Hilton Ratcliffe’s Blog

Would you buy a second-hand car from this man?

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The patent for a time machine has been filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office by one Dr. Marvin B. Pohlman of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here is the abstract of his submission:

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“The method employs sinusoidal oscillations of electrical bombardment on the surface of one Kerr type singularity in close proximity to a second Kerr type singularity in such a method to take advantage of the Lense-Thirring effect, to simulate the effect of two point masses on nearly radial orbits in a 2+1 dimensional anti-de Sitter space resulting in creation of circular timelike geodesics conforming to the van Stockum under the Van Den Broeck modification of the Alcubierre geometry (Van Den Broeck 1999) permitting topology change from one spacelike boundary to the other in accordance with Geroch’s theorem (Geroch 1967) resulting in a method for the formation of Godel-type geodesically complete spacetime envelopes complete with closed timelike curves.”

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Dr Pohlman asserts that by creating an artificial spacetime wormhole in his laboratory, he has a working time machine. Yeah, right…

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Well, that looks fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? Eish! On what basis did the patents clerks decide that this was a real thing? A cursory glance at the abstract reveals just what pie-in-the-sky bulldust it really is. Singularites are physical impossibilities, and certainly have never been created or seen. Pohlman suggests that he can create two of these things in his lab, and then keep them nice and still while he beams an electron stream at them. Ably assisted by a green elephant, no doubt. And it gets worse! The manic gobbledegook spirals down into the most unbelievable claptrap about point-masses changing topology in spacetime envelopes. This is pure LSD stuff.

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The website Before it’s news.com carried the story, and added this fascinating piece of garnishing:

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“Some armchair Internet scientists have made a connection between Pohlman and an infamous personage named John Titor. Who is John Titor?

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“John Titor is the pseudonym of a person who claimed to be a time traveler from the year 2036. He appeared in Internet chatrooms and on message boards for a few months back in the winter of 2000 to 2001.” [John Titor – Time Traveler]

Titor amazed and entertained hundreds of physicists and IT experts. He asserted he came from the future to accomplish a mission in the past. On his way back he stopped off in 2000 for several months to visit with his young parents and younger self in Florida. His younger version was only a toddler in 2000.”

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Of course, having come from the future, Titor could titillate us with definite stories about what was going to happen in the years immediately post-2000. These were not prophecies, they were accounts of what he had allegedly experienced.  These include: That there will be no more Olympic games after 2004, that civil war would be breaking out in America after the 2004 election, and that CERN would create miniature black holes in 2001.

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The time machine used by Titor, supposedly made by GE in 2036. Sure looks hi-tech, doesn’t it? Duh!

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 Nice, Titor! Nought out of three is about what I’d expect you to get. But the pertinent point is that this abject failure to verify his story did nothing to dent the dedication of his followers. We just didn’t understand him properly, they assure us.

Getting the picture? The significant point here is that Pohlman’s patent application was accepted. This, it would appear, is the principle upon which Nobel Prizes are now awarded.

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And what a damned shame that is!

The pioneers who tamed electricity had an exciting ride, and the picture became much more enticing once the intimate relationship of electricity with magnetism came out of the closet. Halfway through the 18^th century, Benjamin Franklin was magnetising and demagnetising iron bars by subjecting them to an electrical current. 70 years later, the accidental arrangement of a compass needle and an electrically charged wire at an evening lecture by Danish physics professor Hans Orsted provided the first experimental evidence of the dynamic relationship between the two phenomena. By subsequent investigation Orsted was able to show a principle of profound importance to our understanding of the universe, and indeed, to the dazzling acceleration of man’s advance into an era of high technology. He observed that a freely suspended magnet tended to curl around an electrical conductor, in other words, that an interaction between electric current and a magnetic field produced rotation. It wanted to spin! Quite by chance, Orsted had stumbled upon the principle of the electric motor. And then came Faraday.

English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday was one of the most luminous scientific thinkers of the 19^th century, and amongst many other achievements, became famous as a founding father of electromagnetism. He had endured a deprived childhood as the son of an itinerant Geordie blacksmith, and received only the rudiments of education. At 14, he was apprenticed to a London bookbinder. This, for Faraday, was an opportunity to read, and read he did. An early edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica taught him the basics of electrical theory, and before long Faraday was building electrical apparatus at home. The die was cast; this was the foundation of a life-long dedication to the experimental method in science.

Using the deductions of French physicist André Ampère that Orsted’s magnetic field formed what amounted to a cylinder around the electric wire, Faraday built the world’s first rudimentary electric motor. By surrounding a conductor with an enveloping magnetic field, he got the conductor to rotate. It was revealed to be a universal principle: An electron stream wrapped in a magnetic field equals spin. In 1831, by a stroke of genius, he reversed the process. By rotating a copper disk in a magnetic field, he produced a continuous electrical current, a phenomenon known as the dynamo effect. Michael Faraday had thus demonstrated also the operation of the first electric generator. This was the second great principle: Spin a conducting material in a magnetic field and you get a stream of electrons—an electric current. His experiments clearly showed the dynamic symbiosis between electricity and magnetism, and revealed to the world how that interaction could get things spinning or conversely, how spin produced the electrical response.

Electromagnets, created by winding an electric wire around an iron bar, had been produced since the 1820’s, and they demonstrated tangibly that a circulating electrical current—a helix—would produce a magnetic field. We will learn shortly how Kristian Birkeland demonstrated in his laboratory that a magnetic field could create a visible, functioning helix in plasma. Not even the superluminal vision of Michael Faraday could have foreseen how profoundly those two principles would change our world and, ultimately, the way that we understand the cosmos. James Clerk Maxwell bound these elements of natural law together in a mathematical formalism, thereby giving the world the electromagnetic theory of light, and the equations with which technology could drive us into the space age. In a few words I have described an intellectual adventure of immense and enduring importance to mankind, one that gave to the world what are arguably amongst the most useful and resilient principles in the history of science.

The picture is this: We have a web of magnetic force fields criss-crossing the deep sky, and into it surge endless clouds of electrically charged plasma. Electricity meets magnetism. What do you think happens next? That’s right, the plasma rotates. It twists and turns and rolls, and organises itself into fantastic electromagnetic tendrils called filaments. Plasma dominates the observable universe. Most of what we can see in the cosmos is plasma, concentrated in the stars and spread throughout gaping interstellar voids. The Sun is covered in an ocean of plasma, part of our atmosphere known as the ionosphere is plasma, and so are the aforementioned auroras and even everyday bolts of lightning. There is plasma in fluorescent lighting tubes and the structure of metallic crystals. The Solar System is suffused with plasma in the form of solar winds. It is all around us, and must therefore surely be the richest and most fertile field of investigation for any physicist. It is certainly one of the most accessible. What is plasma, and why is it so special? Let’s backtrack a bit.

Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir coined the name “plasma” for the phenomenon that he studied in General Electric’s laboratories. To Langmuir, the dynamic behaviour of ionised hydrogen gas when exposed to electrical and magnetic fields was enthrallingly lifelike, particularly in its ability to organise into working subsystems. All of these plasma pioneers found a common underlying principle of immense importance to the extrapolation of our plasma knowledge to the cosmos—it is scale invariant. That is, plasma behaviour in the laboratory is the same as plasma behaviour in galaxies and beyond, for as far as we can see. If we see consistent shapes in partial vacuums in the laboratory, and the same intricate shapes again repeated endlessly in the partial vacuum of space, then we would be foolish—or impossibly stubborn—not to make the connection. We cannot exaggerate how potentially useful that makes plasma science to astronomers. Now all we’ve got to do is get them to use it!

It was Alvén’s predecessor, the visionary Norwegian experimentalist Kristian Birkeland who first looked at the cosmos with electric eyes. The great strength of both Birkeland’s and Alfvén’s work lay in the experimental foundation of their theories. Birkeland was able to deduce the operating principles of the auroras from lab work he had done with cathode rays in partial vacuums. He noticed a correlation between sunspots and auroral excitement. From that he deduced (correctly) that the rays causing the auroras were emanating from the Sun, and that they consisted of streams of electrons.^[1] Further, he reasoned, the preference for polar regions shown by auroras suggested that the shimmering charged particles were somehow linked to the Earth’s magnetic field. Birkeland is today most famous for noticing that electric currents in plasma spiral into twisted, corkscrew shaped streams that now bear the name Birkeland currents, and which are seen in every corner of the sky.

There is structure and form in plasma, and sometimes it is striking. Because plasma has been studied so carefully, both inside the laboratory and out, we know and recognise plasma structures everywhere. Understanding those structures and their functions is crucial to any extrapolation we make from a terrestrial environment to the cosmos at large. A key formation is called a double layer. When a voltage potential exists across plasma, it causes freed electrons to flow through it in the form of an electric current. Now here’s the interesting part: In lab experiments, the current in a plasma-filled glass tube forms a barrier roughly half way along. It is a concentration of the strongest electrical fields, and acts as a natural capacitor—storing electrical force for later discharge. Double layers are now recognised ubiquitously in space plasmas, and we shall see shortly how they affect the behaviour of stars.

Double layers are associated with exceptionally strong z-pinches. The converging streams at that scale are easily powerful enough to compress matter lying between them to densities high enough to form cohesive planetary structures and even stars. In fact, this is probably the way that galaxies evolve, and if we get a more accurate picture of what galaxies actually consist of, it makes a lot more sense. Far from being tightly packed conglomerations of stars, galaxies are in reality very sparsely populated by anything solid. On his website, Professor Don Scott provides a much more realistic definition. A galaxy is, in the words of Dr Scott, “A vast formation of plasma clouds that contain electrical currents and occasional, widely distributed tiny lumped points of matter called nebulae, stars, and planets.”^[2] Apart from being a steadfast empirical scientist and professor in the field of electrical engineering, Don Scott is also a very enthusiastic amateur astronomer. You know, the type of person who actually looks at what he talks about. My kind of man.   

Email Hilton Ratcliffe at hilton@hiltonratcliffe.com

References:

1.      Alfvén, H 1981Cosmic Plasma Dordrecht, D Reidel Publishing Company.

2.      Alfvén, H and Arrhenius, G 1976 Evolution of the Solar System Honolulu, University Press of the Pacific.

3.      Lerner, E 1992 The Big Bang Never Happened New York, Vintage Books.

4.      Ratcliffe, H 2008 The Virtue of Heresy—Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer Raleigh, BookSurge.

5.      Scott, D 2006 The Electric Sky Portland, Mikamar Publishing.

by Isaac Asimov

WJ R Alexander, Pr Eng

Honorary Fellow, South African Institution of Civil Engineering

Professor Emeritus, University of Pretoria.

Summary

Civil engineers and climate change scientists are on a collision course.  The outcome could have very serious, nationally important consequences.  These differences should be resolved as a matter of urgency.

In this submission it is demonstrated with a very high degree of assurance that southern Africa, and possibly the rest of the world as well, is about to enter a period of severe droughts commencing within the next twelve months.  There is an estimated 20% likelihood that they will be as serious as the Great Depression Drought of the early 1930s.  These drought sequences could have disastrous consequences for South Africa if the authorities are caught unawares.

This prediction is based on the well researched multi-year periodic behaviour of the hydro-meteorological processes.  It is shown that this periodicity is in turn causally related to synchronous variations in solar activity.  This linkage is well documented, and has been studied in South Africa for more than a hundred years.

However, climate change scientists vigorously deny both the predictable, multi-year periodicity in the hydro-meteorological processes, as well as the solar linkage.  The study of the solar linkage with the hydro-meteorological processes does not feature in the Water Research Commission’s recently released publication on future research for the period 2008 to 2013.  This period coincides with the predicted occurrence of severe drought sequences.  The drought sequences will be causally related to the ‘quiet sun’. This is raising concern among international solar physicists.

This is an urgent, national policy issue.

Introduction

Just before the outbreak of World War II Albert Einstein fled from Germany to the USA. He warned President Roosevelt that the Germans were developing nuclear weapons.  The Americans assembled a group of scientists, who examined this possibility. They eventually developed their own nuclear weapons.  Two of these were used in Japan, and brought World War II to an end.

I now find myself in a similar position.  Based on my exhaustive studies, starting in 1970 through to the present day, it is my duty to report that there is a very real possibility (about 20%) that South Africa and other parts of the world could experience drought sequences of severity equal to the Great Depression drought experienced in the early 1930s.  This was a global drought.  It was called the Dustbowl Drought in the USA.

This led to joblessness in both South Africa and the USA.  Governments launched large construction projects to relieve unemployment.  These included the construction of the Vaal-Harts and other large water supply projects in South Africa, and the Boulder Dam and other projects in the USA.

I personally recall seeing ‘white labourers’ pushing cocopans for upgrading the roads, while on my way to school.  My parents had to support three of my cousins, whose parents lost their jobs.

In later years, from 1970 to 1984, I was directly responsible for developing national scale policies for flood routing through South Africa’s major rivers, and more importantly, drought operation procedures for our major dams.  I developed drought operation procedures for the Vaal and Mgeni River systems for use by their water boards.

I can assure SAICE Council that a repetition of the droughts of the 1980s could potentially cause considerable damage to South Africa’s economy on a scale equivalent to the consequences of present electricity shortages.  A repetition of the Great Depression droughts would be disastrous, particularly if, as is quite likely, they occur concurrently with the restrictions on electricity usage, and the global economic recession that has already started to occur. These droughts will increase the incidence of poverty, malnutrition and disease in South Africa, and more so in the countries to the north of us.

Drought predictability

In 1970 the multi-disciplinary, national Commission of Enquiry into Water Matters produced a comprehensive report.  Its recommendations led to the establishment of the Water Research Commission and the post of Manager: Scientific Services in the Department of Water Affairs.  I later occupied this post.

Regarding drought analyses, the commission recommended that research be undertaken on the development of a river flow prediction model, however approximate it may be, and that the possible connection with solar activity be researched.

This possible linkage with sunspot activity was not new. It was well known that in the 1850s British astronomers reported that a linkage existed between sunspot activity and famines in India. Here in South Africa, in 1892 DE Hutchins published an extensive report Cycles of drought and good seasons in South Africa. He demonstrated that there was a predictable linkage between sunspot activity and temperature, rainfall and river flow. During the first 50 years of the past century there was sporadic mention of the linkage in the reports of national drought commissions.

I was appointed as Chief of the Division of Hydrology in 1970.  Together with my staff, we addressed the predictability issue and the linkage with sunspot activity.  I published a comprehensive technical report in 1978. I reported that although a linkage existed, it was too weak for predictive purposes.  In retrospect, the reason for the lack of success was the shortness of the hydrological records at that time.  As we were later to demonstrate, it was not the single (about 11-year) sunspot cycles that were important, but the double (about 21-year) sunspot cycles.

Also in 1978 I held a  course on water resource and flood analyses at the department’s Hydrological Research Institute.  This proved to be very popular, and I received requests for repeats from the Department of Agriculture and from Professor Rooseboom at the University of Pretoria. Together with colleagues I continued presenting these courses every two years from then on. As and when time permitted, I continued my research on the predictable linkage.

I retired from the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry at the end of 1984 after a long and very satisfying career.  I then accepted (with alacrity), the offer of a post as professor in the Department of Civil Engineering (now Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering) at the University of Pretoria.  In addition to my undergraduate teaching, I continued my research.  Together with colleagues, I also continued with our popular Hydro courses.  These have been attended by some 2000 participants to date, many of them repeats.

Climate change 

My first experience with the climate change issue commenced in 1993 when, at the request of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, we hosted a small discussion group on this subject.  Some of the participants expressed concerns that climate change would have an adverse effect on South Africa’s water supplies.

By then I had already undertaken further studies of the hydrological data for my own research as well as for our courses. Hydro courses.  I informed the meeting that there was no evidence in the data that could be attributed to climate change.

This was obviously a very important issue, so I decided to follow the publication route in peer reviewed journals, where I specifically addressed the predictability issue and the solar linkage.  By then it was obvious from my studies that there was a predictable, multi-year periodicity in the data and that this was closely, but not exactly, synchronous with the double sunspot cycle. A flip-flop mechanism was also present. There were sudden climatic reversals from low to high runoff conditions and back again.

It is very important that readers of this submission should note that at all times in my studies, I used periodicity in the data as the prediction tool and NOT the sunspot cyclicity. In our joint SAICE paper last year my colleagues and I demonstrated that there is a causal relationship between the predictable multi-year periodicity in the data, and the acceleration and deceleration of the sun as it moves along its trajectory through galactic space. 

The diagram below is our river flow prediction model prepared by my co-author Alwyn vd Merwe. We are presently in period year 13 (2007-08).

Note the very clear, well above average recorded river flows for the present hydrological year (13). Even more importantly, note the succession of below average river flows in the period years that lie ahead (14 to 20). Analyses of other long hydrological data series show similar characteristics.    

Once again, our prediction model based on this thoroughly studied, synchronous linkage between periodic solar activity and the hydrometeorological processes has been tested and verified. The likelihood of prolonged, severe droughts from next year onwards is very real. My research over the years and the successful predictions based on it, were reported in the following published papers and reports. 

Alexander, W.J.R.1978. Long range prediction of river flow – a preliminary assessment. Technical Report TR80, Department of Water Affairs, Pretoria.

Alexander, W.J.R. 1995. Floods, droughts and climate change. S Afr J Sci 91, 403-408. [Successful prediction. Widespread, drought-breaking floods commenced five months after publication. Year 1 in the model.]

Alexander, W.J.R. 1997. Predictability of widespread, severe droughts, and their effect on water resource management. Proceedings, 5^th International conference on southern hemisphere meteorology and oceanography. Pretoria. Invited guest presentation.

Alexander, W.J.R. 2002. Statistical analysis of extreme floods. J S Afr Instn Civ Engg, 44 (1) 2002 20-25.

Alexander W.J.R, 2005a. Development of a multi-year climate prediction model. Water SA Vol 31 No 2 April 2005.

Alexander W.J.R, 2005b. Linkages between solar activity and climatic responses. Energy & Environment, Volume 16, No 2, 2005.

Alexander, W.J.R. 2005c. Flood alert. Issued in November 2005. [Successful prediction. Widespread, drought-breaking floods commenced three months after publication. Year 11 in the model.]

Alexander W.J.R, Bailey F, Bredenkamp D.B., van der Merwe A and Willemse N. 2007, Linkages between solar activity, climate predictability and water resource management. J S Afr Instn Civ Engg, 49 (2) June 2007.

Alexander, W.J.R. 2008. The likelihood of a global drought 2009-2016. Article in press. [Year 13 in the model. My present prediction.]

It has become increasingly clear that the South African hydrometeorological database is one of the best in the world. This, together with our geographical location within the band of maximum rate of poleward redistribution of incoming solar energy, makes southern Africa the ideal region for testing the validity of climate alarmist theories.

My predicament

All the above is a straightforward lead-up to my prediction of an imminent severe national, and probably global, drought.

There is, however, another very important but unpleasant issue that I’m obliged to bring to the SAICE Council’s attention.  Since 1993, I have become increasingly aware of the considerable body of scientific opinion that maintains that continued global increases of undesirable greenhouse gas emissions, principally carbon dioxide, from coal burning power stations, heavy industries (including cement manufacture) and transport, will create a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere.  This will result in increasing global temperatures. 

Climate change scientists used complex global climate computer models to predict a whole range of undesirable consequences.  These include increases in the magnitude and frequency of damaging floods, droughts and threats to water supplies.  They go further, and specifically maintain that there is no linkage between variations in solar activity and climatic responses.  They are forced to do this, as an admission would diminish their claims of exclusive human causality of the postulated consequences of global warming.

I emphasise the word ‘postulated’, because the claims are based on unverified (and unverifiable)  computer models.  This is the essence of my problem.  There is simply no evidence in the hydrological data to support these claims. For example, during the 20 years since the establishment of the IPCC in 1988, there have been no floods or droughts that have exceeded the historical maxima. Nor are there any observable trends in the rainfall and river flow data. 

My own position and responsibilities are very clear.  Since 1993 I have devoted considerable time and effort in a search for evidence that would support these claims.  Had I found this evidence, I would not have hesitated for one moment to report it and include it in my teaching, publications, articles and our Hydro course notes.

I therefore have an equal if unpleasant responsibility. It is to report that there is no observable substance to claims related to the effects of climate change on river flow and South Africa’s water resources.

International situation

The IPCC reports claim that the world will face very serious environmental and humanitarian consequences if global greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, let alone stabilised. There is virtually unanimous international support for these conclusions at the political level. It is the implementation of measures to control these emissions that has become a major economic and political issue.  

I attended the United Nations conference on climate change in Bali last December at the invitation of a New Zealand organisation.  The purpose of the conference was to develop an enforceable agreement whereby all the nations of the world would pass legislation to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.  However, the major developing nations, China and India, with their rapidly rising industrial activities and consequent increases in greenhouse gas emissions, were not prepared to implement these restrictions on the basis that the high expenditures would retard their poverty alleviation measures. The conference failed to meet its objectives.

It was then decided to continue the attempts to reach an international agreement by a series of meetings culminating in a final meeting in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.

The first of these meetings was held two weeks ago in Bangkok.  A third element entered into the picture. The poor nations, particularly the African nations and the island states, were also under pressure to implement these restrictive measures.  At Bangkok, they insisted that the developed nations that had caused the global warming with all its consequences, should compensate them for all the damage that, according to the IPCC documentation has already been caused, and will continue to be caused in the future.  These are huge sums of money. It is most unlikely that in addition to imposing economic burdens on their own populations, the major developed countries will be willing to impose further taxes on their citizens for donations of this magnitude to African countries. An impasse has been reached.

The Bangkok discussions not only failed to meet their objectives, but the international political situation has deteriorated still further.  The United Nations Commissioner conceded last week that a future substantial international agreement on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (the successor to the Kyoto Protocol) was unlikely to be achieved in future. This is particularly so in the light of the current economic recession.  Here in South Africa we are already suffering from the delay in the expansion of our coal-fired power generation network. As a consequence, global greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise inexorably.

To make matters worse, the rising oil prices have resulted in an international rush for coal. Instead of decreasing, South Africa’s exports of coal have risen dramatically as has our domestic usage. The same applies to many other countries. Environmentalists are up in arms.

Climate change science

Until about 2001 there was virtual unanimity among climate change scientists that greenhouse gas emissions have caused and will in future continue to cause severe environmental and humanitarian damage.

This has changed.  Scientists in the affected sciences, particularly those in the applied and engineering sciences, have started to raise serious doubts regarding the very basis of climate change science.  Our research on the solar linkage is an example.  Russian and other solar physicists have noted the unusual delay in the commencement of the next sunspot cycle.  They are warning that there is a possibility that the world could be entering another cold period similar to the historical ice ages that lasted for decades.

Other scientists are questioning the postulated linkage between rising carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures.

In my article on the likelihood of a global drought submitted to the SAICE magazine and my more extensive course notes that I presented at the University of Pretoria earlier this year, I demonstrated that a linkage also exists between variations in solar activity and global temperatures. My analyses replicate the slowing down in the rate of increase of global temperatures followed by the present decreasing tendency. This is despite the increases in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Summary so far

1. There is overwhelming evidence of a causal and predictable linkage between variations in solar activity and climatic responses, specifically rainfall and river flow.
2. There is no evidence of trends in rainfall and river flow data that could be attributed to unnatural climate change.
3. There is increasing worldwide research that questions the fundamental basis of climate change theory.
4. The international political situation regarding the implementation of universal measures to restrict greenhouse gas emissions has collapsed.
5. Recommendations that South Africa should resort to the development of measures to adapt to human caused climate change will fail because they would be adapting to something that does not exist.

Water Research Commission

I now have another unpleasant task.  Please accept my assurance that this is not a personal issue.

Yesterday I was shown a copy of a report published by the Water Research Commission titled Towards defining the Water Research Commission’s research portfolio on climate change for 2008-2013.  I was amazed, frightened and disappointed in that order.

The very first requirement when planning future research is to carry out a literature study of existing knowledge.  This was obviously not done. The huge volume of decades of research by civil engineers on floods, droughts and water resources were completely ignored. In my 93-page extended summary of my technical report An assessment of the likely consequences of global warming on the climate of South Africa, I list 50 references on this subject. A literature study would have demonstrated that virtually all the principal research fields in the WRC document have already been researched.

In the report no attempt at all is made to evaluate the basic assumption that human activities have had and will continue to have adverse effects on South Africa’s water supplies.

The well-documented causal linkage between solar activity and river flow is ignored.

My own conscientious and detailed research published in peer-reviewed literature, copious notes, and presented at courses for practitioners from 1978 onwards, some of which are listed above, was completely ignored.

My peer-reviewed paper in the Water Research Commission’s Water SA and magazine articles Water Wheel were obviously ignored.

I have no wish to comment on the report in detail, but would gladly do so, if requested.

Department of Water Affairs and Forestry

This brings me back in a full circle.  I served with honour and pleasure in the department for 34 years.  I fully appreciate that things have changed since I retired from the department.  However, there are basics that do not change.  The very foundation of all the department’s actions and responsibilities rest on an understanding of the properties of river flow.  This is all the way from initial planning through to design, construction and operation of water resource development projects.

My major concern, and reason for this submission to the SAICE Council, is that the department does not seem to fully realise the consequences that severe water resource droughts will have on their future drought operations, bearing in mind our recent research and publications.  This is compounded by the department’s apparent acknowledgement that climate change will have an adverse effect on South Africa’s water resources, for which there is no believable evidence.

Recommendations

I’ve done my best and achieved great satisfaction for the work that I have done for my profession and my country.  I cannot shoulder these responsibilities any longer.  It is now up to SAICE to decide on what action should be taken from here onwards.  I suggest that this submission, plus any comments that the council wishes to add, be submitted by the SAICE Council as a matter of urgency to Director General of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, and to the Chairperson of the Water Research Commission, together with the accompanying second draft of my article that is in press.

I recommend that a joint workshop be organised by SAICE, the Department of Water Affairs and the Water Research Commission. It should be held in July this year as a matter of urgency. Its limited objective should be to discuss the likelihood of severe water resource droughts occurring in the near future, and the action that should be taken to minimise the consequences. Notice of the workshop and invitations to attend and participate in it should be distributed as soon as possible and included in the June issue of the SAICE magazine.

My further urgent recommendation is that the Water Research Commission should take note of the unequivocal, predictable periodicity in the hydrological data and its causal linkage with synchronous variations in solar activity. The commission should consider what this undeniable periodicity has on all the commission’s future research activities, specifically those linked with climate change as set out in its recent publication on research proposals, where this fundamental causal linkage is completely ignored.

Finally, I urge the Department of Water Affairs and the Water Research Commission to seriously consider the consequences if this warning and its linkage with solar activity are ignored and the droughts occur.

I appreciate that the contents of this document are likely to be hotly contested as lucrative research funding is at stake. This debate should be encouraged, provided it is conducted in an appropriate forum where both sides are given the opportunity to present their views. In this connection I must place on record that my several attempts to have round table discussions on this subject were either refused or ignored. 

This submission is not confidential. On the contrary, it is my wish that it be widely distributed. I intend distributing it immediately after my discussions with the SAICE Council.

Pretoria, 11 April 2008

In the ancient epochs of astronomy, it was tightly bound to social superstition, and there was little to set it apart from the religion of the day. The celestial sphere was perceived to be nearby, and charmingly benign. It was as if the stars in the sky were merely a backdrop to a world that existed entirely to nurture and benefit people. The self-importance that resulted from this myopic view is staggering. I’m trying to stay away from religion as much as I possibly can in telling this story, but gosh it’s a circus! We have in this day and age a popular conception of the creator of the Universe who is proudly male!  Good grief! If there’s any one thing that persuades me that a literal take on biblical philosophy is incredibly naïve, it’s that God looks like a human male, and even more astoundingly, behaves like one, stereotypically. I’m not given to mocking the faith of others, but the conception of a patriarchal, sexist, chauvinist God is surely the most flabbergasting facet of a monumentally incredible belief system.

Science and religion eventually split, thankfully, and astronomy divorced itself at long last from astrology and fortune-telling for the rich and lazy. The development of the telescope in the 17^th century gave the art a huge leg-up, and with it came revelation—the scale of the Universe was undoubtedly vast on the terrestrial scale, and there were other systems out there that emulated our own. Galileo saw planets in detail, and saw how they too had moons in orbit. He saw the phases of Venus, thereby verifying Copernicus’ model. Isaac Newton invented the reflecting telescope, published his cathartic, watershed Principia Mathematica, followed it with his Opticks in 1704, and we took off into a brave new world.

Discoveries in optics and the formulation of the concept of electromagnetism brought with them the stark realisation that much—perhaps most—of the cosmos is not perceptible to the human eye, and that the gentle, cocooning sky worshipped by our forefathers masked a Universe characterised by the most awesome violence. The revelation of invisible, high-energy radiation like X-rays and gamma rays, and later, the invention of instruments with which to detect them and transpose the images to optical wavebands, brought and still brings the most astounding discoveries about the large-scale environment. We began to get a glimmer of understanding of the overwhelmingly inhospitable world in which we have fortuitously found ourselves the tiniest speck of eco-friendliness. We are indeed in that sliver of “just-rightness” that we charmingly call the Goldilocks Zone.

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy of average size, about 100,000 light years in diameter, and containing somewhere between 100 billion and 400 billion stars (we are stymied by the fact that we can’t look at it from outside). Some daring astronomers have estimated that it has about 50 billion planets, of which about 500 million are in the habitable zone, like the Earth is. Wow!

It would be easy to make too much of this. Especially in the Greco-Roman world of the last two millennia, patriarchal, monotheistic religion dominated and ruled with a heavy hand. The importance of our own species in the scheme of things was fertile ground for the propagation of a cosmology that was gloriously homo-centric. Quite honestly, I don’t have too much of a problem with that. We are at the centre of our own universe. This is the place that we look from. Apart from that though, the Earth’s address is not special. What is fairly obvious to the trained eye is that whatever we are part of, it is the outcome of these violent processes. Out of the strong came forth sweetness; from the fires of hell came the Earth, in all her sublime glory.      

The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, and things like the Drake equation that are used to encourage that pursuit, are based on a fundamental assumption that is not only puzzling but indeed also tacitly misleading. The notion is that life is the product of a chemical reaction—given the right ambient chemistry, something lifeless can become a living thing. What on Earth is that based upon? Life as we observe it is a relay race. The ephemeral spirit of living things is passed on through procreation, from one living thing to another, and although the terms and conditions of such a process are carried in a specifically coded molecule called DNA, life itself is quite another phenomenon. Living things always eventually become dead, but nowhere do we have an instance where something properly dead has been made alive again. We can recreate the chemical conditions pretty much exactly, but sorry, no cigar. We might want life to be a purely chemical process, but such a wishful supposition has not a single empirical precedent. Nowhere. I don’t care whether you’re an atheist, the Pope’s cousin, or a bionic meter maid, there is nothing in all the vast body of scientific observation and experiment that you could use to prop up the idea.

I have on my bookshelf a publication by Hoyle and Wickramasingh called “Lifecloud”, in which they put forward their hypothesis of panspermia. Simply put, their idea was that life could have been brought to Earth from other stars by comets. On one hand, it’s an appealing notion because it avoids the dubious premise that biological life could be created from sterile ingredients in a test tube or some particular “primordial stew”. Indeed, panspermia sidesteps the issue of a creation point for life altogether. In an infinite Universe, life could have existed always, and may of course migrate from place to place in living organisms. That brings us to the Achilles heel of panspermia: How would these living things stay alive during the rigours of the journey, from temperatures of minus 270 degrees C in interstellar space to a fiery descent in a planet’s atmosphere? Can’t see it myself. It answers some questions but raises others. Pity…

The proposal that life evolved from some prior lifeless state, given, say, organic compounds, water, and just the right temperature and pressure is utterly without basis in science. That we could spend millions of dollars building models over so fragile a foundation is typical of the way science is going, I’m afraid.

J. Astrophys. Astr. (1984) 5, 79–98

Cosmology: Myth or Science?

For the Golden Jubilee of the Indian Academy of Sciences, representing a culture which has investigated cosmology for four millennia

Hannes Alfvén

Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and University of California,

San Diego

1. Pre-Galilean cosmologies

1.1 Ancient Cosmological Myths

Cosmology began when man began to ask: What is beyond the horizon and what happened before the earliest event I can remember? The method of finding out was to ask those who had travelled very far; they reported what they had seen, and also what people they had met far away had told them about still more remote regions. Similarly, grandfather told about his young days and what his grandfather had told him and so on. But the information was always increasingly uncertain the more remote the regions and the times.

The increasing demand for knowledge about very remote regions and very early times was met by people who claimed they could give accurate information about the most distant regions and the earliest times. When asked how they could know all this they often answered that they had direct contact with the gods, and got revelations about the structure of the whole universe and how it was created. And some of these prophets were believed by large groups of people. Myths about the creation and structure of the universe were incorporated as essential parts of religious traditions.

In different cultures, the mythologies became drastically different, depending on the way the philosophical thinking developed and on the personalities of great prophets. In several of the world religions, both the universe and the gods were believed to the eternal; in others, the gods or one God created the universe. In some religions, there is no conflict between these views; initially the universe was identical with a god and the different members of his body developed into the different parts of the universe. In India during the Vedic period, the god Purusa was initially identical in the whole world, and part of his body became the Earth, other parts the Heaven; the Sun formed from his eyes and the Moon from his soul. In other philosophical-mythological schools, both Heaven and Earth are regarded as gods and as parents of gods. Sometimes one god—in India, Agni or Soma or Rudra—and sometimes all gods together are said to have generated or created the whole universe.

In Rigveda, there is a remarkable poem telling that originally “There was neither Aught nor Naught, no air nor sky beyond”. There was only “A self-supporting mass beneath, and energy above. Who knows, who ever told, from whence this vast creation rose? No gods had yet been born – who then can e’er the truth disclose?”

During the more than three millennia which have passed since the Vedic period, Indian mythology has developed a jungle of co-existing creeds, in part absorbed from neighbours, and in part from earlier cultures which had collapsed. The sophisticated mythological philosophy is, perhaps, somewhat less chaotic. There is a general tendency to consider the evolution of the universe as well as the human society to be periodic. Indeed, there is a hierarchy of periods. ? golden age, followed by a silver, a bronze and the present iron age (Kaliyuga) forms a Mahayuga of 54,000 years. A number of Mahayugas forms a larger period, and so on in steps up to the Kalpa or the day of Brahma, which is 4 × 109 years. This is only half an order of magnitude smaller than what according to the Big-Bang hypothesis should be the ‘age of the universe’.

However, there are 365 Brahma days in one Brahma year, and Brahma lives for 100 years, so the ancient Indians used time units which were four orders of magnitude longer than in the Big Bang. (Of course, when Brahma dies after his 100 years, he is immediately reborn). Indian estimates of the size of the world were not so fantastic.

Sometimes the figure10,000 yojanas is given, which means less than half the distance to the Moon. The Mediterranean-Middle East thinking was initially as closely related to the Indian mythologies as Greek, Latin, and Persian are related to Sanskrit. The way of life of the people speaking these languages was also similar. The battle of Kuruksetra and the battle before the walls of Ilion took place at about the same epoch and were fought in a similar way. The heroes spent day after day fighting, and at dusk they went back to their camps, drinking and bragging. Their gods took a decisive part in the fight. (By the way, in Scandinavian mythology, the Vikings who fell in battle came immediately to Valhalla, where they enjoyed the same type of daily life). In the same way, the Mediterranean mythology was initially similar with a golden, silver, bronze and iron age in sequence. However, the Greek cosmological philosophy which took the lead at the Greek cultural explosion around 500 B.C. did not develop like the Indian. First of all, the world remained very limited in time. Indeed, the guesses of the age of the world considered periods of some thousand years, which is only one micro-kalpa. On the other hand, the estimates of the size of the universe were not so different.

Not all the early cosmologies were so intimately connected with religion. The sages of China had no preconceived theories, and seem to have based their cosmological thinking more on phenomena which they observed. But the observations they could make did not suffice for any certain conclusions, and any more elaborate scenarios were no less speculative than those which originated from divine revelation to prophets.

1.2 Buddhist Cosmology

Buddhism developed views on cosmology which were drastically different from the other Indian cosmologies. As Buddhism is basically an agnostic religion, it does not deny the possible existence of gods, but it does not claim that there are any. The existence of gods is irrelevant to the aim of Buddhism, which is to find the right way to salvation, to the annihilation of desire, to the state of Nirvana.

As a logical consequence of this, when the Buddha was asked whether the universe was eternal or created he is reported to have answered in his characteristic style:

It is wrong to say that it is eternal.

It is wrong to say that it is created.

It is wrong to say that it is both eternal and created.

It is wrong to say that it is neither eternal nor created.

Perhaps this is an echo from the quoted Rigveda poem which probably derives from one millennium earlier: As man got his knowledge about the early states of the universe from prophets who got their knowledge directly from the gods, then no information could be gained about the epoch when the gods had not yet been born. Similarly, as the Buddha did not believe in gods—or in any case, did not care much about them—there was no possibility to get information about early cosmology.

Perhaps one could also find an echo two millennia later, when Descartes proclaimed: De omnibus est dubitandum (We should question everything). However, this is not altogether correct because Descartes had also inherited the Galilean scientific tradition according to which controversial issues should be settled by reference to experiment and observation. But there does not seem to be any basic logical conflict between Descartes and the agnosticism of Rigveda and the Buddha.

1.3 Rise of Mathematics

1.3.1 The Pythagoreans

A new element in the cosmological discussion was introduced by the rise of science and natural philosophy in Greece as a part of the cultural explosion around 500 B.C. The Greeks had absorbed astronomical knowledge both from the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures, and, as we have mentioned already, their mythology was genetically related to the Indian. The new element consisted of the rise of geometry, which to a large extent derived from Egypt, where it was of practical importance for land surveying. The Greeks developed this to the still unsurpassed masterpiece of logically stringent structure which we know as Euclidean geometry. It is questionable whether the beauty of the theorem of the regular polyhedrons will ever be surpassed. By a simple discussion which anyone can understand in a few minutes, the a priori surprising conclusion is reached that there are five and only five such bodies.

Strongly connected with this, a much wider breakthrough of new thinking was achieved by the Pythagoreans. They demonstrated that the basis of musical harmony was simple ratios of integers. It is quite understandable that this led to a philosophical optimism. The Pythagoreans tried to incorporate astronomy and cosmology as well into their philosophy. They claimed that astronomy should be to the eye what musical harmony was to the ear.

This was indeed a revolutionary idea. It was the first attempt to construct a comprehensive mathematical scheme of cosmology and to work out a synoptic view of the universe as a whole. One may say that its basic principle is that because the world was created by the gods, there must be a sublime order in its basic structure – even if many regrettable local disorders were obvious. According to the Pythagoreans, the most ‘perfect’ geometrical figure is the circle, and the most ‘perfect’ of all solid bodies is the sphere. Ergo the Earth must be a circular disk or a sphere, surrounded by a number of crystal spheres, on which the planets and the stars were located. Further, the most perfect motion was uniform motion. Ergo the crystal spheres must rotate with uniform velocity. This was necessary for the ‘harmony of the spheres.’

1.4 Relation between Theory and Observation

Neither the Pythagoreans nor Plato cared very much for a comparison with observations. The Pythagoreans formed a secret society with no real contact with the rest of Greek society. Indeed, traitors were severely punished. The rules of Plato’s Academy included: “Let none who has not learnt geometry enter here,” and he advised all scholars to “concentrate on the theoretical side of their subject and not spend endless trouble over physical measurements to the neglect of theoretical problems.”

This was in conformity with the general attitude of the intellectual aristocracy in Greece. The belief was that technology, including technological innovation, ought to be largely relegated to the lower classes, especially to slaves. It was degrading for a philosopher to get his hands dirty.

It has been suggested that this cleft between sophisticated theoretical thinking and practical work, including experiments, was the basic reason why the highly advanced science in ancient Greece never led to the scientific breakthrough which took place in Europe two millennia later.

1.4.1 The Ptolemaic System

When, in spite of Plato, observations began to attract interest, the Pythagorean cosmology seemed to be confirmed by observations in one respect: the outermost crystal sphere, the one on which the stars were fixed, did apparently move with a constant speed. This was just what could be expected because this sphere was the outermost one, closest to where the gods lived, and hence most divine. Unfortunately, the theory did not agree so well with observational results when applied to the planets, including the Sun and Moon. The Sun and the Moon sometimes moved more to the north, sometimes to the south, and a planet like Jupiter sometimes reversed its motion in relation to the stars.

It was obvious that something was wrong. But the basic principles—uniform motion and perfect geometrical figures—were sacrosanct and could not be given up even if they were in conflict with observations. Instead, very ingenious auxiliary ideas were forwarded. Planets are not directly fixed on the crystal spheres, but each is fixed on a small circle, an epicycle, which moved with a constant velocity with its centre fixed on the crystal sphere. For a time such theories looked promising, but better observations demonstrated that they were not accurate. The reaction of the scientists was to try to patch up an old fiction instead of asking themselves whether, after all, its basis was laid in truth. They tinkered instead of recreating. Hence, increasingly complicated additions to the system were made.

The result of this was the Ptolemaic system, which was worked out in the third century A.D. No less than 54 epicycles, eccentrics, etc., had been introduced. But at the same time, as it became more complicated, it became more sacrosanct. When an avalanche of religious fanaticism put the classical culture into a deep freeze for more than a millennium, it did not develop very much, and age made it still more sacrosanct. Criticism was dangerous, and it was a rare exception when the famous astronomer, King Alphonse X of Castile, complained about its degree of complexity: “Had I been present at the creation, I could have rendered profound advice.”

1.4.2 Astronomy, Astrology, and Myth

This mathematically based cosmology did not come into serious conflict with the ancient myths. They became to a certain extent incorporated, and a jungle grew up of mathematics, astronomy, astrology, and myths from many earlier cultures. Gods and spirits of all kinds began to settle on the crystal spheres, soon causing a population explosion. For example, one group of constellations depicts how Perseus saved Andromeda from Medusa, whose terrible head is represented by a variable star. Still more dramatic is the giant hunter Orion, who, followed by the Big Dog and the Small Dog, lifts his club against the red-eyed Bull.

The early motion of the Sun along the ecliptic was illustrated by a number of sun-myths. For example, when Heracles fought a bull and later a lion, this is thought to represent the Sun’s entry—on its walk along the zodiac—into the constellations Taurus and Leo. Another sun myth, in which Delilah cuts Samson’s hair from which his strength derives, tells us that in the fall, when the Sun enters the constellation Virgo, its rays lose their heating power and he becomes a captive for half a year, until spring, when he has regained his force.

This chaotic conglomeration of mathematics, astronomy (including cosmology), and myths from many religions has turned out to be a permanent ingredient in our culture. Today, after more than 2000 years, it has as much vitality as ever. Newspapers and periodicals usually have astrological columns; every jeweller sells pendants and pins with signs of the zodiac. From the point of view of our commercialized society, there are many more dollars in astrology than in astronomy.

1.5 Creation Ex Nihilo Versus Ungenerated Universe

The rise of the monotheistic religions meant that one of the gods became more important than the others; He became the Pharaoh, the dictator of the Heavens, God with capital ‘G’. He also became more important than the material world. He alone was eternal. He was not a product of the evolution of the universe, as in Rigveda. On the contrary, the whole world was a secondary structure created by Him. In the Bible the creation takes six days. It still has the character of bringing order into a pre-existing chaos. It was not until the first few centuries A.D. that creation was thought of as the production of the world ex nihilo (but this is never taught in the Bible). God had now become powerful enough to create the whole world by just pronouncing some magic words, or by his will-power.

Monotheistic religions have often a tendency to become fanatic. Certainly Christendom did so, at least during some periods. Tertullian said Credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd). Hence there should be no serious attempt to reconcile religion and science. In the Aristotelian philosophy the material world was ‘ungenerated and indestructible’, a view which is not in conflict with some of the Rigvedic views. It was not until medieval times that Aristotle’s views were accommodated to the idea of creation ex nihilo essentially by Saint Thomas, who remodelled the Aristotelian philosophy in accordance with the requirements of ecclesiastical doctrine.

It is of interest to remember that even Saint Thomas confessed that reason could only be satisfied with the assumption that the world had no.beginning. “The doctrine of a beginning or the non-eternity of the world is to be received sola fide, as an act of pure faith in deference to authority.”

Not even the monotheistic religions were fatal to the old myths. The ‘pagan’ gods changed their names—some became devils, others became saints. In Italy, one pays homage to saints in the same places in the woods where earlier a nymph or a dryad used to live. They have only acquired more modern dress. Midwinter solstice was in ‘pagan’ times the festival of the Sun-god, and a fertility Moon-goddess was worshipped at the first full moon after the vernal equinox. These nice old traditions remain, even today, although with a modified meaning.

The ancient belief that the wandering stars governed the life of men was conserved and developed further. Astrology, mythology and religion formed an increasingly complicated, fascinating structure. The basic conflict between an omnipotent God and the old belief that our destiny is governed by the stars was patched over by the formula: Astra regunt hominem, sed regit astra Deus (Stars rule men, but God rules the stars) The scientific basis of the Ptolemaic system, viz., that the stars move according to certain mathematical laws, was forgotten.

1.6 Myth Versus Science; Mathematical Myths

The Ptolemaic system was initially a quite attractive theory but, during the centuries, it developed into a sacred and rigid structure increasingly impotent in incorporating new discoveries. The reason for this was that fundamentally the approach was not scientific but mythological.* The basic ideas were the perfect geometrical figures and uniform motion. The idea of building a world system on such general principles represented great progress, because earlier it had been generally believed that events in the world were governed by the will or the whimsies of gods. The Ptolemaic system did not necessarily question that the celestial system was created by the gods, but it claimed that they must have acted according to certain philosophical or mathematical principles which it was possible to analyze and understand. A sufficiently sophisticated mathematician might find out what the divine mathematic principles were.

The Ptolemaic system originated from what we may call a mathematical myth. The Pythagorean philosophy had a logical beauty which could well be called ‘divine.’ By pure abstract thinking the theoreticians claimed to have discovered the principles according to which the gods acted when they created the world. And when these principles were found, it was held that the world must be structured according to them. In a way, the demiurges had no choice; it was not even necessary that they existed. But not even observations of physical reality were necessary. The system was based on divine inspiration or logical-mathematical necessity. If Galileo claimed that in his telescope he saw celestial bodies or sunspots which a priori do not exist, it was his telescope and not the theoretical system which was wrong.

It is a semantic question whether a model initially deriving from ‘divine inspiration’ should be called a mytheven if it includes philosophical and mathematical elements. Some would no doubt prefer to call it, for example, ‘a priori metaphysics’.

But long before Galileo, new ideas had appeared in Islamic culture, which took the lead in science less than 100 years after the Hegira. In the twelfth century, Avaroës from Cordova claimed that the world is eternal—not created, but in a state of evolution (Singer 1959), a view which is similar to the hierarchical cosmology of today. In his impressive treatise Mugadema Ibn Khaldun (around 1400 AD) dared to oppose Plato’s view that the world could be explored by logical thinking alone. Indeed, he said that “logic is not a safe way of thinking, because of its tendency towards abstraction and its remoteness from the tangible world” (Baali & Ward 1981). This is similar to Bertrand Russell’s warning half a millenium later against ‘unaided reason’. Ibn Khaldun claimed explicitly that cosmology must be based on observations.

1.7 The Copernican System

The Ibn Khaldun idea had to hibernate for two hundred years until it reappeared in Europe, where it led to the well-known crisis which resulted in the victory of the Copernican heliocentric system (but after some time the latter had to abdicate in favour of a ‘galactocentric’ system).

1.8 The Tycho-Brahe Compromise

During the fight between the geocentric and the heliocentric cosmologies, an ingenious compromise was proposed by Tycho Brahe. His cosmology accepted that all the planets moved around the Sun, but the Sun (together with all the planets) moved around the Earth. (The Moon also moved around the Earth.) In this way he satisfied the observations which indicated that the planets moved around the Sun, but he conserved the sacrosanct geocentric cosmology. The Tycho-Brahe cosmology agreed with observations about as well as the Copernican cosmology. But it soon turned out that the basic issue was another. It was the survival or defeat of a sacrosanct myth. The myth had been sterile. It had not been able to predict a single new phenomenon which later was confirmed by observation.

(This is the first 7 of 20 pages in the complete published paper)

It appears that some clever sod has written a piece of malware which is targeting my blog. It is apparently trawling through email ID lists and registering random new users to my blog, at the rate of about 100 per day. I have no idea how to stop it.

If you have been included in this nuisance, please accept my sincere apologies. If it doesn’t die a natural death the soon, this piece of sardonic Internet programming will force me to shut my blog down and start a new one. I’m kinda wishing that the law of karma really does work, and the author of this little piece gets banished to a colony of virulent mosquitoes for the rest of his days.

If anyone has any idea how I can stop it, please let me know!