invented independently in the sixties by a Soviet, N. V. Filippov, and an American, 
Joseph Mather, the device first compresses electrical energy a millionfold into a sub-millimeter-size 
donut of filamentary plasma called a plasmoid, and then collapses the associated magnetic field to shoot 
out two intense, high-energy beams, each in the order of a micron (one ten-thousandth of a centimeter) 
wide—electrons in one direction and ions in the other. In the course of this, some of the confined ions 
are heated to sufficient temperatures to fuse. 

Bostick too thought that filamentary processes might be involved in galaxy formation, and this led 
Lerner to wonder if something like the energy concentration mechanism of the plasma focus might 
account for the distant, highly energetic, yet compact quasars mentioned earlier. Since 1980, the new 
Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, consisting of twenty-seven dish antennas spread over miles of 
the New Mexico desert, had revealed enormously energetic jets of energy emanating from quasars, 


similar to the ones already known to power the emissions of radio galaxies, which Alfvén's work 
attributed to collapsing magnetic fields. If the visible core region of a typical radio galaxy is pictured as a 
spinning dime, two narrow jets of particles shoot out along the axis in opposite directions for a distance 
of about a foot before cooling and dissipating into football-size "lobes," where the energy is radiated 
away as radio waves. The same processes occur at lesser intensity in the jets created by ordinary 
galaxies also. In the case of quasars, conventional theory postulated charged particles spiraling inward in 
the intense gravity fields of black holes as the source. Maybe black holes weren't needed. 

similar to the ones already known to power the emissions of radio galaxies, which Alfvén's work 
attributed to collapsing magnetic fields. If the visible core region of a typical radio galaxy is pictured as a 
spinning dime, two narrow jets of particles shoot out along the axis in opposite directions for a distance 
of about a foot before cooling and dissipating into football-size "lobes," where the energy is radiated 
away as radio waves. The same processes occur at lesser intensity in the jets created by ordinary 
galaxies also. In the case of quasars, conventional theory postulated charged particles spiraling inward in 
the intense gravity fields of black holes as the source. Maybe black holes weren't needed. 

A plasma focus can increase the power density of its emission by a factor of ten thousand trillion 
over that of energy supplied. (Power signifies concentration in time; density, concentration in space.) The 
flow of current inward along a galaxy's spiral arms, out along the axis, and looping back around via the 
rim reproduced the geometry of the plasmoid—the same that Alfvén had arrived at about four years 
earlier. But the suggestion of structures produced via electrical processes didn't stop there. Astronomers 
were producing maps showing the galaxies to be not distributed uniformly across space but in clusters 
strung in "superclusters" along lacy, filament-like threads running through vast voids—scaled-up versions 
of the filaments that Lerner had visualized as forming within galaxies, from which stars formed as matter 
densities increased and gravitation broke them up. These larger filaments—vast rivers of electricity 
flowing through space—would create the magnetic fields that galaxies rotated in, enabling them to 
become generators; indeed, it would be from the initial drawing together and twisting of such large-scale 
filaments that galaxies formed in the first place. 

To establish some kind of firm foundation for his ideas, Lerner needed to know the scaling laws 
that related laboratory observations to events occurring on a galactic scale—the relationships that 
changed as the scale of the phenomenon increased, and the ones that remained invariant. This was when 
a colleague introduced him to Alfvén'sCosmic Electrodynamics , first published in 1963, which set out 
the scaling laws that Alfvén had derived. These laws provided quantitative support for the hierarchical 
picture that Lerner had envisaged—a series of descending levels, each repeating the same basic process 
of plasma twisting itself into vortex filaments that grow until self-gravitation breaks them up. 

Few outside a small circle were receptive to such ideas, however. The majority of astrophysicists 
didn't believe that such currents could flow in space because a plasma's resistance is too low and would 
dissipate them—the same objection that Alfvén had encountered two decades before, now reiterated at 
the galactic level. Then bundles of helically twisted filaments a light-year across and a hundred light-years 
long, looping toward the center and arcing out along the axis of our galaxy and—the sizes predicted by 
Lerner's model—were mapped with the VLA telescope by a Columbia University graduate student, 
Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, and carried on the cover of the August 1984, issue ofNature . Yusef-Zadeh's 
colleague, Mark Morris, later confirmed that magnetic forces, not gravity, must have controlled their 
formation. Encouraged, and at Peratt's suggestion, Lerner submitted a paper describing his theory to 
Astrophysics and Space Science , the journal that Peratt had published in, but it was rejected, the 
reviewer dismissing the analogy between galaxies and the plasma focus as absurd. The black-hole 
explanation of quasars and the cores of energetic galaxies is still favored, sometimes being invoked to 
account for Yusef-Zadeh's filaments. Lerner's paper did finally appear inLaser and Particle Beams in 
1986.52 

The scaling laws implied that the smaller an object is in the hierarchy, the more isolated it will be 
from neighboring objects of the same kind in terms of the ratio of size to distance. Thus stars are 
separated from each other by a distance of 10 million times their diameters, galaxies by thirty times their 
diameters, clusters by ten times their diameters. Hence there was nothing strange about space being so 
filled in some places and empty in others. Far from being a mystery in need of explanation, the observed 
clumpiness was inevitable. 

An upper size limit also emerged, beyond which filaments will fail to form from a homogenous 
plasma because of the distortion of particle paths by internal gravitation. The maximum primordial 


filament would be in the order of ten billion light-years in diameter and compress itself down to around a 
fifth that size before breaking into several dozen smaller filaments spaced 200 million light-years apart— 
which corresponded well with the observed values for the superclusters. Beyond this, therefore, there 
should exist a further, larger structure of elongated, filamentary form, a billion or so light-years in radius 
and a few billion light-years long. It turned out to have contracted a bit more than Lerner's calculations 
said. Brent Tully's 1986 paper inAstrophysical Journal announcing the discovery of "supercluster 
complexes" put their radius at around six hundred million light-years. 

filament would be in the order of ten billion light-years in diameter and compress itself down to around a 
fifth that size before breaking into several dozen smaller filaments spaced 200 million light-years apart— 
which corresponded well with the observed values for the superclusters. Beyond this, therefore, there 
should exist a further, larger structure of elongated, filamentary form, a billion or so light-years in radius 
and a few billion light-years long. It turned out to have contracted a bit more than Lerner's calculations 
said. Brent Tully's 1986 paper inAstrophysical Journal announcing the discovery of "supercluster 
complexes" put their radius at around six hundred million light-years. 

These were far too massive and ancient to have formed since the Big Bang, requiring a trillion years 
or more for the primordial filaments to differentiate themselves. Although this news caused a sensation 
among cosmologists, the plasma-universe alternative remained virtually unknown, since papers on it had 
been rejected by recognized astrophysical journals, while the few journals in which they had appeared 
were not read by astrophysicists. However, through contacts in the publishing world Lerner was invited 
to write a specialized science article for theNew York Times Magazine and promptly proposed one on 
Alfvén and the plasma universe. Alfvén had been skeptical of the Big Bang theory ever since he first 
came across it in 1939. Nevertheless, in discussing theNew York Times offer with Lerner, he cautioned 
that in his opinion an article challenging the Big Bang would be premature; instead it should focus on the 
electrical interpretation of more familiar and observable phenomena to prepare the ground. "Wait a 
year," he advised. "I think the time will be riper next year to talk about the Big Bang."53 

But Lerner couldn't let such an opportunity pass, and after further consulting with Peratt and much 
editing and rewriting, he submitted an article giving a full exposition to his theory. It was not only 
accepted by the editorial staff but scheduled as the cover story for the October 1986 edition. Lerner 
was elated. But Alfvén's experience of the business turned out to be well rooted, and his advice 
prescient. Upon routine submission to the science section of the daily paper for review the article was 
vetoed on the grounds that Alfvén was a maverick, without support in the scientific community. (Being 
awarded a Nobel Prize apparently counts for little against entrenched dogma.) A revised version of 
Lerner's article did eventually appear inDiscover magazine in 1988.54 

Other Ways of Making Light Elements . . . 


The existence of large-scale structures posed difficulties for Big Bang. But it still rested solidly on its 
two other pillars of helium abundance and microwave background ratiation—at least, as far as the 
general perception went. We've already seen that the wide-spread acceptance of the background 
radiation was a peculiar business, since it had been predicted more accurately without any Big Bang 
assumptions at all. More recently conducted work showed that it wasn't necessary to account for the 
helium abundance either. 

The larger a star, the hotter its core gets, and the faster it burns up its nuclear fuel. If the largest 
stars, many times heavier than the Sun, tended to form in the earlier stages of the formation of our 
galaxy, they would long ago have gone through their burning phase, producing large amounts of helium, 
and then exploded as supernovas. Both in Lerner's theoretical models and Peratt's simulations, the stars 
forming along the spiral arms as they swept through the plasma medium would become smaller as the 
density of the medium increased. As the galaxy contracted, larger stars would form first, and smaller, 
longer-lived ones later. The smaller, more sedate stars—four to ten times larger than the Sun—would 
collapse less catastrophically at the end of the burning phase, blowing off the outer layers where the 
helium had been formed initially, but not the deeper layers where heavier elements would be trapped. 
Hence the general abundance of helium would be augmented to a larger degree than of the elements 
following it; there is no need for a Big Bang to have produced all the helium in a primordial binge. 

Critics have argued that this wouldn't account for the presence of light elements beyond helium such 


as lithium and boron, which would be consumed in the stellar reactions. But it seems stars aren't needed 
for this anyway. In June 2000, a team of astronomers from the Universities of Austin, Texas, and 
Toledo, Ohio, using the Hubble Space Telescope and the McDonald Observatory, described a process 
they termed "cosmic-ray spallation," in which energetic cosmic rays consisting mainly of protons traveling 
near the speed of light break apart nuclei of elements like carbon in interstellar space. The team believed 
this to be the most important source of the lighter elements.
as lithium and boron, which would be consumed in the stellar reactions. But it seems stars aren't needed 
for this anyway. In June 2000, a team of astronomers from the Universities of Austin, Texas, and 
Toledo, Ohio, using the Hubble Space Telescope and the McDonald Observatory, described a process 
they termed "cosmic-ray spallation," in which energetic cosmic rays consisting mainly of protons traveling 
near the speed of light break apart nuclei of elements like carbon in interstellar space. The team believed 
this to be the most important source of the lighter elements.

And of Producing Expansion 


That pretty much leaves only the original Hubble redshift as the basis for the Big Bang. But as 
we've already seen, the steady-state theory proposed another way in which it could be explained. And 
back in the early sixties, Alfvén gave some consideration to another. 

A theory put forward by an old colleague and teacher of his, Oskar Kleine, had proposed 
antimatter as the energy source responsible. Antimatter had been predicted from quantum mechanics in 
the 1920s, and its existence subsequently confirmed in particle experiments. For every type of 
elementary particle, there also exists an "antiparticle," identical in all properties except for carrying the 
opposite electrical charge (assuming the particle is charged). If a particle and its antiparticle meet, they 
annihilate each other and are converted into two gamma rays equal in energy to the total masses of the 
particles that created them, plus the kinetic energy they were carrying. (The thermonuclear reaction in a 
hydrogen bomb converts about one percent of the reacting mass to energy.) Conversely, sufficiently 
energetic radiation can be converted into particles. When this occurs, it always produces a 
particle-antiparticle pair, never one of either kind on its own. 

This fact leads to the supposition that the universe too ought to consist of equal amounts of both 
particles and antiparticles. Kleine hypothesized that in falling together under gravity, a particle-antiparticle 
mixture (too rarified to undergo more than occasional annihilating collisions) would separate according to 
mass; at the same time, if the motion were in a magnetic field, positive charges would be steered one 
way and negative charges the other. The result would be to produce zones where either matter or 
antimatter dominated, with a layer of energetic reactions separating them and tending to keep them apart 
while they condensed into regions of galaxies, stars, and planets formed either from ordinary matter, as 
in our own locality, or of antimatter elsewhere. 

Should such matter and antimatter regions later meet, the result would be annihilation on a colossal 
scale, producing energy enough, Kleine conjectured, to drive the kind of expansion that the redshift 
indicated. This would make it a "Neighborhood Bang" rather thanthe Bang, producing a localized 
expansion of the part of the universe we see which would be just part of a far vaster total universe that 
had existed for long before. Although this allows time for the formation of large structures, there are 
questions as to how they could have been accelerated to the degree they apparently have without being 
disrupted, and others that require a lot more observational data, and so the idea remains largely 
speculative. 

Redshift Without Expansion at All 


Molecular Hydrogen: The Invisible Energy-Absorber 

The steady-state and Kleine's antimatter theories both accepted the conventional interpretation of 
the redshift but sought causes for it other than the Big Bang. But what if it has nothing to do with 
expansion of the universe at all? We already saw that Finlay-Freundlich's derivation of the background 
temperature in the early fifties considered a "tired light" explanation that Born analyzed in terms of 
photon-photon interactions. More recently, the concept has found a more substantial grounding in the 
work of Paul Marmet, a former physicist at the University of Ottawa, and before that, senior researcher 
at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics of the National Research Council of Canada. 


It has long been known that space is permeated by hydrogen, readily detectable by its 
21-centimeter emission line, or absorption at that wavelength from the background radiation. This signal 
arises from the spin of the hydrogen atom. Monatomic hydrogen, however, is extremely unstable and 
reacts promptly to form diatomic hydrogen molecules, HIt has long been known that space is permeated by hydrogen, readily detectable by its 
21-centimeter emission line, or absorption at that wavelength from the background radiation. This signal 
arises from the spin of the hydrogen atom. Monatomic hydrogen, however, is extremely unstable and 
reacts promptly to form diatomic hydrogen molecules, H. Molecular hydrogen is very stable, and once 
formed does not easily dissociate again. Hence, if space is pervaded by large amounts of atomic 
hydrogen, then molecular hydrogen should exist there too—according to the calculations of Marmet and 
his colleagues, building up to far greater amounts than the atomic kind.56Molecular hydrogen, however, is 
extraordinarily difficult to detect—in fact, it is the most transparent of diatomic molecules. But in what 
seems a peculiar omission, estimates of the amount of hydrogen in the universe have traditionally failed to 
distinguish between the two kinds and reported only the immediately detectable atomic variety. 

Using the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory, E. A. Valentijn and P. P. van 
der Werf recently confirmed the existence of huge amounts of molecular hydrogen in NGC891, a galaxy 
seen edge-on, 30 million light-years away.57This discovery was based on new techniques capable of 
detecting the radiation from rotational state transitions that occur in hydrogen molecules excited to 
relatively hot conditions. Cold molecular hydrogen is still undetectable, but predictions from observed 
data put it at five to fifteen times the amount of atomic hydrogen that has long been confirmed. This 
amount of hitherto invisible hydrogen in the universe would have a crucial effect on the behavior of light 
passing through it. 

Most people having a familiarity with physics have seen the demonstration of momentum transfer 
performed with two pendulums, each consisting of a rod weighted by a ball, suspended adjacently such 
that when both are at rest the balls just touch. When one pendulum is moved away and released, it stops 
dead on striking the other, which absorbs the momentum and flies away in the same direction as the first 
was moving. The collision is never perfectly "elastic," meaning that some of the impact energy is lost as 
heat, and the return swing of the second pendulum will not quite reverse the process totally, bringing the 
system eventually to rest. 

Something similar happens when a photon of light collides with a molecule of a transparent medium. 
The energy is absorbed and reemitted in the same, forward direction, but with a slight energy loss— 
about 10-13of the energy of the incoming photon.58(Note this is not the same as the transverse "Rayleigh 
scattering" that produces angular dispersion and produces the blueness of the sky, which is far less 
frequent. The refractive index of a transparent medium is a measure of light's being slowed down by 
successive forward re-emissions. In the case of air it is 1.0003, indicating that photons traveling 100 
meters are delayed 3 centimeters, corresponding to about a billion collisions. But there is no noticeable 
fuzziness in images at such distances.) 

What this means is that light traveling across thousands, or millions, or billions of light-years of 
space experiences innumerable such collisions, losing a small fraction of its energy at each one and hence 
undergoing a minute reddening. The spectrum of the light will thus be shifted progressively toward the 
red by an amount that increases with distance—a result indistinguishable from the distance relationship 
derived from an assumed Doppler effect. So no expansion of the universe is inferred, and hence there's 
no call for any Big Bang to have caused it. 

Two further observations that have been known for a long time lend support to this interpretation. 
The Sun has a redshift not attributable to gravity, which is greater at the edges of the disk than in the 
center. This could be explained by sunlight from the edge having to pass through a greater thickness of 
lower solar atmosphere, where more electrons are concentrated. (It's the electrons in H2molecules that 
do the absorbing and reemitting.) Second, it has been known since 1911 that the spectra of hot, bright 
blue OB-type stars—blue-white stars at the hot end of the range that stars come in—in our galaxy show 
a slight but significant redshift. No satisfactory explanation has ever been agreed. But it was not 
concluded that we are located in the center of an expanding shell of OB stars. 

So the redshift doesn't have to imply an expansion of the universe. An infinite, static universe is 
compatible with other interpretations—and ones, at that, based on solid bodies of observational data 
rather than deduction from assumptions. However, none of the models we've looked at so far questions 


the original Hubble relationship relating the amount of the shift to distance (although the value of the 
number relating it has been reappraised several times). But what if the redshifts are not indicators of 
distance at all? 

the original Hubble relationship relating the amount of the shift to distance (although the value of the 
number relating it has been reappraised several times). But what if the redshifts are not indicators of 
distance at all? 
: 
Questioning the Hubble Law 


The completely revolutionary threat to toppling the last of Big Bang's supporting pillars came not 
from outside mavericks or the fringes, but from among the respected ranks of the professionals. And 
from its reactions, it seems that the Establishment reserves its most savage ire for insiders who dare to 
question the received dogma by putting observation before theory and seeing the obvious when it's what 
the facts seem to say. 

Halton Arp's Quasar Counts 

Halton Arp comes from a background of being one of America's most respected and productive 
observational astronomers, an old hand at the world-famous observatories in California and a familiar 
face at international conferences.Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies has become a standard reference 
source. Then, in the 1960s and '70s, "Chip" started finding excess densities of high-redshift quasars 
concentrated around low-redshift galaxies. 




The first reactions from the orthodoxy were simply to reject the observations as being incorrect— 


because theyhad to be. Then a theoretician named Claude Canizares suggested an explanation whereby 
the foreground galaxy acted as a "gravitational lens," magnifying and displacing the apparent position of a 
background quasar. According to Einstein's theory, light rays passing close to a massive body will be 
bent by its gravity (although, as discussed later in the section on relativity, other interpretations see it as 
regular optical refraction). So imagine a massive foreground galaxy perfectly aligned with a distant 
quasar as viewed from Earth. As envisaged by the lensing explanation, light from the quasar that would 
otherwise pass by around the galaxy is pulled inward into a cone—just like light passing through a 
convex optical lens—and focused in our vicinity. Viewed back along the line of sight, it would be seen 
ideally as a magnified ring of light surrounding the galaxy. Less than ideal conditions would yield just 
pieces of the ring, and where these happened to be diametrically opposed they would create the illusion 
of two quasars straddling the intervening galaxy. In other cases, where the alignment is less than perfect, 
the ring becomes a segment of arc to some greater or lesser degree, offset to one side—maybe just a 
point. So quasar images are found close to galaxies in the sky more often than you'd expect. 

because theyhad to be. Then a theoretician named Claude Canizares suggested an explanation whereby 
the foreground galaxy acted as a "gravitational lens," magnifying and displacing the apparent position of a 
background quasar. According to Einstein's theory, light rays passing close to a massive body will be 
bent by its gravity (although, as discussed later in the section on relativity, other interpretations see it as 
regular optical refraction). So imagine a massive foreground galaxy perfectly aligned with a distant 
quasar as viewed from Earth. As envisaged by the lensing explanation, light from the quasar that would 
otherwise pass by around the galaxy is pulled inward into a cone—just like light passing through a 
convex optical lens—and focused in our vicinity. Viewed back along the line of sight, it would be seen 
ideally as a magnified ring of light surrounding the galaxy. Less than ideal conditions would yield just 
pieces of the ring, and where these happened to be diametrically opposed they would create the illusion 
of two quasars straddling the intervening galaxy. In other cases, where the alignment is less than perfect, 
the ring becomes a segment of arc to some greater or lesser degree, offset to one side—maybe just a 
point. So quasar images are found close to galaxies in the sky more often than you'd expect. 
59 

Arp's paper detailing all this, giving five independent reasons why gravitational lensing could not 
account for the results and demonstrating that only physical association with the galaxies could explain 
the quasar counts, was published in 1990.60It should have been decisive. But four years later, papers 
were still reporting statistical associations of quasars with "foreground" galaxy clusters. Arp quotes the 
authors of one as stating, "We interpret this observation as being due to the statistical gravitational lensing 
of background QSO's [Quasi-Stellar Objects, i.e., quasars] by galaxy clusters. However, 
this . . . overdensity . . . cannot be accounted for in any cluster lensing model . . ."61 

You figure it out. The first part is obligatory, required by custom; the second part is unavoidable, 
demanded by the data. So I suppose the only answer is to acknowledge both with an Orwellian capacity 
to hold two contradictory statements and believe both of them. Arp's paper conclusively disproving 
lensing was not even referenced. Arp comments wearily, "As papers multiply exponentially one wonders 
whether the end of communication is near." 

Taking on an Established Church 

It's probably worth restating just what's at stake here. The whole modern-day picture of 
extragalactic astronomy has been built around the key assumption that the redshifts are Doppler effects 
and indicate recessional velocity. Since 1929, when Edwin Hubble formulated the law that redshift 
increases proportionally with distance, redshift has been the key to interpreting the size of the universe as 
well as being the prime evidence indicating it to be expanding from an initially compact object. If the 
redshifts have been misunderstood, then inferred distances can be wrong by a factor of from 10 to 100, 
and luminosities and masses wrong by factors up to 10,000. The founding premise to an academic, 
political, and social institution that has stood for three generations would be not just in error but 


catastrophically misconceived. It's not difficult to see why, to many, such a possibility would be literally 
inconceivable. As inconceivable as the thought once was that Ptolemy could have been wrong. 

catastrophically misconceived. It's not difficult to see why, to many, such a possibility would be literally 
inconceivable. As inconceivable as the thought once was that Ptolemy could have been wrong. 

These associations had been accumulating since the late sixties, but in that time another kind of 
pattern made itself known also. A small group of Arp's less conformist colleagues, who even if perhaps 
not sharing his convictions totally, remained sufficiently open-minded to be sympathetic. From time to 
time one of them would present observational data showing another pair of radio or X-ray sources 
straddling a relatively nearby low-redshift galaxy which coincided with the optical images of Blue Stellar 
Objects—quasar candidates. To confirm that they were quasars required allocation of observation time 
to check their spectra for extreme quasar redshifts. At that point a dance of evasion would begin of 
refusals to look through the telescopes—literally. The requests would be turned down or ignored, even 
when they came from such figures as the director of the X-Ray Institute. When resourceful observers cut 
corners and made their own arrangements, and their findings were eventually submitted for publication, 
hostile referees would mount delaying tactics in the form of finicky fussing over detail or petty objections 
that could hold things up for years. 

In the 1950s, the American astronomer Karl Seyfert had discovered a class of energetic galaxies 
characterized by having a sharp, brilliant nucleus with an emission line spectrum signifying that large 
amounts of energy were being released there. Arp found their association with quasar pairs to be so 
strong that it could almost be said to be a predictable attribute of Seyfert galaxies. Spectroscopically, 
quasars look like pieces of Seyfert nuclei. One of the most active nearby spiral galaxies, known by the 
catalog reference NGC4258, has a Seyfert nucleus from which the French astronomer G. Courtès, in 
1961, discovered a pair of proto-spiral arms emerging, consisting of glowing gaseous matter also 
emitting the "synchrotron" radiation of high-energy electrons spiraling in magnetic fields. An X-ray 
astronomer called Wolfgang Piestch established that the arms of gas led like rocket trails to a pair of 
X-ray sources coinciding perfectly with two Blue Stellar Objects. When the ritual of obstructionism to 
obtain the spectra of the BSOs ensued, Margaret Burbridge, a Briton with over fifty years of 
observational experience, bypassed the regular channels to make the measurement herself using the 
relatively small 3-meter reflector telescope on Mount Hamilton outside San Jose in California, and 
confirmed them to be quasars. Arp put the probability of such a chance pairing as being less than 1 in 

2.5 million. 



Eyes Closed and Eyes Open: Professionals and Amateurs 

A new generation of high-resolution telescopes and more-sensitive instruments produced further 
examples of gaseous bridges emitting in the X-ray bands, connecting the quasars to their source galaxies. 
The configurations could beseen as a composite, physically connected object. But the response of those 
trained to the orthodox view was not to see them. They were dismissed as artifacts of random noise or 
instrument errors. I've witnessed this personally. On mentioning Arp's work to a recent astrophysics 
graduate I was cut off with, "Those are just background noise," although I hadn't mentioned bridges. I 
asked him if he'd seen any of the pictures. He replied stonily, "I haven't read anything of Arp's, but I 
have read the critics." Whence, knowing the approved answers is presumably all that is needed. Shades 
of the Scholastics. 

In 1990, the Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE) launched the X-ray 
telescope ROSAT (Röntgen Observatory Satellite Telescope), which was later used to look for a 
filament connecting the violently disrupted spiral galaxy NGC4319 to the quasarlike object Markarian 
205, whose association had been disputed since 1971. Although the prime aim failed (Arp thinks the 
connection is probably too old now to show up at the energies searched for), it did reveal two new 
X-ray filaments coming out of Mark205 and leading to point-like X-ray sources. So the high redshift, 
quasarlike Seyfert ejected from the low redshift spiral was itself ejecting a pair of yet-higher-redshift 
sources, which turned out to be quasars. 

The NGC4319-Mark205 connection was subsequently established by a high-school teacher, 
when the NASA announced a program making 10 percent of the time on the orbiting Hubble Space 
Telescope available to the community of amateur astronomers. It seems that the amateur community—for 
whom Halton Arp has an extremely high regard—had taken a great interest in his work and were 
arranging more investigations of nearby quasar connections, drawing their subject matter mainly from 
Arp's 1987 book,Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies, which the NASA committees that allocated 
observation time had been avoiding like the plague. After another amateur used his assigned time for a 
spectroscopic study of an Arp connecting filament, the Space Telescope Science Institute suspended the 
amateur program on the grounds that it was "too great a strain on its expert personnel." No doubt. 


Quasar Cascades: Redshifts as a Measure of Galaxy Age 

Quasar Cascades: Redshifts as a Measure of Galaxy Age 


The quasars are not very luminous but grow in brightness as they age and evolve. The enormous 
brightness that's conventionally attributed to them arises from incorrectly assigned distances that place 
them on the edge of the observable universe. Arp found that on charts showing quasar positions, pairing 
the quasars by redshift almost always leads to finding a cataloged Seyfert close to the center point 
between them. 

The process can be taken further. The Seyferts in turn usually occur in matched pairs about some 
larger, still-lower-redshift galaxy from which they appear to have been originally ejected. This yields a 
cascade in which large, older galaxies have ejected younger material that has formed into younger 
companion galaxies around it. The younger galaxies in turn eject material as quasars, which evolve 
through a sequences of stages eventually into regular galaxies. Corresponding to the age hierarchy at 
every step is the hierarchy of redshifts reducing as the associated objects become older. Such cascades 
lead back to massive central spiral galaxies whose advanced age is marked by their large populations of 
old, red stars. Typically they are found with smaller companion galaxies at the ends of the spiral arms. 
Companion galaxies are found to be systematically redshifted with respect to the central galaxy, 
indicating them to be first-generation descendants. The same pattern extends to groupings of galaxies in 
clusters and of clusters in superclusters. 

Our own Milky Way galaxy is a member of the Local Group, centered on the giant Sb spiral M31, 


known as the "Andromeda" galaxy, which is the most massive of the group. All members of the group, 
including our galaxy, are redshifted with respect to M31, indicating it to be the source from which the 
rest were ejected as young, high-energy objects at some time. So, when gazing at the immense disk of 
M31, now about a million light-years away, familiar from almost every astronomy book, we're looking 
back at our "parent" galaxy—and indeed, we see M31 as having a slight negative redshift, or "blueshift," 
indicating it to be older. 

known as the "Andromeda" galaxy, which is the most massive of the group. All members of the group, 
including our galaxy, are redshifted with respect to M31, indicating it to be the source from which the 
rest were ejected as young, high-energy objects at some time. So, when gazing at the immense disk of 
M31, now about a million light-years away, familiar from almost every astronomy book, we're looking 
back at our "parent" galaxy—and indeed, we see M31 as having a slight negative redshift, or "blueshift," 
indicating it to be older. 

On a final note, all the way down, this hierarchy has exhibited the pattern of new objects being 
produced in pairs. The Virgo Supercluster itself, viewed in terms of the configuration of its dominant 
originating galaxies and the clusters of groups they have spawned, turns out to be a virtual twin of the 
Fornax Supercluster, seen from the Southern Hemisphere. 

What Happens to the Distances? 

If redshift isn't a measure of a recessional velocity at all, and hence not of distance either, what 
does this do to the scale of distances that has been constructed, mapping structures out to 10 billion or 
more light-years away? Although the observational evidence has been there for twenty years, 
conventional astronomy has never really accepted that the redshifts are quantized, and has tried 
strenuously to find arguments to show that there is no quantization. Quantized means that the values are 
not continuous through the range like heights of points on a hill from bottom to top, but occur in a series 
of jumps like a staircase. Since, in general, an object can be moving in any direction relative to us, the 
radial components of the velocities, i.e., the part of the motion that is directly toward or directly away 
(which is what the Doppler effect measures) should, if redshift indicates velocity, come in all values. 
Hence, the conventional theory can't allow it not to. 

If redshift correlates with galaxy ages, then what quantization would imply is that the ejections of 
new generations of proto-galaxies in the form of quasars occur episodically in bursts, separated by 
periods of quiescence—rather like the generations of cell division in a biological culture. This fits with the 
kind of way we'd imagine a cascade model of the kind we've sketched would work. It also has the 
interesting implication that interpreting the redshift as distance instead of age would give the appearance 
of galaxies occurring in sheets separated by empty voids, which of course is what the conventional 
picture shows. 

So what happens to the immense distances? it appears that they largely go away. Arp's studies 
indicate that on an age interpretation basis, the Local Supercluster becomes a far more crowded place 
than is commonly supposed, with all of the quasars and other objects that we feel we know much about 
existing within it, and not very much at all beyond. So suddenly the universe shrinks back to something in 
the order of the size it was before Hubble (or, more correctly, the Hubble advocates who grabbed his 
constant and ran with it) detonated it. No wonder the Establishment puts Arp in the same league as the 
medieval Church did Giordano Bruno. 

What Causes Redshift? Machian Physics 
and the Generalization of GRT 

Through the last several pages we've been talking about a hierarchy in which redshift correlates 
inversely with the ages of galaxies and other cosmological objects—i.e., as redshift increases, they 


become younger. Is it possible, then, to say what, exactly, redshift is indicating? In short, what causes it? 

become younger. Is it possible, then, to say what, exactly, redshift is indicating? In short, what causes it? 

Jayant Narlikar is director of the Inter University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, 
India, and has collaborated with Fred Hoyle and others in looking deeply at some of the fundamental 
issues confronting physics. In 1977 he rewrote the equations of GRT in a more general form, yielding 
solutions in which mass is not a constant but can take the form of a quantity that increases with time.62 
Now, the way mathematics is taught is that the proper way to solve an equation is to derive the general 
form first, andthen make any simplifications or approximations that might be appropriate to a particular 
problem. The approximations that Aleksandr Friedmann used in 1922 in solving the GRT equations to 
produce the expanding universe solution were made in such a way as to force any changes in mass to be 
expressed in the geometry of the situation instead. This is what leads to the models involving the curved 
spacetime that helps give relativity its reputation for incomprehensibility, and which science-fiction writers 
have so much fun with. But with the full range of dynamical expressions that permit mass to vary, curved 
spacetime isn't needed. 

According to Narlikar's version, a newly created particle, new to the universe, begins its existence 
with zero mass. That's because it doesn't "know" yet of the existence of any other mass out there, which 
is necessary for it to begin exhibiting the properties of mass. Its "awareness" grows as an ever-widening 
sphere of interaction with other masses, and as it does so the particle's own mass proceeds to increase 
accordingly, rapidly at first and leveling off exponentially. Note, this isn't the same process as pair 
production in an accelerator, which is matterconversion from already existing (and hence "aged") 
energy. It represents the introduction of new mass-energy into the universe, induced in the vicinity of 
concentrations of existing matter—in the form of short-lived "Planck particles," which according to 
quantum mechanical dynamics rapidly decay into the more familiar forms. 

This, then, is what's going on in the nuclei of energetic galaxies like Seyferts. New matter is coming 
into existence and being ejected at high velocities because of its low initial mass. As the mass increases it 
slows to conserve momentum, forming the sequence of quasars, BL Lac Objects (highly variable radio 
and X-Ray sources transitional between quasars and more regular galaxies), BSOs, and the like, 
eventually evolving into the galaxy clusters that we see. The universe thus grows as a pattern of new 
generations appearing and maturing before giving rise to the next, unfolding from within itself. This is 
certainly no more bizarre than a Big Bang that has all the matter in the universe being created at once in a 
pinpoint. Furthermore, its fundamental process is one of continual production and ejection of material, 
which is what's seen everywhere we look, unlike exotic mechanisms built around black holes whose 
function is just the opposite. And to survive as a theory it doesn't have to depend on the burying and 
suppression of observational data. 

But here's the really interesting thing. Consider an electron in some remote part of the universe (in 
the Local Supercluster if that's all there is to it), that's still relatively new and therefore of low mass. If it 
has joined with a nucleus to become part of an atom, and if it makes a transition from one energy state to 
another, the energy of the transition will be less than that of the same transition measured in a laboratory 
here on Earth, because the mass involved is less. Thus the emitted or absorbed photon will be lower in 
energy, which means longer in wavelength, i.e., redder. So the correlation between the age hierarchy and 


the redshift hierarchy is explained. The reason why young objects like quasars have high redshifts is that 
high redshifts mean exactly that: recently created matter. Redshifts don't measure velocities; they 
measure youth, decreasing as matter ages. And for objects that are even older than the massive, 
luminous spiral that we inhabit, such as its parent, Andromeda, or the dominant galaxies in Virgo that are 
of the generation before that, it becomes a blueshift. 

the redshift hierarchy is explained. The reason why young objects like quasars have high redshifts is that 
high redshifts mean exactly that: recently created matter. Redshifts don't measure velocities; they 
measure youth, decreasing as matter ages. And for objects that are even older than the massive, 
luminous spiral that we inhabit, such as its parent, Andromeda, or the dominant galaxies in Virgo that are 
of the generation before that, it becomes a blueshift. 
The God of the Modern Creation Myth 


We've looked briefly at several alternatives that have been developed to the Big Bang model of 
cosmology that dominates the thinking of our culture at the present time. In many ways the alternatives 
seem better supported by the way reality is observed to work at both the laboratory and astronomical 
scale. Certainly, some of the alternatives might appear to be in conflict; yet in other ways they could turn 
out to be complementary. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I doubt if anyone has. 

The Alfvén-Lerner plasma universe builds larger structures up from small, while Arp-Narlikar's 
cascade of "mini-bangs" produces enlarging, maturing objects from compact, energetic ones. 
Conceivably they could work together, the magnetic fields and currents of the former shaping and 
ordering into coherent forms the violently ejected materials that would otherwise disperse chaotically. 

Paul Marmet's molecular hydrogen produces a redshift that increases with distance, preserving the 
conventional scale and structure without involving expansion velocities or a finite time. But this could be 
compatible with an age-related redshift too. Quasars appear to be enveloped in extremely fuzzy, 
gaseous clouds. If this comes with the matter-creation process, subsequent sweeping and "cleaning up" 
of the area by gravity could give an initially high absorption redshift that reduces with time. Nothing says 
that the redshift has to be the result of one single cause. It could be a composite effect, with several 
factors contributing. 

Some critics assert that Lerner's electrical forces simply wouldn't be strong enough to confine stars 
in their orbits and hold galaxies together. Marmet points out that the existence of ten times as much 
virtually undetectable molecular hydrogen as the measured amount of atomic hydrogen—readily 
attainable by his estimation—would provide all the gravity that's needed, without resorting to exotic 
forms of "missing mass." And another possibility is that the law of gravitation assumed to be universal but 
which has only been verified locally could turn out to be just an approximation to something more 
complex that deviates more with increasing distance. 


The point is that enormous opportunities surely exist for cross-fertilizations of ideas and a 
willingness to consider innovative answers that admit all the evidence, instead of a closed-minded 
adherence to sacred assumptions that heretics deny on pain of excommunication. Surely it's a time for 
eclecticism, not ecclesiasticism. Maybe the metaphor is more than superficial. 

The point is that enormous opportunities surely exist for cross-fertilizations of ideas and a 
willingness to consider innovative answers that admit all the evidence, instead of a closed-minded 
adherence to sacred assumptions that heretics deny on pain of excommunication. Surely it's a time for 
eclecticism, not ecclesiasticism. Maybe the metaphor is more than superficial. 

Or is there? 

Maybe there's some kind of a Freudian slip at work when the cardinals of the modern Church of 
Cosmology make repeated allusions to "glimpsing the mind of God" in their writings, and christen one of 
their exotic theoretical creations the "God Particle." 

The servant, Mathematics, who was turned into a god, created the modern cosmos and reveals 
Truth in an arcane language of symbols accessible only to the chosen, promising ultimate fulfillment with 
the enlightenment to come with the promised day of the Theory of Everything. 

To be told that if they looked through the telescope at what's really out there, they'd see that the 
creator they had deified really wasn't necessary, would make the professors very edgy and angry indeed. 

THREE 
Drifting in the Ether 
Did Relativity Take A Wrong Turn? 


Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said Let Newton be! And all was 
light. 

— Alexander Pope. Epitaph intended for Sir Isaac Newton 
It did not last. The Devil, shouting, Ho! Let Einstein be! restored the status quo. 

— Unknown 
It is generally held that few things could be more solidly grounded than Einstein's theory of relativity 
which, along with quantum mechanics, is usually cited as one of the twin pillars supporting modern 
physics. Questioning is a risky business, since it's a subject that attracts cranks in swarms. Nevertheless, 
a sizeable body of well-qualified, far-from-crankish opinion exists which feels that the edifice may have 
serious cracks in its foundations. So, carried forth by the touch of recklessness that comes with Irish 
genes, and not having any prestigious academic or professional image to anguish about, I'll risk being 
branded as of the swarms by sharing some of the things that my wanderings have led me to in connection 
with the subject. 

The objections are not so much to the effect that relativity is "wrong." As we're endlessly being 
reminded, the results of countless experiments are in accord with the predictions of its equations, and 
that's a difficult thing to argue with. But neither was Ptolemy's model of the planetary system "wrong," in 
the sense that if you want to make the Earth the center of everything you're free to, and the resulting 
concoction of epicycles within epicycles correctly describes the heavenly motions as seen from that 


vantage point. Coming up with a manageable force law to account for them, however, would be 
monumentally close to an impossibility.
vantage point. Coming up with a manageable force law to account for them, however, would be 
monumentally close to an impossibility.Put the Sun at the center, however, and the confusion reduces to 
a simplicity that reveals Keplerian order in a form that Newton was able to explain concisely in a way 
that was intuitively satisfying, and three hundred years of dazzlingly fruitful scientific unification followed. 

In the same kind of way, critics of relativity maintain that the premises relativity is founded on, 
although enabling procedures to be formulated that correctly predict experimental results, nevertheless 
involve needlessly complicated interpretations of the way things are. At best this can only impede 
understanding of the kind that would lead to another explosion of enlightenment reminiscent of that 
following the Newtonian revolution. In other words, while the experimental results obtained to date are 
consistent with relativity, they do notprove relativity in the way we are constantly being assured, because 
they are not unique to the system that follows from relativity's assumptions. Other interpretations have 
been proposed that are compatible with all the cited observations, but which are conceptually and 
mathematically simpler. Moreover, in some cases they turn out to be more powerful predictively, able to 
derive from basic principles quantities that relativity can only accept as givens. According to the criteria 
that textbooks and advocates for the scientific method tell us are the things to go by, these should be the 
distinguishing features of a preferred theory. 

However, when the subject has become enshrined as a doctrine founded by a canonized saint, it's 
not quite that simple. The heliocentric ideas of Copernicus had the same thing going for them too, but he 
circulated them only among a few trusted friends until he was persuaded to publish in 1543, after which 
he became ill and died. What might have happened otherwise is sobering to speculate. Giordano Bruno 
was burned at the stake in 1600 for combining similar thoughts with indiscreet politics. The Copernican 
theory was opposed by Protestant leaders as being contrary to Scriptural teachings and declared 
erroneous by the Roman Inquisition in 1616. Galileo was still being silenced as late as 1633, although by 
then heliocentricism was already implicit in Kepler's laws, enunciated between 1609 and 1619. It wasn't 
until 1687, almost a century and a half after Copernicus's death, that the simpler yet more-embracing 
explanation, unburdened of dogma and preconceptions, was recognized openly with the acceptance of 
Newton'sPrincipia . 

Fortunately, the passions loosed in such issues seem to have abated somewhat since those earlier 
times. I experienced a case personally at a conference some years ago, when I asked a well-known 
physicist if he'd gotten around to looking at a book I'd referred him to on an alternative interpretation to 
relativity, written by the late Czech professor of electrical engineering Petr Beckmann64(of whom, more 
later). Although a friend of many years, his face hardened and changed before my eyes. "I have not read 
the book," he replied tightly. "I have no intention of reading the book. Einstein cannot be wrong, and 
that's the end of the matter." 

Some Basics 


Reference Frames and Transforms 

The principle of relativity is not in itself new or something strange and unfamiliar, but goes back to 
the physics of Galileo and Newton. It expresses the common experience that some aspects of the world 
look different to observers who are in motion relative to each other. Thus, somebody on the ground 
following a bomb released from an aircraft will watch it describe a steepening curve (in fact, part of an 
ellipse) in response to gravity, while the bomb aimer in the plane (ignoring air resistance) sees it as 
accelerating on a straight line vertically downward. Similarly, they will perceive different forms for the 
path followed by a shell fired upward at the plane and measure different values for the shell's velocity at 
a given point along it. 

So who's correct? It doesn't take much to see that they both are when speaking in terms of their 
own particular viewpoint. Just as the inhabitants of Seattle and Los Angeles are both correct in stating 
that San Francisco lies to the south and north respectively, the observers on the ground and in the plane 


arrive at different but equally valid conclusions relative to their own frame of reference. A frame of 
reference is simply a system ofx ,y , andz coordinates and a clock for measuring where and when an 
event happens. In the above case, the first frame rests with the ground; the other moves with the plane. 
Given the mathematical equation that describes the bomb's motion in one frame, it's a straightforward 
process to express it in the form it would take in the other frame. Procedures for transforming events 
from the coordinates of one reference frame to the coordinates of another are called, logically enough, 
coordinate transforms. 

arrive at different but equally valid conclusions relative to their own frame of reference. A frame of 
reference is simply a system ofx ,y , andz coordinates and a clock for measuring where and when an 
event happens. In the above case, the first frame rests with the ground; the other moves with the plane. 
Given the mathematical equation that describes the bomb's motion in one frame, it's a straightforward 
process to express it in the form it would take in the other frame. Procedures for transforming events 
from the coordinates of one reference frame to the coordinates of another are called, logically enough, 
coordinate transforms. 

Actually, in saying that the bomb aimer in the above example would see the bomb falling in a 
straight line, I sneaked in an assumption (apart from ignoring air resistance) that needs to be made 
explicit. I assumed the plane to be moving in a straight line and at constant speed with respect to the 
ground. If the plane were pulling out of a dive or turning to evade ground fire, the part-ellipse that the 
ground observer sees would transform into something very different when measured within the reference 
frame gyrating with the aircraft, and the bomb aimer would have to come up with something more 
elaborate than a simple accelerating force due to gravity to account for it. 

But provided the condition is satisfied in which the plane moves smoothly along a straight line when 
referred to the ground, the two observers will agree on another thing too. Although their interpretations 
of the precise motion of the bomb differ, they will still conclude that it results from a constant force acting 
in a fixed direction on a given mass. Hence, thelaws governing the motions of bodies will still be the 
same. In fact they will be Newton's familiar Laws of Motion. This is another way of saying that the 
equations that express the laws remain in the same form, even though the terms contained in them 
(specific coordinate readings and times) are not themselves invariant. Equations preserved in this way 
are said to becovariant with respect to the transformation in question. Thus, Newton's Laws of Motion 
are covariant with respect to transforms between two reference frames moving relative to one another 
uniformly in a straight line. And since any airplane's frame is as good as another's, we can generalize this 
to all frames moving uniformly in straight lines relative to each other. There's nothing special about the 
frame that's attached to the ground. We're accustomed to thinking of the ground frame as having zero 
velocity, but that's just a convention. The bomb aimer would be equally justified in considering his own 
frame at rest and the ground moving in the opposite direction. 

Inertial Frames 

Out of all the orbiting, spinning, oscillating, tumbling frames we can conceive as moving with the 
various objects, real and imaginable, that fill the universe, what we've done is identify a particular set of 
frames within which all observers will deduce the same laws of motion, expressed in their simplest form. 
(Even so, it took two thousand years after Aristotle to figure them out.) The reason this is so follows 
from one crucial factor that all of the observers will agree on: Bodies not acted upon by a force of any 
kind will continue to exist in a state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line—even though what 
constitutes "rest," and which particular straight line we're talking about, may differ from one observer to 
another. In fact, this is a statement of Newton's first law, known as the law of inertia. Frames in which it 
holds true are called, accordingly, "inertial frames," or "Galilean frames." What distinguishes them is that 
there is no relative acceleration or rotation between them. To an observer situated in one of them, very 
distant objects such as the stars appear to be at rest (unlike from the rotating Earth, for example). The 
procedures for converting equations of motion from one inertial frame to another are known as Galilean 
transforms. Newton's laws of motion are covariant with respect to Galilean transforms. 

And, indeed, far more than just the laws of motion. For as the science of the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries progressed, the mechanics of point masses was extended to describe gravitation, 
electrostatics, the behavior of rigid bodies, then of continuous deformable media, and so to fluids and 


things like kinetic theories of heat. Laws derived from mechanics, such as the conservation of energy, 
momentum, and angular momentum, were found to be covariant with respect to Galilean transforms and 
afforded the mechanistic foundations of classical science. Since the laws formulated in any Galilean frame 
came out the same, it followed that no mechanical experiment could differentiate one frame from another 
or single out one of them as "preferred" by being at rest in absolute space. This expresses the principle of 
"Galilean-Newtonian Relativity." With the classical laws of mechanics, the Galilean transformations, and 
the principle of Newtonian relativity mutually consistent, the whole of science seemed at last to have 
been integrated into a common understanding that was intellectually satisfying and complete. 

things like kinetic theories of heat. Laws derived from mechanics, such as the conservation of energy, 
momentum, and angular momentum, were found to be covariant with respect to Galilean transforms and 
afforded the mechanistic foundations of classical science. Since the laws formulated in any Galilean frame 
came out the same, it followed that no mechanical experiment could differentiate one frame from another 
or single out one of them as "preferred" by being at rest in absolute space. This expresses the principle of 
"Galilean-Newtonian Relativity." With the classical laws of mechanics, the Galilean transformations, and 
the principle of Newtonian relativity mutually consistent, the whole of science seemed at last to have 
been integrated into a common understanding that was intellectually satisfying and complete. 
y 


Problems with Electrodynamics 

As the quotation at the beginning of this section says, it couldn't last. To begin with, the new science 
of electrostatics appeared to be an analog of gravitation, with the added feature that electrical charges 
could repel as well as attract. The equations for electrical force were of the same form as Newton's 
gravitational law, known to be covariant under Galilean transform, and it was expected that the same 
would apply. However, as the work of people like André-Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday, and Hans 
Christian Oersted progressed from electrostatics to electrodynamics, the study of electrical entities in 
motion, it became apparent that the situation was more complicated. Interactions between magnetic 
fields and electric charges produced forces acting in directions other than the straight connecting line 
between the sources, and which, unlike the case in gravitation and electrostatics, depended on the 
velocity of the charged body as well as its position. Since a velocity in one inertial frame can always be 
made zero in a different frame, this seemed to imply that under the classical transformations a force 
would exist in one that didn't exist in the other. And since force causes mass to accelerate, an 
acceleration could be produced in one frame but not in the other when the frames themselves were not 
accelerating relative to each other—which made no sense. The solution adopted initially was simply to 
exclude electrodynamics from the principle of classical relativity until the phenomena were better 
understood. 

But things got worse, not better. James Clerk Maxwell's celebrated equations, developed in the 
period 1860–64, express concisely yet comprehensively the connection between electric and magnetic 
quantities that the various experiments up to that time had established, and the manner in which they 
affect each other across intervening space. (Actually, Wilhelm Weber and Neumann derived a version of 
the same laws somewhat earlier, but their work was considered suspect on grounds, later shown to be 
erroneous, that it violated the principle of conservation of energy, and it's Maxwell who is remembered.) 
In Maxwell's treatment, electrical and magnetic effects appear as aspects of a combined 
"electromagnetic field"—the concept of a field pervading the space around a charged or magnetized 
object having been introduced by Faraday—and it was by means of disturbances propagated through 
this field that electrically interacting objects influenced each other. 

An electron is an example of a charged object. A moving charge constitutes an electric current, 
which gives rise to a magnetic field. An accelerating charge produces a changing magnetic field, which in 
turn creates an electric field, and the combined electromagnetic disturbance radiating out across space 
would produce forces on other charges that it encountered, setting them in motion—a bit like jiggling a 
floating cork up and down in the water and creating ripples that spread out and jiggle other corks 
floating some distance away. A way of achieving this would be by using a tuned electrical circuit to make 
electrons surge back and forth along an antenna wire, causing sympathetic charge movements (i.e., 
currents) in a receiving antenna, which of course is the basis of radio. Another example is light, where the 
frequencies involved are much higher, resulting from the transitions of electrons between orbits within 
atoms rather than oscillations in an electrical circuit. 




The difficulty that marred the comforting picture of science that had been coming together up until 
then was that the equations gave a velocity of propagation that depended only on the electrical 
properties of the medium through which the disturbance traveled, and was the same in every direction. In 
the absence of matter, i.e., in empty space, this came out at 300,000 kilometers per second and was 
designated byc , now known to be the velocity of light. But the appearance of this value in the laws of 
electromagnetism meant that the laws were not covariant under Galilean transforms between inertial 
frames. For under the transformation rules, in the same way that our airplane's velocity earlier would 
reduce to zero if measured in the bomb aimer's reference frame, or double if measured in the frame of 
another plane going the opposite way, the same constant velocity (depending only on electrical constants 
pertaining to the medium) couldn't be true in all of them. If Maxwell's equations were to be accepted, it 
seemed there could only exist one "absolute" frame of reference in which the laws took their standard, 
simplest form. Any frame moving with respect to it, even an inertial frame, would have to be considered 
"less privileged." 

Putting it another way, the laws of electromagnetism, the classical Galilean transforms of space and 
time coordinates, and the principle of Newtonian relativity, were not compatible. Hence the elegance 
and aesthetic appeal that had been found to apply for mechanics didn't extend to the whole of science. 
The sense of completeness that science had been seeking for centuries seemed to have evaporated 
practically as soon as it was found. This was not very intellectually satisfying at all. 

One attempt at a way out, the "ballistic theory," hypothesized the speed of light (from now on taken 
as representing electromagnetic radiation in general) as constant with respect to the source. Its speed as 
measured in other frames would then appear greater or less in the same way as that of bullets fired from 
a moving airplane. Such a notion was incompatible with a field theory of light, in which disturbances 
propagate at a characteristic rate that has nothing to do with the movement of their sources, and was 
reminiscent of the corpuscular theory that interference experiments were thought to have laid to rest. But 
it was consistent with the relativity principle: Light speed would transform from one inertial frame, that of 
the source, to any other just like the velocity of a regular material body. 

However, observations ruled it out. In binary star systems, for example, where one star is 
approaching and the other receding, the light emitted would arrive at different times, resulting in 
distortions that should have been unmistakable but which were not observed. A series of laboratory 
experiments65also told against a ballistic explanation. The decisive one was probably one with revolving 
mirrors conducted by A. A. Michelson in 1913, which also effectively negated an ingenious suggestion 
that lenses and mirrors might reradiate incident light at velocityc with respect to themselves—a possibility 
that the more orthodox experiments hadn't taken into account. 


Another thought was that whenever light was transmitted through a material medium, this medium 
provided the local privileged frame in whichc applied. Within the atmosphere of the Earth, therefore, the 
speed of light should be constant with respect to the Earth-centered frame. But this runs into logical 
problems. For suppose that light were to go from one medium into another moving relative to the first. 
The speeds in the two domains are different, each being determined by the type of medium and their 
relative motion. Now imagine that the two media are progressively rarified to the point of becoming a 
vacuum. The interaction between matter and radiation would become less and less, shown as a steady 
reduction of such effects as refraction and scattering to the point of vanishing, but the sudden jump in 
velocity would still remain without apparent cause, which is surely untenable. 

Another thought was that whenever light was transmitted through a material medium, this medium 
provided the local privileged frame in whichc applied. Within the atmosphere of the Earth, therefore, the 
speed of light should be constant with respect to the Earth-centered frame. But this runs into logical 
problems. For suppose that light were to go from one medium into another moving relative to the first. 
The speeds in the two domains are different, each being determined by the type of medium and their 
relative motion. Now imagine that the two media are progressively rarified to the point of becoming a 
vacuum. The interaction between matter and radiation would become less and less, shown as a steady 
reduction of such effects as refraction and scattering to the point of vanishing, but the sudden jump in 
velocity would still remain without apparent cause, which is surely untenable. 

Relativity is able to provide interpretations of these results—indeed, the theory would have had a 
short life if it couldn't. But the claim that relativity is thereby "proved" isn't justified. As the Dutch 
astronomer M. Hoek showed as early as 1868, attempts at using a moving material medium to measure 
a change in the velocity of light are defeated by the effect of refraction, which cancels out the effects of 
the motion.66 

Michelson, Morely, and the Ether That Wasn't 

These factors suggested that the speed of light was independent of the motion of the radiation 
source and of the transmitting medium. It seemed, then, that the only recourse was to abandon the 
relativity principle and conclude that there was after all a privileged, universal, inertial reference frame in 
which the speed of light was the same in all directions as the simplest form of the laws required, and that 
the laws derived in all other frames would show a departure from this ideal. The Earth itself cannot be 
this privileged frame, since it is under constant gravitational acceleration by the Sun (circular motion, 
even at constant speed, involves a continual change of direction, which constitutes an acceleration) and 
thus is not an inertial frame. And even if at some point its motion coincided with the privileged frame, six 
months later its orbit would have carried it around to a point where it was moving with double its orbital 
speed with respect to it. In any case, whichever inertial frame was the privileged one, sensitive enough 
measurements of the speed of light in orthogonal directions in space, continued over six months, should 
be capable of detecting the Earth's motion with respect to it. 

Many interpreted this universal frame as the hypothetical "ether" that had been speculated about 
long before Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, when experiments began revealing the wave nature of 
light. If light consisted of waves, it seemed there needed to be something present to be doing the "waving" 
—analogous to the water that carries ocean waves, the air that conducts sound waves, and so on. The 
eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries saw great progress in the development of mathematics that dealt 
with deformation and stresses in continuous solids, and early notions of the ether sought an interpretation 


in mechanical terms. It was visualized as a substance pervading all space, being highly rigid in order to 
propagate waves at such enormous velocity, yet tenuous enough not to impede the motions of planets. 
Maxwell's investigations began with models of fields impressed upon a mechanical ether, but the analogy 
proved cumbersome and he subsequently dispensed with it to regard the field itself as the underlying 
physical reality. Nevertheless, that didn't rule out the possibility that an "ether" of some peculiar nature 
might still exist. Perhaps, some concluded, the universal frame was none other than that within which the 
ether was at rest. So detection of motion with respect to it could be thought of as measuring the "ether 
wind" created by the Earth's passage through it in its movement through space. 

in mechanical terms. It was visualized as a substance pervading all space, being highly rigid in order to 
propagate waves at such enormous velocity, yet tenuous enough not to impede the motions of planets. 
Maxwell's investigations began with models of fields impressed upon a mechanical ether, but the analogy 
proved cumbersome and he subsequently dispensed with it to regard the field itself as the underlying 
physical reality. Nevertheless, that didn't rule out the possibility that an "ether" of some peculiar nature 
might still exist. Perhaps, some concluded, the universal frame was none other than that within which the 
ether was at rest. So detection of motion with respect to it could be thought of as measuring the "ether 
wind" created by the Earth's passage through it in its movement through space. 

So now we have a conundrum. The elaborate experimental attempts to detect a preferred 
reference frame indicated an acceptance that the relativity principle might have to be abandoned for 
electromagnetism. But the experimental results failed to identify the absolute reference frame that this 
willingness allowed. The laws of electromagnetism themselves had proved strikingly successful in 
predicting the existence of propagating waves, their velocity and other quantities, and appeared to be on 
solid ground. And yet an incompatibility existed in that they were not covariant under the classical 
transforms of space and time coordinates between inertial frames. The only thing left to question, 
therefore, was the process involving the transformations themselves. 

Lorentz's Transforms for Electromagnetics 

Around the turn of the twentieth century the Dutch theoretical physicist Hendrick Lorentz followed 
the path of seeking alternative transformation laws that would do for electromagnetics what the classical 
transforms had done for mechanics. Two assumptions that few people would question were implicit in 
the form of the Galilean transforms: (1) that observers in all frames will measure time the same, as if by 
some universal clock that ticks the same everywhere; and (2) while the space coordinates assigned to 
points on a rigid body such as a measuring rod might differ, the distance between them would not. In 
other words, time intervals and lengths were invariant. 

In the Lorentz Transforms, as they came to be called, this was no longer so. Time intervals and 
lengths measured by an observer in one inertial frame, when transformed to another frame, needed to be 
modified by a factor that depended on the relative motion between them. Lorentz's system retained the 
notion of an absolute frame in which the ether is at rest. But the new transforms resulted in distances 
being reduced in the direction of motion relative to it, and it was this fact which, through an unfortunate 
coincidence of effects, made detection of the motion unobservable. As a matter of fact, an actual 
physical shrinkage of precisely this form—the "Fitzgerald Contraction"—had been proposed to explain 
the Michelson-Morley result as due to a shortening of the interferometer arms in the affected direction. 
Some textbook writers are of the opinion that Lorentz himself took the contractions as real; others, that 
he used them simply as mathematical formalisms, symbolizing, as it were, some fictitious realm of space 
and time that applied to electromagnetic phenomena. I don't claim to know what Lorentz thought. But 
here was a system which acknowledged a preferred frame as required by Maxwell's equations (defined 
by the constancy ofc) , yet at the same time observed the relativity that the optical experiment seemed to 
demand. Okay, maybe things were a bit messy in that a different system applied to mechanics. But 
everything more or less worked, and maybe that was just the way things from now on would have to be. 

Except that somebody called Albert Einstein wasn't happy with it. 


The New Relativity 


Einstein: Transforming All of Physics 


Neither mechanics nor—regardless of the constant in Maxwell's equations— electromagnetics had 
revealed an absolute frame of reference. All experiments seemed to indicate that any inertial frame was 
as good as another. What this suggested to Einstein was that some kind of relativity principle was in 
evidence that applied across the whole of science, according to which physics should be the same for all 
observers. Or putting it another way, the equations expressing all physical laws should be covariant 
between inertial frames. Following Lorentz, but with an aim that was general and not restricted to a 
subset of physics, Einstein set out to discover a system of transforms that would make this true. Two 
postulates formed his starting point. (1) The relativity principle applies for all of physics across all inertial 
frames, which was what the intuitively satisfying solution he was searching for required. (2) The velocity 
of light,c , is the same for observers in all inertial frames regardless of their state of motion relative to 
each other. For that's what Maxwell's equations said, and being a physical law, it had to apply in all 
frames for (1) to be true. 

And what he did in his paper on special relativity, published in 1905, was rediscover the Lorentz 
Transforms. This was hardly surprising, since they gave the right answers for electromagnetism—hence 
anything saying otherwise would have been wrong. But there was a crucial difference. Whereas 
Lorentz's application of them had been restricted to the special area of electromagnetism, Einstein 
maintained that they applied to everything—mechanics as well. 

But, wait a minute. If the relativity principle was to be observed, and the new transforms applied, 
how could they still be compatible with Newton's long-established mechanics, which was enthroned as 
being consistent with the classical Galilean transforms, not with the new Lorentzian ones? 

The only answer could be that Newtonian mechanics wasn't as invincibly established as everyone 
thought it was. Recall the two assumptions we mentioned earlier that the Galilean transforms imply: that 
space and time intervals are invariant. What Einstein proposed was that the velocity-dependencies 
deduced by Lorentz were not part of some fudge-factor needed for electromagnetism, but that they 
expressed fundamental properties of the nature of space and time that were true universally, and hence 
called for a revision of mechanics. However, the new mechanics could hardly render invalid the classical 
results that centuries of experimenting had so strongly supported. And indeed, this turned out to be so; at 
the low velocities that classical science had been confined to, and which shape the common sense of 
everyday experience, the equations of the new mechanics merged into and became indistinguishable for 
all practical purposes from the Newtonian ones. 

Relativity's Weird Results 

Where the two systems began departing significantly was when very high velocities were involved— 
of the order of those encountered in electromagnetism and late-nineteenth-century experiments on 
fast-moving particles, where it had already become clear that classical mechanics couldn't be correct. 
Space and time were no longer fixed and unchanging but behaved weirdly at extremes of velocity that 
everyday experience provided no schooling for, with consequences that Newtonian mechanics hadn't 
anticipated. These are well-enough known now to require no more than that they be listed. All have 
been verified by experiment. 

Addition of velocities. In classical mechanics, a bullet fired from an airplane will hit a target on the 
ground ahead with a velocity equal to that of the plane relative to the ground plus that of the bullet 
relative to the plane. But according to relativity (henceforth the "special relativity theory," or "SRT"), 
what appears to be obvious isn't exactly so. The velocity in the target's frame doesn't equal the sum of 
the two components—although at the speeds of planes and bullets you'd never notice the difference. The 


higher the velocities, the greater the discrepancy, the relationship being such that the bullet's velocity in 
the target's frame never manages to exceedc , the speed of light. Thus even if the plane is coming in at 
90%c and fires a bullet that leaves the plane at 90%c , the bullet's velocity measured by the target will be 
90%c plus something, but not greater thanc itself. (In fact it will be 99.45%c .) In the limit, when the 
bullet leaves the plane atc , the resultant, bizarre as it sounds, is stillc . It has become a photon of light. 
Its speed is the same in both the frame of the airplane (source) and that of the target (receiver). Add two 
velocities—or as many as you like—each equal toc , and the result still comes out atc . And that's what 
all the Michelson-Morley-type experiments confirm. 

higher the velocities, the greater the discrepancy, the relationship being such that the bullet's velocity in 
the target's frame never manages to exceedc , the speed of light. Thus even if the plane is coming in at 
90%c and fires a bullet that leaves the plane at 90%c , the bullet's velocity measured by the target will be 
90%c plus something, but not greater thanc itself. (In fact it will be 99.45%c .) In the limit, when the 
bullet leaves the plane atc , the resultant, bizarre as it sounds, is stillc . It has become a photon of light. 
Its speed is the same in both the frame of the airplane (source) and that of the target (receiver). Add two 
velocities—or as many as you like—each equal toc , and the result still comes out atc . And that's what 
all the Michelson-Morley-type experiments confirm. 

Mass increase. Mass measures the amount of resistance that an object exhibits to being 
accelerated—that is, having its state of motion (speed and/or direction) changed. A cannon ball has a 
large mass compared to a soccer ball of the same size, as kicking or trying to stop one of each will 
verify. Though unobservable at everyday levels, this resistance to being accelerated increases as an 
object moves with higher speed. In particle accelerators, far more energy is required to nudge the 
velocity of a particle an additional tenth of a percentc faster when it is already moving at, say, 90%c than 
to accelerate it the first tenth of a percent from rest. 

Mass-energy equivalence. As the velocity of a body increases, it stores more kinetic energy. 
From the preceding paragraph, it also exhibits an increase in mass. This turns out to be more than just 
coincidence, for according to relativity mass and energy become equivalent and can be converted one 
into the other. This is true even of the residual mass of an object not moving at all, which still has the 
energy equivalent given by the famous equation E = m0• c2, whereE is the energy andm0 the object's 
mass when at rest. All energy transitions thus involve changes in mass, but the effect is usually noticeable 
only in nuclear processes such as the mass deficit of particles bound into a nucleus or the yield of fission 
and fusion bombs; also the mass-energy balances observed in particle creation and annihilation events. 

Time dilation. Time, and hence processes that are time-dependent, runs slower in a moving frame 
than in one at relative rest. An example is the extended lifetimes shown by muons created by 
bombardment of the upper atmosphere by protons from the Sun. The muons reach the Earth's surface in 
numbers about nine times greater than their natural decay time (half-life 2.2 microseconds) says they 
should. This is explained by time in the muon's moving frame being dilated as measured from the surface, 
giving a longer decay period than would be experienced by a muon at rest. High-accuracy clocks on 
rocket sleds run slower than stationary clocks. 

The mathematician Hermann Minkowski developed the Einstein theory further by showing that it 
entailed a reality consisting not of the three-dimensional space and separate time that are ordinarily 
perceived, but of a strange, non-Euclidian, four-dimensional merging of the two known since as 
spacetime. Only from the local standpoint of a particular Galilean frame do they separate out into the 
space and time of everyday life. But the space and time that they resolve into is different in different 
frames—which is what the transforms of SRT are saying. 

Unifying Physics 

Although many might remain unconvinced, this kind of thing is what scientists regard as a 
simplification. When phenomena that were previously thought to be distinct and independent—such as 
space and time in the foregoing—turn out to be just different aspects of some more fundamental entity, 
understanding of what's going on is deepened even if the techniques for unraveling that understanding 


take some work in getting used to. In the same kind of way, momentum and energy become unified in 
the new four-dimensional world, as do the classical concepts of force and work, and electric current and 
charge. 

take some work in getting used to. In the same kind of way, momentum and energy become unified in 
the new four-dimensional world, as do the classical concepts of force and work, and electric current and 
charge. 

In SRT, Minkowski's four-dimensional spacetime is considered to be "flat"—uncurved, like the 
classical Euclidian space of Newton. An object's "world-line"—the path showing its history in spacetime 
—will be a straight line when the object is in a state of rest or uniform motion. What differentiates 
accelerating frames is that their world-lines become curved. In developing his general theory of relativity 
(GRT), Einstein sought to remove the restriction of inertial frames and extend the principle to frames in 
general. In doing so he proposed that a region of space subject to gravitation is really no different from a 
reference frame undergoing acceleration. Inside an elevator, for example, there's no way of telling if a 
pen falling to the floor does so because the elevator is accelerating upward or because the floor is 
attracting it downward.67 

If a gravitational field is equivalent to acceleration, motions associated with it will also be 
represented by curved world-lines in spacetime. Hence, in GRT gravitation is interpreted geometrically. 
Instead of somehow attracting bodies like planets to move in curved paths through flat space, the 
presence of the Sun's mass itself warps the geometry of spacetime such that the paths they naturally 
follow become curved. An analogy often used to illustrate this is a stretched rubber sheet, representing 
undeformed space. Placing a heavy object like a bowling ball on the sheet creates a "well," with sides 
steepening toward the center, that the ball sits in, but which would be indiscernible to a viewer vertically 
above who had no knowledge of a dimension extending in that direction. If a marble is now rolled across 
the sheet, its trajectory will be deflected exactly as if the sheet were flat and the ball exerted an 
attraction. In the absence of any friction, the marble could be trapped in a closed path where the 
tendencies to fall down the well and to be lifted out of it by centrifugal force balance, causing it to orbit 
the bowling ball endlessly. 

If spacetime itself is curved in the vicinity of masses, then not just massive objects but anything that 
moves through space will also follow paths determined by the nonflat geometry. So stars, for instance, 
should "attract" light, not just material bodies. That this is so is verified by the observed deflection of 
starlight passing close to the Sun. So once again, all forms of energy exhibit the equivalence to a 
property of mass. 

Finally we're back to a situation where we have the principle of relativity, a universal statement of 
the laws of physics (the new mechanics, which subsumes electrodynamics), and a system of 
transformations that are mutually consistent. Science has been integrated into a common understanding 
that's found to be intellectually satisfying and complete. Its successes are celebrated practically 
universally as the crowning achievement of twentieth-century science. So what are some people saying is 
wrong with it? 

Dissident Viewpoints 


As we said at the beginning, it's not so much a case of being "wrong." When a theory's predictions 
accord with the facts as far as can be experimentally determined, it obviously can't be rejected as an 
invalid way of looking at things. But that isn't enough to make it the only valid way. And if other ways 


that can be shown to be equally valid by according with the same facts are able to do so more simply, 
they deserve consideration. The objection is more to the confident assurances that we now have all the 
answers, no way of doing better is conceivable, and the book is closed. When claims to a revelation of 
final Truth are heard, with all moves toward criticism being censured, ridiculed, or dismissed out of hand, 
then what's going is drifting toward becoming intolerant dogmatism rather than science. Einstein would 
probably have been one of the first to agree. One of his more endearing quotes was that "I only had two 
original ideas in my life, and one of them was wrong." I don't think he would object at all to our taking a 
long, hard look at the other one too. 

that can be shown to be equally valid by according with the same facts are able to do so more simply, 
they deserve consideration. The objection is more to the confident assurances that we now have all the 
answers, no way of doing better is conceivable, and the book is closed. When claims to a revelation of 
final Truth are heard, with all moves toward criticism being censured, ridiculed, or dismissed out of hand, 
then what's going is drifting toward becoming intolerant dogmatism rather than science. Einstein would 
probably have been one of the first to agree. One of his more endearing quotes was that "I only had two 
original ideas in my life, and one of them was wrong." I don't think he would object at all to our taking a 
long, hard look at the other one too. 

Not everyone is as enamored that the disappearance of such fundamental concepts as space and 
time into abstractions of mathematical formalism helps our understanding of anything or sees it as 
necessary. Traditionally, length, time, and mass have constituted the elements of physics from which all 
other quantities, such as acceleration, force, energy, momentum, and so on, are derived. Elevating a 
velocity (length divided by time) to a privileged position as Nature's fundamental reality, and then having 
to distort space and time to preserve its constancy, just has the feel about it, to many, of somehow 
getting things the wrong way around. This isn't to say that what's familiar and apparently self-evident can 
always be relied upon as the better guide. But a physics of comprehension built on a foundation of 
intuition that can be trusted is surely preferable to one of mere description that results from applying 
formalized procedures that have lost all physical meaning. We live in a world inhabited not by 
four-dimensional tensors but by people and things, and events that happen in places and at times. A map 
and a clock are of more use to us than being told that an expression couched in terms of components 
having an obscure nature is invariant. If other interpretations of the facts that relativity addresses can be 
offered that integrate more readily with existing understanding, they deserve serious consideration. 

Lorentz's Ether Revisited 

A good place to start might be with Lorentz's ether theory (LET). Recall that it was compatible 
with all the electromagnetic results that SRT accounts for but postulated a fixed ether as the propagating 
medium, which is what thec in Maxwell's equations referred to. In another reference frame the velocity 
of light will bec plus or minus that frame's velocity relative to the privileged frame defined by the ether. 
"But measurements don't showc plus or minus anything. They showc ." Which was where all the trouble 
started. Well, yes, that's what measurements show. But measurements are based on standards like 
meter-rules and clocks. While SRT was willing to give up the Lorentzian assumptions of space and time 
being immutably what they had always been, the proponents of an LET interpretation point out that SRT 
itself carries an assumption that would seem far closer to home and more readily open to question, 
namely that the measuring standards themselves are immutable. Before consigning the entire structure of 
the universe to deformities that it hasn't recovered from since, wouldn't it be a good idea to make sure 
that it wasn't the rules and clocks that were being altered? 

If this should be so, then the rest frame of the ether is the one the electromagnetic laws are correct 
in, which thec in Maxwell's equations refers to. In frames that are moving relative to it, the speed of light 
will be different. However, motion through the ether alters physical structures in such a way that the 
standards used will still measure it asc . So nobody can detect their motion with respect to the ether 
frame, and the same experimental results as are derived from SRT follow. But space and time remain 
what they've always been, and light retains the same property as every other wave phenomenon in 
physics in that its velocity is a constant with respect to the medium that it's traveling through. 

If motion relative to the ether frame could be established, the notion of absolute simultaneity would 
be restored. The velocity of light within that frame is known, and it would be meaningful to say, for 
example, that signals sent from the ends of a measured distance arrive at the midpoint at the same time. 
Velocities in other frames could then be corrected with respect to that standard. The situation would be 
similar to using sound signals to synchronize a clock on the ground with one carried on a moving vehicle. 


It might seem a remarkable coincidence that the distortions induced in the measuring standards 
should be of just the right amount to keep the apparent value ofc at that given by Maxwell's equations. 
But it isn't really, since the Lorentz Transforms that yield the distortions were constructed to account for 
those experimental results in the first place. 

It might seem a remarkable coincidence that the distortions induced in the measuring standards 
should be of just the right amount to keep the apparent value ofc at that given by Maxwell's equations. 
But it isn't really, since the Lorentz Transforms that yield the distortions were constructed to account for 
those experimental results in the first place. 

Such distortions would perturb the energy dynamics of electron shell structures and atomic nuclei, 
with consequent modifications to emitted frequencies and other time-dependent processes, and hence 
any measuring techniques based on them. So the assumption of immutable clocks stands or falls on the 
same ground. 

An introduction to the arguments favoring an LET model, and to the philosophical considerations 
supporting it is given concisely by Dr. George Marklin.68The LET interpretation can also be extended to 
include gravitational effects by allowing the ether to move differentially. Such a general ether theory has 
been developed by Ilja Schmelzer.69It is mathematically equivalent to GRT but uses Euclidean space and 
absolute time. Schmelzer gives the ether a density, velocity and pressure tensor and satisfies all the 
appropriate conservation equations, but it's a fairly recent development and there are still unresolved 
issues. 

A comprehensive treatment that covers all the ground of SRT and GRT as well as addressing the 
controversial experimental issues that are argued both ways, such as the interpretation of results from 
rotating frames, transporting of atomic clocks around the world, and the calibrating of GPS satellite 
ranging is Ronald Hatch's "modified Lorentz ether theory," MLET.70The "modified" part comes from its 
extension of using the same ether to account for material particles in the form of standing waves. The 
theory and its ramifications are explored in detail in Hatch's bookEscape from Einstein .71 

Entraining the Ether 

The concept of a fixed ether pervading all of space uniformly like a placid ocean was perhaps 
something of an idealization that owed more to Aristotlean notions of perfection than the messy, turbulent 
world we find ourselves living in. The Michelson-Morely result showed that no motion through such an 
ether can be detected—at least not by present methods—from which one conclusion is that it might as 
well not be there, and therefore to all practical purposes it doesn't exist. This is the path that SRT 
develops. However, the same result would be obtained if the ether in the vicinity of the Earth moved with 
it in its orbit around the Sun, accompanying it as a kind of "bubble" inside which the Earth and the local 
ether remain at rest relative to each other. Such an "entrained ether" interpretation was in fact favored by 
Michelson himself, who never accepted the SRT explanation. The general consensus, however, was it 
was incompatible with the aberration effect on starlight described earlier, and it was rejected accordingly. 

But aberration turns out, on closer examination, to be a more complex business than is often 
acknowledged. The typical SRT textbook explanation attributes the effect to relative velocity, for 
example: " . . . the direction of a light ray depends essentially on the velocity of the light source relative to 
the observer. . . . This apparent motion is simply due to the fact that the observed direction of the light 
ray coming from the star depends on the velocity of the earth relative to the star."72 

This can't be so, however, since stars in general possess velocities that vary wildly with respect to 
the Earth. Pointing a telescope at any patch of sky constrained sufficiently to signify direction should still 
capture a representative sample of them, which should display a spread of aberration displacements 
accordingly. But that isn't what's found. They turn out to be all the same. 


Then again, let's consider what are known as spectroscopic binary stars, that is, double stars too 
close together to be resolved separately but which can be distinguished by their Doppler-shifted spectra. 
If aberration depended on velocity, the very difference in velocities that produces the Doppler shifts 
would be sufficient to separate the images resolvably—in which case they would no longer be 
spectroscopic binaries! 

Then again, let's consider what are known as spectroscopic binary stars, that is, double stars too 
close together to be resolved separately but which can be distinguished by their Doppler-shifted spectra. 
If aberration depended on velocity, the very difference in velocities that produces the Doppler shifts 
would be sufficient to separate the images resolvably—in which case they would no longer be 
spectroscopic binaries! 

There is an apparent displacement of planets, also called aberration, unfortunately, that results from 
the delay of light in reaching the Earth. It does depend on source velocity, but this isn't the quantity that 
we're talking about. Its effect reduces with distance and is effectively zero for things like stars. According 
to Thomas E. Phipps Jr., Einstein used the wrong one.73Howard Hayden, professor emeritus of physics 
at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, arrives at the same conclusion.74 

Stellar aberration affects all stars in a locally surveyed region equally and varies systematically with 
an annual cycle. The velocity that it depends on is clearly the orbital velocity of the Earth, which would 
seem to imply velocity with respect to the Sun's frame. But there's a difficulty. Suppose there was a 
streetlamp beyond the telescope, directly in line with the star being observed. If some kind of motion 
through an ether were responsible, you'd think that light from one would follow the same path as the light 
from the other, and the same aberration should be observed. It isn't. No measurable effect occurs at all. 
Relativists chuckle and say, "We told you so. It's because there's no relative motion between the street 
light and the observer." But the considerations above are enough to say that can't be true either. It's 
more as if different ethers were involved, one containing the Earth and the streetlamp, inside which there 
is no aberration, the other extending out to somewhere less than the Sun's distance such that its annual 
motion within the Sun's frame produces the effect on starlight. There are further complications too, such 
as why long-baseline radio telescope arrays should detect aberration when there's no tube for photons 
to move sideways in, and the theories and arguments currently doing the rounds to try and account for 
them could bog us down for the rest of this book. I've dwelt on it this far to show that the whole subject 
of aberration is a lot more involved than the standard treatments that dismiss it in a few lines would lead 
one to believe. 

Field-Referred Theories 

Petr Beckmann, a Czech professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, 
developed an alternative theory in which the second of SRT's two founding premises—that the speed of 
light is constant with respect to all observers everywhere—is replaced by its speed being constant with 
respect to the dominant local force field through which it propagates. (SRT's first premise was the 
relativity principle, by which the same laws of physics apply everywhere.) For most of the macroscopic 
universe in which observers and laboratories are located, this means the gravitational field that happens 
to dominate wherever one happens to be. On the surface of the Earth it means the Earth's field, but 
beyond some distance that gives way to the Sun's field, outside which the field of the local part of the 
galactic realm dominates, and so on. This gives a more tangible form to the notion of embedded "ether 
bubbles," with light propagating at its characteristic speed within fields that move relative to each other— 
like the currents and drifts and doldrums that make up a real ocean, as opposed to a universally static, 
glassy abstraction. And since, as with any conservative vector field (one in which energy potentials can 
be defined), any point of a gravity field is described by a line of force and the equipotential passing 
through it, the field coordinate system can serve as a local standard of rest. 

Does this mean, then, that the gravitational field is, in fact, the long sought-for "ether"? Beckmann 
asks, in effect, who cares? since the answers come out the same. Marklin is more of a purist, insisting on 
philosophical grounds that whatever its nature finally turns out to be, a physically real medium must exist. 


A "field," he pointed out when I visited him at his home in Houston while researching this book, is simply 
a mathematical construct describing what a medium does. The smile can't exist without the Cheshire cat. 
I'm not going to attempt to sit in judgment on heavyweights like Petr and George. The purpose of this 
essay is simply to inform interested readers on some of the ideas that are out there. 

A "field," he pointed out when I visited him at his home in Houston while researching this book, is simply 
a mathematical construct describing what a medium does. The smile can't exist without the Cheshire cat. 
I'm not going to attempt to sit in judgment on heavyweights like Petr and George. The purpose of this 
essay is simply to inform interested readers on some of the ideas that are out there. 
75 

Michelson-Morley had failed to detect any motion of the Earth relative to an ether in its orbit 
around the Sun. This could be because there is no ether (SRT), or there is but the distortion of 
measuring standards obscures it (LET), or because the local ether moves with the Earth 
(Beckmann-type field-referred theories). Does the local ether bubble rotate with the Earth also, or does 
the Earth spin inside it? 

Michelson and Gale set up an experiment to try to answer this at Clearing, Ilinois, using a 
rectangular interferometer large enough to detect the difference in velocity between the north and south 
arms due to the southern one's being slightly nearer the equator and hence moving slightly faster. It was a 
magnificent affair measuring over 2,000 feet east-west and 1,100 feet north-south, with evacuated pipes 
12 inches across to carry the beams, and concrete boxes for the mirrors, lenses, and beam splitters. 
Two hundred sixty-nine measurements were taken in sets representing various conditions. 

And fringe shiftswere observed—not only of a magnitude consistent with the "hypothesis of a fixed 
ether" (Michelson's words) within the limits of observational error, but from which the experimenters 
were able accurately to calculate the rotation speed of the Earth. 

Beckmann's theory predicts this on the theoretical argument that if the gravitational field describes 
an outward propagation, the effect would "decouple" from the source as soon as it leaves, somewhat 
like bullets from a rotating machine gun still radiating outward in straight lines. In other words, the field's 
effects shouldn't share the source's rotation, and hence the speeds of the light beams in the two arms of 
the interferometer will be different. This doesn't contradict Einstein, though, where the General Theory is 
invoked to arrive at the same result on the grounds that each beam has its own idea of time. But whereas 
Beckmann's conclusion follows from Galilean principles and a few lines of high-school algebra, GRT 
requires multidimensional tensors in spacetime and non-Euclidian geometry. 

Electromagnetic Mass—Increase Without Einstein 

The law of inertia says that a mass tends to keep its momentum constant, i.e., it resists external 
forces that try to change that momentum. That's what the definition of mass is. The same is true of an 
electromagnetic field. A steady electric current produces a steady magnetic field. If the field is changed 
by changing the current, it will, by Faraday's law, induce an electric field that will seek to restore the 
current and its field to its original value—all familiar to electrical engineers as Lenz's laws of 
self-inductance, mutual inductance, and so forth. Similarly, a steady electric field is produced by a steady 
distribution of charge. If the charge sources are moved to change the field, the resulting "displacement 
current" gives rise to a magnetic field, and the changing magnetic field induces an electric field that 
opposes the movement of the charges. This is sometimes known as the "inertia" of the electromagnetic 
field, manifesting an "electromagnetic momentum." 

It turns out that the electromagnetic counterpart to momentum also carries precisely its counterpart 
to mass. The electromagnetic mass of a charged body is an additional factor by which it resists physical 
accelerationbeyond the resistance normally exhibited by the uncharged mechanical mass. This was 


known to the classical physicists of the nineteenth century. It comes out as a constant that multiplies 
velocity to add a further parcel of momentum in the same way that regular Newtonian mass does. 

known to the classical physicists of the nineteenth century. It comes out as a constant that multiplies 
velocity to add a further parcel of momentum in the same way that regular Newtonian mass does. 

However, Maxwell's equations and the relativity principle—and nothing more—indicate that when 
the body moves, the charge distribution will change as the charge begins to partly "catch up" with its own 
equipotentials, causing them to bunch up ahead and spread out behind. The result is that the orthogonal 
field lines are no longer straight but become curves. (This was what prompted Lorentz to conclude that 
electrons contract in the direction in which they move.) 

Now it gets interesting. The expression for the electromagnetic mass of a body depends on the 
distribution of its electric field in space. When the rearrangement that takes place with increasing velocity 
is taken into account, the electromagnetic mass increases from its value at rest. The formula that the 
classical physicists of the nineteeth century derived to describe it is the same as the SRT equation for 
mass increase. The difference is that instead of rearranging the field distribution, SRT rearranged space 
and time, then applied the result toall masses, electromagnetic or mechanical, charged or neutral. It 
would appear that SRT's way of getting there wasn't necessary. 

Page, for example showed in 191276that Coulomb's law of electrostatic attraction and the Lorentz 
transforms are sufficient to derive Maxwell's equations—from which everything supporting SRT follows. 
But Coulomb's law is formally identical with Newton's law of gravitation. Hence, Page's method must 
lead to formally identical results—a "Maxwell" law that holds for mechanical, electrically neutral mass. 
By this argumentall mass is shown to be velocity-dependent from classical principles, invoking none of 
the observer-dependence of SRT. (Objection. "But it's right there in the textbooks. Force equals mass 
times acceleration. F = mždv/dt. Mass is a constant. You can't get away from it." Answer: "True, that's 
what most textbooks show. But Newton never said it. His force was always given by the change in 
momentum : d(mžv)/dt. It allowed for the possibility of mass being velocity dependent. Mark of a 
careful scientist.") And since both masses, neutral and electromagnetic, respond to velocity in the same 
way, they can be combined into a single inertial reaction—a force that resists changes in momentum— 
increasing with velocity. There's nothing especially remarkable about velocity-dependent forces. 
Hydraulic friction and aerodynamic drag are everyday examples. 

When the mass expressed as a function ofc is used to calculate the work done in accelerating a 
body from rest to velocityv , the resulting expression for kinetic energy reduces to the familiar 1/2mv2 
whenv is small. At rest, a residual energy E0remains that's related to the mass m0by, yes, you've guessed, 
E0= m0žc2. You can do it without Einstein. 

In his bookEinstein Plus Two Beckmann goes on to show that all of the experiments usually cited 
as confirming the Einsteinian formulas for mass, energy, and momentum are equally consistent with the 
field-referred theory. Similar arguments were presented following the publication of Einstein's original 
SRT paper in 1905—see, for example, Lewis, 1908, which derives the velocity-dependent relationships 
showing mass tending to infinity as its velocity approaches that of light, from considerations of 
conservation when a mass is accelerated by radiation pressure. 

From the theory based on the real, physical deformation of forces in motion through the locally 
dominant field, Beckmann is also able to derive from first principles the line spacing of the spectrum of 
the hydrogen atom, a first approximation to the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics, and the 
Titius-Bode series giving the distances between planetary orbits, which relativity must simply accept as 
given. Doesn't this make it a more powerful candidate predictively? In the latter connection, Beckmann 
also correctly deduces the precession of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit, usually cited as one of the 


decisive tests for GRT, and shows that a German by the name of Paul Gerber was able to do so using 
purely classical considerations in 1898, seventeen years before publication of the Einstein General 
Theory in 1915. 

decisive tests for GRT, and shows that a German by the name of Paul Gerber was able to do so using 
purely classical considerations in 1898, seventeen years before publication of the Einstein General 
Theory in 1915. 
77shows that the measurements were not particularly accurate, 
the standard error being about 30 percent, while the various displacements ranged from half to twice 
what the theory predicted, and a lot of fudging went on to come up with an average of the order that 
was needed. But in any case, if the local gravitational field is effectively the propagating ether, the speed 
of a traveling disturbance will vary with its density, and the same result can be arrived at by treating it as 
a refractive medium in uncurved space.78 

Gravity and Electromagnetics 

Why have we been postulating the local gravitational field as the possible propagating medium, 
when everything we've been talking about refers to electromagnetics? Well, the reference frame that 
Beckmann's theory actually postulates is the dominant localforce field. For most practical purposes it 
reduces to the same thing. The magnetic force between moving charges is so small compared to the 
electric force between them (one of those relationships like that of mass with energy, involvingc2 ) that it 
can't even be measured unless the electric field is neutralized. 

The example Beckmann gives to illustrate this is two lines of negative charges—electrons, say— 
moving past a stationary observer like parallel columns of soldiers. The moving charges constitute 
currents moving in the same direction, which accordingly generate a magnetic attraction between them. 
But this attractive force will be completely overshadowed by the electrostatic repulsion of the charges. 
To reveal the magnetic effect, it's first necessary to neutralize this repulsion, which could be achieved by 
adding a row of stationary positive charges like fence posts along the line of march of at least one of the 
columns. This is exactly what happens with the ionized atoms inside a conductor. What this says is that 
to demonstrate a magnetic force, at least one of the currents must flow in a normally neutral conductor 
such as a wire. 

In the macroscopic world of neutral matter that we live in and build instruments out of for 
investigating electromagnetic phenomena, therefore, the dominant force field that's left after the electric 
fields have been eliminated by positive and negative charges that neutralize each other is that of 
gravitation. Or perhaps we should say "almost neutralize each other." Some fascinating work is going on 
that interprets the gravitational force as a residual effect of electromagnetism—see, for example, Assis, 
1992 and 1995. So certainly it might be the case that in other parts of the universe not dominated by 
neutral matter, some other definition of the local reference frame should apply. 

Dr. Carl Zapffe in hisA Reminder on E =mc2 interprets the phenomena usually cited as relativistic 
in a field-referred theory using the magnetosphere, which also defines the local frame moving with the 
Earth—and in the process he provides three derivations using classical physics of the sanctified formula 
contained in the title. Plots derived from space probe data and other sources show the Earth's 
magnetopause—the boundary of the magnetosphere—as a huge, teardrop-shaped bubble compressed 
to a bowshock front on the sunward side and extending outward more than ten Earth radii, around 
which the solar wind streams like the airflow around the body of a plane. On our planet deep inside this 
bubble, we've been trying assiduously for over a century to measure our airspeed with our instruments 
inside the cabin. Zapffe offers a model of 




We can conduct a conversation effortlessly with another passenger in a plane because our entire 
acoustic environment is moving with us. Trying it sitting out on the wing would be a different matter, 
swiftly disposing of any notions we might have formed that air doesn't exist. It might be revealing to 
perform experiments along the lines of Michelson-Morley on a space platform outside the Earth's 
magnetosphere, under conditions that have never been tested before, in motion relative to the local frame 
as defined by the Sun. 

Does "Time" Dilate? Or Do Clocks Run Slower? 

When we're assured of something to the effect that "relativity is confirmed routinely in laboratories 


all around the world thousands of times every day," one of the instances usually cited is the verifying of 
time dilation. The example given earlier was of muon decay, where more muons from the upper 
atmosphere survive long enough to reach the ground than should be able to. According to relativity, it's 
because time in the muon's moving frame runs slower than the time in the observer's frame, which 
includes the ground, the atmosphere, and the whole of the path followed in the particle's flight down. But 
a crucial question isn't being asked about another possible state of affairs that would produce the same 
result. 

all around the world thousands of times every day," one of the instances usually cited is the verifying of 
time dilation. The example given earlier was of muon decay, where more muons from the upper 
atmosphere survive long enough to reach the ground than should be able to. According to relativity, it's 
because time in the muon's moving frame runs slower than the time in the observer's frame, which 
includes the ground, the atmosphere, and the whole of the path followed in the particle's flight down. But 
a crucial question isn't being asked about another possible state of affairs that would produce the same 
result. 

As an illustration of the principle (one which has nothing to do with relativity), consider an ordinary 
pendulum clock being flown around the world in an eastbound direction. The rate of a pendulum clock 
depends ong , the acceleration due to gravity. The Earth's rotation generates an upward centrifugal force 
that acts againstg , reducing it slightly. Since an eastbound clock is adding to the Earth's rotation speed, 
this effect will be increased, causing the airborne clock to run marginally slower. This isn't due totime in 
the aircraft "dilating," but a real, physical effect arising from its motion. Hayden discusses this distinction 
and provides references to relevant experiments.79 

This is also the answer that LET or field-referred-type theories give to the famous "twins paradox," 
where two young twins are separated by a motion that can be regarded as symmetrical and then 
reunited, upon which one or the other or neither is found to be older, depending which argument you buy. 

"One's frame had to be accelerated somehow in order to bring them back together again, and 
therein lies the difference," runs one line. Response: "But the difference in ages increases with the time 
that the traveling one has been traveling. Yet exactly the same process of stopping and reversing will 
eventually return him whatever the duration of the trip. How can the same acceleration sequence cause 
different results?" 

"It's the reversal of direction of one of them that does it. Even with the ingenious arrangements that 
have been proposed for effectively synchronizing oppositely moving, constant-speed conveyors."80 
Response: "But the SRT equations don't anything about direction. They only involve velocity." 

"Acceleration is involved one way or the other, so SRT doesn't apply. You need to go to GRT." 
Response: "So why was it given as an example of an SRT effect in the first place?" 

And so it goes. The debate has gone on for as long as the theory of relativity has existed. Careers 
have been toppled by it.81According to LET and its equivalents, the twin who does the most moving 
through the preferred reference frame (or the local preferred frames at the places he passed through) will 
age more, and that's the end of it. 

In principle there is a way to resolve this. Going back to the muon, relativity says that only the 
velocity with respect to the observer matters, so the muon is just as entitled to argue that it's the 
laboratory that's moving. Thus, by the muon's frame of reckoning, the laboratory's time should be 
running slower. What we need is an observer sitting on the muon as it passes through the lab to tell us 
once and for all if the laboratory clock runs faster (Lorentz, Beckmann, field-referred) or slower 
(Einstein). This has never been done, of course. But eventually the ingenuity of experimenters will no 
doubt come up with an equivalent. 

Perhaps the closest that anyone has come to actually testing this is the Hafele-Keating experiment 
in 1972, where cesium atomic clocks were transported east and west in commercial jets and their rates 
compared to a standard on the ground at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. It's not 
uncommon to hear the result dismissed blandly with, "The moving clocks ran slower, just as relativity 


says they should." And it's true that they did—referred to a fictitious standard that didn't figure anywhere 
in the experiment. And they did so at different rates. The fact was that relative to the stated ground 
reference in Washington, D.C., the westbound clock ranfaster , gaining 273 nanoseconds, whereas the 
eastbound one lost 59 nanoseconds. In a fast-foot shuffle to accommodate this awkward state of affairs, 
the relativists decided that everything should be referred to a nonrotating Earth-centered frame, relative 
to which everything was moving east, and hence it was possible to describe the three clocks as moving 
"slow" (westbound), "slower" (Washington, D.C.), and "slowest" (eastbound). But that still doesn't 
rescue the theory, which says, clearly, that as far as Washington, D.C., is concerned, as with any 
observer, lightspeed is constant and moving clocks are slowedirrespective of direction. Those who 
regard the clocks as moving with regard to an absolute local reference have no problem. Apparently, R. 

says they should." And it's true that they did—referred to a fictitious standard that didn't figure anywhere 
in the experiment. And they did so at different rates. The fact was that relative to the stated ground 
reference in Washington, D.C., the westbound clock ranfaster , gaining 273 nanoseconds, whereas the 
eastbound one lost 59 nanoseconds. In a fast-foot shuffle to accommodate this awkward state of affairs, 
the relativists decided that everything should be referred to a nonrotating Earth-centered frame, relative 
to which everything was moving east, and hence it was possible to describe the three clocks as moving 
"slow" (westbound), "slower" (Washington, D.C.), and "slowest" (eastbound). But that still doesn't 
rescue the theory, which says, clearly, that as far as Washington, D.C., is concerned, as with any 
observer, lightspeed is constant and moving clocks are slowedirrespective of direction. Those who 
regard the clocks as moving with regard to an absolute local reference have no problem. Apparently, R. 
Keating himself was surprised by the result82but accepted the explanation that astronomers always use 
the Earth's frame for local phenomena. But they use a solar barycentric frame for other planetary 
phenomena in order to get results that agree with relativity. Interesting, eh? 
The Famous Faster-Than-Light Question 


So what about the consequence that comes out of it all that "nothing"—no kind of energy or other 
causal influence—can travel faster than light? It's probably the most popularly quoted line whenever 
relativity is mentioned, and so some words on it wouldn't be out of order here, although they are 
necessarily speculative. 

The limit follows from the form of the equations that express velocity as a fraction of the speed of 
light—you can't have anything greater than a hundred percent of itself. Put that way it sounds a bit trite, 
rather than expressing anything especially profound. The same fraction forms the basis of all the 
velocity-dependence equations, such as that for mass, which increases to infinity as velocity approaches 
lightspeed, and time, which tends to a standstill. So accelerating a massive object to lightspeed would 
require an infinite input of energy, and since that's impossible the implication is you can't get there. All 
experiments on fast-moving particles confirm the predictions, and as far as some kinds of minds are 
concerned, those that seem to need limits and restrictions to guide their lives, that closes the subject. If 
all of the human race thought that way we'd never have bothered trying to build flying machines because 
the eminences who knew better had proved them impossible. 

One person who didn't think that way was the aerospace engineer, science-fact and science-fiction 
writer G. Harry Stine.83As Stine pointed out, and we have spent space enough being reminded of here, 
relativity theory derives primarily from Maxwell's equations of electromagnetics, and the evidence 
supporting it comes from a narrow range of experiments using charged particles accelerated by electric 
or magnetic fields. The way mass is determined (or, strictly speaking, the mass-charge ratio) is by 
measuring the reaction to other fields or the momentum transfer of impacts with other particles. It's an 
extremely restricted sample for building overall pictures of the world. 

Maxwell's equations, in essence, state that a charged particle, (a) at rest possesses an electric field; 

(b) moving at a steady velocity generates a magnetic field; (c) accelerating, radiates away some of the 
applied energy, i.e., not all of the accelerating energy will appear as motion of the particle. The theory 
derived from those statements and the experiments designed to test it say that the "deficit" not appearing 
as acceleration increases with velocity. It's as if energy is being supplied faster than the system can 
absorb it by changing its state motion. It sheds the excess by radiation, and the faster it moves the 
greater a proportion it has to get rid of until it's radiating all of it, at which point it can't be accelerated 
further. Interestingly, the equations of aerodynamics for propeller-driven aircraft take the same form, 
approaching a limit at the speed of sound through air. As a plane approaches the speed of sound, more 
of the propulsion energy goes into generating shock waves that radiate it away, and accelerating the 
plane further becomes progressively harder. It exhibits an increase of "aerodynamic mass." 
In his general field equations, Einstein theorized that a gravitational "charge" (mass) would produce 
a field analogous to the magnetic field when in motion. Furthering the analogy, it should produce a 


gravitational radiation when accelerated. This would be true, for example, of any spinning mass. What is 
the nature, Stine wonders, of the peculiar forces we're all familiar with that hold gyros at strange angles 
when intuition says they ought to fall over, and play havoc when you try to carry them around corners? 
All of the second-derivative Newtonian forces are already accounted for, since a rotating mass 
undergoes constant acceleration. [Second-derivative of space with respect to time, hence dgravitational radiation when accelerated. This would be true, for example, of any spinning mass. What is 
the nature, Stine wonders, of the peculiar forces we're all familiar with that hold gyros at strange angles 
when intuition says they ought to fall over, and play havoc when you try to carry them around corners? 
All of the second-derivative Newtonian forces are already accounted for, since a rotating mass 
undergoes constant acceleration. [Second-derivative of space with respect to time, hence dx/dt2, or 
d/dt(momentum).] Stine hypothesizes a Newtonian-like third-derivative force that's proportional to rate 
of change of acceleration (d3x/dt3)—a quantity referred to as "surge"—and associated with it, a 
combined gravitational and inertial "GI" field playing a role comparable to the electromagnetic field, but 
one derivative step up from the counterpart in the charged domain. This field is also able to accept 
excess energy beyond the ability of an accelerating body to absorb quickly enough. But in the case of a 
charged body, electromagnetic reactions account for all the energy supplied by the time lightspeed is 
reached, and no further acceleration beyond that limit is possible. 

But if that "barrier" could be overcome, the GI field would still be available to continue absorbing 
excess energy, meaning that acceleration could be pushed further. In other words, onlycharged particles 
—the magnetic-propeller-driven kinds used in all our relativistic experiments—are limited to lightspeed. 
Uncharged matter—providing you had a means of accelerating it—would have a limiting velocity set by 
the currently unknown properties of GI propagation. What might that be? Anybody's guess, really. But 
Stine cites an estimate made in 1961 by William Davis, S. A. Korff, and E. L. Victory, based on the 
apparent stability and relative sizes of structures from binary stars, up through galaxies, to the entire 
universe, that gave a range of from 10,000 to 15,000 times lightspeed. He gives them the unit "Mikes," 
after A. A. Michelson. 

In considering possibilities of this kind, mention should also be made of the intriguing "field 
distortion theory" (FDT) developed by Steve Dinowitz.84As with other alternatives that we've looked at, 
the classical Galilean transforms hold, and the same experimental results are expected that support SRT. 
FDT begins with a model of propagation in which the field lines around a charged body such as an 
electron behave like radial compressible springs (recalling the charge redistribution treated by 
Beckmann) and exhibit an aerodynamic-like distortion when the source moves through a gravitational 
field. The body's inertial mass is then related to this distortion of its field, resulting in an expression for 
mass in which the determining factor is the motion through the locally dominant gravitational field and the 
field's energy density. As a consequence, mass-increase and time-slowing are not pure velocity effects 
but also depend on the comparative field energy densities of the body being accelerated and other 
bodies in the vicinity. These effects would not occur to anywhere near the degree expressed by the 
relativistic limits when the gravitational field due to the accelerated body predominates. This condition is 
never realized on the Earth's surface, where the gravitation of accelerated particles like electrons or 
protons is vanishingly small compared to the Earth's, and the equations of FDT reduce to those of SRT. 
But it would occur naturally in the case of, say, a spacecraft leaving the Solar System. 

Little of this impresses the custodians of the sacred dogma, however. Heretical findings have been 
reported in connection with things like experiments performed on rotating platforms where light beams 
seem clearly to be traveling around in opposite directions at different speeds—the basic operating 
principle of the laser-ring gyro, which works just fine—and the synchronization of GPS satellites.85True 
enough, a relativistic explanation can usually be produced eventually—typically in the form of wheeling in 
GRT to account for a contradiction of something that SRT said in the first place—but always after the 
event, uncomfortably suggestive of the way in which with enough ingenuity a new epicycle could always 
be added to Ptolemy's hopelessly over-elaborate system to explain the latest data. Otherwise the 
problem is declared "meaningless." But if the underlying premises of relativity are inconsistent as some 
have argued it's really immaterial, since it can be proved that logic based on inconsistent premises can be 
made to agree withany conclusion.86 

As with the Church of old, it seems to be "political" scientists of an authoritarian bent who end up 
directing and bureaucratizing the system. This becomes particularly true of "Big" science, where so much 
of what will be rewarded by recognition, funding, and appointments depends on political approval. But 


good science works best when left to muddle through in its own sloppy and democratic ways. Maybe 
what we need is a Constitutional amendment separating Science and State. Government should no more 
be deciding what good science shall be than dictating or suppressing religion. 

good science works best when left to muddle through in its own sloppy and democratic ways. Maybe 
what we need is a Constitutional amendment separating Science and State. Government should no more 
be deciding what good science shall be than dictating or suppressing religion. 
R 
Catastrophe of Ethics 
The Case for Taking Velikovsky Seriously 


Once one has experienced the desperation with which clever and conciliatory men 

of science react to the demand for a change in the thought pattern, one can only be 

amazed that such revolutions in science have actually been possible at all. 

—Werner Heisenberg 

I believe we must look for salvation from the non-specialists, amateurs and 
interdisciplinary thinkers—those who form judgments on the general thrust of the 
evidence, those who are skeptical about any explanation, particularly official ones, and 
above all are tolerant of other people's theories. 

— Halton Arp 
In the earlier section dealing with evolution, we saw that by the late nineteenth century the doctrine 
of uniformitarianism had been established as the officially recognized mechanism of geological and 
biological change. Ideas of catastrophism, previously unquestioned, were quickly relegated to obscurity. 
They carried too much suggestion of divine intervention and biblical retribution, which didn't fit with the 
new world view. Evidence that had long been accepted as pointing clearly to the occurrence of immense 
cataclysms in the course of Earth's history disappeared from the classrooms and the textbooks to be 
replaced by lyrical accounts of Nature rendering its works insensibly but tirelessly over huge spans of 
time. And the same spirit extended to the realm of astronomy, where the regularities of celestial motions 
were no longer seen as a choreography of God, but as the working of a vast, endlessly repeating, 
cosmic machine obeying the mechanical lawfulness revealed by Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and their 
followers. Although rigorous observation had been limited to just a couple of centuries, the reigning 
philosophy of gradualism put no restraint on extrapolating the current conditions backward, creating a 
picture of the past that remained essentially unchanged. The possibility was never seriously entertained 
that even back in epochs long before humans existed, the skies might have been different in any 
significant way from the ones we see today. 

As a teenager I was enthralled by the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky. But when the scientific 
authorities which at that time I didn't question did such a superb job of misrepresenting his work and 
dismissed him as a crank, I largely forgot about the subject. It was not until forty or so years later, in the 
1990s, that I came across a remarkable book by Charles Ginenthal entitledCarl Sagan and Immanuel 
Velikovsky ,87collecting together findings from the space missions and later developments in astronomy, 
geology, archeology, ancient history, and other areas, that were consistent with Velikovsky's ideas and 
basic theory, while refuting just about everything that had been said by the experts who vilified him. This 
was enough to revive my interest in the subject of catastrophism generally. 

Early Work: The Makings 
of an Iconoclast 



Immanuel Velikovsky was born in Vitebsk, Russia, in 1905, and graduated from the Medvednikov 
Gymnasium in Moscow in 1913. He completed premedical studies in France and Scotland, returned to 
Moscow during World War I to study law and ancient history, and received a medical degree in 1921. 
He then moved to Berlin, where he helped found and published a series of monographs by prominent 
Jewish scholars, known asScripta Universitatis , which was instrumental in forming the Hebrew 
University at Jerusalem. The volume on mathematics and physics was edited by Albert Einstein. In 1923 
Velikovsky married Elisheva Kramer, a violinist from Hamburg, and the following year moved to 
Palestine to become a general medical practitioner and psychiatrist. 

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in Vitebsk, Russia, in 1905, and graduated from the Medvednikov 
Gymnasium in Moscow in 1913. He completed premedical studies in France and Scotland, returned to 
Moscow during World War I to study law and ancient history, and received a medical degree in 1921. 
He then moved to Berlin, where he helped found and published a series of monographs by prominent 
Jewish scholars, known asScripta Universitatis , which was instrumental in forming the Hebrew 
University at Jerusalem. The volume on mathematics and physics was edited by Albert Einstein. In 1923 
Velikovsky married Elisheva Kramer, a violinist from Hamburg, and the following year moved to 
Palestine to become a general medical practitioner and psychiatrist. 

In the summer of 1939 Velikovsky came with his family to the United States to complete his 
research for a proposed book on ancient history. The period he was interested in covered the time of 
the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt, and in comparing records it struck him as curious that an event that 
figured so prominently in Hebrew history, with all its attendant troubles and plagues, seemed to have no 
corresponding account in the Egyptian records. This had been a longstanding problem for historians, 
who because of the incongruities involved had never even been able to agree on who the pharaoh at the 
time of the Exodus had been. It turned out to be only one of many examples of major historical events in 
the Hebrew account with no correlating Egyptian counterpart, which had led some historians to dismiss 
Hebrew history as largely fictional. On the other hand, its claims received substantial support from 
archeological findings. 

Further investigation led to a translation of an obscure papyrus written by an Egyptian sage called 
Ipuwer, kept at the museum of Leiden, in Holland, that described a time of rivers turning to blood, falling 
stones, sickness, darkness, and other events uncannily like those recounted in Exodus, in the aftermath 
of which the land fell into ruin and civil war, to be overrun by Asiatic tribes from the east. A papyrus 
preserved at the Hermitage in Leningrad told a similar tale of the Egyptian empire perishing in a period of 
natural disasters and falling prey to desert nomads. 

It seemed that the missing Egyptian corroboration had been found. However, such considerations 
as language style and certain historical references indicated the time of these events to be the collapse of 
the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, conventionally dated around five hundred years before the Exodus, the 
latter being identified with the expulsion from Egypt of a people referred to as the Hyksos. Velikovsky 
began to suspect that this equating of the Hyksos with the Hebrews was an error, and the Hyksos were 
in fact the desert tribe that had invaded Egypt at the time the Middle Kingdom ended and the Hebrews 
left—and were then driven out themselves at a later date. This would mean that the Middle Kingdom 
ended more recently than the accepted chronology holds, leading Velikovsky to reexamine the entire 
Egyptian-Hebrew historical record. Since Egyptian chronology was taken as the standard by which the 
histories of other cultures in the region were correlated and dated, any error found in it would have 
widespread repercussions. And Velikovsky's conclusion was that the grounds the standard rested on 
were a lot shakier than was confidently supposed. 

The ancient Egyptians did not use an absolute time scale as we do today, of dating all events with 
respect to a chosen reference year. They chronicled events occurring during the reign of each ruler 
separately, dating them from the beginning of that period—a bit like saying that the great San Francisco 
earthquake happened in the second year of Theodore Roosevelt, and then having to start over again 
with William Taft. This created many uncertainties for later scholars, first by being unclear about exactly 
what was meant in such cases as a co-regency by father and son, and second by frequently leaving no 
definite indication of how long a reign lasted. In addition to these, the list of dynasties drawn up by the 
historian-priest Manetho, which is used as the key in many accepted reconstructions, has been passed 
down in two recorded versions that don't agree, both apparently having been exaggerated by the 
inclusion of extraneous years and dynasties. Sometimes this stemmed from the practice of giving the 
same person different names, leading to acts of the same pharaoh being attributed to different individuals; 
at others it seemed deliberately contrived to show Egypt's civilization as going back farther than rivals 


such as the Greek or Assyrian-Babylonian. 

such as the Greek or Assyrian-Babylonian. 
88Velikovsky's response was to 
go with what the weight of evidence seemed to say and concluded that Egyptian history was padded to 
the extent of making events seem 500 to 800 years further away from the present than they had in fact 
been. To bring things into line, he proposed moving the end of the Middle Kingdom and invasion by the 
Hyksos down 500 years to accord with the Hebrew date for the Exodus of around 1450 b.c. When this 
was done, a whole set of what had been other anomalies were found to line up, too. 

The biblical account of the Queen of Sheba's royal visit to Jerusalem after hearing of the fame and 
wisdom of King Solomon has always had something of a mysterious air, not the least being that the 
identity of this majestic sovereign and the location of her domain have never been established. She is 
described elsewhere as queen of Egypt and Ethiopia, but conventional chronology has no female 
pharaohs in Egypt during this period. But 600 years before the accepted biblical date, practically the 
inverse story is told in Egyptian records. Queen Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh, journeyed with a large 
entourage to a land to the east called Punt, described by one official as being associated with Byblos, the 
old capital of Phoenicia, its ruins today lying eighteen miles north of Beirut. Descriptions of the route 
overland from Thebes to the Red Sea coast, and by sea to the Gulf of Aqaba, returning via the 
Mediterranean and back up the Nile, tally. On her return, Hatshepsut built a temple patterned after the 
one she had visited in Punt, its wall decorated by reliefs commemorating her visit. The gifts from the ruler 
of Punt that they record closely match those that the Hebrew texts list as Solomon's to the Queen of 
Sheba. One of the features of Solomon's temple that especially impressed the Queen of Sheba was its 
terraces planted with algum trees. Hatshepsut's temple at Thebes was laid out with similar terraces 
planted in the same way. 

And so it goes. Hebrew history records that after Solomon's death his son and successor, 
Rehoboam, was conquered by a king of Egypt called Shishak. Hatshepsut's successor in Egypt was 
Thutmose III, who invaded Palestine. Topping the list made at Karnak of the 119 cities that he took— 
the place where the most important would normally be found—is one called Kadesh. Many Hebrew and 
Arabic writings give Kadesh as the name of Jerusalem, the capital of Judah. Conventional historians have 
always hesitated to make this connection, however, since by their chronology David didn't establish it as 
the capital until long after Thutmose. A number of the other cities listed as conquered by Thutmose III 
didn't even yet exist according to the orthodox chronology. But if Shishak and Thutmose III were one 
and the same, as Velikovsky maintained, then it all makes sense. 

Velikovsky's revised chronology also explained many discrepancies in the histories of other cultures 
whose chronology is derived from the Egyptian standard. One example is in styles of pottery and tomb 
construction found in parts of Cyprus and the neighboring coast of Syria, where clear association 
between the two cultures is indicated. However, conventional dating puts the Syrian culture five hundred 
years earlier than the other—presumably implying that customs and influences took that long to 
propagate across sixty miles of water. Another is the "dark age" of ancient Greece that orthodox 
chronology is forced to postulate to make its dates match with the Egyptian, when progress in the 
development of Greek art and technology ceased for half a millennium for no apparent reason and then 
resumed again. What makes this even more perplexing is that the activity of the Greek olive industry that 
supplied oil for lamps, cooking, and so forth, as recorded in layers of pollen grains preserved on lake 
bottoms, indicates it to have been at a maximum during precisely this time This would be like 
archeologists of the future determining that U.S. oil production peaked before Columbus arrived. But 
under the revised scheme the Greek time line closes up as Egypt's is contracted, and the need for a dark 
age goes away. 

The outline for Velikovsky's revised chronology was published in 1945 as a booklet,Theses for 


the Reconstruction of Ancient History . Later, a more detailed account of about half of this work 
would be published as a full book form, covering the period from the Exodus to the time of the pharaoh 
Akhnaton.
the Reconstruction of Ancient History . Later, a more detailed account of about half of this work 
would be published as a full book form, covering the period from the Exodus to the time of the pharaoh 
Akhnaton.

Implications of Catastrophism 

For Velikovsky this was only a beginning. The Exodus had been synchronized with the collapse of 
the Middle Kingdom at around 1450 b.c. However else the plagues and other disruptions attending 
these events might have been interpreted at the time, the most likely explanation was that they coincided 
with a period of natural disasters. This invited the questions, how widespread were they? and what 
caused them? Starting with the regions adjoining Egypt and Israel, Velikovsky began investigating the 
histories and received mythologies of other ancient cultures for indications of parallel events. It became 
apparent that the phenomenon had affected not just the entire Middle East but places far remote from it 
as well. In fact, it showed signs of being nothing less than a global catastrophe. Further, it hadn't been the 
first time such a thing had happened, and neither was it the last.90 

The first affliction that the Bible describes as befalling the Egyptians was the rivers turning to blood 
and there being blood throughout the land, both of which Ipuwer echoed. Babylonian myth tells of the 
land being covered by the blood of the slain heavenly monster, Tiamat. Likewise, those of the Asiatic 
Tartars and the Central American Maya relate sagas of the world turning red, while the Finns say it was 
sprinkled with pink milk. 

Then came "hail." The word chosen by the earlier translators was one that we associate with icy 
pellets and cold rains, but this might be because they could imagine little else falling from the sky. The 
original Hebrew word,barad , means hot rocks. Ipuwer describes falling stones and fire, which in a day, 
he says, turned all the fields to wastelands. Similar accounts of red-hot stones falling in torrents, 
frequently accompanied by crashing thunder and showers of a blazing, sticky substance that ran along 
the ground causing widespread death and destruction, appear in Buddhist texts on world cycles, 
Siberian legends, and tales handed down in places as far apart as Mexico and Siberia. The same kind of 
story can be told relating days of darkness so intense that people were unable to move from the spot 
they were at, worldwide hurricanes that swept away towns and forests, and earthquakes devastating 
entire regions. 

According to Velikovsky, the familiar interpretation of the tenth plague as the smiting by the Angel 
of Death of the Egyptian "firstborn" (Hebrewbkhor ), which of course would require some supernatural 
agency, arises from a corruption ofbchor , which means "chosen," or high-born.91Hence the reason why 
the Israelites fared better was probably that as slaves they lived in dwellings made of reeds and clay, 
whereas the brick and stone houses of the Egyptians were more susceptible to collapse by earthquake. 
Eminently reasonable in my opinion. 

Finally, there are suggestions that the "parting of the waters" during the pursuit by the Egyptians 
could have been the local aspect of a tidal disruption of global dimensions. Chinese annals tell of a time 
when the world was in flames, after which the water of the oceans was piled to enormous heights and 
swept across the continent to fill the valleys between the mountains, taking decades to drain away. The 
traditions of the people of Peru hold that after five days of darkness the ocean left the shore and broke 
over the land with a terrible din, changing the appearance of the surface permanently. The Choctaw 
Indians of Oklahoma (not their original habitat) relate a time when the world was plunged in darkness 
until light appeared in the north; but the light turned out to be mountain-high waves of water rapidly 
approaching. 

Venus and the Cosmic Connection 

Repeatedly, these calamities were attributed to a malicious deity—almost invariably a goddess— 
coming to wreak havoc upon the Earth. Although the actual names naturally varied, the deity involved 
turned out time and time again to be the one that cultures worldwide associated with the object we know 
today as the planet Venus. But they didn't talk about it as if it were a planet; they described it as a 


comet. A Chinese text describes Venus as spanning the heavens, rivaling the Sun in brightness. Mexican 
astronomers referred to it as "the star that smokes," while on the opposite side of the world the same 
theme is found in the Hindu Vedas, the Hebrew Talmud, and the Egyptian description of Sekhmet. The 
Aztecs called Venus the "heart" of Quetzlcoatl, which in turn means "plumed serpent," with feathers that 
signify fire. The serpent or dragon is one of the most common figures used in the ancient world to signify 
"comet," examples being the Greek Typhon, Egyptian Set, Babylonian Tiamat, Hindu Vrta, all of whom 
raged across the sky and brought destruction upon the world. 

comet. A Chinese text describes Venus as spanning the heavens, rivaling the Sun in brightness. Mexican 
astronomers referred to it as "the star that smokes," while on the opposite side of the world the same 
theme is found in the Hindu Vedas, the Hebrew Talmud, and the Egyptian description of Sekhmet. The 
Aztecs called Venus the "heart" of Quetzlcoatl, which in turn means "plumed serpent," with feathers that 
signify fire. The serpent or dragon is one of the most common figures used in the ancient world to signify 
"comet," examples being the Greek Typhon, Egyptian Set, Babylonian Tiamat, Hindu Vrta, all of whom 
raged across the sky and brought destruction upon the world. 

Another widespread association of Venus was with the figure of a cow or a bull, still recalled in 
many religious rites and cults today. If Venus did indeed once possess a cometary coma, the illuminated 
portions would at times be seen as a gigantic crescent in the same way as the crescent forms of planets 
and of the Moon, especially during close approaches to Earth. The curving shapes sprouting from the 
body of the comet would be suggestive of a bull's head and horns. 

Velikovsky discovered that the Hindu records from before the second millennium b.c. spoke of 
four visible planets, not five, omitting Venus. The Babylonians, who were also meticulous in their 
observations, likewise made no mention of Venus in their tables of planets. In Greek mythology, Venus 
was the goddess Pallas Athene, unique among the deities in being born during the time of human history 
and not present, like all the other gods, from the beginning. The hymn dedicated to her by Homer 
describes Pallas Athene as being born from the head of Zeus, i.e., Jupiter. And once again mythologies 
of other peoples, too, carry accounts of the birth of their deity that corresponds to Venus, but not 
Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, or any of the other gods. 

In Greek legend, Athene was attacked by a monster, Pallas-Typhon, whom she fought and killed. 
Likewise, the newborn Egyptian Horus battled with the serpent-monster, Seth, as did the Hindu Vishnu, 
also a newcomer to the celestial family, born of the many-armed Shiva. Horus was originally the 
Egyptian name for Jupiter, apparently transferred to the new object that became supreme in the sky— 
possibly due to some initial confusion as to which was which. The same thing happened in the 
Babylonian version, where Ishtar was originally Jupiter and became Venus, Jupiter being renamed 
Marduk. 

Many ancient traditions divide the history of the world into a series of ages each ending in calamity, 
the birth of the new age being attended by altered appearances of the heavens. Early astronomers 
diligently recorded the motions of celestial bodies, looking for changes that might signal coming 
destruction and the end of the current age. The times following the above happenings saw repeated 
allusions to the motion of the Sun and the stars being reversed, and north and south changing place. Both 
the Ipuwer and the Ermitage papyruses speak of the land turning upside down and south becoming 
north. Herodotus, in his visit to Egypt in the second half of the fifth century b.c., was told by priests 
about a former era when the Sun rose where it now sets and set where it now rises. Plato and Seneca 
wrote about the same thing. The architect of Hatshepsut's tomb included a stone panel from an earlier 
age showing the celestial constellations upside down. Similar accounts are found in the Hebrew Talmud 
and the Islamic Koran; with the Chinese, whose zodiac signs also have the strange property of 
proceeding in a retrograde direction; and in the written or oral myths of Greeks, Syrians, Aztec, Maya, 
Mexican Indians, Greenland Eskimos, and tribes of western Brazil and the Indian Ocean Andaman 
Islands, to name a few. 

Velikovsky's conclusion, then, was that Venus is not billions of years old as believed according to 
orthodox theory, but a young object ejected from Jupiter within the span of recorded human history. In 
the course of evolving into the planet that we see today it had passed close enough to bring death, terror, 


and destruction on an immense scale, and disturbed the motion of the Earth itself. This carried the 
impertinent suggestion that the ancients might not have been so facile as to spend lifetimes inventing 
fairytales and building imposing monuments to them, but might actually have known what they were 
talking about and had something important to say; that the "mythologies" dismissed by the authorities of 
today as fanciful fictions could in fact have been attempts by nontechnical people to describe events that 
they actually witnessed. This would mean, of course, that the comforting picture of a safe and secure 
Solar System acting out its predictable cycles with minor variations, arrived at by projecting back 
today's quiescent conditions, was wrong; the Solar System could be a very violent and unpredictable 
place indeed. But Velikovsky had already shown from his historical revisions what he thought of 
conventionally accepted pictures of things if what appeared to be the facts indicated otherwise. 

and destruction on an immense scale, and disturbed the motion of the Earth itself. This carried the 
impertinent suggestion that the ancients might not have been so facile as to spend lifetimes inventing 
fairytales and building imposing monuments to them, but might actually have known what they were 
talking about and had something important to say; that the "mythologies" dismissed by the authorities of 
today as fanciful fictions could in fact have been attempts by nontechnical people to describe events that 
they actually witnessed. This would mean, of course, that the comforting picture of a safe and secure 
Solar System acting out its predictable cycles with minor variations, arrived at by projecting back 
today's quiescent conditions, was wrong; the Solar System could be a very violent and unpredictable 
place indeed. But Velikovsky had already shown from his historical revisions what he thought of 
conventionally accepted pictures of things if what appeared to be the facts indicated otherwise. 

Thereafter, priests and astronomers everywhere followed the movements of Venus relentlessly for 
signs of its returning again. Whole temples and cults were devoted to worshiping and appeasing the deity 
that it was taken to be, invariably regarded as violent and wrathful. A fifty-year cycle between times of 
hardship and destruction is recounted in the traditions and records of cultures the world over. The 
natives of pre-Columbian Mexico observed a ceremony of congregating every fifty-two years to await a 
catastrophe, fearful that the Sun would fail to rise again. They watched for the appearance of Venus, and 
when the world didn't end, celebrated with bonfires and sacrifices the new period of grace that had been 
granted. The Israelite festival of the Jubilee was proclaimed every fifty years as a time for leaving the land 
fallow, releasing slaves, and returning land to the original owners as a sign of repentance in preparation 
for the Day of Atonement. 

The Universal War God: Mars 

This pattern continued for something like seven centuries. Then a striking change took place in the 
order of precedence the ancients gave to their celestial gods: Venus ceased being the most feared object 
in the heavens, the destroyer and bringer of chaos, and was replaced in this role by Mars, universally 
acclaimed as the war god. 

Mars had not figured as a significant figure in the celestial pantheon before the eighth century b.c. It 
was known, of course, and its motions tabled, but it seems generally to have been considered a minor 
player. Then, suddenly, it achieved prominence. This was not a period shrouded in the distant past, but a 
time when observations and written records had become more refined and extensive. Mythologies 
abound with accounts of battles between Venus and Mars, one of the most well known being Homer's 
Iliad , in which heavenly deities influenced the fortunes of the combatants in the ten-year siege of Troy, 
Athene siding with the Greeks, while the Trojans were backed by Ares, the Greek name for Mars. 
Interestingly, this practically mirrors the situation on the other side of the world in the wars between the 
Aztecs and the Toltecs, where Mars rooted for the former, and Venus, the latter. (Once again this 
questions conventional chronology, making the American civilizations much older than is generally held. 
Of which, more later.) 

Following these encounters, Mars continued to menace Earth periodically for about ninety years, 
bringing earthquakes, floods, and times of desolation, though never with a ferocity rivaling the first two 
visits of Venus. This was the age of prophets, who developed reputations for knowing when hard times 
were ahead; it could also be the source of the astrological belief in celestial events portending disasters 


and affecting lives down on Earth—it would be a peculiar notion to arise today, with the planets being 
insignificant pinpoints. The prophet Amos predicted destruction that arrived in 747 b.c., but didn't live to 
see it because he seized the opportunity to link the event to morality and warn people to mend their 
ways, so they killed him. Amos's cue might have been an encounter that conceivably took place in 776 
b.c., the year the Olympic games were founded—possibly in commemoration of it. 

and affecting lives down on Earth—it would be a peculiar notion to arise today, with the planets being 
insignificant pinpoints. The prophet Amos predicted destruction that arrived in 747 b.c., but didn't live to 
see it because he seized the opportunity to link the event to morality and warn people to mend their 
ways, so they killed him. Amos's cue might have been an encounter that conceivably took place in 776 
b.c., the year the Olympic games were founded—possibly in commemoration of it. 
92 

Before this time, the calendars of the Chinese, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Chaldeans, 
Assyrians, and Hebrews, as well as the Incas of Peru and the Mayas of the Yucatan had all shown a 
year of 360 days. The modern year of 365 1/4 days was introduced subsequently. Following this final 
event, Mars and Venus retreated to take up their stations as we know them today. And the gods, their 
anger, and their caprices faded from being a vivid and terrifying reality in human affairs, to a realm 
regarded these days as imaginative fancy and superstition. 

Worlds in Collision 


The End of Everything You Thought You Knew 

After something like ten years of research into the subject, Velikovsky's account was published as 
Worlds in Collision , which appeared in 1950. Its essential thesis can now be summarized in modern 
terms as follows. 

Some time before the middle of the second millennium b.c., a white-hot, fiery object was ejected 
from Jupiter. For an indeterminate period, possibly centuries, it moved as a giant comet on a highly 
elongated orbit that passed close around the Sun and intersected the orbit of the Earth. Eventually, 
around 1450 b.c., it emerged from perihelion—the point of closest approach to the Sun—on a path that 
brought it to an encounter with Earth. 

Approaching tail-first, it engulfed the Earth in the outer regions of its millions-of-miles-long coma, 
from which a rain of caustic, asphyxiating dust filtered down through the atmosphere, turning red the 
landscape everywhere, and choking rivers and lakes with dead fish. As the Earth moved deeper into the 
tail, this intensified into rains of red-hot gravel and meteorites, destroying crops, livestock, and towns, 
and laying waste whole regions. Hydrocarbon gases torn from Jupiter's atmosphere, unable to ignite in 
the oxygen-free space environment, mixed with Earth's atmosphere to form explosive mixtures that fell 
as flaming naphtha, causing fires that burned for years and smoke that darkened the entire surface. 
Unburned petroleum sank into the ground in enormous quantities forming broad swathes across the 
planet. 







If such events indeed happened, they would be expected to have left evidence discernible today. 
Velikovsky offered a number of suggestions for findings that would support his theory, many of them 
going against the prevailing scientific beliefs of the times. One was that close encounters between the 
Earth and bodies the size of Venus and Mars would also have major effects on the Moon. (The lunar 
deity is also involved in the mythological scenarios of all cultures, usually in some kind of amorous 
entanglement or rivalry with the other gods.) Hence, the Moon's craters and other surface features 
should be relatively young—in the order of thousands of years, not billions. It should show evidence of 
recent heating, possibly with some remnant volcanic activity still detectable, and exhibit magnetic effects 
impressed into its rocks. 

Similarly with Mars. Mars has a mass of around a tenth that of the Earth and a radius slightly over a 
half, whereas Venus is only slightly smaller than Earth. Tidal effects of a larger body upon a smaller one 
will be immensely greater than those of a small body on a larger one. Therefore Mars would be a 
devastated planet, its surface scarred by rifts and fissures. This suggestion was put forward at a time 
when the possibility of life on Mars was still being vigorously debated by many scientists, and some 
believed that the "canals" might be the legacy of a lost civilization. It also seemed probable that a small 
body like Mars would lose a portion of its atmosphere in encounters with Earth. Since oxygen and water 
vapor are not present in the Martian atmosphere, Velikovsky reasoned that some other elements of the 
terrestrial atmosphere should be found there. He urged that a search be made for argon and neon.93 

As for Venus itself, the mainstream view propounded in 1950 held it to be an Earthlike sister 
planet, probably somewhat warmer than Earth on account of its closer position to the Sun. Some 


astronomers predicted that its clouds would turn out to be water vapor and its surface covered by 
oceans. This was despite infrared and spectroscopic data available at that time that indicated a higher 
temperature and complete absence of water, but which were largely discounted because the current 
theory had no explanation for them. Further, although indications were that Venus's rotation about its 
axis was very slow, there was no difference between the radiated temperatures of the dark and light 
sides, which seemed anomalous. For Velikovsky there was no contradiction. Because of its violent 
expulsion from Jupiter and recent history as an incandescent object, it would be innately very hot, 
swamping any day-night effect due to the Sun. 

astronomers predicted that its clouds would turn out to be water vapor and its surface covered by 
oceans. This was despite infrared and spectroscopic data available at that time that indicated a higher 
temperature and complete absence of water, but which were largely discounted because the current 
theory had no explanation for them. Further, although indications were that Venus's rotation about its 
axis was very slow, there was no difference between the radiated temperatures of the dark and light 
sides, which seemed anomalous. For Velikovsky there was no contradiction. Because of its violent 
expulsion from Jupiter and recent history as an incandescent object, it would be innately very hot, 
swamping any day-night effect due to the Sun. 

Since petroleum hydrocarbons were universally attributed to organic origins, Velikovsky 
speculated that life might exist on Jupiter, and that its transportation in some form that could survive 
might account for the "vermin" that came with the other Egyptian plagues. While acknowledging that the 
heat and general conditions were in themselves sufficient to produce proliferations of things like frogs and 
locusts, he thought it possible that the plague of flies could have come as larvae, known to be capable of 
surviving extremes of temperature and the absence of oxygen. The suggestion of life first arriving here in 
some preserved larval or microbial form has been put forward since from other quarters too.94 
(Personally, I think that the rivers full of dead fish, along with all the animal and human corpses from 
everything else that was going on provide a ready explanation for flies and the like.) 

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, Velikovsky suggested, would be a structural scar marking the place 
where Venus erupted, still giving rise to atmospheric perturbations. And in a lecture at Princeton in 1953 
he proposed that contrary to the prevailing view of Jupiter's being cold and dead, it should be emitting 
nonthermal radio energy. His reason for supposing this was that if electrical forces played a role in 
planetary dynamics, and the Solar System as a whole was neutral, the Sun and planets would have 
opposite charges. Jupiter would have the largest planetary charge, and its rapid rotation should radiate 
electromagnetically. He had asked Einstein, with whom he maintained friendship, to use his influence to 
have a radio survey performed to look for such an effect. In the same talk, Velikovsky suggested that 
while the Earth's magnetic field was known to decrease with distance at lower altitudes, it could be 
stronger beyond the ionosphere and extend at least as far as the Moon—again violating currently held 
opinions. 

Science in Convulsion: 
The Reactions 


I always think it's pathetic when writers resort to phrases like "Words cannot describe . . ." It's the 
writer's job, after all, to find words that do describe. But the reaction of the scientific community to 
Worlds in Collision came pretty close. "Vituperative," "vitriolic," "hysterical," "irrational" jostle for 
consideration. Critics vied with each other in the shrillness of their denunciations. 

Word of the impending release by the Macmillan Company had circulated in the publishing trade, 
and a preview article entitled "The Day the Sun Stood Still" appeared in the in January 1950 issue of 
Harpers , which sold out in a few days. The following month,Readers Digest featured a popularization 
that interpreted Velikovsky as proving the assertions of the Old Testament scientifically. Velikovsky had 
also contracted withCollier's Magazine to produce what he understood would be a three-part 
serialization, but the manuscripts that he received for approval were condensations, and so 
sensationalized without examination of the scholarship behind the work that he threatened public 


disavowal unless they were severely revised. Eventually the first two appeared; the third was abandoned. 

disavowal unless they were severely revised. Eventually the first two appeared; the third was abandoned. 

Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, wrote twice to Macmillan, 
expressing astonishment that they would consider venturing into the "Black Arts," threatening to cut of all 
relations with the company (Macmillan owned a substantial and profitable textbook division), and 
insinuating that their reputation might be severely damaged if they went ahead. The February 25 issue of 
Science News Letter , a publication directed by Shapley, printed a condemnation ofWorlds in Collision 
by authorities in the fields of archeology, oriental studies, anthropology, and geology, as well as 
astronomy—the last topic spoken for by Shapley himself. The book was only then going to press, so not 
one of the critics had actually seen it. Somewhat taken aback, the president of the Macmillan Company 
submitted the manuscript to three independent arbiters and decided to abide by their recommendation. 
Their vote was to go ahead with publication, and the book was released on schedule in April. Although 
the names of the arbiters were never officially disclosed, one of them later identified himself as the 
chairman of the Department of Physics at New York University and confirmed that he had voted in 
favor. 

Meanwhile, the attacks had intensified, spurred by an article in theReporter written by Shapley's 
associate at Harvard, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, based on the JanuaryHarpers article and circulated to 
scientists, science editors, and publishers. It insisted, essentially, that electromagnetic phenomena can 
have no effect in space, where processes are purely mechanical, and the events described inWorlds in 
Collision were impossible. The gist of this was cited in the March 25 issue ofScience News Letter as a 
"Retort to Velikovsky," who as yet had not been heard from. 

Gordon Atwater, curator of the Hayden Planetarium and chairman of the Department of 
Astronomy of the American Museum of Natural History, had read the manuscript and recommended 
publication before the original Macmillan contract was signed. When he received a letter from Otto 
Struve, director of the Yerkes Observatory, requesting that he change his position, he failed to 
appreciate the situation and replied that while he didn't accept all of Velikovsky's claims, he felt the work 
had merit. Accordingly, he was preparing a favorable review of the book forThis Week magazine and 
planning a program at the planetarium depicting the events that it described. A week later, Atwater was 
summarily fired from both his positions and instructed to vacate his office immediately. Attempts were 
also made to suppress his review in the April 2 issue ofThis Week , but failed. However, the credentials 
that appeared alongside his name, above an article pleading for open-mindedness in evaluating the new 
theory, were already history. 

An intended review in the New YorkHerald Tribune , also scheduled for April 2, was pulled, and 
instead readers found a denunciation by Struve with a reference to Payne-Gaposchkin stating that 
observations of Venus extended back at least five hundred years before the Exodus, "thus refuting the 
absurd idea that a comet had turned into a planet." But Velikovsky had given no date for the ejection of 
Venus by Jupiter, saying only that it had occurred at some earlier time. And as Velikovsky had pointed 
out in his book, the Babylonian tablets cited by Gaposchkin ("Venus Tables of Ammizaduga") describe 
Venus as exhibiting erratic motions that have baffled translators and astronomical commentators ever 
since their discovery. So even if the tablets do date from early in the second millennium b.c., what they 
show is that Venus was moving enigmatically at that time, in a way quite unlike a planet. This was a 
preview of the kind of distortion that was to become typical. TheNew York Times Book Review , again 


April 2, followed Gaposchkin in accusing Velikovsky of ignoring or suppressing the Ammizaduga tablets 
completely. But they couldn't have reviewed it very carefully. Velikovsky devotes over four pages to the 
tablets, quoting the complete texts for observations from five successive years and discussing the 
opinions of seven orientalists and astronomers who had studied them.
April 2, followed Gaposchkin in accusing Velikovsky of ignoring or suppressing the Ammizaduga tablets 
completely. But they couldn't have reviewed it very carefully. Velikovsky devotes over four pages to the 
tablets, quoting the complete texts for observations from five successive years and discussing the 
opinions of seven orientalists and astronomers who had studied them.

In the following months, astronomers descended from their telescopes in droves to put down the 
heresy. Newspapers across the country were bombarded with abusive letters, frequently syndicated to 
achieve better coverage. Ignoring Velikovsky's suggestion that tilting the axis of a rotating body could 
produce the visual effect of an arrested or even retrogressing Sun, the director of one observatory 
castigated him for not being bothered by "the elementary fact that if the earth were stopped, inertia 
would cause Joshua and his companions to fly off into space at a speed of nine hundred miles an hour" 
(also brought up by Gaposchkin). But the argument is disingenuous. Even if Velikovsky is read as 
conceding that the Earth stopped, he makes no mention of the rate at which it decelerated. If the Earth 
under present conditions were to halt its rotation totally in six hours, the deceleration experienced at the 
equator would be the same as a car traveling at sixty miles per hour taking twenty minutes to stop. 
Stopping the car in an easy span of thirty seconds would be equivalent to halting the Earth in a cool 8.7 
minutes—not enough to strain a seat belt, never mind throw people off the planet. 

Nevertheless, many writers and reviewers were enthusiastic, as, evidently, was the general public, 
forWorlds in Collision topped the bestsellers list for twenty successive weeks. But letters continued to 
come in to Macmillan from scientists demanding that they cease publishing the book, and some large 
institutions were refusing to see Macmillan salesmen. One astronomer dismissed the book as nothing but 
lies, on the same page declaring that he had not read and never would read it. Macmillan backed down 
and persuaded Velikovsky to accept a deal they had worked out to transfer the rights to Doubleday, 
who had no textbook division and were immune to pressure and blackmail in that direction. All 
remaining copies of the Macmillan edition were burned, and the editor who had accepted the book was 
fired after twenty-five years with the company. 

The campaign continued. Gaposchkin attacked Velikovsky again in the June 1950 issue ofPopular 
Astronomy , the essence of the argument being that his claims couldn't be true because they violated 
undemonstrable dogmatisms that antedated him and therefore took precedence. In an article inIsis that 
was widely reproduced and circulated, Professor Otto Neugebauer of Brown University, a specialist in 
Babylonian and Greek astronomy, accused Velikovsky of altering quoted source material to suit his case 
—specifically, that he had changed a figure of 3º13' to 33º13'. When Velikovsky protested to the editor 
that his figure was correct and that the 33º13' figure was Neugebauer's substitution, not his, the professor 
dismissed the incident as "simply a misprint of no concern."96 

But it didn't change his fundamental position, which was that since Babylonian astronomical tables 
from before the seventh century b.c. cannot be reconciled with the celestial motions seen today, they 
must have been compiled in disregard for actual observations. In other words, the people who not only 
understood the number systems and astronomical procedures that we still use today, but who developed 
them, couldn't have seen what they say they saw because it contradicts what boils down to faith in a 
dogma. 

There were some sympathetic voices, to be sure, such as Walter Adams, director of the Mount 
Wilson and Palomar Observatories, who complimented Velikovsky on the accuracy of his astronomical 
material although not agreeing with all of it; Professor Lloyd Motz, astronomer at Columbia University, 
who was interested in the new proposals for celestial mechanics; and S. K. Vsekhsviatsky, director of 
Kiev University, who corresponded extensively and cited Velikovsky in support of his own views. But in 
the main the general pattern continued of critics repeating the same worn fallacies, citing misquotes of 
their own making, and academic journals publishing attacks on Velikovsky's person but not his 
arguments, and then refusing him space to respond. This systematic disinformation left the majority of 
scientists with the impression that Velikovsky had been demolished by those who knew better, and that 
no answers existed to the only version of the debate that they were permitted to hear. 

As noted earlier, the first volume of Velikovsky's revisions to ancient history,Ages in Chaos , 


followed in 1952, this time producing what theHerald Tribune described as "howls of anguish" among 
historians. The scientific press did not devote as much space to analyzing this work, but a measure of the 
criticism and its quality can be gained from one example, where the only fault that one professor could 
allege was that Velikovsky had mistaken the cuneiform plural signmesh for the name of the Moabite 
king, Mesha. However, Velikovsky twice calls attention to the fact that in several instances the normal 
reading cannot apply, since the grammatical construction definitely alludes to an individual. Further 
commentators repeated the professor's erroneous claim, inviting the suspicion that they had read the 
critics but not the actual work that they purported to review. 

followed in 1952, this time producing what theHerald Tribune described as "howls of anguish" among 
historians. The scientific press did not devote as much space to analyzing this work, but a measure of the 
criticism and its quality can be gained from one example, where the only fault that one professor could 
allege was that Velikovsky had mistaken the cuneiform plural signmesh for the name of the Moabite 
king, Mesha. However, Velikovsky twice calls attention to the fact that in several instances the normal 
reading cannot apply, since the grammatical construction definitely alludes to an individual. Further 
commentators repeated the professor's erroneous claim, inviting the suspicion that they had read the 
critics but not the actual work that they purported to review. 

Testimony from the Rocks: 
Earth in Upheaval 


A line that some critics ofWorlds in Collision had been harping on was that if events as violent as 
those Velikovsky described had really happened in recent times, they would have left unmistakable signs 
all over the surface of the Earth. Either the critics hadn't heard of Cuvier, or they had forgotten him. In 
November 1955, Velikovsky obliged them with the publication ofEarth in Upheaval , a testimony 
drawn not from myth or anything created by the minds of Man, but written into the rocks of the planet 
itself. In it, he examined the then-unquestioned principle of Lyellian gradualism, and contrasted its tenets 
with what is actually found the world over, testifying to immense cataclysms that changed the face of the 
Earth. 

The Fossil Graveyards 

From Alaska to Florida, Europe to Far Eastern Asia, huge graveyards are found, containing the 
remains of millions of animals, many types abundant and well adapted until recent times, but now extinct. 
They didn't die out gradually but were overwhelmed suddenly and violently across whole regions, along 
with entire forests that were uprooted and splintered. The fast-frozen mammoths with pieces of their last 
meal still preserved between their teeth that most people today have heard about represent just a tiny 
part of the picture. Off the north coasts of Siberia are islands hundreds of feet high that consist of 
practically nothing but heaped up bones and tusks of mammoths, elephants, rhinoceroses, and smashed 
trees. Fissures, caves, and excavations across the British Isles, France, Switzerland, and Gibraltar yield 
elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, lions, tigers, bears, wolves, hyenas, and others that the perplexed 
archeologists of earlier times could only guess had been brought by the Romans. But the numbers were 
too vast for that to be credible. In many instances the types were already extinct by the time of the 
Romans; others were later found spread across parts of Europe that they were just as foreign to, but 
which the Romans had never occupied. Whales somehow found their way to lodgements 500 feet above 
sea level in Michigan, Vermont, and Quebec. 

The scale and nature of the devastation is consistent with a gigantic tidal surge away from the 
equator, being stopped at barriers such as the Himalaya chain and the Alps, but elsewhere funneling 
through the northern Atlantic and Pacific inlets to the Arctic Basin and then rebounding in a backwash 
rolling southward across the Asian and North American continents. In many places the animal and plant 
debris are of all types from all regions, marine and land forms, from tropical and temperate climates, all 
jumbled and heaped up together. The Siwalik Hills on the southern edge of the Himalayas consist of 


sedimentary deposits 2,000 to 3,000 feet high and extending for several hundred miles, abounding with 
fossil beds of so many and so varied species that the animal world of today looks impoverished by 
comparison. Thirteen hundred miles away, in central Burma, the deposits cut by the Irrawaddy river 
reach 10,000 feet and contain a comparable variety, along with hundreds of thousands of entire trunks 
of silicified trees. Yet, as also happens in other places, the beds are separated by huge thicknesses of 
sediment—4,000 feet in the case of the Irrawaddy—that contain no fossils or trace of any organic 
material at all, suggesting the sudden halting of colossal volumes of water. 

sedimentary deposits 2,000 to 3,000 feet high and extending for several hundred miles, abounding with 
fossil beds of so many and so varied species that the animal world of today looks impoverished by 
comparison. Thirteen hundred miles away, in central Burma, the deposits cut by the Irrawaddy river 
reach 10,000 feet and contain a comparable variety, along with hundreds of thousands of entire trunks 
of silicified trees. Yet, as also happens in other places, the beds are separated by huge thicknesses of 
sediment—4,000 feet in the case of the Irrawaddy—that contain no fossils or trace of any organic 
material at all, suggesting the sudden halting of colossal volumes of water. 

Rapidly moving water can move amazingly heavy objects. Erratic rocks and boulders found 
hundreds of miles from their places of origin have usually been attributed to transportation by glaciers or 
ice sheets. But they occur widely across parts of Siberia where there are no high grounds to impart 
motion to ice, and in places that were never covered by ice. 

The evidence Velikovsky presents is of precisely the kind that the events proposed inWorlds in 
Collision would be expected to leave, such as of meteorite storms, pole shifts, abrupt climate changes, 
alterations of sea level, and increased tectonic activity. Mountain uplifts and other formations show 
indications of being younger than conventional geology maintains. The Columbia Plateau consists of 
solidified lava sheets covering two hundred thousand square miles of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. 
The Snake River at Seven Devils Canyon has cut more than three thousand feet deep and not reached 
the bottom of them. Tens of thousands of elliptical craters, many now flooded to form lakes, occur all 
along the coastal areas from New Jersey to northeast Florida, but especially in the Carolinas. They all 
exhibit a parallel alignment from northwest to southeast, and many have raised rims at the southern end, 
suggestive of scars from an intense meteorite shower coming down at a grazing angle. Similar patterns 
occur at other parts of both hemispheres. Volcanic and earthquake activity has declined significantly 
even since Roman times. In the Andes, ruins of fishing villages and ports are found 12,000 feet above 
sea level. What were once cultivated agricultural terraces today disappear under the snow line. 

Of course, much of this clashes with the orthodox dating system. In his usual fashion, Velikovsky 
cares little for theory and sides with the evidence, questioning the assumptions that the conventional 
dating system rests on. It was more a product of materialism's fight with religion than an empirical 
construct, he contends, manufactured to provide the long time scales that Lyell and Darwin needed. 
Paralleling much of what we said earlier in this book, he was skeptical that natural selection had the 
ability to do what was claimed of it and offered evidence that biological change occurred in sudden 
epochs of repopulation by radically new designs, triggered by the occurrence of global-scale 
catastrophes. Needless to say, this didn't earn him many friends in that department either. 

Orthodoxy in Confusion 


Embarrassing Confirmations 

The reactions after release ofEarth in Upheaval were more restrained, possibly because some 
were beginning to feel that things had gone too far for the good of the professional image the first time. 
Others no doubt hoped that if they ignored Velikovsky he might just go away. But a big part of the 
reason could have been that an embarrassing number of his predictions were beginning to be shown as 
correct. 

WhenWorlds in Collision was published, four Yale University professors had collaborated in 
preparing a rebuttal in theAmerican Journal of Science , where one of them ridiculed the suggestion 
that the Mesoamerican civilization appeared to be much older than conventional history allowed. Five 
years later, the National Geographical Society announced: "Atomic science has proved the ancient 
civilizations of Mexico to be some 1,000 years older than had been believed."97The chief of the Bureau 
of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution declared this to be the most important archeological 
discovery in recent history. 


Another of the Yale critics scorned Velikovsky's suggestion that petroleum might have a cosmic 
origin. Two years later, in 1952, P. V. Smith reported inScience (October 24) the "surprising fact" that 
oil from recently deposited sediments along the Gulf of Mexico could be only thousands of years old. 
Hydrocarbons were subsequently found in the composition of some types of meteorites. A smallish 
carbonaceous chondrite asteroid—say, around ten kilometers in diameter—is estimated to contain a 
trillion tons of them.
Another of the Yale critics scorned Velikovsky's suggestion that petroleum might have a cosmic 
origin. Two years later, in 1952, P. V. Smith reported inScience (October 24) the "surprising fact" that 
oil from recently deposited sediments along the Gulf of Mexico could be only thousands of years old. 
Hydrocarbons were subsequently found in the composition of some types of meteorites. A smallish 
carbonaceous chondrite asteroid—say, around ten kilometers in diameter—is estimated to contain a 
trillion tons of them.In 1960, Professor A. T. Wilson of Victoria University in Wellington, New 
Zealand, produced high-molecular-weight hydrocarbons by electric discharges in Jupiter-like gases and 
suggested that terrestrial petroleum might have come from elsewhere—a theme that others have taken 
up since.99Both he and Professor W. Libby, chemist at the University of California, speculated that oil 
might exist on the Moon. By the early 1960s, neon and argon were repeatedly being found in meteorites, 
too. 

In April of the same year asEarth in Upheaval was published, 1955, scientists from the Carnegie 
Institution startled their audience at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society by announcing the 
chance detection of unexpected radio emanations from Jupiter, which they had recorded for several 
weeks before identifying the source. When a Doubleday editor wrote, calling attention to Velikovsky's 
anticipating just such a finding, one of them replied that even Velikovsky was entitled to a "near miss 
once in a while." The full extent of the radiation belt encompassing Jupiter, a hundred trillion times more 
powerful than Earth's, was established in 1960. 

Dr. Harry Hess, head of the Department of Geology at Princeton University, who had always been 
sympathetic toward Velikovsky's theories, submitted a memorandum to the U.S. National Committee in 
December 1956, proposing as part of the planned agenda for the International Geophysical Year a 
search for the extended region of terrestrial magnetic influence as Velikovsky had suggested. The Van 
Allen Belts were discovered in 1958 and featured as one of the high points of the program. In 1960 the 
Pioneer V space probe was launched, and after it had been in solar orbit for six weeks NASA called a 
press conference to announce that "In one exciting week, man has learned more about the near reaches 
of space that surround the earth than the sum of his knowledge over the last 50 years. . . . [A] fantastic 
amount of cosmic traffic (hot gaseous clouds, deadly rays, bands of electricity) rushes by at high speed, 
circles, crisscrosses, and collides."100The tail of the Earth's magnetosphere was later measured as 
extending beyond the orbit of the Moon. 

There was also news from Venus. As late as 1959, many astronomers still maintained that because 
of the great reflectivity of its cloud cover its surface temperature would be little different from Earth's, 
despite its closer orbit to the Sun. However, in April 1961, radio astronomers announced that the figure 
had to be at least 600ºF. In 1963, after analysis of data from theMariner 2 probe, the measured value 
turned out to be 800ºF. At about the same time, radiometric measurements by the U.S. Naval 
Observatory and the Goldstone Tracking Station in California showed Venus to have a very slow 
retrograde rotation, making it unique among the planets and suggesting something unusual about its 
history. Some astronomers wondered if it might have been created separately from the others. 

Further results fromMariner 2 were interpreted as indicating atmospheric condensation and 
polymerization into heavy molecules at temperatures around 200ºF, leading to the conclusion that 
Venus's atmosphere must contain heavy hydrocarbons and possibly more complex organic compounds. 
Lloyd Motz of Columbia, who had supported Velikovsky before, along with Princeton physicist V. 
Bargmann, wrote a joint letter toScience drawing attention to Velikovsky's priority in predicting these 
seemingly unrelated facts about the Solar System and urged that his whole thesis be objectively 
reexamined. When the letter was published, Velikovsky submitted a paper showing that the points 
brought out in the letter were just a few of many his books raised, that had been supported by 
independent research. The paper was returned unread. Instead,Science published a facetious letter from 
a reader stating that "the accidental presence of one or two good apples does not redeem a spoiled 
barrelful." Or a barrelful of sour grapes, maybe? 

More Electrical Heresies: Charges and Counter-Charges 


The theoretical front was seeing some interesting developments also. One of Velikovsky's 
suggestions that had been greeted with derision was that electromagnetic forces might play a part in 
celestial dynamics as well as gravity, and that astronomical bodies could be affected by acquiring 
electrical charge during their encounters. At a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in 1952, 
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin presented a paper taking Velikovsky to task on selected biblical quotations, 
but which was itself riddled with misrepresentations.
The theoretical front was seeing some interesting developments also. One of Velikovsky's 
suggestions that had been greeted with derision was that electromagnetic forces might play a part in 
celestial dynamics as well as gravity, and that astronomical bodies could be affected by acquiring 
electrical charge during their encounters. At a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in 1952, 
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin presented a paper taking Velikovsky to task on selected biblical quotations, 
but which was itself riddled with misrepresentations.Velikovsky, who was in the audience, came 
forward to give a rebuttal and was warmly received. But when he requested that his remarks be 
reproduced along with Gaposchkin's in the society'sProceedings , he was refused. 

Appended to Gaposchkin's paper, however, was a "quantitative refutation of Velikovsky's wild 
hypotheses" by Donald H. Menzel, also of Harvard. To show how preposterous Velikovsky's 
hypothesis was, Menzel demonstrated that to contribute ten percent of its gravitational attraction on the 
Earth, the Sun would need a charge of 1019volts, whereas he calculated it was incapable or retaining 
anything greater than 1800 volts. (He also showed that the sudden acquisition of such a charge would 
involve a supply of more energy than the Sun radiates in a thousand years, which was neither here nor 
there since Velikovsky had said nothing about its being acquired suddenly.) 

Then in 1960, Professor V. A. Bailey, professor of physics at the University of Sydney, Australia, 
who was not familiar with Velikovsky's work, announced that the magnitudes of five different known 
astronomical phenomena could be explained by the single hypothesis that a star like the Sun carries a net 
negative charge. Bailey's figures for making this work gave a surface potential of 1019volts—precisely 
that which Menzel had used to show how wacky Velikovsky was. Menzel wrote to Bailey pointing out 
what he perceived as an error and asked that Bailey revoke his theory since it wasn't helping the 
American scientists' campaign to discredit Velikovsky. Bailey took exception to the suggestion and in 
turn uncovered an arithmetical slip in Menzel's calculations that invalidated Menzel's whole argument. 
Menzel duly published a correction, but without acknowledging that it demolished his widely publicized 
anti-Velikovsky claim. 

With regard to the radio emissions from Jupiter, Menzel wrote that since scientists generally didn't 
accept the theory ofWorlds in Collision , "any seeming verification of Velikovsky's predictions is pure 
chance."102He dismissed the prediction of the high temperature of Venus on the grounds that Velikovsky 
hadn't supplied a figure but said only that it would be hot, which was a relative term—liquid air, for 
example, being "hot" relative to liquid helium. 

Velikovsky's suggestion of electrical interaction as an agency for arresting the motion of the Earth 
and circularizing the orbit of Venus had been scoffed at by the eminences because they insisted that the 
bodies of the Solar System were not charged and the space between them electromagnetically inert. 
Both these assertions had been shown to be wrong. 1960 was also the year when Professor André 
Danjon, director of the Paris Observatory, reported to l'Académie des Sciences that following an 
unusually large solar flare, the length of the day suddenly increased by 0.85 milliseconds, which he 
ascribed to electromagnetic forces induced by the flare. Thereafter, as the charge acquired by the Earth 
leaked away into the conductive medium afforded by the recently discovered solar wind, the Earth's 
rotation recovered at the rate of 3.7 microseconds every 24 hours.103 

We saw earlier how fiercely the entrenched priesthood resisted Hans Alfvén's theories about space 
being an electrically active medium—from one of the club, who later received a Nobel Prize for his work 
in celestial electrodynamics. It isn't difficult to imagine how they must have felt about being upstaged by a 
scholar in ancient history and classical languages, who was not only asking questions that they 
themselves should have been asking long before, but moving in on the turf and coming up with some 
good answers. 

A New View of Planets: Violent Origins; Rapid Change 

Needless to say, the proposal of Venus erupting out of Jupiter, and that the Greeks hadn't imagined 
it or made it all up, sent the Establishment into a frenzy. Everybody knew that all the planets had been 
formed at the same time billions of years ago. The two prevalent mechanisms doing the rounds in the 


fifties were the tidal theory, going back to Laplace, in which the planets had condensed from a blob 
pulled off the Sun by a close-passing star, and the more recent model of accretion from a contracting 
nebular disk. 

fifties were the tidal theory, going back to Laplace, in which the planets had condensed from a blob 
pulled off the Sun by a close-passing star, and the more recent model of accretion from a contracting 
nebular disk. 
104 
The following year, the British cosmologist Raymond. A. Lyttleton concluded from a fluid-dynamic study 
of Jupiter's core that an object of its size and estimated accretion rate, rotating at such a speed, would 
periodically become unstable and assume the form of an ovoid rotating about its short axis. The ovoid 
would elongate into an asymmetrical dumbbell and eventually fission to shed excess mass. Most of this 
ejected amount—up to 10 percent the mass of the original body—would be expelled from the Solar 
System. But lesser drops torn out in the process could be captured by the Sun and have formed the 
inner planets. Thus the only primordial members of the planetary system would be the gas giants.105And 
as we saw previously, Alfvén also concluded (in 1963106) from considerations of angular momentum that 
the gas giants must have been formed before the terrestrial planets. A doctoral thesis presented in 1969 
doubted if planets could form beyond the orbit of Saturn and suggested that the planets now out there 
had been propelled by encounters with others.107 

These days, the shortcomings of the accretion theory are more widely acknowledged, and it is 
permissible to propose alternatives. Conference papers discussing the origination of planets and other 
objects through fission from larger ones are commonplace and receive due consideration. Impact 
theories are in vogue following identification of the Cretaceous event believed to have caused the 
extinctions that included the dinosaurs, the most recent proposal for the formation of the Moon 
attributing it to ejection from the Earth following a strike by a possibly Mars-size body. But no citation 
ever acknowledges Velikovsky as the first whose ideas had departed from the idealized, endlessly 
repeating Laplacian machine.108 

The Earth itself had also departed from the picture of gradual, nonthreatening change that had 
persisted since the days of Lyell and Darwin. It had been argued that pole shifts and crustal movements 
of the magnitude that Velikovsky described would have left no stalactites or stalagmites unbroken in 
caves, yet it was known—according to accepted theory—that such structures were far older than the 
dates he talked about. But in 1962, in the Gnome Cavern, New Mexico, to the astonishment of 
geologists, stalactites had grown within one year of the nuclear test explosion there. A newspaper 
dispatch reported, "All nature's processes have been speeded up a billionfold." (Within five years of the 
1980 Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington, strata deposited in new-formed canyons had hardened 
into rock. With the presence of a fine-grained ingredient to act as a binder, the process resembles the 
setting of cement and can occur very rapidly.) 

The modern picture of plate tectonics—laughed at in the 1920s when Alfred Wegener first put 
forward his ideas that continents moved—was coming together in the mid fifties, with new evidence 
appearing in the journals just about every month for magnetic reversals, shifting poles, ice sheets 
covering what had once been tropics, mountain tops that had been seabeds, and slabs of crust rifting, 
separating, and colliding like grease patches on cold soup. Velikovsky's sympathizer, Harry Hess, was 
one of the leading figures in these developments. (Current theory still assumes millions-of-years time 
scales, arrived at by extrapolating backward the rates of plate movement observed today. My own 
guess is that these will turn out to be the cooled-down remnant of processes that once operated much 
faster.) 

Cores from the ocean bottoms were read as testifying to prodigious falls of meteorites, dust, and 
ash over enormous areas. Claude Schaeffer of College de France, unaware at the time of Velikovsky's 
work, concluded in a study of archeological strata that the ancient East, as documented for every 
excavation from Troy to the Caucasus, Persia, Palestine, and Syria, underwent immense natural 
paroxysms unknown in the modern experience of seismology. Five times between the third and first 
millennia b.c., cultures disappeared, empires collapsed, cities were buried, climates altered.109 


Rejected Call for Reappraisal 

Rejected Call for Reappraisal 

"Science itself," he wrote, "even while most scientists have considered his case to be closed, has 
been heading in Velikovsky's direction. Proposals which seemed so shocking when he made them are 
now commonplace. . . . There is scarcely one of Velikovsky's central ideas—as long as it was taken 
separately and devoid of its implications—which has not since been propounded in all seriousness by a 
scientist of repute." 

The responses were fast and ireful, but for the most part repeated all the old fallacies. On the 
subject of conducting plasmas and magnetic fields in interplanetary space, the tune changed to "we knew 
all that before Velikovsky" (maybe because of publication of Alfvén's work?). The debate carried on 
through the August, October, December 1963, and January 1964 issues ofHarpers . Larrabee's 
performance in taking it upon himself to answer the opposition was described by one commentator as "a 
classic example of the demolition of a scientist's arguments by a non-scientist." The "scientific" side was 
reduced to arguing that since nonscientists did not understand scientific issues and the scientific method, 
they should be restrained from debating in a public forum.110 

In the same period, Velikovsky, feeling optimistic that the new findings might have earned him a 
more considered hearing by now, prepared an article entitled "Venus, a Youthful Planet," which Harry 
Hess agreed to recommend to the American Philosophical Society for publishing—the same organization 
whose publications committee in 1952 had rejected Velikovsky's corrections of Cecilia Payne 
Gapschkin's misquotations in itsProceedings . This time the committee was split into two belligerent 
camps who argued for something like six months. In January 1964, the decision was taken not to publish 
Velikovsky's paper. 

An article entitled "The Politics of Science and Dr. Velikovsky," documenting the scientific 
community's treatment of the whole affair and accusing it of conspiracy and suppression, appeared in the 
September 1963 issue ofAmerican Behavioral Scientist , requiring a second printing even though the 
initial run had been unusually large in anticipation. The response of the readership, composed mainly of 
specialists in fields that Velikovsky's work hadn't touched upon, was predominantly favorable. A number 
of sociologists felt theABS account should be required reading in social science courses. Professor G. A. 
Lundberg of the University of Washington wrote, "[T]he A.A.A.S., not to mention individual scientists 
and groups, must now prepare a detailed answer. What is really at issue are the mores governing the 
reception of new scientific ideas on the part of the established spokesmen for science."111 

Since the issue was essentially one of scientific ethics, the seemingly natural choice for a vehicle to 
pursue the matter in was theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists , which prided itself on being a medium 
for expression of such issues. In a later letter to Harry Hess, the editor of theBulletin, Eugene 
Rabinowitch, acknowledged the reawakening of interest in Velikovsky's theories and alluded to the 
situation as requiring "remedial action," i.e., rallying to the defense of the threatened citadels. The ensuing 
piece, "Velikovsky Rides Again" (Bulletin, April 1964), was jeering and uncivil, employing all the 
devices seen when the earlier outcry was raised, of unfounded charges, misrepresentation, and 
dogmatically presenting received opinion as established fact. The writer given the assignment was 
unfamiliar with the fields of ancient languages and Egyptology in which he chose to attack Velikovsky— 
and even, apparently, with the elementary French needed to read one of Velikovsky's sources. But these 
were areas that typical readers of a journal like theBulletin would have to take on trust, and the tone 
met with satisfied and often eager approval. 

One protector of the faith sent a copy of theBulletin article to Moses Hadas, Jay Professor of 
Greek at Columbia University, who had remarked in an earlier review that Velikovsky appeared to be 
approaching vindication. Doubtless to illuminate him as to the error of his ways, Hadas was told that he 


should find the piece "of interest and perhaps amusing." But the ploy backfired. Hadas replied that he 
had no opinion about Velikovsky's astronomical theories "but I know that he is not dishonest. What 
bothered me was the violence of the attack on him: if his theories were absurd, would they not have 
been exposed as such in time without a campaign of vilification? One after another the reviews 
misquoted him and then attacked the misquotation. . . . [Regarding theBulletin article] It is his critic, not 
Velikovsky, who is uninformed and rash."
should find the piece "of interest and perhaps amusing." But the ploy backfired. Hadas replied that he 
had no opinion about Velikovsky's astronomical theories "but I know that he is not dishonest. What 
bothered me was the violence of the attack on him: if his theories were absurd, would they not have 
been exposed as such in time without a campaign of vilification? One after another the reviews 
misquoted him and then attacked the misquotation. . . . [Regarding theBulletin article] It is his critic, not 
Velikovsky, who is uninformed and rash."

Eric Larrabee was promised an opportunity to reply in theBulletin , but on meeting the stated 
deadline he was informed that space was not available. When challenged, Rabinowitch affirmed that the 
matter should be resolved in the "spirit of scientific argumentation" and agreed that since theBulletin 's 
article had made claims involving Hebrew and Egyptian paleographic and philological evidence, it should 
devote space to material disputing them. Velikovsky, however, would not consent to entering into such a 
debate, since in his view the author of the piece had amply demonstrated incompetence in those 
subjects. Instead, he proposed publication of "Venus, a Youthful Planet," which Hess had again agreed 
to submit. This was turned down on the grounds that theBulletin was "not a magazine forscientific 
controversies." But wasn't that the reason why it had been chosen as a forum in the first place? The 
article was returned unread with a letter from Rabinowitch stating that he wasn't qualified and didn't have 
the time to study Velikovsky's books. But he knew enough about the absence of dogmatism in modern 
science to trust the pronouncements of qualified experts. As Epictetus observed almost two thousand 
years go, "A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." 

The summer of 1965 saw the release by Delta of paperback editions ofWorlds in Collision and 
Earth in Upheaval , provoking another round of reactions along the same general lines that had been 
seen before. One reviewer, ridiculing the former book, flaunted his own ignorance of the content of the 
latter by declaring blithely that the alleged events couldn't have happened since "animal life went through 
the fateful year of 1500 b.c. without any disturbance."Science andScientific American both refused to 
accept advertisements for the Delta editions. 

The Planets Speak, Regardless 

An interesting twist to the suppression or ignoring of inconvenient facts was added bySky & 
Telescope , a journal for amateur astronomers published by Harvard Observatory. Their report on the 
findings ofMariner 2 , a summary from the bookMariner, Mission to Venus (1963), by the staff of Jet 
Propulsion Laboratory, deleted references to (a) Venus's retrograde motion; (b) an interpretation of the 
clouds as consisting of condensed hydrocarbons held in oily suspension; (c) absence of water and the 
possibility of small lakes of molten metal; and (d) the paltriness of sunlight, if any, finding its way down 
through the fifteen-mile-thick cloud blanket (effectively demolishing the notion of a "runaway greenhouse 
effect" that had been cobbled together in an attempt to explain the temperature). It could, of course, 
have been coincidence that these were precisely the points that lent the most support to Velikovsky's 
contentions. As Larrabee had commented in his 1963Harpers piece, science itself continued to unfold at 
its own pace regardless of what some scientists tried to make of it. 

Theoretical studies showed that the tidal pumping effect of a large, plastic, plasma object orbiting in 
a strong gravitational field would convert orbital to thermal energy and was consistent with the rapid 
circularization of Venus's orbit.113(Einstein was of the opinion that Velikovskian orbits could arise through 
purely gravitational influence, although it would require some fortuitous coincidences.) It had also been 
shown that a combination of electromagnetic and gravitational forces on the scale envisioned for a Venus 
encounter was quite capable of producing an arrest of apparent celestial motions as seen from Earth 
without violent deceleration by tilting the Earth's axis and producing a temporary transfer of momentum 
from axial spin to a precessional wobble.114 

From Jupiter: In April 1964, radio astronomers measured a sudden change in the rotation rate, 
speculated as caused by interaction of its intense electromagnetic field with fields permeating the Solar 
System. 

From the Moon: TheExplorer 18 satellite measured a lunar magnetosphere extending at least 


68,000 miles. Unexpected volcanic and seismic activity was detected on the Moon—supposedly a 
tectonically dead body for billions of years. Dome structures were identified all over the surface that 
seemed to be bubbles of once-molten magma that had failed to burst—raising the question of how many 
other crater formations might be the marks of bubbles that had. The first tests of lunar rock brought back 
by the Apollo astronauts yielded unexpected amounts of neon and argon. The solar wind was excluded 
as a source, yet the elements had to have come from the outside, since the concentration was found to 
be proportional to the area of the soil grains, not the volume. Hydrocarbons were also found. TheApollo 
11 crew observed peculiar glazed regions where the surface appeared to have been molten too recently 
for erosion of the reflective surface by meteorite and dust infall. Experiments performed by theApollo 15 
team measured a temperature gradient in the surface layers indicating heat flow from the interior, which 
surprised scientists. 

68,000 miles. Unexpected volcanic and seismic activity was detected on the Moon—supposedly a 
tectonically dead body for billions of years. Dome structures were identified all over the surface that 
seemed to be bubbles of once-molten magma that had failed to burst—raising the question of how many 
other crater formations might be the marks of bubbles that had. The first tests of lunar rock brought back 
by the Apollo astronauts yielded unexpected amounts of neon and argon. The solar wind was excluded 
as a source, yet the elements had to have come from the outside, since the concentration was found to 
be proportional to the area of the soil grains, not the volume. Hydrocarbons were also found. TheApollo 
11 crew observed peculiar glazed regions where the surface appeared to have been molten too recently 
for erosion of the reflective surface by meteorite and dust infall. Experiments performed by theApollo 15 
team measured a temperature gradient in the surface layers indicating heat flow from the interior, which 
surprised scientists. 

And from the Earth itself: A paper inNature in 1971115suggested interaction between Earth and an 
external body as the cause of magnetic pole reversals and claimed that tektites—a type of small, glass 
stone—were deposited on Earth at the time of the last reversal. This had previously been believed to 
have occurred 700,000 years ago, but later studies of ancient hearthstones and pottery brought it down 
first to 12,500 years ago, and then to the eighth century b.c. 

Velikovsky had been trying for over a decade to have dating tests performed to check his theories 
of Egyptian chronology but met evasion and obstruction. Eventually, the radiocarbon laboratory at the 
University of Pennsylvania determined dates for samples of wood from the tomb of Tutenkhamen as 
being 200 to 300 years younger than the fourteenth century b.c. that accepted chronology assigns. 
Velikovsky had placed Tutenkhamen in the ninth century. The reported dating fell midway between the 
two, but it doesn't present a problem for Velikovsky's revised chronology because the objects that the 
samples were taken from could have been fashioned from wood that was older. On the other hand, they 
could hardly have been made from trees that grew centuries later, which means that the conventional 
system can only admit a discrepancy. 

There are other reasons why wood can yield incorrectly high radiocarbon dates. Shorter-lived 
items should be more reliable. In a 1964 letter to Dr. Elizabeth Ralph at the University of Pennsylvania, 
Velikovsky had stated that he expected short-lived items from Tutenkhamen's tomb would give figures 
around 840 b.c. The British Museum finally reported tests on reed and palm nut kernels as giving 846 

b.c. and 899 b.c. respectively (designated by the Museum as BM 642A and BM 642B). Despite an 
assurance that these results would be published "shortly," they weren't. But they were discussed in the 
May 1972 issue of the journalPensée . A Dr. Van Oosterhout of the Department of Chemistry and 
Chemical Engineering at the University of Delft, the Netherlands, wrote toPensée in 1973, saying that he 
could find no details in the published radiocarbon data from the British Museum and asking for additional 
information. After follow-up and questioning, an official of the British Museum admitted that results 
deviating substantially from the expected values were often discarded without being published. Another 
letter from the Museum to Van Oosterhout denied that tests on materials from the tomb had ever been 
performed at all.116 
Slaying the Monster: The AAAS 
Velikovsky Symposium, 1974 



Through all of this, two traits stand out in the treatment of Velikovsky by his detractors. One is 
repeated admissions, frequently boasts, by his most vehement critics that they hadn't read the material 
they castigated—as if the touch of it might be somehow unclean and defiling. They just "knew" that he 
couldn't be right, and that was sufficient. The other was that after solemnly reciting commitment to such 
scholarly principles as scientific objectivity, fairness, and civility of discourse, they would then go on to 
immediately violate every one of them. Organized science had tried every tactic of distortion, evasion, 
misrepresentation, intimidation, vilification, and suppression of evidence to slay the monster that 
threatened the entire foundation of the collective uniformitarian worldview and mind-set. But after twenty 
years, interest in Velikovsky's theories was not only getting stronger with the apparent vindication from 
all quarters that was getting past the censorship and receiving coverage, but Velikovsky was no longer 
virtually alone. Scientists from many disciplines were beginning to organize in his defense, bringing the 
message to a new generation of readers and students. The topic became included in university courses, 
and Velikovsky symposia and invitations for Velikovsky to speak on university campuses multiplied. The 
list of venues from 1970 to 1974 included Harvard; SUNY-Buffalo, Notre Dame, and North Carolina 
Universities, as well as McMasters and Lethbridge in Canada; NASA Ames Research Center; Lewis 
and Clark College, Portland; the IBM Research Center; and a conference in Switzerland devoted to his 
work. In 1971 the editors ofPensée decided to publish a special issue on the purely scientific aspects of 
Velikovsky's ideas, but the amount of material available was by then so vast that it became a ten-issue 
series—later compiled into book form asVelikovsky Reconsidered (1976)—which attracted 
widespread attention. 

Through all of this, two traits stand out in the treatment of Velikovsky by his detractors. One is 
repeated admissions, frequently boasts, by his most vehement critics that they hadn't read the material 
they castigated—as if the touch of it might be somehow unclean and defiling. They just "knew" that he 
couldn't be right, and that was sufficient. The other was that after solemnly reciting commitment to such 
scholarly principles as scientific objectivity, fairness, and civility of discourse, they would then go on to 
immediately violate every one of them. Organized science had tried every tactic of distortion, evasion, 
misrepresentation, intimidation, vilification, and suppression of evidence to slay the monster that 
threatened the entire foundation of the collective uniformitarian worldview and mind-set. But after twenty 
years, interest in Velikovsky's theories was not only getting stronger with the apparent vindication from 
all quarters that was getting past the censorship and receiving coverage, but Velikovsky was no longer 
virtually alone. Scientists from many disciplines were beginning to organize in his defense, bringing the 
message to a new generation of readers and students. The topic became included in university courses, 
and Velikovsky symposia and invitations for Velikovsky to speak on university campuses multiplied. The 
list of venues from 1970 to 1974 included Harvard; SUNY-Buffalo, Notre Dame, and North Carolina 
Universities, as well as McMasters and Lethbridge in Canada; NASA Ames Research Center; Lewis 
and Clark College, Portland; the IBM Research Center; and a conference in Switzerland devoted to his 
work. In 1971 the editors ofPensée decided to publish a special issue on the purely scientific aspects of 
Velikovsky's ideas, but the amount of material available was by then so vast that it became a ten-issue 
series—later compiled into book form asVelikovsky Reconsidered (1976)—which attracted 
widespread attention. 
117 

A Glimpse of the Ground Rules 

In the summer of 1972, a past president of the AAAS, astronomer and atmospheric scientist 
Walter Orr Roberts, had written to Stephen L. Talbott, the editor ofPensée , suggesting that a 
symposium be held on Velikovsky's work. It seems that Roberts's motives were fair and aimed at an 
honest reappraisal. The following year an announcement appeared inScience , inviting suggestions for the 
1974 AAAS meeting agenda. Dr. C. J. Ransom, a plasma physicist, AAAS member, and Velikovsky 
supporter, proposed the topic of "Venus—A Youthful Planet," offering himself as conference organizer 
and proposing several more names as speakers. This was rejected without explanation, but less than a 
month later a similar proposal was accepted from the AAAS Astronomy Committee, the salient 
difference being that it was to be organized by noted critics of Velikovsky: Ivan King, astronomer at 

U.C. Berkeley; Donald Goldsmith, assistant professor of astronomy at the State University of New 
York, Stony Brook; and Professor Owen Gingerich, historian of science at Harvard. Because of time 
limitations, it was decided that the symposium should concentrate on the nature and motions of the 
planets, with particular regard to Venus and Jupiter. 
It soon became clear that the intention was not to stage an impartial debate but a court of 
inquisition, where the verdict already had been determined. The aim was not to give Velikovsky a 
hearing but to discredit him in the eyes of the press and the public, and banish his ideas from the forum of 
acceptable scientific discourse. In this it was resoundingly successful and for the most part remains so to 
the present time. 

The agreement had been that there would be six panelists, three pro- and three anti-Velikovsky, 
and that Velikovsky would be allotted excess time since he would be presenting his own paper as well 
as answering his opponents. The promises were promptly broken. The two others that Velikovsky 
nominated to make up his side were Ransom, cited above, and Professor Lynn E. Rose, a specialist in 
the history, philosophy, and method of science, who had also taught ancient history and classical 
languages. These would have made up a formidable team indeed, fully conversant with Velikovsky's 
theories and between them amply informed to speak on all of the important issues. That was probably 


why the rules were hastily changed to exclude them. Rose was disqualified on the grounds that he was 
not from the "hard sciences"—although nothing about such had been said up to this point. Ransom 
obviously fitted this stipulation, but it suddenly became necessary to be an "academician," whereas he 
was at the time employed in corporate research. Velikovsky was unwilling to go away and come back 
with further names when the ones he'd said he wanted were turned down, which later resulted in his 
being blamed for the blatant inequality that he was to face. 

why the rules were hastily changed to exclude them. Rose was disqualified on the grounds that he was 
not from the "hard sciences"—although nothing about such had been said up to this point. Ransom 
obviously fitted this stipulation, but it suddenly became necessary to be an "academician," whereas he 
was at the time employed in corporate research. Velikovsky was unwilling to go away and come back 
with further names when the ones he'd said he wanted were turned down, which later resulted in his 
being blamed for the blatant inequality that he was to face. 

Originally the deal had been for equal time for both sides of the panel. This was now reinterpreted 
to mean equal time for eachspeaker . So, for every half hour that Velikovsky was given, every one of his 
opponents would receive a half hour too. The flagrant bias was hardly allayed by a statement from King 
toPensée stating that "What disturbs the scientists is persistence of these views, in spite of all the efforts 
the scientists have spent on educating the public" and "This is not a debate on the correctness of 
Velikovsky's view of the planetary system; none of us in the scientific community believes that such a 
debate would be remotely justified at a serious scientific meeting."118 

So much for the promised impartiality. It apparently followed that the considerable number of 
specialists who evidentlydid believe that such a debate would be justified were by definition not among 
"us" of the scientific community. 

Velikovsky's hope that the flood of evidence and rekindled interest in his ideas might finally have 
won him a fair hearing had clearly been misplaced. Many of his supporters advised him to pull out right 
there rather than accept a pitch that had already been tilted seismically against him. The bind, of course, 
was that this would immediately have been seized upon as showing that he had no answers. Lynn Rose 
has since speculated that Velikovsky knew exactly what he was doing, and accepted the inevitability of 
short-term defeat, given the climate of the times, in return for an even stronger verdict in his favor that 
history would one day pronounce. 

So it came about that on February 25, 1974, in the Grand Ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel, 
Velikovsky, then in his seventy-ninth year, watched by a press corps that had been appropriately primed 
and apparently saw nothing amiss with the arrangements, mounted the dais to take on four hostile 
opponents all around half his age in an ordeal that would last until 1:00 a.m. and continue the following 
day. The final low trick was that the only paper he was permitted to see in advance was Storer's, which 
didn't deal with Velikovsky's scientific issues. The others were withheld until the day itself, forcing 
Velikovsky to muster what defense he could in the time he could find—a practice that would be illegal in 
any law court not rigged by a totalitarian state. At the end of the first session, which went on for five and 
a half hours, one reporter, seeing that Velikovsky looked tired, remarked that he was not his own best 
spokesman. Not one of the press representatives mentioned that at the end of it all, he had acquitted 
himself well enough to receive a standing ovation. 

Echoing the tone of his memorandum toPensée , King's opening statement included the words, 
"No one who is involved in the organization of this symposium believes that Dr. Velikovsky's ideas are 
correct. Yet millions of people have read his books and after more than twenty years of condemnation 
by the scientific establishment he still has a large and often devoted following. . . . It is in this spirit that 
we present this morning's symposium." In other words, this isn't to debate a scientific theory. The 
purpose is to investigate the persistence of views that we know are wrong. We're here to stamp out 
heresy. 


The first speaker was Storer, who talked about the norms of science and the ideals of method and 
behavior that it seeks to live up to. Acknowledging that the scientific community had violated these 
standards in its treatment of Velikovsky back in the fifties, he reminded the audience that this had been a 
period when science and indeed the whole intellectual enterprise was under attack. The Cold War had 
been at its chilliest, with loyalty oaths being demanded, blacklists drawn up, and Senator Joseph 
McCarthy waiting to pounce at the first hint of deviancy or Communist connection. Simply being a 
scientist was to be a potential traitor, and it was perhaps understandable that they had reacted 
defensively and failed to welcome with open arms another apparent attempt to discredit established 
scientific knowledge—and in particular by an outsider. 

The first speaker was Storer, who talked about the norms of science and the ideals of method and 
behavior that it seeks to live up to. Acknowledging that the scientific community had violated these 
standards in its treatment of Velikovsky back in the fifties, he reminded the audience that this had been a 
period when science and indeed the whole intellectual enterprise was under attack. The Cold War had 
been at its chilliest, with loyalty oaths being demanded, blacklists drawn up, and Senator Joseph 
McCarthy waiting to pounce at the first hint of deviancy or Communist connection. Simply being a 
scientist was to be a potential traitor, and it was perhaps understandable that they had reacted 
defensively and failed to welcome with open arms another apparent attempt to discredit established 
scientific knowledge—and in particular by an outsider. 

Only the Data That's Fit to Print: The Venus Tablets 

Peter Huber's profession and hobby were inverted both in the official program, which described 
him as a "professor of ancient history" speaking on "ancient historical records," and King's introduction 
as one who "has made a study of the ancient archaeological records relating to astronomy. He also, 
incidentally, has a second specialty in statistics . . ."119 

The essence of Huber's paper was that ancient Babylonian records show Venus to have been 
where it is today, orbiting as it does today, long before the events that Velikovsky claims, and therefore 
those events could not have happened. This was a rehash of the same line that Payne-Gaposchkin had 
used twenty years before, and which Velikovsky had answered. The opposition either hadn't read the 
earlier exchanges or didn't care, since it would all be new anyway to the public who were to be 
"educated." 

Huber maintained that "Velikovsky draws on historical and archeological evidence to support his 
hypothesis, but unfortunately his arguments are mainly based on late and secondary sources, in part on 
obsolete and erroneous translations, and therefore lack force." A devastating indictment, by the sound of 
it, from one listed and presented as an authority on the subject. It is acknowledged that discrepancies 
exist between old translations and modern ones, and then asserted that the modern ones contain the 
truth, whereas the older ones do not. A better way to phrase it, however, would be that the older ones 
say what the original records said, whereas the modern ones are "corrected" to reflect what proponents 
of today's approved theory think they should have said. This couldn't have been better demonstrated 
than by the procedure that Huber himself followed. It would have been far more "unfortunate" for Huber 
if Lynn Rose, who was in the audience, had been allowed on the panel as Velikovsky requested. Rose 
made some pointed observations during the questions session afterward, and later, working with 
Raymond C. Vaughan, wrote a detailed rebuttal showing just how far the evidence has to be twisted to 
make it conform to current preconceptions. The title, "Just Plainly Wrong," speaks for itself.120 

Huber's first claim boiled down to stating that records from Uruk, in Mesopotamia, show Venus to 
have existed in the early third millennium b.c., before Velikovsky's Venus encounter occurred. But 
Velikovsky had never denied that Venusexisted before then and was visible. His answer at the 
symposium was, "That Venus was observed before it came into conflict with Earth is clear from what I 
wrote. It did not come from Jupiter just on the eve of that collision. It came thousands of years before. It 
could be seen." And what Velikovsky had said all along could have been seen since 1950. 

From the floor, Lynn Rose made the point that the symbols for Venus in these very sources that 
Huber cited, along with representations of Inanna, the goddess associated with Venus, all take the form 
of a compact body attached to a long, spreading and sometimes curving fan shape, distinctly suggestive 
of a comet. Huber's defense amounted to saying that sometimes they don't. This part of his paper was 


omitted from the version that appeared in the final book form of the proceedings two and a half years 
later, entitled, aptly enough,Scientists Confront Velikovsky (1977).
omitted from the version that appeared in the final book form of the proceedings two and a half years 
later, entitled, aptly enough,Scientists Confront Velikovsky (1977).

Huber's second claim drew upon the Ammizaduga tablets, mentioned earlier, which were 
introduced with something of an air of revelation, as if Velikovsky had avoided them because they would 
damage his case. In fact, Velikovsky cites them extensively for doing just the opposite—provided 
they're allowed to be taken as meaning what they say. 

Since some doubts have been expressed about their conventional assignment to the time of 
Ammizaduga, Rose refers to them as the "Ninsianna" (Venus) document. They record the appearances 
and disappearances of Venus as it moves close to the Sun and it is swamped by the solar glare, causing 
it to be seen first at sunset to one side of the solar disk, and then, following a period of invisibility, at 
dawn on the other. Today, on its inner orbit, Venus is seen for about 260 days as the "Evening Star," 
disappears behind the Sun for 63 to 70 days, reappears on the other side as the "Morning Star" for 
about another 260 days, and after vanishing in front of the Sun for around 8 days becomes the Evening 
Star again. (It took many ancient cultures some time to figure out that it was the same object.) Note that 
there's no conflict in the suggestion of a comet on an eccentric orbit spending part of its period inside the 
Earth's orbit, and hence disappearing periodically behind the Sun. During the time it spent outside the 
Earth's orbit it would at times appear overhead at night, which could never happen with Venus in today's 
circumstances. Older translations, however (the ones dismissed as obsolete by Huber), clearly state it as 
appearing atzenith. 

Huber's contention was that when properly understood, the ancient observations match the orbits 
of Venus and Earth that are seen today, and so the orbits haven't changed. To make this work, a period 
given in the cuneiform records as 5 months, 16 days had to be changed to 2 months, 6 days. Several of 
the names of the months had to be changed. Places where the texts read "west" had to be changed to 
"east," and places where they said "east" were changed to "west." Intercalary months—inserted between 
the regular months of a calendar to correct the cumulative error that builds up from years not being exact 
multiples of days—were taken out from where they had been put in and inserted where the modern 
translators thought they should go. Huber justified such alterations as being necessary to amend "scribal 
errors" in the originals. All in all, under further questioning, he admitted changing thirty percent of his data 
in this way. So presumably a culture that is noted for astronomical records whose accuracy in some 
areas was not rivaled until the nineteenth century employed scribes who couldn't tell east from west, 
didn't know what month it was, and who bungled their figures thirty percent of the time. But that wasn't 
the end of it. In his later, more thorough analysis, "Just Plainly Wrong," Rose found the actual count of 
errors and fudged data to be closer to seventy-five percent. And even after that amount of abuse, they 
still don't fit today's orbits. 

The press and the custodians of truth who had taken it upon themselves to educate the public were 
evidently satisfied that the interests of the public were in good hands. The following month, Owen 
Gingerich, one of the organizers, was quoted inScience (March 14, 1974), in an interview by Robert 
Gillette, as saying that "He [Huber] demolished Velikovsky" and "There was no point in continuing after 
that." As with the Egyptian dating figures that we talked about earlier, whatever didn't fit the assumptions 
was thrown out, and what remained was pointed to as proving the assumptions. The logic is totally 
circular. Or anything else if you like. On this basis you could pick four points from a circle, alter the rest 
to suit, and show that it's a square. Small wonder that modern translations fit the approved theory better. 

A final argument by Huber was again one that had been used before, namely that dates of eclipses 
retrocalculated from modern observations match records from before the events that should have made 
them invalid. Velikovsky responded that none of the instances he was aware of proved much at all, since 
the locations and dates are not specified, the year alone typically being named or inferred indirectly. One 
of Huber's examples, taken from the ChineseSpring and Autumn Annals, was given as occurring in the 
eighth century b.c. In his later study, however, Rose points out that the furthest back this document can 


be traced is 500 to 600 years after that time. So the question arises of whether the eclipse was actually 
observed, or was it inferred through retrocalculation by the compilers of theAnnals a half a millennium 
later?—known to be a not-unusual practice. In support of his cautioning against relying too much on 
such sources, Rose cites a work entitledScience Awakening II: The Birth of Astronomy , by Bartel L. 
Van der Waerden, where Chapter 4 contains the statement, "Very often it is difficult to decide whether 
text data were observed or calculated. We know from the diaries of later times that missing observations 
were filled in by calculation sometimes without explicit indication of the fact."
be traced is 500 to 600 years after that time. So the question arises of whether the eclipse was actually 
observed, or was it inferred through retrocalculation by the compilers of theAnnals a half a millennium 
later?—known to be a not-unusual practice. In support of his cautioning against relying too much on 
such sources, Rose cites a work entitledScience Awakening II: The Birth of Astronomy , by Bartel L. 
Van der Waerden, where Chapter 4 contains the statement, "Very often it is difficult to decide whether 
text data were observed or calculated. We know from the diaries of later times that missing observations 
were filled in by calculation sometimes without explicit indication of the fact."

A contributor to the book, who in his Preface Van der Waerden says wrote considerable parts of 
Chapters 3 and 4—was Peter Huber. 

Pronouncements from the Celestial Heights 

Derral Mullholland was introduced by King as "a celestial mechanician whose name is almost 
synonymous with high precision." The open snub to Velikovsky, whose ideas, the gathering had shortly 
before been informed, "No one who is involved in the organization of this symposium believes . . . are 
correct," was difficult to miss; as were the implied directions to those interpreting the event for the public 
as to how they should apportion their impartial evaluation. 

Mulholland opened: "Before I am asked the question, I would like to point out that I first read Dr. 
Velikovsky's work inCollier's magazine, when I was sixteen years old, and have read that same work 
three times since, the most recent yet this year. I found it entertaining when I was sixteen, incidentally, 
and I still do."123The celestial mechanician whose name was almost synonymous with high precision, 
having given his source as a popular magazine, then began with a synopsis of Velikovsky's planetary 
theory that read: "Within the folk memory of man, Venus and Mars erupted into the sky and rushed 
close to the Earth and each other several times. . . . Finally, the two giant comets settle down into their 
present harmless orbits and became peaceable planets." 

Whether he had in mind this invented scenario or the one that Velikovsky actually described, 
Mulholland repeated the usual insistence that gravitational dynamics provides the most clear-cut 
contradiction to its being possible. Well, without repeating all that was said earlier, suffice it to say that 
Einstein didn't think so. The critique then went on to question the validity of accounts of abnormally long 
days and nights from various parts of the world, when the durations given by people said to possess 
clocks of high accuracy varied from three to ten days. The lowest form of wit notwithstanding, it's 
difficult to restrain an impulse toward sarcasm at a suggestion that people in terror, beset by 
earthquakes, hurricanes, totally enveloping darkness, and torrents of meteorites should be faulted for 
losing track of time and failing to check with their sundials and water clocks. Mulholland also stated that 
the myths Velikovsky quotes "do not seem to satisfy the simple requirement" that abnormally long day in 
one hemisphere ought to be accompanied by abnormally long night in the other. Perhaps the myths 
Velikovsky quotes that do say precisely this were not among the excerpts condensed inCollier's . 

InWorlds in Collision , Velikovsky discusses various ancient sundials and water clocks that read 
incorrectly for the locations that they are found at, and offers this as evidence of changes in the Earth's 
motion in space. Mulholland's rejoinder was to doubt the accuracy of such old artifacts and question 
whether they were constructed at the sites where they are found. No independent evidence is cited of 
such inaccuracies, or that any relocation of the instruments in question actually took place. The 
assumptions are made ad hoc, to conform to a preconceived theory that the lengths of days, months, 
and yearsmust have been the same as they are today. Therefore ancient peoples were unable to 
measure the time of day. In fact, Babylonian water clocks were accurate enough to be used for 
astronomical observations and measuring the distances between stars in arc degrees.124Moving sundials 
to another location would make no sense, as anyone capable of designing them would know. A water 
clock would function correctly at a different latitude if it told only constant hours, but not if it measured 
different hours in summer and winter. Some water clocks divided day into twelve hours and night into 


twelve hours, which vary with latitude and with the seasons. Again, it's difficult to imagine designers who 
were aware of these differences not having the competence to set them up correctly. 

twelve hours, which vary with latitude and with the seasons. Again, it's difficult to imagine designers who 
were aware of these differences not having the competence to set them up correctly. 
125 

In any case, Mulholland maintained, if the spins and orbits of the bodies Velikovsky talks about 
were seriously disturbed, they would depart from the smooth progression showing angular momentum as 
a function of mass across the bodies of the Solar System. But he admitted that Mercury, Venus, the 
Moon, and Mars didn't fit the relationship. Ransom and Rose later showed that the function line misses 
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Neptune, and the Sun. Too bad they weren't up on the panel. 

It would not be out of place to mention here that the pictures of Mars returned byMariners 6 and7 
in 1969 had shown a system of surface cracks ("lineaments") running more or less straight over extended 
distances and aligned with the rotational axis, indicating a violent deceleration and change in angular 
momentum at some time, stressing the crust. Comparable structures are seen also on the Moon and on 
Earth. 

During the question session after Storer's talk earlier, Mulholland had given anomalous mass 
concentrations on the Moon and the unexpected internal heat of the Moon as examples of scientists' 
readiness to accept new concepts when they were justified. Velikovsky asked if he knew who had been 
the first person to claim that the Moon would be found to have internal heat, and if there was any 
explanation for the mass concentrations other than an encounter with other celestial bodies. Mulholland 
had no suggestion regarding the second, and admitted that he didn't know the answer to the first, 
apparently not realizing that the person had been Velikovsky himself. 

Irving Michelson's talk was in the evening session and went back to the notion of electrical forces 
playing a role in celestial dynamics. Mulholland rejected the suggestion that they played any role, and 
when Velikovsky cited Danjon's report of a temporary slowing of the Earth's rotation by electrical 
influences following a large solar flare, Mulholland denied that Danjon's data had shown any such effect. 

Toward the end of his paper, Michelson mentioned a "curious but tantalizing" finding of his: that the 
energy required to turn the Earth's rotational axis through 180ºcorresponded closely to estimates of a 
single moderately strong geomagnetic storm that could be triggered by a solar flare—in the way the 
energy of a bomb is triggered by the small energy release of a detonator. Evidently missing the point, 
Mulholland scoffed at the idea, pointing out that since 108times as much energy is emitted by a solar flare 
as is intercepted by the Earth, Michelson's result was in error by that amount. When Michelson 
responded wearily, "I'll let that go," his remark was widely misinterpreted as meaning that he had no 
answer. A stormy exchange of correspondence resulted subsequently with the editorial department of 
Science , who tried to suppress a letter from Michelson straightening out the error. 

Dr. Robert Bass, who had been a keen observer of the whole affair for some years, wrote a 
concise reply to a number of the points that Mulholland had raised in the day and requested time to 
present them at the same evening session, which was supposedly open to all. He was told that this 
wouldn't be allowed since the public might become confused if a noted authority disagreed with the 
expert chosen by the committee. 

Well, at least we can be comforted that the organizers hadn't forgotten their commitment to 
education. 

Carl Sagan: The Star Billing 

And then there was Dr. Carl Sagan. . . . How to begin here? 

Professor Lynn Rose records that in January 1974, when arrangements for the symposium were 
being finalized, he commented in a letter to Stephen Talbott atPensée that Sagan delivered errors and 


untruths at a rate faster than it would be possible tolist in the time Velikovsky was being given, let alone 
be able to refute them. In a tape of a lecture by Sagan at Cornell in March 1973 entitled "Venus and 
Velikovsky," Rose timed them at three or four per minute, giving a grand total of several score. His 
review of them appeared some years later in the journalThe Velikovskian , edited by Charles Ginenthal. 

untruths at a rate faster than it would be possible tolist in the time Velikovsky was being given, let alone 
be able to refute them. In a tape of a lecture by Sagan at Cornell in March 1973 entitled "Venus and 
Velikovsky," Rose timed them at three or four per minute, giving a grand total of several score. His 
review of them appeared some years later in the journalThe Velikovskian , edited by Charles Ginenthal. 
127Even after the time that had been given to reflect, as far as Sagan was concerned all questioning 
of accepted theory originated in theminds of the—implicitly—deluded, to justify religious convictions. 
No possibility exists that it could have originated in the form of real events in the real universe before 
anything at all was written. On page 126 he goes on, "Velikovsky attempts to rescue not only religion 
but also astrology." 

Hence, the question of a scientific debate never arose. The presumption of fighting an evangelical 
crusade was written into the ground rules from the beginning, and when saving souls from heresy is at 
stake, winning is the only thing that counts, at whatever cost and by any means. Robert Anton Wilson 
writes: 

"Sagan likes to quote a 'distinguished professor of Semitics' who told him no Semitic scholars take 
Dr. Velikovsky very seriously. . . . [T]his 'distinguished professor' remains anonymous, and thus Sagan's 
hearsay about him would get thrown out of any civilized court. Three distinguished professors of Semitic 
studies, however, have all shown cordial support for Dr. Velikovsky: Prof. Claude F. A. Schaeffer, 
Prof. Etienne Droiton, and Prof. Robert Pfeiffer. Look them up in anyWho's Who of Semitic studies, 
archeology and Egyptology. They have a lot more prestige in those fields than Sagan's Prof. 
Anonymous, who doesn't have a single entry under his name anywhere . . ."128 

At the San Francisco symposium, Sagan presented ten problems, which he referred to as 
"plagues," with Velikovsky's proposals. Ginenthal's book (1995) that I cited near the beginning is a 
compilation and rebuttal of the errors, evasions, denials of evidence, and self-contradictions that took the 
author eight years of research and occupies 447 pages. I will touch on all of them, elaborating on just a 
few. 

Sagan on Astronomy 

Problem 1. The Ejection of Venus by Jupiter 

Sagan stated that "Velikovsky's hypothesis begins with an event that has never been observed by 
astronomers and that is inconsistent with much that we know about planetary and cometary physics, 
namely the ejection of an object of planetary dimensions from Jupiter." 

One wonders who, exactly, the "we" in the authoritarian "we know" is, since the literature makes it 
clear that the scientific community didn't pretend to know, and nothing much in that respect has changed 
since. As related above, grave doubts had been cast on the fashionable tidal and accretion theories of 
Solar System formation, and such figures as McCrea and Lyttleton couldn't have been among the "we" 
who "knew," since the fission theory that their work (among others) pointed to emerged as an alternative 
thatwas consistent with planetary physics. And the reason for their conclusions? Gravitational theory— 
precisely what Velikovsky was accused of not understanding or ignoring. But he was fully conversant 
with Lyttleton's work, which he had cited in "Venus—A Youthful Planet" seven years previously. Sagan 
also produced figures for energy and heat generation showing that a volcanic eruption on Jupiter couldn't 
have ejected an object resembling Venus, which was all neither here nor there because Velikovsky 
never said that a volcanic eruption had. 

Sagan went on: "From the fact that the apehelia (greatest distances from the Sun) of the orbits of 
short-period comets have a statistical tendency to lie near Jupiter, Laplace and other early astronomers 
hypothesized that Jupiter was the source of such comets. This is an unnecessary hypothesis because we 
now know [again] that long-period comets may be transferred to short-period trajectories by the 


perturbations of Jupiter." 

perturbations of Jupiter." 
129 

So ever since 1893 there had been people who not only didn't "know," but found such a transfer 
model unsupported by the evidence. The main problem is that it would only happen very rarely that a 
comet entering the Solar System would pass close enough to Jupiter to be pulled into an elliptical orbit 
that returns it periodically to near Jupiter's distance from the Sun. S. K. Vsekhsviatsky estimates 1 in 
100,000, whereas the observed ratio is about 1 in 25. About 70 comets are known in the Jupiter family, 
and their lifetime is estimated to be not more than 4,000 years before repeated passes by the Sun 
evaporate all their volatiles and cause them to break up. Capturing this number from parabolic comets 
entering from afar would require seven million comets entering the Solar System over the last 4,000 
years, which works out at five per day. Since a comet would remain in the System for a few years, the 
night sky should contain somewhere around 9,000 of them. It doesn't. A further difficulty is that all the 
Jovian comets orbit the Sun in the same direction, but since incoming trajectories should show no 
preference, according to the capture model about half should be retrograde. As a final embarrassment, 
the perturbation of comets by planets can work to eject them from the Solar System too, and this in fact 
turns out to be a more likely and effective mechanism, resulting in the number of short-period comets as 
a whole being in the order of one hundred times too large. 

On the other hand, all of these observations are consistent with the suggestion of many such objects 
being created recently inside the Solar System. (Accounts from the Roman period indicate significantly 
more comets occurring then than are seen today.) And no elaborate and implausible construction is 
needed to explain why they should appear to have originated from the vicinity of Jupiter, for the simple 
reason that they did. 

The conventional way of preserving the short-term-capture principle is the "Oort Cloud," 
postulated to contain millions of cometary bodies and extend halfway to the nearest stars, which once in 
a while is disturbed by a passing star to send showers of comets into the Solar System. However, 
studies of the distribution of comet trajectories and energies show the long-term comets to be quite 
distinct from shorter-period ones. Arrivals from such a remote source should exhibit preponderantly 
hyperbolic orbits incapable of being converted to short-term ones. To explain the short-term comets, a 
new cloud termed the "Kuiper Belt" is then proposed, existing in deep space near the planetary plane. 
Finally, a belt of "dark matter," the invisible astronomical duct tape that fixes anything, is introduced to 
induce the Kuiper Belt comets to approach the Solar System. None of this has ever been "observed by 
astronomers" either. It's invented to enable what the theory requires. 

Plenty of people, on the other hand, did claim to have observed the event that Sagan denies, and 
they left precise descriptions of it. But since Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Maya, and the like aren't 
figured among the exalted "we," they don't count as astronomers. 

Problem 2. Repeated Collisions Among the Earth, Venus, And Mars 

Sagan produces a mathematical proof that the probability of five or six near collisions occurring 
between a comet and a planet are in the order of a "trillion quadrillion" (1027) to one against. The trouble 
with it is that it treats each near-collision as an independent event unrelated to the others, which in effect 
ignores gravity. It's a simple consequence of Newton's laws that two celestial bodies, once they have 
interacted gravitationally, will continue to approach one another periodically. The astronomer Robert 
Bass wrote that this was "so disingenuous that I do not hesitate to label it a deliberate fraud on the public 


or else a manifestation of unbelievable incompetence or hastiness combined with desperation."or else a manifestation of unbelievable incompetence or hastiness combined with desperation."On the 
other hand, Sagan has no hesitation in accepting that "most short-period comets may have achieved their 
orbits by multiple encounters with Jupiter, or even by multiple encounters with more distant planets and 
eventually Jupiter itself"—a process calculated to require hundreds of repeated near-collisions. 

In his own bookComet (1985) Sagan states (p. 266) that a collision with an Earth-crossing 
asteroid kilometers across, which he believes to be extinct comets, would represent "a major 
catastrophe, of a sort that must have happened from time to time during the history of the Earth. It is a 
statistical inevitability." Enough said. 

Problem 3. The Earth's Rotation 

Sagan's question here is how, if the Earth slowed down in its rotation, could it get speeded up 
again? The Earth couldn't do it by itself, he insisted, because of the law of conservation of angular 
momentum. In 1960, as we've already seen, Danjon measured precisely this happening and attributed it 
to electrical effects. Conceivably Sagan, like Mulholland, simply refused to believe it. But in 1972 it had 
happened again, this time even more impressively. On August 7–8, after a week of frenzied solar 
activity, Stephen Plagemann and John Gribbin measured a 10-millisecond lengthening of the day, once 
more followed by a gradual return to normal.131 

This is in accord with electrical fundamentals, whereby adding charge to a rotating flywheel 
constitutes a current that increases the polar moment of inertia, which by the conservation of angular 
momentum must be accompanied by a decrease in angular velocity, i.e., the flywheel slows down. When 
the wheel is grounded, dissipating the charge, then by the same principle of conservation—the very law 
that Sagan invokes—the wheel, still storing the same mechanical energy but with no electrical force to 
overcome, will speed up again. The application of this to planetary dynamics is discussed by Ralph 
Juergens.132 

Sagan goes on to another mathematical proof, this time showing that the energy released by the 
Earth's stopping would be enough to boil all the oceans and generate enough heat to end all advanced 
life forms. But once again, it isn't necessary for the Earth to halt to produce the visual effect of the Sun's 
motion being arrested or even reversed. Ginenthal points out that with proto-Venus approaching from 
the sunward direction, the Earth would be pulled first inward and then outward from its normal orbit, the 
differences in distance being sufficient on their own to make the Sun appear to move more slowly, 
without appreciable change in the Earth's rotation at all. He refers anyone skeptical of such a possibility 
to the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan, who later wrote: 

"There is another strange thing about Mercury. It has a highly elliptical orbit. That is, there is a 
commensurate relation between how long the planet takes to turn once around its axis and how long it 
takes to go around the Sun. . . . Suppose you stood at one particular place on the equator of Mercury. 
During the course of the day there you would observe the following. You would see it rising . . . moving 
toward the zenith . . . Then one degree past the zenith it stops, reverses its motion in the sky, stops 
again, then continues its original motion. . . ."133 

That was in 1975. I can only wonder what might have prompted the inspiration. 

Sagan on Terrestrial and Lunar Geology 

Problem 4. Terrestrial Geology And Lunar Craters 

Sagan repeats the assertion that there ought to be ample geological and archeological evidence of 
such catastrophes if they happened, but he was unable to find records of any. One can only suggest 
visiting the library on that one—as Velikovsky did, and found enough to fill a whole book. 

Sagan was aware of Velikovsky's contention that major mountain uplifts had attended these recent 
events, but stated that this was belied by geological evidence that put them at tens of millions of years old 
or more. It's true that the evidence Sagan cites is generally interpreted that way. But we've already seen 
how sufficient prior belief in a theory can influence interpretation of the evidence by uncritically accepting 


whatever conforms to it and rejecting anything that doesn't. Much of Velikovsky's evidence was of a 
kind that doesn't lend itself to a wide range of interpretation—for example, of human presence in the 
Alps and Andes at heights that are uninhabitable today. It's difficult to read this in any other way than 
that within the time of human history the land was a lot lower, or else the climate at high altitudes was a 
lot milder. The second alternative has trouble on other counts, for instance that in the historical period 
usually assigned to these cultures, glacial cover was more extensive. 

whatever conforms to it and rejecting anything that doesn't. Much of Velikovsky's evidence was of a 
kind that doesn't lend itself to a wide range of interpretation—for example, of human presence in the 
Alps and Andes at heights that are uninhabitable today. It's difficult to read this in any other way than 
that within the time of human history the land was a lot lower, or else the climate at high altitudes was a 
lot milder. The second alternative has trouble on other counts, for instance that in the historical period 
usually assigned to these cultures, glacial cover was more extensive. 

With regard to Velikovsky's claim that the Moon should show signs of recent disturbances and 
melting, Sagan responds that the samples returned by the Apollo missions show no melting of rock more 
than a few hundred million years ago. We've already seen some examples of how strong expectations of 
what the results ought to be can lead to circular reasoning in dating procedures. And lunar dating is no 
exception. When it was believed early on that lunar rocks would provide a direct measure of the age of 
the Moon and hence the Earth, the results subsequently released with confidence and which found their 
way into textbooks cited 4.5 billion years, which agreed exactly with the predictions of the most widely 
accepted theory. Later, the actual data were found to cover the range 2 billion years to 28 billion, in 
other words from less than half of what was expected to 8 billion years before the universe was 
supposed to have existed. 

But aside from that, Velikovsky had suggested in a letter to theNew York Times in 1971 that tests 
be performed on lunar material by the dating method of thermoluminescence, which many authorities 
consider to be more reliable than radioisotope testing. NASA did in fact have such tests performed, at 
the Washington University, St. Louis. The results on samples from six inches or so beneath the surface— 
below recently deposited dust and mixing of micrometeorites—showed them to have been molten less 
than ten thousand years ago. Sagan should surely have been aware of this. It's also worthy of mention 
that the darker "maria" features of the lunar surface, which consist of vast solidified lava sheets, occur not 
haphazardly but cover a broad swathe following a great circle across one hemisphere—consistent with 
tidal melting induced by a close-passing massive object. 

And speaking of the great lunar plains, what happened to all the dust that ought to be covering 
them? According to estimates of the rate of infalling meteorite dust and other debris on Earth—including 
some made by Sagan himself—if the lunar surface has been exposed for over four billion years, it ought 
to have accumulated dust to a depth of more than fifty feet. An early concern of the space program had 
been that the landers would sink into the dust or become too bogged down in it to take off again. But all 
that was found was about an eighth of an inch. On the other hand, such features as rills, rifts, and crater 
walls that should, by those same figures, have been eroded away and disappeared long ago seemed 
sharp and fresh—dare one say "young"? The features that should have been gone were still there, while 
the dust that should have worn them down and buried them was not. And even of the dust that does 
exist, only 1 to 2 percent turns out to be meteoritic. The rest comes from "gardening" (after remelting?) 
of the moon rock itself. 

Exposed lunar rock is a natural particle counter. Fast-moving particles of cosmic dust produce tiny, 
glass-lined microcraters, and if the exposure age is known—which solar-flare particle tracks in the glass 
linings should indicate—a count of the crater density will give a measure of the rate at which the rock 
was bombarded. Studies of a largeApollo 16 sample showed exposure on the lunar surface for abut 
eighty thousand years, but with the rate of particle bombardment going up during the last ten thousand 
years. Nuclear tracks on interplanetary dust particles collected in the Earth's stratosphere also indicate 
an age no greater than ten thousand years.134 


Sagan on Planetary Biology and Chemistry 

Sagan on Planetary Biology and Chemistry 

According to Sagan, "Velikovsky's thesis has some peculiar biological and chemical consequences, 
which are compounded by some straightforward confusion of simple matters. He seems not to know (p. 
16) that oxygen is produced by green-plant photosynthesis on the Earth." 

What Velikovsky says on p. 16 ofWorlds in Collision is that under the conditions envisaged by 
the tidal and nebular theories of planet formation, the iron of the globe should have oxidized and 
combined with all the available oxygen. Thus there would be no oxygen to form the abundance found in 
the modern atmosphere. Sagan says it comes from photosynthesis. But plants are also composed partly 
of oxygen, and hence need it to form before they can start making it. And before it existed in any 
significant amount, there would be no ozone in the upper atmosphere to block harmful bands of 
ultraviolet that would stop biological molecules forming. Moving the process under water as some 
theorists have tried to do doesn't help much, since water is about as damaging and corrosive as oxygen 
and UV for organic chemistry without complex biological defenses to protect it. So it's not clear how the 
earliest plants got started. 

This is a well-known problem that has been widely acknowledged among scientists, including 
Sagan himself inBroca's Brain . The usual assumption is that the plants got started somehow on trace 
amounts of oxygen, and once it was in production, bootstrapped themselves from there. The snag with 
this is that while the beginnings of life are conventionally put at around a billion years ago, the existence 
of massive "red beds" of rock rich in oxidized iron testify to the existence of not traces but large amounts 
of available oxygen a billion years earlier. So where did that come from? That's what Velikovsky was 
saying. Answering that "the green plants did it" doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't sound to me as if it 
was Velikovsky who was confused here. 

Worlds in Collisionhas petroleum liquids falling to Earth at the time of the meteorite storm as Earth 
moves into the comet's tail, before the time of intense darkness to which smoke from the widespread 
fires contributed. In a later section of the book, entitled "Ambrosia," Velikovsky speculates that the 
"manna from heaven" that saved the Israelites when no other food was to be had could have been 
carbohydrates formed from hydrocarbon vapors reacting with oxygen under the influence of sunlight in 
the upper atmosphere. (The difference between them is that carbohydrates, such as sugars, contain 
oxygen whereas hydrocarbons don't.) Interestingly, traditions from as far removed as Iceland, the 
Maoris of the Pacific, Greece, India, Egypt, and Finland all tell of a time when a sweet, sticky, milky or 
honey-like substance precipitated from the skies. Sagan's reading of this is that Velikovsky claimed there 
were carbohydrates on Jupiter and Venus; that he displayed a sustained confusion of carbohydrates and 
hydrocarbons; and "seems to imagine that the Israelites were eating motor oil rather than divine 
nutriment . . ." The irony is that all of Sagan's errors here can be explained by his showing precisely that 
confusion himself. 

If Venus came from Jupiter and was a comet carrying hydrocarbons, then presumably it brought 
those hydrocarbons from Jupiter. Sagan asks (1) Are hydrocarbons found on Jupiter? (2) Do comets 
contain hydrocarbons? (3) Is there a process that converts hydrocarbons to carbohydrates? which 
questions, he says, pose "grave difficulties" for Velikovsky. 

In answer to (1), Ginenthal cites the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan, who at a NASA 
conference, after describing the Jovian atmosphere, relates a series of experiments that he and his 
associates performed on comparable mixtures, producing a high yield of a brownish colored substance. 
Analysis showed it to be " . . . a very complex mixture of organic molecules, that is carbon-based 
molecules, some of very high complexity. Most of them were of the kind called straight chain 
hydrocarbons."135 

This information was also available from theEncyclopedia Britannica by 1972, which in Vol.13, 

p.142 for that year states that "the upper atmosphere of Jupiter is a giant organic factory producing 
complex organic molecules that include many of biological importance." 

In answer to (2), yes, "in large amounts," according to the same well-known astronomer, in his 
bookComet (p.153). 

In answer to (2), yes, "in large amounts," according to the same well-known astronomer, in his 
bookComet (p.153). 

Next, we move to Mars. Sagan cites Velikovsky as saying that the Martian polar caps are "made 
of manna, which are described ambiguously as 'probably in the nature of carbon.' " Actually, it's Sagan's 
inversion of the text that loses clarity. Velikovsky states that the white precipitate masses are "probably 
of the nature of carbon," having been derived from Venus, and later refers to this substance as "manna"— 
using the double quotes—when speculating that the differences from terrestrial conditions prevent it from 
being permanently dissolved by sunlight. 

There seem to be two ingredients to the Martian polar caps. One disappears during the summer 
and is thought to be solid carbon dioxide that sublimates, while the nature of the other, which remains, is 
still "unsettled"—the word Sagan uses in his bookThe Cosmic Connection (1973), published the year 
before the symposium. Since then, others have concluded that it contains carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, 
the elements needed for carbohydrates—and enough ultraviolet exists there to produce them. 

BeforeMariner 4 , scientists had felt confident that Mars would turn out to be generally flattish, at 
most with a gently undulating surface. The craters, uplifts, and planetwide system of canyons and 
fractures that they saw in the pictures came as a shock. Sagan seems to have forgotten this when he 
assures us that the features observed are fully compatible with an ancient surface shaped hundreds of 
millions of years ago than a planet recently devastated by catastrophic events. But the fact that these 
features can be seen at all belies this. Thin as it may be, the atmosphere of Mars creates high-velocity 
dust storms for seasons that last from three to six months and at times blanket the entire planet. The 
erosion from this process should long ago have worn down any features of prominence, and things like 
cracks, river beds, flood plains, and runoff channels would be completely obliterated by the volume of 
sand produced. We even have some indication of the rates that would be involved from the following, 
which appeared inAviation Week and Space Technology , January 29, 1973—a year before the 
symposium. 

UsingMariner 9 wind data, Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University calculated 
erosion rates, assuming a dust storm peak wind of 100 mph blowing ten percent of the 
time. This would mean erosion of 10 km (6.2 miles) of surface in 100 million 
years. . . . there is no way to reconcile this picture with a view of the planet. 

The enormous amounts of water that evidently existed on Mars at one time could only add to the 
process of erasing the ancient surface and reworking it. Where all the water went and why is another 
mystery, along with the atmosphere that must have existed to be compatible with liquid oceans. 
Observers have commented repeatedly on the sharpness and definition of the surface formations, and 
found themselves at a loss to explain how they could have the appearance of being so new. That the 
obvious answer never seemed to occur to anyone, or was repressed as taboo, perhaps testifies to the 
power of professional indoctrination and the pressures to conform. 

Problem 6. Manna 

Yes, I know we already covered this, but Sagan evidently couldn't let it go. Here, he concedes that 
"comet tails" contain hydrocarbons "but no aldehydes—the building blocks of carbohydrates." However, 
in his bookComet (p. 134) he shows how, in the Earth's atmosphere, water vapor, methane, and 
ammonia, all of them constituents of comets (pp.149–150) "are broken into pieces . . . by ultraviolet light 


from the Sun or electrical discharges. These molecules recombine to form, among other molecules . . . 
formaldehyde." Which, in case the connection isn't clear, is an aldehyde. 

from the Sun or electrical discharges. These molecules recombine to form, among other molecules . . . 
formaldehyde." Which, in case the connection isn't clear, is an aldehyde. 

But that's beside the point because "it is now known that comets containlarge quantities of simple 
nitriles—in particular, hydrogen cyanide and methyl cyanide. These are poisons, and it is not immediately 
obvious that comets are good to eat." (emphasis added) 

Sagan also deals with the question of cyanide in comets in his bookComet . Here, however, he 
ridicules people in the past for imagining that the amounts were anything to worry about. For example, 
with regard to the passage of Halley's comet relatively close to the Earth in 1910 (pp. 143–144): 
"People imagined themselves choking, gasping, and dying in millions, asphyxiated by the poison gas. The 
global pandemonium . . . was sadly fueled by a fewastronomers who should have known better ." 
(emphasis added) "The cyanogen gas is in turn a minor constituent in the tails of comets. Even if the 
Earth had passed through the tail in 1910 and the molecules in the tail had been mixed thoroughly down 
to the surface of the Earth, there would have been only one molecule of cyanogen in every trillion 
molecules of air." 

Problem 7. The Clouds of Venus 

The layer of bright clouds covering Venus is perhaps its most immediately striking characteristic, 
making it one of the brightest objects in the skies. What these clouds are composed of has long been a 
topic of debate and study. The atmosphere of Earth consists mostly of nitrogen and oxygen, but the 
clouds that form in it are water vapor. 

Sagan was long of the opinion that Venus's clouds were water vapor, too—the subject formed a 
large part of his research as a graduate student. This could perhaps have been partly why he clung to the 
conviction long after others, including Velikovsky, had noted that it wasn't compatible with theMariner 2 
findings from 1963.Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966), coauthored by Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii, 
states (p. 323), "From a variety of observations . . . it has recently been established that the clouds of 
Venus are indeed made of water [ice crystals at the top and droplets at the bottom]." In 1968 his 
published paper "The Case for Ice Clouds on Venus" appeared in theJournal of Geophysical Research 
(Vol. 73, No. 18, September 15). 

Velikovsky had predicted that the atmosphere of Venus would contain "petroleum [hydrocarbon] 
gases," which perhaps explains the somewhat peevish tone when Sagan tells us that "Velikovsky's 
prognostication that the clouds of Venus were made of carbohydrates has many times been hailed as an 
example of a successful scientific prediction." (No, Carl. The carbohydrates were produced in the 
atmosphere ofEarth . The one that's got "ate" in it is the one that you "eat." Try remembering it that way.) 

By 1974 Sagan had decided that "the question of the composition of the Venus clouds—a major 
enigma for centuries—has recently been solved (Young and Young, 1973; Sill 1972; Young 1973; 
Pollacket. al., 1974). The clouds of Venus are composed of an approximately 75 percent solution of 
sulfuric acid."136 

However, in the following year Andrew T. Young, one of the sources whom Sagan cites as an 
architect of that theory, was to caution in a NASA report that "none of the currently popular 
interpretations of cloud phenomenon on Venus is consistent with all the data. Either a considerable 
fraction of the observational evidence is faulty or has been misinterpreted, or the clouds of Venus are 


much more complex than the current simplistic models."much more complex than the current simplistic models."The enigma still did not seem generally to be 
considered solved by the 1980s, and several of the models being proposed then made no mention of 
sulfuric acid. 

But it had been reported back in 1963, following theMariner 2 flyby in December of 1962, that 
the clouds of Venus contained hydrocarbons. At the symposium Sagan dismissed this as an instance of 
journalists seizing on a scientist's personal conjecture and reporting it as fact. Velikovsky disagreed, 
having established that the person who originated the statement, Professor L. D. Kaplan of the Jet 
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), had arrived at his conclusion after careful consideration of the data and 
had repeated it in several papers and memoranda. Sagan's assertion that JPL revoked the statement was 
also untrue. JPL's reportMission to Venus (Mariner II) , published in 1963, states that "At their base, 
the clouds are about 200ºF and probably are comprised of condensed hydrocarbons." 

Having evidently done his homework, Velikovsky had also ascertained that in a later letter to a 
colleague at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, Kaplan's identifying of "hydrocarbons" caused 
a violent reaction among astronomers—at that time Kaplan was seemingly unaware of just why. In a 
later version he amended the offending term to "organic compounds." 

The tenor of the astronomers who reacted violently might perhaps be gauged from a later item in 
Popular Science (April 1979) reporting that the head of the mass spectrometer team forPioneer Venus 
2 stunned colleagues by reporting that the atmosphere of Venus contains 300 to 500 times as much 
argon as Earth. He then went on to say there were indications that the lower atmosphere may be rich in 
methane—the simplest hydrocarbon, and also a constituent of Jupiter's atmosphere. A follow-up article 
inScience News (September 1992) describes the researchers as being so surprised by the findings of 
methane that they were loathe to publish them. The explanation concocted was that the probe must have 
just happened to come down over a volcanic eruption of a size which, to produce the amount of 
methane indicated, would occur about once in a hundred million years. 

As an amusing footnote, if it turns out that Sagan was indeed correct in his insistence on 
sulfuric-acid clouds (we left the jury as still being out), then it would seem to rule out the possibility of 
Venus being 4 billion years old, since sulfuric acid would decompose under solar ultraviolet radiation. 
People who have done the calculations give sulfuric acid a lifetime in the upper atmosphere of ten 
thousand years at most. The hydrogen resulting from its dissociation would escape into space, as would 
hydrogen released by the dissociation of water released through volcanic outgassing. What's missing is 
all the oxygen that this ought to produce. Similar considerations apply to the abundance of carbon 
dioxide, CO2, which splits into O and CO (carbon monoxide) under ultraviolet, and the two do not 
readily recombine. Once again, where is all the oxygen that ought to be there? 

In considering Earth, earlier, we touched on the puzzle of abundant oxygen combining with iron 
(also identified on Venus) in early times, a billion years before life is supposed to have emerged, and 
asked where it came from. So everything is consistent with the suggestion that when looking at Venus 
now, we're watching a new Earth in the making. 

Sagan on Planetary Physics and Surfaces 

Problem 8. The Temperature of Venus 

The conventional view before results fromMariner 2 showed, in early 1963, the surface 
temperature of Venus to be 800ºF had been that it would be slightly warmer than Earth. By the time of 
the symposium Sagan's recollection had become, in effect, that "we knew it all along." In fact, the only 
person—apart from Velikovsky—who had predicted a high temperature was a Dr. Rupert Wildt, 
whose work was based on a greenhouse mechanism and not generally accepted. (By 1979 Sagan's 
memory had evidently suffered a further lapse, for inBroca's Brain he states [p. 153], "One now 
fashionable suggestion I first proposed in 1960 is that the high temperatures on the surface of Venus are 
due to a runaway greenhouse effect.") When the conventional view was shown to be spectacularly 
wrong (one is tempted to say "catastrophically"), Wildt's proposal was hastily resurrected in an attempt 
to explain why, while preserving the doctrine of a long-established planet and slow, uniformitarian 


change. 

change. 
ºF cooler) isn't carbon 
dioxide but water vapor, which contributes over 90 percent. Back in the days when Venus's atmosphere 
was believed to contain a considerable amount of water, the suggestion of an enhanced greenhouse 
effect yielding temperatures considerably higher than those generally proposed wasn't unreasonable. But 
it just doesn't work as a plausible mechanism for sustaining the huge temperature gradient that exists 
down through Venus's atmosphere. Especially when it turns out that the heat source is at the bottom, not 
the top. 

Besides an efficient medium for absorbing and reradiating incoming radiation, an effective 
greenhouse also needs adequate penetration of the medium by sunlight to utilize the available mass. With 
Venus, for a start, only about twenty percent of the incoming sunlight gets past the cloud tops forty to 
forty-five miles above the surface, the rest being reflected back into space—which is why Venus is so 
bright. The surface pressure on Venus is around ninety times that of Earth's, which translates into 
something like seventy-five times the mass of gases, giving it more the optical characteristics of a sea—in 
fact, corresponding to a depth of about three thousand feet. Virtually all the sunlight entering the oceans 
is absorbed within the top three hundred feet. Likewise, any greenhouse mechanism on Venus would be 
confined to the top fifteen percent of the atmosphere. These objections were well known. In 1968 the 
British astronomer V. A. Firshoff, inThe Interior Planets , put it like this: 

The greenhouse effect cannot be magnifiedad lib . Doubling the [glass] thickness 
may enhance its thermal insulation, so raising its temperature, but it will cut down the 
transmitted sunshine, so reducing its heat. In the end the process becomes 
self-defeating. . . . The sea is a perfect "greenhouse" of this kind—none of the obscure 
heat from the bottom can escape into space. But it is not boiling; in fact it is not much 
above freezing point. Sagan's deep atmosphere would behave in exactly the same 
way. . . . An adiabatic atmosphere of a mass envisaged by Sagan is possible only if it is 
heated from below. In other words, the surface of Venus would have to be kept at a 
high temperature by internal sources. 

By the time the official version of the proceedings was published over two years later asScientists 
Confront Velikovsky , Sagan had embellished his argument by reference to the SovietVenera 9 and10 
landings in October 1975. (True to the spirit of the whole affair, while Sagan was permitted to add a 
revised appendix of new points, Velikovsky was denied space to respond to them.) The Soviet craft, 
Sagan claimed, were able to obtain clear pictures in sunlight of surface rocks, showing Velikovsky 
wrong in saying that light does not penetrate the cloud cover. This doesn't seem to appreciate the fact 
that the Soviet landers were equipped with floodlights. Further, as reported by Professor Lewis 
Greenberg,138theVenera instruments detected nothing but gloom and darkness after descending through 
the clouds, until a glow appeared and grew brighter as they neared the surface. The atmosphere at the 
surface was much brighter than had been expected. V. A. Avduevsky, deputy director of the Soviet 
Space Flight Control Center, described the terrain as showing distinct, dark shadows that persisted even 
when the floodlights were turned off, which was unanticipated since sunlight from the clouds would be 
diffuse. He and his colleagues agreed that it indicated a direct light source on the surface but they could 
not guess what it was. Velikovsky had proposed that there could still be hydrocarbons burning on the 
extremely hot surface. 

If Sagan is permitted to draw on information from after the symposium, then so shall we. In 
Scientists Confront Velikovsky and also inBroca's Brain , Sagan charges that the reflected spectrum 
from Venus is entirely consistent with the infrared cloud temperature of 240ºK, in other words the 
temperature is what would be expected for the amount of sunlight, and this negates Velikovsky's 
prediction of Venus giving off more heat than it receives from the Sun. That is to say, Venus is in thermal 


equilibrium with its surroundings, whereas Velikovsky says it shouldn't be. Well, in an article headed 
"The Mystery of Venus' Internal Heat," the U.K. journalNew Scientist reported in 1980 (November 
13) that data from thePioneer Venus orbiter showed Venus to be radiating fifteen percent more energy 
than is received from the Sun (later figures put it at twenty percent). This would mean that Venus is 
producing ten thousand times more heat than the Earth—stated as being "inconceivable, according to 
present theories of planetary formation." 

equilibrium with its surroundings, whereas Velikovsky says it shouldn't be. Well, in an article headed 
"The Mystery of Venus' Internal Heat," the U.K. journalNew Scientist reported in 1980 (November 
13) that data from thePioneer Venus orbiter showed Venus to be radiating fifteen percent more energy 
than is received from the Sun (later figures put it at twenty percent). This would mean that Venus is 
producing ten thousand times more heat than the Earth—stated as being "inconceivable, according to 
present theories of planetary formation." 
139But for Venus to be in thermal balance, while at the same time having an 
internal heat comparable to Earth's, the figure should be about 0.76—more sunlight being absorbed to 
account for the temperature. The procedure followed, therefore, was that both these conditions were 
assumed , and the error ranges of the instruments recalculated to allow the observed data—all the 
presumed errors being biased in the desired direction. And lo and behold, the final massaged figure 
comes out at 0.76 +/- 0.01—entirely consistent with expectations. So why bother sending anything at 
all? 

It doesn't end there. Albedo corrections deal only with the situation at the cloud tops. For Venus to 
be in thermal equilibrium, a balance between emitted and incoming energy should apply all the way 
down. If Venus is the predominant source of heat, the imbalance should become greater closer to the 
surface. And this was whatall the American and the Soviet landers found. The fourPioneer Venus 
probes entered at locations varying from 30ºsouth to 60ºnorth, both in daylight and night, and each one 
found more energy being radiated up from below than was coming down as sunlight. To complicate 
things further, the upward energy flux varied from place to place by a factor of two, which is difficult to 
reconcile with any greenhouse model but fits perfectly well with some areas being hotter than others on 
the young and still primarily volcanic surface of a recently incandescent planet. ThePioneer data 
indicated a progressive increase in thermal imbalance from twenty percent at the cloud tops to fifty 
percent at around seven miles altitude, where all inputs terminated. The SovietVenera landers showed 
the trend accelerating all the way to the surface, where the emitted infrared flux wasforty times more 
than that coming from overhead. 

None of which was acceptable, of course. Accordingly, the investigators again searched for 
instrument errors, and having found one that they considered could have increased thePioneer Venus 
readings, adjusted the figures for the low-level data to what they considered to be "reasonable values." 
But withVenera , there was no saving the situation. So as with the scribes who cut the Babylonian 
tablets, and the dating of reed and nut samples from Egyptian tombs, the story of what they say they saw 
was dismissed. 

As a final word on Venus's temperature, Dr. George Talbott, whose field is thermodynamics, 
particularly with regard to space application, wrote in the pro-Velikovskian journalKronos that the 
thermal calculations presented inScientists Confront Velikovsky were irrelevant, and developed a 
cooling curve for an incandescent body the size and mass of Venus. It showed that in the course of 
thirty-five hundred years the surface temperature would fall to 750ºK—just about the observed value.140 
My understanding is that Talbott's paper was not well received in establishment circles. 

Problem 9. The Craters of Venus 

Sagan turns to Venus's topography to show that it must be as ancient as the Earth. He tells us that 
radar observations reveal enormous linear mountain ranges, ringed, basins, a great rift valley and 
abundant cratering, maybe with areas saturated like parts of the Moon. Such tectonic or impact features 
couldn't be supported by the thin and fragile crust that Velikovsky's theory requires. 


Well, whatever the earlier interpretations of the radar images may have been, many of these 
features seemed to have disappeared in later years. Studies of thePioneer-Venus radar mappings were 
described in various journals in 1980.Science , July 4, reported (p. 103) that "plate tectonics is also 
absent";Scientific American , August, (p. 65) concluded "the motion of large plates appears not to have 
played a dominant role"; while theJournal of Geophysical Research , December 30, found a pattern 
"indicative of global tectonism has not been identified" (p. 8232). Rick Gore wrote inNational 
Geographic , January, 1985 (p. 36), "Until the orbiter's cloud penetrating radar began, crudely mapping 
the Venusian surface, we knew relatively nothing about the planet's terrain. . . . [until a surge of new 
imaging revealed] Venus as a volcanic cauldron . . . with shapes suspiciously like lava flows across the 
planet." 

Well, whatever the earlier interpretations of the radar images may have been, many of these 
features seemed to have disappeared in later years. Studies of thePioneer-Venus radar mappings were 
described in various journals in 1980.Science , July 4, reported (p. 103) that "plate tectonics is also 
absent";Scientific American , August, (p. 65) concluded "the motion of large plates appears not to have 
played a dominant role"; while theJournal of Geophysical Research , December 30, found a pattern 
"indicative of global tectonism has not been identified" (p. 8232). Rick Gore wrote inNational 
Geographic , January, 1985 (p. 36), "Until the orbiter's cloud penetrating radar began, crudely mapping 
the Venusian surface, we knew relatively nothing about the planet's terrain. . . . [until a surge of new 
imaging revealed] Venus as a volcanic cauldron . . . with shapes suspiciously like lava flows across the 
planet." 

By then Sagan had stopped seeing areas saturated with craters like parts of the Moon. His book 
Comet of the same year, coauthored with Ann Druyan, tells us (p. 258) "[T]he sparseness of craters on 
Venus shows that the surface is continually being modified—probably by volcanism." 

Problem 10. The Circularization of the Orbit of Venus 

This was a continuation of the insistence that had been heard since 1950 that electromagnetic 
forces play no part in celestial dynamics. However, Einstein, since the outset, had been of the opinion 
that given some unlikely coincidences they didn't have to, and since Sagan himself conceded that the 
odds against a Velikovskian scenario were "not overwhelming," it wasn't essential that they be brought 
up. Velikovsky had introduced the suggestion as a possibility, and as mentioned earlier various 
candidates for contributory mechanisms have been investigated, such as proto-Venus being in a charged 
plasma state, and tidal effects on a plastic body acting to pull it toward a lower-energy, hence more 
circular orbit, converting orbital momentum into heat. And let's bear in mind that electrical conditions 
across the Solar System following an event like the ejection of Venus from Jupiter could well be vastly 
different from the relatively quiescent conditions that we observe today. The debate is still going on, and 
while nothing put forward so far has been sufficient to convince everybody, the subject is far from closed. 

And then there's the unthinkable question: Is conventional gravitational theory really on such solid 
ground as is almost universally supposed? Sagan assures us that literally millions of experiments testify to 
its validity. Yet, those reports keep coming in from what would seem to be reputable sources of 
pendulums doing things they're not supposed to under certain conditions of electrical charge and during 
solar eclipses, when the Sun is obscured.141Sagan reminds us of the accuracy achieved in injectingVenera 
8 , andVoyager 1 precisely into their designated orbits, and getting within one hundred kilometers with 
theViking orbiters, using Newtonian mechanics alone. . . . Well, yes; but they did employ 
course-corrections in flight. AndMariner 2 missed its target area by twelve thousand miles. And in the 
last year or so we've been hearing that probes now in the outer Solar System are deviating from their 
expected trajectories and nobody is sure why. 

Appealing though Newton's gravitation law may be in its simplicity, the only tests actually 
performed so far have been very close by in our own backyard. Everything beyond that is based on faith 
that it continues to apply over unlimited distances because the formula says so. But what if, as in many 
relationships of physics, this turns out to be an approximation to a more complex function whose 
deviation becomes more significant as distance increases? The only observational evidence we have of 
how gravity operates over distances much larger than those found in the Solar System are from the 
courses of stars within the disks of faraway galaxies, thousands of light-years across. And these are so 
much in violation of expectations that all kinds of exotic unseen matter are invented to explain them. 


Could the whole exercise, I can't help wondering, turn out one day to be another case of self-deception 
arising from a refusal to accept the most simple explanation—that the evidence means what it says— 
because "we know" it can't be possible. 

Could the whole exercise, I can't help wondering, turn out one day to be another case of self-deception 
arising from a refusal to accept the most simple explanation—that the evidence means what it says— 
because "we know" it can't be possible. 
: 
The Parallel Universe 


Velikovsky died in 1979. From working essentially alone through most of the first twenty years of 
his research, supported by a few who, while receptive to his ideas and prepared to defend them, in the 
main tended not to be active contributors, he saw the emergence of a vigorous new generation of 
participating researchers from archeology, history, philosophy, as well as practically all of the physical 
sciences. 

The journalPensée , was founded by Stephen and David Talbott in 1971, and that gave way in 
1976 toKronos , under the editorship of Lewis Greenberg, stimulating the growth in North America of 
what has become something of a parallel universe of catastrophism existing alongside the traditional 
mainstream disciplines. In Britain, the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies was founded under the 
impetus of Howard Tresman and puts out the journalChronology and Catastrophism Review , besides 
hosting a regular program of workshops and conferences. In 1989 the journalAeon appeared, edited by 
David Talbott, Dwardu Cardona, and Ev Cochrane, and since 1993 Charles Ginenthal has been 
publishingThe Velikovskian , usually running at four issues of 120 pages or so each per year. 

Establishment science, on the other hand—in its official stance, anyway—seems still to be ruled by 
its own propaganda from twenty-five years ago. The notion of catastrophic events figuring in the Earth's 
history has become commonplace, sure enough—but only if they are kept comfortably in the remote 
past and involve impacts by minor objects occurring in essentially the Solar System as it exists today. 
But any thought of major instabilities and encounters between the planets themselves is still off-limits, let 
alone the possibility of their happening recently. It would mean opening minds to accepting that it could 
happen again, and maybe unconsciously that's simply too much to face. 

Electromagnetic influences far from Earth are a familiar part of the picture revealed by the space 
program; conferences are held regularly to present papers on such topics as ancient cometary 
encounters, revisions to history, mass extinctions, sudden climatic changes, and the fission of minor 
planets from the gas giants. It's hard to find one of Velikovsky's ideas that wasn't once derided and 
rejected with ill grace, only to be quietly wheeled in through the back door of "respectable" science later. 
That would be forgivable to a degree if the originator of the ideas were acknowledged and given credit 
as such in the references. But in what are considered the mainstream journals, he never is. Any mention 
of Velikovsky is a fast ticket to rejection by the review committees, academic ostracism, and probable 
oblivion. It would be too clear an admission of how the system works to preserve the Establishment 
monopoly on funding, tenure, journal access, and influence on policymaking. 

But fiction writers are free to follow their inclinations, and so I gave Velikovsky's work the 
dedication forCradle of Saturn —a tribute to a person I consider to have been one of the most original 
and innovative thinkers of our time. I'm sure he didn't get everything right, and his supporters remain 
divided over many issues. But Velikovsky's true genius, I would submit, lies in recognizing the possibility 
that ancient myths and legends might represent cosmic events that actually happened, and asking why 
planets that most people today would be unable even to find in the sky should have dominated human 
life to the degree that they did, and been seen universally as objects of awe and terror. 

Copernicus didn't have all the details right either—he got the Sun in the center but thought the 
planets moved on circles rather than ellipses—but that doesn't diminish what we refer to today as the 
Copernican revolution. For that to get past the Aristotlean professors of the day and catch on generally 
took about a hundred years. Of the names that took part in the Inquisition hearing in San Francisco in 
1974, I wonder which will be known, say, two centuries from now. 


FIVE 
Environmentalist Fantasies 
Politics and Ideology 
Masquerading As Science 


Every age has its peculiar folly: some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it 
plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of 
imitation. 

—Charles Mackay, 
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds , 1841 


Nothing is more predictable than the media's parroting of its own fictions and the 
terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by others, whether or not the story is 
true. . . . In the news game these days we don't have the staff, time, interest, energy, 
literacy or minimal sense of responsibility to check our facts by any means except calling 
up whatever has been written by other hacks on the same subject and repeating it as 
gospel. 

— John le Carré, fromThe Tailor of Panama 
I mentioned in the Introduction that one of the things that first turned me from being an eager 
apologist for anything pronounced in the name of Science to taking a more skeptical view was the 
discrepancy between what the world was being told about such things as pesticides and holes in the 
ozone layer, and the accounts that I heard from people I talked to directly, who specialized in such 
fields. Once again we have a massive body of evidently wrong information being delivered to the public, 
endorsed by an authoritative stamp of science. The difference here, however, was that for the main part 
the working scientists in these areas seemed to have a reliable picture of the way things were in the real 
world. But nobody was hearing from them. The lurid accounts of a despoiled and poisoned planet 
accelerating in a headlong rush to doom were coming from popularizers and activists with other agendas, 
or from institutional administrations with an eye on political visibility and funding. So I've grouped the 
selection of topics that this applies to into one section. (It also makes organizing the references 
easier.)This is a highly politicized area in today's world. Compared to the long-established and 
prestigious institutions that we've talked about so far, the environmental sciences are new arrivals to the 
scene of experiencing constant public awareness and exercising a voice in the running of society's affairs. 
Departments which thirty years ago consisted of a few dedicated specialists running on a pittance, whose 
subjects and terminology few on the outside had heard of, today wallow in lavish federal funding, send 
delegates to internationally reported conferences, and provide headlines for the evening's news. This 
makes them a target for invasion and takeover by the kind of opportunism that thrives wherever the 
limelight shines and the reward system beckons. In such circumstances the integrity of preserving truth is 
quick to suffer, since the object of the game was never to discover and report truth for its own sake in 
the first place, but to mold the beliefs that affect what is construed as success. 

Environmentalist issues are also the kind of thing that can easily lead scientists feeling a need to 
"make a difference" to allow ideology to bias their professional judgment. Of course, scientists have as 
much right to an opinion on these matters as anyone else. The danger comes when authority earned in 


some totally unrelated field is accepted—by themselves as much as anyone, in some cases—as 
qualification to speak for "science" on matters in which their information is really no different from anyone 
else's, being drawn from the same sources. 

some totally unrelated field is accepted—by themselves as much as anyone, in some cases—as 
qualification to speak for "science" on matters in which their information is really no different from anyone 
else's, being drawn from the same sources. 

New technologies create new resources. And when breakthroughs occur such as harnessing a 
qualitatively new realm of energy density, they do so on a scale dwarfing anything that went before, 
opening up possibilities that were inconceivable within the limits of earlier paradigms. Powered flying 
machines were impossible by the sciences known to the Greeks and the Romans, and spacecraft 
unattainable by the engineering of the nineteenth century. The average Englishman today lives a life style 
that commands more accessibility to energy, travel, communication, and variety than was available to 
Queen Victoria. 

A resource isn't a resource until the means and the knowledge exist to make use of it. Oil was of no 
use to anyone until the industries had come into being to extract and refine it, and produce devices 
capable of applying it to useful purposes. Oil is nothing more than hydrogen and carbon configured into 
molecules that lock up a lot of energy. Both elements are plentiful, and it seems far more likely to me that 
human ingenuity and a sufficiently concentrated energy source will produce cheaper, more convenient 
alternatives long before the last barrel of the stuff we're squabbling about today is pumped out of the 
ground. A suitably concentrated source would be nuclear, when the world gets over its present phobia, 
and the disincentives that arise from the commitment to the current worldwide commercial and political 
infrastructure lessen. This is one of the reasons why nuclear technology—not just in energy generation, 
but for eventually obsoleting today's methods in such industries as metals extraction, refining, and 
processing; chemicals manufacture; desalination, all forms of waste disposal, to name a few—represents 
a breakthrough into the next qualitatively distinct realm, while the so-called alternatives, do not.142 

In earlier societies that existed before the days of life insurance, retirement pensions, social 
services, and the like, children were an economic asset. They contributed to a family's productivity, and 
having a couple of strong sons to run the farm provided the security in later years. But since half the 
family on average would be girls, not all the sons might be fit and healthy, and with untold perils lying in 
wait along the road from infancy to adulthood, it was better start out with a dozen or so to give two 
strong sons reasonably good chances of making it. In today's modern state, by contrast, children are an 
expense to raise, to educate, and to prepare for life; families are correspondingly smaller—and raising 
families in the traditional way ceases to be the automatic choice of a great number of people, in any case. 
The result is that as wealth and living standards improve, new factors come into play that cause 
populations to become self-limiting in numbers in ways that Thomas Malthus never dreamed of. And 
neither, it seems, do his ideological descendants today, who apply results taken from the population 
dynamics of animals, who consume resources and create nothing, to humans. No big noise is made 
about it, but the populations of all the advanced industrial nations are now reproducing at below the 
minimum replacement rate—to the point that some European states are offering cash incentives for 
couples to have larger families. (Malthus was obsessed by the geometric growth rate of population, 
compared to what he assumed could only be an arithmetic growth for food supplies. But once a decline 
sets in, the collapse is geometric too.) 

But for populations where traditional values and customs still exist alongside the increased longevity 
and reduced mortality that come with the shift to industrialization,of course , for a while, the population 
is going to increase as numbers adjust to come into balance with the new conditions. It's a sign of things 


getting better, not worse.getting better, not worse.The increases happening in the Third World today are following the same 
pattern that occurred in Europe in the eighteenth century and in America in the ninteenth. But since the 
1950s, the UN projections for the future global population have consistently been revised downward, 
meaning that the curve is already leveling out again. 

No one is questioning that the world today is experiencing social and political problems that are 
perhaps going to call for some radical reappraisals of long-held attitudes and cultural values to solve. But 
abandoning the gains we have achieved in improving the quality of life as far as material comfort and 
security goes would be an irrational reaction and contribute nothing to the solving them, besides being a 
travesty in throwing away unquestionable triumphs of the human intellect. Some would argue that our 
material gains have been taken too far, and that's the largest part of the problem. Maybe so. But the 
point I would contend is that our material problems are effectively solved. We have the knowledge and 
the ability to ensure that every child born on the planet can grow up with a healthy and well-fed body, an 
educated mind, and the opportunity to make of themselves as much as they are able. The real problems 
that confront us are social and political—deciding who gets what share, and who gets the power and 
authority to make such decisions. 

But they should be acknowledged as social and political issues and dealt with openly as such, not 
hidden behind a facade of phony science. The main victim in the end can only be real science and its 
credibility. That's what this section is all about. 

Garbage In, Gospel Out: 
Computer Games and Global Warming 


Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority 
in any town? 

— Mark Twain,Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 
Out of all the environmentalist alarms that were raised from around the early seventies onward, 
global warming emerged asthe banner issue that all the cohorts rallied behind. It was the perfect formula 
for everyone with stakes in the man-made-disaster business: scenes of polar meltdown, drowning cities, 
and dried-up farmlands providing lurid graphics for the media; a threat of global dimensions that 
demanded global action for political crusaders and the would-be abolitionists of sovereign nation-states; 
and all of the usual suspects to blame for opponents of industrialism and the Western world in general. 

The picture the world was given is sufficiently well known not to require much elaboration here. 
"Greenhouse gases" produced by industry, automobiles, and human agricultural practices, notably 
carbon dioxide (C02), nitrous oxides, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), are building up in the 
atmosphere. They trap heat from the Sun like an enormous hothouse, which will melt the icecaps and 
glaciers, raising raise sea levels hundreds of feet, and turn productive land into deserts, which will lead to 
famine, epidemics, riots, wars over dwindling resources, and the end of the world as we know it. The 
only solution is to end the world as we know it by other means, specifically by taking immediate and 
draconian political action to shut down or cut back offending economic activities of the industrialized 
Western nations—but curiously not those of the Third World, which are less effectively controlled and 
growing faster—and setting up an international apparatus for planning and policing future growth. The 
side less publicized was that the trillions-of-dollars cost, when you got down to taking a close look at 


what was really being talked about, would have the effect of cutting the world's economy to the level of 
being able to support only a drastically reduced population, with the remainder reduced for the most part 
to serving a global controlling elite and their bureaucratic administrators and advisors. The Soviet 
nomenklatura reinstated on a world scale. It seems to me that the world would want to check its facts 
very carefully before letting itself be sold a deal like that. 

what was really being talked about, would have the effect of cutting the world's economy to the level of 
being able to support only a drastically reduced population, with the remainder reduced for the most part 
to serving a global controlling elite and their bureaucratic administrators and advisors. The Soviet 
nomenklatura reinstated on a world scale. It seems to me that the world would want to check its facts 
very carefully before letting itself be sold a deal like that. 

The first thing to be said is that the "greenhouse effect" isn't something new, brought about by 
human activities. It's a natural phenomenon that has existed for as long as the Earth has had an 
atmosphere. All objects above zero degrees Kelvin radiate heat. As an object gets hotter, the peak of 
the frequency band that it radiates (where most of the radiated energy is emitted) shifts toward shorter 
wavelengths. Thus, a warm hotplate on a stove radiates mainly in the infrared band, which while invisible 
can still be felt as heat. As the hotplate is heated more, its radiation peak moves up into the visible region 
to red and then orange. The Sun radiates a lot of energy at ultraviolet wavelengths, shorter than the 
visible. The atmosphere is transparent to certain bands of this, which reach the Earth's surface and are 
absorbed. But since the Earth is a lot cooler than the Sun, this energy is reradiated not at ultraviolet 
wavelengths but at the much longer infrared, to which the atmosphere is not as transparent. Atmospheric 
gas molecules that consist of three or more atoms typically absorb energy at characteristic wavelengths 
within the infrared band, which heats them up, and consequently the atmosphere. Note that this excludes 
the diatomic gases N2and O2that form the bulk of the atmosphere (78 and 20 percent respectively), and 
also the monatomic traces, argon and neon. 

This, then, defines the notorious "greenhouse gases" that are going to stifle the planet. The one that 
gets all the publicity is carbon dioxide, which human activities generate in five main ways: making cement 
(CO2being driven out of the limestone used in the process); breathing; rearing animals; using wood 
(which once harvested, eventually decomposes one way or another); and burning fossil fuels. This 
translates into the release of about 3 million liters on average of CO2per human per year, for a grand 
yearly total of 1.6 x 1016liters, or 30 billion tonnes.144(1 tonne = a "metric ton" = 1,000 kilograms = 

0.984 ton.) The other gases, while present in smaller amounts, have a greater relative absorptive 
capacity that ranges from fifty-eight times that of CO2in the case of methane to several thousand for 
CFCs, and the amounts of them have been increasing. 
This all sounds like something that should indeed be a cause for concern, until it's realized that the 
atmosphere contains something like 1,800 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide already from such sources as 
volcanoes, the outgassing of oceans, and the natural functioning of the biosphere. In other words, all of 
human activity adds less than two percent to the gases that nature puts out anyway. And then it turns out 
that all of these gases put together add up to a minor player, for the greatest contributor by far is water 
vapor. Although the exact figure varies from place to place and season to season, water vapor is 
typically present at ten times the concentration of carbon dioxide; further, it is active across the whole 
infrared range, whereas heat absorption by CO2is confined to two narrow bands. Without this natural 
greenhouse mechanism, the Earth would be about 33oC cooler than it is, which would mean permanent 
ice at the equator. Estimates of the contribution of water vapor vary from 95 to 99 percent, thereby 
accounting for somewhere around 32oC of this. The remaining one degree is due to other gases. The 
effects of all of human activity are in the order of two percent of this latter figure. But, of course, you 
can't put a tax on water vapor or lambaste your favorite industrial villains for producing it, and so water 
vapor never gets mentioned in the polemics. Even professionals uncritically buy the publicized line. An 
astronomer reports that in an impromptu survey, six out of ten of her fellow astronomers replied "carbon 
dioxide" when asked what was the major greenhouse gas.145 

Twiddling with Models 

So where does the idea come from that humans are upsetting the climate in ways that are already 
visible and about to spiral out of control? Just about exclusively from computer models. And despite the 


awe that many hold for anything that comes out of a computer, these are not yet models that can 
demonstrate realism or reliability to any great degree. They were created as research tools to investigate 
their usefulness in climatic simulation, and while such application no doubt has potential, that still closely 
describes the situation that exists today. The physics of planetary water vapor and the effect of clouds is 
not well understood, and so the models are unable to correctly represent the largest part of reality. 
Known phenomena such as the ocean transport of heat from the tropics to the polar latitudes are 
ignored, and the computational units used to simulate the dynamics across the Earth's surface might be as 
coarse as squares 500 miles on a side. But given the sheer complexity of the interactions taking place, 
this is to a large degree unavoidable even with the most advanced computers and methods available 
today. Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and deputy 
director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, points out that to reliably simulate a climatic change over 
several decades, an ideal computer model would need to track 5 million parameters and apply ten 
million trillion degrees of freedom.
awe that many hold for anything that comes out of a computer, these are not yet models that can 
demonstrate realism or reliability to any great degree. They were created as research tools to investigate 
their usefulness in climatic simulation, and while such application no doubt has potential, that still closely 
describes the situation that exists today. The physics of planetary water vapor and the effect of clouds is 
not well understood, and so the models are unable to correctly represent the largest part of reality. 
Known phenomena such as the ocean transport of heat from the tropics to the polar latitudes are 
ignored, and the computational units used to simulate the dynamics across the Earth's surface might be as 
coarse as squares 500 miles on a side. But given the sheer complexity of the interactions taking place, 
this is to a large degree unavoidable even with the most advanced computers and methods available 
today. Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and deputy 
director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, points out that to reliably simulate a climatic change over 
several decades, an ideal computer model would need to track 5 million parameters and apply ten 
million trillion degrees of freedom.Nevertheless, the outputs from programs that do exist—which can 
only be extrapolations of the assumptions built into them—are treated as authentic predictions. 

Thus, focusing on CO2effects, models being used in 1990 postulating a doubling in concentration 
by the year 2100 showed a global warming typically in the order of 4oC. When the effects of 
concomitant increases in other gases were factored in, this became 6.5oC. On top of this, some theorists 
proposed that "biogeochemical" feedback could double that figure yet again to the range 12oC–14oC, 
with the warming in the polar regions twice the average or more, rivaling the 33oC natural greenhouse 
effect.147However, as the models became more sophisticated, the base temperature rise being predicted 
as due to CO2in 2100 had reduced progressively to 3oC by 1992 and 2oC by 1996. 

One TV production brought it all vividly to life by portraying a 2050 in which it had all happened, 
with the world ruled by a "Planetary Management Authority" that invades South America to redistribute 
that land; beef so heavily taxed that the staple diet is "cactus potatoes," genetically engineered to grow in 
the desert that was once America's grain lands; and Florida slipping away beneath the waves.148This 
wouldn't have been so bad had it been portrayed as a piece of doomsday science-fiction entertainment, 
but it was advertised as if it were a science documentary. 

Meanwhile, in the Real World . . . 

Predictions of what will happen decades in the future or at the end of the century can't be tested, of 
course. But what can be tested are results from the same models of what temperatures ought to be 
today, given the known changes in the atmosphere that have taken place in years gone by. And when 
this is done, the models are found not to do too well. 

Accurate measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations through the last century are available. 
There's no dispute that it has risen from the region of 280 parts per million (ppm) at the end of the 
nineteenth century to 350 ppm by the close of the twentieth, an increase of 25 percent, attributed mainly 
to the burning of fossil fuels. When the "carbon-dioxide equivalent" of other gases is factored in, the 
effective figure comes closer to 50 percent. Depending on whose model one takes, this should have 
resulted in a temperature rise of 1oC to 2oC. Of this 0.5oC should have occurred during the period 1979– 
2001. 


oC—a sixfold discrepancy.149Other analyses of satellite- and 
balloon-based measurements show no increase at all. Ocean measurements tend to be sparse and 
scattered, but a joint study of thousands of ships' logs by MIT and the British Meteorological Office 
indicate no change in sea-surface or marine-air temperature 


150Land-based measurements do show some increase. However, 
meteorological stations tend to be located at places like airports and on urban rooftops that become 
centers of local hot spots created by expansion and development going on around them over the years. 
When allowance is made for such "heat island" effects, the figure that emerges as a genuine global 
temperature rise through the twentieth century is of the order of 0.5oC. 

Even if off from the predictions by 400 percent, this 0.5oC rise is seized upon by the global 
warming lobby as being due to the CO2increase, hence proving the theory. And as is inevitably the case 
when the aim is to advance an agenda in the eyes of the public, anything that appears to fit is embellished 
with visibility and publicity, while equally irrelevant counter-examples are ignored. Thus, the hot summer 
of 1988, when the Mississippi was unusually low, was blamed on global warming, as was the record 
Mississippi high in 1993. Then the unusually mild 1998 winter in the Eastern United States was singled 
out as the long-awaited global warming "fingerprint," while the winter of 1996, when New York City 
froze under an all-time record of 75.6 inches of snow, was forgotten. Hot years through the eighties and 
nineties were singled out, but not the all-time lows in Alaska and subzero conditions across Scandinavia 
and in Moscow. Nor was it mentioned that North America's high was reached on July 10, 1913, when 
Death Valley hit 134oF, Africa's in 1922, Asia's in 1942, Australia's in 1889, and South America in 
1905. 

A huge fuss was made in early 2002, when the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica broke up into a 


mosaic of icebergs; but nothing about it's being part of a peninsula that projects into open water that isn't 
even inside the Antarctic Circle—where such an event is inevitable and had been expected—or that the 
remaining 98 percent of the continent had been steadily cooling and accumulating ice. In October 1998 
an iceberg the size of Delaware—92 miles long and 30 miles wide—broke off from Antarctica and was 
described by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as "a possible indicator of 
global warming." ButThe American Navigator , a prestigious naval text updated annually since 1799, 
reports in 1854 a crescent-shaped iceberg in the South Atlantic with horns 40 and 60 miles long, and 40 
miles separating the tips; in 1927, a berg 100 miles long by 100 miles wide. In 1956 a U.S. Navy 
icebreaker reported one 60 miles wide by 208 miles long—more than twice the size of Connecticut. A 
federal agency was unable to ascertain this? Or was its public-relations policy driven by politically 
correct ideology? 

mosaic of icebergs; but nothing about it's being part of a peninsula that projects into open water that isn't 
even inside the Antarctic Circle—where such an event is inevitable and had been expected—or that the 
remaining 98 percent of the continent had been steadily cooling and accumulating ice. In October 1998 
an iceberg the size of Delaware—92 miles long and 30 miles wide—broke off from Antarctica and was 
described by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as "a possible indicator of 
global warming." ButThe American Navigator , a prestigious naval text updated annually since 1799, 
reports in 1854 a crescent-shaped iceberg in the South Atlantic with horns 40 and 60 miles long, and 40 
miles separating the tips; in 1927, a berg 100 miles long by 100 miles wide. In 1956 a U.S. Navy 
icebreaker reported one 60 miles wide by 208 miles long—more than twice the size of Connecticut. A 
federal agency was unable to ascertain this? Or was its public-relations policy driven by politically 
correct ideology? 

But the biggest fact that refutes the whole thing is that the 0.5But the biggest fact that refutes the whole thing is that the 0.5C warming that occurred over the 
twentieth century took place before 1940, while 80 percent of the increase in CO2didn't happen until 
afterward , with the rapid industrialization worldwide that followed World War II. Not even by 
environmentalist logic can an effect come before the cause that was supposed to have produced it. The 
complete lack of correlation is clear. In fact, from 1940 to the mid seventies, when the buildup in CO2 
was accelerating, global temperatures actually fell. The dire warnings that were being dispensed then, 
couched in virtually the same language that we hear today, were that the Earth was facing an imminent 
ice age.Science , March 1, 1975, announced that the Earth had better prepare for "a full-blown, 
10,000-year ice age."Newsweek , April 28, declared that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down 
[which would] reduce agricultural production for the rest of the century."International Wildlife in July of 
the same year agreed that "A new ice age must stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of 
wholesale death and misery." The cause? Industry, of course, by releasing smoke and other particulates 
into the atmosphere, cutting down incoming solar radiation. The cure? Drastic restrictions enforced 
through international action, more controls, higher taxes to pay for it all. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? 

And then from about 1970 to the present we've seen a rise back to less than 0.1oC above 1940. 
Just when the predicted increase should have been greatest according to the C02models, temperatures 
since around 1980 have actually declined. 

But the 0.5oC Net Rise Is Still There: 
If the CO2Increase Didn't Do It, What Did? 


Well, one of the most compelling correlations with the temperature rise of 0.5oC from 1890 to 
1940, the fall of 0.2oC to 1970, the recovery to 1990, and a leveling since then turns out to be with the 
length of the nominally eleven-year sunspot cycle. When the Sun is more active the Earth is warmer, and 
vice versa. The tail end of a decreasing curve from around 1870 to 1890 also matches, but before then 
the data become imprecise. Overall, in the course of the twentieth century the Sun's brightness seems to 
have increased by about 0.1 percent. 

The suggestion that changes in solar radiation might have a significant effect on the Earth's climate 
seems a pretty reasonable, if not obvious one, but until recently most scientists apparently dismissed such 
evidence as "coincidences" because it simply wasn't fashionable to think of the Sun's output as varying. 
In 1801, the astronomer William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, hypothesized that times when many 
sunspots were observed would mean a greater emission of heat and hence mild seasons, while times of 
few sunspots would signal less heat and severe seasons. Since he lacked an accurate record of 
temperature measurements to check his theory he suggested using the price of wheat as an indicator 
instead, but was generally ridiculed. But it turns out that periods of low sunspot activity in his times are 
indeed associated with high wheat prices. 




Reconstructions of earlier times show the pattern as extending back to long before any human 
industrial activity existed.151The net 0.1 percent solar brightening and 0.5oC mean temperature rise that 
took place through the twentieth century was the last phase of a general warming that has been going on 
since early in the eighteenth century, a time known as the Little Ice Age, when the Thames river in 
England froze regularly in winter with ice thick enough for fairs to be held on it. This was also the period 
that astronomers refer to as the "Maunder Minimum" of solar activity, with sunspots virtually 
disappearing. R. D. Blackmore's novelLorna Doone tells that in the winter of 1683–4, trees in Somerset 
could be heard bursting from the cold. 

The cooling that reached its low point in the Little Ice Age had begun around 1300. Before then 
there had been a warm period of several centuries centered around 1100, known as the "medieval 
climate optimum." This was a time when Greenland was indeed green, and the Vikings established farms 
and settlements there. (There's evidence that they explored into North America as well. Markers that 
they used to denote their day's travel have been found mapping a trail southward from Hudson Bay into 
Minnesota.) This in turn is revealed as being part of an approximately 2,500-year-long cycle of greater 
temperature swings. It reached a low just before 3,000 years ago, and before that peaked between 
4,000 and 5,000 years ago, being as high above today's global mean as the Little Ice Age was below it. 
This was when forests and herd animals numbering millions thrived across what today are barren 
Siberian tundra, the Sahara was green and traversed by rivers, and the plains of Europe and North 
America resembled safari parks. None of this was due to fossil-fuel power plants or refrigeration 
industries operated by the Vikings or Paleolithic village dwellers. 


153 
the general basis is agreed for cosmic events outside the Earth being the prime determinants of climatic 
changes. 

And yes, the global warmers are correct in their insistence on a connection between temperature 
and carbon dioxide levels. The records from ice cores, isotope ratios in the shells of marine fossils, 
growth ring patterns in trees, and so forth show that at times when temperatures were high, carbon 
dioxide levels were high, and vice versa. But they get the order the wrong way around. Detailed analysis 
of the timings shows consistently that the temperature changes comefirst , with the CO2increases 
following after a lag of typically forty to fifty years—just as has happened recently.154Although in the 
latter instance the CO2rise is conventionally attributed to human activities, before accepting it as the final 
word or the whole explanation, let's be aware that the Earth possesses enormous reservoirs of carbon in 


various forms that would find ready release into the atmosphere given even a mild rise in atmospheric 
and ocean temperature. The frozen soil and permafrost of the polar regions contain carbonates and 
organic matter that will be reemitted as carbon dioxide upon thawing and melting. Peat, the great Irish 
fossil-fuel contribution, occurs in a huge belt around the Arctic, passing through Greenland and 
Labrador, across Canada and Alaska, through Siberia and Scandinavia to the British Isles. It can reach 
thirty or forty feet in depth, and two million tons of dried fuel can be extracted from a square mile, almost 
three quarters of it carbon. The oxygenation of this material as air permeated downward after the 
thawing of a overlying permafrost layer would produce more COvarious forms that would find ready release into the atmosphere given even a mild rise in atmospheric 
and ocean temperature. The frozen soil and permafrost of the polar regions contain carbonates and 
organic matter that will be reemitted as carbon dioxide upon thawing and melting. Peat, the great Irish 
fossil-fuel contribution, occurs in a huge belt around the Arctic, passing through Greenland and 
Labrador, across Canada and Alaska, through Siberia and Scandinavia to the British Isles. It can reach 
thirty or forty feet in depth, and two million tons of dried fuel can be extracted from a square mile, almost 
three quarters of it carbon. The oxygenation of this material as air permeated downward after the 
thawing of a overlying permafrost layer would produce more CO. 

A final source worth mentioning are methyl hydrate deposits, estimated at 2,000 billion tons 
contained in tundra and as much as 100,000 billion tons in ocean sediments.155Raising the ocean 
temperature just a few degrees would cause this source to release methane at the rate of 8 billion tons 
per year—a greenhouse gas 50 times more effective than CO2. This is equivalent to eight times all the 
fossil fuel burned in the hundred years from 1850 to 1950. 

Global Greening 

All this suggests that in the warmer epochs that have occurred in the past, CO2levels must have 
been a lot higher than those that are causing the hysteria today. And so they were. The concentration 
100 million years ago is estimated to have been 3,000–5,000 ppm against today's paltry 350.156And the 
biosphere thrived. Carbon dioxide is the most basic of plant foods, after all; and it's the plants that we 
and everything else depend on. Most of the plants on this planet can't survive below CO2concentrations 
in the range 50–100 ppm. During the coldest part of the last ice age the content of the atmosphere fell to 
around 180 ppm—perilously close to the extinction threshold for practically everything above microbes. 
Outside the make-believe world of computer models, there's actually more evidence over the longer 
term for cooling rather than warming, and as a number of scientists have remarked, the warm periods 
between glacials seem to last about 11,000 years, and we're 10,800 years into the current one. 
Sherwood B. Idso, a research physicist at the Water Conservation Laboratory of the U.S. Department 
of Agriculture, argues that flooding the atmosphere with CO2could be just about the best thing we could 
do right now—our "one good deed for the other life forms with which we share the planet."157 

Given the conditions that prevailed in past epochs, plants ought to be better adapted to higher 
concentrations of atmospheric CO2than the level that exists today. And this turns out to be exceedingly 
true. Field and laboratory experiments show that a simple doubling of the air's CO:2content increases 
plant yield by about a third, at the same time reducing evaporation and doubling the efficiency of water 
use. Sour orange trees planted as seedlings in open-top enclosures supplied with an extra 300 ppm CO2 
almost tripled in biomass compared to untreated controls. Hence, biologists refer to the process as 
"enrichment," and commercial agriculturalists, who apply the technique routinely in growing houses, as 
"aerial fertilization." (This didn't stop a member of the Canadian House of Commons from speaking of it 
as a poison gas.158Which about sums up the scientific literacy of the captains we entrust the ship to.) 

But that's only the beginning of the good news, for the rate of improvement continues itself 
improving all the way out to CO2concentrations of 1,000 ppm or more. And unlike the signs of warming 
that the doomsday advocates seek desperately to tease out of spiky thickets of data points, or see in 
every above-average month of heat or below-average month of rainfall, there could already be very 
clear fingerprints of a different kind telling of the CO2increase that we are unquestionably experiencing. 
Standing timber in the United States has increased by 30 percent since 1950, and tree-ring studies 
confirm a spectacular increase in growth rates. Mature Amazon rain forests are increasing in biomass by 
about two tons per acre per year.159 

The transformation this could bring to our partly frozen, largely desertified planet could be 
stupefying. It would mean a return of forests and grasslands to vast areas that are currently wastes, with 
all the concomitant benefits of cycling greater amounts of organic matter back to the soil, increased 
populations of microorganisms, deeper rooting systems capable of mining nutrients from greater depths, 
greater penetration, purifying, and circulation of water, all leading toward greater size and diversity of the 


animal populations that the system supports—in short, a proliferation of the kind of ecological richness 
that we associate with rain forests. It is quite conceivable that such "bootstrapping" of the biosphere 
could result in a tenfold increase in the totality of Earth's bioprocesses. 

animal populations that the system supports—in short, a proliferation of the kind of ecological richness 
that we associate with rain forests. It is quite conceivable that such "bootstrapping" of the biosphere 
could result in a tenfold increase in the totality of Earth's bioprocesses. 

But little of this finds its way to the public through the agencies that are generally considered to be 
entrusted with informing the public. What the public hears is a litany of repetitions that scientists are in 
agreement on the imminence of a global calamity, accompanied by the spectacle of a political circus bent 
on foisting the canon that any delay beyond taking drastic action now could be too late. With the 
exception of theWall Street Journal , none of the mass media mentioned the Heidelberg Appeal, signed 
initially by 218 leading scientists including 27 Nobel Prize winners in April 1992, after the "Earth 
Summit" in Rio, as a condemnation of irrational ideologies opposed to scientific and industrial progress. 
By the fall of that year the number of signatories had grown to 500 scientists, including 62 Nobel Prize 
winners, and by 1997, S. Fred Singer, who heads the Science and Environmental Policy Project in 
Washington D.C., reported the figures as 4,000 and 70 respectively.160Nor do the media publicize the 
Leipzig Declaration, based on an international symposium held in Germany in November 1995, which 
contains the statements "there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of 
greenhouse warming" and "we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired worldview that envisages 
climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions." This was reissued in 1997 prior to the climate treaty 
conference due to be held in Kyoto in December, signed by almost a hundred atmospheric specialists, 
and carried the caveat "we consider the drastic emission control policies likely to be endorsed by the 
Kyoto conference—lacking credible support from the underlying science—to be ill-advised and 
premature."161 

Instead, the world was told there was a virtually unanimous scientific consensus on the existence of 
a clear and present danger. On July 24, 1997, President Clinton held a press conference at which he 
announced that the catastrophic effects of man's use of fossil fuels was now an accepted scientific fact, 
not a theory. To underline this, he produced a list stated as being of 2,500 scientists who had approved 
the 1996 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report preparing the ground for Kyoto. 
That sounded conclusive, and most of the world at large accepted it as such. 

However, upon further delving, things turn out to be not quite that simple. For a start, by far the 
majority of the signers were not climate scientists but political representatives from their respective 
countries, ranging all the way from Albania to Zimbabwe, with degrees in the social sciences. Their listing 
as "contributors" meant, for example, that they might have been given a part of the report and asked to 
express an opinion, and even if the opinion was a negative one they were still listed as "reviewers."162Only 
seventy-eight of the attendees were involved in producing the document. Even then, to give it even a hint 
of supporting the global warming position, the executive summary, written by a small IPCC steering 
group, was purged of all politically incorrect skepticism and modified—afterthe scientists had signed it! 
—which caused an uproar of indignation from the qualified atmospheric specialists who participated.163 

Fred Singer later produced a paper entitled "The Road from Rio to Kyoto: How Climatic Science 
was Distorted to Support Ideological Objectives," which couldn't have put it much more clearly.164The 
IPCC report stated the twentieth century to have been the warmest in six hundred years of climate 
history. Although correct, this avoided any mention of the Little Ice Age that the twentieth century was a 
recovery from, while going back just a little further would have brought in the "medieval optimum," which 
was warmer than today. Another part of the report told that increases in carbon dioxide in the geological 
past were "associated with" increases in temperature. This is disingenuous in that it obviously aims at 
giving the impression that the CO2increases caused the temperature rises, whereas, as we've seen, the 
temperature rises came first. If any causation was involved, there are stronger reasons for supposing it to 
have been in the opposite direction. 

These are just two of twelve distortions that Singer's paper discusses, but they give the general 
flavor. Two phrases edited out of the IPCC report were, "None of the studies cited above has shown 


clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in 
greenhouse gases" and "When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? . . . [T]he best 
answer is, 'we do not know.' " 

clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in 
greenhouse gases" and "When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? . . . [T]he best 
answer is, 'we do not know.' " 

How the Real Scientists Feel 

So how did atmospheric physicists, climatic specialists, and others with scientific credentials feel 
about the issue? To find out, Dr. Arthur Robinson, president and research professor of the Oregon 
Institute of Science and Medicine, also publisher of the newsletterAccess to Energy , in February 1998, 
conducted a survey of the professional field by circulating a petition calling for the government to reject 
the Kyoto agreement of December 1997, on the grounds that it would harm the environment, hinder 
science, and damage human health and welfare; that there was no scientific evidence that greenhouse 
gases were or were likely to cause disruption of the climate; and on the contrary there was substantial 
evidence that such release would in fact be beneficial.165After six months the petition had collected over 
seventeen thousand signatures. 

At about the same time the German Meteorologisches Institut Universitat Hamburg and 
Forschungszentium, in a survey of specialists from various branches of the climate sciences, found that 
67 percent of Canadian scientists rejected the notion that any warming due to human activity is 
occurring, while in Germany the figure was 87 percent, and in the US, 97 percent.166Some consensus for 
Kyoto! 

After all the vivid depictions of drowning coastlines, devastated landscapes, and hunger-crazed 
mobs fighting amid the ruins of derelict cities, I can't think of a better contrasting note to finish on than the 
words of Arthur Robinson and his son, Zachary, from the piece cited ealier: 

What mankind is doing is moving hydrocarbons from below the ground and turning 
them into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and 
animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with 
twice as much plant and animal life as that with which we are now blessed. This is a 
wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution. 

Holes in the Ozone Logic— 
But Timely for Some 


—Cui Bono? (Who Benefits?) 

The early 1990s saw the coming to a crescendo of the panic over alleged depletion of the ozone 
layer being caused by CFCs. The following is based on an article of mine that appeared inOmni 
magazine in June 1993. It's reproduced here with a few minor changes. 

Man-made chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, we're told, are eating away the ozone layer that shields 
us from ultraviolet radiation, and if we don't stop using them now, deaths from skin cancer in the United 
States alone will rise by hundreds of thousands in the next half century. As a result, over eighty nations 
are about to railroad through legislation to ban one of most beneficial substances ever discovered, at a 
cost that the public doesn't seem to comprehend, but which will be staggering. It could mean having to 
replace virtually all of today's refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment with more expensive types 
running on substitutes that are toxic, corrosive, flammable if sparked, less efficient, and generally 


reminiscent of the things that people heaved sighs of relief to get rid of in the 1930s. 

reminiscent of the things that people heaved sighs of relief to get rid of in the 1930s. 


Now, I'd have to agree that the alternative of seeing the planet seared by lethal levels of radiation 
would make a pretty good justification for whatever drastic action is necessary to prevent it. But when 
you ask the people who do have the competence to know: scientists who have specialized in the study 
of atmosphere and climate for years, a very different story emerges. What they point out, essentially, is 
that the whole notion of the ozone layer as something fixed and finite, to be eroded away at a faster or 
slower rate like shoe leather, is all wrong to begin with—it's simply not a depletable resource; that even 
if it were, the process by which CFCs are supposed to deplete it is highly speculative and has never 
actually been observed to take place; and even if it did, the effect would be trivial compared to what 
happens naturally. In short, there's no good reason for believing that human activity is having any 
significant effect at all. 

Ozone Basics 

To see why, let's start with the basics and take seashores as an analogy. Waves breaking along the 
coastline continually generate a belt of surf. The surf decomposes again, back into the ocean from where 
it came. The two processes are linked: Big waves on stormy days create more surf; the more surf there 
is to decay, the higher the rate at which it does so. The result is a balance between the rates of creation 


and destruction. Calmer days will see a general thinning of the surfline, and possibly "holes" in the more 
sheltered spots—but obviously the surf isn't something that can run out. Its supply is inexhaustible for as 
long as oceans and shores exist. 

and destruction. Calmer days will see a general thinning of the surfline, and possibly "holes" in the more 
sheltered spots—but obviously the surf isn't something that can run out. Its supply is inexhaustible for as 
long as oceans and shores exist. 

Ozone is destroyed by chemical recombination back into normal oxygen in several ways: by 
reaction with nitrogen dioxide (produced by high-altitude cosmic rays); through ultraviolet dissociation 
by the same UV-C that creates ozone; and also by a less energetic band known as UV-B, which is not 
absorbed in the higher regions. Every dissociation of an oxygen or ozone molecule absorbs an incoming 
UV photon, and that is what gives this part of the atmosphere its ultraviolet screening ability. 

The height and thickness of the ozone reservoir region are not constant, but adjust to accommodate 
variations in the incoming ultraviolet flux. When UV is stronger, it penetrates deeper before being 
absorbed; when weaker, UV penetration is less. Even if all the ozone were to suddenly vanish, there 
would still be 17 to 30 kilometers of hitherto untouched, oxygen-rich atmosphere below, that would 
become available as a resource for new ozone creation, and the entire screening mechanism would 
promptly regenerate. As Robert Pease, professor emeritus of physical climatology at the University of 
California, Riverside, says, "Ozone in the atmosphere is not in finite supply."167In other words, as in the 
case of surf with oceans and shores, it is inexhaustible for as long as sunshine and air continue to exist. 

The Depletion Controversy 

Even though the physics makes it difficult to see how, the notion of something man-made 
destroying the ozone layer has always fascinated an apocalyptic few, who have been seeking possible 
candidates for over forty years. According to Hugh Ellsaesser, retired and now guest scientist at the 
Atmospheric and Geophysical Sciences Division of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 
"There has been a small but concerted program to build the possibility of man destroying the ozone layer 
into a dire threat requiring governmental controls since the time of CIAP."169(Climatic Impact Assessment 
Program on the supersonic transport, conducted in the early seventies.) 

In the 1950s it was A-bomb testing, in the sixties the SST, in the seventies spacecraft launches and 
various chemicals from pesticides to fertilizers. All of these claims were later discredited, and for a while 
the controversy died out.170Then, in 1985–1986, banner headlines blared that a huge ozone hole had 
been discovered in the Antarctic. This, it was proclaimed, at last confirmed the depletion threat, the 
latest version of which had been around for just under a decade. 

In 1974, two chemists at the University of California, Irvine, Sherwood Rowland and Mario 
Molina, hypothesized that ozone might be attacked by CFCs—which had come into widespread use 
during the previous twenty years.171Basically, they suggested that the same chemical inertness that makes 
CFCs noncorrosive, nontoxic, and ideal as a refrigerant would enable them to diffuse intact to the upper 
atmosphere. There, they would be dissociated by high-energy ultraviolet and release free atoms of 
chlorine. Chlorine will combine with one of the three oxygen atoms of an ozone molecule to produce 
chlorine monoxide and a normal two-atom oxygen, thereby destroying the ozone molecule. The model 
becomes more insidious by postulating an additional chain of catalytic reactions via which the chlorine 
monoxide can be recycled back into free chlorine, hence evoking the specter of a single chlorine atom 
running amok in the stratosphere, gobbling up ozone molecules like Pac Man. Scary, vivid, sensational: 
perfect for activists seeking a cause, politicians in need of visibility, and the media, always hungry for 


anything sensational. But it doesn't fit with a few vital facts. 

anything sensational. But it doesn't fit with a few vital facts. 
172Hence 
the number of CFC splittings is vastly lower than the original hypothesis assumes, for same reason that 
there aren't many marriages between Eskimos and Australian aborigines: the partners that need to come 
together don't mix very much. 

For the UV photons that do make it, there are 136 million oxygen molecules for them to collide 
with for every CFC—and every such reaction willcreate ozone, not destroy it. So even if we allow the 
big CFC molecule three times the chance of a small oxygen molecule of being hit, then 45 million ozone 
molecules will still be created for every CFC molecule that's broken up. Hardly a convincing disaster 
scenario, is it? 

Ah, but what about the catalytic effect, whereby one chlorine atom can eat up thousands of 
ozone molecules? Doesn't that change the picture? 

Not really. The catalysis argument depends on encounters between chlorine monoxide and free 
oxygen atoms. But the chances are much higher that a wandering free oxygen atom will find a molecule 
of normal oxygen rather than one of chlorine monoxide. So once again, probability favors ozone creation 
over ozone destruction. 

At least 192 chemical reactions occur between substances in the upper stratosphere, along with 48 
different, identifiable photochemical processes, all linked through complex feedback mechanisms that are 
only partly understood.173Selecting a few reactions brought about in a laboratory and claiming that this is 
what happens in the stratosphere (where it has never been measured) might be a way of getting to a 
predetermined conclusion. But it isn't the end of the world. 

But surely it's been demonstrated! Hasn't one thousand times more chlorine been measured 
over the Antarctic than models say ought to be there? 

Yes. High concentrations ofchlorine —or to be exact, chlorine monoxide. But all chlorine atoms 
are identical. There is nothing to link the chlorine found over the Antarctic with CFCs from the other end 
of the world. It might also be mentioned that the measuring station at McMurdo Sound is located 15 
kilometers downwind from Mount Erebus, an active volcano currently venting 100 to 200 tons of 
chlorine every day, and which in 1983 averaged 1,000 tons per day. Mightn't that have more to do with 
it than refrigerators in New York or air conditioners in Atlanta? 

World CFC production is currently about 1.1 million tons annually, 750,000 tons of which is 
chlorine. Twenty times as much comes from the passive outgassing of volcanoes. This can rise by a 
factor of ten with a single large eruption—for example that of Tambora in 1815, which pumped a 
minimum of 211 million tons straight into the atmosphere. Where are the records of all the cataclysmic 
effects that should presumably have followed from the consequent ozone depletion? 

And on an even greater scale, 300 million tons of chlorine are contained in spray blown off the 
oceans every year. A single thunderstorm in the Amazon region can transport 200 million tons of air per 
hour into the stratosphere, containing 3 million tons of water vapor. On average, 44,000 thunderstorms 
occur daily, mostly in the tropics.174Even if we concede to the depletion theory and allow this mechanism 
to transport CFCs also, compared to what gets there naturally the whiff of chlorine produced by all of 
human industry (and we're only talking about theleakage from it, when all's said and done) is a 
snowflake in a blizzard. 

Despite all that, isn't it still true that a hole has appeared in the last ten years and is getting 
bigger? What about that, then? 


In 1985 a sharp, unpredicted decline was reported in the mean depth of ozone over Halley Bay, 
Antarctica. Although the phenomenon was limited to altitudes between 12 and 23 kilometers, and the 
interior of a seasonal circulation of the polar jet stream known as the "polar vortex," it was all that the 
ozone-doomsday pushers needed. Without waiting for any scientific evaluation or consensus, they 
decided that this was the confirmation that the Rowland-Molina conjecture had been waiting for. The 
ominous term "ozone hole" was coined by a media machine well rehearsed in environmentalist politics, 
and anything that the scientific community had to say has been drowned out in the furor that has been 
going on ever since. 

In 1985 a sharp, unpredicted decline was reported in the mean depth of ozone over Halley Bay, 
Antarctica. Although the phenomenon was limited to altitudes between 12 and 23 kilometers, and the 
interior of a seasonal circulation of the polar jet stream known as the "polar vortex," it was all that the 
ozone-doomsday pushers needed. Without waiting for any scientific evaluation or consensus, they 
decided that this was the confirmation that the Rowland-Molina conjecture had been waiting for. The 
ominous term "ozone hole" was coined by a media machine well rehearsed in environmentalist politics, 
and anything that the scientific community had to say has been drowned out in the furor that has been 
going on ever since. 
175His first thought was that the result 
might have been due to faulty equipment or operator error. But when such possibilities had been 
eliminated, and the same thing happened the following year, he concluded: "It was clear that the winter 
vortex over the South Pole was maintained late into the spring and that this kept the ozone values low. 
When it suddenly broke up in November both the ozone values and the stratosphere temperatures 
suddenly rose." A year after that, in 1958, a similar drop was reported by French scientists at the 
Antarctic observatory at Dumont d'Urville—larger than that causing all the hysteria today.176 

These measurements were on the edge of observational capability, especially in an environment 
such as the Antarctic, and most scientists regarded them with caution. After the 1985 "discovery," 
NASA reanalyzed their satellite data and found that they had been routinely throwing out low Antarctic 
ozone readings as "unreliable." 

The real cause of the variation is slowly being unraveled, and while some correlation is evident with 
volcanic eruptions and sunspot cycles, the dominant factor appears to be the extreme Antarctic winter 
conditions, as Dobson originally suspected. The poleward transportation of ozone from its primary 
creation zones over the tropics does not penetrate into the winter vortex, where chemical depletion can't 
be replaced because of the lack of sunshine. Note that this is a localized minimum relative to the 
surrounding high-latitude reservoir regions, where global ozone is thickest. As Hugh Ellsaesser observes, 
"The ozone hole . . . leads only to spring values of ultraviolet flux over Antarctica a factor of two less 
than those experienced every summer in North Dakota."177 

But isn't it getting bigger every year? And aren't the latest readings showing ozone depletion 
elsewhere too? 

In April 1991, EPA Administrator William Reilly announced that the ozone layer over North 
America was thinning twice as fast as expected, and produced the figures for soaring deaths from skin 
cancer.178This was based on readings from NASA'sNimbus-7 satellite. I talked to Dr. S. Fred Singer of 
the Washington-based Science and Environmental Policy Project, who developed the principle of UV 
backscatter that the ozone monitoring instrument aboardNimbus-7 employs. "You simply cannot tell 
from one sunspot cycle," was his comment. "The data are too noisy. Scientists need at least one more 
cycle of satellite observations before they can establish a trend." In other words, the trend exists in the 
eye of the determined beholder, not in any facts that he beholds. 




Creating Catastrophe: The Wizards of Ozone 

But apart from all that, yes, world mean total ozone declined about five percent from 1979 to 
1986. So what? From 1962 to 1979 it increased by five and a half percent. And since 1986 it has been 
increasing again—although that part is left out of the story that the public gets. On shorter timescales it 
changes naturally all the time and from place to place, and hence surface ultraviolet intensity is not 
constant and never was. It varies with latitude, i.e., how far north or south from the equator you are, with 
the seasons, and with solar activity. And it does so in amounts that are far greater than those causing all 
the fuss. 




Superposed on this is a minimum 25 percent swing from summer to winter, and on top of that a 
ten- to twelve-year pattern that follows the sunspot cycle. Finally there are irregular fluctuations caused 
by the effects of volcanic eruptions, electrical storms, and the like on atmospheric chemistry. Expecting 
to find some "natural" level, that shouldn't be deviated from, all this is like trying to define sea level in a 
typhoon. 

Skin cancer is increasing, nevertheless. Something must be causing it. 

An increasing rate of UV-induced skin cancers means that more people are receiving more 
exposure than they ought to. It doesn't follow that the intensity of ultraviolet is increasing, as it would if 
ozone were being depleted (in fact it's decreasing. Other considerations explain the facts better, such as 
that sun worship has become a fad among light-skinned people only in the last couple of generations; or 
the migrations in comparatively recent times of peoples into habitats for which they are not adapted, for 
instance the white population of Australia. (Native Australians have experienced no skin cancer increase.) 

Deaths from drowning increase as you get nearer the equator—not because the water becomes 
more lethal, but because human behavior changes: not many people go swimming in the Arctic. 
Nevertheless, when it comes to skin cancer the National Academy of Sciences has decided that only 
variation of UV matters, and from the measured ozone thinning from poles to equator, and the change in 
zenith angle of the Sun, determined that a 1 percent decrease in ozone equates to a 2 percent rise in skin 
cancer.179 

How you make a disaster scenario out of this is to ignore the decline in surface UV actually 
measured over the last fifteen years, ignore the reversal that shows ozone to have been increasing again 
since 1986, and extend the 1979–86 downward slope as if it were going to continue for the next forty 
years. Then, take the above formula as established fact and apply it to the entire United States 
population. Witness: According to the NAS report (1975), approximately 600,000 new cases of skin 
cancer occur annually. So, by the above, a 1 percent ozone decrease gives 12,000 more skin cancers. 


Projecting the 5 percent ozone swing from the early eighties through the next four decades gives 25 
percent, hence a 50 percent rise in skin cancer, which works out at 300,000 new cases in the year 2030 
a.d., or 7.5 million over the full period. Since the mortality rate is around 2.5 percent, this gives the 
EPA's "200,000 extra deaths in the United States alone."Voilà : instant catastrophe. 

Projecting the 5 percent ozone swing from the early eighties through the next four decades gives 25 
percent, hence a 50 percent rise in skin cancer, which works out at 300,000 new cases in the year 2030 
a.d., or 7.5 million over the full period. Since the mortality rate is around 2.5 percent, this gives the 
EPA's "200,000 extra deaths in the United States alone."Voilà : instant catastrophe. 

A Few Coincidences 

So, what's going on? What are publicly funded institutions that claim to be speaking science doing, 
waving readings known to be worthless, faking data, pushing a cancer scare that contradicts fact, and 
force-feeding the public a line that basic physics says doesn't make sense? The only thing that comes 
through at all clearly is a determination to eliminate CFCs at any cost, whatever the facts, regardless of 
what scientists have to say. 

Would it come as a complete surprise to learn that some very influential concerns stand to make a 
lot of money out of this? The patents on CFCs have recently run out, so anybody can now manufacture 
them without having to pay royalties. Sixty percent of the world market is controlled by four companies 
—DuPont Chemical and Allied Chemical in the United States, Imperial Chemical Industries in Britain, 
and Atochem in France, who are already losing revenues and market share to rapidly growing chemicals 
industries in the Third World, notably Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan, which threatens their entire 
pricing structure. They also hold the patents in a sharing arrangement on the only substitutes in sight, 
which will restore monopoly privileges once again if CFCs are outlawed. 

Ultraviolet light has many beneficial effects as well as detrimental. For all anyone knows, an 
increase such as the one that's being talked about could result in more overall good than harm. But 
research proposals to explore that side of things are turned down, while doomsayers line up for grants 
running into hundreds of millions. United Nations departments that nobody ever heard of and activists 
with social-engineering ambitions could end up wielding the power of global police. The race is on 
between chemicals manufacturers to come up with a better CFC substitute, while equipment suppliers 
will be busy for years. Politicians are posturing as champions to save the world, and the media are 
having a ball. Bob Holzknecht, who runs an automobile air-conditioning company in Florida, and who 
has been involved with the CFC industry for over twenty years observed when I talked to him, 
"Nobody's interested in reality. Everyone who knows anything stands to gain. The public will end up 
paying through the nose, as always. But the public is unorganized and uninformed." 

Good science will be the victim too, of course. For a while, anyway. But truth has a way of winning 
in the end. Today's superstitions can spread a million times faster than anything dreamed of by the doom 
prophets in days of old. But the same technologies which make that possible can prove equally effective 
in putting them speedily to rest, too. 

Well, that's the way I wrote it originally. Nowadays I'm not so sure about the "equally effectively" in 
that last sentence. It can take a long time. Yet I still find grounds for optimism in the long term. Wrecking 
is so much easier than building. But machines and cities are constructed; works of art and thought are 
accomplished. Overall, the human propensity to create seems vastly to outweigh the destructiveness. 

To round things off, the following is taken from "Fact-Free Science," which appeared two years 
later, inAnalog Science Fiction and Fact , April 1995. 

The bottom-line test, after all the modeling and arguments over atmospheric chemistry are said and 
done with, is the amount of ultraviolet light reaching the Earth's surface. If stratospheric ozone were 
under relentless chemical attack in the way that we're told, the measured UV ought to be increasing. 
People who have measured it say it isn't. 


In 1988, Joseph Scotto of the National Cancer Institute published data from eight U.S. ground 
stations showing that UV-B (the wavelength band affected by ozone) decreased by amounts ranging 
from 2 to 7 percent during the period 1974–1985.
In 1988, Joseph Scotto of the National Cancer Institute published data from eight U.S. ground 
stations showing that UV-B (the wavelength band affected by ozone) decreased by amounts ranging 
from 2 to 7 percent during the period 1974–1985. A similar politically wrong trend was recorded over 
fifteen years by the Fraunhofer Institute of Atmospheric Sciences in Bavaria, Germany.181 

The response? Scotto's study was ignored by the international news media. He was denied funding 
to attend international conferences to present his findings, and the ground stations were closed down. 
The costs of accepting the depletion theory as true will run into billions of dollars, but apparently we 
can't afford a few thousand to collect the data most fundamental to testing it. In Washington, D.C., 
scientists who objected were attacked by environmentalist pressure groups, and former Princeton 
physics professor William Happer, who opposed the (1995) administration and wanted to set up an 
extended instrumentation network, was dismissed from his post as research director at the Department 
of Energy. The retiring head of the German program was replaced by a depletionist who refused to 
publish the institute's accumulated data and terminated further measurements, apparently on the grounds 
that future policy would be to rely on computer models instead.182 

Critics jeered, and the depletion lobby was not happy. Then, after a lengthy silence, a paper 
appeared inScience, claiming that upward trends in UV-B had been shown to be linked to ozone 
depletion.183So, suddenly, all of the foregoing was wrong. The party line had been right all along. 
Depletion was real after all. 

The study showed plots of ozone above Toronto declining steadily through 1989–1993, and UV 
increasing in step over the same period. But Dr. Arthur Robinson, the same whom we met before in the 
discussion on Global Warming, noticed something curious: Although the whole point was supposed to 
be the discovery of a correlation between decreasing ozone and increasing UV-B, nowhere in the study 
was there a graph relating these two quantities one to the other.184Neither were there any numbers that 
would enable such a graph to be constructed. Robinson enlarged the published plots and performed his 
own analysis. And the reason why no consequential trend line was shown, he discovered, was that there 
was no trend. 

For the first four years, the ozone and UV-B rose and fell together: completely opposite to what 
the paper claimed to show. The result wouldn't have surprised depletion skeptics, however, who never 
accepted that UV has to go up as ozone goes down, in the first place. Rather, since UV creates ozone 
out of oxygen in the upper atmosphere, more UV getting through means a high UV flux, and so more 
ozone is being made up there. Hence, all else being equal, both quantities should change together with 
the seasonal variations and fluctuations of the sun. And the 1989–1992 pattern shows just that. 

But all else isn't always equal. Ozone worldwide fell through the second half of 1992 to reach an 
extraordinarily low level in 1993. Satellite maps for this period show the diffusion through the 
stratosphere of huge plumes of sulfur dioxide from the Mount Pinatubo volcano eruption in 1991. This 
would extend to global dimensions the depletion chemistry usually restricted to polar ice clouds and 
responsible for the notorious Antarctic "hole" (replacement can't occur in the winter months because 
there's no sun). 

So the low 1993 ozone was not caused by unusually low solar activity. Solar activity was normal, 
which would be expected to result in above-normal UV intensity because of the chemically thinned 
ozone cover. Thisone -time eventwas then stretched out to create an illusory trend beginning in 1989. 
In fact, it was produced from just four high readings out of more than 300 data points.185 

Logically, this would be like proving to the landlord that there's damp rising in the house by waiting 
for a flood and then averaging the effect back over four years. If the lawyers catch on to this one, it 
could open up a whole new world of liability actions. 

The May 27, 1994, issue ofScience carried a letter from Professors Patrick J. Michaels, Office of 
Climatology of the University of Virginia, and S. Fred Singer, director of the Science and Environmental 
Policy Project, Maryland, and research associate Paul C. Knappenberger, also from the University of 
Virginia, stating that the study was "So flawed as to require a formal withdrawal from the Scientific 
Literature." 


Saving The Mosquitoes: 
The War On DDT 


When all its work is done the lie shall rot; 
The truth is great, and shall prevail, 
When none cares whether it prevails or not. 


— Coventry Patmore, from the poem "Magna est Veritas" 
The DDT controversy takes us back over thirty years and might have slipped from the memories of 
some. Others may never have been cognizant of it in the first place. And that's a good reason for 
selecting it for inclusion, for it constitutes the original, model environmental catastrophe scenario and 
protest movement, setting the pattern for just about all of the major issues that have become news since. 

Some Background Intelligence: Malaria 

The biggest single killer of human beings through history has been malaria. Before the 1940s, 300 
million new cases were contracted annually worldwide, and of those stricken, 3 million died. 6 to 7 
million cases occurred every year in the United States, primarily in the South and parts of California. 

Malaria is caused by a genus of protozoan—the simplest, single-cell animal form—called 
Plasmodium , which comes in four species. In the human bloodstream they take a form known as 
merozoites, which burrow into the red blood cells and reproduce asexually, each one producing 6 to 26 
new individuals which burst out to infect new blood cells on a cycle that repeats every forty-eight hours. 
When the number of merozoites exceeds about 50 per cubic milliliter of blood (a typical drop), the 
victim suffers a malaria attack every forty-eight hours. In a heavily infected person, the number of 
plasmodia present can be as high as 2 million per milliliter. 

The severity of the symptoms depends on the species involved, but a typical attack consists of 
severe frontal headache and pain in the neck, lower back, and limbs, dizziness and general malaise, 
accompanied by waves of chill and seizures alternating with fever temperatures of up to 104oF and 
profuse sweating, acute thirst and vomiting being not uncommon. The falciparum variety can kill up to 40 
percent of those affected. Deaths occur mainly among children under five years old. For those who 
survive, the pattern continues for several months, and then gives way to symptom-free periods 
punctuated by relapses that occur over anywhere from a year to ten years. The effects can be sufficiently 
debilitating to incapacitate 80 percent of a workforce, with such consequences as preventing harvesting 
of a food crop, thus rendering a population vulnerable to all of the opportunistic threats that come with 
malnutrition and an impaired immune system, such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, dysentery, and typhoid 
fever. Transmission from person to person takes place through the ingestion of blood by females of the 
Anopheles mosquito, and re-injection ofPlasmodium into a new victim via the saliva after undergoing 
another part of its life cycle within the mosquito's stomach. 

Since, through most of history, eliminating the mosquito was never feasible, attempts at checking 
the spread of the disease were directed at destruction of the breeding grounds. The two main methods 
were draining of swamps and marshy areas, which dates back to the Romans, and the flooding of lakes 
and open areas of water with oil from early spring to fall, to prevent the mosquito larvae from breathing. 
Where irrigation channels were needed for agriculture, a common practice was to introduce the 
"mosquito fish"Gambusia , a typically arduous and expensive undertaking, since it was usually necessary 
to first eradicate such predatory types as catfish, which were partial toGambusia . These measures 
were partially successful at best, and confined to the more developed countries. Only Italy achieved 
what seemed to be eradication, after a fifteen-year program of intensive effort under Mussolini, but the 
victory turned out to be temporary. 

Then, in 1939, Paul Mueller, a chemist working for J. R. Geigy S.S. in Switzerland, developed a 


compound, ichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane—DDT—by combining chlorals with hydrocarbons and 
phenols that was cheap, easy to produce and use, nontoxic to mammals and plants, but extremely toxic 
on contact to insects and various other arthropods. The Allies quickly recognized its value for wartime 
use and found it 100 percent effective as a fumigant against the ticks and body lice that transmit typhus, 
which in World War I had killed millions of soldiers and civilians in Europe. In early 1944 an incipient 
typhus epidemic in Naples was halted with no adverse side effects apart from a few cases of very minor 
skin irritation, after efforts with more conventional agents achieved only limited results. A plague 
epidemic in Dakar, West Africa, was stopped by using DDT to eliminate the carrier fleas, and it was 
mobilized with great success against malaria in the Pacific theater, Southeast Asia, and Africa. After the 
war, DDT became widely available not only for the reduction of insect-transmitted human diseases but 
also of a wide range of agricultural, timber, and animal pests. The results from around the world seemed 
to bear out its promise as the perfect insecticide. 

compound, ichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane—DDT—by combining chlorals with hydrocarbons and 
phenols that was cheap, easy to produce and use, nontoxic to mammals and plants, but extremely toxic 
on contact to insects and various other arthropods. The Allies quickly recognized its value for wartime 
use and found it 100 percent effective as a fumigant against the ticks and body lice that transmit typhus, 
which in World War I had killed millions of soldiers and civilians in Europe. In early 1944 an incipient 
typhus epidemic in Naples was halted with no adverse side effects apart from a few cases of very minor 
skin irritation, after efforts with more conventional agents achieved only limited results. A plague 
epidemic in Dakar, West Africa, was stopped by using DDT to eliminate the carrier fleas, and it was 
mobilized with great success against malaria in the Pacific theater, Southeast Asia, and Africa. After the 
war, DDT became widely available not only for the reduction of insect-transmitted human diseases but 
also of a wide range of agricultural, timber, and animal pests. The results from around the world seemed 
to bear out its promise as the perfect insecticide. 
186A 1.5-ounce shot glass of DDT solution covered twelve by twelve feet of wall. The cost 
per human life saved worked out at about twenty cents per year. In the same period, India's wheat 
production increased from less than 25 million tons to over 100 million tons per year due to a 
combination of pest reduction and a healthier workforce. Ceylon—now Sri Lanka—reduced its malaria 
figures from 3 million cases and 12,000 deaths per year in the early fifties to 31 cases total in 1962, and 
17 cases the year after, with zero deaths. Pakistan reported 7 million cases of malaria in 1961, which 
after the introduction of an aggressive spraying program had fallen to 9,500 by 1967.187 

In Africa, in what is considered to be its second most important medical benefit after reducing 
malaria, DDT proved effective in a program to control the bloodsucking tsetse fly, which transmits the 
protozoan responsible for deadly sleeping sickness and also fatal cattle diseases. According to the 
World Health Organization, 40 million square miles of land that had been rendered uninhabitable for 
humans because of tsetse fly infestation became available. 

Another serious menace in parts of Africa and Central American is the blackfly that transmits 
roundworms causing "river blindness" in humans. Before DDT was introduced, more than 20,000 
victims of this affliction in Africa were blind, with incidences as high as 30 percent of the populations of 
some villages. The larvae of the flies live in fast-flowing streams and had proved impossible to control 
until the occurrence of a fortunate accident in the 1950s in the Volta River basin, when a mule carrying 
DDT powder to a spraying project slipped while fording a stream and spilled its load into the water. 
Blackfly larvae were killed for a mile downstream without ill effects on other forms of aquatic life, and a 
river treatment program was implemented subsequently, greatly reducing the number of river-blindness 
sufferers. No masks or protective clothing were required for the operatives. In this entire period no 
instance of DDT-induced illness was reported among the estimated 130,000 spraying personnel 
employed, or the millions of people whose dwellings were treated. S. W. Simmons, chief of the 
technology branch of the Communicable Disease Center of the U.S. Public Health Service, said in 1959: 

The total value of DDT to mankind is inestimable. Most of the peoples of the globe 
have received benefit from it either directly by protection from infectious diseases and 
pestiferous insects, or indirectly by better nutrition, cleaner food, and increased disease 
resistance. The discovery of DDT will always remain an historic event in the fields of 
public health and agriculture.188 

Such being the perversity of human nature, it could only be a matter of time before people started 
finding reasons why something as good as that couldn't be allowed to continue. 


Opening Assault: Silent Spring 

Opening Assault: Silent Spring 

The 1960s was a time when all these currents converged. A new generation separated from roots 
in the past by the disruptions of World War II was manifesting an awakening social conscience through 
such channels as the civil rights movement and challenges to all forms of traditional authority. The 
destructiveness of the war, particularly its climaxing in the atomic devastation of two Japanese cities, 
followed by the specter of general nuclear annihilation promulgated through the Cold War with the 
Soviet Union, made for a climate of distrust in "Big Science" wedded to "Big Politics," with widespread 
questioning of whether all the effort and upheaval had brought any worthwhile benefits at all. And waves 
of radical technological change coming in such forms as mass automobile and jet travel, computing and 
electronics, nuclear energy, the space program, coupled with social revolutions sweeping away the old 
political and economic order across three quarters of the world had left people everywhere reeling in 
bewilderment and the social organism in need of respite to collect itself back together and regain 
cohesion. 

In 1962, naturalist and writer Rachel Carson published a book calledSilent Spring that touched a 
sympathetic note in just about every one of the simmering discontents and nagging apprehensions waiting 
to be released. But for once, the dangers were straightforward and comprehensible, the villains of the 
piece identifiable, and rising frustrations saw the prospect of relief through a chance to take action that 
could make a difference. Carson's work was an eloquent and passionate indictment of what many had 
come to regard as man's reckless chemical assault in the name of misplaced humanitarianism and the 
pursuit of profits on the natural environment. Its major target was DDT. The general tenor can perhaps 
be assessed from the following, taken from the first chapter, "Fable for Tomorrow," which in execution 
and effect must be described as brilliant. 

"There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its 
surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and 
hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields." The idyllic 
picture is developed at some length and concludes, "So it had been from the days many years ago when 
the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns." 

There continues (pp. 13–14): 

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some 
evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of 
chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. 
The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had 
become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sicknesses appearing among their 
patients. . . . 

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? . . . The 
few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It 
was a spring without voices. On the morning that had once throbbed with the dawn 
chorus . . . only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. . . . 


The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered 

The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered 

Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had 

died. 

In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular 

powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the 

roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. 

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. 

The people had done it themselves. 

J. Gordon Edwards is a professor emeritus of entomology at San Jose State University in 
California, having taught biology and entomology there for over forty years, and a lifetime fellow of the 
California Academy of Sciences. He is also a long-term member of both the Audubon Society and the 
Sierra Club, the latter of which published his bookClimbers' Guide to Glacier National Park . Such a 
person should certainly qualify as a sincere lover of nature and knowledgeable scientist with concerns for 
protecting living things. In 1992 he wrote ofSilent Spring : 
" . . . I was delighted. I belonged to several environmental-type organizations, had no feelings of 
respect for industry or big business, had one of my own books published by the Sierra Club, and I had 
written articles forThe Indiana Waltonian ,Audubon Magazine , and other environmental 
magazines. . . . I eagerly read the condensed version ofSilent Spring in theNew Yorker magazine and 
bought a copy of the book as soon as I could find it in the stores."189 The enthusiasm carried him onward 
for a while. "As I read the first several chapters, I noticed many statements that I realized were false; 
however, one can overlook such things when they are produced by one's cohorts, and I did just that." 

But by the middle of the book, his feeling had grown that "Rachel Carson was really playing loose 
with the facts and deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain 
things without actually saying them." Upon checking the references that were cited, Edwards found that 
they didnot support the book's contentions about harm being caused by pesticides. He concluded, 
"When leading scientists began to publish harsh criticisms of her methods and her allegations, it slowly 
dawned on me that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about these topics, and that I really 
was being duped, along with millions of other Americans." 

Millions of other Americans, however, did not possess the background knowledge of somebody 
like Edwards or read the journals in which leading scientists published their criticisms. What they did see 
was a media and journalistic frenzy of sensationalism, nascent action groups discovering a moral crusade 
of fund-raising potential that was without precedent, and politicians vying for public visibility as 
champions of the cause. Leading environmentalist organizations found they had become big business and 
campaigned to expand the operation. In July 1969 the National Audubon Society distributed seventeen 
thousand leaflets to its members urging them to support the position that DDT should be banned 
throughout the United States and its export prohibited. In February 1971 the director of the Sierra Club 
declared , "The Sierra Club wants a ban, not a curb, on pesticides, even in the tropical countries where 
DDT has kept malaria under control."190 

The Offensive Develops 

The attack against DDT was based, essentially, on three broad allegations: (1) that it interfered with 
bird reproduction, causing mass die-offs among the population; (2) that it persisted in the environment 
and its concentration was magnified at higher levels of the food chain, and (3) that it caused cancer. 
While all of these claims continued to draw vigorous opposition within the scientific community, the 
popular imagery depicted a heroic grass-roots battle affecting everyone. 

The imagery and attendant political pressures had their effects overseas, too. Many of the countries 


that had joined energetically in the war on malaria cut back or abandoned their programs. In 1967 the 
World Health Organization (WHO) changed its official goal from worldwide "eradication" to "control of 
the disease, where possible." In India, where health officials at one point had believed malaria on the 
point of being eradicated, the number of cases returned to a million in 1972, to quadruple by 1974. 
Ceylon, which in 1963 had brought its incidence down to just 17 cases with no deaths, halted its 
program on the strength of the claims and public opposition in the West. The number of cases went back 
up to 308 in 1965; 3,466 in 1967; 17,000 in January 1968; 42,000 in February, and thereafter, millions. 

that had joined energetically in the war on malaria cut back or abandoned their programs. In 1967 the 
World Health Organization (WHO) changed its official goal from worldwide "eradication" to "control of 
the disease, where possible." In India, where health officials at one point had believed malaria on the 
point of being eradicated, the number of cases returned to a million in 1972, to quadruple by 1974. 
Ceylon, which in 1963 had brought its incidence down to just 17 cases with no deaths, halted its 
program on the strength of the claims and public opposition in the West. The number of cases went back 
up to 308 in 1965; 3,466 in 1967; 17,000 in January 1968; 42,000 in February, and thereafter, millions. 

In 1967 the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) was founded by Victor Yannacone, a New York 
attorney; Charles Wurster, then assistant professor of biology at the State University of New York, 
Stony Brook; George Woodwell, a plant physiologist at the Brookhaven National Laboratories on Long 
Island, and several other scientists with environmental concerns. The stated aim was "to create, through 
litigation, a body of legal interpretations for natural resource conservation and abatement of ecologically 
perilous situations." The law courts, then, would be made the forum for the environmental debate. This 
meant that procedures followed in legal hearings, where each side presents only those points that best 
support its case, would be applied to deciding what were essentially scientific issues—even if the 
consequences had significant social implications. But a scientific debate can only be properly decided 
after consideration of all the pertinent data and all of the available evidence. The truth value of a scientific 
statement is not affected by debating skill or the persuasive powers of a trained advocate. 

In the late sixties the EDF initiated a number of legal actions challenging local practices in various 
areas, an example being 1967, where it filed suit in western Michigan to restrain nine municipalities from 
using DDT to spray trees against Dutch elm disease. While in the main these cases lost in court, they 
were successful nevertheless in gaining publicity and attracting broadbased support through a process of 
education-by-headlines. Scientists heady with the new feeling of celebrity status took to the laboratories 
and produced results backing their claims, for example two studies published in 1969 purporting to 
show that DDT caused cancer in mice.192When public interest waned, they called journalists to organize 
press conferences. 

In 1971 a group of environmentalist organizations led by the EDF brought suit against the recently 
formed (1970) Environmental Protection Agency, which had taken over from the Department of 
Agriculture the regulation of pesticide registration and use, for the sale and use of DDT to be banned. In 
response to an appeal by the Montrose Chemical Company, the sole remaining manufacturer of DDT in 
the United States, and the Department of Agriculture in conjunction with about thirty suppliers of 
products containing DDT, the EPA appointed a scientific advisory committee to investigate and report 
on the situation. The hearings began in August 1971. 

The 1971 EPA Hearings 


Well-Designed, Well-Executed Experiments: 
DDT as a Carcinogen 

One of the major causes of public concern was the claim that even small amounts of DDT residues 
could accumulate in the body tissues over time and cause cancers. Samuel Epstein, a principal witness 


for the EDF, testified that DDT had been shown to be carcinogenic in well-designed experiments, and 
that in his opinion there was no safe exposure level.
for the EDF, testified that DDT had been shown to be carcinogenic in well-designed experiments, and 
that in his opinion there was no safe exposure level.This was immediately picked up and echoed 
widely by the popular press, and also cited in the "Point of View" column inScience (175: 610). None of 
the press, however, gave space to the testimonies of several other experts, among them Jesse Steinfield, 
the U.S. Surgeon General, and John Higginson, director of the International Agency for Research on 
Cancer, that DDT is not a human carcinogen. Neither didScience condescend to publish a letter from 

W. H. Butler of the British Medical Research Council, who also testified at the hearing, opposing the 
view expressed by Epstein. So, regardless of the hyped phrases and the font sizes in which the headlines 
were set, what can be made of the facts? 
Repeated incessantly by the media, and still heard today, was the mantra that a single molecule of a 
carcinogen is capable of initiating a tumor, and hence no level of exposure is safe. All one can say here is 
that this goes against the long-established principle of toxicology that recognizes a threshold of dose 
below which adverse effects become undetectable—and hence to assert their reality becomes a matter 
of faith, not science. This was acknowledged as far back as the sixteenth century by Paracelsus, who 
noted that "The dose makes the poison." Were it not so, it is doubtful whether any individual could ever 
survive to maturity and perpetuate the species, for in sufficient doses and under suitable conditions just 
about anything can be made to induce cancers, examples being honey, egg yolk, plain table salt, and 
even water. Of course, anyone is free to disagree. But when such a view is presented in such a way that 
it is likely to be taken as representative of expert opinion, the result is clearly misleading. In the words of 
Claus and Bolander (p. 324): 

[F]or although [Epstein's] right to hold his own opinions and make dissenting 
evaluations cannot be questioned, his views cease to be mere private judgments when he 
either claims or implies the agreement of his scientific colleagues and speaks for them in 
a public forum. It then becomes a matter for public argument whether he represents 
properly what is in the literature and whether he describes accurately the consensus 
among scientists. 

Now let's return to the well-designed experiments that showed DDT to be a carcinogen. 

Extensive human and animal studies to assess the toxicity of DDT had been conducted ever since 
its introduction. In 1956, a group of human volunteers ingesting DDT for periods of from twelve to 
eighteen months at 1,750 times the average amount for the United States population showed no adverse 
effects either at the conclusion of the trial or in follow-up studies five years later. A 1964 study of the 
incidence of different forms of cancer from all areas of the U.S. from 1927 to the early 1960s showed 
no correlation with the use patterns of DDT, nor with its presence in food or human body tissues. Similar 
results were reported from studies of industrial workers exposed for years to 600 to 900 times the 
intake of the general population, inhabitants of tropical countries who had been liberally dusted with 
DDT, and the work crews employed in applying it as spray and powder. The FDA had conducted 
prolonged investigations of fifteen groups of heavily exposed persons, each group consisting of one 
hundred individuals matched with controls, that looked especially for gradual or delayed effects but 
found none. One paper of a different kind described an experiment in the therapeutic use of DDT, where 
administration of a daily dose 7,500 times greater than the average produced no ill effects but was highly 
effective as a treatment for congenital jaundice.194 

Epstein's response was to dismiss all of these studies as "irrelevant" or "a travesty of the scientific 
data."195The irrelevance seemed to follow from his emphatic statement that there were no data to be 
found anywhere in the literature on chronic inhalation studies, which was a significant mode of human 
exposure. Claus and Bolander offer a list of references to precisely such studies covering the period 
1945 to 1969 that were right there, in the literature. A direct contradiction. What more can be said? The 
latter comment is apparently to be taken as meaning that it's a travesty of the data to find a substance 
safe simply because no carcinogenic effects can be found among heavily exposed humans after many 


years. 

years. 

First, the two group (1) cases. In 1969, Tarján and Kemény, in Hungary, feeding low dosages to 
successive generations of a strain of inbred mice, reported a higher tumor incidence among the 
experimental animals than the controls, becoming statistically significant in the third and fourth generations. 
196But there were puzzling features. For one thing, tumors were lower in the controls than in the breeding 
stock, indicating some factor in the experiment that was not accounted for. Further, while the strain used 
was supposed to be leukemia-free, leukemia in fact occurred in both the experimental and control 
groups. Finally, nothing comparable—nor any cancer of any type—had been found by other researchers 
working with similar dose levels. A subsequent WHO investigation showed that all of the oddities could 
be explained by suspected contamination of the feed with aflatoxins—among the most potent of naturally 
occurring carcinogens. So one can agree with Epstein's assessment of the study's being defective in 
method or analysis. But of "highly suggestive"? Hardly. 

The remaining paper in this category described an earlier series of several experiments with rats.197 
Evaluation of the results was complicated by the fact that more than two-thirds of the test animals were 
lost for one reason or another over the two-year period. Of the 75 from 228 that survived, 4 developed 
liver tumors compared to 1 percent of the controls. Whether this is statistically significant is debatable, 
since the four came from different test groups, and no relationship was indicated between dose and 
effect. On the contrary, some of the rats that showed no liver cell necrosis had reportedly existed for 
twelve weeks on doses that other workers had found to be 100 percent lethal. Subsequent attempts to 
duplicate the reported results failed. The British pathologist, Sir Gordon Roy Cameron, who conducted 
one of these endeavors, a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, later knighted for his contributions 
to the field, observed that the 1947 study had employed formalin as a fixative agent for the tissues, which 
is not suitable for cytological studies on account of its tendency to produce artifacts of precisely the kind 
that had been identified as hyperplasia nodules. The inference could therefore be made that the results 
were "highly suggestive" of wrongly fixed tissue.198 

This leaves us with two studies qualifying as well-designed and well-executed. In this connection 
Epstein sprang something of a surprise on the defense by introducing data from an in-house FDA 
experiment performed between 1964 and 1969 that nobody else had heard of, describing it as an 
excellent piece of work and expressing puzzlement that its findings had never been published.199The 
experiment involved two compounds, DDT and methoxychlor, fed to two strains of inbred mice. Epstein 
disregarded all the results for the strain-A mice, which experienced high mortality from a bacterial 
infection. This was not mentioned in the actual report but came to light in a memorandum from one of the 
researchers later, which included a terse comment that its effect on the study as a whole had not been 
determined. A second possible contributory factor was found in the sixty-seventh week with the 
discovery that the strain-A had been fed three times the intended dose for an undetermined period of 
time. Whether this had also been the case with the strain-B mice was not known. Well, one can only 
speculate that a good reason for refraining from publication and saving further expenditure of funds and 
effort might be found right there. 

Anyway, delving deeper regardless we find that taking both strains together there were actually 
more tumors among the controls (males 66, females 82) than among the experimental animals (males 63, 
females 73). For strain-B alone, a slight increase occurs for DDT-fed (males 42, females 50) versus 


controls (males 39, females 49). However, this applied tobenign tumors only. If it is permissible to 
select just one subgroup from the entire study to make a point, then we could by the same token select 
just the strain-B females that developed malignant tumors, where the numbers were controls 10, 
DDT-fed 3. Hence, by a far larger margin, the same study could be shown as equally "conclusively" 
demonstrating DDT to be ananti carcinogen. 

controls (males 39, females 49). However, this applied tobenign tumors only. If it is permissible to 
select just one subgroup from the entire study to make a point, then we could by the same token select 
just the strain-B females that developed malignant tumors, where the numbers were controls 10, 
DDT-fed 3. Hence, by a far larger margin, the same study could be shown as equally "conclusively" 
demonstrating DDT to be ananti carcinogen. 
200The work was part of an ambitious 
study performed by Bionetics Laboratories, a subsidiary of Litton Industries, under contract to the 
National Cancer Institute, on the effects of 123 chemical compounds in bioassays on 20,000 mice 
covering periods of up to eighty-four weeks. Epstein's confidence notwithstanding, the methods and 
findings have been widely criticized in the professional literature. 

One objection was that the researchers did not assure random distribution of the litters. Genetic 
disposition counts heavily in tumor occurrences among mice. Subjecting litter mates to the same 
compound runs the risk that genetic factors can mask the results, making any ensuing statistics worthless. 
Others were that the study failed to distinguish between malignant tumors and benign nodules, the 
significance of what was being measured being further obscured by relying on a single figure of 
"maximum tolerated dose" in lieu of providing more orthodox dose-effect relationships—at levels 
100,000 times higher than those of residues typically encountered in food. 

But perhaps the greatest oddity, pointed out by Claus and Bolander (p. 351) was that whereas the 
authors of the paper lumped all five control groups together on the grounds that there was no significant 
variation between them, the actual data showed there to be large differences. For strain-X, as an 
example, the percentage of mice developing tumors varied from 0 to 41.2 percent for the males and 0 to 

16.3 percent for the females. Applying regular statistical procedures reveals that for the group showing 
the highest tumor incidence—strain-X males at 41.4 percent—with the above degree of variation 
present in the controls, the maximum part of this that could be attributed to DDT is 5.5 percent, which 
no amount of manipulation could make significant. Following the same procedure with the strain-Y mice 
yields higher tumor percentages among the controls than among the DDT-fed groups. 
Their skepticism highly aroused by this time, the authors ofEcological Sanity then turned their 
attention to the report's listing where the tested substances were classified as "tumorigenic," "doubtfully 
tumorigenic," or "not tumor-producing," i.e., safe. And again, a raft of inconsistencies was found. 
Substances widely agreed upon as being carcinogenic received a clean score. Others considered to be 
innocuous—one, in fact, used for the treatment of alcoholics—did not. Compounds with similar 
molecular structures and chemical behavior received very different ratings. And piperonyl butoxide, 
which was tested twice, managed to end up on both the "doubtful" and the "safe" lists. 

Claus and Bolander point out that a program of this magnitude would involve the preparation of 
about 48 million tissue sections placed on 2,400,000 microscope slides, requiring 60,000 boxes. 
Making what appear to be reasonable estimates of the likely workforce, rate of working through such a 
phenomenal task, and the time available, they doubt that meaningful results would even be possible. 
They ask (p. 362): "What kind of an expert panel is it that can not only so warmly endorse this ambitious 
but dismally sloppy study and dignify it with the name of the NCI but also provide rationalizations for its 
obvious weaknesses?" 

A Plague of Birds 

One of the most serious ravages that can befall woodlands is infestation by the gypsy moth. The 
larvae devourall the foliage of trees, especially oaks, and in large numbers can strip bare entire areas, 
forcing other life left without food or habitat to either perish or migrate. This can be unpleasant and even 
dangerous, as inhabitants of northern New Jersey discovered in the seventies when large numbers of 
rattlesnakes and copperheads invaded suburban areas there. In 1961, the year beforeSilent Spring was 
published, large areas of Pennsylvania were sprayed with DDT to eradicate this pest. The Scranton Bird 


Club kept careful records but didn't report a single case of bird poisoning. Officials of the National 
Audubon Society were satisfied that no harm was done to bird life, including nesting birds. 

Club kept careful records but didn't report a single case of bird poisoning. Officials of the National 
Audubon Society were satisfied that no harm was done to bird life, including nesting birds. 
201The Audubon Society's figures for annual bird 
counts bore him out, reporting 8.41 robins per observer in 1941 (pre-DDT) and 104.01 for 1960, 
representing a more-than twelve-fold increase during the years when DDT use was at its highest. The 
corresponding figures for the eagle and swallow were increases by factors of 2.57 (counts per observer 
3.18, 8.17) and 1.25 (0.08, 0.10) respectively.202This pattern was general for most of the species listed, 
showing 21 times more cowbirds, 38 times more blackbirds, and no less than 131 times more grackles, 
the average total count per observer being 1,480 in 1941 and 5,860 in 1960. Gulls became so abundant 
on the East Coast that the Audubon Society itself obtained permission to poison 30,000 of them on Tern 
Island, Massachusetts, in 1971. Wild turkeys increased from their rare status of the pre-DDT years to 
such numbers that hunters were bagging 130,000 annually. Of the few species that did decrease, some, 
such as swans, geese, and ducks, are hunted, while bluebirds are known to be susceptible to cold 
winters. 

Ironically, some of the areas where birds seemed to thrive best were those of heaviest DDT use, 
such as in marshes sprayed to control mosquitos. Part of the reason seems to be that DDT is also 
effective in reducing insects that transmit bird diseases and which compete with birds for seeds and fruit. 
But perhaps even more important, DDT triggers the induction of liver enzymes that detoxify potent 
carcinogens such as aflatoxins that abound in the natural diets of birds 

None of this prevented any real or imagined decline in bird population from being immediately 
attributed to pesticides.203A severe reduction in eastern ospreys turned out to be due to high levels of 
mercury in the fish upon which they fed and to pole traps set around fish hatcheries—blamed on DDT 
even though reported as early as 1942. Alaska ospreys continued to do well despite high DDT residues. 
California brown pelicans increased almost threefold during the heavy DDT years but experienced a 
sharp decline at the beginning of the seventies—two months after an oil spill at Santa Barbara 
surrounded their breeding island of Anacapa (not mentioned in the reports of the state and federal 
wildlife agencies). In 1969 the colony had been severely afflicted by an epidemic of Newcastle disease 
transmitted from pelican grounds along the Mexican coast of the Gulf of California (also not mentioned). 
It was later established that helicopter-borne government investigators collected 72 percent (!) of the 
intact eggs on Anacapa for analysis and shotgunned incubating pelicans in their nests.204DDT was also 
implied as being connected with the reduction of the Texas pelican, even though the decline had been 
noted in 1939 and attributed to fishermen and hunters. 

The great eastern decline in the peregrine falcon was to a large degree due to the zealousness of 
egg collectors who have been known to rob hundreds of nests year after year, and then attribute the 
ensuing population collapse to the encroachments of civilization. In 1969, "biologists" studying peregrines 
in Colville, Alaska, collected fully one-third of the eggs from the colony and then dutifully reported that 
only two-thirds of the expected number of falcons subsequently hatched.205 

Cracking Open the Eggshell Claims 

But by the time of the 1971 hearings, the main allegation, still perpetuating the fiction that a 
catastrophic fall in bird populations was taking place, had become that DDT was the cause not as a 
result of immediate toxicity, but indirectly through disruption of the reproductive cycle by the thinning of 
eggshells. This again goes back toSilent Spring , which states (p. 120), "For example, quail into whose 
diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers 
of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched." This was a reference to experiments performed by James 
DeWitt of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, published in theJournal of Agricultural Food and 


Chemistry in 1956 (4: 10 pp. 853–66). The quail were fed 3,000 times the concentration typically 
encountered in the wild. 80 percent of the eggs from the treated group hatched, compared to 83.9 
percent of the untreated controls, so the claim of a "few" was clearly false, and the difference in results 
hardly significant. Moreover, 92.8 percent of the eggs from the DDT-fed birds were fertile, compared to 
89 percent from the controls, which reverses the impression created by the quoted text. Also omitted 
was that DeWitt's study was actually conducted on quail and pheasant. Of the pheasants, 80 percent of 
the eggs from the treated birds hatched compared to 57.4 percent for the controls, and 100 percent of 
the DDT birds survived against 94.8 percent of the control group. 

Chemistry in 1956 (4: 10 pp. 853–66). The quail were fed 3,000 times the concentration typically 
encountered in the wild. 80 percent of the eggs from the treated group hatched, compared to 83.9 
percent of the untreated controls, so the claim of a "few" was clearly false, and the difference in results 
hardly significant. Moreover, 92.8 percent of the eggs from the DDT-fed birds were fertile, compared to 
89 percent from the controls, which reverses the impression created by the quoted text. Also omitted 
was that DeWitt's study was actually conducted on quail and pheasant. Of the pheasants, 80 percent of 
the eggs from the treated birds hatched compared to 57.4 percent for the controls, and 100 percent of 
the DDT birds survived against 94.8 percent of the control group. 
A number of later studies were cited at the EPA hearings, purporting to account for an effect 
(major decline in bird populations) that wasn't happening. All of them are examined inEcological Sanity 
—with more care and thoroughness, it would appear, than by the witnesses who built their cases on 
them. 

A 1969 experiment (Heath et al.) on mallard ducks, performed at the Patuxent Wildlife Center at 
Laurel, Maryland, reported that birds fed DDT and DDE (the major metabolic residue from DDT 
breakdown) suffered a mortality among embryos and hatchlings of from 30 to 50 percent. The first thing 
that struck Claus and Bolander upon reviewing the paper was an enormous range of variation with the 
control groups that nobody else had apparently objected to. For instance, the number of eggs laid per 
hen in one control group was 39.2, whereas in another it was 16.8. This difference alone was far greater 
than any of the differences said to be "significant" among the experimental birds. The difference in live 
fourteen-day-old hatchlings in the same groups was 16.1 versus 6.0, which again was greater (69 
percent) than the 50 percent deficit in ducklings per hen reported for the birds fed the highest DDT diet. 
When the variations among the controls are greater than the variations between the control and 
experimental animals, it should be obvious that some factor other than the test variable is operating (a 
bacterial infection, for example), which affects both groups. Claus and Bolander conclude (p. 406): 

On the basis of these absurd differences . . . the entire study becomes meaningless, 
and all of the conclusions presented by the authors have to be discarded." And (p.408) 
"How this paper could have been passed for publication inNature is unfathomable, for 
even rapid scanning of the tables presented in the article should have made it 
immediately evident to the referees that the data for the two series of control birds 
invalidated the whole experiment. 

But published inNature it was (227: 47–48), and it remains virtually unchallenged as one of the 
most frequently cited references in support of the contention that sublethal concentrations of DDT can be 
held responsible for declines in wildlife populations. 

The same issue ofNature (was there some editorial decision to convey a message here?) carried 


another paper cited at the hearings, this time by Dr. Joel Bitman and coworkers, describing experiments 
on Japanese quail. It concluded from direct measurements that DDT and related compounds induce a 
decrease in eggshell calcium and produce thinner eggshells. How were these conclusions arrived at? 

another paper cited at the hearings, this time by Dr. Joel Bitman and coworkers, describing experiments 
on Japanese quail. It concluded from direct measurements that DDT and related compounds induce a 
decrease in eggshell calcium and produce thinner eggshells. How were these conclusions arrived at? 

Their results, however, showed no significant differences in the calcium content of the blood or the 
bones that were analyzed from the three groups. It seems odd that if the calcium reserves of the parent 
birds showed no reduction, there should be a significant difference in the eggshells they produce. The 
significance reported was 0.07 percent, arising from 2.03 percent calcium content measured in the shells 
from the controls, versus 1.95 and 1.96 for the test groups. While mathematically the claim of 
significance is correct, it turns out that the method followed was to analyze the shell for the weight of 
calcium, which was then expressed as a percentage of the fresh weight of the entire egg. The weights of 
the shells themselves were not given, leaving wide open the possibility that eggs smaller and presumably 
lighter in total weight could nevertheless have possessed shells that were heavier. Hence, it's not possible 
to tell from the presented data whether the percentage of eggshell calcium was reduced or not, which 
was the whole point of the exercise. 

It gets even more interesting when we look at the measuring of eggshell thickness. This was done 
with a mechanical screw-type micrometer after the shell membranes were removed. An average 
reduction is reported of 69.5 x 10-4inches for the controls to 66.7 x 10-4in. and 65.6 x 10-4in. for the eggs 
of two groups of test birds, and is described as "highly significant." Well, let's look at it. 

Converting these figures to metric at the same accuracy as that given—namely of three significant 
figures—yields figures for reduction in thickness of 0.00711 and 0.00991 millimeters. The last two digits 
of each are below the resolving power of a light microscope, and eliminating them leaves reported 
thinnings of 7 and 10 microns. (1 micron = 0.001 mm—about half the size of a well-developed 
bacterium.) Screw micrometers available at the time were not considered to resolve differences below 
50 microns reliably. More recent devices graduated to 10 microns are useful for gauging thicknesses of 
materials like metal foil, but for compressible samples such as paper—or eggshells—the determination of 
"end point" is a subjective quantity based on feel, typically resulting in variations of 10 to 30 microns. To 
borrow the phrase so beloved of textbook writers, it is left as an exercise for the reader to judge if such 
methods could have given results justifiably acclaimed as being highly significant. 

Everywhere, and Indestructible 

The final allegation was that DDT persisted virtually indefinitely, accumulating in the environment, 
which again traced back toSilent Spring and had been faithfully repeated ever since by the media. In 
response to one of these widely circulated claims, J. Gordon Edwards sent to dozens of radio and TV 
stations, and newspapers a list of over 150 scientific articles documenting the breakdown of DDT by 
living things. Not one of them ever made any reference to that material or modified the false impression 
that they had helped convey to the public. 

One of the witnesses who testified at the hearings to the persistence of DDT claimed, under 
questioning, not to be aware of the work of his own research colleagues at Gulf Breeze, Florida, who 
had demonstrated in 1969 that 92 percent of all DDT, DDD, and DDE broke down in seawater within 
thirty-two days.206 

Dr. George Woodwell, who in 1967 had coauthored a paper with EDF founder Charles Wurster 
on DDT residues measured at a salt marsh on the shore of Long Island, admitted that the figure 
published had been 13 times too high because the spot they had selected for taking soil samples just 
happened to be at the place where the spray trucks cleaned out their tanks. When asked if he had ever 


published a retraction, Woodwell replied (Hearings, p. 7238) "I never felt that this was necessary," In 
fact, he had published work that showed the earlier results to have been grossly exaggerated, but EDF 
lawyers had advised him not to mention it.
published a retraction, Woodwell replied (Hearings, p. 7238) "I never felt that this was necessary," In 
fact, he had published work that showed the earlier results to have been grossly exaggerated, but EDF 
lawyers had advised him not to mention it.

Wurster himself did also testify, with regard to experiments he had performed in 1968 at the 
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution into the effects of DDT on marine algae, which showed a 
marked reduction in photosynthetic activity—to three-quarters of normal and less. He had commented 
at the time that all animal life on Earth ultimately depends on this process, and speculated that changes in 
growth patterns at this level could have repercussions throughout the entire food chain. This caused 
tremendous agitation among environmental alarmists, resulting in wild media stories about an imminent 
disruption of the Earth's oxygen manufacturing ability that were repeated by the secretary general of the 
United Nations, U Thant. 

Strangely, however, Wurster's group had never measured the amount of DDT actually taken into 
the organisms, but simply assumed it to be the case, that assumption carrying with it the further one that 
the observed reduction in photosynthesis was a result of biochemical action on the algal metabolism. But 
a simpler interpretation of the data suggests it to have been a purely physical effect caused by DDT 
particles adsorbing to the outside surfaces of the algae and cutting down the light supply.208This was 
reinforced by the work of others (e.g., Mendel et al., 1970), showing that the effect does not occur with 
filtered solutions of the compound, indicating that the DDT needs to be present in the form of large 
(hence filterable) flakes. Inhibition of algal growth, although also widely aired in the public forum, had 
been mentioned by Wurster only speculatively and was not confirmed experimentally. Despite all the 
furore, therefore, all these experiments really proved was that photosynthesis works better in clearer 
water. 

The further two broad issues concerning the persistence of DDT were that it was ubiquitous, 
showing up everywhere from Asian jungles to the Antarctic, and that once taken up into the animal food 
chain its concentration was progressively magnified through successively higher trophic levels, such as 
algae—fish—predator fish—fish-eating bird—predator bird. 

The examples cited to illustrate the first turned out invariably to be artifacts of the measuring 
techniques used, or results of misidentification. One of the principal instruments used in pesticide 
analysis, introduced in the early sixties, was the gas chromatograph, in which the sample being tested is 
vaporized into a stream of carrier gas that is passed through a column of porous material. The various 
constituents, having different molecular weights, separate out into distinct bands which can be identified 
by their emergence after a characteristic propagation time to be registered, usually as a "peak" of signal 
voltage, at a detector. (The process is analogous to the way in which water from a plumbing leak 
spreads out across a ceiling tile and dries to leave a ring pattern of successively colored haloes—hence 
the name.) 

Although highly sensitive, it is a fact with this technique that totally different substances with similar 
mobilities can have similar "signatures," making skilled interpretation an imperative. The much-publicized 
finding of "DDT" in the Antarctic, for example, turned out to be due to contamination by molecules from 
the connecting tubing of the apparatus. Soil samples sealed in glass jars since 1911 gave results that 
were interpreted as five kinds of pesticides that didn't exist until thirty years later. A similar story applies 
to a gibbon from Burma, preserved since 1935.209 

The examples given to "prove" the hypothesis of magnification along the food chain were based on 
selected data. Figures were taken for DDT concentrations found in hawk brains, where they are highest, 
fish muscle, where it is lowest, and duck fat, which is intermediate. Comparison of figures formuscle 
tissue from crustaceans, fish, duck, hawk shows no magnification.210 

The Scientists' Findings and the Administrator's Ruling 

The hearings went on for seven months, during which 125 witnesses were heard and 9,362 pages 
of testimony recorded. The EPA's hearing examiner, Judge Edmund Sweeney, was even-handed in his 
dealings, which seemed to infuriate environmentalists and drew criticism from theNew York Times and 


Science , neither of which sent reporters to cover the proceedings. The scientific advisors had also 
followed the testimony and were unanimous in their eighty-page recommendation that the claims were 
unsubstantiated and there was no reason for DDT to be banned. Sweeney issued his conclusions on 
April 25, 1972.
Science , neither of which sent reporters to cover the proceedings. The scientific advisors had also 
followed the testimony and were unanimous in their eighty-page recommendation that the claims were 
unsubstantiated and there was no reason for DDT to be banned. Sweeney issued his conclusions on 
April 25, 1972.They included the following: 

• DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. . . 
• DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man. . . . 
• The uses of DDT under the registrations involved here do not have a deleterious 
effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. . . . 
• The adverse effect on beneficial animals from the use of DDT under the 
registration involved here is not unreasonable on balance with its benefit. . . . There is a 
present need for the continued use of DDT for the essential uses defined in this case. 
This was in line with the professional scientific and medical scientific pleas that had been made 
worldwide. During the EPA hearings the World Health Organization issued a statement that included: 

Improvement in health occasioned by antimalarial campaigns has broken the 
vicious cycle of poverty and disease in many areas by preventing incapacity and death 
. . . . [N]o economic alternative to DDT is available and the . . . consequences of the 
withdrawal of DDT would be very grave. . . . [T]he safety record of DDT for man is 
truly remarkable. 

Six weeks after Sweeney's findings, on June 2, 1972, the EPA Administrator, William 
Ruckleshaus, reversed the decision, rejected the scientific evidence, and ordered a ban on the sale and 
production of DDT. Ruckleshaus had not attended any of the sessions during the seven-month hearing 
and admitted that he had not read the transcript. The decision, he stated, was taken for political reasons. 
Environmentalist groups have campaigned vigorously ever since for a full ban on all use, by all nations. 

Today, more than 2 billion people—40 percent of the world's population—live in malarious 
countries. Around 300 million are infected, and something like 100 million cases are estimated to occur 
each year along with millions of deaths, most of them children. Africa is one of the worst sufferers, with 
nearly 85 percent of the world's cases. More than 30 percent of childhood deaths there are caused by 
malaria. 

Perhaps the most charitable interpretation of the 1972 decision would be that it was intended as a 
demonstration by a fledgling federal agency, in its first major test, that it was genuinely a disinterested 
arm of the national executive and not a lackey to financial or private corporate interests. One can only 
say here that if public perceptions are to take precedence over fact in the formulation of policy, it's a sad 
day for science. Critics have seen the ruling as part of a deliberate policy of population control, in a 
period when global overpopulation has been widely promoted as one of the greatest problems that the 
world faces. 

In the foregoing, I have leaned heavily on the bookEcological Sanity , by George Claus and 
Karen Bolander, which devotes almost six hundred pages to the subject of which I have managed to 
address only a few selected details briefly. The authors are meticulous in their treatment. They obviously 
read and studied the materials which in many cases expert witnesses who testified at the EPA hearing 
appeared not to have understood. In a number of instances they redid calculations and replotted graphs, 
showing data to indicate the reverse of what the authors of the papers maintained. In other words, as a 
source reference for anyone wanting seriously to grasp the issues at stake and how they were handled, I 
would recommend it as invaluable. It is, however, out of print. After reading a review, I managed to 
track a copy down in a used bookstore in New Jersey. 

Silent Springcan be found in mass-market editions at any bookstore, and is reprinted regularly. 


"Vitamin R": Radiation 
Good for Your Health212 


It is very difficult, and perhaps entirely impossible, to combat the effects of 
brainwashing by argument. 


— Paul Feyerabend 
Radiation Phobia 

It seems that the public is at last coming around to accepting that a nuclear power-generation plant 
cannot explode like a bomb. The majority that I talk to appear to concede, also, that the Chernobyl 
accident that occurred in the Soviet Union in 1986 was a result of practices and policy very different 
from the West's, and that there are other methods of bomb-making that are easier, quicker, cheaper, 
and safer than fooling around with used power-plant fuel. This leaves fear of radiation as probably the 
only effective weapon for carrying on the crusade against nuclear energy, as well as justifying what has 
become a lucrative and no-doubt for some, morally gratifying, cleanup industry. The key credo that 
keeps both sides of the act in business, re-aired periodically lest we forget, is that "no level of radiation is 
safe." In other words, any exposure to ionizing radiation, however small, is damaging to health. Yet 
despite the colossal cost to society in terms of a stalled energy policy, the waste of funds and effort on 
windmills and solar toys, and millions of tax dollars diverted into hauling away dirt and burying it in holes 
in the ground, the belief rests on a theoretical construct that has never been substantiated by evidence. In 
fact, what evidence there is tends to disprove it. 

At levels encountered ordinarily—i.e., excluding bomb victims and patients subjected to massive 
medical doses, usually as a last resort in terminal situations—no measurable results of low-level radiation 
doses are actually observed at all. Low-level effects areinferred by taking a known high-level point 
where the effect is measurable, and assuming that it connects to the zero-point (zero dose, therefore zero 
effect) as a straight line. From this presumed relationship it is possible to read off as an act of faith the 
pro-rata effects that small doses ought to have, if one accepts the straight-line assumption. In the early 
days of radiation physics, when comparatively little was known, this was about as good a relationship as 
any to use when attempting to set safety standards for researchers and workers. By the same token, 
since little was known about the natural ability of biological systems to repair radiation damage, it was 
assumed that the effects would accrue cumulatively with dose—a bit like equating a shot of whiskey 
every night for a month with a full bottle straight down. If this overstated the risk, then so much the 
better, for in the absence of firm knowledge one would obviously prefer to err toward the safe side. 

However, somewhere along the line what started out as a sensible precaution came to be 
perceived as reality. The invisible but assumed effects then took on substance with the introduction of the 
curious practice of extrapolating them across the whole of an exposed population to derive a total figure 
for personsX dose, from which effects were deduced statistically. This would be like saying that since a 
temperature of 1000oC is lethal, 1 degree kills 1/1000th of a person. Therefore raising the temperatures 
of classrooms in schools containing a million children by two degrees will kill two thousand children. Yet 
this is the kind of model that the figures the media are so fond of repeating are based on. Research that 
has been known to the health and radiation physics community for many years indicates, however, that it 
is wrong. 

"The Dose Makes the Poison": Hormesis 

Trying to emulate the labors of Hercules would cause most of us to drop dead from exhaustion. 
Nevertheless, jogging a few miles a week makes lots of people feel good and keeps them in shape. A 
dip in the boilers of an ocean liner would be decidedly damaging to one's health, but soaking in a hot tub 
is relaxing. Things that get lethal when taken to extremes are often beneficial in small quantities. 


This has long been acknowledged for chemical and biological toxins. Trace amounts of germicides 
canincrease fermentation of bacteria. Too-small doses of antibiotics will stimulate growth of dormant 
bacteria that they are supposed to kill. A moderate amount of stress keeps the immune system fit and in 
good tone, no less than muscles. The phenomenon is known as "hormesis," from the Greekhormo, 
meaning "to stimulate." For around two decades, evidence has been mounting that hormesis holds true 
also for ionizing radiation. Not that sunbathing during a nuclear strike is good for you; but low levels 
aren't as bad as many would have us believe. 

This has long been acknowledged for chemical and biological toxins. Trace amounts of germicides 
canincrease fermentation of bacteria. Too-small doses of antibiotics will stimulate growth of dormant 
bacteria that they are supposed to kill. A moderate amount of stress keeps the immune system fit and in 
good tone, no less than muscles. The phenomenon is known as "hormesis," from the Greekhormo, 
meaning "to stimulate." For around two decades, evidence has been mounting that hormesis holds true 
also for ionizing radiation. Not that sunbathing during a nuclear strike is good for you; but low levels 
aren't as bad as many would have us believe. 
213 of over twelve hundred experiments dating back to the turn of the century on the effects of 
low-level radiation on biota ranging from viruses, bacteria, and fungi through various plants and animals 
up to vertebrates. He found that, by all the criteria that biologists use to judge the well-being of living 
things, modest increases above the natural radiation background make life better: living things grow 
bigger and faster; they live longer; they get sick less often and recover sooner; they produce more 
offspring, more of which survive. 

And the same appears to be true also of humans. The state that the EPA found as having the 
highest average level of radon in the home, Iowa, also has below-average cancer incidence.214The 
mountain states, with double the radiation background of the U.S. as a whole (cosmic rays are stronger 
at higher altitudes, and the rocks in those states have a high radioactive content), show a cancer rate way 
below Iowa's. The negative correlation—more radiation, less cancer—holds for the U.S. in general and 
extends worldwide.215The waters of such European spas as Lourdes, Bath, and Bad Gastein, known for 
their beneficial health effects since Roman times, are all found to have high radioactivity levels. British 
data on over ten thousand U.K. Atomic Energy Authority workers show cancer mortality to be 22 
percent below the national average, while for Canada the figure is 33 percent.216Imagine the hysteria 
we'd be seeing if those numbers were the other way around. 

This kind of relationship is represented not by a straight line, but by aJ -shaped curve sloping 
upward to the right. Dose increases to the right; the damage that results is measured vertically. The 
leftmost tip of theJ represents the point of no dose/no effect. ("No dose" means nothing above 
background. There's some natural background everywhere. You can't get away from it.) At first the 
curve goes down, meaning that the "damage" is negative, which is what we've been saying. It reaches an 
optimum at the bottom, and then turns upward—we're still better off than with no dose at all, but the 
beneficial effect is lessening. The beneficial effect disappears where the curve crosses its starting level 
again (the "zero-equivalent point), and beyond that we experience progressively greater discomfort, 
distress, and, eventually, death. 

This has all been known for a long time, of course, to the authorities that set limits and standards. 
The sorry state of today's institutionalized science was brought home at a conference I attended some 
time ago now, in San Diego. Several of the speakers had been involved in the procedures that are 
followed for setting standards and guides for low-level ionizing radiation. The conventional model, upon 
which international limits and regulations are based, remains the Linear, Non-Threshold (LNT) version. 
Yetall the accumulated evidence contradicts it. According to the speakers, the reality of hormesis is 
absolutely conclusive. Were it to be acknowledged as real, just about all of the EPA hysteria about 
cleanups could be forgotten, the scare-statistics being touted about Chernobyl would go away, and most 
of the worries concerning the nuclear industry would be seen as baseless. However, such an 
interpretation is not, at the present time, politically permissible. Hence, quite knowingly, the committees 
involved ignored all the discoveries of molecular biology over the past twenty-five years, and threw out 
the 80 percent of their own data that didn't fit the desired conclusions in order to preserve the official 
fiction. 


217puts it roughly at two-thousandths of a 
"rem," or two "millirems," per day. That's about a tenth of a dental X ray, or one coast-to-coast jet flight, 
or a year's worth of standing beside a nuclear plant. For comparison, the "zero equivalent point" (ZEP) 
crossover where the net effect becomes harmful is at around two rems per day; fifty (note, we're talking 
rems now, not millirems) causes chronic radiation sickness, and a hundred is lethal. 

On this basis, if regulatory authorities set their exposure limits too low, i.e., to the left of where the J 
bottoms out, then reducing levels to comply with them can actually make things worse. In a study of 
homes across 1,729 U.S. counties, Bernard Cohen, professor of physics and radiation health at the 
University of Pittsburgh, has found a correlation between radon levels and lung cancer mortality almost 
as high as that for cigarette smoking. Except, it's in the opposite direction: As radon goes up, cancer 
goes down.218 




Rip-Out Rip-Off: The Asbestos Racket 


Authorities . . . are the curse of science; and do more to interfere with the scientific 
spirit than all its enemies. 

— Thomas Huxley, (C. Bibby:T. H. Huxley: Humanist and Educator ) 

Sometimes, environmentalist crusades result from good, old-fashioned, honest greed, seizing an 
opportunity created by fanatical regulators. 

Sometimes, environmentalist crusades result from good, old-fashioned, honest greed, seizing an 
opportunity created by fanatical regulators. 

Readers who visit my website at www.jamesphogan.com will be aware that I maintain a "bulletin 
board" there, carrying postings on scientific and topical issues that catch my interest and seem worth 
sharing, and anything else that takes my fancy. I didn't put anything up there when the September 11 
event occurred, since it seemed that everyone in the world was already airing opinions of every 
conceivable stripe, and there wasn't much to add. However, I did find myself getting a bit irked as time 
went by, and criticisms began surfacing that the architects and engineers responsible for the World Trade 
Center (WTC) "should have designed it to be able to take things like that." Well, they did. Both towers 
withstood the impacts as they were supposed to. What brought them down was the fire. And it turns out 
that the designers had done a professional and competent job of providing against that eventuality too, 
but their work was negated by over-hasty bureaucracy being pushed by environmentalist junk science. 

The structural steel used in skyscrapers loses most of its strength when red hot. To provide thermal 
protection, buildings like the Empire State and others from the prewar era enclosed the steel support 
columns in a couple of feet of concrete. This was effective but it added a lot of weight and cost, while 
also consuming a substantial amount of interior space. In 1948, Herbert Levine developed an 
inexpensive, lightweight, spray-on insulation composed of asbestos and rock wool, which played a key 
part in the postwar office-tower construction boom. Buildings using it would tolerate a major fire for four 
hours before structural failure, allowing time for evacuation of the building below the fire and airlift by 
helicopters from the roof for people trapped above. By 1971, when the two WTC towers were being 
built, the country was being beset by various environmentalist scare campaigns, one of which was the 
demonization of asbestos. When the use of asbestos was banned, Levine's insulation had already been 
installed in the first sixty-four floors. The newer lightweight construction didn't permit using the traditional 
heavy concrete insulation for the remaining fifty-four floors, and so a non-asbestos substitute was 
jury-rigged to complete the buildings. On studying the arrangement, Levine said, "If a fire breaks out 
above the sixty-fourth floor, that building will fall down." He was right. 

I finally put an item up on the bulletin board in May, 2002, giving the gist of the above and also 
commenting that it was all a result of baseless hysteria, and there had never been a shred of evidence 
that insulating buildings with asbestos was harmful to health. A number of readers wrote to say that they 
hadn't been aware that the whole things was a scam, and asked for more details. I posted a follow-up 
piece accordingly, and since it seems relevant to the subject matter of this part of the book, I thought I'd 
include it here too. 

Insulated from Reality 

In the late 1960s, Dr. Irving Selikoff of the Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, published a study of 
lung cancers among insulation workers.219Although the figures indicted cigarette smoking as the primary 
culprit by far, media accounts played up the asbestos connection and hyped the "one-fiber-can-kill" 
mantra that was being repeated widely at the time—essentially the same false notion that we came 
across with low-level radiation. By 1978 the ensuing misrepresentations and exaggerations formed the 
basis of an OSHA report that predicted 58,000 to 73,000 cancer deaths each year from asbestos, on 
the basis of which the government upped its estimate of industry-related cancers from 2 percent to 40 
percent.220A full-blown epidemic had become reality, and the witch-hunt was on. Mining in the U.S. 
Southwest ceased. Over a dozen companies were forced into bankruptcy by tens of thousands of tort 
cases, clogging the courts and costing thousands of jobs. An Emergency Response Act was passed by 
Congress mandating removal from over 700,000 schools and other buildings, worded such as to levy 
the cost on the school system, diverting tens of billions of dollars away from education. Many private 
and parochial schools were forced to close. 


Yet ten years later the forecast of 58,000–73,000 deaths had been reduced to 13–15 (yes, a 
dozen-odd, not thousands), which the New Orleans-based Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw 
out in November 1988, because the EPA was unable to their satisfaction to substantiate even that figure. 
But by then a lucrative legal and removal industry worth an estimated $150–200 billion had come into 
being that many interests were not about to let go away. So the country continued to witness such 
absurdities as space-suited OSHA workers conducting tests of air samples among unprotected children 
in school buildings where the fiber content of the air was lower than in the street outside. After walls 
were torn down and the insulation removed, levels of airborne asbestos measured up to forty thousand 
times higher than it had been before—remaining so for months afterward. 

Yet ten years later the forecast of 58,000–73,000 deaths had been reduced to 13–15 (yes, a 
dozen-odd, not thousands), which the New Orleans-based Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw 
out in November 1988, because the EPA was unable to their satisfaction to substantiate even that figure. 
But by then a lucrative legal and removal industry worth an estimated $150–200 billion had come into 
being that many interests were not about to let go away. So the country continued to witness such 
absurdities as space-suited OSHA workers conducting tests of air samples among unprotected children 
in school buildings where the fiber content of the air was lower than in the street outside. After walls 
were torn down and the insulation removed, levels of airborne asbestos measured up to forty thousand 
times higher than it had been before—remaining so for months afterward. 

Ninety-five percent of the asbestos ever used in the U.S. and Canada, and 100 percent of that 
mined there, is the "chrysotile," or "white" form, well suited to building insulation, auto brake linings, 
cement, and the like on account of its strength and fire resistance. It consists of a tubular fiber that is 
dissolved and expelled by the lungs, and represents a negligible cancer hazard—21,500 times less than 
cigarettes, according to a Harvard study.221Exposure over many years to the high concentrations that 
existed in the unregulated workplace in times gone by can, it is true, lead to the lung condition known as 
asbestosis, where the tissue becomes fibrous and ceases functioning. But similar problems exist with 
heavy concentrations of coal or silica dust, baking flour, or any other dusty environment, whatever the 
material. No excess cancers above the population average have been found from exposure to the 
chrysotile variety of asbestos. 

The other significant form is crocidolite, also known as "blue asbestos," a hard, needlelike fiber that 
lodges in the tissues and is deadly. As little as three months of exposure can result in fatal cancers not 
only of the lungs but also the body cavities. It is mined only in South Africa, and was used during the 
1930s and '40s in such demanding areas as warship construction, causing cancers among shipyard 
workers that became apparent only in later years. So the true problem, while real, is one of the past. 

But the EPA legislators ignored this distinction and classifiedall asbestos equally as a carcinogen, 
despite being told of these differences in scientific reports submitted in 1978, 1979, and 1984, and 
severe criticism fromScience andThe Lancet . Sir Richard Doll, the Oxford epidemiologist who proved 
the causal link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, wrote of their decision, "No arguments based 
even loosely on [these estimates] should be taken seriously. It seems likely that whoever wrote the 
OSHA paper did so for political rather than scientific reasons."222Quite perspicacious, possibly. In the 
late 1980s, the EPA director involved became president of one of the largest asbestos abatement 
companies in the United States. 

A statistician who helped produce the original OSHA paper later lamented of the fiasco, "We did 
what scientists so often do, which was to use . . . estimates without questioning them."223Wrong. It's what 
regulators bent on advancing a political ideology do, not scientists interested in facts. 

In this connection, it should also be recalled that the O-ring failure that was finally pinpointed as the 
cause of theChallenger shuttle disaster occurred with the first use of a replacement for the original 
sealant putty, well suited to the task, that had been used safely in all prior shuttle missions and 
seventy-seven successfulTitan III rocket launches. So why was it replaced? Under EPA regulations it 
had to be phased out because it contained asbestos—as if astronauts are going to climb out of a 
spacecraft and start snorting it. 

Makers and Takers 

So bureaucrats and sloppy legislators prosper, while people who actually produce something useful 
are thrown out of work, schools are closed or robbed of their funding, and competently designed 
structures and systems are sabotaged by incompetents. I hadn't followed the asbestos story after the 
eighties, until my attention was drawn to its connection with the WTC tragedy. Since the press seemed 


to have gotten the facts straight finally, I had naively assumed that the matter was effectively ended, the 
damage consigned to the endless catalog of past silliness. And then I came across an article by Arthur 
Robinson in the November 2002 issue of his newsletter,Access to Energy , entitled "Goodbye to Union 
Carbide." The extracts below need no comment. 

to have gotten the facts straight finally, I had naively assumed that the matter was effectively ended, the 
damage consigned to the endless catalog of past silliness. And then I came across an article by Arthur 
Robinson in the November 2002 issue of his newsletter,Access to Energy , entitled "Goodbye to Union 
Carbide." The extracts below need no comment. 

numerous useful plastics and other essential synthetic materials to American industry and 

individuals. My father designed and supervised the construction of some of these Union 

Carbide plants. 

"Dow Chemical Held Responsible In Asbestos Cases" by Susan Warren inThe Wall 
Street Journal, October 25, 2002, p. A6, reports, however, that the scourge of 
asbestos litigation has now hit Union Carbide. A Charleston, West Virginia, jury has 
ruled in favor of no less than 2,000 'plaintiffs' in finding that Union Carbide operated 
unsafe facilities from 1945 to 1980. 

Regardless of Dow's best legal efforts, this is the beginning of the end for another 
American corporation. Asbestos, useful and safe, was used throughout American 
industry for more than a century. It was also used in nearly every research laboratory in 
the United States for everything from lab benches to fume hoods. We suppose that 
when these leeches are finished with American industry, they will go after the 
endowments of our universities too. . . . 

Why conduct military operations against terrorists abroad when we are allowing people 
with no better principles to destroy our country in American courts? The "asbestos 
lawyers" are doing more damage to the United States than all the terrorists on Earth will 
ever do. . . . If, however, the legal profession continues to refuse to police itself, this 
problem will continue to worsen. 

It will be no pleasure to watch my father's life's work along with that of the tens of 
thousands of productive men and women who built Union Carbide ruined by these 
reprehensible thieves who have perverted and are destroying America's legal system as 
well. 

SIX 
CLOSING RANKS 
AIDS Heresy In The Viricentric Universe 


Sometimes a deception cannot be prevented from running its course, even at 
terrible cost, until eventually it collides with reality. 

— Phillip Johnson 
Maybe someday AIDS experts will be as well informed as they are well funded. 

— Christine Maggiore, director, Alive and Well 

Science is supposed to be concerned with objective truth—the way things are, that lie beyond the 
power of human action or desires to influence. Facts determine what is believed, and the consequences, 
good or bad, fall where they may. Politics is concerned with those things that are within human ability to 
change, and in the realm of politics, beliefs are encouraged that advance political agendas. All too often 
in this case, truth is left to fall where it may. 

Science is supposed to be concerned with objective truth—the way things are, that lie beyond the 
power of human action or desires to influence. Facts determine what is believed, and the consequences, 
good or bad, fall where they may. Politics is concerned with those things that are within human ability to 
change, and in the realm of politics, beliefs are encouraged that advance political agendas. All too often 
in this case, truth is left to fall where it may. 
224Our species could be staring at extinction. 

But I didn't buy that line either. I can't really offer a rationally packaged explanation of why. Part of 
it was that although AIDS had been around for some years, it was still clearly confined overwhelmingly 
to the original risk groups to which the term had first been applied. If it was going to "explode" out into 
the general population, there should have been unmistakable signs of its happening by then. There 
weren't. And another large part, I suppose, was that scaring the public had become such a lucrative and 
politically fruitful industry that the more horrific the situation was made to sound, the more skeptically I 
reacted. All the claims contradicted what my own eyes and ears told me. Nobody that I knew had it. 
Nobody that I knew knew anybody who had it. But "everybody knew" it was everywhere. Now, I don't 
doubt that when the Black Death hit Europe, or when smallpox reached the Americas, peopleknew they 
had an epidemic. When you need a billion-dollar propaganda industry to tell you there's a problem, you 
don't have a major problem. 

So I got on with life and largely forgot about the issue until I visited the University of California, 
Berkeley, to meet Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology, whom a mutual friend had 
urged me to contact. Talking to Duesberg and some of his colleagues, both then and on later occasions, 
left me stupefied and led to my taking a new interest in the subject. This has persisted over the years 
since and involved contacts with others not only across the U.S., but as far removed as England, Ireland, 
Germany, Russia, Australia, and South Africa. We like to think that the days of the Inquisition are over. 
Well, here's what can happen to politically incorrect science when it gets in the way of a bandwagon 
being propelled bylots of money—and to a scientist who ignores it and attempts simply to point at what 
the facts seem to be trying to say. 

An Industry Out of Work 

The first popular misunderstanding to clear up is that "AIDS" is not something new that appeared 
suddenly around 1980. It's a collection of old diseases that have been around for as long as medical 
history, that began showing up in clusters at greater than the average incidence.225An example was 
Pneumocystis carinnii, a rare type of pneumonia caused by a normally benign microbe that inhabits the 
lungs of just about every human being on the planet; it becomes pathogenic (disease-causing) typically in 
cancer patients whose immune systems are suppressed by chemotherapy. And, indeed, the presence of 
other opportunistic infections such as esophagal yeast infections confirmed immunosuppression in all of 
these early cases. Many of them also suffered from a hitherto rare blood-vessel tumor known as 
Kaposi's sarcoma. All this came as a surprise to medical authorities, since the cases were concentrated 
among males aged twenty to forty, usually considered a healthy age group, and led the conditions being 


classified together as a syndrome presumed to have some single underlying cause. The victims were 
almost exclusively homosexuals, which led to a suspicion of an infectious agent, with sexual practices as 
the main mode of transmission. This seemed to be confirmed when other diseases associated with 
immune deficiency, such as TB among drug abusers, and various infections experienced by hemophiliacs 
and transfusion recipients, were included in the same general category too, which by this time was 
officially designated Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or "AIDS." 

classified together as a syndrome presumed to have some single underlying cause. The victims were 
almost exclusively homosexuals, which led to a suspicion of an infectious agent, with sexual practices as 
the main mode of transmission. This seemed to be confirmed when other diseases associated with 
immune deficiency, such as TB among drug abusers, and various infections experienced by hemophiliacs 
and transfusion recipients, were included in the same general category too, which by this time was 
officially designated Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or "AIDS." 

And there you have the basic paradigm that still pretty much describes the official line today. This 
virus that nobody had heard of before—the technology to detect it didn't exist until the eighties—could 
lurk anywhere, and no vaccine existed to protect against it. Then it was found in association with various 
other kinds of sickness in Africa, giving rise to speculations that it might have originated there, and the 
media gloried in depictions of a global pandemic sweeping across continents out of control. Once 
smitten there was no cure, and progression to exceptionally unpleasant forms of physical devastation and 
eventual death was inevitable and irreversible. 

While bad news for some, this came at a propitious time for a huge, overfunded and largely 
out-of-work army within the biomedical establishment, which, it just so happened, had been set up, 
equipped, trained, and on the lookout for exactly such an emergency.226Following the elimination of polio 
in the fifties and early sixties, the medical schools had been churning out virologists eager for more Nobel 
Prizes. New federal departments to monitor and report on infectious diseases stood waiting to be 
utilized. But the war on cancer had failed to find a viral cause, and all these forces in need of an epidemic 
converged in a crusade to unravel the workings of the deadly new virus and produce a vaccine against it. 
No other virus was ever so intensively studied. Published papers soon numbered thousands, and jobs 
were secure as federal expenditures grew to billions of dollars annually. Neither was the largess confined 
to just the medical-scientific community and its controlling bureaucracies. As HIV came to be 
automatically equated with AIDS, anyone testing positive qualified as a disaster victim eligible for 
treatment at public expense, which meant lucrative consultation and testing fees, and treatment with some 
of the most profitable drugs that the pharmaceuticals industry has ever marketed. 

And beyond that, with no vaccine available, the sole means of prevention lay in checking the 
spread of HIV. This meant funding for another growth sector of promotional agencies, advisory centers, 
educational campaigns, as well as support groups and counselors to minister to afflicted victims and their 
families. While many were meeting harrowing ends, others had never had it so good. Researchers who 
would otherwise have spent their lives peering through microscopes and cleaning Petri dishes became 
millionaires setting up companies to produce HIV kits and drawing royalties for the tests performed. 
Former dropouts were achieving political visibility and living comfortably as organizers of programs 
financed by government grants and drug-company handouts. It was a time for action, not thought; 
spreading the word, not asking questions. Besides, who would want to mess with this golden goose? 

Storm-Cloud Over the Parade 

And then in the late eighties, Peter Duesberg began arguing that AIDS might not be caused by HIV 
at all—nor by any other virus, come to that. In fact, he didn't even think that "AIDS" was infectious! This 
was not coming from any lightweight on the periphery of the field. Generally acknowledged as one of the 
world's leading authorities on retroviruses, the first person to fully sequence a retroviral genome, 
Duesberg had played a major role in exploring the possibility of viruses as the cause of cancers. In fact it 
was mainly his work in the sixties that showed this conclusively not to be the case, which had not exactly 
ingratiated him to many when that lavishly funded line of research was brought to a close. But this didn't 


prevent his being tipped as being in line for a Nobel Prize, named California Scientist of the Year in 
1971, awarded an Outstanding Investigator Grant by the National Institutes for Health in 1985, and 
inducted to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1986. 

prevent his being tipped as being in line for a Nobel Prize, named California Scientist of the Year in 
1971, awarded an Outstanding Investigator Grant by the National Institutes for Health in 1985, and 
inducted to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1986. 
227 

Although Duesberg is highly qualified in this field, the observations that he was making really didn't 
demand doctorate knowledge or rarefied heights of intellect to understand. For a start, years after their 
appearances, the various "AIDS" diseases remained obstinately confined to the original risk groups, and 
the victims were still over 90 percent male. This isn't the pattern of an infectious disease, which spreads 
and affects everybody, male and female alike. For a new disease loose in a defenseless population, the 
spread would be exponential. And this was what had been predicted in the early days, but it just hadn't 
happened. While the media continued to terrify the public with a world of their own creation, planet 
Earth was getting along okay. Heterosexuals who didn't use drugs weren't getting AIDS; for the U.S., 
subtracting the known risk groups left about five hundred per year—fewer than the fatalities from 
contaminated tap water. The spouses and partners of AIDS victims weren't catching it. Prostitutes who 
didn't do drugs weren't getting it, and customers of prostitutes weren't getting it. In short, these had all 
the characteristics of textbook non-infectious diseases. 

It is an elementary principle of science and medicine that correlation alone is no proof of cause. If 
A is reported as generally occurring with B, there are four possible explanations: (1) A causes B; (2) B 
causes A; (3) something else causes both A and B; (4) the correlation is just coincidence or has been 
artificially exaggerated, e.g., by biased collecting of data. There's no justification in jumping to a 
conclusion like (1) until the other three have been rigorously eliminated. 

In the haste to find an infectious agent, Duesberg maintained, the role of HIV had been interpreted 
the wrong way around. Far from being a common cause of the various conditions called "AIDS," HIV 
itself was an opportunistic infection that made itself known in the final stages of immune-system 
deterioration brought about in other ways. In a sense, AIDS caused HIV. Hence, HIV acted as a 
"marker" of high-risk groups, but was not in itself responsible for the health problems that those groups 
were experiencing. The high correlation between HIV and AIDS that was constantly being alluded to 
was an artifact of the way in which AIDS was defined: 

HIV + indicator disease = AIDS 
Indicator disease without HIV = Indicator disease. 

So if you've got all the symptoms of TB, and you test positive for HIV, you've got AIDS. But if 
you have a condition that's clinically indistinguishable and don't test positive for HIV, you've got TB. 

And that, of course, would have made the problem scientifically and medically trivial. 


Anatomy of an Epidemic 

Anatomy of an Epidemic 

For example, statistics for new AIDS cases were always quoted as cumulative figures that could 
only get bigger, contrasting with the normal practice with other diseases of reporting annual figures, 
where any decline is clear at a glance. And despite the media's ongoing stridency about an epidemic out 
of control, the actual figures from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), for every category,were 
declining, and had been since a peak around 1988. This was masked by repeated redefinitions to cover 
more diseases, so that what wasn't AIDS one day became AIDS the next, causing more cases to be 
diagnosed. This happened five times from 1982 to 1993, with the result that the first nine months of 
1993 showed as an overall rise of 5 percent what would otherwise—i.e., by the 1992 definition—have 
been a 33 percent drop.228 

Currently (January 2003) the number of indicator diseases is twenty-nine. One of the newer 
categories added in 1993 was cervical cancer. (Militant femininists had been protesting that men 
received too much of the relief appropriations for AIDS victims.) Nobody was catching anything new, 
but suddenly in one group of the population what hadn't been AIDS one day became AIDS the next, 
and we had the headlines loudly proclaiming that heterosexual women were the fastest-growing AIDS 
group. 

A similar deception is practiced with percentages, as illustrated by figures publicized in Canada, 
whose population is around 40 million. In 1995, a total of 1,410 adult AIDS cases were reported, 
1,295 (91.8%) males and 115 (8.2%) females. The year 1996 showed a startling decrease in new cases 
to 792, consisting of 707 males (89.2%) and 85 females (10.8%). So the number of adult female AIDS 
cases actually decreased by 26% from 1995 to 1996. Yet, even though the actual number decreased, 
because the percentage of the total represented by women increased from 8.2% in 1995 to 10.8% in 
1996, the Quarterly Surveillance Report (August 1997) from the Bureau of HIV/AIDS and STD at the 
Canadian Laboratory Centre for Disease Control issued the ominous warning that AIDS cases among 
Canadian women had dramatically increased.229 

Meanwhile, a concerted campaign across the schools and campuses was doing its part to terrorize 
young people over the ravages of teenage AIDS. Again, actual figures tell a different story. The number 
of cases in New York City reported by the CDC for ages 13–19 from 1981 to the end of June 1992 
were 872. When homosexuals, intravenous drug users, and hemophiliacs are eliminated, the number left 
not involving these risks (or not admitting to them) reduces to a grand total of 16 in an eleven-year 
period. (Yes, 16. You did read that right.)230 

The correlation between HIV and AIDS that was repeatedly cited as proving cause was 
maintained by denying the violations of it. Obviously if HIV is the cause, the disease can't exist without it. 
(You don't catch flu without having the flu virus.) At a conference in Amsterdam in 1992, Duesberg, 
who had long been maintaining that dozens of known instances of AIDS patients testing negative for 
HIV had been suppressed, produced 4,621 cases that he had found in the literature. The response was 
to define them as a new condition designated Idiopathic CD4+ Lymphocytopenia, or ICL, which is 
obscurese for "unexplained AIDS symptoms." The figures subsequently disappeared from official 
AIDS-counting statistics.231 

Questioning the Infectious Theory 


Viral diseases strike typically after an incubation period of days or weeks, which is the time in 
which the virus can replicate before the body develops an immunity. When this didn't happen for AIDS, 
the notion of a "slow" virus was introduced, which would delay the onset of symptoms for months. When 
a year passed with no sign of an epidemic, the number was upped to five years; when nothing happened 
then either, to ten. Now we're being told ten to fifteen. Inventions to explain failed predictions are 
invariably a sign of a theory in trouble. (Note: This is not the same as a virus going dormant, as can 
happen with some types of herpes, and reactivating later, such as in times of stress. In these cases, the 
most pronounced disease symptoms occur at the time of primary infection, before immunity is 
established. Subsequent outbreaks are less severe—immunity is present, but reduced—and when they 
do occur, the virus is abundant and active. This does not describe AIDS. A long delay before any 
appearance of sickness is characteristic of the cumulative buildup of a toxic cause, like lung cancer from 
smoking or liver cirrhosis from alcohol excess.) 

Viral diseases strike typically after an incubation period of days or weeks, which is the time in 
which the virus can replicate before the body develops an immunity. When this didn't happen for AIDS, 
the notion of a "slow" virus was introduced, which would delay the onset of symptoms for months. When 
a year passed with no sign of an epidemic, the number was upped to five years; when nothing happened 
then either, to ten. Now we're being told ten to fifteen. Inventions to explain failed predictions are 
invariably a sign of a theory in trouble. (Note: This is not the same as a virus going dormant, as can 
happen with some types of herpes, and reactivating later, such as in times of stress. In these cases, the 
most pronounced disease symptoms occur at the time of primary infection, before immunity is 
established. Subsequent outbreaks are less severe—immunity is present, but reduced—and when they 
do occur, the virus is abundant and active. This does not describe AIDS. A long delay before any 
appearance of sickness is characteristic of the cumulative buildup of a toxic cause, like lung cancer from 
smoking or liver cirrhosis from alcohol excess.) 

One of the major advances in medicine during the nineteenth century was the formulation of 
scientific procedures to determine if a particular disease is infectious—carried by some microbe that's 
being passed around—and if so, to identify the microbe; or else a result of some factor in the 
environment, such as a dietary deficiency, a local genetic trait, a toxin. The prime criteria for making this 
distinction are known as Koch's Postulates, from a paper by the German medical doctor Robert Koch 
published in 1884 following years of investigation into such conditions as anthrax, wound infections, and 
TB. It's ironic to note that one of problems Koch was trying to find answers to was the tendency of 
medical professionals, excited by the recent discoveries of bacteria, to rush into finding infectious causes 
for everything, even where there were none, and their failure to distinguish between harmless "passenger" 
microbes and the pathogens actually responsible for illness. 

There are four postulates, and when all are met, the case is considered proved beyond reasonable 
doubt that the disease is infectious and caused by the suspected agent. HIV as the cause of AIDS fails 
every one.232 

(1) The microbe must be found in all cases of the disease. 
By the CDC's own statistics, for 25 percent of the cases diagnosed in the U.S. the presence of 
HIV has been inferred presumptively, without actual testing. And anyway, by 1993, over four thousand 
cases of people dying of AIDS diseases were admitted to be HIV-free. The redefinition of the criteria 
for AIDS introduced during that year included a category in which AIDS can be diagnosed without a 
positive test for HIV. (How this can be so while at the same time HIV is insisted to be the cause of 
AIDS is a good question. The required logic is beyond my abilities.) The World Health Organization's 
clinical case-definition for AIDS in Africa is not based on an HIV test but on certain clinical symptoms, 
none of which are new or uncommon on the African continent. Subsequent testing of sample groups 
diagnosed as having AIDS has given negative result in the order of 50 percent. Why diseases totally 
different from those listed in America and Europe, now not even required to show any HIV status, 
should be called the same thing is another good question. 

(2) The microbe must be isolated from the host 
and grown in a pure culture. 

This is to ensure that the disease was caused by the suspect germ and not by something unidentified 
in a mixture of substances. The tissues and body fluids of a patient with a genuine viral disease will have 
so many viruses pouring out of infected cells that it is a straightforward matter—standard undergraduate 
exercise—to separate a pure sample and compare the result with known cataloged types. There have 
been numerous claims of isolating HIV, but closer examination shows them to be based on liberal 
stretchings of what the word has always been understood to mean. For example, using chemical 
stimulants to shock a fragment of defective RNA to express itself in a cell culture removed from any 
active immune system is a very different thing from demonstrating active viral infection.
This is to ensure that the disease was caused by the suspect germ and not by something unidentified 
in a mixture of substances. The tissues and body fluids of a patient with a genuine viral disease will have 
so many viruses pouring out of infected cells that it is a straightforward matter—standard undergraduate 
exercise—to separate a pure sample and compare the result with known cataloged types. There have 
been numerous claims of isolating HIV, but closer examination shows them to be based on liberal 
stretchings of what the word has always been understood to mean. For example, using chemical 
stimulants to shock a fragment of defective RNA to express itself in a cell culture removed from any 
active immune system is a very different thing from demonstrating active viral infection.In short, no 
isolation of HIV has been achieved which meets the standards that virology normally requires. More on 
this later. 

(3) The microbe must be capable of reproducing the original disease when introduced into a 
susceptible host. 
This asks to see that the disease can be reproduced by injecting the allegedly causative microbe 
into an uninfected, otherwise healthy host. It does not mean that the microbe must cause the disease 
every time (otherwise everyone would be sick all the time). 

Two ways in which this condition can be tested are injection into laboratory animals, and accidental 
infection of humans. (Deliberate infection of humans would be unethical). Chimpanzees have been 
injected since 1983 and developed antibodies, showing that the virus "takes," but none has developed 
AIDS symptoms. There have been a few vaguely described claims of health workers catching AIDS 
from needle sticks and other HIV exposure, but nothing conclusively documented. For comparison, the 
figure for hepatitis infections is fifteen hundred per year. Hence, even if the case for AIDS were proved, 
hepatitis is hundreds of times more virulent. Yet we don't have a panic about it. 

(4) The microbe must be found present in the host so infected. 
This is irrelevant in the case of AIDS, since (3) has never been met. 

The typical response to this violating of a basic principle that has served well for a century is either 
to ignore it or say that HIV is so complex that it renders Koch's Postulates obsolete. But Koch's 
Postulates are simply a formalization of commonsense logic, not a statement about microbes per se. The 
laws of logic don't become obsolete, any more than mathematics. And if the established criteria for 
infectiousness are thrown away, then by what alternative standard is HIV supposed to be judged 
infectious? Just clusterings of like symptoms? Simple correlations with no proof of any cause-effect 
relationship? That's called superstition, not science. It puts medicine back two hundred years. 

Science by Press Conference 


So how did HIV come to be singled out as the cause to begin with? The answer seems to be, at a 
press conference. In April 1984, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, 
sponsored a huge event and introduced the NIH researcher Robert Gallo to the press corps as the 
discoverer of the (then called HTLV-III) virus, which was declared to be the probable cause of AIDS. 
This came before publication of any papers in the scientific journals, violating the normal protocol of 
giving other scientists an opportunity to review such findings before they were made public. No doubt 
coincidentally, the American claim to fame came just in time to preempt the French researcher Luc 
Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who had already published in the literature his discovery of 
what later turned out to be the same virus. From that point on, official policy was set in stone. All 
investigation of alternatives was dropped, and federal funding went only to research that reflected the 
approved line. This did not make for an atmosphere of dissent among career-minded scientists, who, 
had they been politically free to do so, might have pointed out that even if the cause of AIDS were 


indeed a virus, the hypothesis of its being HIV raised some distinctly problematical questions. 

indeed a virus, the hypothesis of its being HIV raised some distinctly problematical questions. 

Reference is sometimes made to several papers that Gallo published inScience after the press 
conference, deemed to have settled the issue before any outside scientists had seen them.234But even if 
the methods described are accepted as demonstrating true viral isolation as claimed, which as we've 
seen has been strongly disputed, they show a presence of HIV in less than half of the patients with 
opportunistic infections, and less than a third with Kaposi's sarcoma—the two most characteristic AIDS 
diseases. This is "overwhelming" evidence? It falls short of the standards that would normally be 
expected of a term-end dissertation, never mind mobilizing the federal resources of the United States 
and shutting down all investigation of alternatives. 

And the case gets even shakier than that. 

Biology's Answer to Dark Matter? The Virus that Isn't There 

Viruses make you sick by killing cells. When viruses are actively replicating at a rate sufficient to 
cause disease, either because immunity hasn't developed yet or because the immune system is too 
defective to contain them, there's no difficulty in isolating them from the affected tissues. With influenza, a 
third of the lung cells are infected; with hepatitis, just about all of the liver cells. In the case of AIDS, 
typically one in one thousand T-cells shows any sign of HIV, even for terminally ill cases—and even 
then, no distinction is made of inactive or defective viruses, or totally nonfunctional viral fragments. But 
even if every one were a lethally infected cell, the body's replacement rate is thirty times higher. This 
simply doesn't add up to damage on a scale capable of causing disease.235 

Retroviruses, the class to which HIV belongs, survive by encoding their RNA sequences into the 
chromosomal DNA of the host cell (the reverse of the normal direction of information flow in cell 
replication, which is DNA to RNA to protein, hence the name). When that part of the host chromosome 
comes to be transcribed, the cell's protein-manufacturing machinery makes a new retrovirus, which 
leaves by budding off through the cell membrane. The retrovirus therefore leaves the cell intact and 
functioning, and survives by slipping a copy of itself from time to time into the cell's normal production 
run. This strategy is completely different from that of the more prevalent "lytic" viruses, which take over 
the cell machinery totally to mass-produce themselves until the cell is exhausted, at which point they 
rupture the membrane, killing the cell, and move on, much in the style of locusts. This is what gives the 
immune system problems, and in the process causes colds, flu, polio, rabies, measles, mumps, yellow 
fever, and so on. 

But a retrovirus produces so few copies of itself that it's easy meat for an immune system 
battle-trained at dealing with lytic viruses. For this reason, the main mode of transmission for a retrovirus 
is from mother to child, meaning that the host organism needs to live to reproductive maturity.236A 
retrovirus that killed its host wouldn't be reproductively viable. Many human retroviruses have been 
studied, and all are harmless. (Some rare animal cancers arise from specific genes inserted retrovirally 
into the host DNA. But in these cases tumors form rapidly and predictably soon after infection— 
completely unlike the situation with AIDS. And a cancer is due to cells proliferating wildly—just the 
opposite of killing them.) 

HIV conforms to the retroviral pattern and is genetically unremarkable. It doesn't kill T-cells, even 
in cultures raised away from a body ("in vitro"), with no immune system to suppress it. Indeed, HIV for 
research is propagated in immortal lines of the very cell which, to cause AIDS, HIV is supposed to kill! 
—and in concentrations far higher than have ever been observed in any human, with or without AIDS. 


Separated from its host environment it promptly falls to pieces. 

Separated from its host environment it promptly falls to pieces. 

Some researchers, looking skeptically at the assortment of RNA fragments, bits of protein, and 
other debris from which the existence of HIV is inferred go even further and question if there is really any 
such entity at all. (Question:If so, then what's replicating in those culture dishes?Answer: It has never 
been shown conclusively that anything introduced from the outside is replicating. Artificially stimulating 
"something" into expressing itself—it could be a strip of "provirus" code carried in the culture-cell's DNA 
—is a long way from demonstrating an active, pathogenic virus from a human body.) 

A research group in Perth, Western Australia, headed by Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, finds that 
every one of the proteins that the orthodox theory interprets as components of a viral antibody can be 
expressed by the DNA of any cell in the human body subjected to sufficient levels of oxidative stress— 
without any infectious agent from another individual being present at all.237 

Is it not significant that chemical stimulation of precisely this nature is needed to induce "HIV 
replication" in cultures? Immunosuppressive oxidative stress, as a consequence either of environment or 
behavior, is also a common denominator across all of the recognized AIDS risk groups. If this 
explanation is correct, it implies that immune systems under stress from such causes as toxic drug assault 
or overload by foreign proteins frequently begin manufacturing proteins that parts of the rich mixture of 
antibodies usually found in such circumstances react to. Finding out precisely what these proteins do and 
why they are produced would perhaps be a better use for the billions of dollars so far spent futilely on 
conventional AIDS research. (My own suspicion is that they are part of a mechanism for updating the 
genome with new survival information, thus violating the dogma of evolutionary biology that says 
mutations are unaffected by the environment. But that's another story.) 

Detection of activity of the enzyme reverse transcriptase is still cited as proof of the existence of a 
retrovirus. Although this was believed—somewhat rashly, it would seem—at one time, the enzyme has 
been shown to be present in all living matter, with no particular connection to retroviruses per se. 

A key step in demonstrating the existence of a new virus has always been the production of a 
micrograph showing the purified virus, exhibiting the expected structural and morphological features. 
Despite repeated demands by skeptics, no example was published until 1997. It turned out to be a 
mishmash of cellular debris, in which what had been identified as viruses turned out to be assorted 
fragments of material being similar only in having the size and general appearance of viruses, long familiar 
to virologists and known as "viral-like particles." According to Dr. Etienne de Harven, emeritus 
professor of pathology, University of Toronto, who worked on the electron microscopy of retroviral 
structures for twenty-five years at the Sloan Kettering Institution in New York, "Neither electron 
microscopy nor molecular markers have so far permitted a scientifically sound demonstration of 
retrovirus isolation directly from AIDS patients."238 

The German virologist Stefan Lanka puts it more bluntly: 

The dispute over who discovered HIV was a distraction from the question of 
whether the virus actually exists at all. The public was impressed that if a President and a 
Prime Minister had to meet to resolve attribution, then the thing they were negotiating 
about had to be real.239 


Well, the royalties on antibody testing were certainly real. 

Well, the royalties on antibody testing were certainly real. 

If HIV is virtually undetectable even in its alleged terminal victims, how do you test for it? You 
don't; you test for the antibody. What this means in principle is that a culture containing "antigens"— 
foreign proteins that provoke an immune response, in this case proteins allegedly from the HIV virus— 
are exposed to a sample of the patient's blood. If the blood plasma contains antibodies to that antigen, 
they will bind to it in a reaction that can be made visible by suitable means. 

Wait a minute. . . . Aren't antibodies part of the body's own defense equipment—that you either 
acquired from your mother, learned to make yourself at some time in life when you encountered the 
virus, or were tricked into making by a vaccine? If you have no symptoms of an illness and no detectable 
virus, but your system is supplying itself with antibodies, isn't this a pretty good description of immunity? 

Yes—for any other disease, and if we were dealing with rationality. But this is the land of AIDS. 
The usual reason for antibody testing is as a check to see if somebody needs to renew their shots. Also, 
there are situations where testing for the antibody to a pathogen suspected of causing a condition can 
make sense, given the right circumstances.If a person is showing clinical symptoms that areknown to be 
caused by that pathogen, (perhaps by satisfying Koch's postulates),and a test has been shown 
independently to identify an antibody specific to that pathogen,then testing for the antibody can be a 
convenient way of confirming the suspected disease without going through the rigmarole of isolation. 

But none of this is true of HIV. It has never been shown to cause anything, nor has a likely 
explanation even been advanced as to how it could. And the only way of showing that an antibody test is 
specific to a virus is to compare its results with a "gold standard" test, one that has been shown to 
measure the virus and nothing else. Establishing such a standard requires isolating the virus from clinical 
patients in the true, traditional sense, and for HIV that has never been done. What, then, if anything, 
does the "HIV test" mean? 

A genuinely useful antibody test can confirm that anobserved sickness is due to the microbe 
thought to be the culprit. A positive HIV result from somebody who is completely symptom-free, on the 
other hand, means either that the antibody has been carried from birth without the virus ever having been 
encountered, or that the virus has been successfully neutralized to the point of invisibility. So in this 
context, "HIV positive" means HIV-immune. Interpreting it as a prediction that somebody will die years 
hence from some unspecifiable disease makes about as much sense as diagnosing smallpox in a healthy 
person from the presence of antibodies acquired through childhood vaccination. 

Testing for What? 

The test can mean a lot of other things too. The most common, known as ELISA (Enzyme-Linked 
Immuno-Sorbent Assay, for those who love quoting these things at cocktail parties), was developed in 
1984 for blood screening. Now, when you're looking for contaminated blood, youwant a test that's 
oversensitive—where anything suspect will ding the bell. If the positive is false, after all, you merely 
throw away a pint of blood; but if a false negative gets through, the consequences could be catastrophic. 
(Whether or not what you're screening for is a real hazard isn't the issue here.) But the same test started 
being used for diagnosis. And when people are being told that a positive result means certainty of 
developing a disease that's inevitably fatal, that's a very different thing indeed. 

Here are some of the other things that can give a positive result, which even some doctors that I've 
talked to weren't aware of: prior pregnancy; alcoholism; certain cancers; malaria antibodies; leprosy 
antibodies; flu vaccination; heating of blood sample; prolonged storage of the sample; numerous other 
viruses; various parasitic diseases; hepatitis B antibodies; rheumatoid arthritis. In fact, almost seventy 
other causes have been shown to be capable of causing a positive reaction that have nothing to do with 
AIDS conditions.240In a mass screening in Russia in 1991, the WHO performed thirty million tests over a 
two-year period and found 30,000 positive results. Attempts to confirm these yielded around 300, of 


which 66 were actual AIDS cases.which 66 were actual AIDS cases.

In addition to the tests being uncertain in that precisely what they measure has never been defined, 
and nonspecific in that many other factors can give the same result, they are not standardized. This 
means that no nationally or internationally accepted criteria exist for deciding what constitutes a positive 
result. What people take as a death sentence on the basis of the things they've been told varies from one 
country to another, and even from one testing authority to another within the same country. The U.S. 
practice is to require a repeated positive result to an ELISA "search" test, to be "confirmed" by a test 
known as the HIV Western Blot (WB), which is supposed to be more accurate—although the United 
Kingdom won't use it because of the risk of misinterpretation due to cross-reactions. 

However, despite the reassuringly suggestive terminology, the WB remains as nonspecific, since it 
tests for the same antigen proteins as ELISA (but separated out into bands, so it's possible to see which 
ones are causing the reaction) and has likewise never been verified against any gold standard.242In fact, 
some authorities cite it as the "standard" for assessing ELISA. This is a bit like using one clock to check 
the accuracy of another, when neither has been verified to be correct in the first place. According to the 
WB interpretations handed down in different places, an HIV positive African would not be positive in 
Australia; a positive from the U.S. Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study 1983–1992 would not be positive 
anywhere else in the world, including Africa.243The pamphlet supplied with the ELISA test kit from 
Abbot Laboratories states: "At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or 
absence of antibodies to HIV-1 and HIV-2 in human blood." 

Biotechnology's Xerox Machine 

A new diagnostic definition, introduced with several others in 1993, now makes it possible to have 
AIDS simply on the basis of a low CD4 cell count, without the presence of HIV being established at all. 
However, this amendment was not followed in Canada. Since 1995, more than half the new AIDS cases 
diagnosed in the U.S. have been in persons with no overt symptoms of AIDS illness, but who exhibited 
a "bad" cell count. All of those people, it seems, could be cured immediately by simply by heading 
northward and crossing the 49th parallel. It would certainly be a lot cheaper than going on medication of 
dubious benefit—and with the certainty of suffering no side effects. 

The latest diagnostic disease indicator, "viral load," is an indirect measure divorced from any actual 
symptoms at all, which means that the efficacy of a drug is judged according to the observed change in a 
number deemed to be a "surrogate marker," and whether you're actually better, worse, or felt fine to 
begin with has got nothing to do with it. It's based on the "polymerase chain reaction" (PCR) method of 
amplifying formerly undetectable amounts of molecular genetic material—in this case, fragments of RNA 
that are said to be from HIV—by copying them in enormous numbers.Forbes magazine called it 
biotechnology's version of the Xerox machine. But errors are amplified too, by the same amount. The 
PCR process will indiscriminately copy dud HIVs that have been neutralized by antibodies, defectives 
that never formed properly in the first place, scraps of free-floating RNA, all of which end up being 
counted. And incredibly, these counts are presented as if they represented active viruses detected in the 
patient and not creations of the PCR process itself.244The Australian mathematician Mark Craddock has 
shown the mathematical basis of the model to be fatally flawed and based on wrong assumptions about 
what the number of RNA fragments says about the number of free viruses.245The inventor of the PCR 
method, Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, holds "quantitative PCR" to be a self-contradiction and 
dismisses its application in this way as worthless. The whole point is that if HIV were present and active 
in the body in the way that the viral load advocates claim, regardless of the foregoing, it should be readily 
amenable to standard virus-counting techniques. It shouldn't be necessary to use extra-high-sensitivity 
film to get an image if there's plenty of sunlight. 

The Export Industry: Africa and Asia 

"Everybody knows," from the flow of government and U.N. agency handouts uncritically passed on 
by the media that Africa is being devastated by an AIDS epidemic running out of control, with cases 


counted in tens of millions. What they probably don't realize is that the figures are estimates arrived at by 
basing very questionable statistical manipulations on what are often ludicrously small numbers, for 
example leftover blood samples in a village prenatal clinic. So when UNAIDS announces that 14 million 
Africans are AIDS victims, it doesn't mean that 14 million bodies have been counted, but that computers 
in Geneva have run a model with an assumed relationship between positive test results and AIDS deaths, 
and extrapolated the results to the population of the entire continent.
counted in tens of millions. What they probably don't realize is that the figures are estimates arrived at by 
basing very questionable statistical manipulations on what are often ludicrously small numbers, for 
example leftover blood samples in a village prenatal clinic. So when UNAIDS announces that 14 million 
Africans are AIDS victims, it doesn't mean that 14 million bodies have been counted, but that computers 
in Geneva have run a model with an assumed relationship between positive test results and AIDS deaths, 
and extrapolated the results to the population of the entire continent.Thus in 1987 the WHO reported 
1 million cases of "HIV disease" in Uganda. Yet ten years later, thecumulative number of AIDS cases 
actually reported was 55,000.247Nobody knew what had happened to the other 945,000. There are 
strong financial and other pressures that encourage the reporting as AIDS of old diseases that have been 
endemic on the African continent throughout history. According to Dr. Harvey Bialy, an American with 
long experience in Africa, because of the international funds poured into AIDS and HIV work, "It has 
become a joke in Uganda that you are not allowed to die of anything but AIDS. . . . A friend has just 
been run over by a truck; doctors put it down as AIDS-related suicide"248 

Unlike the cases in New York and San Francisco, the conditions that are reported as AIDS in 
Africa affect both sexes equally, which should be an immediate indicator that what's being talked about 
in the two instances are not the same thing. This is hardly surprising, since "AIDS" in Africa is accorded 
a different definition. The unifying factor that makes all of the 30-odd disparate indicator diseases 
"AIDS" in the West is testing positive for antibodies claimed to be specific to HIV. But in Africa no such 
test is necessary.249 

Virus hunters armed with antibody test kits began descending on the continent in the mid eighties 
because of three pointers possibly linking it to AIDS: a now-discredited theory that HIV might have 
originated there; the presence in Africa of an AIDS-related sarcoma (although it had existed in Africa 
since ancient times); and the presence of a small number of native Africans among AIDS cases reported 
in Western countries.250And sure enough, they began finding people who reacted positive. Furthermore, 
the numbers were distributed equally between the sexes—just what was needed to demonstrate that 
AIDS was indeed an infectious condition, which statistics in the West refused, obstinately, to confirm. 
However, in 1985 a different, "clinical" definition was adopted, whereby "AIDS" was inferred from the 
presence of prolonged fever (a month or more), weight loss of 10 percent or greater, and prolonged 
diarrhea. 

The problem, of course, is that attributing these symptoms to a sexually transmitted virus invites— 
indeed, makes inevitable—the reclassifying of conditions like cholera, dysentery, malaria, TB, typhus, 
long known to be products of poverty and tropical environments. More insidious, funds and resources 
are withdrawn from the support of low-cost but effective traditional clinics and the provision of basic 
nutrition, clean drinking water, and sanitation, and directed instead on ruinously expensive programs to 
contain a virus that exists for the most part in WHO statisticians' computers.251Since it's decreed that 
"AIDS is caused by HIV," cases diagnosed according to the above definition are attributed to HIV 
presumptively. But studies where actual tests have been conducted show up to a third as testing 
negatively252 —making "AIDS" a catch-all that arises from the loosely interpreted antibody testing. 

For as we've seen, many factors that are common in most African regions, such as malaria, 
leprosy, parasitical infections, TB, can also test positive. This is a particular problem in Africa, where the 
population carries a naturally high assortment of antibodies, increasing the probability of cross-reactions 
to the point of making any results worthless. A study in central Africa found that 70 percent of the 
reported HIV positives were false.253Nevertheless, the official reports attribute all positives to HIV, 
making every instance automatically an AIDS statistic. Of the resulting numbers, every case not known 
to be a homosexual or drug abuser is presumed to have been acquired through heterosexual 
transmission, resurrecting tendencies to sexual stereotyping that go back to Victorian racial fantasies. 
Given the incentives of limitless funding, a glamorous crusader image, and political visibility, it isn't 
difficult to discern an epidemic in such circumstances. People in desperate need of better nutrition and 
sanitation, basic health care and education, energy-intensive industrial technologies, and productive 
capital investment are instead lectured on their morals and distributed condoms. 


With the hysteria in the West now largely abated (although at the time of writing—early 2003—a 
campaign seems to be gathering momentum, targeting blacks), the bandwagon has moved on to 
embrace other parts of the Third World too. This follows a pattern that was set in Thailand, where an 
AIDS epidemic was said to be raging in the early nineties. Now, it so happens that over 90 percent of 
the inhabitants of Southeast Asia carry the hepatitis B antibody. The figure for actual disease cases in this 
region populated by tens of millions was around 700 in 1991, and by 1993 it had grown to 1,500 or so. 
Perhaps what the reports meant was an epidemic of AIDS testing. Just like the inquisitors of old, the 
more assiduously the witch hunters apply their techniques and their instruments, sure enough they find 
more witches. 

With the hysteria in the West now largely abated (although at the time of writing—early 2003—a 
campaign seems to be gathering momentum, targeting blacks), the bandwagon has moved on to 
embrace other parts of the Third World too. This follows a pattern that was set in Thailand, where an 
AIDS epidemic was said to be raging in the early nineties. Now, it so happens that over 90 percent of 
the inhabitants of Southeast Asia carry the hepatitis B antibody. The figure for actual disease cases in this 
region populated by tens of millions was around 700 in 1991, and by 1993 it had grown to 1,500 or so. 
Perhaps what the reports meant was an epidemic of AIDS testing. Just like the inquisitors of old, the 
more assiduously the witch hunters apply their techniques and their instruments, sure enough they find 
more witches. 
: 
The Miracle Drugs 


Liquid Plumber: AZT 

In the cuckoo land of HIV "science" anything becomes possible. To combat the effects of an agent 
declared soon after its discovery as being inevitably lethal after a dormancy of ten to fifteen years (now, 
how could that be known?), HIV positives, sick and symptom-free alike, were put on the drug AZT, 
which was billed as "antiviral." AZT was developed in the 1960s as a chemotherapy for leukemia but 
never released because of its toxicity. It's known as a "nucleoside analog" drug, or DNA chain 
terminator, which means it stops the molecule from copying. It kills cells that try to reproduce. The idea 
for cancer treatment is that a short, shock program of maybe two or three weeks will kill the tumor while 
only half-killing the patient, and then you get him off it as quickly as possible. Youcan't take something 
like that four times a day indefinitely and expect to live. (Although some people don't metabolize it but 
pass it straight through; hence the few long-term AZT survivors that are pointed at to show how benign it 
is). 

Chemotherapies are notoriously immunosuppressive. The "side effects" look just like AIDS. 
Officially acknowledged effects of nucleoside analog drugs include diarrhea, dementia, lymphoma 
(cancer), muscle wasting, and T-cell depletion, which are also AIDS-defining conditions. Christine 
Maggiore, director of the West Coast-based organization Alive & Well, who, after being given a 
positive diagnosis and sternly delivered death-sentence that turned out to be false, went on to research 
the entire subject exhaustively and became an activist to share her findings. In her highly informative 
book,What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? (2000) she describes 
these medications superbly as "AIDS by Prescription." 


254In any case, it is known that a body subjected to this kind of toxic assault can mobilize 
last-ditch emergency defenses for a while, even when terminal. A sick chicken might run around the yard 
for a few seconds when you cut its head off, but that isn't a sign that the treatment has done it any good. 

In the fifteen years or so up to the late eighties, the life expectancy of hemophiliacs doubled. This 
was because improved clotting factor—the substance they can't make for themselves—meant fewer 
transfusions. The cumulative burden of constantly infused foreign proteins eventually wears down an 
immune system and opens the way for infections. Many also acquired HIV, but the death rates of those 
testing positive and negative were about the same. Then, from around the late eighties, the mortality of 
the HIV positives from conditions diagnosed as AIDS rose significantly, and a widely publicized study 
cited this as proof that their AIDS was due to HIV.255What it didn't take into account, however, was that 
only the HIV positives were put on AZT. Nobody was giving AZT to the HIV negatives. Peter 
Duesberg believes that AZT and other "antivirals" are responsible for over half the AIDS being reported 
today. 


Protease Inhibitors—Hype Uninhibited 

Protease Inhibitors—Hype Uninhibited 
256 

Researchers who have worked with PIs all their professional lives state flatly that they are 
incapable of doing what the highly publicized claims say they do.257The efficacy of the drugs is assessed 
by measuring the reduction of the number designated "viral load," which has never been shown to 
correspond to anything defining sickness in the real, physical world. As a "control," the viral load of 
those given cocktails is compared with the former level when they received AZT. A decrease in the 
number is taken as meaning that the cocktails have reduced sickness. To me this sounds a bit like saying 
that beer cures hangovers because the headache you wake up with isn't as bad as the one you get from 
whiskey. 

One thing the cocktail drugs can be credited with without doubt is the resurgence to even greater 
heights of extravaganza of drug-company advertising, following a growing disenchantment with AZT. PIs 
are hyped as working the "miracle" of reducing AIDS mortality by 50 percent as reflected in the figures 
reported since the mid nineties. A closer look at them, however, shows the story not to be quite that 
straightforward. The greatest reductions occurred in 1995, which was before PIs had been approved for 
general use, and in 1996, by which time somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of HIV positive cases 
had been issued prescriptions for them. As mentioned above, in 1993 the definition of AIDS was 
expanded by the Centers for Disease Control, causing a large increase in the number of people 
qualifying as AIDS patients. One of the new diagnostic conditions was having a CD4 T-cell count of 
200 or less at some point during a given year, no HIV positive condition being necessary. From 1993 
forward, the majority of declared new AIDS cases were individuals with no clinical illness. When the 
size of a population hitherto consisting for the most part of people who are sick in one way or another is 
suddenly increased by the addition of large numbers of people who are illness-free, this must result in an 
increased survival rate for the overall population. It has to do with the restructuring and labeling of 
statistical groups, not with the effects of any treatment. 

A Virus Fixation 


Although not a lot is said publicly, a growing number of scientific and medical professionals are 
becoming skeptical of the received dogma but tend, especially in times of uncertainty over careers and 
funding, to keep a low profile. When you see what happened to Duesberg, you can see why. Maybe 
after his derailing of the previous gravy train by showing cancers were not virally induced, nobody was 
going to let him loose on this one. He was subjected to ridicule and vilification, abused at conferences, 
and his funding cut off to the point that by the end of the eighties he could no longer afford a secretary. In 
two years, he had seventeen applications for funding for research on alternative AIDS hypotheses turned 
down. Graduate students were advised to shun his classes or risk adverse consequences to their 
careers. Publication in the mainstream scientific literature was denied—even the right of reply to personal 
attacks carried in the journalNature, violating the most fundamental of scientific ethical traditions. His 
scheduled appearances on talk shows were repeatedly canceled at the last moment upon intervention by 
officials from the NIH and CDC. 


Duesberg has been accused of irresponsibility on the grounds that his views threaten confidence in 
public health-care programs based on the HIV dogma. But scientific truth doesn't depend on perceived 
consequences. Public policy should follow science. Attempting to impose the reverse becomes 
Lysenkoism. And in any case, what have those programs achieved that should command any 
confidence? After all these years they have failed to save a life or produce a vaccine. (And if they did, to 
whom would it be given? The function of a vaccine is to stimulate the production of antibodies. By 
definition, HIV-positive individuals have them already. If they are given the HIV negatives and they 
work, then everyone will presumably become an AIDS case. So, finally, the prediction of a global 
pandemic will have come true.) No believable mechanism has been put forward as to how HIV kills 
T-cells. And billions of dollars continue to be spent every year on trying to unravel the mysteries of how 
HIV can make you sick without being present, and how an antibody can neutralize the virus but not 
suppress the disease. Scientific principles that have stood well for a hundred years are arbitrarily 
discarded to enable what's offered as logic to hang together at all, and the best that can be done at the 
end of it all is to prescribe a treatment that's lethal even if the disease is not. Yet no looking into 
alternatives is permitted; all dissenting views are repressed. This is not the way of science, but of a 
fanatical religion putting down heresy. 

Duesberg has been accused of irresponsibility on the grounds that his views threaten confidence in 
public health-care programs based on the HIV dogma. But scientific truth doesn't depend on perceived 
consequences. Public policy should follow science. Attempting to impose the reverse becomes 
Lysenkoism. And in any case, what have those programs achieved that should command any 
confidence? After all these years they have failed to save a life or produce a vaccine. (And if they did, to 
whom would it be given? The function of a vaccine is to stimulate the production of antibodies. By 
definition, HIV-positive individuals have them already. If they are given the HIV negatives and they 
work, then everyone will presumably become an AIDS case. So, finally, the prediction of a global 
pandemic will have come true.) No believable mechanism has been put forward as to how HIV kills 
T-cells. And billions of dollars continue to be spent every year on trying to unravel the mysteries of how 
HIV can make you sick without being present, and how an antibody can neutralize the virus but not 
suppress the disease. Scientific principles that have stood well for a hundred years are arbitrarily 
discarded to enable what's offered as logic to hang together at all, and the best that can be done at the 
end of it all is to prescribe a treatment that's lethal even if the disease is not. Yet no looking into 
alternatives is permitted; all dissenting views are repressed. This is not the way of science, but of a 
fanatical religion putting down heresy. 

Section Notes 

224Oprah Winfrey Show , February 18, 1987 
225 Duesberg, 1996, p. 210 
226 Duesberg, 1996, Chapters 4, 5 
227 See Duesberg, 1992 for a full account of the theory 
228 Root-Bernstein, 1993 
229 Maggiore, 2000, p. 46 
230 Thomas, 1993 
231 Thomas et al., 1994 
232 Duesberg, 1996, pp. 174–186 
233 Papudopulos et al, 1993 
234Science 224: pp. 497–500; 503–505; 506–508 
235 Duesberg, 1992, p. 210 
236Ibid ., p. 222 
237 Papudopulos et al., 1996; Lanka, 1995 
238 De Harven, 1998 
239 Lanka, 1995 
240 Ransom and Day, 2000, p. 71; Maggiore, 2000, p. 11 
241 Shenton, 1998, p. 164 
242 Papadopulos-Eluopulos et al., 1993 
243 Turner and McIntire, 1999 



244 Philpott and Johnson, 1996 

244 Philpott and Johnson, 1996 

246 See Malan, 2002, for the story of a journalist true-believer who became an 

apostate. 

247 Geshekter, 1998 

248 Quoted in Hodgkinson, 1993 

249 Papadopulos-Eluopulos et al., 1995 

250 Johnson, 2001 

251 Johnson, 1994, cites health care costs in Nigeria falling from $10–20 per 

person in 1974 to 3 cents in 1994 

252 Shenton, 1998 

253 Geshekter, 1998 

254 For example, Lauritsen, 1990 

255 Darby et al., 1989 

256 Maggiore, 2000, p. 34 

257 Rasnick, 1996 

AFTERWORD 
Gothic Cathedrals And The Stars 


The fact is, most 'scientists' are technicians. . . . Because their noses are often 
buried in the bark of a particular tree, it is difficult to speak meaningfully to them of 
forests. 

— Gary Zukav 
Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will 

prove to be a hoax. 

—William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, English scientist, 1899 

If science is the quest to find out what's true regardless of how we might feel about the answers, 
then a sign of genuine science is a readiness to change a belief if the evidence seems to call for it. The 
topics we've covered represent a fair sampling of subjects on which I've held very different views in 
times gone by—see some of my earlier militant defending of Darwinism, for example. The exceptions 
would be mainly on environmental issues, where I never found the alarmist accounts very persuasive. 
Science as the ideal that exists in textbooks and the rhetoric of its popularizers would appear to be a 
very fine thing. But as is so often the case with this messy, distinctly non-Platonic real world that we 
inhabit, the actuality often turns out to be a different matter. The same disposition to healthy skepticism 
would appear to be in order when receiving pronouncements made in the name of "science" as when 
evaluating the patter on a used-car lot or the story-of-my-life as related in a singles-bar pitch. People 
have ways of making reality fit their own aims, needs, and agendas. 

Every human society possesses its own cultural myths that help hold it together. Darwinian fixations 
on competition notwithstanding, humans are at heart a cooperative animal, and a commonly shared 
structure of belief in fundamental truths provides the social glue that binds a culture. The beliefs don't 
have to be true to be effective. Every culture believes itself to be unique in that its own beliefsare true, of 
course, and it appears that ours is little different. Well, yes, we do claim to be different in that we attempt 
to check what we believe against reality. But as we've seen, it turns out to be all-too-easy to proclaim 


the verdict as being what we "know" it ought to be, or would have it be, rather than what reality actually 
says, laying the idealized scientific paradigm open to the charge that some cynics have made of 
Christianity and socialism: A good idea; somebody should try it sometime. 

the verdict as being what we "know" it ought to be, or would have it be, rather than what reality actually 
says, laying the idealized scientific paradigm open to the charge that some cynics have made of 
Christianity and socialism: A good idea; somebody should try it sometime. 

In his book,Disciplined Minds ,258Jeff Schmidt, a physicist and editor atPhysics Today (until he 
was fired for writing it), argues that the political constraints and demands for conformity imposed by the 
academic training and selection process, and the priorities of today's workplace suppress independent 
thought and inclinations toward free creativity. 

Our society features a single, thoroughly integrated system of education and 
employment," he said when interviewed. "The education component is hierarchical and 
competitive because it is a sorting machine for employers, a gate-keeper for the 
corporations and academic institutions. Learning doesn't require credentialing, ranking, 
grading, high-stakes testing, groveling for letters of recommendation and so on. Good 
teachers don't need—or want—the power to crush their students socially.259 

Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson comments: "As science is brought more under centralized 
control, researchers must concentrate more on the agenda set by paradigm; see what they have been 
trained to see."260 

An illusion of democratic freedoms is maintained by the forum of debates that take place over 
details, so long as the core belief system is not challenged—examples that come to mind here being 
those we looked at of AIDS and Evolution. As with the priesthoods of old, serious consideration of 
possibilities beyond the permissible limits becomes literally inconceivable. 

The history of science reveals strikingly that it has been predominantlyoutsiders , not trained to 
think within the mental walls of the assumptions governing a given discipline, who have contributed the 
most to having genuinely new insights and making real breakthroughs, such as formulating basic laws of 
physics and chemistry, founding entire new disciplines, and making innumerable original inventions and 
discoveries. A few examples: 

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), trained as a painter, otherwise for the most part self-taught. A 
total polymath of original concepts in architecture, hydraulics, mechanics, astronomy, geology, anatomy, 
military and naval engineering, mapmaking, design of harbors and other works. 

Antony van Leeuwenhoeck (1632–1723), haberdasher and chamberlain for the sheriffs of Delft, 

Holland. Ground lenses as a hobby and invented the microscope. 

Gottfried Leibnitz (1646–1716), Newton's mathematical rival, trained as a librarian and diplomat. 

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), Unitarian minister banned from English universities, stimulated by 
science after meeting Benjamin Franklin (by trade, a printer). Proposed an inverse square law for 
electrical charge, and credited with being the first to prepare oxygen, nitric oxide, and gaseous ammonia. 

William Herschel (1738–1832), joined a regimental band in Hanover, Germany, at fourteen and 
went to England to work as a musician. Self-taught in mathematics and astronomy, built his own 
reflecting telescopes, pioneered the study of binary stars and nebulae, discoverer of Uranus, infrared 
solar rays, and the basic form of the Milky Way. 

Thomas Young (1773–1879), general medical physician, mostly self-taught, who pioneered 


discoveries concerning interferometry and the wave theory of light, as well as in fluids and solids, theory 
of kinetic energy. 

discoveries concerning interferometry and the wave theory of light, as well as in fluids and solids, theory 
of kinetic energy. 

Nicolas Leonard Carnot (1796–1832), army engineer of fortifications, pioneered work on 
mathematics and heat engines as a hobby, effective founder of the science of thermodynamics. 

John Dunlop (1840–1921), Scottish vet, invented the pneumatic tire to help his son win a bicycle 
race. Went on to found a company that sold for three million pounds in 1896, after five years trading. 

George Westinghouse (1846–1914), ran away as a schoolboy to fight in the Civil War, prolific 
inventor and electrical pioneer who later secured the services of Nikola Tesla. 

George Eastman (1854–1932), self-educated, worked as a bank clerk. Patented first practicable 
photographic roll film and perfected the Kodak camera. 

Albert Einstein (1879–1955), patents clerk with no academic qualifications in theoretical physics.261 

The conventional image of academic research pushing back an ever-widening horizon of pure 
knowledge, which is formulated into new theories to be applied through technology is tidy and attractive, 
but doesn't describe the way the real world works. Overwhelmingly, it turns out to be the people with an 
insatiable need to know that comes from somewhere inside and can't be channeled or trained, or with a 
practical bent and incentive to roll their sleeves up and find out, who break the new ground. From steam 
engines and telescopes, through seed improvement and screw propellers, to jet aircraft, rocketry, and 
electronics, the academic theories to explain what was going on came afterward. While most research 
today depends ultimately on government funding, either directly through grants or indirectly through 
support of the participating institutions, history shows that bureaucratic stifling and an inherent 
commitment to linear thinking makes officially inaugurated programs the least productive in terms of true 
creativity.262Much the same could be said about research commissioned and directed by commercial 
interests. 

Although lip service is paid to the virtues of truth and integrity, the social dynamic that rules is a 
reflection of the value system of society at large, where the rewards are in material compensation, 
power, and prestige. Acceptance to an honored elite can be the greatest source of self-esteem, with 
excommunication and ostracism the ultimate unthinkable. Pointing to successful applications of 
technology such as computers and the space telescope as vindicating any theory of "science," as if they 
were all products of the same method, is to claim false credentials. Notions on such issues as how life 
originated or the nature of the cosmos face no comparable reality checks that can't be evaded. The 
Halton Arps and Immanuel Velikovskys, for whom the inner need toknow , and a compulsion to speak 
out, outweigh effects on personal life, career advancement, and all else, are rare. Very rare. 

I remember a lunch with Peter Duesberg and others on one occasion, when his funding had been 
cut off, his laboratory effectively shut down, his marriage had broken up partly as a consequence, and 
the department had snubbed him by giving him as his only official appointment that year the chairing of its 
picnic committee. Somebody asked him if it was worth the destruction of his professional and personal 
life; wouldn't he have been better off just forgetting the whole thing and going with the mainstream 
Establishment? Duesberg blinked, frowned, and thought for a moment as if trying to make sense of the 
question. Finally, he replied, "But it wouldn't alter what is true." 

Corruption of society's primary institution of faith accelerated the decline of the medieval order. 
When Martin Luther nailed his accusations up on the church door, a new era began. I see faith in what 
has been presented as the primary vehicle for revealing truth in our order eroding too. Science is losing 
its popular constituency as the rewards and the accolades are seen more blatantly to flow not in 
recognition of contribution to human knowledge, but of efficacy in contributing to profit-making or 
military capability. The way toward truth that was to be unique in the human experience, a model of 
impartiality and integrity, turns out to be as open to the serving of vested interests and as subject to all 
the familiar human propensities toward self-delusion and wilful deception. Small wonder, then, that we 


arrive at an age where lying and the packaging of things and people as other than what they are become 
richly rewarded professions, classes are offered in the faking of résumés, and the arts of what used to be 
statecraft are reduced to coaching in how to look good on TV. 

arrive at an age where lying and the packaging of things and people as other than what they are become 
richly rewarded professions, classes are offered in the faking of résumés, and the arts of what used to be 
statecraft are reduced to coaching in how to look good on TV. 

Presumably such an age would be founded on a different value system than buying and selling, 
shopkeeper economics, petty promotions, and emphasis on Darwinian rivalries, that produce alienated 
societies in which everyone becomes a threat or an opportunity to be exploited for some kind of gain. If 
the romance with materialism has taught anything, it's surely that the foundation has to rest on solid, 
culturally instilled human qualities that no amount of gimmickry or slick talk from self-help bestsellers can 
substitute for. Such old-fashioned words as truth, justice, honor, integrity, compassion come to mind, 
among which technology has its place in securing the material aspects of life, without dominating life or 
becoming a substitute for it, and education means being taught how to think, not drilled in what to say. 
Imagine what a difference it would make if businesses saw their foremost function in society as the 
providing of employment and the supplying of needs, and departments of government existed to actually 
serve its citizens. And where truth is valued for its own sake, without having to be conscripted to politics 
or economics, real science flourishes naturally. 

And here we come to a great irony. For it could be that the system of values needed to make real 
science, the new world view that was to replace religion, work, turns out to be just what all the world's 
true religions—the original models, as opposed to the counterfeits they were turned into later to serve 
power structures—have been trying to say all along. The first discipline to be mastered for truth to be 
apprehended clearly is control of passions, delusions, and material distractions; in other words, the 
cultivation of true objectivity: the ability, honestly, to have no preconception or emotional investment in 
what the answers turn out to be. For unmastered passions enslave us to those who control what we 
imagine will satisfy them. 

Like a lot of the other ideals that we've touched upon, it's probably unrealizable. But that doesn't 
mean that it's impossible to get closer to. I think that those philosophers who wonder if the world is 
perfectible, and then, on arriving after maybe years of agonizing at the answer that should have been 
obvious, "No, its not," get depressed even to the point of suicide, ask the wrong question. They should 
be asking instead, "Is the world improvable?" Since nothing could be plainer that a resounding "Yes!" 
they could then live content in the knowledge that contributing even a nickel's worth to leaving things 
better than they found them would make an existence worthwhile. 

Meanwhile, of course, we have some wonderful themes to be explored in science fiction—which 
after all is the genre of asking "what if?" questions about the future and creating pictures of possible 
answers. Submarines, flying machines, space ships, computers, and wrist TVs aren't science fiction 
anymore. At least not real science fiction, in the sense that stretches the imagination. But we can still 
paint visions of an age, possibly, in which confidence and a sharing of the simple fact of being human 
replace fear and suspicion, the experience of living life is the greatest reward to be had from it, and the 
ships of the new Gothic builders launch outward to explore the universe for no better reason than that it's 
out there. 

And who knows? Maybe one day those dreams of science fiction will come true too. 

Section Notes 

258 Schmidt, 2000 


259 Schmidt, 2001 
260 Johnson, 1991, p. 121 
261 A sample from Newgrosh, 2000 
262 Kealey, 199 
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING 
ONE 
HUMANISTIC RELIGION—The Rush 
to Embrace Darwinism 
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Borel, Emile, 1962,Probabilities and Life , Dover, NY 
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Darwin, Charles, 1859, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or 
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Dawkins, Richard, 1976,The Selfish Gene , Oxford Univ. Press, NY 
Dawkins, Richard, 1986,The Blind Watchmaker, Norton, NY; Longmans; 
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Dawkins, Richard, 1996,Climbing Mount Improbable , Norton, NY 
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Dembski, William A., 1998, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through 
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Dembski, William A., 1999,Intelligent Design , Intervarsity Press, Downers 
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Dembski, William A., 2002,No Free Lunch , Rowman & Littlefield, NY 
Dennett, Daniel C., 1995,Darwin's Dangerous Idea , Simon & Schuster, NY 
Denton, Michael, 1985,Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986 edition).Adler & 
Adler, Bethesda, MD 
Gish, Duane T., 1995,Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!, ICR, El Cajon, CA 
Hall, Barry G., 1982, "Evolution in a Petri dish: the evolved â-galactosidase system 
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Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 1962,Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, W.W. 
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Ho, M-W, and P. T. Saunders, 1979, "Beyond Darwinism: An epigenetic 
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Hogan, James P., 1988, "The Revealed Word of God,"Minds, Machines, & 
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Johnson, Phillip, 1991,Darwin on Trial, Regnery, Washington, D.C. 
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Judson, Horace Freeland, 1979, The Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the

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Macbeth, Norman, 1971,Darwin Retried , Dell, Boston 
Milton, Richard, 1992,Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Park Street Press, 

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El Cajon, CA 

TWO 
OF BANGS AND BRAIDS: Cosmology's Mathematical Abstractions 

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THREE 

DRIFTING IN THE ETHER. Did Relativity 
Take A Wrong Turn? 

Assis, A. K. T., 1992, "Deriving gravitation from electromagnetism,"Canadian 
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FOUR 

CATASTROPHE OF ETHICS: The Case 
For Taking Velikovsky Seriously 

Angiras, 1999,Firmament and Chaos, 1—Earth . Infinity Publishing, Bryn 

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Kronos, Glassboro, NJ 


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FIVE 

ENVIRONMENTALIST FANTASIES: Politics & Ideology Masquerading 
As Science 

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Baliunas, Sallie, 1994, "Ozone and Global Warming: Are the Problems Real?", 

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September 13, p. 33 

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Claus, George and Karen Bolander, 1977,Ecological Sanity , David McKay & 

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Cohen, Bernard L., 1990,The Nuclear Energy Option, Plenum Press, NY 

Dobson, Gordon M.B., 1968, "Forty Years Research on Atmospheric Ozone at 

Oxford University: A History,"Applied Optics , Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 387–405 

Edwards, J. Gordon, 1985, "DDT Effects on Bird Abundance & Reproduction." 

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Edwards, J. Gordon, 1992, "The Lies of Rachel Carson,"21st Century , summer, 

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Edwards, J. Gordon, 1993, "Malaria: The Killer That Could Have Been 

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Ellsaesser, Hugh, 1978, "Ozone Destruction by Catalysis: Credibility of the Threat," 


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Ellsaesser, Hugh, 1991, "The Holes in the Ozone Hole, II," Cato Institute 
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Elmsley, John, 1992, "On Being a Bit Less Green,"New Scientist , October 17 

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Grant, R. W., 1988,Trashing Nuclear Power , Quandary House, Manhattan 
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Hayden, Howard, 2001,The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the 
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Hogan, James P., 1988, "Know Nukes,"Minds, Machines, & Evolution , (Baen 
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Idso, Sherwood, B., 1992, "Carbon Dioxide and Global Change." See Lehr, 
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Jukes, John, 1994, "Silent Springand the Betrayal of Environmentalism,"21st 
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Lehr, Jay H. (Ed.), 1992,Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns , Van 
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SIX 
CLOSING RANKS: AIDS Heresy In The Viricentric Universe 

Brink, Anthony, 2000,Debating AZT: Mbeki and the AIDS Drug Controversy , 
Open Books, Pietermaritzburg, SA 
Caton, Hiram, 1994,The AIDS Mirage , University of NSW Press, Sydney, 
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Craddock, Mark, 1996, "Doesn't Anybody Read Anymore?"Reappraising AIDS 
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De Harven, Etienne, 1998, "Remarks on Methods for Retroviral Isolation," 


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Netherlands 

Fumento, Michael, 1990,The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, Regnery Gateway, 
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Geshekter, Charles, 1998, "Science, Public Health, and Sexual Stereotypes: 
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Hodgkinson, Neville, 1993, "Epidemic of AIDS in Africa 'a Myth,' " London 
Sunday Times , March 21 

Hodgkinson, Neville, 1996,AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, 
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Johnson, Christine, 1994, "The Role of HIV In AIDS: Why There Is Still A 
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Lanka, Stefan, 1995, "HIV—Reality or Artefact?"Continuum , April/May 

Lauritsen, John, 1990,Poison by Prescription , Asklepios, NY 

Lauritsen, John, 1993,The AIDS War , Asklepios, NY 

Lauritsen, John & Ian Young (Eds), 1997,The AIDS Cult , Asklepios, 
Provincetown, MA 

Maggiore, Christine, 2000, What If Everything You Thought You Knew About 
AIDS Was Wrong? AFAA, Studio City, CA 

Malan, Rian, 2002, "AIDS in Africa: In Search of Truth,"Rolling Stone 

Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al., 1993, "Is a Positive Western Blot Proof of HIV 

Infection?"Bio/Technology , June 

Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni, Valendar Turner, John Papadimitriou, Harvey 
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Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni, Valendar Turner, John Papadimitriou, John Causer, 
1996, "The Isolation of HIV: Has it Really Been Achieved? The Case Against," 
Continuum Supplement Vol. 4, No. 3, Sep/Oct 

Philpott, Paul, and Christine Johnson, 1996, "Viral Load of Crap,"Reappraising 
AIDS , Vol. 4, No. 10, October 

Ransom, Steven, and Phillip Day, 2000,World Without AIDS , Credence 
Publications, Tonbridge, UK 

THE END 

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