AGE LIMITS OF THE EARTH'S BIOSPHERE
saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thoth.1997.03.txtBy Dr. Robert W. Bass (rbrtbass at ix.netcom.com)
Recently I spoke on the phone with my old friend, Nitro-Nobel
Medalist & physical chemist, Dr. Melvin Cook, who is now 85 and
"totally blind" (except that he can read a computer when it is set to
150X Magnification and thereby he is still reading & writing
research papers).
Cook received a special Gold Medal in Stockholm in 1968 for
doing the best work on the physical chemistry of High Explosives
since Alfred Nobel discovered dynamite in 1867. (This medal was
awarded by Nobel's company, not the Nobel Foundation, and it was
for, among other things, inventing non-dangerous "slurry
explosives" which are blasting agents as powerful as nitroglycerine
but not anywhere so dangerous to handle.)
One of Cook's most extraordinary breakthroughs came when he
discovered, by accident, and then _explained_ theoretically the
remarkable phenomenon of a fully ionized plasma in the state of a
liquid metal (rather than a gas, which is what all conventional plasma
theorists believe is the ONLY possibility).
Though he is not infallible, he is certainly a genius who has
made very important discoveries. And his works on prehistory merit
serious study.
Cook is the author of the highly-scientific, very quantitative, and
very difficult to read book "Prehistory & Earth Models" (PEM)
published in London by Max Parrish & Co in 1966, but now out of
print. The book is highly condensed, and reading is complicated by
use of 3-letter acronyms for almost every technical term the second
time -- and all later times -- but the book is in my opinion
extremely valuable.
In 1993 Dr. Cook (a retired Prof. of Metallurgy at the U of Utah)
updated PEM by a new book "Scientific Prehistory", 336 pages,
many photos, tables, drawings, and graphs, Library of Congress
Catalog Card Number 93-74404. This is a leather-covered hardbound
book. Cook had 150 copies printed and placed in 150 libraries so it
CAN be borrowed, but I don't believe that any copies are available for
sale.
Cook's address is: Dr. Melvin A. Cook, 1586 East Tomahawk
Drive, Salt Lake City, UT 84103.
In December, 1993, Cook put out a 15-page privately-printed paper
which summarizes the main findings (especially the main NOVEL
findings in comparison to PEM) of his new book.
I have the impression that Cook would send a free copy of the
paper to anyone who writes & requests it.
I believe that his material on solar nuclides would interest plasma
cosmologists such as Wal Thornhill. Like the late Ralph Juergens, who
had an isothermal model of the Sun, Cook does not believe in the
conventional fusion-energy explanation of the Sun's energy, and
he provides evidence that all of the Sun's energy can be
explained" by the observed rate of matter falling into the Sun (i.e.
rate of accretion).
Cook has chapters on ALL of the radiometric dating methods, and in my
opinion, demolishes them all. He also computes that IF the cosmic
rays are in "nuclear thermodynamic equilibrium" (NTE) then the Solar
System and Earth are about 4.5 billion years old.
However, the surface features of the Earth cannot possibly be more
than 100,000 years old for many reasons. For example (& the
Editor of "Nature" admitted that this is the biggest anomaly which
ever crossed his desk) the radiogenic helium escaping from the
Earth's crust at a known rate and escaping into outer space at a
known rate "prove" that the present atmosphere cannot be more
than 100,000 years old.
See "Where is the earth's radiogenic helium?," _Nature_, vol. 177
(1957), p. 215.
Also, radiocarbon is being produced in the stratosphere at a rate
TWENTY FIVE PERCENT discrepant with its well-measured absorption into
the hydrosphere, lithosphere & biosphere; Cook once showed me
correspondence that he had with Willard Libby over 25 years wherein
Libby finally admitted he was wrong, the discrepancy is REAL and
cannot be ignored. The deduction is that the Earth's atmosphere
cannot be more than 30,000 years old, else it would have attained
equilibrium already, which it has NOT! In Cook's view, the
radiocarbon balance in the earth's atmosphere has attained 73 percent
of its equilibrium value in the approximately 5,000 years "since the
Flood."
In his latest unpublished paper Cook is providing evidence for a
theory that the Flood resulted from a combination of his ice-cap
model tipping the Earth or its crust as a result of certain Asteroid
impacts which he thinks he has pinpointed. [this statement is made on
Cook's verbal summary to me, and may be inaccurate]
Physicist Dr. Larry Vardiman has jumped onto the helium-escape
problem, and written a 32-page mathematical paper:
THE AGE OF THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE: a Study of the
Helium Flux through the Atmosphere, 1990
in which he reviews in detail dozens of mainstream attempts to
explain away the anomaly, and satisfied me (as a professional
mathematician who checked his differential equations) that they
have failed, and that the present atmosphere could have been
produced in at most 2 million years. (This of course is 2,500
TIMES shorter than the uniformitarian age of the earth.) He
quotes mainstream experts as admitting that "this helium escape
problem will not go away, and it is unsolved."
Vardiman has also written an impressive-looking paper on the Ice
Core dating method (which I have not studied myself). At the
recent Portland conference, on "Planetary Violence in Human History
Dr. Paul LaViolette disputed the Hapgood "Earth Crust Slippage" theory
as argued by Rand & Rose Flem-Ath to place Plato's lost continent of
Atlantis under Lesser Antarctica (which was supposedly in the
Temperate Zone up until 10,500 years ago), by means of Ice Core
dating. Hence, Vardiman's study of the flaws & fallacies in that
method should be of interest to Dr. Laviolette.
Personally, I find the Earth-crust slippage model much more likely
than the entire earth tipping over. Nevertheless, in my 1987
paper at Glasgow (of which I no longer have a copy) I mentioned that
the Australian government Astronomer for West Australia had sent me an
unpublished book showing his historical researches on the Obliquity of
the Ecliptic (in which he compared the tilt from "gnomon measurements"
and as they got more ancient the departure from the famous formula of
Simon Newcomb became more & more pronounced. This Cambridge-trained
astronomer then fit the observations with a dynamical model of the
earth as a spinning top, and showed that the observations indicated
that the axis of the earth was stabilizing in a new position after the
entire earth had turned over about 2,500 BC (or whatever his
particular dating of the Flood was).
I also have to admit that I have not yet checked out the
mathematical accuracy of a paper sent me by a "Saturnist"
mathematician in Italy named Dr. Spedicato by his friend, a Prof.
Barbiero, in which Barbiero posits that an asteroid hitting the
spinning earth under certain conditions could cause the Earth itself
(rather than merely its crust) to tilt by a large amount.
Reading the Flem-Ath book has motivated me to want to check the
Barbiero calculation, but there are not enough hours in the day!
Bob
