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 V, No 7 July 15, 2001 EDITOR: Amy Acheson PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS IN PRAISE OF ORTHODOXY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Mel Acheson INTERSECT 2001: CONFERENCE SPECIAL, PART I . . . . by Ian Tresman, Amy Acheson, Jamie Thistlethwait >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>-----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< IN PRAISE OF ORTHODOXY by Mel Acheson I come not to bury astronomical orthodoxy but to praise it. It's replaced the imaginary Man in the Moon with real men ON the moon. It's put robots on Mars and Venus and Eros. It's put Ulysses into a polar orbit around the sun and SOHO into a halo orbit around a mathematical point. With the Hubble telescope it's looked farther than man has ever looked before, and with the Chandra x-ray telescope it's looked in a light man has never looked in before. It's replaced Galileo's telescopic view of Jupiter with an electronic eye orbiting Io. Without the achievements of orthodox astronomy, we wouldn't have the accumulation of anomalies to inspire new ideas. Without the orthodoxy of orthodox astronomy, we couldn't identify ourselves as crackpots with impossible theories. We complain about the blindness of orthodoxy. I'm always tickled to hear Wal's depiction of "applying a blind eye to the wrong end of a telescope and telling us what they imagine they see." But blindness is beneficial and even epistemically necessary. Donald Campbell, Karl Popper, and others maintain that the accumulation of knowledge itself, scientific and otherwise, is a process of blind variation and selective retention. This is commonly known as trial and error. Attempts to plan or to second-guess the trials have opportunity costs: Peeking under the blindfold keeps you from stumbling over new discoveries. This requirement for discovery is antagonistic to the requirement for funding. No self-protective bureaucrat is going to risk approving a research grant that doesn't have a foreseeable outcome. To get funding, the researcher must propose what he will find and when. This is not just peeking under the blindfold, it's taking it off. Orthodox astronomers have shown courage and ingenuity in finding ways around these antagonisms. I commend their achievements in finance as well as in space. Perhaps I can even be of some help. Here's a research project that's a slam-dunk, and it's going begging: There are 10 x-ray and radio sources in a line to the northwest of the active galaxy M82. They've never been analyzed to see if they're quasars. On the exactly opposite side of M82 are 9 quasars, coincidentally aligned with a jet of luminous material from M82. Now the odds of adding coincidences in a string is the product of the odds for each incident. This means the 9 in a line are highly unlikely, but, hey, coincidences happen. Because quasars are background objects at the far reaches of the universe, they're distributed fairly uniformly. This means the 9 in a line pretty much account for all the quasars in the vicinity of M82. Multiplying all these unlikelihoods makes it nearly certain the 10 unidentified objects are NOT quasars. Because they're clustered together, analysis would be easy. You can get spectra of them all with a few nights' observation. You could hold a press conference the next day to announce the results. The bureaucrats will love the project because it's a sure find, and the astronomers will love it because it's sure to vindicate orthodox truth over crackpot error. The enterprising researcher can gain fortune and fame with practically no risk and with losing only one night's sleep. Bureaucratic science doesn't get any better than this! Why hasn't someone jumped on it? What do you think they would find? Mel Acheson thoth at whidbey.com **************************************************** IMAGES OF CONFERENCE: INTERSECT 2001 by Ian Tresman Amy Acheson, Jamie Thistlethwait IAN TRESMAN PROVIDES DAY BY DAY COMMENTARY: I arrived on Thursday evening, staggered to find the outside temperature at 11pm to be 92-degrees. In England, it doesn't get that hot during the day! Fortunately daytime temperatures have been falling this week, and are expected to touch 100-degrees. [Amy adds: as opposed to 123-degrees reported by the weather news 3 days before the conference.] On Friday morning, it was reassuring that the first person I bumped into when I was getting out of the hotel elevators was Wal Thornhill. After a quick exchange of pleasantries, Wal told me that they're setting up in the Toucan room, one of a several conference rooms at the Flamingo hotel (www.flamingolaughlin.com). This is a casino hotel, and Laughlin could be mistaken for being a mini Las Vegas. Friday evening's Intersect 2001 registration and introductory talks begin at 7pm. Most of the attendees seem to have arrived before me, though there are still 20 or so welcome packs on the table. Ted Holden is one of the first people I met. He found two hotel guests with an interest, and mustered them along to take part. They won't forgot their holiday in a hurry. Next I saw Michael Armstrong who organized the conference. I could tell it's him because he had his name badge on. I didn't have mine on yet so he looked at me knowingly and blankly. As soon as introductions are made, it's like greeting old friends. Kathleen Anderson, conference co-director, was taking registrations at the table outside the Toucan conference room, helped by Annis Scott (Don's wife), who looks just like her photo at www.users.qwest.net/~dascott/ As my registration was completing, Dave Talbott emerged from the conference room, and we greeted each other like long lost friends. The opening agenda looked like this: Intersect 2001: Electricity, Cosmology, and Human History. July 6 - 9th 2001 7:15. Don Scott: Welcome and Announcements 7:30 Wal Thornhill: The Electric Universe -- The Big Picture 7:55 Mel Acheson: Verbal Vignette 8:00 Rupert Sheldrake: An overview of his work 8:30 CJ Ransom: Circumstance DON SCOTT got the conference off to a bumpy start, through no fault of his own: the microphone stopped working. But Don showed his experience of speaking to lecturer theatres crammed with 300 students, and boomed out his voice to all. "Many of the speakers are iconoclasts", Don Scott told us. "They have recognized patterns, and their works have converged". The introduction was good. Upbeat. Full of details and trivia. WAL THORNHILL was first to speak, giving an overview of the Electric Universe, a project he has been developing over the last 40 years, and feels that it is just now coming together. We were reminded that Samuel Johnstone said that "Nothing is achieved if all the objections have to be solved first". And that Velikovsky, in Worlds in Collision, wrote that it was a heresy that gravity was the dominant force in nature. AMY ACHESON ADDS: I especially liked Wal's opening. He played the intro to "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (the theme to the movie 2001) while displaying an animation of the Polar Configuration and saying something like "Throughout history, mankind has had a vital interest in Conjunctions." It was a fine dramatic touch. BACK TO IAN: Wal added that the Electric Universe is a holistic approach to science (a term which I feel is more encompassing, and easier to spell than 'interdisciplinary'). Wal said that science still does not know all the answers, and pointed out that there is still little understanding about the true nature Electric Charge, Magnetism, Light, Mass, Gravity and Life itself. Wal explained the analogue between lightning storms on Earth, and the Sun's own atmosphere. Terrestrial lightning is "shadowed' from above by Blue Jets and Red Sprite, above them are Elves; the energy of these affects increases UPWARDS, and this is analogous to the Sun's atmosphere, where there is a temperature inversion gradient. ****************** MEL ACHESON gave the first of several promised "Verbal Vignettes", this one reminding us that not only can landscapes look different from different viewpoints, but so can science from different paradigms. [Ed note: Mel's Vignettes appeared as editorials in the THOTH newsletter and a reasonably complete set may be found on the Acheson's website, www.dragonscience.com under "viewpoints". This particular one is titled: THE PARADIGM SHOPPE] ****************** RUPERT SHELDRAKE introduced himself as a biologist, and as someone who hadn't heard of planetary catastrophism nor Kronia before. But he felt optimistic because the group contained a bunch of maverick scientists. ... AMY SAYS: I would say that Rupert was the backbone that really "made" this conference, in the same sense that Halton Arp and Tony Peratt "made" the last conference. All were mainstream enough to be scientists, PhD's (all three) with actual monthly paychecks (two out of three) to show for it. But all are vitally interested in new research and all showed at least polite interest in most of the totally crazy ideas we were presenting. Bruce Lipton and Gary Schwartz added the same sense of validation. I don't know what they whispered to their friends about us when they got home, but to our faces they were interested and enthusiastic. BACK TO IAN: One of Rupert's interests was in Morphogenetic fields, which he defined as that which make plants a certain shape. According to orthodox biology, hormones, DNA and genes do this. But different plants contain different amounts of the same hormone, and the same plant would have the same genes and DNA in the individual cells of both its leaves and stem, yet every cell somehow knows exactly how to grow in order to form the part required. Later Rupert became interested in other non-mainstream aspects of biology, such as ESP in animals, and how animals could predict earthquakes, or tell when their owners were coming home. ******************* CJ RANSOM gave the final talk of the evening, an introduction to how science works. He described two broad examples: using a top- down approach where you begin with a bigger picture and work out the detail later; and bottom-up, where you begin with lots of data, and try and work out patterns from the data in order to work out the bigger picture. AMY SAYS: In addition to the new friends from various fields, it was great to see old friends from the early Velikovsky years to remind us of where our search for understanding diverged from the mainstream. CJ Ransom, Lynn Rose and Nancy Owen were three of these. One of the saddest notes from the conference was that Nancy tripped on a non-working escalator and cracked her kneecap. But, in keeping with her delightful spirit, she was soon back, pushed around by Lynn in a wheelchair. IAN SAYS: CJ the described how much science had changed since 1950 (the first publication date of Velikovsky's _Worlds in Collision_.) As one illustration, he reminded us that Carl Sagan (in 1963) had predicted that Venus could support life, because the scientific community felt it was similar to the Earth. He mentioned that scientists believed that the Solar System and the planets were formed from a disk of gases. However, all the planets differ in form, size, composition, axial orientation, etc. There were some nice quotes too, e.g. "It is easy to find what you hope to find" attributed to Derek Ager. People believe what they want to believe, e.g. Oppenheimer could not accept C14 dating because he could not believe that C14 existed, because THEORY did not account for it. And as General Colin Powell said "Experts often posses more data than judgement". And finally, CJ quipped: When it comes to Paradigms: Shift Happens ******************* JAMIE THISLETHWAIT ADDS: Because of Ian's incredible work covering the content of the various papers, I'll gladly stick to my usual feeling-intuitive, impressionistic subjective right-brain, Mercury in Sagittarius babble mode. Right off I must agree with Amy about Rupert being the star speaker, just because of the effortless gravitational pull of his rhetorical style. Charismatic in a charming, modest, brilliant and unconventional way, he spoke with an accent that was toney but never posh and he gesticulated with a gentle swaying body language you don't find much on scientific podiums (podia?). They should name a new order of stellar objects after him, the Red Elves. He and his ex-colleague, the American Latter-Day Psychedelic Saint, Terence McKenna (now deceased) were 2 visionary elves on an evolutionary shelf. Both make attempts to re-enchant a world rendered dead by Cartesian logic, one by entering the collective time-spirit dimension through psycho-active plants and the other through expanding our understanding of the seemingly super-natural mental spectrum of animal (and human) communication. From observation I can say both operated with a fey and humorous approach to their intellectual journeys which never precluded serious insights into scarcely travelled mental realms. Shifts happen, but it helps when someone leads the way. I find it curious what the balancing of male and female energies in one individual can produce. Rather than taking yang or yin to extremes and then getting blind-sided by the return of the repressed energies, why not cultivate a dynamic balance? These guys make it work and there may be a universal lesson. Likewise, both Dave and Dwardu reminded me in private conversations that Saturn was androgynous, and even that pesky old Polar Column, can be seen as either male (cock) or female (skirt). Finally, I believe Rupert was quite taken with Wal's evidence for crater scarring and other interplanetary effects though he didn't seem ready to connect his "morphic fields" at a fundamental (atomic) level with the electric/plasma universe. My intuition tells me the dialogue is not over yet as his intriguing observation that plasma may respond to telekinetic force in a lab experiment showed an interest in collaboration. Cheers, Jamie ******************* DAY 2 FROM IAN's REPORT: Saturday 7th July. AM 8:30 Annis Scott: Our Universe: Unlocking its Mysteries 9:00 Michael Armstrong: Context for Reconstruction 9:30 Mel Acheson: Verbal Vignette 9:35 Don Scott: Our Electric Sun 10:35 Break 10:45 Dave Talbott: Symbols of an Alien Sky, Part I 11:30 Mel Acheson: Verbal Vignette 11:35 Ted Holden: The Impossible Dinosaurs 12:15 Lunch ANNIS SCOTT is a freelance writer and editor. It was mentioned that at conferences such as this, there is a lot of information to digest, and people tend to end up seeing the trees, but not the forest. An overview would go someone towards helping us out, and this is what Annis sets out to do. AMY ADDS: Annis has been working on this since the conference in September. She saw the new people, Anthony Peratt in particular, two days into the conference snagging Wal and Don to say something like "Saturn was here, and Earth was here and WHERE was Venus?" "MARS, too?" Annis thought it was odd that we never gave a concise summary of the polar configuration and the electric universe, not to begin with, not in the middle, not even at the end. So she set out to remedy the situation with a simple "ABC" version. When Annis asked the rest of us for ideas and comments on the subject, we were a bit apprehensive. We had, after all, been tutored by Velikovsky, who carefully warned that these concepts are simply too radical to introduce up front. Velikovsky bragged that in _Worlds in Collision_ he had waited until page 153 before even mentioning the word "Venus." We we afraid that to give a short summary would be too much of a jolt for newcomers. However, Annis persisted. The rest of us picked over the details until she was tearing her hair out, but the result turned out to be a delightful introduction. And Ian (following) has summarized the summary nicely. Thank you to both. I think that it added cohesiveness and understanding to the conference. IAN AGAIN: Annis asks: What kind of sky did the ancients see? The ancients were long fascinated with the sky, and their myths tell of strange and violent events. Were ancient myths merely fantasies? Myths tend to be dismissed by astronomers and even mainstream mythologists. But Dave Talbott, Ev Cochrane and Dwardu Cardona have found that there are consistent patterns, with widely separated cultures telling the same story. Now Kronia have begun to challenge some of the generally accepted theories, and includes astronomers, physicists, electrical engineers, and mythologists. Annis reminds us that heavenly bodies were worshipped as gods. Myth proclaimed that "We once lived in the presence of gods". The gods were visible and often violent. The myths often speak of a Garden of Eden, and then also a Doomsday. Wal Thornhill ventures that Earth was once within the protective aura of a cool brown dwarf star --proto-Saturn -- which provided an ideal environment for life on Earth, and there were no seasons. This was the Golden Age. And then the end of the Golden Age was Doomsday, caused by the breakup of the Earth-Saturn system. Critics of the "Saturn Theory" suggest that there is no mechanism that could circularize the planets' orbits. Annis says that Donald Scott points out the plasma physics could help here, electrical attraction and repulsion could be the answer, which become effective when their plasma sheaths overlap. Annis mentions that dinosaurs would be impossible in today's gravity, and is the subject of a talk to be given later by Ted Holden. And Red Shifts, the 'lynch pin" of modern cosmology which are assumed to related to objects moving away from, are re- assessed by the work of Halton Arp. Dozens of his photos provide strong evidence that "redshift = distance" as an assumption is wrong. And finally, Annis mentions that there is common thread that connects the speakers at Intersect 2001, they have a willingness to base their theories on new data, and change their theories if the data requires it. ***************** MICHAEL ARMSTRONG followed. He's studied the Saturn theory for some 25 years, and was aiming to pull together the themes from the conference towards an intersection, combining "The Saturn Model Reconstruction", with psychological and physical scarring, with a spiritually fragmented "Cacophony of Confusion". Michael told us that the Big Bang was under attack, as is the Universal Gravitation Constant, and a fixed upper limit for the speed of light. And that fundamentalist elevate ancient myths to a god-like status, similar to scientists whose theories are elevated to a dogmatic cosmic view. Michael thought that although Velikovsky had gone astray in some of his detail, he must be credited with several innovations: (a) That the Earth was once in orbit about Saturn (b) Electric energy plays a part in orbital mechanics (c) Mankind witnessed and recorded catastrophic events. Finally Michael went on to summarize why we should consider the Saturn thesis, even though it is often obscure, violates the theory of gravity, violates orbital dynamics, and introduces catastrophic mechanisms which can shorten geological time scales. AMY COMMENTS: And I want to add that for Michael this is a small part of the story. His take is far more serious than say, mine and Mel's. We want to study our environment and our past in order to understand what happened. Michael wants much more -- to understand what happened well enough to undo it and return the Earth and its living family to the Golden Age. **************** MEL ACHESON gave another Verbal Vignette, starting with the story of Christian Eijkman and Gerrit Grijns. In 1886, Eijkman thought that unpolished (white) rice contained a toxin or microbe that caused beriberi. However, Grijns thought it was due to something that was not in the white rice. Both had data to support their claims. Eventually it was found that white rice was missing vitamin B1 [see Thiamine History at http://chemistry.gsu.edu/glactone/vitamins/b1/] Astronomers on the other hand, assign non-Newtonian movements to so-called Dark Matter. New ideas (i.e. Electric universe) suggest that non- Newtonian movements are due to gravity not really being there! Newton's mistake was assuming that the domain was gravity was universal. [See this editorial at www.dragonscience.com -- it's called "Error Probes, Truth Probes, Space Probes".] ***************** IAN SAYS: DON SCOTT is a professor of Electrical Engineering, and became interested in the idea of an electrical sun after reading an article in Industrial Research magazine by Ralph Juergens, on plasmas; the Sun is a plasma (cloud of ionized gas), there are ionized particles (hydrogen ions) in space, but astronomers say this can't happen. But it a appears that stars and galaxies tend to form strings: plasma is carried along braided Birkeland currents, stars and galaxies are formed where the Z-pinch effect occurs. Plasma discharges appear in one of three types: (a) Dark current (invisible, but gives off radio frequency emissions) (b) Normal glow, as in fluorescent tubes and the Sun's corona (c) Arc discharge, as in the Sun's photosphere. Moving from (a) to (c) requires increasing the voltage. There is a threshold point where the change occurs and as small a charge as a millivolt can separate regions of differing discharge type. A planet's magnetosphere usually discharges in the Dark Current region, as does the Sun's heliopause which extends out past Pluto. As you get closer to the Sun, the voltage density increases (same voltage, but squeezed into a smaller volume,) until normal glow appears at the Sun's corona, etc. The Standard Solar model uses "Twisted Magnetic Fields" to explain many anomalies. But the Standard Model has many problems, such as (a) the lack of neutrinos (said to be due to there being different flavours of neutrinos) (b) Heat Transfer (convection) from the Sun's interior (c) Oscillations in the Sun's size and brightness (much faster than expected) (d) The temperature inversion layer (e) The acceleration of the Solar wind which increases as it moves away from the Sun (f) The Sun rotates faster at its equator than at its poles. Ref: http://www.users.qwest.net/~dascott/Sun.htm ***************** IAN SAYS: DAVE TALBOTT gave an introduction to the Saturn Theory, about when the planets were gods, when the gods lived in the sky. Dave asks why we do not believe in the gods as the ancients did in the past; the answer is simply that nature does not support any of the original primary motifs, i.e. we just don't see them like the ancients did. Myth has no reference in nature today. Dave also credited Velikovsky identifying (a) planetary instabilities (b) electricity plays an important part (c) Human memories of past events count as evidence (even though he disagrees with much of the detail). **************** TED HOLDEN described the problem of the size of dinosaurs in today's gravity. If size had been such an advantage, why had nothing evolved since to fill their place? Because there are size limits in animals that are designed to hunt, fly etc. A hundred years ago, it was thought that dinosaurs lived in water, but (a) the area of their feet is too small to cope with muddy ground (b) their teeth is suited to harder vegetation (c) The snorkel idea of breathing is unworkable (d) Fossilized tracks show that walking may have been difficult (e) In water, they would have no defense from predators, i.e. sharks. Also, elephants need 25 sq-miles of grazing area, so a sauropod would require more. They get to sizes approaching 180 tons! [More at http://www.seismosaur.com/] Bill Kazmaier is a legendary strongman 6' 3'' and ranged from 330 to 350 lbs. [see http://www.mcshane-enterprises.com/ASL/kaz.html]. But because power/weight ratio decreases with size, at what size would he become dysfunctional. Ted calculates this would happen at about 20,000 lbs. So much gravitation attenuation would be required for a sauropod to be able to lift itself? Ted calculates 2.1:1 ratio. Even the Saturn configuration would not fully account for this, but combined with another explanation of gravity (e.g. Sansbury's dipole electrical explanation of gravity), it could explain how gravity could have been much less in the past. Dinosaurs necks are also a problem: blood pressure, and torques. A giraffe is on the edge of maximum neck length with specially strengthened artery walls. A seismosaur's neck is 40-60ft long weighing 25-40,000 lbs. Blood pressure would be a problem if it held its neck upright; if it held its neck down and outwards, the torque would be a problem: you couldn't support that weight with steel I-beams. Ted went on to speculate on whether dinosaurs co-existed with man, and mentioned some of the evidence from rock art, and the work of Vine Delores in "Red Earth, White Lies" [see http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/deloria/] More at Ted Website at www.bearfabrique.org ********************* Saturday 7th July. PM 1:45 Earl Staelin: Resistance to Scientific Innovation 2:30 Mel Acheson: Verbal Vignette 2:35 Dwardu Cardona: A World with One Season 3:00 Break 3:20 Amy Acheson: Halton Arp: A Modern Day Galileo 4:35 Bed Ged Low: The Saturn Theory video trailer 4:50 Panel: Dwardu Cardona, Dave Talbott, Michael Armstrong, Rens van de Sluijs EARL STAELIN is introduced as a trail lawyer, advocate of human rights, and an impressive and varied biography. I thought we looked nearly the same age. He was born in 1940 making him at least 60. I'm 40. Earl begun with couple of quotes: "...the present generation will probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon them that which the generality of mankind most hate - -the necessity of revising their convictions." Thomas Henry Huxley "A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe." -- Henry David Thoreau Earl covers several areas concerning the resistance of science to new idea. He says that the better we can understand resistance, the more easily we'll be able to overcome it. Resistance is due to changes in idea. Small changes, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA and discovery of penicillin, can still take a short time accept (penicillin was left on Alexander Fleming's shelf for several years after its discovery in 1922, and use in the Second World War). Big changes concern large paradigm shift. The Electric Universe is a major change in paradigm. There are many reasons why people find it hard to accept new ideas, including psychological and emotional causes such as the possible humiliation experienced by mainstream scientists who suddenly find their life's work is wrong, or, if they have to consider a new paradigm, may have to risk the loss of the job, existing friends and even family. Flaws in the educational system give a false aura of authority, where there is often little mention of limitations, anomalies and assumptions with a scientific theory, and the history of science is also neglected. The peer review system can not handle major change in paradigms, and it is also flawed: (a) It is anonymous (b) there are no disclosed conflicts of interest (c) there are no rights of appeal. Perhaps if the peer review system followed the methods of a legal trial, it might be fairer. Repressed childhood memories can also affect how an individual accepts new idea. Teaching the young is probably the best way encourage change, by teaching them about alternative theories, conflicts of interest, etc. It would also helps if weaknesses in a theory are also taught. In The Graduate, one of the characters tells Dustin Hoffman that "The Future is in Plastics". Perhaps we would help the next generation by telling them that "The Future is Plasma." ******************** MEL ACHESON gave another verbal vignette. These are very good, but I can't take down the notes fast enough! This was loosely on thinking, and that people often relate WHAT they know, but not WHY they know what they know. AMY ADDS: This editorial, "How You Know" will be available soon on www.dragonscience.com, perhaps even as soon as this newsletter is published. At lunch during the conference, one of the invited guests, Gary Schwartz, asked Mel to post his entire collection of editorials. Gary, a professor at the University of Arizona, would like to make them required reading for his classes. ******************* IAN SAYS: DWARDU CARDONA starts his talk with no build up: Earth was once a satellite of Saturn, AND it was once extraneous to our Solar System. Perhaps Saturn was brown dwarf star. Earth did not orbit Saturn (as the Moon does the Earth), but shared the same axis of rotation. Hence there was no day/night, only daytime. There was a springtime-like climate. But are seasons necessary for life. (The word 'seasons' derives from the word 'sowing' which in turn derives from the word for 'Saturn'). In equatorial areas, temperature and rainfall do not necessarily correspond to the season. The people of the Gilbert Island (now Kiribati) do not even refer to the four seasons. The Romans tell that during Saturn's reign, seasons were absent. What hard evidence is there for there having been no seasons? The Arctic once enjoyed a tropical climate, and islands within the Arctic circle had forests that could not have survived with 6 months of darkness throughout the year, and sub-freezing temperatures. There were also crocodiles, tapirs, etc. DWARDU CARDONA ADDS: Continental Drift cannot be used to explain tropical fauna and flora in the Arctic regions because, during the Tertiary to which these assemblages belonged, the regions in question WERE ALREADY WITHIN THE ARCTIC. Melvyn Cook's assertion, on the other hand, refers to the ANTARCTIC, in that land masses moved away from Antarctica RADIALLY, leaving Antarctica more or less in the position we now find it - thus Continental drift cannot be made to account for Antarctic sub-tropical flora either. BACK TO IAN's REPORT: The Antarctic also enjoyed a warmer climate. But if the Earth and Saturn shared the same axis of rotation, with the Earth's North Pole pointing towards Saturn, how did the Southern Pole receive a similar amount of heat? To be answered Dwardu's next talk tomorrow! ******************* AMY ACHESON talked about Halton Arp comparing him to a modern-day Galileo. Arp is a 21st century scientist, Galileo a 17th century one. Both threatened the established view. Both were ordered to stop their research. Both could not get published in the mainstream, so wrote their own popular books. Arp was refused telescope time to pursue his research. People refused to look through Galileo's telescopes. Arp eventually had to move to German. Galileo was put under house arrest. Amy reminded us that it difficult to measure the distance to stars and galaxies. Originally, the brightness of galaxies was used as an indication to their distance, the brighter they appeared, the closer they were. But now redshift is used to calculate distance. Edwin Hubble discovered that the spectra of galaxies was shifted (light patterns that mark individual chemical elements are shifted toward the red end of the spectrum). Not only did he assume that his meant that they were moving away from us, but the greater the redshift, the further away the galaxies are. Since he found that all galaxies appeared to be moving away from us, then at some time in the past, they must come have all been together. This is the origin of the Big Bang. The only foundations of the Big Bang are: (a) Size and luminosity are proportional to redshift. (b) Size and luminosity are proportional to distance (c) Hence Redshift is proportional to distance (d) Hence velocity of galaxies is proportion to distance (i.e., the further away galaxies are, the faster they appear to move). However, Arp found many galaxies that fail this test. So Arp questioned the expansion. For example NGC1372 and its companions, 1372A&B all have radically different redshifts; Arp found that NGC1372B had 15 times the expected redshift. [See also www.haltonarp.com] The high redshift objects don't look smaller and fainter because they are farther away. They look smaller and fainter because they really are smaller and fainter. The prediction of microwave background radiation is often used a evidence of the Big Bang, and when it was eventually measured, was proclaimed as proof. But it was actually predicted in 1896 by Charles-Edouard Guillaume, and others, as expected in a steady- state universe. [see http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/people/history.html] ******************** BEN GED LOW is planning a film on The Electric Universe, and together with a Canadian animation company, have produced a short 5-minute 'rough'. It begun with a stock image of stars in the sky, and went on to ask if this is what we have always seen, and proceeded to show some animation of how the skies may have looked. ******************** PANEL. Unfortunately I didn't note all the questions that were asked, and didn't know the name of all those that asked. RUPERT SHELDRAKE asked a multipart question; as a trained biologist, he was having problems with many of things he had heard, such as the development of circadian rhythms, reoccurring ice-ages, and sacrifice. AMY ADDS: I remember Rupert's long list of questions, too, ending with the one which springs quickly to mind for anyone who seriously considers planetary catastrophics. How in the world could we on earth have survived something like that? And Dave Talbott offered the short reply that "It's a friendly universe." BACK TO IAN's REPORT: GARY SCHWARTZ asked whether, since the recent past was about deconstruction (taking everything apart in order to explain it), was it now time for reconstruction. Dave Talbott replied that it was not exactly 'reconstruction', but reconciliation. EARL STAELIN asked about the "No Eight" = "No Night" translation, also seen in French, German, Spanish. RENS replied that it appeared to be just a coincidence. [See also Usenet thread at: http://groups.google.com/groups?ic=1&th=9e314f9fb0623cce] ******************************************************** Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of special issues of THOTH devoted to the INTERSECT 2001 Conference. The second should be coming out in a few days. ********************************************************