THOTH A Catastrophics Newsletter VOL VI, No 1 Jan 15, 2002 EDITOR: Amy Acheson PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS CREDIBILITY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mel Acheson THE CAPTURE QUESTION AGAIN . . . . . . . . . . . .Dwardu Cardona THE FUTURE OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES. . . . . . . Amy Acheson MISSING "DARK" MATTER!!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Don Scott BROWN DWARFS AND IRON SUNS . . . . . . . . . . . . Wal Thornhill >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>-----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< CREDIBILITY by Mel Acheson For most of my life I've tried to be a crackpot. That's because all the bold and interesting new ideas first appear as crackpot ideas. It's a risky business because most bold and interesting new ideas don't pan out. But the excitement of the few that do makes it worthwhile. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people react to a bold, new idea with the question, "Is it credible?" When I describe one of my crackpot ideas to some unsuspecting victims, they're apt to exclaim, "How can you believe that?" Now I never said I believed it, only that I found it interesting. And I find it interesting that it's often the people who call themselves skeptics who respond with this fideistic snap judgement. (Look up 'skeptic' in your dictionary. It derives from a Greek word that means to look around, to consider. It's defined as someone who doubts conventional beliefs. You'd think a skeptic would welcome crackpot ideas.) But I have to admit my own first response to a new idea is often the credibility question: I have to work at not disbelieving what I don't believe. I have to ask myself, "What makes an idea credible?" Perhaps it has something to do with a correlation between the idea and the facts. Theories are often claimed to be "proved" by some fact. Of course, this isn't true in any logical sense: It's been proved since the time of David Hume that you can't deduce a universal statement, which is what a theory is, from an existential statement, which is what a fact is. A less ambitious claim is that theories explain facts. Or, turning the claim around, it's said that the facts verify a theory. But what is a fact? Karl Popper has proposed that a fact is an observation pinned down by language. But language is intimately tied up with theory. The very act of explaining a fact is what makes it a fact. And a fact verifies a theory in part because the theory enables that interpretation of the fact. Perhaps we can avoid this circularity by jumping over the facts and dealing directly with observations. But our jump falls short: An observation is practically useless unless we tell someone-even ourselves-what we've seen ... and then it becomes a fact. As Julian Jaynes puts it, language is not just a tool for communication, "language is an organ of perception." Perception, like language, is a Siamese twin to the ideas we want to evaluate from some independent ground. A credibility of perceived facts is not that ground. If it's true that "I'll believe it when I see it," it's equally true that "I'll see it when I believe it." Facts and perceptions are slippery and mutable things: Sometimes they imitate what we believe. Sometimes they change when those beliefs change. And sometimes they defy us regardless of what we believe. They're just not stable enough or independent enough to use as a foundation for judgement. I'll try a different approach. Perhaps credibility has something to do with compatibility between the new idea and other ideas that are already credible. But the wiseacre at the back of the room is already on his feet asking what made the other ideas credible. This is an infinite regress. It's also a surreptitious way of asking merely how familiar an idea is. It's simply a bias against newness. In the end, it would find credible only tautologies of what we already know. Creativity and discovery would not be credible. This credibility of familiarity says more about the timidity of our imaginations and about our fear of the unknown than it does about the worth of a new idea. With all this in mind, I have to conclude that credibility as a criterion for judging the worth of a theory is just not credible. So if credibility doesn't work, what does? There's an important aspect of this matter that's almost always overlooked. Ideas and theories, including the facts and observations with which they're twinned, are usually discussed as if they were islands of concepts unrelated to anything else. But ideas, and scientific theories especially, arise in response to some problem. They're attempted solutions. Once they solve the problem, the problem fades from awareness and the theory floats off to become another familiar cognitive island. But it's this relationship with problems that provides criteria for evaluation that are objective, in contradistinction to the subjectivity of "credibility." Instead of asking if a theory is credible or true or correct and then floundering around to invent a credible theory of truth or a correct definition of correctness, we can ask such questions as these: Does the proposed theory solve the problem better than alternative theories? Is it more comprehensive? Can it solve more problems? Is it more elegant? Is it simpler to use? Does it provide greater opportunities for further discoveries of interesting problems? Evaluating a theory in terms of how well it solves a particular problem avoids the unending-and unendable-squabbling over correctness or believability according to some ill-defined and ultimately subjective standard. It avoids absolutism in the sense of "only one" true theory. It recognizes that truth is not some isolated, unconnected, and therefore literally irrelevant standard. And it avoids relativism in the sense of "anything goes." It recognizes that truth is not some construct of propaganda and therefore, once deconstructed, again irrelevant. In this view, truth is relational in that it's an appropriate solution to a particular problem. A true theory will have a domain of validity within which it's verified and outside of which it's falsified. Different viewpoints, different data, different arrangements of data, or different formulations of the problem will have different solutions with different domains of validity. Each solution can be judged true or false in relation to the problem it tries to solve. And problems can be related to each other, generating "tangled hierarchies" among which solutions can be compared. A corollary of this is that you can't stop with the discovery of the first solution that works. There may be another one that works better. And the problem itself is apt to change after you poke it with a few speculations. You need to conduct what Douglas Allchin calls an error probe: You need to look for other solutions, from other viewpoints, with different assumptions. The history of physics illustrates this discrepancy between problem-delimited domain and justified credibility. For 200 years after Newton, physicists believed his mechanics was the sole and indubitable truth. Even though it incorporated the idea of influences of one body upon another (derived from astrology, which made even Newton uncomfortable), its accuracy generated verifications that overwhelmed all doubt. No one thought about error probes or alternate assumptions. Then Einstein invented the mechanics of relativity. His idea was based on geometry instead of on influences. It explained more phenomena with greater accuracy than Newton's mechanics, but it wasn't as simple to use. Now there were two edifices of theoretical truth. Still, they shared the fundamental assumption that the primary quality of the universe was mass. A third contender arose over a century ago which replaced the assumption of mass with the assumption of charge. Instead of gravity influencing or geometrizing the cosmos, electricity was driving it. Plasma mechanics is a shocking error probe that has received only gradual and grudging attention. As a solution to the problem of cosmology-explaining the structures and motions of the universe-it's certainly more comprehensive than either Newton's or Einstein's mechanics: It can explain similarities of structure over 14 orders of magnitude as homologues to laboratory phenomena. It's conceptually simpler: The discoveries of the space age have surprised both Newton and Einstein, resulting in a proliferation of ad hoc adjustments. Plasma physics can explain the fine detail of structures in space as expected properties of high-energy electricity. It provides greater opportunities for discovery because theoretical solutions can be subjected to laboratory experiment. But the mathematics are messy and not yet well developed, compared with the mathematics of gravity: If it can't produce numbers that tell how much of what to put where, it can't produce technologies that rival, say, space travel. Newton's mechanics could still be the preferred truth for landing a robot on Mars, but perhaps with the addition of lightning rods. (Of the more than two dozen probes which have been sent to Mars, two thirds reached the end of their rope sooner than expected. Did those unexplained "flashes" get them?) The point to all this is really rather simple: The truth that's relevant to our current scientific condition is the truth that solves our current scientific problems and leads to the next ones. It's to be distinguished from certainty and from the leap of faith that credibility entails. It's tempting to say, it's what works. But what works can't be conceived in simplistic terms nor can it be prejudged. We need speculation to uncover possibilities; we need experimentation to weed out what doesn't work; and we need awareness of being in the middle of a process of discovery. Reality is interactive. Credibility, determined by familiarity and by facts seen through theory-colored glasses-the usual criteria for deciding whether an idea is crackpot-is the only crackpot idea around. Mel Acheson thoth at whidbey.com www.dragonscience.com ************************************************************ THE CAPTURE QUESTION AGAIN by Dwardu Cardona QUESTION: In your opinion, is there enough information in the mytho- historical record(or geological record) to discriminate between an interpretation of the Saturnian system coming from outside the system and the Saturnian system always being at the distance of the asteroid belt? If so, what do you accept as evidence? REPLY: This ties in with the manner in which the Cosmic Egg was seen to break. See here my article, "The Evolution of the Cosmogonic Egg," AEON III:5, pp. 52 ff., but especially p. 67. [editor's note: back issues of _Aeon_ are available for $15 each at http://www.aeonjournal.com/back_issues/back_issues.html. Here's a brief summary of the reference from pg. 52: ... "one consistent motif connected with [the myths of creation] ...concerns the universal, celestial, or cosmic egg. This motif is found scattered throughout the entire world -- Mircea Eliade has noted examples from Polynesia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Greece, Phoenecia, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Africa, Central and South America." And from pg. 67: "As Talbott has already shown, the luminous gases expelled by the dislodged Venus slowly congealed into a circular band which expanded and was visually seen from Earth to surround the Saturnian orb. This band, or egg, ... was originally of a golden color. ... having glowed as a complete circle for an ambiguous length of time, the band's illumination changed so that, while half of it remained a brilliant gold, the other half changed to a lesser silver light -- or half bright and half dark, as other sources inform us. What this means is that the position of the ring must have changed with respect to the present, but still somehow hidden, Sun."] Also, had the Saturnian system always existed at the distance of the asteroid belt, the crescent would always have been there, and we have deduced from the mytho-historical record that it had not. Also, had the crescent always been there, its circling around the Saturnian orb would have enabled man to tell the passage of time, which the ancients themselves tell us they could not. See here my paper, "The Beginning of Time," in same issue of AEON, pp. 71 ff. Also, we need a mechanism to account for Saturn's flare-up and, as Thornhill has indicated, this is best explained by the Saturnian system's plasmasphere coming in contact with that of the Sun. Had the Saturnian system always existed at the distance of the asteroid belt, it would already have been within the heliosphere. Also, had the Saturnian system always been at the distance of the asteroid belt, Venus, Mars, and Earth would have long been within the clutches of the Sun's attracting power, and the planets would not have been able to sustain their linear stacking. The asteroid belt is therefore best understood as the GENERAL locality in which the system broke up, having come within that orbital distance from outside the Sun's domain of influence. There's more, but the above should suffice for now. Dwardu Cardona ************************************************************ THE FUTURE OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES by Amy Acheson Velikovsky dissected the world of ancient history, art and storytelling to reveal the science locked within. He called this process interdisciplinary research, a term continually gaining popularity in small pockets of successful scientific research. But what does it mean? Scientists strive to make sense of experiences, and artists all over the world have preserved human experiences scientists have ignored. The conventional scientist asks, what does a mere artist know? Especially an artist or storyteller who lived before the great scientific paradigm shifts of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton? For the modern day catastrophist, the many forms of ancient art are treasure chests of unsorted jewels. How could ancient Greek sculptors carve thunderbolts in the hands of the planetary gods which look like the plasmoids in Australian lightning labs? How could the ancient petroglyph artists carving on rock with tools of rock record the same forms all around the world? How could ancient storytellers compose epic poems that tell the same global tale? Equally important is the question, where will interdisciplinary studies lead tomorrow? I caught a glimpse of a possible answer at the conference in Laughlin. Among the participants was a band called "The Sedona Players". The musicians set up keyboards, drum machines and a harp in the corner and added delightful background music between sessions. It's not the sort of thing you find at a scientific convention. And, indeed, some attendees feared the band's presence might undermine what little scientific credibility catastrophists enjoy. But I disagree. I ate dinner one evening with the keyboard player and discovered she is as passionate about catastrophics as I am. After that, I went out of my way to linger near the band during breaks. That's why I was one of a very few witnesses of an almost magical moment. Between sessions, one of the speakers was standing near the band explaining the details of plasma discharge phenomena to an attendee. As the speaker talked, the band picked up on his words, tone of voice, and gestures. They began improvising a musical accompaniment to his descriptions. The tension of the build-up of charge, the thunder of release, the complexity of the discharge -- it was all there, threaded into the music. Although I used the phrase "almost magical" in the last paragraph, I don't think of what happened as magic. Professional musicians can improvise, and most, if motivated, could have produced an exciting background for scientific discourse. But I think this moment illuminates an aspect of the big picture that may too often be overlooked. Science and the arts belong together under the larger category of human experience. The extreme specialization of the academic approach is a divisive, defensive, "king of the mountain" stance. The role of interdisciplinary studies is one of healing old wounds and stimulating new ideas. We're opening up the possibility of a new paradigm. For science, that means expanding our theories to include plasma and catastrophics in every field -- in astronomy, in biology, in geology and psychology. But that's not the end to this new paradigm. There will also be new music, new art and new inventions. From where I stand, on the brink of a new century, it is as difficult for me to see the future of interdisciplinary studies as it was for a 19th century buggy whip manufacturer to anticipate personal computers, commuter jets and hard rock radio stations. But I can almost guarantee there will be changes. Amy Acheson ************************************************************ MISSING "DARK" MATTER!! by Don Scott Dutch astronomer Jan Oort first discovered the "missing matter" problem in the 1930's. By observing the "Doppler red-shift" values of stars moving near the plane of our galaxy, Oort assumed he could calculate how fast the stars were moving. Since the galaxy was not flying apart, he reasoned that there must be enough matter inside the galaxy such that the central gravitational force was strong enough to keep the stars from escaping, much as the Sun's gravitational pull keeps a planet in its orbit. But when the calculation was made, it turned out that there was not enough mass in the galaxy. And the discrepancy was not small; the galaxy had to be at least twice as massive as the sum of the mass of all its visible components combined. Where was all this "missing matter"? In addition, in the 1960's the radial profile of the tangential velocity of stars in their orbits around the galactic center as a function of their distance from that center was measured. It was found that typically, once we get away from the galactic center all the stars travel with the same velocity independent of their distance out from the galactic center. (See the figure below.) Usually, as is the case with our solar system, the farther out an object is, the slower it travels in its orbit. See full article and charts at: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/darkmatter.htm To visualize the seriousness of the problem cosmologists face, we need to consider just a bit of Newtonian dynamics: To change a body's velocity vector - either in direction or magnitude, or both, a force must be applied to the mass of the body. The resulting acceleration is equal to the ratio of the applied force divided by the mass of the object; i.e., f = m a, where f is the force applied to the body, m is the mass of the body, and a is the resulting acceleration (change in velocity). Both f and a are vectors; the change in direction of the velocity will be in the direction of the applied force. When an Olympic athlete, starting to do the hammer throw, swings the hammer around himself in a circle, the force he feels stretching his arms (the force he is applying to the hammer) is the "centripetal force". That force is equal to the product of the hammer's mass, m1, times the "centripetal acceleration" (which in this case is the acceleration that continually changes only the direction, not the magnitude, of the velocity vector of the hammer - inward - so as to keep it in a circular orbit around the athlete). This acceleration is equal to the square of the hammer's tangential velocity, v, divided by the radius of the circle. So, the inward force the athlete needs to exert to keep the hammer in its circular path is: f = m1 v^2/R. Newton's law of gravitational force says that the force between two masses is equal to G (the gravitational "constant") times the product of the two masses divided by the square of the distance between them. f = G(m1 x m2)/R^2. Consider the case of a star on the outskirts of a galaxy. Its radius from the galactic center is R. Its mass is m1, and m2 is the total mass of everything else (all the other stars and matter) inside a circle whose radius is R, the distance of the star from the galaxy's center. All that combined mass, m2, acts as if it were located at a single point at the galaxy's center. For the star to remain in a fixed orbit, the necessary inward (centripetal) force, m1 V^2/R, must be exactly equal to the available (gravitational) force, G(m1 x m2)/R^2. Setting these two expressions equal to each other results in the expression: m2 = (V^2) R /G This, of course, says that for the tangential velocity, V, to remain constant as R increases - as it does in figure 1 (as we look at stars farther and farther out from the galaxy's center) the included mass, m2, must increase proportionally to the radius. But we realize that, if we move far out from the center, to the last few stars in any galaxy, included mass will not increase proportionally to the radius. So there seems to be no way the velocity can remain the same for the outermost stars as for the inner stars. Therefore, astronomers have concluded that, either some mass is "missing" in the outer regions of galaxies, or the outer stars rotating around galaxy cores do not obey Newton's law of gravity. There were problems, too, at a larger scale. In 1933 astronomer Fritz Zwicky announced that when he measured the individual velocities of a large group of galaxies known as the Coma cluster, he found that all of the galaxies that he measured were moving so rapidly relative to one another that the cluster should have come apart long ago. The visible mass of the galaxies making up the cluster was far too little to produce enough gravitational force to hold the cluster together. So not only was our own galaxy lacking mass, but so was the whole Coma cluster of galaxies. MACHOs, WIMPs & MOND At first, cosmologists decided to leave Newton's laws inviolate and to postulate the existence of some "invisible, unmeasureable, dark" entities to make up the missing mass. To quote Astronomy magazine (Aug. 2001 p 26): "What's more, astronomers have gone to great lengths to affectionately name, define, and categorize this zoo of invisible stuff called dark matter. There are the MAssive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) - things like ... black holes, and neutron stars that purportedly populate the outer reaches of galaxies like the Milky Way. Then there are the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), which possess mass, yet don't interact with ordinary matter - baryons such as protons and neutrons - because they are composed of something entirely foreign and unknown. Dark matter even comes in two flavors, hot (HDM) and cold (CDM)....." 1. Cold dark matter - supposedly in dead stars, planets, brown dwarfs ("failed stars") etc. 2. Hot dark matter - postulated to be fast moving particles floating throughout the universe, neutrinos, tachions etc. "And all the while astronomers and physicists have refined their dark matter theories without ever getting their hands on a single piece of it. But where is all of this dark matter? The truth is that after more than 30 years of looking for it, there's still no definitive proof that WIMPs exist or that MACHOs will ever make up more than five percent of the total reserve of missing dark stuff." Of course, the second possibility mentioned above (that the outer stars rotating around galaxy cores do not obey Newton's Law of Gravity) was thought to be impossible. But the first alternative - the fanciful notion that 99% of the matter in the universe was "invisible" - began to be worrisome too. It was stated that WIMPs and MACHOs were in the category of particle known as "Fabricated Ad hoc Inventions Repeatedly Invoked in Efforts to Defend Untenable Scientific Theories" (FAIRIE DUST). Even such an august authority as Princeton University cosmologist Jim Peebles has been quoted as saying, "It's an embarrassment that the dominant forms of matter in the universe are hypothetical..." So the second alternative, radical as it is, was chosen by some astronomers and called "MOdify Newton's Dynamics" (MOND). This paradigm shaking proposal to alter Newton's Law of Gravity - because it does not seem to give correct answers in the low density regions of galaxies - was first put forward in 1983 by astrophysicist Moti Milgrom at the Weizman Institute of Science in Israel. It has recently been given more publicity by University of Maryland astronomer Stacy McGaugh. Some other astronomers have grasped at the announcement that neutrinos, that permeate the cosmos, have mass. This, they say, must be the previously "missing matter". But the "missing mass" is not missing homogeneously throughout the universe - just in specific places (like the outer reaches of galaxies). The neutrinos are homogeneously distributed. So this last ditch explanation fails as well. The dilemma presented by the fact that Newton's Law of Gravity does not give the correct (observed) results in most cases involving galaxy rotation can only be resolved by realizing that Newton's Law of Gravity is simply not applicable in these situations. Galaxies are not held together by gravity. They are formed, driven, and stabilized by dynamic electromagnetic effects. The Real Explanation: Dynamic Electromagnetic Forces in Cosmic Plasmas Ninety nine percent of the universe is made up of tenuous clouds of ions and electrons called "electric plasma". Plasmas respond to the electrical physical laws codified by James Clerk Maxwell and Oliver Heaviside in the late 1800's. An additional single law due to Hendrick Lorentz explains the "mysterious" stellar velocities described above. d/dt(mv) = q(E + v x B) Simply stated, this law says that a moving charged particle's momentum (direction) can be changed by application of either an electric field, E, or a magnetic field, B, or both. Consider the mass and charge of a proton for example. The electrical force (given by the above Lorentz equation) between two protons is 36 orders of magnitude greater than the gravitational force (given by Newton's equation). It's not that Newton's Law is wrong. It is just that in deep space it is totally overpowered by the Maxwell- Lorentz forces of electromagnetic dynamics. Electrical engineer Dr. Anthony L. Peratt, using Maxwell's and Lorentz's equations, has shown that charged particles, such as those that form the intergalactic plasma, will evolve into very familiar galactic shapes under the influence of electrodynamic forces. The results of these simulations fit perfectly with the observed values of the velocity contours in galaxies. No missing matter is needed - and Newton can rest easy in his grave. The electromagnetic force is many orders of magnitude stronger than the force due to gravity. But present day astronomy refuses to recognize the existence of any cosmic force other than gravity. An allegory: A farmer and his young daughter are driving along a dusty road. They are almost home when the car breaks down. The farmer walks to the barn and gets his horse, Dobbin. He harnesses Dobbin to the front bumper of the car and begins to drag it along the road toward home. The young daughter takes a piece of string and attaches it to the bumper and says, "I'll help drag the car, Daddy." Anyone who cannot see horses will think the daughter must possess "missing muscle". In 1986, Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven postulated both an electrical galactic model and an electric solar model. Recently physicist Wal Thornhill has pointed out that Alfven's circuits are really scaled up versions of the familiar homopolar motor that serves as the watt-hour meter on each of our homes. The simple application of the Lorentz force equation ("crossing" the direction, v, of the current into the direction, B, of the magnetic field) yields a rotational force. Not only does this effect explain the "mysterious" tangential velocities of the outer stars in galaxies, but also (in scaled down version) the observed fact that our Sun rotates faster at its equator than at higher (solar) latitudes. see diagram at http://www.electric-cosmos.org/darkmatter.htm Up to now astronomers and cosmologists have not given serious consideration to any sort of electrical explanation for any of the above phenomena. This is puzzling because all these electrical principles have now been known for decades. They have long been applied in the solution of problems in plasma laboratories here on Earth and have been used successfully in the invention of many practical devices - such as industrial electrical arc machining, particle accelerators, etc. The correct, simple, solution to the "mysteries" of galaxy rotation lies in Plasma Electro-Dynamics - not in the invention of imaginary, fanciful entities such as WIMPs and MACHOs or in the trashing of a perfectly valid law of physics as is proposed in MOND. Conclusion Present day astronomy/cosmology seems to be on the horns of a very painful dilemma. This dilemma is caused by the fact that Newton's Law of Gravity does not give the correct (observed) results in most cases involving galaxy rotation. The "missing matter" proposal attempts to balance the equation by increasing one of the variables (one of the mass terms). The second proposal (MOND) is to change Newton's equation itself. (If you are losing the game, change the rules.) But, the ultimate resolution of the dilemma lies in realizing that Newton's Law of Gravity is simply not applicable in these situations. Maxwell's equations are! ~Don Scott ************************************************************ BROWN DWARFS AND IRON SUNS by Wal Thornhill [Editor's note: There are a lot of new ideas currently being proposed about star formation and function in orthodox astronomy circles, probably because the large input of new data is stretching the standard theories beyond their domain of validity. Here are two examples of new ideas, compared by Wal Thornhill to the electric universe.] ARTICLE I: Strange Object Found, Defying Ideas of Solar System Formation By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer WASHINGTON D.C. - Solar system creation theorists got more to chew on Monday when astronomers announced the discovery a huge object called a brown dwarf orbiting a star nearly as closely as Saturn is to our Sun. Added to recent findings of extrasolar planetary systems that are markedly unlike the one around the Sun, the new finding makes our solar system look like an oddball in the galaxy. Brown dwarfs are large balls of gas, much more massive than Jupiter but not heavy enough to generate the thermonuclear fusion that powers a star. In recent years, these strange, in-between objects have been found in so many bizarre configurations that researchers are scrambling to figure out whether they are dealing with one class of object or several. Lone brown dwarfs have been spotted wandering through space fairly nearby. Others have been detected at vast distances from other stars, forming in nests. Brown dwarfs might even spawn their own planetary systems [on this see: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/aas_browndwarfs_010607.html ]. Full article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/gemini_keck_020107.html WAL THORNHILL RESPONDS: It's going to be quite a task to convince experts, who "know" that stars are powered by thermonuclear fusion, that brown dwarfs have access to the same power source that lights up all stars. In my view there may be two classes of brown dwarfs, those that were formed in a z-pinch like all bright stars, and those that were born later by electrical expulsion from the center of a bright star. The different origins should show up in their element abundances. Estimates that brown dwarfs probably equal bright stars in number are probably correct, or even on the low side. That is encouraging because I believe they are prime environments for the development of life. Paradoxically, bright stars like our Sun are quite inhospitable by comparison. I am also confident that brown dwarfs don't "spawn" their own rocky planetary systems in the sense that planets grow outside the body of the star in a so-called accretion disk. The word "spawn" covers a multitude of ad hoc requirements in an unsuccessful attempt to explain planet formation from a ring of dust. Instead, if we pursue the biological analogy, I am confident that brown dwarfs "give birth" to fully formed planets (and maybe expulsion disks). Brown dwarfs are so dim that there could be another "proto-Saturn" system near the Sun without our being aware of it - so far. The first indication of its presence then might be a sudden cometary flare-up as it entered the heliosphere. Now that would confuse the astronomers! What to call it - a failed star or the daddy of all comets? ARTICLE II: University of Missouri-Rolla 8-Jan-02, Sun Is Mostly Iron, Not Hydrogen Description: For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper to be presented Thursday, Jan. 10, at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Washington, D.C., Dr. Oliver Manuel says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. See http://www.newswise.com/articles/2002/1/IRONSUN.UMR.html WAL THORNHILL RESPONDS: Here we have an extreme proposal - that the Sun was built upon a collapsed supernova remnant and has an iron core! I suggest that if orthodox astronomers do not understand what a star is in an electrified cosmos, there is no chance that they understand supernova outbursts or their consequences. What is more, the Sun is observed to be an average star. Birth in a supernova is anything but average. The report also proposes that, "The inner planets are made mostly of matter produced in the inner part of that star, and the outer planets of material from the outer layers of that star." But it has been clear to blind Freddie that all of the conventional stories of the primordial formation of the solar system are inadequate. The planets are a complete fruit salad of element and isotope abundances. Both planets and meteorites have short-lived isotopes in them that conventionally require supernovae to be blasting away in the vicinity of the nascent solar system. This proposal takes this idea one step further and places the supernova at the center of the solar system. A supernova has the energy to destroy and disperse any hapless planets it might have had. We have no evidence of planets orbiting supernova remnants. And we have no evidence of stars like the Sun sitting where we expect to find a supernova remnant. With new planetary systems being discovered almost daily, and proposed for brown dwarfs, are we to believe that they all required one of the galaxies rarest events for their formation? Or is it that we are unique in having rocky planets and moons in our planetary system? Any theory that requires us to be unique is off to a bad start. The fixation on rare supernovae as the source of all the heavy elements, which they dissipate into deep space, strikes me as one of the silliest ideas in cosmology (and it has plenty of competition). ...This latest proposal, like so much else in cosmology, is driven by a theory that is built upon many others, each with so many knobs to twiddle that the outcome could as well have been an ornithorhynchus as a planetary system. It is all concocted after the event and is not predictive. ...It is time to start from scratch. The fact that "strange xenon is enriched in isotopes that are made when a supernova explodes," and we find it in meteorites and on the Moon and Jupiter, does suggest a local origin. But a model that does not require an extraordinary event is to be preferred. One of the simplest means of producing short-lived and strange isotopes is to use a particle accelerator. Plasma discharges are natural particle accelerators. So the simplest solution is to suggest that plasma discharges accompanied the formation of meteorites, the Moon, Jupiter and most likely all other bodies in the solar system. But because the experiences of each body is unique under these circumstances, we should expect a fruit salad of planets and moons. And with such different faces it proposes the question of who was parent to whom, and when? ~Wal Thornhill visit the electric universe at www.holoscience.com ************************************************************** 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/html/sales.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.catastrophism.com/cdrom/index.htm http://www.science-frontiers.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 at Whidbey.com New readers are referred to earlier issues of THOTH posted on the Kronia website listed above.