by Charles Fort
The difference between half a mile and five miles is great. If the prophets of Lick Observatory did not take refraction into consideration, all the rest of their supposed knowledge may be attributable to incompetence. This difference may mean that the moon is not more than a day’s journey away from this earth.
In The Earth and the Stars, p. 211, Abbot tells of the spectroscopic determinations, by which the new star in Perseus (Feb. 22, 1901) was “found” to be at a distance of 300 light-years from this earth. The news was published in the newspapers. A new star had appeared, about the year 1600, and its light was not seen upon this earth, until Feb. 22, 1901. And the astronomers were able to tell this—that away back, at a moment when Queen Elizabeth—well, whatever she was doing—maybe it wouldn’t be any too discreet to inquire into just what she was doing—but the astronomers told that just when Queen Elizabeth was doing whatever she was doing, the heavens were doing a new star. And where am I, comparatively? Where are my poor, little yarns of flows of methylated spirits from ceilings, and “mysterious strangers,” and bodies on railroad lines, compared with a yarn of the new star and Queen Elizabeth?
But the good, little star restores my conceit. In the face of all spectroscopes in all Observatories, it shot out nebulous rings that moved at a rate of two or three seconds of arc a day. If they were 300 light-years away, this was a velocity far greater than that of light is said to be. If they were 300 light-years away, it was motion at the rate of 220,000 miles a second. There were dogmas that could not stand this, and the spectroscopic determinations, which were in agreement, were another case of agreements working out, as they shouldn’t have worked out. The astronomers had to cut down one of their beloved immensities. Whether as a matter of gallantry, or not, they spread a denial for Queen Elizabeth’s reputation to tread upon, saving that from the mud of an inquiry into just what Her Majesty was doing, and substituting unromantic speculations upon what, say, Andrew Jackson was up to.
Abbot’s way of explaining the mistake is by attributing the first “pronouncements” to “the roughness of the observations.”
All over this earth, astronomers were agreeing in these “determinations.” They were refinements until something else appeared and roughened them.
It would seem that, after this fiasco of the readjusted interest in what historical personages were doing, astronomers should have learned something. But, if Prof. Todd is right, in his characterization of them, that is impossible. About twenty years later, this situation, essentially the same in all particulars, repeated. Upon May 27, 1925, a new star was discovered in the southern constellation Pictor. By spectroscopic determination, its distance was “determined” to be 540 light-years. See this stated in a bulletin of the Harvard Observatory, November, 1927.
March 27, 1928—the new star split.
When the split was seen, astronomers of the South African Observatory repudiated the gospel of their spectroscopes of three years before. There must have been much roughness, even though there had been three years in which to plane down the splinters. They cut the distance from 540 to forty light-years. If there should be any more reductions like this, there may start a slump of immensities down toward a conception of a thinkable-sized formation of stars. A distance cut down 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 500 x 186,000 miles is a pretty good start.
Prof. Einstein, having no means of doing anything of the kind, predicts a displacement of the stars.
Astronomers go out upon an expedition to observe an eclipse, and, not knowing that Einstein has no special means of predicting anything, they report, presumably because they want so to report, that he is right.
Then eclipse after eclipse—and Einstein is wrong.
But he has cast an ancient system into internal dissensions, and has cast doubts upon antiquities of thought almost as if his pedantic guesses had had better luck.
Whether the time has come, or not, here is something that looks as if it is coming:
An editorial in the New York Sun, Sept. 3, 1930: views of somebody else quoted:
“The public is being played upon and utterly misled by the dreamery of the rival mathematical astronomers and physicists—not to mention the clerics—who are raising the game of notoriety to a fine art; in rivalry to religious mysticism, a scientific pornography is being developed, and attracts the more because it is mysterious.”
These are the views of Professor Henry E. Armstrong, emeritus head of the department of chemistry, at City and Guilds College: South Kensington, London.
This is revolt inside. That is what develops into revolution.
Prof. Armstrong’s accusation of pornography may seem unduly stimulating: but, judging by their lecheries in other respects, one sees that all that the astronomers have to do is to discover that stars have sex, and they’ll have us sneaking to bookstores, for salacious “pronouncements” and “determinations” upon the latest celestial scandals. This would popularize them. And after anything becomes popular—then what?
That the time has come—or is coming—or more of the revolt within—
Or that, if they cannot continue upon their present pretenses of progress, the astronomers must return from their motionless excursions. A generation ago, they told of inconceivable distances of stars. Then they said that they had, a thousand times, multiplied some of these distances: but, if the inconceivable be multiplied any number of times, it is still the same old inconceivability. If, at the unthinkable, thought stops, but if thought must move somewhere, the astronomers, who cannot go on expansively, will, if they do think, have to think in reductions. If the time has come, there will be a crash in the Observatories, with astronomers in a panic selling short on inconceivabilities.
Upon Sept. 2, 1930, began a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in Chicago. A paper that was read by Dr. P. Van de Kamp may be a signal for a panic. Said he: “Some of the stars may actually be thousands of light-years nearer than astronomy believes them to be.”
That—with some extensions—is about what I am saying.
Says the astronomer Leverrier—back in times when an astronomical system is growing up, and is of use in combating an older and decaying orthodoxy, and needs support and prestige—says he—“Look in the sky, and at the point of my calculations, you will find the planet that is perturbing Uranus.”
“Lo!” as some of the astronomers say in their books. At a point in the sky that can be said—to anybody who does not inquire into the statements—to be almost exactly the point of Leverrier’s calculations, is found the planet Uranus, to which—for all the public knows—can be attributed the perturbations of Uranus.
Up goes the useful renown of the astronomers. Supported by this triumph, they function.
But, if they’re only the figments of one of the dream-like developments of our pseudo-existence, they, too, must pass away, and they must go by way of slaughter, or by way of laughter. Considering all their doings, I think that through hilarity would be the fitter exit.
Later:
“Look at the sky,” we are told that the astronomer Lowell said, “and at the point of my calculations, you will find the planet that is perturbing Neptune.”
But this is in the year 1930.
Nevertheless we are told that a planet is found almost exactly at the point of the calculations. The exultations of the astronomers are spreadheaded.
But this is later. The damned thing takes a tack that shows that it could no more have been perturbing Neptune than I, anyway just at present, could cast a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences into disorder by walking past it.
They must be murdered, or we shall laugh them away. There is always something that can be said in favor of murder, but in the case of the astronomers that would be willful waste of the stuff for laughter. Orthodox astronomers have said that Leverrier used no mathematical method by which he could have determined the position of Neptune. See Lowell’s The Evolution of Worlds, p. 124. By way of stuff for the laugh, I mention that one of these disbelieving as
tronomers was Lowell.
One time, in a mood of depression, I went to the New York Public Library, and feeling a want for a little, light reading, I put in a slip for Lowell’s Memoir on a Trans-Neptunian Planet. I got even more amusement than I had expected.
Just where was this point, determined by Lowell, almost exactly in which his planet was found? The spreadheads—the special articles—over and over in the newspapers of the world—“almost exactly.”
Says Lowell, page 105: “Precise determination of its place does not seem possible. A general direction alone is predicable.”
The stuff for a laugh that is as satisfactory as murder is in the solemn announcements, by the astronomers, about April Fool’s Day, 1930, that they had found Lowell’s planet almost exactly in the place, precise determination of which does not seem possible—
Their chatter over Lowell’s magnificent accuracy in pointing in a general direction—
Then the tack of a thing that showed that it could not have been all this indefiniteness, anyway—265 years, instead of 3,000 years—
And instead of going the thing was coming.
If they can’t tell whether something is coming or going, their solemn announcements upon nearness or farness may be equally laughable.
If by mathematical means Adams and Leverrier did not determine the position of the planet Neptune, or if it was, in an opinion that Lowell quotes, “a happy accident,” how account for such happiness, or for this timely and sensational boost to a prestige, if we suspect that it was not altogether an accident?
My expression is that herein I’d typify my idea of organic control which, concealed under human vanity, makes us think that we are doing all things ourselves, gives support to human institutions, when they are timely and are functioning, and then casts its favorites into rout and fiasco, when they have outlived their functioning period.
If Leverrier really had had powers by which he could have pointed to an unseen planet that would have been a finality of knowledge that would be support to a prestige that could never be overthrown. Suppose a church had ever been established upon foundations not composed of the stuff of lies and frauds and latent laughter. Let the churchman stand upon other than gibberish and mummery, and there’d be nothing by which to laugh away his despotisms.
Say that, whether it be a notion of organic control, or not, we accept any theory of Growth, or Development, or Evolution—
Then we accept that the solemnest of our existence’s phenomena are of a wobbling tissue—rocks of ages that are only hardened muds —or that a lie is the heart of everything sacred—
Because otherwise there could not be Growth, or Development, or Evolution.
21
A trek of circumstances that kicks up a dust of details—a vast and dirty movement that is powdered with particulars—
The gossip of men and women, and the yells of brats—whether dinner is ever going to be ready, or not—young couples in their nightly sneaks—and what the hell has become of the grease for the wheels?—who’s got a match?
It’s a wagon train that feels out across a prairie.
A drink of water—a chaw of tobacco—just where to borrow a cupful of flour—and yet, even though at its time any of these wants comes first, there is something behind all—
The hope for Californian gold.
The wagon train feels out across the prairie. It traces a path that other wagon trains make more distinct—and then so rolls a movement that to this day can be seen the ruts of its wheels.
But behind the visions of gold, and the imagined feel of nuggets, there is something else—
The gold plays out. A dominant motive turns to something else. Now a social growth feels out. Its material of people, who otherwise would have been stationary, has been moved to the west.
The first, faint structures in an embryonic organism are of cartilage. They are replaced by bone.
The paths across prairies turn to lines of steel.
Or that once upon a time, purposefully, to stimulate future developments, gold was strewn in California—and that there had been control upon the depositions, so that only enough to stimulate a development, and not enough to destroy a financial system had been strewn—
That in other parts of this earth, in far back times, there had been purposeful plantings of the little, yellow slugs that would—when their time should come—bring about other extensions of social growths.
But the word purposeful, and the word providential, are usurped words. They are of the language of theologians, and are meant to express an idea of a presiding being, ruling existence, superior to it, and not of it, or not implicit to it. I’d rather go on using these words, denying their ownership by any special cult, than to coin new words. With no necessity for thinking of an external designer and controller, I can think of design and control and providence and purpose and preparation for future uses, if I can think not loosely of Nature, but of a Nature, as an organic whole. Every being, except for its dependence upon environment, is God to its parts.
It is upon the northern parts of this earth that the civilizations that have persisted have grown up, then extending themselves colonially southward. History, like South America and Africa, tapers southward. There are no ruins of temples, pyramids, obelisks in Australia, Argentina, South Africa. Preponderantly peninsulas are southward droops. As if by design, or as if concordantly with an accentuation of lands and peoples in the north, the sun shines about a week longer in the north, each year, than in the south. The coldness in the less important Antarctic regions is more intense than in the Arctic, and here there is no vegetation like the grasses and flowers of the Arctic, in the summertime. Life withers southward. Musk oxen, bears, wolves, foxes, lemmings in the Far North—but there are only amphibious mammals in the Antarctic. Fields of Arctic poppies in the Arctic summertime—but summer in the Antarctic is gray with straggling lichens. If this earth be top-shaped as some of the geodesists think, it is a bloom that is stemmed with desolation.
There are no deposits of coal in the southern parts that compare with deposits in the northern parts. The greatest abundance of oil supplies is north of the equator. It looks like organic preparation, in formative times, before human life appeared upon this earth, for civilizations that would grow up in the north. For ages, peoples of this earth were ignorant of the uses of coal and oil, upon which their later developments would depend.
But so conventionalized are the thoughts of most persons, upon this subject, that if, for instance, my expression is that gold was strewn in California in preparation for future uses, there must be either a visualization of an aggrandized man, who walked about, slinging nuggets, or a denial that, except in the mind of a man, there can be purpose, or control, or design, or providence—
But the making of a lung in an embryonic being that cannot breathe—but it will breathe. This making of a lung is a preparation for future uses. Or the depositions of tissues that are muscles that are not, but that will be, used. Mechanical foresight, or preparation for future uses, pervades every embryonic being. There is a fortune-teller in every womb.
Still, not altogether only theological have been speculations upon the existence of purpose, or design, control, or guidance in “Nature.” There are philosophical doctrines known as orthogenesis and entelechy. Again we are in a situation that we have noted. If there be orthogenesis, or guidance from within—within what? Heretofore, this doctrine has provided no outlines within which to think. All that is required for thinkableness, instead of bafflement, is to give up attempted notions upon Nature, as Universality, and conceive of one thinkable-sized existence, of shape that is representable in thought, and conceive of an organic orthogenesis within that.
In the organic sense, there is, in the Arctic regions, no great need for water. Though the coldness is not so intense here as it is commonly supposed to be, the climate nevertheless prevents much colonization. I have never read of a deluge in the Arctic. Thunderstorms are very uncommon. Some explor
ers have never seen a thunderstorm in the Arctic regions. And at the same time there are oppressively warm, or almost tropical, summer days in the Arctic. Instead of the enormous falls of snow, of common suppositions, the fall of snow, in the Far North, is “very light” (Stefansson). It looks like organically economic neglect of a part that cannot be used. Where, as reliefs, thunderstorms are not needed, there are, except as vagaries, no thunderstorms, though the summertime conditions in places of need and no need are much alike. See Heilprin’s account of his experiences in Greenland—summer days so nearly tropical that pitch melted from the seams of his ship.
The alternations that are known as the seasons are beneficial. They have come about accidentally, or they have been worked out by Automatic Design, or by all-pervasive intelligence, or by equilibration, if that word be preferred to the word “intelligence.” It looks as if more complexly a problem was solved. It is commonly thought that only brains solve problems, or, rather, approximate to solutions: but every living thing that carries a weapon, or a tool, has, presumably not with its brains, but with the intelligence that pervades all substances—so then with the intelligence of its body—solved a problem. It looks as if more complexly a problem was solved, as I say, though in anything like a real, or final, sense, no problem ever has been solved. By the varying incidence of the sun, alternations of fruitfulness and rest could be brought about in the north and the south, but that left rhythms small in the tropics. It looks as if here, intelligently, were brought about the changes that are known as the dry season and the rainy season.
I have never read a satisfactory explanation of this alternation, in conventional, meteorological terms.
In the April rains there is evidence, or might be, if we could have a rational idea as to what we mean by evidence, of design, and an automatically intelligent provision and control. Something is controlling the motions of the planets, according to all appearances that we take as appearances of control. Accepting this, I am only amplifying. Rains, of a gentle and frequent kind that is most beneficial to young plants, or best adapted to them, fall in April. Conventional biology is too one-sided. It treats of adaptation of plants to rain. We see also the adaptation of rains to plants. But there must be either the conventionally theological, or the organic, view, to see this reciprocity. If one prefers to think of a kind and loving deity, who is sending the April rains, he will have to consider—or, rather, will be faced by—records of other rains, which are of the loving kindness of slaughter and desolation and woe.