mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== THOTH -A Catastrophics Newsletter- VOL I, No. 16 June 15, 1997 EDITOR: Michael Armstrong PUBLISHER: Walter Radtke CONTENTS: ICE CUBES FROM SPACE.................Robert Matthews LOUIS FRANK'S MINI-COMETS................Benny Peiser SCIENTISTS COMMENT ON THE "SNOWBALLS" SNOWBALL MINI-COMETS.....................Wal Thornhill --------------------------------------------------- QUOTE OF THE DAY: "It's better to be roughly right than precisely wrong." -John Dayton ----------------------------------------------------------- "When the Planets were the Gods" THE COMING REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE ------------------------------------------------------- BIOGAPHICAL NOTES: David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill ------------------------------------------------------- David Talbott was the founder and publisher of the ten-issue Pensee magazine series, "Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered," and is the author of book, THE SATURN MYTH. He is also the founder of the periodical, AEON: A Journal of Myth and Science, in which his articles have regularly appeared. More recently he became a regular contributor to the electronic newsletter THOTH, published approximately every week to ten days. Wallace Thornhill is a physicist and a computer systems engineer, whose papers on the youthful Venus, the origin of chondritic meteorites, and the electrical character of the solar system have gained much recent attention in catastrophist circles. His most recent work has focused on sinuous rilles of the Moon, Venus, Mars, the Moons of Mars, and the moons of the gas giants. He has shown these rilles to be the scars from massive electrical dischargesÐa finding that could well produce one of the great scientific controversies of this century. Talbott and Thornhill are now collaborating on a book, GOLDEN DAWN, COSMIC NIGHT, an introduction to the "Saturn theory," supplemented by a summary of the "electric universe," all designed for the general reader. The book will review the global memory of the Golden Age and the world-changing catastrophe that brought that unique period of human history to its catastrophic conclusion. It will also show how plasma physics enables us to understand these events dynamically, in ways that can be replicated in the laboratory. Processes that have mystified astronomers and planetary geologists need not remain obscure any longer. ----------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 02 Jun 1997 12:14:03 -0400 (EDT) From: Benny J Peiser Subject: LOUIS FRANK'S MINI COMETS STIR DEBATE LOUIS FRANK'S MINI COMETS STIR NEW CONTROVERSY Last week's press release about Louis Frank's latest research findings about watery and icy mini comets which are claimed to impact our atmosphere at a rate of one every three seconds(!), has provoked a new scientific controversy among astrophysicists. For the non-astronomer, it remains extremely difficult to assess whether or not Dr Frank's findings are based on valid interpretation of observational data or whether the evidence is still too ambiguous (as the skeptics have pointed out on this network). Should Louis Frank's findings be corroborated, though, the implications would not only affect the understanding of our cosmic environment; it might also demonstrate - once again - the Kuhnian suggestion that astronomers tend to apply 'biased' observational technics which - in one way or another - simply mirror and compliment their personal views about the solar system. What is more, some dogmatic leaders in their field might even try to suppress contradictory evidence. Or how should one explain the reluctance of many astronomers to publish (never mind test) Dr. Frank's theory? Let's hope that something good will come out of this debate - whatever its outcome - and that the great attention will now generate the essential tests. I have attached Robert Matthews' essay about this latest controversy below. He not only describes the "unscientific approach" by Frank's fellow astronomers to his theory but also places this episode in its proper historical context within the ongoing debates about neo-catastrophism. The article appeared in yesterday's SUNDAY TELEGRAPH. Benny J Peiser ------------------------------------------------------------ THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, 1 June 1997 ICE CUBES FROM SPACE PROVE THE SCOFFERS WRONG Robert Matthews Many scientists are having to eat humble pie this weekend, following the revelation that the Earth is constantly pelted by cosmic snowballs the size of houses. And not before time either, as these same scientists have spent a decade disparaging Dr Louis Frank of Iowa University for his refusal to bow to orthodoxy and deny the evidence of his own eyes. That evidence first emerged in 1982, when a student of Dr. Frank's was analysing images of the Earth sent back by two Nasa satellites. To the student's frustration, many of the images were spoiled by tiny black dots. At first sight, they appeared to be faulty data, but careful study revealed that they behaved far too regularly to be dismissed as random flaws. Instead, they appeared to be tiny comet-like objects that were striking the atmosphere at a rate of one every three seconds, each dumping tons of water on to the Earth. For a few years, other researchers showed no more than polite interest in Frank's claims when they were mentioned at conferences. It was when he tried to get his research published in academic journals that Frank discovered the fate that awaits those who make radical claims in science. The leading journal NATURE rejected his claims, saying that "a representative poll" had been taken of experts in the field and they had voted against publication. Frank's attempt to answer his critics with fresh evidence by using major telescopes were met with obstruction and foot- dragging, with astronomers insisting that the enterprise was a waste of time. When Frank did succeed in getting access to a telescope, it revealed objects streaking across the atmosphere at 20,000mph - as he had predicted. It made no difference: the findings were still rejected for publication. Now, after 10 years of obstruction and ridicule, it is Frank's turn to laugh. Cameras he designed aboard Nasa's Polar spacecraft have revealed the existence of the small comets beyond all doubt. Spectacular images taken by cameras show the comets streaking into the atmosphere before dumping their water. They arrive at the rate about one every three seconds - just as Frank had claimed. Frank himself has always been surprisingly sanguine about the controversy, apparently taking the view that the "truth will out" (sic). But there is no getting around the fact that many scientists have taken a woefully unscientific approach to the whole issue. While extraordinary claims must demand extraordinary evidence, the reluctance of many to consider Frank's evidence was matched only by their keenness to block his attempts to gather more. Frank's experience in this quintessentially Strange but True story are far from unique. The whole issue of bombardment by cosmic debris is one that has always been dogged by mule- like intransigence dressed up as academic rigour. Until the early 19th century, anyone claiming to have seen stones falling out of the sky was regarded as having had a few beers too many; the French Academy of Sciences even declared such claims to be a scientific absurdity. When hundreds of stones were reported to have smashed on to the French village of L'Aigle in 1803, the Academy dispatched a young astronomer to debunk the story. He returned with bad news: the reports were correct. Everyone now accepts the existence of meteorites but the confirmation came too late to save hundreds of specimens from being unceremoniously thrown out of museums as "superstitious artefacts". The now widely-accepted theory that a hugh meteor struck the Earth 65 million years ago, pushing the dinosaurs into extinction, also came in for a least as much abuse as the idea of micro-comets when it was originally proposed. When the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his team first published their evidence for the giant impact in 1980, one authority described it as "a nutty theory of pseudoscientists posing as paleontologists". Today it is the nutters who argue against it. There is one aspect of the Earth bombardment issue that remains a source of incredulity among many scientists: the idea that humanity is under serious threat from meteor impacts. The sceptics are still demanding hard evidence for this threat. We can only hope that the "hard evidence" doesn't come in form of a billion-tonne meteor any time soon. **end** From: David Morrison [Director of Space, NASA Ames Research Centre] >: > >COMMENTS ON INTERPLANETARY SNOWBALLS > >It should be remembered that Lou Frank has not detected >mini-comets directly, and at issue should be his >interpretation of the spacecraft data. This has been missed >in most of the press reports I have seen, which assume that >his mini-comet hypothesis of 1986 is now verified. But we >must remember that the impact rate proposed by Lou Frank >for 5-m comets is about a million times greater than >that given by a power-law size distribution, which is well >anchored by observations of objects just an order of >magnitude higher than the sizes that Frank suggests are so >abundant. Is it physically possible for the numbers of NEOs >to increase by six orders of magnitude in the one order of >magnitude size range from 50 m to 5 m diameter? I think we >should all be skeptical. I look forward to seeing a >refereed, published paper on these results and their >interpretation. And we should all ask if these objects >could have been missed by other detection techniques, >including our eyeballs looking up at the night sky. After >all, he is talking about roughly Hiroshima size flashes >happening at a rate of 10 per minute, rather than the >accepted rate of once every few months. How could these >have been missed? > >David Morrison > >Following are some additional comments from Al Harris (JPL): > >1. If they are there we should see them. We know within a >factor of a few what the flux of ~5m sized objects is. We >may arguably not know if they are ice or rock or metal, or >their density, or their albedos, but within reasonable >limits we certainly know the numbers to better than an >order of magnitude, and Frank's numbers are a million or so >too high. If there really were that many 5 m objects out >there, even at albedo 0.05, you should be able to see >several in an evening scanning the sky with binoculars: >about one per 400 sq. deg. at magnitude 8.5, and moving at >about the speed of a slow earth satellite. > >2. Nothing breaks up at "600 to 15,000 miles above the >Earth." Not even icy fluff balls, certainly not a 5 meter >object which weighs 30 tons. Anything so weak as to come >apart in that environment wouldn't stay intact even in >heliocentric orbit. > >3. The mass he proposes (~10/minute impacts of ~30 tons) >adds up to a fair fraction of the Earth's mass (~10-20%) in >the age of the solar system. That's about 1 cm of water a >decade, which is measurable. The oceans aren't rising that >fast, and certainly haven't for a geologically significant >length of time. > **end** ----------------------------------------------- SNOWBALL MINI-COMETS By Wal Thornhill (walt at netinfo.com.au) Dr. Louis Frank's recent announcement of confirmation of his theory of icy comets bombarding the Earth has stirred up considerable controversy after more than a decade of rejection by most astronomers. The "proof" comes in the form of some images from orbiting spacecraft of glowing trails plunging toward the Earth, hundreds of kilometers above the surface. The glowing, ionized trails are said to emit the characteristic radiation of excited atoms and ions associated with water. The size of these "mini water comets" is thought to be about 5-20 metre diameter and density about 0.2g/cc, which would mean they are fluffy like a snowball. Dr. Frank's theory was developed from observations, beginning in 1981, of "holes" in dayglow images of the Earth returned by orbiting spacecraft. Dayglow is caused by sunlight exciting oxygen atoms high in the ionosphere which then emit ultraviolet light, invisible to the naked eye. Frank and a co-worker noticed that the dayglow images had small blemishes in the form of dark spots. After considerable effort to determine that the spots were not just noise or errors in transmission (since the spots were often no more than a pixel wide) it was found that the spots were real, that they grew and faded quickly and moved in a prograde fashion like meteoric dust. So the cause appeared to be extraterrestrial. The next question was what could cause the rapid extinction and recovery of the dayglow over a circle about 30 miles (48km) in diameter? The holes are too big to be caused by a solid object, so Frank decided it must be a cloud of water vapour. This led to the notion that comets must be the cause since they are believed to be composed largely of water ice. The biggest hurdle for Frank's theory is the number of holes measured, which implies that 20 comets per minute are striking the Earth. That's 10 million comet-like objects per year, up to the size of a small house! It is understandable that people in the Spacewatch program are very concerned that they haven't seen anything of these impactors. Astronomers have rightly asked why it is that we haven't detected this barrage by some other means. It should provide ample water to make the rare, stratospheric noctilucent clouds a continuous feature of our skies. It would be sufficient to give the Moon an appreciable atmosphere and cause seismic shocks and surface erosion there - none of which are apparent. Earth satellites would be expected to have detected the plasma disturbance in their wake. It is unlikely the military would have missed them. Frank's answer to the objections is that the phenomena is real and no one has come up with an alternative explanation. In his words, "There was no other reasonable explanation." The new photographs of the bright trails of objects entering the Earth's ionosphere, reported widely, have focussed attention on Frank's theory but in no way constitutes proof. If anything, the NASA publicity has polarised the astronomical fraternity. On the one hand are the skeptics who view it as an ill-judged NASA publicity stunt which may have the undesirable effect of reducing confidence in future press releases. On the other are those who point to the oppression they feel Dr. Frank has suffered at the hands of the establishment for more than a decade for peddling such an audacious theory. When I saw the news item, it occurred to me that I had a possible alternative explanation for the ionospheric holes. It is an extension of an idea I presented to the SIS Cambridge conference in 1993. I have read most of Frank's papers on his discovery and theory as well as the arguments against. I find that I agree with the astronomers who are unconvinced by Frank's explanation. Apart from the objections raised by astronomers about the lack of supporting evidence for the existence of these "comets", there are many special ad-hoc requirements of the comets to allow them to exist in such numbers in the inner solar system. For example they must contain enough "dust" to prevent the ices from sublimating away in the Sun's radiation. They must have low density (snow) to allow them to breakup in the ionosphere. This adds even more restrictions to the simplistic dirty ice model of comets which itself is not well supported by recent comet observations. Frank noted two important characteristics of the ionospheric "holes": first, the rate of occurence is qualitatively similar to that for radar meteors (that is, meteors whose presence can be detected by radar echoes from their ionized trail through the atmosphere); second is that the movement of the holes showed the prograde motion characteristic of meteoritic debris. These observations provide a strong link between the holes and simple meteors. So, with the benefit of a little more thought, I present an alternative "reasonable explanation" for the ionospheric dayglow holes which does not require cometary impacts. The hypothesis is a logical extension of my paper of 1993 (1) which provided a model to explain another mysterious earthly phenomena, this time in the realm of lightning - red sprites and blue jets. There were reports in 1990 of low-light TV cameras capturing discharges, later dubbed "blue jets", originating 14km above the Earth over storm clouds, rising like fountains another 20km into the stratosphere. There followed a report, published in New Scientist of 19 August, 1995, p.34: "...in the summer of 1994, using two aircraft flying about 50 kilometres apart, they [Davis Sentman and Eugene Wescott of the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks] caught the first colour videos of sprites at work. ''The flashes look like the Fourth of July, like Roman candles with fountains," says Sentman. Observing the same sprites from two different directions allowed Sentman and Wescott to work out their altitudes and dimensions for the first time. ''Prior to that other groups had speculated they go up to 40 kilometres, maybe 50, tops," Sentman recalls. "It was stretching the imagination too far to speculate they might go all the way to the ionosphere." But that's exactly what happened: the sprites stretched right up into the ionosphere more than 90 kilometres above the Earth. The sheer size of the sprites is daunting, according to John Molitoris of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco. ''You're talking about a flash roughly 60 kilometres in diameter,'' says Molitoris." Our view of the Earth as an electrically neutral and isolated body is exemplified by the researchers' comment that it is one way for an electrical storm to dissipate energy into the magnetosphere. It is merely assumed that energetic events above the storm must be driven by the storm below. However, there are severe problems with that notion. For at the very edge of space, above the storm, gamma rays have been detected! I propose a simple model which has the virtue of offering solutions to a number of mysteries with one simple assumption - that planets transact electrically with the solar wind. From that perspective, magnetospheres should properly be called Langmuir plasma sheaths, or plasmaspheres, and exhibit a radial electric field within the sheath. The radial field was inadvertently detected by the Tethered Satellite last year, when it caused arcing and burned through the tether. In the New Scientist of 31 May, p.18, there is a news item, "Planet's tail of the unexpected", which, un-noticed, provides direct confirmation of electric currents flowing between a planet and its surroundings. The "stringy things" detected near the Earth and causing such puzzlement can only be "Birkeland currents" which alone are capable of maintaining narrow plasma filaments over vast distances. It is the only force free configuration for a current carrying plasma. Hannes Alfven described them in his works and they feature in the recent plasma cosmology book, "The Big Bang Never Happened", by Eric Lerner. So, I suggest that storm clouds which span great heights are merely providing a convenient path to ground for electric charge conducted through the ionosphere from the plasmasphere. It is at this point where the importance of the correlation of ionospheric holes with meteors may be crucial. It has been suggested that red sprites may be triggered by meteors as they blaze an ionized, conducting trail through the ionosphere and mesosphere. I believe this to be highly likely. I then note one of the less well known characteristics of lightning in its ability to compress and accelerate atmospheric ions along the discharge channel from regions of high pressure to regions of lower pressure. In other words, to create a roughly vertical fountain of warmer air. Such a phenomenon has been reported: One afternoon in July 1971 a retired general practitioner, Dr L.H. Worth, climbed to the rounded summit of the Puy Mary, 1770m, in central France. He could see a storm in the valley below him about 3km away and he heard the thunder. A few seconds later he felt a blast of hot air, so powerful that he had to lean against it, and this occurred three times in the next few seconds. That it was not an imaginary or hallucinatory experience is shown by the fact that people on the mountain near him rushed away for shelter.(2) In the case of the ionospheric holes, it would seem that a "red sprite" type of diffuse lightning discharge occurs preferentially along the ionized trail created by a meteor. The result is that a fountain of air from lower levels punches through the airglow level, causing a sudden decrease in the airglow until the newly exposed atmospheric gases can be dissociated by solar radiation. As well, the sudden localised change in the electrical balance of the airglow layer quenches the UV output momentarily. The dimensions of red sprites are of the order of magnitude required to explain the diameters of ionospheric holes. My proposed mechanism of formation of blue jets and red sprites sees them resulting from ionospheric discharges to ground via thunderstorms in the troposphere. In other words they form part of an electrical energy input from the solar plasma to weather systems, quite distinct from solar insolation. So the discharge will be found to extend in diffuse form into space. I speculate that the radial spokes in Saturn's rings are a graphic indication of a similar electrical input to that planet, with particles being displaced above and below the narrow plane of the rings by the electrical discharge. I would even hazard a guess that the Great Red Spot (GRS) on Jupiter is, for reasons as yet unknown, the continual focus of a powerful ionospheric discharge. I deduce this from an example of the same effect on a much smaller scale on Earth in the reported glow discharge seen from space above tornadic storms on Earth. It would be of interest to know if Jupiter's ionosphere is the site of diffuse electrical discharges above the GRS. This model does not require large quantities of water to quench the Earth's airglow in the ionospheric holes. I am suggesting that material is not being dumped into the ionosphere from space, but erupted from the atmosphere below. I would expect that the phenomena of radar meteors can be correlated with the ionospheric holes. It is also probable that it is not a necessary condition for a meteor to initiate such an ionospheric discharge. In that case, ionospheric holes should also be looked for above exceptionally violent electrical storms. Wal Thornhill (1) Thornhill, W., Evidence for the Extreme Youth of Venus, Proceedings of the 1993 Cambridge Conference of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, pp.74-94. (2) Worth, L.H., Atmospheric mystery, Nature, 236, 413(1972). ----------------------------------------------- * UPDATE * UPDATE * UPDATE * UPDATE * UPDATE * UPDATE PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE TO VIEW THE INTRODUCTORY SLIDE SHOW FOR NEWCOMERS-- http://www.kronia.com/~kronia/ Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: http://www.ames.net/aeon/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/velikovskian/ http://www.access.digex.net/~medved/Catastrophism.html http://www.grazian-archive.com/ http://www.tcel.com/~mike/paper.html http://nt.e-z.net/mikamar/default.html ----------------------------------------------- The THOTH electronic newsletter is an outgrowth of scientific and scholarly discussions in the emerging field of astral catastrophics. Our initial focus will be 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. New readers are referred to earlier installments in issues of THOTH posted on the Kronia website listed above. Go to the THOTH page and click on the image titled "Thoth: the Egyptian God of Knowledge" to access the back issues. Michael Armstrong Mikamar Publishing mikamar at e-z.net