The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (108 page)

Russian space probes also revealed that Venus has violent electrical storms. Velikovsky had argued that the planets have powerful magnetic fields, and that therefore a close brush between the earth and a “comet” would produce quite definite effects. The discovery of the Van Allen belts around the earth supported Velikovsky’s view. There also seem to be close links between the rotation of Venus and Earth – Venus turns the same face to earth at each inferior conjunction, which could have come about through an interlocking of their magnetic fields. In the 1950s Velikovsky’s assertion about electromagnetic fields in space was treated with contempt – in
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
, Martin Gardner remarked dismissively that Velikovsky had invented forces capable of doing whatever he wanted them to do. His electromagnetic theory also led Velikovsky to predict that Jupiter would be found to emit radio waves, and that the sun would have an extremely powerful magnetic field. One critic (D. Menzel) retorted that Velikovsky’s model of the sun would require an impossible charge of 10
¹⁹
volts. Since then, Jupiter
has
been found to emit radio waves, while the sun’s electrical potential has been calculated at about 10
¹⁹
volts. It could be said that many of Velikovsky’s theories are now an accepted part of astrophysics except, of course, that no one acknowledges that Velikovsky was the first one to formulate them.

Another matter on which Velikovsky seems to have been proved correct is the question of the reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles. When molten volcanic rocks cool, or when clay or brick is baked, the magnetic minerals in it are magnetized in the direction of the earth’s magnetic field. At the turn of the century Giuseppe Folgerhaiter examined Etruscan vases, looking for minor magnetic variations, and was astonished to find that there seemed to have been a complete
reversal of the magnetic field around the eighth century
BC
. Scientists explained his findings by declaring that the pots must have been fired upside down. But in 1906 Bernard Brunhes found the same complete reversal in certain volcanic rocks. Further research revealed that there had been at least nine such reversals in the past 3.6 million years. No one could make any plausible suggestion as to why this had happened. Velikovsky’s suggestion was that it was due to the close approach of other celestial bodies and that the earth’s brush with Venus should have produced such a reversal. His critics replied that there have been no reversals in the past half-million years or so. But since then two more have been discovered – one 28,000 years ago, the other about 12500
BC
, and one of Velikovsky’s bitterest opponents Harold Urey, has come to admit that the “celestial body” theory is the likeliest explanation of pole-reversal. Yet so far the crucial piece of evidence – volcanic rock revealing a reversal about 1450
BC
– has not been forthcoming.

Those who regard Velikovsky as an innovator comparable to Freud should also be prepared to admit that he had many of Freud’s faults – particularly a tendency to jump to bold and unorthodox conclusions, and then to stick by them with a certain rigid dogmatism. Yet it must also be admitted that whether or not his Venus theory proves to be ultimately correct, his “guesses” have often been amazingly accurate. Like Kepler, who came to all the right conclusions about the solar system for all the wrong reasons (including the belief that it is somehow modelled on the Holy Trinity), Velikovsky seems to possess the intuitive genius of all great innovators. Even one of his most dismissive critics, Carl Sagan, admits: “I find the concatenation of legends which Velikovsky has accumulated stunning . . . If twenty per cent of the legendary concordances . . . are real, there is something important to be explained”.

60

Vortices

The Bridge Between the Natural and the Supernatural?

In 1839 a gray-bearded professor read a paper entitled “An Essay on the Figure of the Earth” to the Royal Society in Edinburgh; it exhibited a high order of mathematical ability, and its author had been awarded a gold medal by Edinburgh University. But the professor who read it was not, in fact, its author; the actual author was a boy of fifteen named William Thomson, and he was not allowed to read his own work because it might have embarrassed the learned audience to be lectured by a fresh-faced teenager. In due course, William Thomson went on to become one of the most celebrated scientists of his day, the discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the recognition that the universe is “running down”), of “absolute zero”, and of the moving coil galvanometer. He was also instrumental in laying the first trans-atlantic cable and in bringing Bell’s telephone to Britain. At the age of sixty-eight he was made Lord Kelvin, and the absolute scale of temperature still bears his name.

Yet if Kelvin had been asked what he considered his most important achievement, he would undoubtedly have replied: the vortex (or whirlpool) theory of atoms – a theory that has now been totally forgotten. In fact, most of his contemporaries would have agreed; the 1875 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
carries a two-page entry on his vortex theory of atoms, written by the eminent mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell. The idea had come to Kelvin in 1867, in a flash of inspiration, and only a few weeks later, he delivered a paper on his theory to the same Royal Society in Edinburgh that had listened to his first paper twenty-eight years earlier.

Kelvin had been a child prodigy; the son of James Thomson, a Belfast professor of mathematics, he had started attending his father’s lectures
at the age of eight and had entered the University of Glasgow (to which his father had moved) at the age of eleven. A trip to Europe at the age of sixteen had introduced him to Fourier’s book on the mathematical theory of heat; from then on, he was determined to become a physicist – or, as they called it in those days, a “natural philosopher”.

The dazzling idea that struck him in 1867 seems to have developed from his observation of smoke rings. A simple way to create these is to introduce smoke into a box that has a round hole in one of its sides. If you give the opposite side of the box a vigorous slap (particularly if that side is made of some soft material like toweling), a smoke ring will shoot out of the hole. But if you try to stop the smoke ring with your hand, it will not dissolve like a bubble, as you might expect. It will simply bounce off your hand like a rubber ball. If you make two smoke rings collide head on, they vibrate from the impact like two charging bulls meeting head on, then bounce away from each other. In short, they behave like solid objects.

In 1803 an English chemist named John Dalton had suggested that matter is finally made up of tiny hard balls called “atoms”, which are indivisible. He had borrowed the idea from the Greek philosopher Democritus but had backed it up with highly convincing evidence. Dalton’s theory had led to a number of important breakthroughs in physics and chemistry, such as the recognition of how atoms fuse together to form molecules – so that two atoms of hydrogen, for example, combine with one of oxygen to form water.

That still left many problems. For example,
why
are atoms of hydrogen and oxygen quite different? You would think that if the universe were made up of primordial particles, all those particles would be the same.

Kelvin went on to explain that “vortices” of energy can form different substances because there can obviously be many different types of vortices – different sizes, speeds, and so on. Within ten years or so most physicists accepted Kelvin’s view that atoms are vortices; it simply seemed to make sense. In 1882 a brilliant twenty-six-year-old Cambridge scientist, J. J. Thomson (no relation to William Thomson), won a prize for a paper on the motion of vortex rings. Yet fifteen years later, Thomson’s discovery of the electron apparently made Kelvin’s vortex theory obsolete. Kelvin himself intensely disliked the “new physics” that arose from the study of the disintegration of radioactive particles and declined to believe that atoms could fall apart.

The discovery of the electron led to quantum physics, to the theory of relativity, and, eventually, to the “discovery” of subelectronic particles
like quarks – all of which seemed to make the vortex theory doubly irrelevant.

In 1968 a twenty-year-old science student at Kelvin’s old university, Belfast, went to see his professor of zoology, Dr G. Owen. The student’s name was David Ash, and he was thinking of transferring from physics and zoology to medicine. He expected some resistance and was startled when his professor showed him to a chair and then strode about the room delivering a diatribe on the way young men believe everything their elders tell them. All they cared about, he complained, was getting a degree and a good job. Learning for the sheer joy of learning had vanished.

When Ash left the professor’s study, he was fired with sudden determination. He would stop thinking about a career and devote himself to
real
learning – to inventing theories and exploring ideas for the sheer joy of it. Fortunately, his father, Dr Michael Ash, was the author of some highly unorthodox theories of medicine and raised no serious objection. After a period as a science teacher, Ash became a consultant on nutrition and alternative medicine and devoted all his spare time to developing his own unorthodox theories of the nature of matter, based on an idea that he called “primordial spin” – or vortices. He had come across the idea in a physics textbook printed in America in 1904 that championed Kelvin’s “outmoded” idea. In due course, Ash joined forces with a young science graduate, Peter Hewitt, to argue these ideas in a book entitled
Science of the Gods –
which, in spite of its catchpenny title, is a serious attempt to create a theory of the nature of matter that can transcend the serious limitations of contemporary science.

One of the most irritating of these limitations must be obvious to any reader of this book: that science seems incapable of dealing with certain fundamental mysteries of human existence. You and I have no idea of where we were a hundred years ago and where we shall be a hundred years hence. It is a real question, and it is as important as anything we could ask; yet science regards it as a pseudoquestion. Neither can modern science deal with such mysteries as precognition – glimpses of the future – second sight – glimpses of things that are happening elsewhere – or out-of-the-body experiences. If it humbly admitted that these are at present beyond its range, there would be no problem. But it insists that these problems do not exist, that they are simply a sign of human gullibility and self-deception. Yet anyone who has taken a serious look at these problems knows this to be escapist nonsense.

In the 1870s a group of British scientists and philosophers decided to
form a society that would study claims about ghosts and life after death; in 1882 it was launched under the title The Society for Psychical Research. Most of its members – scientists like J. J. Thomson, literary men like Tennyson and Mark Twain, and statesmen like Gladstone – were skeptics but were willing to admit that there
was
something here that needed explaining. Lewis Carroll wrote: “That trickery will
not
do as a complete explanation of all the phenomena . . . I am more than convinced”. He thought that perhaps spirits could be explained as some unknown natural force “allied to electricity”. By the 1890s the Society had made important investigations of ghosts, out-of-the-body experiences, and telepathy and had proved beyond all doubt that – as Carroll suspected – they could not be explained as trickery. But at that point they got stuck. All their hopes of turning the “paranormal” into a science melted away like ghosts at cockcrow. And, more than a century later, the position is still unchanged. As far as science is concerned, the paranormal does not exist – or is, at best, a kind of crank fringe activity.

That is why David Ash and Peter Hewitt are asking one of the most important and relevant of all scientific questions: can some new approach provide science and the paranormal with a common foundation?

In the third chapter of their book, they raise the question of “the key to the supernatural”. Energy, they say, is the prime reality. But is our physical universe the
only
reality? If matter and light are two forms of energy (as Einstein showed), is it not possible that there are other forms of energy, so-called nonmaterial forms? To anyone interested in the paranormal, the answer is obviously yes. The entity known as the poltergeist has been proved to have the ability to make solid objects pass through walls (so that, for example, in one case a picture fell out of its frame without either breaking the glass or the sealed cardboard at the back of the frame). Neither matter nor light can pass through solid walls; ergo, some other form of energy must exist.

If, as Kelvin believed, matter is made up of “vortices” or whirlpools, what are these whirlpools
in
? Ash replies that the very question is based on a misconception. Before Einstein, scientists believed that light was a vibration in the “ether” – an unknown fluid that pervades all space. Two physicists named Michelson and Morley showed that the “ether” does not exist. Light seems to be “pure movement”, not a movement
in
something. A simple illustration might clarify this idea. Suppose I toss a book across the room – as I am always tossing books from my worktable onto the camp bed that serves as a halfway house to the bookshelf, while the book is in motion, it remains in every way the same book; a tiny Martian scientist sitting on it would detect no difference whatever. Yet
its motion is undoubtedly real. You must regard its motion as a kind of invisible additive. Now try to imagine this invisible additive on its own. It is impossible, of course; but that does not prove that it cannot exist. When you look at the night sky you cannot imagine space going on forever; yet common sense tells you it does, even beyond the edge of the universe. Ash is suggesting that, just as energy is more “fundamental” than matter, so “pure movement” is more fundamental than energy.