(goofy music)
- You know what?
Space is awe inspiring, and it also inspires
lots of different theories and hypotheses.
Not all of them are good.
So there's a guy named Immanuel Velikovsky.
He was a psychiatrist and an author,
and in 1950, he published a book called
"Worlds in Collision" in which he proposed
some original ideas about astronomy
and the history of our solar system.
Here was his idea.
An enormous mass collides with Jupiter,
and Venus springs out almost like a comet,
and starts zipping around the solar system,
including making a few really close passes at Earth,
causing some Biblical catastrophes,
thus being the source of those.
Here are a few minor problems with his idea.
First, it violates the laws of physics,
which is, generally speaking, a no-no.
There is also no proof of it as far as geology is concerned,
there's no evidence there,
and Venus is made of very different stuff than Jupiter,
so this one was pretty much universally panned.
All right, so it's the mid 1990s,
and a lady in Wisconsin named Nancy Lieder gets online,
joins a forum, and posts a shocking revelation.
She says that she was visited by aliens
and they communicate with her through these implants
they left in her, and they've warned her about a planet,
Planet X, that is going to come into our solar system,
near the closest planets to the Sun,
and really muck things up,
causing huge amounts of devastation.
Well, no.
Astronomers point out that if anything planet size
were to come remotely close to us,
we would have more than a decade's worth of warning
because we would see it from really far away.
So, so far, so good.
This isn't so much a theory as it is
an incorrect observation.
If you look up at the Moon,
it looks like the same face is always facing you,
so it looks like the Moon's not rotating,
but it actually is.
It's in a synchronous rotation with the Earth.
So, more or less, the same side
is always pointing toward us,
but it does in fact rotate.
Now this also means that
there is no permanent dark side of the Moon.
One side of the Moon is always gonna be dark,
but since it rotates, all sides get light.
Still love Pink Floyd, though.
This one is pretty crazy.
An engineer named Hanns Hörbiger proposed in 1913
that perhaps the reason we have water
is because eons ago,
a wet star collided
with a hot star,
and the wet star exploded, sending water vapor
throughout the entire universe,
some of it condensing and freezing into big chunks of ice,
and in fact, hailstorms aren't a meteorological effect
in that sense, instead, it's actually a meteorite storm
coming from space!
And yeah, this one was also pretty much universally panned.
The Nazis seemed to like it, though.
This one's a little understandable.
A pulsar is a rotating neutron star,
and it's kind of like a lighthouse in space.
It's got a beam of light that rotates around.
So when we observe a pulsar,
we see flashes of light at regular intervals,
which seems like it's actually a message,
but there's no real complex information there.
There's no structure.
It's just a flashing light.
So, I'm sorry.
Pulsars are not aliens attempting to talk to us.
So what is your favorite crackpot theory about space,
or science, or nature?
Let us know in the comments below.
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And if you wanna know more, you should read
"10 Crackpot Theories About Space"
at HowStuffWorks.com
I'm dead inside!
(fart noise)