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Bigger, smaller –"Alice in Wonderland" science

Ah, the travails and uncertainties of homeschooling. This chapter I’m naming “Alice in Wonderland” science.

We’re listening to “Carmina Burana” this morning, an old favorite of H.o.p.’s, because it was used in a video at a website on the “4th Revolt”, which I came across via Pen Elayne. The idea over at the 4th Revolt is that biogeography shows the earth is expanding and used to be much smaller. I couldn’t possibly give you the rundown. Go read. Please. Neil Adams is the author and he states…

On December 1st, 2005, articles on both expanding Earth
theory and the ether theory appeared in mainstream science
texts — my paper in The Journal of Biogeography and the
ether view in Scientific American. The title of The Fourth
Revolt refers to the current broad-based scientific revolution
involving these two theories…

The appearance of these papers in two different journals
on the same day is notable for two reasons:
1) Both theories have struggled for acceptance since the
first half of the 20th century.
2) And the theories are intimately connected: The ether
sink view of gravity provides a natural mechanism for
planetary and lunar expansion.

[clear]

I read and gave a profoundly distilled account to Marty on how the 4th Revolt states there was One Earth but there wasn’t this big ocean that the One Earth split up and went journeying all about willy-nilly, that instead of subduction and regurgitation the planet is expanding, something like that, in my layman’s ineffectual way of discernment, and his first question was on increase of mass and earth’s rotation. And if you go the 4th Revolt faq it’s briefly approached. And my first question and Marty’s second question was essentially, “Isn’t the expansion of planets and moons geophysically impossible and wouldn’t it violate conservation of mass?” and that too is answered in the faq with something about views consistent with ether-sink views of gravity, which I’ve not read up on yet.

Like it will make any difference to my beetle brain when I do!

Enter “Alice in Wonderland” science.

The thing is I well remember my days in science in the hallowed halls of public education and I would look at the map on the wall and I’d think, “The earth all fit together at one point, why doesn’t anyone talk about that?” Which was back in the ancient days when men were landing on the moon and no one did talk about that, at least not in schools I went to, and so I was very excited when I learned about Pangaea, a theory controversial into the ’60s, because it had been so damned obvious to me. And then there’s the time I circled on my science test the mutiple choice answer that the earth was pear-shaped rather than round. I was in 5th grade and stared at that, thinking for quite some time that my teacher could have been listening to Walter Conkrite tell me about the earth not being perfectly round but was kind of pear-shaped, or this could be a trick question where she wanted “round” as the answer. But I circled “pear” and got it wrong and when I explained to her why I circled “pear” she told me basically I was an idiot, that the books said round and that’s all that mattered was what the books said, and I decided that science in grade school was nothing but trick questions and that was that for me and science.

So, being the child who was staring at the map in the 60’s and thinking, “It’s so obvious, it all fits together like a puzzle,” but my elementary teachers were having nothing to do with that, I look at “The 4th Revolt” and think, “What do I know? Could be.” For which reason I sat briefly with my eight-year-old son this morning and told him a little about how some people think the earth is actually expanding.

When I read things such as “The 4th Revolt” I wish for some kind of easily accessible ongoing dialogue where I could recount more of the back and forth, “Could be! Can’t be!” to H.o.p. Hate the idea of H.o.p. being fed uneducated science because of an uneducated mom who looks at something and says, “Hell, could be! Let’s talk about this!”

“I’ve decided I’m going to make a movie about the day the aliens were alive,” H.o.p. is saying behind me. Which will let you know where he is mentally right now. Just right where an eight-year-old should be I guess.

On Saturday I was reading to him about how one of Saturn’s moons is geologically alive and spewing ice. Which I figured would entertain H.o.p. and did.

Right now he’s talking about Pluto being made of ice and the aliens living on it being frozen on it. He’s talking about an alien that has two heads and one head froze and the other head didn’t and the unfrozen head said, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

No biogeographers are going to happen by my blog and give me tips on homeschooling H.o.p. on biogeography. I do know that. I’m one of the unwashed masses off whose tongue science latin doesn’t easily trip.

Anyway, not knowing big from small in “Alice in Wonderland’s” world, where things aren’t always what they seem to be, I tossed a few of the ideas of 4th Revolt at H.o.p. I played the video for him. He wanted to see it again and again, because of Carmina Burana. I told him to go put on his Carmina Burana CD as I didn’t want to have to keep skipping Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” which which the video opened and which he wasn’t interested in hearing.

“Please, can I look up aliens on Firefox which keeps you safe from viruses?” H.o.p. says. While we were all worried about IE and image viruses, I was trying to get H.o.p. interested in Firefox (which he wouldn’t use) but he insisted he couldn’t use it because of aesthetic reasons, he didn’t like the arrows. So I gave him stern warning then not to google images and go floating about the internet on IE. Now the patch is out but he in the meanwhile also absorbed that Firefox was a friend and wants to Google aliens on it.

I’m placing this in the “homeschool” category but pay no attention as .myategories so don’t work here. I categorize almost nothing. Except Hanford. I categorize that. And art.

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5 responses to “Bigger, smaller –"Alice in Wonderland" science”

  1. Jim McCulloch Avatar
    Jim McCulloch

    I worked as a geology librarian for many years at the University of Texas at Austin, and a few years ago the department invited an old guy, I forget his name, an important exponent of expanding earth, to give a talk. No one was convinced by it, but no one considered it crazy. They just thought it had less going for it than plate tectonics. The mechanisms of plate tectonics are well understood and the evidence is, as scientists like to say, robust. Whereas the mechanism for an expanding earth is obscure at best.

    The reason Wegener didn’t get a hearing for continental drift was that no one could think of a mechanism for it to work. They even knew how the rocks matched up on opposite continents. But no mechanism, no dice. Once people realized how the mid-ocean ridges worked, though, it all fell into place. If a mechanism for an expanding earth is found I think it would quickly become as accepted as plated tectonics today.

    Your home schooling seems to be the cadillac version. H.o.P. is very lucky in that. Eve’s current boyfriend (a grad student in geology) was home schooled–sort of. His family lived out of a car, in a tent, actually, in an East Texas national forest. His mother had disappeared, and he and his sister were taught to read and write by their one-legged father, but otherwise the kids ran wild in the woods. But both of them have, as they say, “turned out fine.”

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  2. Idyllopus Avatar
    Idyllopus

    Thanks for the info, Jim. Was hoping for some opinions on the matter that would help me determine which mental file cabinet to place this info.

    If it’s the cadillac version of homeschooling it’s only in the flashing of rocketship styled lights and chrome at H.o.p. in a bid for attention. His grandmother just called and is asking him about how he is doing with his math and he switched the subject to telling her about the archaeopteryx and is now telling her about paleontologists finding fossils. But then blows it all by saying, “Yeah, I saw a dinosaur skeleton in a museum. It was about 50 inches high, taller than a two story building!”

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  3. cruelanimal Avatar
    cruelanimal

    I know we were disxcussing home schooling on my blog earlier in the week. One thing touched upon was institutional regimentation. What I like about your post today, and I’ve seen this with other friends of mine who I feel have home schooled well, is that connections are made — the big picture gets seen — like your insight early in life about how the forms of the map fit together.

    Education too often gets compartmentalized. You have X minutes for science, X for math, X for literature or whatever. The ties between disciplines so seldom cross. Each ununified field of study is a cubicle. You never get to look out the window and see how the physics of a sunrise makes for the perspective of long shadows on the trees. “Only connect” said E. M. Forster. Yes, H.o.p did “blow it all up” with his grandmother — because he put it all together.

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  4. Idyllopus Avatar
    Idyllopus

    You’re right and it’s one of the factors we took into accouont when we decided to homeschool.

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  5. dan donaldson Avatar
    dan donaldson

    Gday, I am also a product of home-schooling, for what its worth.
    Perhaps the search for the elusive mechanism responsible for the growth of the creature we call Earth could be subsumed into the larger mystery of why the cosmos is expanding by assuming that everything that is not electromagnetically bound (or of course bound by stronger forces such as the so-called color force), is part of the general expansion.
    Obviously, we cannot assume that everything expands, because the beauty of the insights of Carey et al with regard to the ‘exploded’ jigsaw puzzle of the continents only apply if the continents were roughly the same size and shape on the smaller globe.
    Intriguingly, if we assume the time of the universe to be c. 13.76 billion years AO [after origin], -and it is, as I will discuss below- then the presumed age of the Earth, c. 4.6 billion years, corresponds to c. 9.16 b.y AO. Thus the cosmos has also increased in radius by a factor of roughly 1.5 since the Earth was formed. This factor should be familiar to anybody acquainted with the expanding Earth hypothesis, as it is the same factor by which the planet must have grown since the continents fit together on a globe of about 4200 km radius.
    The biggest challenge for the hypothesis of the growth of the Earth to this degree is that gravity would act stronger on a smaller Earth, as the square of the distance between masses would be less. This scenario is refuted by archaic crystals and fossils, which have retained their structure over countless ages. Such evidence leads me to suspect that perhaps an increase in G has occurred in synch with the general expansion, and perhaps is even responsible for it, in some obscure manner. Perhaps this may have some bearing on the ‘flatness problem’ in cosmology, as a weaker gravity in the early universe would not be so prone to clustering, or clumpiness. Back of envelope calculations leads me to a approximate gravitational constant of 6.84 x 10^ -132 at the time of origin. Perhaps somebody with knowledge of the observed fluctuations of the CMB radiation could compare this to the smoothness of the early universe to see if these ideas have any validity at all…
    My interest in this subject flows from my recreational attempts to map the cosmos onto one A4 size sheet of paper. Obviously I could only do this with a logarithmic scale. This led me to use a minimum of 4.05096 x 10^-35, i.e. the calculation of Planck length using h instead of h-bar, which gave me an exact octave at 13.761 billion years. This was sufficient for my purposes, and I was using this figure when the best guess of the age of the cosmos was still somewhere between 10 and 15 billion years.
    Perhaps it will be apparent why subsequent estimates from the wonderful cosmologists has fuelled my interests in the fringe areas where science meets pseudoscience, and has turned me into the kind of crank who has an almost irresistible urge to harass physicists with vague and ill-educated ideas about the nature of the cosmos.
    If there is anything to this coincidence, which seems likely to me –but then it would because it made me feel like the cosmologists were confirming and encouraging my pseudoscientific nonsense- then it follows that time cannot be growing by the addition of quanta of space /time, because this would ruin the pattern. Thus I am led to the conclusion that the cosmos grows due to the growth of quanta of space, i.e. the Planck length, by some sort of ‘stretching’, which would allow me to keep my 201 octaves intact.
    Also intriguing is the fact that 21cm, apparently something to do with the wavelength of Hydrogen, is also an octave of 13.761 billion light years…
    My interest in ‘octaves’ of space, so to speak, has also been fuelled by my discovery that the wavelengths we perceive as red and violet are rather close to being ‘octaves’ of each other, which to me seems likely to explain why we perceive these colours as more similar than, say, red and green, although the latter are closer to each other in frequency. All animals that can hear apparently recognize octaves of sound as being somehow similar, and I believe that if we could perceive wavelengths of 800 nanometres, we would perceive a colour that was an octave of violet, and if we could perceive wavelengths of, say 350 nanometres we would perceive a visual octave of red.
    I am very pleased to learn that the mysterious motions of our furthest space probes fits in well with such a generalized expansion of the cosmos.
    To quote an ancient Scientific American article discussing Dirac’s large-number hypothesis: “A number of planetary astronomers have pointed out that the large rift faults in the crust of the moon and Mars imply that these bodies have expanded somewhat since they were formed, perhaps as a result of a decrease [!] in G.” Scientific American, February 1976, p. 50.
    Anybody who has anything to say to me can email donaldson@tasmail.com
    Kind Regards, Dan.

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