THOTH A Catastrophics Newsletter VOL VII, No 5 July 31, 2003 EDITOR: Amy Acheson PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS WHAT IS ACTUALLY THE CASE?. . . . . . . . . Mel Acheson PLANET BIRTHING - MORE EVIDENCE . . . . . . Wal Thornhill SQUASHED STAR FLATTENS SOLAR THEORY . . . . Wal Thornhill >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>-----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< WHAT IS ACTUALLY THE CASE? Mel Acheson Everything I know I've read in a book. You may then ask, How is this knowing different from reading? I see the words; I understand the sentences; I make sense of the ideas; I comprehend what the author is proposing. But is the proposal actually the case? How do I know it is or isn't? The same question arises with the philosophy of physics. In its most simplistic form, that philosophy assumes knowing is looking and knowing more is looking more closely. At first look, this appears to be the case. But looking more closely at looking and knowing reveals surprises and raises doubts. Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, photographed an arrangement of flowers with black-and- white transparencies. One transparency was taken in yellow light, another in orange light. He then projected the images simultaneously, each in the same light with which it was taken. The audience expected to see a yellow-orange bouquet of flowers. They saw instead reds and blues and greens and purples, as well as yellow and orange. Perception of color is not a simple response of the eye to each wavelength of light but a complex of activities that converge on a judgment of color. After cataract surgery was perfected, many people who had been blind from birth suddenly were enabled to see. But they saw only senseless patches of color. The doctors were surprised to learn the patients had to learn to see. It took great effort for the patients to make the patches make sense. Not only did they have to learn to interpret the new ocular stimuli, they had to reinterpret the old stimuli of touch and hearing and smell and taste. They weren't simply adding knowledge to what they already knew, they had to learn to know a different and unfamiliar world. Some gave up, closed their eyes, and retreated to their familiar world of sensation and interpretation that omitted the new ocular stimuli. Most people learn to see in the first few weeks of life. By the time they've learned to speak and can tell someone about the experience, they've forgotten it. The linking of stimuli and concepts comes to be taken for granted, the composite nature of perception is overlooked, and people assume that sensory stimuli come pre-assembled into intelligible configurations. Those who become physicists mistake "seeing what's there" for "knowing what's there". This lapse of awareness leads them to reify their preconceptions and to betray their empirical principles for a blind idealism that leaps from fervent faith to foregone conclusions. The irony of modern physics is that the more its theories have achieved, the less its philosophy has been supported by discoveries of how perception and cognition work. (Or maybe, as my astronomy advisor warned me, this just means philosophy is irrelevant.) Reading is the linking of ideas with ocular stimuli. An astronomer looking at the spectrum of a quasar is also linking ideas with ocular stimuli. How does he know the redshifted lines in the spectrum are those of a superluminous object on the frontier of the observable universe? How do I know the words in the textbook that describe the astronomer's linkage of idea and looking are what the quasar is? What assurance does either of us have that the ideas we link with the particular ocular stimuli we experience are what's happening? At first look, it appears we can be assured by ideas that have been verified. Many associated stimuli have been linked repeatedly with the same ideas by many investigators, forming a web among several disciplines of interlocking ideas and lookings. The intensity of light decreases as distance increases. The frequency of light decreases as velocity of separation increases. The angular size of an object decreases as distance increases. The angular sizes of galaxies decrease as their luminosities and the frequencies of their light decrease. Therefore quasars must be bright and distant. It all fits together assuringly. But this web of verification only confirms that I've understood my reading, made sense of my looking. It doesn't answer the question, Is my understanding and sense-making actually the case? Fantasies also make sense and can be verified. The history of science is the story of linkages that came unlinked. Remember Eijkman and Grijns: Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Eijkman proved that beri-beri was caused by a bacterium in rice kernels and could be cured by an antitoxin in the polishings. In the largest case study ever conducted, he ruled out every other imaginable cause. He demonstrated that eating polished rice caused the disease and eating the polishings cured it. He was awarded a Nobel Prize. Not long after, Dr. Grijns imagined something Dr. Eijkman had not: Perhaps beri-beri was caused not by something in the rice but by something not in the rice. The idea of 'bacterial infection' was severed from the experience of beri-beri and the idea of 'nutritional deficiency' became linked instead. If sensory stimuli give no IDEA of what's the case, and theories give no ASSURANCE of what's the case, and verification can't PRECLUDE that something else might be the case, how can we KNOW what's the case? After the stimuli and the ideas have been linked, after the observations have been classified and the experiments replicated, after the theory has been formulated and verified, the critical question still guards the door to knowledge: Is it actually the case? This is a question for judgment. But how are we to judge? To remain scientific, the judgment must arise from the cognitive activities that define science: from sensory observations and intellectual hypotheses. There can be no appeal to the revelation of religion or to the intuition of mystical or spiritual realities, even though creative insights may be revealed or intuited. Because this judgment arises from and is reflected back into the data and ideas that are judged, it appears to be circular. But ideas have implications that can lead to new data; data contain anomalies that can lead to new ideas. Instead of a closed and static circle of certain knowledge, we have a spiraling process of knowledge production that is inherently uncertain and evolving. Knowing is not simply taking a look as a camera takes a snapshot but a constructive struggle of cognitive artistry. This view of knowledge as dynamic, provisional, and adaptive provokes another question: What else could be the case? What other theories might make better sense of the same observations? What other observations might verify a bolder theory? Anomalies and impossibilities are the soil in which the answers to these questions grow. Oliver Sacks notes, in an essay on "Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science:" "The first difficulty, the first barrier, lies in one's own mind, in allowing oneself to encounter new ideas and then to bring them into full and stable consciousness, and to give them conceptual form, holding them in mind even if they do not fit, or contradict, one's existing concepts, beliefs, or categories. Darwin remarks on the importance of 'negative instances' or 'exceptions,' and how crucial it is to make immediate note of them, for otherwise they are 'sure to be forgotten.'" Grijns couldn't find the bacterium that Eijkman had proved must cause beri-beri. This anomaly caused Grijns to doubt what was accepted as secure knowledge: the germ theory of disease. He wondered what else might be the case and came up with nutritional deficiencies. Arp found connections among quasars and nearby galaxies that almost any astronomer can prove is impossible. This anomaly caused Arp to doubt what is currently accepted as secure knowledge: the expanding universe theory of cosmology. He and his colleagues are wondering what else might be the case and are exploring such ideas as mass variability and plasma cosmology. Anomalies and doubts such as these keep knowledge on the move. The question of what is actually the case is actually defective: To be answered scientifically, it must be asked in the context of human senses, human intelligence, and human judgment--in the context of adaptive knowledge. We can only observe those parts of 'the case' to which our senses and instruments respond, can only hypothesize from insights and inspirations that are circumscribed by history and culture, can only judge as those observations and hypotheses evolve. The question of what is actually the case must be conceived on a higher level of abstraction than that of the content of particular theories. A more accurate question is, What do WE KNOW is the case? What is actually the case with human knowing of mutable groupings of experiences and ideas? Scientific truth is not written once and for all on the sky, despite its descent from mytho-religious fiat, but in the cognitive functioning of the human brain. Mel Acheson thoth@whidbey.com ******************************************************** PLANET BIRTHING - MORE EVIDENCE By Wal Thornhill In my May news item I wrote, "It is far simpler and infinitely more efficient if planets are "born" at intervals by the electrical ejection of charged material from the similarly charged interiors of larger bodies -- gas giants from stars, and rocky planets from gas giants." [Ed note: This article is a supplement to the May 2003 holoscience news item. The article appeared in THOTH VII-4 and can be found on Wal Thornhill's webpage here: http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=rbkq9dj2 ] The following report is from Astronomy.com of July 23 and provides further evidence in favor of such a model: Planets Prefer Metal Stars with high metal content are most likely to harbor planets. by Vanessa Thomas When looking for planets beyond our solar system, astronomers often target stars like the sun. But they may want to refocus their attention on stars that hold more metals than our own. A new study reveals that the more metal-rich a star is, the better the chance it hosts a planet. Extrasolar-planet hunter Debra Fischer of the University of California, Berkeley, and astronomer Jeff Valenti of the Space Telescope Science Institute analyzed the composition of 754 nearby stars and looked to see which stars had planets. They found a strong, nearly linear correlation between a star's metal content and the likelihood that it has a planet. "We now know that stars which are abundant in heavy metals are five times more likely to harbor orbiting planets than are stars deficient in metals," says Fischer, who presented the results Monday at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Sydney, Australia. "If you look at the metal-rich stars, twenty percent have planets. That's stunning." Fischer and Valenti examined the abundances of iron, nickel, titanium, silicon, and sodium in the spectra of more than 1,000 stars. (In astronomy, all elements heavier than helium are considered "metals.") Of these, 754 were monitored for at least two years, so the astronomers could tell whether the stars had any close- orbiting gas giant planets. (A large, orbiting planet exerts a gravitational force on a star, causing a "wobble" that's detectable in the star's spectrum.) Planets orbit 61 of the studied stars while the other 693 have no known planets. After grouping the stars by metal content, the pair compared how many stars of each type had planets. Stars with sun-like metal abundances have a 5 to 10 percent chance of having planets. Those with three times more metals than the sun have a 20 percent chance. Metal-poor stars with only one-third as much as the sun have just a 3 percent probability. None of the 29 most metal- deficient stars of the study had planets. "These data suggest that there is a threshold metallicity, and thus not all stars in our galaxy have the same chance of forming planetary systems," Fischer says. "Whether a star has planetary companions or not is a condition of its birth. Those with a larger initial allotment of metals have an advantage over those without." The findings also suggest that younger stars are more likely to have planets. That's because stars born in the galaxy's early days formed from nebulae that included fewer heavy elements. As time passed, more stars exploded as supernova and heavier elements fused in their cores were scattered into the interstellar medium. "Stars forming today are much more likely to have planets than early generations of stars," comments Valenti. "It's a planetary baby boom." THORNHILL COMMENTS ABOUT THE ARTICLE: Given the orthodox notion of how planets form, it is not clear why we should expect more gas giant planets about a star simply because it has more heavy elements in its spectrum. However, I argued in my earlier news item that stars "give birth" from time to time by electrical parturition. It occurs in a nova-type discharge from their charged interior. Unlike the hydrogen-bomb model of stars, there is no internal heating. Intense plasma discharges at the stellar surface give rise to starshine. Those discharges synthesize "metals" that continually rain into the star's depths. The heavy element abundance in a star's spectrum is not just an inheritance from old supernovae. Stellar interiors become enriched in heavy elements. The star "children" are gas giants or binary partners formed from those heavier elements after expulsion from the star. Therefore we should simply expect from the electric star model that the longer a star has been shining the more heavy elements it will show in its spectrum and the more time it has had to "give birth." So stars forming today are not more likely to have planets than earlier generations. They probably have not had time to have planetary "children." Whether a star has planetary companions or not is NOT a condition of its birth. We should expect that below a certain metallicity (that is, age) a star will not have planets. We do not expect babies to give birth! Planet formation has more to do with the growth of internal electrical stress in a star. It can be enhanced by episodes of unusual electric stress in its environment. We should be looking closely at stars that have undergone nova outbursts. It should be noted that plasma cosmologists have a view of star formation that allows for a number of condensed bodies to be formed in close proximity at the same time. And the separation of elements by their "critical ionization velocity" in a plasma pinch may offer an alternative explanation for differences in metallicity between the bodies. However, it is not clear to what extent this mechanism plays a role in the development of planets about a star. Certainly, it does not explain the propensity for planets to be found in higher numbers near stars of higher metallicity. The stellar parturition model seems to offer a simple solution to: a) the presence of heavy elements in gas giants, b) a greater number of gas giants being found around stars of high metallicity, and c) the propensity for close orbits of the gas giants about their parent star. (c) Wal Thornhill 2003 author of The Electric Universe: A Holistic Science for the New Millennium See www.electric-universe.org ******************************************************** SQUASHED STAR FLATTENS SOLAR THEORY By Wal Thornhill >From New Scientist for 12 June 2003: Flattest star puts astronomers in a spin Danny Penman The flattest star yet seen is forcing researchers to revise their ideas on the dynamics and structure of celestial bodies. The star, called Achernar, was observed by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. According to standard celestial theories, the fast spinning star should be only 20 to 30 per cent wider across its equator than from pole to pole. But Achernar, which spins at 225 km per second, has a colossal bulge around its equator and is 50 per cent wider. [ed note: artist's conception available at Thornhill's electric universe website] http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=x50hfzxa#top Brilliant blue Achernar, (Alpha Eridani), the ninth brightest star in the sky, lies at the southern tip of the star-river Eridanus. It has a belt of emitting gas circling its equator. It is a member of a peculiar class of stars known as "Lambda Eridani" stars that show tiny but very regular periodic light variations. All stars and planets that reach a critical spin velocity bulge slightly at the equator. The Earth is 40 kilometres, or 0.3 per cent, wider from east to west than from north to south. Astronomers had been confident that their calculations of this oblateness were fairly accurate. "But the new observation means that the model for fast rotating stars is not complete," says astronomer Pierre Kervella, one of the team at the European Southern Observatory. "We clearly do not know enough." "Either the core is rotating faster than the surface or the star's matter is circulating in an unexpected way. We're not sure which possibility is correct at the moment," he told New Scientist. The discovery was made by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer at ESO's Paranal site in Chile. This uses two 40-centimetre reflecting telescopes to produce images which are then combined and passed through an interferometer. This permits extremely accurate measurements - the instrument could spot a one euro coin at 2500 kilometres distance. The astronomers now plan to gather even higher resolution images using a trio of 1.8 metre telescopes. "But our immediate task will be to re-design our computer models," says Kervella. The team hopes to use the models to distinguish between the two possible explanations for the star's extraordinary flatness. THORNHILL COMMENTS ABOUT THE ARTICLE: There is a third important alternative, notable for its absence from the discussion. Perhaps we don't know how stars work! The simplest way to explain stellar flattening due to swift rotation would be if the star were more homogeneous in density. But that would require giving up the notion of a central thermonuclear fire. Predictive success is a key indicator of the correctness of a theoretical model. The above report demonstrates once more the predictive failure of present astrophysical models. The recommended scientific approach to such a dilemma is to question all of the assumptions that go into the failing model. However, when it comes to the question of how stars work, embodied in the "standard solar model," there is no question. Stars shine, so obviously something must be burning within the star. But electric lights shine without consuming themselves. In the above report, two ad hoc solutions are offered to complicate things. But this is merely tinkering with a model that is already in deep trouble according to other fundamental observations. Unfortunately it seems scientists are encouraged by their training to indulge in "confirmatory bias." That is, "the tendency for humans to seek out, attend to, and sometimes embellish experiences that support or 'confirm' their beliefs." "One study found that the vast majority of scientists drawn from a national sample showed a strong preference for "confirmatory" experiments. Over half of these scientists did not even recognize disconfirmation (modus tollens) as a valid reasoning form! In another study the logical reasoning skills of 30 scientists were compared to those of 15 relatively uneducated Protestant ministers. Where there were performance differences, they tended to favor the ministers. Confirmatory bias was prevalent in both groups, but the ministers used disconfirmatory logic almost twice as often as the scientists did." ~Michael J. Mahoney, Publication Prejudices: An Experimental Study of Confirmatory Bias in the Peer Review System Cognitive Therapy and Research, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1977, pp. 161-175. Two fundamental observations about the Sun do not support the standard solar model but they have been minimised or ignored. The first is the celebrated "neutrino problem" where the neutrinos arriving from the Sun are far too few to account for the Sun's presumed thermonuclear energy output. No scientist could contemplate trashing the standard solar model so the problem had to be with the neutrinos. After decades of expensive research it was shown by the "KamLAND" experiment [see below] that neutrinos can oscillate between different forms, known whimsically as 'flavors.' Following the habit of confirmatory bias, this notion was seized upon as "proof" that the standard solar model was correct. A report in Physics Today, March 2003, put it this way: "After 36 years of solar neutrino experiments, the inescapable conclusion is that a large fraction of the electron neutrinos produced by nuclear processes in the Sun's core are metamorphosing into other neutrino varieties somewhere en route to the detectors on Earth." The report came to the conclusion that neutrinos were not undergoing any significant change of flavor in the vacuum of space between the Sun and Earth. Instead they were performing "an irreversible flavor change that takes place in high-density regions of the Sun." So not only does the Sun need a hypothetical hot, high-density core to have any hope of generating thermonuclear energy, it now needs a hypothetical "critical-electron-density Region" as well, to fudge the neutrino results. No doubt this will give rise to a flurry of theoretical activity using neutrinos to probe the imagined interior of the Sun. A widely viewed site on the Internet reported the KamLAND experiment in triumphal terms: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030623.html "A large sphere beneath Japan has helped verify humanity's understanding of the inner workings of the Sun. ..leading astrophysicists now consider the long standing solar neutrino deficit problem as finally solved." But neutrino metamorphosis is not an "inescapable conclusion." It is confirmatory bias with bells on! Conflicting evidence about the source region of the neutrinos is being ignored. There have been several reports of a correlation between the neutrino count, the sunspot number and solar wind strength. These are solar surface effects that should have no connection with what is going on in the Sun's core, where the hidden energy of the nuclear furnace is supposed to take hundreds of thousands of years to "leak out" to the surface. The electric star model suggests a simpler explanation of solar neutrino observations. The Sun produces all of the neutrino flavors on the surface in more complex nuclear reactions than mere heat and pressure allows. The nuclear reactions are ignited by the plasma pinch effect in the gigantic electrical discharges that cover the star and produce starlight. Ironically, it is the same phenomenon as that employed in some laboratories attempting to mimic the Sun's energy production! In this model, the connection between neutrino count, sunspot number and solar wind is expected, because the driver for them all is the same - galactic electrical power. The second serious challenge to the standard solar model comes from solar oscillations. In the 1970's, the Sun was unexpectedly found to ring like a bell. In 1976 Severny, Kotov & Tsap discovered a dominant 160-minute ringing mode of the Sun. They wrote, "The simplest interpretation is that we observed purely radial pulsations. The most striking fact is that the observed period is almost precisely... the value if the Sun were to be an homogeneous sphere. ... We have investigated two possible solutions to this dilemma. The first alternative is that nuclear... reactions are not responsible for energy generation in the Sun. Such a conclusion, although rather extravagant, is quite consistent with the observed absence of appreciable neutrino flux from the Sun, and with the observed abundance of Li and Be in the solar atmosphere." The second alternative involved force fitting the data to the standard solar model by assuming that the oscillations were not simply radial but of a more complicated form. However, the implications were so disturbing for theorists that the work was repeated in various locations and all sources of error considered. The result in 1981 was that the original oscillation was found to be the highest peak in the power spectrum, and "one may conclude that 160-min oscillation shows mostly radial motion." In reporting the status of solar oscillation observations in 1991 in "Solar Interior and Atmosphere", F. Hill et al mention the 160-minute oscillation without any reference to the implied homogeneous Sun. Rather, they spend half a page casting suspicion on the extensive observations and attempting to minimize its significance. The reason is only thinly veiled; "Additional doubt comes from the difficulty of theoretically describing the nature of the oscillation. ...". The authors were merely behaving with the usual confirmatory bias. The question of what is ringing the stellar bell has not been satisfactorily answered. It should be noted that the size of an electric star is determined by the degree of electric stress it suffers. And since the electric Sun forms part of a galactic circuit, it will exhibit resonant effects. The Sun is an electric bell as well as an electric light! It seems particularly significant that the 160-minute oscillation also appears with high statistical significance in the solar intensity, infra- red, radio and radio polarization (connected with the solar magnetic field). All of these effects are to be expected in an electric star model because they are driven by the same resonant electrical power circuit. Kotov went on to publish a paper in 1985 that detailed a number of other significant astrophysical manifestations of this basic 160-minute resonance in the solar system, binary stars and RR-Lyrae variable stars in globular clusters. He concluded, "beyond doubt, ..the nature of the 160-min oscillation, firstly found in the Sun and then in the solar system as a whole and then among the stars, does present a new challenging problem for astrophysics. ..the next thing to suggest is that a fundamental aspect of the physics of gravitation is not yet understood(?)." I suggest that the problem has nothing to do with gravity. Instead, problems arise because incorrect gravitational models are used in astrophysics. The correct electrical models are much simpler and can be verified by direct observations instead of inferences about the hidden interiors of stars. As outlined in THOTH VII-4 article and Thornhill's May 2003 holoscience news item about planet formation, and in an Aug 2001 article about neutrinos, an electric star is expected to be much the same density throughout. So the peculiar flattening of fast-spinning Achernar is easily understood. SEE EARLIER ARTICLES HERE: http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=rbkq9dj2 http://www.holoscience.com/news/puzzle.html In the not-too-distant future we will look back on attempts to explain the Sun in terms of a central fire with the same dismissive humor that we use for earlier notions of the Sun as some sort of fire in the sky, steadily consuming itself. What appears at first glance a perfectly natural and simple explanation fails to explain almost all of the strange solar phenomena we see. Our old fiery model of the Sun, and consequently of all stars, has become a complicated theoretical nightmare. It seems that the leap from an old worldview to a new one is difficult for the human mind. But once achieved we can teach young children ideas that defeated the greatest minds for centuries. Our grandchildren will view it as perfectly obvious that Nature should provide us with an electric light, the Sun, powered over galactic distances by a vast network of invisible transmission lines, humming at an ultra-low frequency. Plasma physicists already know those transmission lines as Birkeland currents. (c) Wal Thornhill 2003 author of The Electric Universe: A Holistic Science for the New Millennium See www.electric-universe.org ******************************************************** PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA GROUP WEBSITE: http://www.kronia.com Subscriptions to AEON, a journal of myth and science, now with regular features on the Saturn theory and electric universe, may be ordered from this page: http://www.kronia.com/library/aeon.html Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: http://www.aeonjournal.com/index.html http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovskian/ http://www.bearfabrique.org http://www.grazian-archive.com/ http://www.holoscience.com http://www.electric-cosmos.org/ http://www.electric-universe.org http://www.science-frontiers.com http://www.catastrophism.com/cdrom/index.htm http://www.dragonscience.com ----------------------------------------------- The THOTH electronic newsletter is an outgrowth of scientific and scholarly discussions in the emerging field of astral catastrophics. Our focus is on a reconstruction of ancient astral myths and symbols in relation to a new theory of planetary history. Serious readers must allow some time for these radically different ideas to be fleshed out and for the relevant background to be developed. The general tenor of the ideas and information presented in THOTH is supported by the editor and publisher, but there will always be plenty of room for differences of interpretation. We welcome your comments and responses. thoth@Whidbey.com New readers are referred to earlier issues of THOTH posted on the Kronia website listed above.