New Lands

by Charles Fort

  Popular Science Review, 1-513:

  That, in April, 1862, the thing was still visible.

  Something else that was seen under circumstances that cannot be considered triumphant—upon Nov. 28, 1872, Prof. Klinkerfues, of Göttingen, looking for Biela’s comet, saw meteors in the path of the expected comet. He telegraphed to Pogson, of Madras, to look near the star Theta Centauri, and he would see the comet. I’d not say that this was in the field of magic, but it does seem consummate. A dramatic telegram like this electrifies the faithful—an astronomer in the north telling an astronomer far in the south where to look, so definitely naming one special little star in skies invisible in the north. Pogson looked where he was told to look and announced that he saw what he was told to see. But at meetings of the R.A.S., Jan. 10 and March 14, 1873, Captain Tupman pointed out that, even if Biela’s comet had appeared, it would have been nowhere near this star.

  Among our later emotions will be indignation against all astronomers who say that they know whether stars are approaching or receding. When we arrive at that subject it will be the preciseness of the astronomers that will perhaps inflame us beyond endurance. We note here the far smaller difficulty of determining whether a relatively nearby comet is coming or going. Upon Nov. 6, 1892, Edwin Holmes discovered a comet. In the Jour, B.A.A., 3-182, Holmes writes that different astronomers had calculated its distance from twenty million miles to two hundred million miles, and had determined its diameter to be all the way from twenty-seven thousand miles to three hundred thousand miles. Prof. Young said that the comet was approaching; Prof. Parkhurst wrote merely that the impression was that the comet was approaching the earth; but Prof. Berberich (Eng. Mec., 56-316) announced that, upon November 6, Holmes’ comet had been 36,000,000 miles from this earth, and 6,000,000 miles away upon the 16th, and that the approach was so rapid that upon the 21st the comet would touch this earth.

  The comet, which had been receding, kept on receding.

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  Nevertheless I sometimes doubt that astronomers represent especial incompetence. They remind me too much of uplifters and grocers, philanthropists, expert accountants, makers of treaties, characters in international conferences, psychic researchers, biologists. The astronomers seem to me about as capitalists seem to socialists, and about as socialists seem to capitalists, or about as Presbyterians seem to Baptists; as Democrats seem to Republicans, or as artists of one school seem to artists of another school. If the basic fallacies, or the absence of base, in every specialization of thought can be seen by the units of its opposition, why then we see that all supposed foundations in our whole existence are myths, and that all discussion and supposed progress are the conflicts of phantoms and the overthrow of old delusions by new delusions. Nevertheless I am searching for some wider expression that will rationalize all of us—conceiving that what we call irrationality is our view of parts and functions out of relation to an underlying whole; an underlying something that is working out its development in terms of planets and acids and bugs, rivers and labor unions and cyclones, politicians and islands and astronomers. Perhaps we conceive of an underlying nexus in which all things, in our existence, are different manifestations—torn by its hurricanes and quaked by the struggles of Labor against Capital—and then, for the sake of balance, requiring relaxations. It has its rougher hoaxes, and some of the apes and some of the priests, and philosophers and wart hogs are nothing short of horse play; but the astronomers are the ironies of its less peasant-like moments—or the deliciousness of pretending to know whether a far-away star is approaching or receding, and at the same time exactly predicting when a nearby comet, which is receding, will complete its approach. This is cosmic playfulness; such pleasantries enable Existence to bear its catastrophes. Shattered comets and sickened nations and the hydrogenic anguishes of the sun—and there must be astronomers for the sake of relaxations.

  It will be important to us that the astronomers shall not be less unfortunate in their pronouncements upon motions of the stars than they have turned out to be in other respects. Especially disagreeable to us is the doctrine that stars are variable because dark companies revolve around them; also we prefer to find that nothing fit for somewhat matured minds has been determined as to stars with light companions that encircle them, or revolve with them. If silence be the only true philosophy, and if every positive assertion be a myth, we should easily find requital for our negative preferences.

  Prof. Otto Struve was one of the highest of astronomic authorities, and the faithful attribute triumphs to him. Upon March 19, 1873, Prof. Struve announced that he had discovered a companion to the star Procyon. That was an interesting observation, but the mere observation was not the triumph. Sometime before, Prof. Auwers, as credulous, if not jocular, as Newton and Leverrier and Adams, had computed the orbit of a hypothetic companion of Procyon’s. Upon a chart of the stars, he had drawn a circle around Procyon. This orbit was calculated in gravitational terms, and a general theme of ours is that all such calculations are only ideal, and relate no more to stars and planets or anything else than do the spotless theories of uplifters to events that occur as spots in the one wide daub of existence. Specifically we wish to discredit this “triumph” of Struve’s and Auwers’, but in general we continue our expression that all uses of the calculus of celestial mechanics are false applications, and that this subject is for aesthetic enjoyment only, and has no place in the science of astronomy, if anybody can think that there is such a science. So, after great labor, or after considerable enjoyment, Auwers drew a circle around Procyon, and announced that that was the orbit of a companion star. Exactly at the point in this circle where it “should” be, upon March 19, 1873, Struve saw the point of light which, it may be accepted, sooner or later someone would see. According to Agnes Clerke (System of the Stars, p. 173) over and over Struve watched the point of light, and convinced himself that it moved as it “should” move, exactly in the calculated orbit. In Reminiscences of an Astronomer, p. 138, Prof. Newcomb tells the story. According to him, an American astronomer then did more than confirm Struve’s observations: he not only saw but exactly measured the supposed companion.

  A defect was found between the lenses of Struve’s telescope: it was found that this telescope showed a similar “companion,” about ten inches from every large star. It was found that the more than “confirmatory” determinations by the American astronomer had been upon “a long well-known star” (Newcomb).

  Every astronomic triumph is a bright light accompanied by an imbecility, which may for a while make it variable with diminishments, and then be unnoticed. Priestcrafts are not merely tyrannies: they’re necessities. There must be more reassuring ways of telling this story. The good priest J.E. Gore (Studies in Astronomy, p. 104) tells it safely—not a thing except that, in the year 1873, a companion of Procyon’s was, by Struve, “strongly suspected.” Positive assurances of the sciences—they are islands of seeming stability in a cosmic jelly. We shall eclipse the story of Algol with some modern disclosures. In all minds not convinced that earnest and devoted falsifiers are holding back Development, the story, if remembered at all, will soon renew its fictitious luster. We are centers of tremors in a quaking black jelly. A bright and shining delusion looks like beaconed security.

  Sir Robert Ball, in the Story of the Heavens, says that the period in which Algol blinks his magnitudes is 2 days, 20 hours, 48 minutes, and 55 seconds. He gives the details of Prof. Vogel’s calculations upon a speck of light and an invisibility. It is a god-like command that out of the variations of light shall come the diameters of faint appearances and the distance and velocity of the unseeable—that the diameter of the point of light is 1,054,000 miles, and that the diameter of the imperceptibility is 825,000 miles, and that their centers are 3,220,000 miles apart: orbital velocity of Algol, 26 miles a second, and the orbital velocity of the companion, 55 miles a second—should be stated 26.3 miles and 554 miles a second (Proctor, Old and New Astronomy, p. 773).

 
We come to a classic imposition like this, and at first we feel helpless. We are told that this thing is so. It is as if we were modes of motion and must go on, but are obstructed by an absolute bar of ultimate steel, shining, in our way, with an infinite polish.

  But all appearances are illusions.

  No one with a microscope doubts this; no one who has gone specially from ordinary beliefs into minuter examination of any subject doubts this, as to his own specific experience—so then, broadly, that all appearances are illusions, and that, by this recognition, we shall dissipate resistances, monsters, dragons, oppressors that we shall meet in our pilgrimage. This bar-like calculation is itself a mode of motion. The static cannot absolutely resist the dynamic, because in the act of resisting it becomes itself proportionately the dynamic. We learn that modifications rusted into the steel of our opposition. The period of Algol, which Vogel carried out to a minute’s 55th second, was, after all, so incompetently determined that the whole imposition was nullified—

  Astronomical Journal, 11-113:

  That, according to Chandler, Algol and his companion do not revolve around each other merely, but revolve together around some second imperceptibility—regularly.

  Bull. Soc. Astro. de France, October, 1910:

  That M. Mora has shown that in Algol’s variations there were irregularities that neither Vogel nor Chandler had accounted for.

  The Companion of Sirius looms up to our recognition that the story must be nonsense, or worse than nonsense—or that two light comedies will now disappear behind something darker. The story of the Companion of Sirius is that Prof. Auwers, having observed, or in his mania for a pencil and something to scribble upon, having supposed he had observed, motions of the star Sirius, had deduced the existence of a companion, and had inevitably calculated its orbit. Early in the year 1862, Alvan Clark, Jr., turned his new telescope upon Sirius, and there, precisely where, according to Auwers’ calculations, it should be, saw the companion. The story is told by Proctor, writing thirty years later: the finding of the companion, in the “precise position of the calculations”; Proctor’s statement that, in the thirty years following, the companion had “conformed fairly well with the calculated orbit.”

  According to the Annual Record of Science and Industry, 1876-18, the companion, in half the time mentioned by Proctor, had not moved in the calculated orbit. In the Astronomical Register, 15-186, there are two diagrams by Flammarion: one is the orbit of the companion, as computed by Auwers; the other is the orbit, according to a mean of many observations. They do not conform fairly well. They do not conform at all.

  I am now temporarily accepting that Flammarion and the other observing astronomers are right, and that the writers like Proctor, who do not say that they made observations of their own, are wrong, though I have data for thinking that there is no such companion star. When Clark turned his telescope upon Sirius, the companion was found exactly where Auwers said it would be found. According to Flammarion and other astronomers, had he looked earlier or later it would not have been in this position. Then, in the name of the one calculus that astronomers seem never to have heard of, by what circumstances could that star have been precisely where it should be, when looked for, Jan. 31, 1862, if, upon all other occasions, it would not be where it should be?

  Astronomical Register, 1-94:

  A representation of Sirius—but with six small stars around him—an account, by Dr. Dawes, of observations, by Goldschmidt, upon the “companion” and five other small stars near Sirius. Dr. Dawes’ accusation, or opinion, is that it scarcely seems possible that some of these other stars were not seen by Clark. If Alvan Clark saw six stars, at various distances from Sirius, and picked out the one that was at the required distance, as if that were the only one, he dignifies our serials with a touch of something other than comedy. For Goldschmidt’s own announcement, see Monthly Notices, R.A.S., 23-181, 243.

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  Smugness and falseness and sequences of readjusting fatalities—and yet so great is the hypnotic power of astronomic science that it can outlive its “mortal” blows by the simple process of forgetting them, and, in general, simply by denying that it can make mistakes. Upon page 245, Old and New Astronomy, Richard Proctor says—“The ideas of astronomers in these questions of distance have not changed, and, in the present position of astronomy, based (in such respects) on absolute demonstration, they cannot change.”

  Sounds that have roared in the sky, and their vibrations have shaken down villages—if these be the voices of Development, commanding that opinions shall change, we shall learn what will become of the Proctors and their “absolute demonstrations.” Lights that have appeared in the sky—that they are gleams upon the armament of Marching Organization. “There can be only one explanation of meteors”—I think it is that they are shining spear-points of slayers of dogmas. I point to the sky over a little town in Perthshire, Scotland—there may be a new San Salvador—it may be a new Plymouth Rock. I point to the crater Aristarchus, of the moon—there, for more than a century, a lighthouse may have been signaling. Whether out of profound meditations, or farrago and bewilderment, I point, directly, or miscellaneously, and, if only a few of a multitude of data be accepted, unformulable perturbations rack an absolute sureness, and the coils of our little horizons relax their constrictions.

  I indicate that, in these pages, which are banners in a cosmic procession, I do feel a sense of responsibility, but how to maintain any great seriousness I do not know, because still is our subject astronomical “triumphs.”

  Once upon a time there was a young man, aged eighteen, whose name was Jeremiah Horrox. He was no astronomer. He was interested in astronomic subjects, but it may be that we shall agree that a young man of eighteen, who had not been heard of by one astronomer of his time, was an outsider. There was a transit of Venus in December, 1639, but not a grown-up astronomer in the world expected it, because the not always great and infallible Kepler had predicted the next transit of Venus for the year 1761. According to Kepler, Venus would pass below the sun in December, 1639. But there was another calculation: it was by the great, but sometimes not so great, Lansberg: that, in December, 1639, Venus would pass over the upper part of the sun. Jeremiah Horrox was an outsider. He was able to reason that, if Venus could not pass below the sun, and also over the upper part of the sun, she might take a middle course. Venus did pass over the middle part of the sun’s disc; and Horrox reported the occurrence, having watched it.

  I suppose this was one of the most agreeable humiliations in the annals of busted inflations. One thinks sympathetically of the joy that went out from seventeenth-century Philistines. The story is told to this day by the Proctors and Balls and Newcombs: the way they tell this story of the boy who was able to conclude that something that could not occupy two extremes might be intermediate, and thereby see something that no professional observer of the time saw, is a triumph of absorption:

  That the transit of Venus, in December, 1639, was observed by Jeremiah Horrox, “the great astronomer.”

  We shall make some discoveries as we go along, and some of them will be worse thought of than others, but there is a discovery here that may be of interest: the secret of immortality—that there is a mortal resistance to everything; but that the thing that can keep on incorporating, or assimilating within itself, its own mortal resistances, will live forever. By its absorptions, the science of astronomy perpetuates its inflations, but there have been instances of indigestion. See the New York Herald, Sept. 16, 1909. Here Flammarion, who probably no longer asserts any such thing, claims Dr. Cook’s “discovery of the north pole” as an “astronomical conquest.” Also there are other ways. One suspects that the treatment that Dr. Lescarbault received from Flammarion illustrates other ways. In the year 1859, it seems that Dr. Lescarbault was something of an astronomer. It seems that as far back as that he may have known a planet when he saw one, because, in an interview, he convinced Leverrier that he did know a planet when he saw one. He had at le
ast heard of the planet Venus, because in the year 1882 he published a paper upon indications that Venus has an atmosphere. Largely because of an observation, or an announcement, of his, occurred the climax of Leverrier’s fiascos: prediction of an intra-Mercurial planet that did not appear when it “should” appear. My suspicion is that astronomers pardonably, but frailly, had it in for Lescarbault, and that in the year 1891 came an occurrence that one of them made an opportunity. Early in the year 1891, Dr. Lescarbault announced that, upon the night of Jan. 11, 1891, he had seen a new star. At the next meeting of the French Academy, Flammarion rose, spoke briefly, and sat down without overdoing. He said that Lescarbault had “discovered” Saturn.

  If a navigator of at least thirty years’ experience should announce that he had discovered an island, and if that island should turn out to be Bermuda, he would pair with Lescarbault—as Flammarion made Lescarbault appear. Even though I am a writer upon astronomical subjects, myself, I think that even I should know Saturn, if I should see him, at least in such a period as the year 1891, when the rings were visible. It is perhaps an incredible mistake. However, it will be agreeable to some of us to find that astronomers have committed just such almost incredible mistakes—