One person who didn't think that way was the aerospace engineer, science-fact and science-fiction writer G. Harry Stine. 83 As 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 d2x/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, only charged 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. 84 As 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. 85 True 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 with any 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.
FOUR
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 celestia
l 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 entitled Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky, 87 collecting 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 as Scripta 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.
How It All Began: A Small Question About the Exodus
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.
Resorting to astronomical evidence to provide an absolute time scale frequently leads to the same kind of circularity as we found with Darwinism. The historians and the astronomers each believe that the other has accurate data to support the conventional chronology, and hence their own speculations must be true. A. H. Gardiner, the original translator of the Ipuwer papyrus, commented that "what is proudly advertised as Egyptian history is merely a collection of rags and tatters." 88 Velikovsky'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, Re
hoboam, 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.
Kicking the Sacred Cow Page 17