Welcome to Space News from the Electric
Universe, brought to you by the
Thunderbolts Project™ at Thunderbolts.
info. The following presentation is an
adaptation of the Mel Acheson Picture
Of The Day article “Conceptual
Chromatography.” The link to the article
may be found in the description box of
this video. Is the Earth at the center of
the universe after all? Or is the
expanding universe an artifact of
conceptual chromatography? Chromatography
has been quite a useful invention. The
high-school science demonstration of it
is to place a drop or two of ink in a
beaker of water and to suspend a length
of filter paper over the water, with the
bottom of the paper barely immersed. The
various pigments in the ink will travel
up the paper at different speeds,
producing a “spectrum” of colors. This
technique can be used with various
mixtures to detect the particular
compounds composing them. But an analogue
of this process can occur with theories,
and the results can be misleading,
instead of enlightening. Let's start with
an example from cosmology: the
”paper” of the Doppler effect is dipped
into the “beaker” of redshift measurements
of galaxies and quasars. The Doppler
paper imposes a distance proportional to
redshift on the measurements. Low-
redshift galaxies don't get far.
High-redshift quasars
”chromatograph” into the farthest reaches
of space. Hence, what could be a
relatively nearby cluster of mixed
galaxies and quasars, becomes a “spike” or
”finger” of objects stretching away from
the Earth. What does this have to do with
reality as we imagine it? Halton Arp in
his book, Seeing Red plots all the
galaxies in the Virgo cluster at their
Doppler interpreted redshift distances.
The galaxies stretch out in a long
narrow strip, exactly along a radius
vector from Earth. If quasars were to be
included in the plots, the entire
universe would
like spokes of a wheel, with Earth at the
hub. Well, that was an amusing exercise.
Let's look for some more “paper” theories.
Time, some wag has said, is what keeps
everything from happening all at once.
But what if some things did happen all
at once and a geologist came along with
a quote “geologic record?” Single episodes
of flooding have been known to build up
many layers of sediments, sorted
according to fluctuations in the
velocity of the water. Afterward, “dipping”
the concept of geologic record into the
strata, would stretch out each layer in
time, marking off thousands of years at
each stratum. Obviously, the flood would
have to be slowed considerably. Equally
obviously, the easy way to do that would
be to freeze it. Our conceptual
chromatography has created an ice age.
But this is just idle speculation right?
Well, there is the matter of the Bretz
floods in eastern Washington. It took a
long time and much careful argumentation,
but it's now accepted that Eastern
Washington was shaped by monstrous
floods instead of by ice. One entire lobe
of the Ice Age has been conceptually
melted. Now I hear talk of similar floods
coursing into the Atlantic from Central
Canada. The conceptual climate of the Ice
Age just got a bit warmer, and a few
things have started happening all at
once. What if we “melted” the entire
ice age and recalled the mythical
stories of the collapse of the World
Mountain or Tree which resulted in
global floods from the north? This is fun.
Let's play the game with plate tectonics:
instead of counting to a million years
with every magnetic stripe on the
Atlantic seafloor,
let's use smaller numbers. Just to up the
ante, let's use smaller units, too. How
about a few minutes! We'd have to imagine
SOMETHING ripping the Americas away from
Europe and Africa all at once. It would
have to be something so big that the
continents and the energy to move them
would be small potatoes in comparison. it
would have to be something
of astronomical proportions. Velikovsky
already proposed other planets sweeping
by and causing somewhat similar
commotions. Let's take a clue instead
from the Electric Universe: instead of
moving the Americas, we can leave them be.
A “thunderbolt”- an interplanetary
electrical discharge just a bit more
energetic than that alleged to have
machined Valles Marineris out of Mars'
surface arcs along the Earth from pole
to pole. It blasts out and lifts large
chunks of lithosphere along each side of
the more sinuous central channel. It
melts the bottom and leaves stripes of
reversed magnetism
every time the oscillations in the
discharge channel reverse polarity. The
pinching of the discharge channel
confines the excavation to a parallel-
sided gouge in the Earth that afterward
fills with water. A few thousand years
later, a geologist comes along with a
strip of geologic record.... If modern
theories of astronomy and geology are
vulnerable to chromatographic suspicion,
can biology be far behind?
Speciation and extinction color large
areas on the paper of evolution. Natural
selection works slowly but surely to
bleed colorful moments into pastel
millennia. A bit of color has been
restored to moments of extinction with
proposals of impacts from asteroids and
comets. it's fairly easy to kill off
large populations suddenly, but building
up those populations surely takes time.
the J-curves in S-curves of population
growth have long initial tails. Gestation
times and birth rates (for mammals-
reproduction parameters in general) keep
initial increases low. That is, if you
start off with only a few individuals. If
it all happens at once - replacement of
one population with another - the new
population must be created ex nihilo.
But what if the parents were another
species? There have been several
proposals for mass mutation. But their
requirement for some direct linkage
between genetic and environmental
parameters is too Lamarckian for comfort.
As long as we have chromato-
graphic evolution, we don't need Lamarck.
But if natural selection is augmented
with forces of extinction that can be
confined to extraordinary events of
short duration, why not also augment the
forces of speciation? The direct linkage
between genes and environment would
become a kind of “driven” genetics
in which active groups of genes are
”switched on and off” by extraordinary
environmental changes. This leads to
something like metamorphic evolution: if
butterflies do it today, why not other
creatures under other conditions? 90% of
our genes don't seem to do anything. What
are they waiting for? A full moon? Let's
perform one more thought experiment with
this conceptual chromatography. Modern
linguistics postulates a development of
language gradually over thousands of
years. A band of “oral color” spreads
out before the band of “written color.” But
the earliest expressions contained in
this linguistic “spectrum” testify that
both utterance and symbol were given all
at once by the gods. In the beginning was
the word, and it was both an audible and
a visual emanation from a planetary
deity. Perhaps a prior language was
obliterated and forgotten in the wake of
the terrors and traumas accompanying the
”sacred word.” But linguistics is not
concerned with the forgotten; it's
concerned with the remembered. And
languages remember “sacred sounds” that
are tied to “sacred symbols” by way of
”sacred stories” which memorialize an all-
at-once creation witnessed by and
imposed upon humankind. Linguistic
chromatography dissociates the sound
from the symbol and misses the story. 196 00:08:18,290 --> 00:00:00,000 [Music]