... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 83: Sep-Oct 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Earth's water not imported?That the earth is continuously bombarded by icy minicomets is unpopular in the Court of Science. Even less acceptable is the notion that over the eons these house-sized chunks of ice contributed substantially to our planet's inventory of water. In what will surely be hailed as the death knell of the icy comet theory is the discovery by K. Muehlenbachs, of the University of Alberta, and F. Robert and M Javoy, from the University of Paris, that the water contained in the earth's rocks, both ancient and recent, is isotopically different from the water found in meteorites. Meteoric water is assumed to be isotopically the same as cometary water. Conclusion: comets could not have contributed substantially to our planet's water inventory in the geological past. (Anonymous; "Earth's Water Did Not Come from Comets," New Scientist, p. 19, June 20, 1992.) Comment. Of course, the isotpic measurements have to be weighed against all the data supporting the icy comet theory Icy comets could, after all, be a recent phenomenon. Also, no one has ever actually analyzed a piece of cometary ice; it is simply assumed that it would be similar to meteoric water. From Science Frontiers #83, SEP-OCT 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... system consisting of a single particle moving in a force field, experiencing friction, and being periodically jolted. Besides settling into chaotic motion, this particle may also be forced away to infinity -- two radically different final states. The analysis revealed that for any set of initial conditions leading to the first type of behavior, there was an infinite number of slightly different initial conditions that would lead to the second type of behavior. In other words, systems that we have long thought to be deterministic, like the motions of the planets, may be not only chaotic but indeterminate. Since Sommerer and Ott found their indeterminate system easily, we must face the possibility that the future behavior of just about everything is beyond our capability to predict, even with our best instruments and computers. Apparently the universe is built in such a way that exact science is impossible. (Sommerer, John C., and Ott, Edward; "A Physical System with Qualitatively Uncertain Dynamics," Nature, 365:138, 1993. Also: Peterson, I.; "Finding Riddles of Physical Uncertainty," Science News, 144:180, 1993.) Comment. This discovery is even more profound than Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which is merely quantitative in character and for practical purposes rules only the atomic world. From the above we see that the entire cosmos is uncertain quantitatively and qualitatively. A heck of a way to construct a universe! From Science Frontiers #90, NOV-DEC 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 89: Sep-Oct 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Electric Fish Not Backward In Data Processing The incredible sophistication of the brain and nervous system of fish using active electric sensing is evident in the South American fish Eigenmannia . This fish (different from the knife fish above) emits electric pulses at frequencies betwen 250 and 600 per second for electrolocation and communication. M. Kawasaki, at the University of Virginia, has investigated what happens when two of these fish operating on similar frequencies meet. Ordinarily, the fish would jam each other's sensory apparatus and "blind" each other. To circumvent this Eigenmannia has evolved a "jamming avoidance response," in which they both shift their pulse frequencies away from each other. To accomplish this, the fish must be able to detect time disparities between the two sets of signals less than 1 microsecond long. Their individual electroreceptors are not capable of handling such small time differences. Kawasaki has concluded that the jamming avoidance response can come only from highly sophisticated signal processing in the fish's central nervous system. (Kawasaki, Masashi; "Temporal Hyperacuity in the Gymnotiform Electric Fish Eigenmannia ," American Zoologist , 33:86, 1993.) Comment. Echo-locating bats and dolphins also possess sophisticated data processing apparatus for analyzing the echos they receive back from their prey and surroundings. It will be interesting to discover if evolution has come up with similar organic "components" for handling acoustic and electric signals. Further, we know ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 104: Mar-Apr 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The pit-zodiacs Schagen-Muggenburg lies 50 kilometers north of Amsterdam. The Muggenburg part of the town name is only a few years old. Before it was built, archeologists were allowed to explore the meadows making up the construction site. L. Therkorn, an archeologist from the University of Amsterdam, led the exploration team. The digs yielded artifacts going as far back as 300 AD, when this region was sparsely populated by farmers. However, if Therkorn et al had dug up only these old bones and pottery shards, we would not be writing this for SF! For anomalists, it was the pits -- old pits that had been filled in and that seemed to be arranged in an intricate pattern that mirrored the star constellations making up the classical Greek zodiac. But this revelation didn't come until later. After all, pits are common in archeology. Often they contain just rubbish, sometimes human remains. "But the pits at Muggenburg are different. There are 57 of them, each about a meter wide and deep, extending over about half a hectare [about 1 acres] They were certainly not used for storage because the level of the groundwater is too high. Nor were they used as dumps; archaeological evidence shows that they were filled in shortly after they were dug, and some have very little in them." It was only when Therkorn mapped the pits did she see that they ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Mutant Molecules Fight For For Survival Under ASTRONOMY, we saw how universes might mutate and evolve. Shifting dimensions by just a few-score orders of magnitude, from the cosmological to the molecular, we find that molecules, too, may mutate and evolve. A group of scientists at MIT, led by J, Rebek, believes that it has discovered the chemical equivalent of biological evolution. This is the same team that claimed the synthesis of the first self-replicating molecule in 1990. "Now the same chemists have carried out experiments with two more selfreplicating molecules, and discovered that they can cooperate, catalysing each other's formation. Furthermore, when one of the molecules is exposed to ultraviolet light and is 'mutated', it becomes 'aggressive' and takes over the system. According to Rebek and his colleagues, this is evidence that evolution can be modelled at the molecular level." (Emsley, John; "How 'Mutant' Molecules Fight for Survival," New Scientist, p. 22, February 29, 1992.) Comment. We wonder if the "passive" molecules are "uphappy" about being bullied in this way! From Science Frontiers #81, MAY-JUN 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 82: Jul-Aug 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Does nature compute?Back in the 1960s, kids used to watch the TV series Lost in Space . Starring on this show was a robot which, when asked a stupid or answerless question replied, "It does not compute!" More seriously, we now ask, "Does Nature compute?" Science believes very deeply that mathematics reflects the real world, that we live in an ordered universe where everything can be reduced to mathematical expressions. The progress of science, particularly physics, seems to bear out this symbiotic relationship between mathematics and the physical world. However, P. Davies points out that that there are uncomputable numbers and operations. In fact, there are infinitudes of them. All the world's computers could chug away forever and not come up with answers in these cases. So far , Nature has been kind, or we have been lucky, because we have been able to nicely mirror Nature with "doable" math. Davies wonders if it has been entirely a matter of luck: "Einstein said that God is subtle but not malicious, and we must hope that the laws of physics will turn out to be computable after all. If so, that fact alone would provoke all sorts of interesting scientific and philosophical questions. Just why is the world structured in such a way that we can describe its basic principles using 'do-able' mathematics? How was this mathematical ability evolved in ...

... Sourcebook Subjects Heavy traffic in near-earth space That region of outer space near the earth carries a heavier load of flotsam and jetsam than scientists expected. The devastation of the 1908 Tunguska impact in Siberia warns us that this space debris -- meteors, comets, asteroids -- is an active threat. A recent spate of articles paints an ominous future. The earth's retinue of mini-asteroids. "Asteroids as big as houses pass near the Earth 100 times more often than anyone suspected. On an average day, about 50 asteroids measuring at least 10 metres across come closer to the Earth than the Moon, and each year about five such objects may hit the planet." (Second reference below.) These startling data come from D. Rabinowitz and coworkers at the University of Arizona, who have been scanning nearby space with a telescope fitted with supersensitive charge-coupled devices (CCDs). They have picked up astronomical objects that have escaped conventional instruments. Several sources have been suggested for this unexpected, threateningly large population of small asteroids: (1 ) debris hurled earthward from collisions within the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter; (2 ) the breakup of a large object formerly in orbit about the earth; and (3 ) fragments blasted off the moon by impacts of large asteroids there. (Kerr, Richard A.; "Earth Gains a Retinue of Mini-Asteroids," Science, 258: 403, 1992. Also: Mitton, Simon; "HouseSized Asteroids Home In on the Earth," New Scientist, p. 16 ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 87: May-Jun 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The american discovery of europe!Wow, that's an inflammatory title, and we must be very wary here. Who could be promoting such an idea? The perpetrator is J. Forbes, a professor of Native American Studies at the University of California-Davis. The title above is, in fact, the title of Forbes' forthcoming book. Forbes recently gave a talk on his thesis in Berkeley, and the evidence below is based on a newspaper account of his talk. The account began with: "It is a common perception, and one which is taught in most history classes, that the Europeans 'discovered' America. Some scholars, however, postulate that it may be quite the opposite: Native Americans went across the Atlantic and 'found' their European counterparts first." Now for the claimed evidence: Carribean people were the Polynesians of the Americas. Excellent mariners, they built sophisticated sailing vessels 80-feet long, carrying up to 80 people. With the favorable winds and currents, they had the capabilities of reaching Europe. There are tales of "redmen" arriving on the west coast of Portugal during the Middle Ages. Columbus himself, during a visit to Ireland, noted the presence of people resembling North Americans. Columbus also made notes on Indians in canoes wrecked off the coast of Germany in 1410. Inuits (Eskimos) are said to have landed in the Orkneys, off Scotland ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 88: Jul-Aug 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Voyages Of The Imagination We would be remiss if we did not record here an article by F.J . Frost, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Frost proceeds to shoot down all claims, save one, of Precolumbian contacts with the New World. He accepts only the Viking signs found at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland, dating back to about 1000 AD. Everything else: Roman amphorae in Brazil, Japanese pottery in Ecuador, Egyptian architecture in Mesoamerica, Celtic inscriptions in New England, etc.; is the product of hoaxes, misinterpretations, and sloppy archeology. Frost has no patience with the (mainly) amateur archeologists; he is not impressed by all the mountains of evidence they have collected. (Frost, Frank J.; "Voyages of the Imagination," Archaeology, 46:46, March/April 1993.) Comment. Frost's stonewalling reminds one of other negative pronouncements, such as: "Stones cannot fall from the sky"; and "Continents cannot drift." From Science Frontiers #88, JUL-AUG 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... sentence from Nature's review will suffice: "Commenting on the hundreds of millions of dollars of research time and resources that were taken up in showing that there is no convincing evidence for cold fusion as a source of nuclear power, he [Huizenga] notes that 'much of this would not have been necessary had normal scientific procedures been followed.'" (Close, Frank; "The Cold War Remembered," Nature, 358:291, 1992.) But what's this from Los Alamos? "A Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher says he has duplicated the results of a Japanese experiment in which power was generated by cold fusion. "Edmund Storms, a high-temperature chemist at Los Alamos, used palladium metal supplied by Japanese fusion researcher Akito Takahashi of Osaka University." (See: SF#82) (Anonymous; "Los Alamos Scientist Duplicates Japanese Cold Fusion Experiment," Associated Press, July 28, 1992. Cr. E. Hansen) Where There's Heat There's Yen. Japan's Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI) plans to launch a five-year program to study cold fusion. Isn't this folly, since most physicists have declared cold fusion to be impossible? "Not so, says MITI -- it's just Japanese pragmatism. All MITI is interested in is the continuing reports of excess heat generated in the hydrogenpalladium cells studied by Pons and Fleischmann and the possibility of putting any new phenomenon -- even if chemical rather than nuclear in origin -- to industrial use. ...

... . Becker's ideas also jibe with experimental evidence that the psi faculty is suppressed by electromagnetic storms, which (presumably) act only upon the "primitive" analog system. Becker readily admits that the physical basis for the generation, transmission, and reception of psi signals is unknown. (Becker. Robert O.; "Electromagnetism and Psi Phenomena," American Society for Psychical Research, Journal, 86:1 , 1992.) Comment: We use above the adjective "psi-type" in describing signals traveling along the primitive analog system be cause we may also be receiving other kinds of signals not yet recognized even by the parapsychologists, and which are also masked by everyday sensory data rushing brainward. After all, we must not let the parapsychologists restrict our vision of the universe! From Science Frontiers #81, MAY-JUN 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... energy derived from meteorite/asteroid/comet impacts. Together these energy sources, especially ultraviolet light, might synthesize thousands of tons of complex organic compounds each year. (Chyba, Christopher, and Sagan, Carl; "Endogenous Production, Exogenous Delivery and Impact-Shock Synthesis of Organic Molecules: An Inventory for the Origins of Life," Nature, 355:125, 1992. Also: Henbest, Nigel; "Organic Molecules from Space Rained Down on Early Earth," New Scientist, 2. 27, January 25, 1992.) Comment. Little is said in either of the above articles about the nature of and impetus for that final elusive step from organic chemicals to the simplest life forms. Everyone assumes that it happened, but did it? One can always imagine a universe in which matter, energy, and life have always existed. From Science Frontiers #80, MAR-APR 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 105: May-Jun 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Arboreal Internets Over a half century ago, Yale scientist H.S . Burr was inserting electrodes into trees to measure how voltage differences varied during the day and lunar month. Y. Miwa, at Waseda University in Tokyo, has gone more than one step farther. He and his coworkers have placed electrodes in the trunks of trees - 250 trees at a time - and measured the voltage differences every 2 seconds. They have discerned intriguing synchrony. "Miwa and his colleages studied primeval forests in Japan's Shizuoka and Nigata Prefectures, recording signals for two days at a time. In each forest, there were several groups of between 20 and 50 trees showing a similar pattern of changes in their potentials, each of which contained about half a dozen species. Neighboring trees were the most likely to be synchronized, but the groups did not have rigid boundaries. The membership of the groups was also not fixed: between the first and second days of recording, individual trees 'joined' and 'dropped out'." Miwa advances the idea that the trees must somehow be communicating with each other to achieve this synchrony. Botanists, though, suspect that environmental conditions force this coordinated behavior. Miwa will next remove a few members from each group to see if his arbicides are noticed by the neighbors. (Endo, Shinichi; "Japan's Ancient Trees Whisper Their Secrets," New Scientist, p. 19, ...

... Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Solar activity, your mother's birth year, and your longevity "According to two scientists who stumbled on a startling statistical association -- though not necessarily a causeeffect relationship -- your life span may depend on the number of sunspots that appeared in the year your mother was born. "They found that if the sun was at a maximum in its 11-year cycle (during which the number of sunspots rises and falls), children of mothers born at that time would die an average of two to three years sooner than if their mothers had been born during the sunspot minimum." Before dismissing this fascinating correlation as "nut science," consider that the study was conducted by two established scientists at Michigan State University, B. Rosenberg and D.A . Juckett. Their report was published in the March 1993 issue of the mainstream journal Radiation Research . Furthermore, in two English studies of longevity. the same periodicity was remarked. Although the population sample in the Michigan State work was small (7552), the phenomenon appears sufficiently robust to admit to the columns of Science Frontiers! (In truth we covet bizarreness as much as robustness!) But what possible causal link might connect one's longevity with one's mother's date of birth? Rosenberg and Juckett point to the fact that when a woman is born all of her eggs are already formed. Later, they will mature and be released one at a time (usually). Therefore, if solar radiation levels ( ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 86: Mar-Apr 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Where did agriculture really begin?The archeological party line points to the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. There, the authorities say that, about 10,000 years ago, humans suddenly learned how to sow and harvest such crops as wheat and barley. There, civilization really began. Or was it there? Wadi Kubbaniya, Egypt. At this site, G. Hillman, of the Institute of Archeology, London, has found grinding stones and tubers. This site is dated at 17,000-18,000 years old. New Guinea highlands. J. Golson, formerly of the Australian National University, has found ditches and crude fields in this area. The implication is that humans were tending plants here between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. Buka Island, Solomons. While excavating Kilu cave, M. Spriggs and S. Wickler unearthed small flake tools with surfaces displaying starch grains and other plant residues. Evidently, these tools were used for processing taro. Further, the starch grains resembled those of cultivated rather than wild taro. Date: about 28,000 years ago. (Dayton, Leigh; "Pacific Islanders Were World's First Farmers," New Scientist, p. 14, December 12, 1992.) From Science Frontiers #86, MAR-APR 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... of Mars, with only two tiny moons to dampen its spin excursions, seems to have gone through many wild swings, as indicated in the figure. What deadly climatic changes must have wracked our sister planet! (Touma, Jihad, and Wisdom, Jack; "The Chaotic Obliquity of Mars," Science, 259: 1294, 1993. Also: Laskar, J., and Robutel, P.; "The Chaotic Obliquity of the Planets," Nature, 361:608, 1993.) Comment. The successful evolution of higher life on earth (a presumption!) therefore seems to have depended upon the gravitational shields of Jupiter and Saturn as well as the presence of our unusually large satellite. How likely is this combination of planets and satellites in the rest of the universe? Of course, life-as-we-know-it also requires just the right kind of central star and a planet with good air and water. Perhaps lifeas-we-do-not-know-it is more likely! From Science Frontiers #87, MAY-JUN 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 88: Jul-Aug 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Blasted By A Beam Weapon On The Edge Of Space January 31, 1993. Aboard NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. This satellite detected a gammaray burst containing ten times more energy than any other burst ever observed. It was one hundred times stronger than any known constant source of gamma rays. Even so, careful searches with ground-based telescopes found nothing visible in the direction of the burst. Scientist B. Dingus remarked: "It's clear that it is unique event that liberates more energy in a few seconds than any other process in the Universe." Gamma-ray bursts remain one of the outstanding mysteries of astronomy. The depth of the mystery is underscored by the belief that the gamma rays must be confined to a narrow beam by their sources, rather than being emitted in all directions. No one knows how this focussing might be accomplished. Also, since we detect only those bursts that happen to be aimed at the earth (at a rate of about one per day), there should be a colossal number of bursts that we are unaware of. Yet, we cannot divine what these common, immensely powerful energy sources are. (Kiernan, Vincent; "Blasted by a Beam Weapon on the Edge of Space," New Scientist, p. 13, May 8, 1993.) From Science Frontiers #88, JUL-AUG 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 67: Jan-Feb 1990 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Astronomers up against the "great wall"" For more than a decade now, astronomers have been haunted by a sense that the universe is controlled by forces they don't understand. And now comes a striking confirmation: 'The Great Wall.'" The Great Wall is the largest known structure in the universe at present, having superceded sundry superclusters and clusters of superclusters. The Wall is a "thin" (15 million-light-year) sheet of galaxies 500 million light years long by 200 wide; and it may extend even farther. It is emplaced some 200-300 million light years from earth. It helps outline contiguaous parts of vast "bubbles" of nearly empty space. Both the Wall and the adjacent voids are just too large for current theories to deal with. All popular theories have great difficulties in accounting for such large inhomogeneities. To illustrate an important observable -- the 2.7 K cosmic background radiation -- which is usually described as the afterglow of the Big Bang, ar gues for a very smooth, uniform distribution of galaxies. Great Walls are definitely anomalous. M.J . Geller, codiscoverer of the Great Wall with J.P . Huchra, remarked: "My view is that there is something fundamentally wrong in our approach to understanding such large-scale structure -- some key piece of the puzzle that we're missing." (Waldrop, ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 75: May-Jun 1991 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Of iron whiskers and particles that increase mass with age!Two pillars of the Big Bang hypothesis are: (1 ) Redshifts of galaxies support the notion of an expanding universe; and (2 ) The background microwave radiation can be interpreted as the dying embers of the Big Bang itself. Proponents of the Big Bang feel secure atop these pillars. But should they? A few Big-Bang skeptics, who have survived considerable establishment pressure, see growing cracks in those pillars. J. Narlikar identified two such cracks and, best of all, offered exciting remedies: (1 ) The redshift relationship, which works well with galaxies, falls apart when applied to quasars (see graphs); and (2 ) The background microwave radiation is much too smooth to come from the lumpy universe we observe. Narlikar opines as follows: Plot of red shift versus galaxy faintness supports the proposition that red shift is proportional to distance The same plot for quasars produces a scatter of points, suggesting that here red shifts have nothing to do with distance. "Given these problems, it is not a sound strategy to put all of our cosmic eggs in one big-bang basket. Rather, we should explore other possibilities. Thirty years ago, there was a more open debate on alternative theories, which made valuable contributions to our undersanding of cosmology. For a healthy growth of the subject, the big bang hypothesis needs competition from other ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 66: Nov-Dec 1989 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Down With The Big Bang We might have concocted the above title, but we didn't ! Rather, J. Maddox, the Editor of Nature, raised that red flag. To make things even worse, he subtitled his editorial: "Apart from being philosophically unacceptable, the Big Bang is an oversimple view of how the Universe began, and it is unlikely to survive the decade ahead." His philosophical objcections to the Big Bang are powerful: "For one thing, the implication is that there was an instant at which time literally began and, so, by extension, an instant before which there was no time. That in turn implies that even if the origin of the Universe may be successfully supposed to lie in the Big Bang, the origin of the Big Bang itself is not susceptible to discussion." The Big Bang, Maddox says, is no more scientific than Biblical creation! The scientific objections involve space, time, the curvature of space. The Big Bang further fails at explaining quasars and the hidden mass of the Universe. Maddox doubts that the Big Bang will survive the new data to be provided by the Hubble telescope. (Maddox, John; "Down with the Big Bang," Nature, 340: 425, 1989.) From Science Frontiers #66, NOV-DEC 1989 . 1989-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... newly added section in Nature bearing the heading Hypothesis . Hypothesis "is intended as an occasional vehicle for scientific papers that fail to win the full-throated approval of the referees to whom they have been sent, but which are nevertheless judged to be of sufficient importance to command the attention of readers..." Certainly, this is a commendable development. But not surprisingly, the first paper is an at-tack on the Big Bang. Most of the authors of this first article are familiar to readers of Science Frontiers: H. Arp (Not all redshifts are measures of receding velocity.); G. Burbidge (Quasars are not as far away as they seem.); and F. Hoyle (The multidisciplinary iconoclast who helped de velop the Steady State theory of the universe.) None of these scientists has recanted, even in face of not-so-subtle pressures to conform. The first paper in Hypothesis. Arp et al summarize in two sentences: "We discuss evidence to show that the generally accepted view of the Big Bang model for the origin of the Universe is unsatisfactory. We suggest an alternative model that satisfies the constraints better." Most of the paper sets out observational evidence for the authors' main themes, as stated parenthetically above following their names. Space is also devoted to the contention that the vaunted "proofs" of the Big Bang are really not. Since these themes have appeared repeatedly in Science Frontiers, we will bypass details here. The paper concludes with suggestions for an alternative to the Big Bang, which is based ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 74: Mar-Apr 1991 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Repent! the phase change is coming!The world as we know it may not end in a nuclear holocaust or even in the greenhouse effect. Rather, suggest M. M. Grone and M. Sher, the universe-as-a -whole may undergo a phase change. Such an event has already happened once and it may again. Approximately 10-10 seconds after the Big Bang, the force laws changed discontinuously as the universe cooled. Some models of the cosmos predict that another such phase change may occur when photons suddenly acquire mass. Grone and Sher have sketched the effects on terrestrial civilization: "The most dramatic effect would be the elimination of all static electric and magnetic fields over a range greater than 1 cm, and the elimination of all electromagnetic radiation with frequencies smaller than a few hundred gigahertz. We have shown that there would be relatively little impact on atomic structure and on solar radiation. The absence of electrostatic fields would force a redesign of current power plants (to use smaller solenoids); the absence of radio and television waves would force a much greater use of cables. The elimination of solar and geomagnetic fields would have a significant meteorological impact. The potential ly most devastating effect could be on the propagation of neural impulse along motor neurons; it appears that the effects might be small, but they do depend on the precise value of the photon mass." Crone and Sher conclude that ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 76: Jul-Aug 1991 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Cold fusion: new experiments and theories Cold-fusion research continues in many labs, particularly outside the US, where minds seem more open. At a recent meeting in the Soviet Union, 45 coldfusion papers revealed intense foreign activity. The Soviets are spending 15 million rubles for further research. In Japan, a Japanese-American team has even set up an experiment a half-mile underground to cut out stray radiation. (R2) However, the US is doing something despite the ridicule from the popular and scientific media. B.F . Bush and J.J . Lagowski of the University of Texas in Austin and M.H . Miles and G.S . Ostrom of the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, Calif., say the helium levels they measured correlate roughly with the amount of heat generated in the fusion reaction. .. .. . Those who believe in cold fusion are quite excited. "It's a world-turning experiment, a lollapalooza," says John O'M . Bockris, a physical chemist who has researched cold fusion at Texas A&M University in College Station. (R1) According to Dr. Mallove of M.I .T ., another provocative set of experiments are those at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico where Dr. Howard Menlove has repeatedly detected bursts of neutrons, subatomic particles that are a fusion byproduct. (R2) ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 68: Mar-Apr 1990 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Wanted: a bona fide black hole Don't you get tired of all those science books, newspaper articles, TV documentaries, and commentators gushing at length about black holes as if they were well-verified denizens of the universe? Black holes are popularly presented as "fact"; no doubts permitted; here the Book of Science is closed! It was like a breath of fresh air to read this sentence in Sky and Telescope: "Scientists are still unable to confirm the existence of even a single black hole, despite a widespread belief that such things should, and indeed must, exist." This single sentence won't change anything, because everyone is comfortable with black holes. They are part of the (often false) reality that the media smothers us with. Actually, there are two places where black holes "might" dwell, based upon the anomalous behavior of matter around these regions: (1 ) at the centers of some galaxies, including our own Milky Way; and (2 ) as unseen components of some close double stars, where the mass of the unseen companion is too great for it to be an ordinary neutron star. W. Kundt and D. Fischer, at Bonn University, have recently concluded that the second possibility is better explained without resorting to black holes. For example, a neutron star with a massive accretion disk might suffice. As for black holes at the ...

... Anomalies Under The Rug A series of articles in the science magazine Mercury so slavishly followed the scientific party line on the meaning of the redshift that G. Burbidge was prompted to pen a rejoinder. Burbidge reviewed the considerable observational evidence supporting a non-cosmological interpretation of some redshifts. (Such data has been included in past issues of Science Frontiers and in our Catalog Stars Galaxies, Cosmos.) A typical observation is the apparent physical connection (streams of connecting matter) between quasars and galaxies with radically different redshifts. Burbidge remarks: "Evidence of this kind exists. If it is accepted it means: That at least some quasars do lie at so-called cosmological distances. That at least some parts of the redshifts of quasars are due to some effect other than the expansion of the universe. That quasars are physically related to bright, comparatively nearby galaxies." Burbidge is not concerned by the fact that some astronomers find the data unconvincing, rather he objects to the so-obvious attempts to brush such anomalous data under the rug. His concluding remarks are pertinent to all of science: "I cannot end this part of the discussion without making two points which are rarely made, but which are important: Evidence of the kind just mentioned which is favorable to the cosmological interpretations of the redshifts does not negate the other evidence. It simply means that the world is a complicated place. Only in articles of this kind is one expected to describe such re sults. In articles such as that by Weedman, it is somehow considered all right to totally the noncosmological hypothesis. ...