It was the day of the big check up.
If the sun and the planets compose a system that is enormously remote from everything else in existence, what is it that regularizes the motions, and why does not the mechanism run down? The astronomers say that the planets keep moving, and that a whole system does not run down, because space is empty, and there is "absolutely" nothing to tend to stop the moving bodies. See Abbot, The Earth and the Stars, p. 71. Astronomers say this early in their books. Later, they forget. Later, when something else requires explanation, they tell a different story. They explain the zodiacal light in terms of enormous quantities of matter in space. In their chapters upon meteors, they tell of millions of tons of meteoric dusts that fall from space to this earth, every year. Abbot says that space is "absolutely" empty. Ball, for instance, explains the shortening of the orbit of Encke's comet as a result of friction with enormous quantities of matter in space. I don't know how satisfactory, except to ourselves, our own expression will be, but compare it with a story of an absolute vacancy that is enormously occupied.
There is a tendency to regularize. Crystals, flowers, and butterflies’ wings. Proportionately as they become civilized, people regularize, or move in orbits. People regularize in eating and sleeping. There are clockwork Romeos and Juliets. Everywhere, where the tendency is not toward irregularization, the tendency is toward regularization. Here's a good specimen of my own wisdom. Something is so, except when it isn't so.
Not in terms of gravitation, but in terms of this tendency to regularize, celestial periodicities may be explained.
Why does not the mechanism of what the astronomers think is a solar system run down?
The astronomers say that this is because it is unresisted by a resisting medium.
Why does not a heart run down? Anyway for a long time?
It is only a part, and, as a part, is sustained by what may be considered a whole. If we think of the so-called solar system, not as a virtually isolated, independent thing, with stars trillions of miles away, but as part of what may be considered an organic whole, within a starry shell, our expression is that it is kept going organically, as the heart of a lesser organism is kept going.
Why does not the astronomers’ own system, or systematized doctrine, run down, or why so slow about it? It is only a part of wider organization, from which it is receiving maintenance in the form of bequests, donations, and funds of various kinds.
Our opposition is a system of antiquated thought, concerned primarily with the unthinkable. It is supported by instruments that are believed when they tell what they should tell. The germ of the system is the fall of the rising moon. Its simplest problem is a fairy-theorem, fit for top-heavy infants, but too fanciful for grownup realists. Its prestige is built upon its predictions. We have noted one of them that was three-quarters of a mile wrong.
Newtonism is no longer satisfactory. There is too much that it cannot explain.
Einsteinism has arisen.
If Einsteinism is not satisfactory, there is room for other notions.
For records of eclipses during which the stars were not displaced, as, according to Einstein, they should be, see indexes of Nature. See vols. 104 and 105. Displacement of spectral lines— see records of astronomers who have disagreed. Perihelion-motion of Mercury's orbit— Einstein calculated without knowing what he was calculating about. Nobody knows what this eccentricity is. See records of the transits of Mercury. Neither Newtonians nor Einsteinites have predicted them right. See the London Times, April 17 and 24, 1923. Here Sir J. Larmor shows that, if Einstein's predictions of light-effects during eclipses were verified, they disproved his theory— that, though Prof. Einstein would be a great mathematician, if in our existence anything could really be anything, relativity is so against him that he is only a relatively great mathematician, and made a bad error in his calculations, having mistakenly doubled certain effects.
Defeat has been unconsciously the quest of all religions, all philosophies, and all sciences. If they were consciously trying to lose, they would be successes. Their search has been for the Absolute, in terms of which to explain the phenomenal, or for the Absolute to relate to. Supposed to have been found, it has been named Jehovah, or Gravitation, or the Persistence of Force. Prof. Einstein has taken the Velocity of Light, as the Absolute to relate to.
We cannot divorce the idea of reciprocity from the idea of relations, and relating something to the Absolute would be relating the Absolute to something. This is defeating an alleged concept of the Absolute, with the pseudo-idea of the Relative Absolute. The doctrine of Prof. Einstein's is based not upon an absolute finding, but upon a question:
Which is the more graspable interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiments:
That no motion of this earth in an orbit is indicated, because the velocity of light is absolute;
Or that no motion of this earth in an orbit is indicated, because this earth is stationary?
Unfortunately for my own expressions, I have to ask a third question:
Who, except someone who was out to boost a theory ever has demonstrated that light has any velocity?
Prof. Einstein is a Girondist of the Scientific Revolution. His revolt is against classical mechanics, but his methods and his delusions are as antiquated as what he attacks. But it is my expression that he has functioned. Though his strokes were wobbles, he has shown with his palsies the insecurities of that in Science which has been worshipfully regarded as the Most High.
It is my expression that the dissolution of phenomenal things is as much a matter of internal disorders as the effect of any external force, and that the slump of so many astronomers in favor of Einstein, who has made good in nothing, indicates a state of dissatisfaction that may precede a revolution— or that, if a revolt starts in the Observatories, hosts of irreconcilable observations will be published by the astronomers themselves, cutting down distances of planets and stars enormously. I shall note an observation by an astronomer, such as probably no astronomer, in the past, would have published. It seems to have been recorded reluctantly, and a conventional explanation was attempted— but it was published.
I take from a clipping, from the Los Angeles Evening Herald, April 28, 1930, which was sent to me by Mr. L. E. Stein, of Los Angeles. In an account of the eclipse of the sun, April 28, 1930, Dr. H. M. Jeffers, staff astronomer of Lick Observatory, says: "We expected the shadow to be but half a mile in width. Instead of that, I think that it was nearer five miles broad." He says: "It may be suggested by others that the broad shadow was cast by astronomical errors due to the moon being closer to the earth than we have placed it in theory. But I don't believe that this broad belt was caused by anything but refraction."
The difference between half a mile and five miles is great. If the prophets of Lick Observatory did not take refraction into consideration, all the rest of their supposed knowledge may be attributable to incompetence. This difference may mean that the moon is not more than a day's journey away from this earth.
In The Earth and the Stars, p. 211, Abbot tells of the spectroscopic determinations, by which the new star in Perseus (Feb. 22, 1901) was "found" to be at a distance of 300 light years from this earth. The news was published in the newspapers. A new star had appeared, about the year 1600, and its light was not seen upon this earth, until Feb. 22, 1901. And the astronomers were able to tell this— that away back, at a moment when Queen Elizabeth— well, whatever she was doing— maybe it wouldn't be any too discreet to inquire into just what she was doing— but the astronomers told that just when Queen Elizabeth was doing whatever she was doing, the heavens were doing a new star. And where am I, comparatively? Where are my poor, little yarns of flows of methylated spirits from ceilings, and "mysterious strangers," and bodies on railroad lines, compared with a yarn of the new star and Queen Elizabeth?
But the good, little star restores my conceit. In the face of all spectroscopes in all Observatories, it shot out nebulous rings that moved at a rate of 2 or 3 seconds of arc a day. If they were 300 light years away, this was a velocity far greater than that of light is said to be. If they were 300 light years away, it was motion at the rate of 220,000 miles a second. There were dogmas that could not stand this, and the spectroscopic determinations, which were in agreement, were another case of agreements working out, as they shouldn't have worked out. The astronomers had to cut down one of their beloved immensities. Whether as a matter of gallantry, or not, they spread a denial for Queen Elizabeth's reputation to tread upon, saving that from the mud of an inquiry into just what Her Majesty was doing, and substituting unromantic speculations upon what, say, Andrew Jackson was up to.
Abbot's way of explaining the mistake is by attributing the first "pronouncements" to "the roughness of the observations."
All over this earth, astronomers were agreeing in these "determinations." They were refinements until something else appeared and roughened them.
It would seem that, after this fiasco of the readjusted interest in what historical personages were doing, astronomers should have learned something. But, if Prof. Todd is right, in his characterization of them, that is impossible. About twenty years later, this situation, essentially the same in all particulars, repeated. Upon May 27, 1925, a new star was discovered in the southern constellation Pictor. By spectroscopic determination, its distance was "determined" to be 540 light years. See this stated in a bulletin of the Harvard Observatory, November, 1927.
March 27, 1928— the new star split.
When the split was seen, astronomers of the South African Observatory repudiated the gospel of their spectroscopes of three years before. There must have been much roughness, even though there had been three years in which to plane down the splinters. They cut the distance from 540 to 40 light years. If there should be any more reductions like this, there may start a slump of immensities down toward a conception of a thinkable-sized formation of stars. A distance cut down 60 × 60 × 24 × 365 × 500 × 186,000 miles is a pretty good start.
Prof. Einstein, having no means of doing anything of the kind, predicts a displacement of the stars.
Astronomers go out upon an expedition to observe an eclipse, and, not knowing that Einstein has no special means of predicting anything, they report, presumably because they want so to report, that he is right.
Then eclipse after eclipse— and Einstein is wrong.
But he has cast an ancient system into internal dissensions, and has cast doubts upon antiquities of thought almost as if his pedantic guesses had had better luck.
Whether the time has come, or not, here is something that looks as if it is coming:
An editorial in the New York Sun, Sept. 3, 1930: views of somebody else quoted:
"The public is being played upon and utterly misled by the dreamery of the rival mathematical astronomers and physicists— not to mention the clerics— who are raising the game of notoriety to a fine art; in rivalry to religious mysticism, a scientific pornography is being developed, and attracts the more because it is mysterious."
These are the views of Professor Henry E. Armstrong, emeritus head of the department of chemistry, at City and Guilds College, South Kensington, London.
This is revolt inside. That is what develops into revolution.
Prof. Armstrong's accusation of pornography may seem unduly stimulating: but, judging by their lecheries in other respects, one sees that all that the astronomers have to do is to discover that stars have sex, and they'll have us sneaking to bookstores, for salacious "pronouncements" and "determinations" upon the latest celestial scandals. This would popularize them. And after anything becomes popular— then what?
That the time has come— or is coming— or more of the revolt within—
Or that, if they cannot continue upon their present pretenses of progress, the astronomers must return from their motionless excursions. A generation ago, they told of inconceivable distances of stars. Then they said that they had, a thousand times, multiplied some of these distances: but, if the inconceivable be multiplied any number of times, it is still the same old inconceivability. If, at the unthinkable, thought stops, but if thought must move somewhere, the astronomers, who cannot go on expansively, will, if they do think, have to think in reductions. If the time has come, there will be a crash in the Observatories, with astronomers in a panic selling short on inconceivabilities.
Upon Sept. 2, 1930, began a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in Chicago. A paper that was read by Dr. P. Van de Kamp may be a signal for a panic. Said he: "Some of the stars may actually be thousands of light years nearer than astronomy believes them to be."
That— with some extensions— is about what I am saying.
Says the astronomer Leverrier— back in times when an astronomical system is growing up, and is of use in combating an older and decaying orthodoxy, and needs support and prestige— says he— "Look in the sky, and at the point of my calculations, you will find the planet that is perturbing Uranus."
"Lo!" as some of the astronomers say in their books. At a point in the sky that can be said— to anybody who does not inquire into the statements— to be almost exactly the point of Leverrier's calculations, is found the planet Uranus, to which— for all the public knows— can be attributed the perturbations of Uranus.
Up goes the useful renown of the astronomers. Supported by this triumph, they function.
But, if they're only the figments of one of the dream-like developments of our pseudo-existence, they, too, must pass away, and they must go by way of slaughter, or by way of laughter. Considering all their doings, I think that through hilarity would be the fitter exit.
Later:
"Look at the sky," we are told that the astronomer Lowell said, "and at the point of my calculations, you will find the planet that is perturbing Neptune."
But this is in the year 1930.
Nevertheless we are told that a planet is found almost exactly at the point of the calculations. The exultations of the astronomers are spreadheaded.
But this is later. The damned thing takes a tack that shows that it could no more have been perturbing Neptune than I, anyway just at present, could cast a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences into disorder by walking past it.
