COSMIC HERETICS: Part 3 :

by Alfred de Grazia

CHAPTER TEN

ABC'S OF ASTROPHYSICS

In his journal of January 12, 1968, Deg writes of a conversation with Professor Lloyd Motz of Columbia University, the same who had called the attention of scientists to Velikovsky's successful predictions of Jupiter's radio noises and Venus' high heat:

With Director of Antiquities Spiridon Marinatos in 1968, Deg met astronomer Constantinos Chassapis who had studied the Orphic Hymns and derived certain conclusions about Greek astronomy in the second millennium B. C. The Hymns, he asserted, had originated between -1841 and -1382, but probably in the 17th century. They showed the Greeks to understand heliocentricity and the sphericity and rotation of the Earth, and spoke of the attraction of the Sun as the source of orbital movement, and named the planets, the seasons, the atmosphere, and the ether beyond. Their calendar was of twelve lunar months; they identified Saturn with time; and they referred to a universal law that regulated the universe and stabilized the Earth.

Stecchini, Santillana, and Von Dechend, among historians of science known to Deg, were quite persuaded of the advanced state of the most ancient known science, so Deg was rather more impressed by the indications of modernity in Orphism, which Chassapis was exhibiting at the same time. If the hymns had originated so early, though, they went to prove a uniformitarian history of the heavens. Incompetent to challenge Chassapis' readings, Deg could but question the definitiveness of the poetic lines, which seemed indeed vague, and the technique of retrojecting the present celestial motions unjustifiably.

The Orphic Hymns, Chassapis also maintained, evidenced an early knowledge to lenses. This, too, rankled with Deg. He had worried over a mention of a lens-like object found in Ninevah's earliest levels, and had discussed the general question with Stecchini. If the Bronze Age peoples had been able to magnify the stars, meteors, planets, sun and moon, they might also have derived proportions and distances among the planets, this making Jupiter the King and Saturn the retired king. Too they might thus have perceived the rings of Saturn and bands of Jupiter. They might then for religious reasons, and because humans are anxious animals, have created a body of legends ascribing to the heavenly bodies the various adventures, including approaches to the Earth, that the revolutionaries said were historical occurrences.

Stecchini believed that the ancients had lenses, or at least would have built concave disks of copper alloys polished to a high reflectivity. He wavered often in his basic position about cosmic encounters. Always quite happy to play the game of catastrophic models, he might still be readily influenced by Santillana or another colleague to believe that other solutions might be found in the messages sent down through the ages by the earliest voices.

Deg, on the other hand, even when he postulated ancient telescopes, could not explain away the concordance among ancient voices; did they have telescopes everywhere? Moreover the explosive speech of the modern skies and terrestrial crust were seeming to make a point. Not until 1980 did a space vehicle confirm the great and incessant electrical discharges of Jupiter, but then he had for fifteen years been persuaded that the legendary electrical behavior was real, and on a much large scale than anything that might be observed today. The same concordance on many other matters was consistent, too, with ancient legend. If the ancients had telescopes, they would have previewed the catastrophes but could only have modestly exaggerated them in their mythology.

A possibility existed, he thought, that the theocratic elites, here and there, using telescopes, would purvey to the masses distorted history, where legends survive and where are perpetuated some happenings and forecasts; but there would be no compelling reason for widely divergent cultures to achieve consensus on these. Why, let us ask, would the priests of the Jupiter (Yahweh, Zeus) age, using telescopes upon calm heavens, invent catastrophic heavens of the time of the birth of Jupiter, and of the earlier times of Saturn?

For that matter, the great telescopes of the past century have not induced uniformitarian astronomers to alter their dogma of a calm celestial history. However, they have made an increasing number of observers proto-catastrophists. So telescopes, even if the ancients possessed them, could not impress catastrophes upon men who had not experienced such. If Venus simply seemed big and beautiful enlarged 50 times, why would men go berserk, catatonic, orgiastic at her regular, safe, distant approach? Fossil telescopes could not affect quantavolutionary theory. They might even support the notion of cultural hologenesis that Deg espoused.

The great Book of Venus was of course Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision. In Deg's long acquaintanceship with the book there developed practically no significant errors of astronomy or geology, errors or omission of sources, or misreporting of legends. There is some exaggeration and "purple prose", as in the title that suggests explosive impacts between the planets Venus, Mars, Earth, and Moon, which he does not claim in the book itself. The style is less timid, hesitant, than might be deemed appropriate. There are hints of arrogance as he warns of the dire fate awaiting the theses of Darwin and Newton (less unseemly today than in 1950, however). There are no appeals to religion, only rare confusions of "ought" and "must" with the factual "is". A certain repetitiveness occurs that may be impossible to avoid, but which nevertheless tends to overstress and amplify some catastrophic occurrences. He avoids scientific and pseudoscientific jargon and the coinage of terms.

I cannot here defend all of this, of which the first statement is already shocking: that "there are practically no errors of astronomy?" How can a book that enraged many astronomers commit no errors of astronomy? Apart from the main reasons, which are sociological and psychological, there occur two substantive reasons: Velikovsky established his natural history by assertions of fact; certain events either happened or did not happen and we weigh the evidence tending to the one and the other to arrive at a judgment about planetary behavior. Second, after this is done, Velikovsky asks how can the laws of astronomy permit such happenings. He understands the laws. But when the behavior of the heavens does not conform to the demands of the laws, he offers briefly some ideas as to what may improve the laws, such as the introduction of a larger measure of electrical transactions into solar system behavior. He reasons the same in respect to geology.

In legendary matters, he follows Euphemeris the Sicilian (fl. 300 B. C.) who established the scientific canon that a myth is to be explained by natural causes. And when Dorothy Vitaliano years later attacked Velikovsky while espousing euphemerism herself, she failed to realize that she was merely reducing Velikovsky, not supplanting his method, which was the same as her own.

By the standards that Cook, Bruce, Juergens, Milton and Deg came to set for sky-body conduct, Velikovsky was actually conservative and conciliatory to the establishment. He was heretical but not a full-scale quantavolutionary. Deg came to feel almost perfunctory when he argued for the middle-road quantavolutionaries like Velikovsky.

If a mini-microphone had been implanted in one of Deg's large ears, we would be entertained by a litany of quantavolution over the years, emerging from an analysis of his stream of discourse whenever the subject occurred, whether it would be in Greece, Manhattan, or Washington, Princeton, London, Thailand, or India. What happens is this: most educated people are unaware of the case for quantavolution; the subject is perennially interesting; it is impossible to state or argue a full case; certain sloganized propositions are proven over time to have an enlightening and convincing effect; these slogans are packaged and delivered in personal and group conversations, with a couple left out where unnecessary or deemed inappropriate.

I have not had the advantage of an elaborate study, but I notice the frequency of these statements, prefaced by something like: "more has happened to change the world by catastrophe than by gradual evolution."

And other such simplicities occur more or less frequently. Whether tossed out in defense or in exposition, the expressions collide with a variety of phrases with which the well-educated person is equipped, such as:

After the clash of these sets of slogans is amplified somewhat, the discussion is usually turned off or diverted. Book reviews and scientific table-talk infrequently go even as far. Once in a while a foray in strength is launched by one or the other side. Even so, rational discussion or exposition does not ensue, but rather an elaboration of one of these slogans with the citation of authorities, or with dogmas more elegantly stated.

Rarely does the exposition break out of the brush into the clearing. It would not be an exaggeration to state that in the two decades about which this book talks, no more than a dozen public presentations have occurred in which a systematic attempt has been made by a practiced and specialized scientist in the face of opposition to destroy and bury one or another facet of quantavolution, such as the capacity of moving the Earth without destroying it.

If this condition appears incredible, it is because so few people understand the sociology of scientific communication, or human discourse of any kind. Scientists can answer questions that they pose for themselves, and spend most of their time doing so, and encourage their "stooges" to ask these questions; but they cannot well answer questions that are asked by others, true others, who come out of a different mentality and have different purposes in mind.

Take an example from Deg's experience in these years from a quite distant field, political science, where in parts of three different books he proposed a single equal tax on every living soul: that the annual budget be divided by the population to figure the tax of each one. The shocks, reverberations, incomprehension, suspicions, reservations, indignation and flustered unmediated ejaculations assailing the idea make it practically impossible to present or discuss, even to the point of starting up research in the subject. Yet when he captured an honors seminar at New York University and forced the students to expel all their preconceptions and prejudices, and to dig up fresh facts, the single equal tax was not only understood by the small group, but was also preferred by them, as one after another of the terms were defined, the data researched, a sample of people interrogated, and the idea drafted into the common and understandable form of a legislative bill.

On the proposition: "Venus is a young planet," first reactions tend to be equally obstreperous and incredulous. The attack builds up rapidly:

Against these, the quantavolutionary argument, as it was developed by Velikovsky and his friends, asserts:

The idea of a double sun, the system of Solaria Binaria, as Deg named it, came with shocking suddenness. It was a monster that came leaping at him even before he had a name for it, and before he conceived of a dynamic for it. On April 28, 1963, shortly after becoming concerned with cosmogony, his journal reads:

The old order must have functioned on some basic principle, probably a simple principle. What could it have been? He knew next to nothing about formal astronomy or palaeontology or chemistry. What he was picking up might be scornfully and legitimately called static, a buzzing of voices, weak signals from many directions, from alleys and haunted houses of science, disreputable astrologies, occult references, stern and orgiastic religious cults and sects, ancient poetry, restless cemeteries of legends, the rage for science fiction, anomalies, contradictions overlooked and brushed aside.

Probably if he had not experienced the hubbub of politics and warfare, where all is said and done and almost nothing is true, he would have avoided all of this, shut his eyes, clapped his hands over his ears. Even earlier, the presumptuous liberal education at the University of Chicago, which combined in a nettlesome but hardfast marriage with skeptical sociological pragmatism, had irrevocably attuned him to ideological quarrels.

Perhaps, too, had he not been pummeled by contradictory and obstreperous personalities among his friends and family, his neighborhood and his schools, he would have been quick to settle upon a regular line of thought. And, to be sure, the din was pierced by his immoderate ambition, which clamored louder than all else for solutions. He did not wait upon his betters.

He asked himself what he could contribute, and in line with his character it had to be "the bigger, the better." It had to avoid competition with superior heretics, not to mention superior conventional scholars, whenever there appeared a well-worn path -- solar chemistry, celestial mechanics, the fossil record, and so on. His head contained a large quantity of whispers and scratches telling him what to avoid and what might be chosen. He disagreed with most of Teilhard de Chardin's work, for instance but in reading The Appearance of Man, he caught a fine phrase that would describe his own mental set: "On the cosmic scale (as all modern Physics teaches us) only the fantastic has a chance of being true." Chardin followed this course by continuing as a Catholic priest; Deg followed it more specifically.

It was strange that an old, different order of the heavens did not suggest itself much earlier. However, going through the hundreds of titles that Earl Milton and he had compiled for the research on Solaria Binaria, Deg could find no statement that the solar system had been anything but a great sun which had cast off its planets in its early history. The history had been stretched greatly over the past century, from some millions of years to several billion years. A rotating hot ball of gases, interrupted by its own violence, perhaps, had operated as a centrifuge. An alternative theory had predicted a passing body which by gravitational attraction had pulled off the planets and gone its own way.

Perhaps somewhere in the literature, as there always seems to be precedents, an obscure passage or writing would suggest that the Sun had a companion that had withered away, or, who knows, even Jupiter may have somewhere been called such a companion. If so, it remained hidden to contemporary discussion.

How did it happen that a few minds adventured in new directions? Let us extract some of the ideas that seem to have influenced the turning of thought.

Legends were gaining respect. After two centuries of general neglect, the idea of Giambattista Vico that behind legends stood a substantial truth began once more to pick up support. It is not without significance that Giorgio Tagliacozzo, an economist and employee of the Voice of America conceived a lush Tree of Knowledge whose fruit was of all the sciences and schools of philosophy and brought it to Deg publication in the 1950's. Then Tagliacozzo went on a one-man crusade to resurrect the figure of Vico and Deg became the recipient of a continuous flow of material, which, however irrelevant to Solaria Binaria, carried a message of the validity of ancient materials. There were others to come, the historians of science, Stecchini, de Santillana, von Dechend, and of course V.

But, going back, too, some twenty-five years, there were the anthropologists and sociologists whom Deg knew at Chicago, who respected the customs and ideas of so-called primitive peoples. By his simple and radical logic, it seemed always that if these people were so smart about the present, what they said about the past could not be more stupid than what the great religions said. And, if the two -- the "civilized" and "primitive" -- agreed that a great god blew a great wind over the Earth, burned it and flooded it, here might be the beginning of a historical truth. Perhaps this was not all so easy. The anthropologists hardly went farther. Nor did the historians of religion: Mircea Eliade went a great distance to establish the obsession of peoples everywhere with their traumatic beginnings, and the beginnings generally correlated; Eliade just failed to take the step, enveloped as he was in the uniformitarian song of science, to say that these earliest peoples spoke some universal truths.

Nor was it a simple matter to detour around Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other psycho-historians. Freud had his own basis for reality, a primeval cultural event establishing the oedipal complex, guilt, obsession, recapitulation and, for the cosmogonies and catastrophes, nothing but uniformitarian principles. Jung had archetypes, primeval to be sure, cosmic also, but purely psychic in origin.

Velikovsky's was a different story. He generated a formidable sometimes caricatured obsession out of ancient catastrophes, and, further, had attached to the beliefs-cum-faith of mankind an original series of skies that carried two explosive bodies the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn, then later Venus that looked like a Sun in its approaches to Earth.

To my mind, there is but little doubt that if Velikovsky had been able to focus upon the general cosmological problem of the solar system, in the last decades of his life, he would have provided an ingenious explanation of the behavior of Saturn and Jupiter within a dynamic system. He understood that Jupiter's behavior was akin to a "dark star" it being "cold" (i. e. non-luminous) but with turbulent gases, and suggested that it sends out radio noises; his unpublished talk on the subject preceded by less than a year the actual announcement of the detection of the radio signals by Burke and Franklin (1955). In the same paper containing the bold surmise, he had been arguing on the solar system and, just before mentioning Jupiter's radio noises, he had used the analogy of a close binary or double star to illustrate the presence of electromagnetic effects between stars. He had also brought forward late studies demonstrating a correlation between the positions of the planets and electrical effect detected upon Earth.

He had argued in Pensée and in conversations that Saturn must have gone nova to eject immense waters some of which flooded the Earth during the Noachian Deluge. Then X-ray emissions were discovered to emanate from Saturn, a possible sign of recent nova. On 4 November 1976, Milton was asking Deg's advice about mentioning this in a Foreword to Recollections of a Fallen Sky. "Ransom suggests that I not draw attention to this claim until Sagan et al. make some claims about Saturn's heat, magnetosphere, and X-ray emission. The point is relevant to Velikovsky's talks, but Ransom may be right, 'don't give them any points to avoid, let them commit themselves first. '"

In no case, however, did Velikovsky venture the concept of the solar system having a full binary history. In several passages here and there he broaches the idea that Jupiter and Saturn may have encountered the solar system and wreaked havoc from a distance, and he appears to have favored the idea that collisions between Jupiter and Saturn may have caused the Deluge and later on made Venus erupt from Jupiter. It was difficult to try to discuss such matters with him, and when, in his last years, Deg mentioned to him working upon a theory of Solaria Binaria he let the subject pass like a report on the local weather.

Meanwhile, most cosmic heretics who followed Velikovsky were devising schemes by which the major encounters among the planets occurred incidental to their clustering as satellites around the two giant planets, a kind of independent Olympian system interacting at a great distance from the Sun. They believed that the present solar system was occasioned by the forcible ejection of the planets into their present positions in consequence of disruptive encounters of Saturn and Jupiter, after which these large planets spaced out. What may exist in the way of specific scenarios for these occurrences rests still in private files unpublished. When Deg and then Deg and Milton came out with the model of Solaria Binaria in detail, they met with an initial refusal within V.'s circle to consider it; it was lamented that these two had "made up their minds;" the existence of Ouranos as a sky god was denied and other key assertions were denigrated.

The respect and patience of Ralph Juergens towards Velikovsky assumed proverbial proportions. Juergens devoted most of his professional life to establishing a fully electrical theory of the solar system, including especially the explanation of solar radiance as the reflection of an accumulation and dissipation of electric charge from the galaxies. When Deg asked Velikovsky, more than once, whether he could accept Juergens' theory, he would reply with a definite negative. He adhered to internal thermo-nuclear fusion as the secret of the Sun's radiation. Because Deg respected Juergens, and then came upon Melvin Cook and then Bruce and Milton, he was never of this opinion. And now, looking backwards, one must wonder whether Velikovsky should have spent with Juergens the many hours that he spent instead, and writes a book about, with Einstein.

In introducing a posthumous paper of Juergens, a "pioneer in the study of electric stars," in 1982, Milton comments that Juergens perceived the astronomical bodies as inherently charged objects immersed in a universe which could be described as an electrified fabric.

"The Sun," writes Juergens, "is the anode end of a cathodeless discharge extending from the perimeter of the solar system." The solar photosphere is comparable to the "tufted anode glow" in an electric discharge tube. The Sun gathers electrons from galactic bodies and plasma, and sends out an ion current, the solar wind, to the galaxy.

Juergens dismissed the thermonuclear explanation of the Sun's heat in favor of a galaxy-solar electric exchange. The thermonuclear theory, recently developed, sought to explain the Sun's properties of luminosity, temperature and stability by its essential chemical composition, mass and size, assuming that the Sun and its behavior are effects of the conditions in galactic space, not in its interior. So, much of his time went into seeking ways of detecting and measuring the suspected inflow, capable of reflecting a continuous output of electrical power amounting to 4 x 10 26 watts, or 6.5 x 10 7 watts per square meter; this, it happens, registers 0.137 watts per square centimeter at the Earth's position in space. The searched-for input must amount to 4 x 10 26 watts as well.

Now whereas scientists have for a long time accepted the invisible source of power known as gravitation, they have largely ignored and disdained the possibility of an invisible source known as electrical discharge in a gas. "Electric discharge is a known and observable phenomenon, yet we might live immersed in a cosmic discharge and know nothing its existence."

V. A. Bailey of Australia published in Nature (1961) his calculations, based on the data of Pioneer space probes, that the Sun must possess a net negative charge with the potential of the order of 10 19 volts. Bailey visited Princeton to meet V. and there Juergens and Deg became acquainted with him as well.

V. was always excited by indications of unforeseen electrical forces playing about the universe. Still he never accepted Juergens' theory, possibly, as he told Deg, because the thermonuclear theory seemed solid to him, and it is indeed regarded as fact by physicists, astronomers, science publicists, and of course the educated public. Since V. never read or discussed Deg's theory of Solaria Binaria, which accepted Juergens' theory and satisfied so many requirements of V.'s own reading of natural and astronomical history, it can be surmised that Juergens' theory was not working for him, V., and should be tolerated because of the usefulness of Juergen's ideas and work, whether as an ever-respectful historian of the V. Affair or as indefatigable discoverer of electrical forces and effects on Earth, Moon. Mars, Venus, and in planetary encounters. Long after Juergens pulled up stakes from the Princeton area to find a new life in Flagstaff, Arizona, partly to be "his own man," V. tried to coax him into returning to collaborate on one or another of his books.

Juergens persisted in developing his theory, while repeatedly coming to V.'s aid in the astrophysical exchanges in which V. engaged. Never was the issue of the origins and prior shape of the solar system introduced to systematic discussion. V. generally reacted negatively, even harshly, when material which he objected to or deemed irrelevant sought its way into the magazine Pensée. Ultimately the magazine was discontinued in part because of a disagreement between V. and the Talbott brothers on the question of broadening the magazine's scope. However, he behaved gently towards Juergen's material, and Juergens' ideas did receive their initial publication in Pensée where Deg could study them, along with the rebuttal of them by Princeton Physicist Martin Kruskal, to learn something about the Sun. The date was 1972. Juergens had already moved from Hightstown, New Jersey, to Flagstaff, Arizona.

Deg was by now knocking the planets around like billiard balls, looking for the right pockets. He came to realize in the legendary succession of Greek gods, which might be afforded backup from divine successions in other parts of the world, a possible sequence of real cosmic events. His basic god became Ouranos (Uranus), generally ignored by V. and the other heretics. And, reading in the century-old esoteric papers of Isaac Vail, and elsewhere, he found an original divine Heaven, which eventually produced a Sun-like figure which was still called by the name of Heaven. Thence the succession, of events took shape: Ouranos-Heaven, Ouranos-Sun, Kronos (Saturn) Sun, Zeus (Jupiter) Sun, and the antics of the Olympian family of planets -- Earth, Ares (Mars), Hermes (Mercury), Apollo, Poseidon (Neptune), Uranus-Minor and Venus. Each and every one of these had been a principal in catastrophes upon Earth, and victim of catastrophes itself.

Deg thought that these might be interacting meaningfully and in a series or succession, ending at the beginning of the present historical period, when Greek philosophy was born, which could be regarded as the Solarian Age. From that time onwards, the Sun (and Moon) seem to have been the dominating bodies of the sky and no intruder -- planetary, cometary, or meteoroidal -- appears to have played a major role in the sight of mankind, excepting always in the beliefs of astrologers that carry down to us their fossil memories.

Deg speculated as follows: there were three legendary Fathers -- Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus. Hence only these three major bodies had to be accounted for as the basis of the earlier solar system. But, since Zeus was the son of Kronos, and Kronos was the Son of Ouranos, only one body had to be accounted for, that is, Ouranos. Now, since Ouranos was originally a thick cloud enveloping the Earth when mankind's legends began and was the first subject of creation legends, this canopy-sky must have been an atmosphere thicker than any in historical experience, thicker even than those provoked by known catastrophes such as the temporary darknesses of Exodus and other legendary or pre-historic episodes and the recent volcanic explosion of Krakatoa. But finally Ouranos emerged and exposed himself, enveloped in clouds. To some, he was the Cosmic Egg.

The birth of Kronos and his revolt against his father was readily pictured as successive explosions of a super-Uranus and the establishment of the new body, Kronos. The birth of Zeus out of Saturn was analogous. The planetary children of Zeus, of different mothers, remained under his nudging regime until the settled skies eroded his rule and, indeed, all planetary rulership, except in myth and astrology.

Deg imagined that electricity might do what seemed impossible for gravitation, although he clung to both powers until Earl Milton persuaded him that all the problems could be solved without gravitation, letting Deg cling only to the inertia which he had cherished all along as the vital element in "gravitational" behavior. In 1976, he was in touch with Milton, who was coaxing a key paper from V. for his book, Recollections of a Fallen Sky. He was also in correspondence with Juergens, and he told both of them what he was up to in Chaos and Creation. Both were sympathetic.

On April 22, 1976 he wrote to Milton a memorandum of "Alternate scenarios for the shift of planets, including Earth, from a proposed binary system to the unitary solar system." He conceived of the planetary system as strung out between Sun and Super-Uranus and rotating around the common electrical axis while the axis, carrying the whole set, wheeled in revolution around the Sun. He is becoming enthusiastic:

Further exchanges took place: then came a week's discussions in New York in 1977, ten days together in Washington, D. C. in early 1978, the same in Princeton in early Fall of 1978, the months on the lonely promontory at Stylida, Naxos, by the Aegean Sea in the Spring of 1980, where most of Solaria Binaria was written in its final from. On May 26 1980, Deg notes in his journal 'Finished 1st draft of chaps II and III of Solaria Binaria with Earl Milton 1230 hours. ' He tells how they would discuss heatedly from early morning until early afternoon, sometimes arguing stridently, their voices echoing over the rocks of Stylida, putting their only competitors, the crows and seagulls, to flight. Afternoons and evenings they would write in their separate rooms. In the early summer of 1981 they met again in Princeton and New York, and again in late 1981, spending a strenuous ten days at Edward de Grazia's beach house at Rehoboth, Delaware to complete a manuscript of the full work. Leroy Ellenberger, not far away, called repeatedly but was not invited to come, for a visitor would have disrupted the relentless pace through the manuscript. (This incident may have triggered Leroy's animosity, who before had been deferential and complaisant.) Pages of notes and reprints lay in piles about the large room, on the floor, the chairs, the tables. Upstairs Ami worked quietly at her novel. Outside the low sun beat weakly upon the great beach and roaring waves. They drove to Annapolis to visit St. John's College where Bill Mullen and Joe de Grazia were now teaching. Deg and Ami dropped Milton off at the Washington Airport amidst a howling blizzard for his long flight back to Alberta.

The notes and manuscripts had traversed the continent and the Atlantic Ocean several times, punctuated by messages and phone calls, and by "Did you receive....?" letters, with chapters and cassettes chasing the men like heat-homing missiles. By the Spring of 1982 the book was completed and stood in line for publication.

So ambitious a work should have been created under ideal conditions, with at least a solid year of side-by-side collaboration and next to a giant library. If they had waited for this setting, the book would never have been written. Milton had been troubled by asthma most of his life. He was placed under great pressure in the writing of Solaria Binaria. The discussions were heated, the environment often strange, yet he was less troubled by poor health when they were exerting themselves upon their creation to the point of exhaustion. Milton worked steadily over the years to make a respected place for V. and quantavolution in Canadian thought. He was a popular teacher and, at some risks to his career, he systematically introduced the new ideas into his courses. Canadian higher education employs outside evaluators whose word goes far on matters of curriculum and promotion. He was able successfully to fight off professional criticism of his innovations in teaching and writing, and ultimately achieved an influential role as spokesman for quantavolution.

He was a principal agent in persuading his faculty to offer an honorary doctorate to V., the only one ever given him, and within a decade he was once more agitating at the University for the same honor on behalf of Deg. He held meetings, journeyed to contact potential supporters, wrote reviews, spoke on the radio, and was an organizer of the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. He was the principal Canadian representative in England and the United States. Only Irving Wolfe, at the University of Montreal, and Dwardu Cardona, living in Vancouver, approached him in effectiveness and productivity. Two papers of Milton, written at the turn of the decade, one erasing gravitation as a necessary concept in celestial mechanics, the second dealing with Earth-Venus close transactions, are among the classic expositions of astronomical quantavolution.

Ralph Juergens was struck down by a heart attack in 1979, a few weeks after Stecchini expired, and a few weeks before V. died. He was gearing up to participate in the writing of Solaria Binaria. I doubt that the final manuscript would have been much changed if Juergens had taken an active hand. Milton thinks not. He had gone over the general theory with him, and Juergens had received in 1976 and 1977 Deg's skeleton of the book and chapters from Chaos and Creation. In Juergens' home, Deg's accumulated manuscripts were used as a raised seating facility for Milton's little son Davin, when they were visiting.

Afterwards Milton examined Juergens' rigorously organized archive of materials and manuscripts; Solaria Binaria would have been improved, but no contradiction would have ensued, given Juergens' outlook. Deg and Milton dedicated the work to Juergens, for his electromagnetic theory was deeply implicated in it. To the dedication the ancient fragment 64 of Heraclitus was appended: "Lighting steers the universe." Deg wrote a poem to his memory and sent it to his widow. It was printed in The Burning of Troy, along with an oratorio to Stecchini and a memorial to V.

In 1979 he was beginning a friendship with geology Professor Frank Dachille at Pennsylvania State University to whom he sent Chaos and Creation, and who engaged himself in the new astrophysics.

Dachille wrote to Deg:

It is depressing to many to think that the planets may have once undergone displacement; it is much more depressing to think that they may have changed motions recently. Of course we must admit that displacements must have occurred to bring the planets into existence, and to place them where they are now. But very few astronomers and philosophers have let the planets shift thereafter, and practically none allowed this within the time span allotted to mankind.

Malcolm Lowery, in a letter to the London Times Literary Supplement August 27, 1976, named several latter-day movers.

Robert Bass in 1974 exposed the prevailing common misunderstanding of the mathematics describing planetary stability, even when based upon present recorded behaviors, such that planetary orbits could not be proven stable for more than a few centuries or millennia. W. M. Smart, wrote Bass, "demonstrated unquestionably that the interval of assured reliability of the La Place-Lagrange perturbation equations is at most some interval 'small' relative to 300 years; Prof. W. M. Smart's exact words are 'one or two centuries."

Bass went on to apply to astronomers the kind of pragmatic critique that impresses experts in propaganda analysis: "... Whenever these authoritative statements about time intervals of validity have been made, they are without exception accompanied by words like 'supposed, ' 'appeared, ' 'hope, ' 'seems' 'might, ' and 'think, ' revealing clearly that the writer was relying on his personal intuition rather than quantitative evidence."

Bass repeated his findings at a Glasgow (Scotland) conference held by the S. I. S. in April 1978, where there appeared to speak also Astronomy Professor A. E. Roy. Roy agreed with Bass, saying that "even under Newton's law of gravitation, we have not changed by more than 1 or 2 percent over a period of more than, say, 50,000 years." This figure allows humanly witnessed perturbations, but is not enough for the wilder of the cosmic heretics, who want to bring changing planetary orbits within memory of myth-making man and even historical mankind.

Thus it occurred that when Melvin Cook, Ralph Juergens, Earl Milton, Eric Crew, Deg and others -- and V. in principle -- wanted to move the planets more, and recently, they turned to electromagnetics, and Bass once more, now in 1978, applauded their heretical stance, affirming that "if planets approached closely, there would be electrostatic and electromagnetic interactions not predicted on the basis of orthodox theory."

This was not enough. The solar system had to operate as a electromagnetic system, and, though Bass produced an awareness of the sources of such theory, in Juergens and Cook, it was Milton who, with Deg cheering from the sidelines, took the fatal leap onto the plane of non-gravitational fully electromagnetic operation of the solar system.

In a paper circulated in 1979, called "10 -36 =0" to connote the vastly superior forces at the disposal of electricity by contrast with gravitation, Milton wrote that the phenomenon of gravitation implies "an interaction of slightly unequal strong electrical repulsions between distantly separable objects (or centers) that yield a weak net attraction." Thus masses vary when determined gravitationally insofar as they represent an electrical transaction between two bodies of unequal negative charges. In close encounter masses undergo polarization and transact strongly as dipolar bodies. Rapid and forceful exchange of charge then occurs which can modify motions significantly and suddenly. Hence the absolute level of electric charge on a body is indeterminate, as is, for example, absolute motion under relativity theory.

Deg's image of the whole solar system as consisting of bodies lined up between Super-Uranus and Sun within a tube of gases and rotating with the gases around a discharging electrical current, with the whole system falling apart recently into its present configuration, proved to be just the mechanism to display a non-gravitational system, and Deg, who had never quite understood gravitational mechanics in the first place was happy to observe his model work nicely within the systems of permissions and restraints belonging to electromagnetic theory. He was doubly pleased because he had been so fond of Juergens and found Milton so congenial: one should not dismiss compatibility in scientific achievement; any scientific (or social group) manager will be glad to elaborate the proposition: compatibility is as important as computability. An eloquent instance of this proposition suffuses James Watson's autobiographical account of the construction of the DNA molecule in his book, The Double Helix (1968).

V. was the Great Hostess, in the earlier time, of this whole business; he took no active part at all in it, and the heretics dutifully thanked him at every opportunity in their writings. It will be remembered that Juergens left the Princeton area in flight from the domineering proximity of V. Milton was too far away to be captured intellectually, though he was continually active in defending V.'s views. What Deg received from V. in the theory of Solaria Binaria was nil; all he got from V. was the useful dogma that electricity had been neglected by scientists and was an essential factor in cosmic encounters. Whether V. discussed much of importance with Einstein will not be known until the manuscript devoted to this subject is made available. My hunch is that Einstein retarded V.'s growth in electromagnetics just as V. retarded the growth of some heretics in this regard.

V. made no attempt to relate his work to that of Charles E. R. Bruce of the Electrical Research Association of England, whose seminal work of 1944 on electrical discharges in astrophysics had been the basis for correspondence initiated by Juergens in 1965, and whose work was introduced by Juergens in Pensée in 1973. Bruce was a cosmic heretic whose ideas made little or no impression upon British astronomy. They were carried into the British quantavolutionary circle by Eric Crew when it was organized. To this day his one hundred and more articles and notes have not been published in assembled form. Milton caught on to Bruce in the early seventies, Deg after his meeting with Crew in London in 1976.

Bruce observed the first identity between the velocity of propagation of a solar prominence and an electrical discharge in 1941, when at a lecture he heard of Evershed's photograph of a solar prominence that had reached a height of a million miles in an hour. He writes, "I thought, 'If that isn't about 3 x 107 cm sec-1, I'll eat my hat. ' It was, as a little mental arithmetic, confirmed on an envelope when the lights went up, established -- and I was in business as an astrophysicist." He thereupon published privately A New Approach in Astrophysics and Cosmogony, copies of which several cosmic heretics came ultimately to possess. Galaxies were seen by him to be structurally determined as electrical fields. Magnetic fields spring up around cosmic flares and bolts. In cosmic discharges, matter aggregates along the discharge channel, and in this process of electrical breakdown "one can forget about the force of gravitation, as every arc welder knows." This discovery Bruce attributed to Bellaschi of the American Westinghouse Company in 1937. Jets and balls of hot gases are formed in the process. Bruce also applied the notion of pinched-off discharges under extreme pressures to the extinction of novas. Juergens and Milton pushed Bruce's electrical interactions between stars and atmospheres into stellar interiors, the greatest step in obviating the need for gravitational theory.

V. lacked the capacity to give and take; he would disrupt any on-going thought processes to call all hands to shoo the chickens out of his backyard. Those heretics, like Rose and Vaughan, who opted to exercise their intellects in his garden, found themselves becoming over-specialized in certain crops, interpreting Venus tablets and calculating conceivable orbits under conventional restraints. This is only to say that such heretics became unfortunately limited despite their eminent suitability for larger tasks; they were also diligently occupied, as was the solaria binaria trio, in developing the larger network of heretics and playing firemen for V.'s fires (some of which were arson).

The progress of quantavolution in the astrosphere required an electrical model. Fortunately it could profit from a considerable advance along the whole front of electromagnetic studies which was occurring in conventional science, as well as from the work of the heretics themselves. But one ought not forget that the theory of quantavolution in the atmosphere was sustained too by heavy inputs from faraway field: myth analysis, paleontology, and critical geochronology.

Deg's assurances that the fossil voices of myth and legend were speaking truths of the skies kept the theory from flying off to join the conventional dogma that change could only happen hundreds of millions of year ago. They also blocked the hopeful theory that comets and meteors could take the place of the planets.

In paleontology we have this remarkable logical position, perhaps exposed for the first time by Professor Roy in explaining why astronomers should prefer a longer rather than a shorter period of celestial stability:

What Roy is saying here is that, for no other reason, a long term stability of the solar system is acceptable because it has taken so long, according to the fossil record, to evolve life and its peculiar, complex structures. Further the rocks are datable by radiochronometry and the Sun is datable by its self-burnup rate. This is nice: here we have the queen of sciences, to which the other sciences had looked for their assurance, abandoning its throne and asking for refuge among the fossils of the rocks and the furnaces of the Sun.

Effectively, however, the quantavolutionists had spotted this cross disciplinary mutual rescue society, and had begun to launch assaults against the positions of the other disciplines as well. Juergens had fully disestablished the thermonuclear theory of the Sun, so far as some heretics were concerned, and substituted (with Cook) a galactic electric-collecting model.

So far as the fossil record is concerned, Bass in 1978 accords Cook the honor of having achieved the main victory over radiochronometry. (The old catastrophists, such as Price and V., had done the job on conventional stratigraphy and erosional gradualism in geology.)

Deg had supported Juergens in several works, and had relied heavily upon Cook in attacking the full range of dating tests offered in support of great ages of time. I have not yet introduced the several other contributors to the demolition of time measures. They appeared in the pages of Pensée, the Creation Research Society Quarterly and the SISR for the most part. The attack requires hundreds, not a dozen, writers, however. But still there must be a elite, leaders of the republic of science, like Robert Bass. Everyone got a lift in spirits with his appearance upon the scene, a stocky dark man, bespectacled, a convert to Mormonism it appeared, with a weakness for women which, Deg reflected, was in keeping with history and not incompatible with his experiences of Mormon friends who came out of the West to the University of Chicago in the 1930's. Bass was associated with Brigham Young University, where, paradoxically, catastrophists were unwelcome in the sciences; a story goes that Bass forgot to sign and return his contract, lost his tenure, and, in order to retrieve it, was asked to agree to submit to pre-censorship of his publications, which he refused. Bass was covered with the medals of scholarships and degrees and when he showed up, it was like a troop pinned down by continuous fire greeting a marksman with just the right gun.

Bass took aim at the brain center of the opposition, the reliability of planetary motions, and fired. The shot was on target. Blasted was the astrophysics of orderliness. His troops cheered. The opposing line continued firm; hardly a surrender or desertion. It seemed that the facing army lacked a brain center. It operated just as well by rote.