Dec 23, 2016 That the Christmas tree did not originally root in Christian symbolism has never been a secret. The custom to erect a Christmas tree during the winter solstice, sustaining a reminder of the summer’s verdancy and abundance of sunlight through the heart of winter, is of ‘pagan’ …
Dec 21, 2016 Whatever the explanation, it would seem that Venus’ ‘smoking’ is the same as its ‘burning’ and that such incidents – regarded as portents – occurred throughout the historical period on a decadal or centennial time scale, ruling out any dramatic scenarios such as Velikovsky’s Venus comet. The …
Dec 19, 2016 From a study of ancient sources, the catastrophist polymath Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) famously concluded that the planet Venus had presented a comet-like appearance just a few millennia ago. Instead of a puerile response of outright condemnation and censorship, the academic world ought to have invested its …
Aug 25, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. In a paper published in 1904, the Swedish physicist and chemist Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927) maintained that radiation pressure accounts for comets’ tails and the build-up of negative charges on “the atmospheres of celestial bodies, …
Aug 23, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. Up to this point, the electron had not yet been discovered. Around 1879, the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) reasoned that “solar spots are cavities by which hydrogen and other substances escape from the …
Aug 18, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. The ideas of the Irish-English physicist Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912) marked a further intellectual milestone. In a few little-known articles dated to 1870 and 1871, he suggested that cometary tails are not appendages ‘evaporated’ from …
Aug 16, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. Might the solar corona not just resemble, but actually facilitate the terrestrial aurora? The German baron Carl Ludwig von Reichenbach (1788-1869) professed as much when he posited, in 1851, that the earth’s magnetic field is …
Aug 11, 2016 PART I “The usual fate of attempts to found a cosmo-physical theory upon experimental results is scarcely such as to encourage imitators.” —Eugen Goldstein (1881) ‘Electric sun’ is a vague term, as equivocal as it would be to speak of an ‘electric earth’ or a ‘gravitational sun’. …
Mar 29, 2016 That mythology has an appetite for bizarre imagery is hardly a secret. A remarkable motif in the world’s creation myths, rarely even recognised, is that of the ‘edible sky’. A few examples will suffice to give a flavour of the theme. A 19th-century Greek myth concerning the …
Jan 18, 2016 Speculations on electrical aspects of the sun were common long before Birkeland. In a paper published in 1904, the Swedish physicist and chemist Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927) maintained that radiation pressure accounts for comets’ tails and the build-up of negative charges on “the atmospheres of …
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