COSMIC HERETICS: Part 3 :

by Alfred de Grazia

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CLOCKWORK

It was inevitable that Deg should end up in defiance of billions of years of time. He could hardly lie on a beach unless he was exhausted from swimming and diving. He knew and disliked the stereotype of the American as restless and impatient, so he cultivated various devices and appearances that would let him seem to be casual and unconcerned with waiting upon the world. Since he was raised without the time-consuming liturgies of religion, religious routines were not a common means for stopping his time or feeling it. Sports, smoking, drinking, eating time. More than all of this, he played games against time. He wanted quick results in everything he did; but the world is not constructed to provide results, much less to provide them quickly.

The same urge to quick results inclines one toward intellectualism, because so much can be solved in the mind and the world of the imagination can be rich and malleable; fat gobs of time can be reduced to frizzled specks, and one can leap over far spaces and epochs. However, intellectualism is also opposed to both physiological and mental time-control in that it forces one to be physically inactive over long stretches of time; research and writing are termite mounds of time and a single footnote, a single bad line, can drive one to despair.

Sometimes I think that Deg was one of Alfred Adler's pure compensatory characters, who set himself very often to do precisely what he was unfit to do because of his unfitness. If under such circumstances he was not destroyed by the contradiction, it was because he often escaped into the activities already noted but also into sex, travel, brief adventures, commitments to thing extraneous. Most of all, and too important to call an escape, was his taking on two or more large tasks at the same time, so that while to the outside world he appeared to be proceeding carefully along one line, at a measured pace, he was in fact speeding along other lines and then doubling back to the first line of engagement.

Paradoxically, the intellectual who is so fretful of time's arrow hastens but to sit and stare upon dead written pages, to pitch his nervous system and organs upon his several moving digits, gaze at the stars, watch the rats run, listen, observe, and discuss only that world that his mind will accept for consideration -- all of this consuming such enormous amounts of time that those who in turn observe the intellectual cannot be blamed for thinking him mad for his dissociation and hatred of reality, his obsession, his wrestling with details, his fear and guarding of his own thoughts, his ruthless hunting down of words and meanings, amounting in the end to the squandering of the very object of his anxiety, time itself, time in the thousands of hours of which every minute, he insists, counts dear, and if this lunacy is not sufficiently oxymoronic, the time-saving time-waster can dedicate himself to time-studies.

Perhaps one-fourth of all Deg's work on quantavolution over the year dealt with time. Perhaps a quarter of the three thousand pages that he wrote were concerned with or governed by calculations of time. Before he had entered the field he had been possessed by problems of time and had written but not finished what was supposed to be a lengthy philosophical and psychological poem on the subject. By virtue of the tricks I have already alluded to, he would escape the psychiatrist's verdict of obsession, but in fact he was obsessed and his impatient and striving character often led to pitched battles against time; it was the most uncontrollable element in life.

He beat time as a child by being precocious, stripping off three years of schooling, and he became the youngest member of his graduating class at the University. But then time reacted smartly at war and he felt the full poignant irony of "Hurry up and wait" the life of the soldier. He nosed his jeep into many destroyed towns where clocks were stopped; hanging crazily, sober and still, or startled faces starting from the rubble -- they were all wrong. Are all clocks wrong? Madness about time was a disease of the poets, literati and humanists; turn to scientists, and 99 out of 100 are perfectly satisfied that they are measuring an absolute, an ever-so-old process; they are like the bureaucrat who is content to keep the entrepreneur waiting, because his check comes in regularly no matter what, while for the businessman time is money. For these scientists, there was something called the relativity of time, which was reserved for their Sunday outings.

All of this joins in with Deg's anti-authoritarianism and republicanism (which goes back to sibling rivalry) and gave him his ideological stance confronting time . If authorities would say time was long, well then he would be pleased to discover time to be short, and thus more containable and controllable. There was a contradiction here, however, but it can be explained away. Deg had always been a darwinian, but might this not have been because Darwin was anti-authoritarian, anti-theologian, too, while trying to be nice to the traditional believers? Deg was exactly like this, against the scriptures as authority, against church authority as such, but then respectful and even loving towards the many "nice" and "gentle" believers he met. How could he join the theologians, the short-time creationists? Well, he didn't really. He found them to be the most active critics of macrochronism. They were experienced microchronists, who knew the history of the defeat of microchronism well because it was their history.

The problems of time came in two batches. First there was the historical batch, epitomized in V.'s Ages in Chaos. Second, there was the geological batch, which could also be epitomized in V. 's Earth in Upheaval. Let us see what V. did with time in both regards.

V. aligned and connected Jewish and Egyptian history which had hitherto gone along on separate tracks. The alignment settled upon the Exodus at about 1450 B. C., the Biblical date tied it into the end of the 13th Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt with Hyksos invaders as the Amalekite enemies of the Biblical Hebrews. He begins the splendid 18th Dynasty of Egypt at the time of Saul and David. King Solomon he places alongside Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt, and has her, as Queen of Sheba, visiting his court. And so on.

The reconstruction attempted in his volumes on later time, as I have already indicated, fell victim to the scholars of the "British Connection."

Dropping by 500 years the accepted chronology of Egypt after the Exodus, and holding the Exodus at -1450 meant that all dates elsewhere, whether of the Near East, Greece, or finally Italy, which had been set by coordination with Egyptian artefacts and occurrences, required resetting by 500 years as well. In Greece, a gap which had been closed only by creating a barbaric "five hundred years of the Dark Ages," was promptly nominated for elimination. A grateful rush of scholars to profit from the new chronology did not occur; the Greek scholars were frozen to their Positions until the Egyptologists (all 30 of them) would admit the loss of the five centuries. Then they would follow suit. Similar scientific lags continued in the other ages affected by V. 's reconstruction of Egyptian chronology.

When did the mistaken chronology begin? V. traced the major error to Manetho of the third century, B. C. as reported and adopted later by scholars. Manetho was eager to prove to the Greeks and Asians the superior antiquity of Egyptian civilization. Berosus followed suit, exaggerating for his Assyro-Babylonian country by tens of thousands of years. Eratosthenes, soon afterwards, took up the cudgels for his Greek compatriots and moved Greek dates backwards by approximately the length of the "Dark Age." The motive of ethnocentrism thus played a large part in the beginnings of modern chronology, as it did in V.'s stupendous reconstruction itself. But it was not at all clear that the ancient chronographers following Manetho were wrong, for their errors were covered up by a heavy burden of refinements and rationalizations up to the present time. If V. had written nothing else in his life he would have deserved the highest accolades for his essay on "Astronomy and Chronology."

Soon after his first attack upon Egyptian chronology was published, V. sent a copy to Etienne Drioton, Director General of the Service for Antiquities of Egypt and received shortly one of the most nearly prefect replies an author could wish for, and, for that reason alone, as a model for my readers, I reprint it here. (My translation is from the French original.)

Cairo, May 29, 1952

You were kind to have had me sent your beautiful book, Ages in Chaos, which I received this morning, and which I have read nearly in entirely, so exciting and interesting is it. You have certainly jostled -- and with what vigor! -- many historical tenets of ours which we regarded as firmly established. But you do it with a total absence of prejudice and with an impartial and complete documentation, which is most sympathetic. Your conclusions might be argued at every step: whether they are allowed or not, they will have posed anew the problems and compelled a fundamental discussion of them in the light of your new hypotheses. Your beautiful book will have been, in every way, very useful to science.

I thank you warmly for having sent it to me and I pray you accept, Dear Doctor, the assurance of my sentiments of cordial devotion.

Etienne Drioton

V. received few such letters concerning Age in Chaos. Actually, a number of archaeological discoveries were made in the years following Ages in Chaos which tended to corroborate V. 's reconstruction of time. One of the most important of his priorities for testing was at the town of El-Arish, between Egypt and Israel, where he believed might be uncovered the capital of the Hyksos, Avaris, and, if so, then there might be demonstrated the further correspondence of Biblical and Egyptian history in revealing that the city fell to a join Egyptian-Judean army, one led by an Egyptian Prince (Ahmose?) and the other by King Saul. This excavation has not been accomplished.

V. paid attention closely to developments in carbondating, for here was one of the places which he thought might give him a quick and decisive victory. He corresponded with experts, beginning with Libby, founder of the C14 system of dating. His pathetic and persistent efforts to achieve a dating of 18th dynasty objects were put into a manuscript called "Ash," selections from which were published in 1974. To Libby he writes (October 7, 1953), "I also assume that if analyses of organic objects dating from the time of Hatshepsut, Thutmose II, III, or Amenhotep II, Akhnaton were made, the results will indicate a reduction by as much as 500 years from the conventional figures; and over 650 years for objects of Seti or Ramses II or Merneptah." At the same time, he suggests the dating of Pleistocene fossil beds and petroleum deposits, predicting a late date. Libby was unhelpful, but said petroleum datings by Cl4 had shown "great antiquity."

Now V. begins a circuit of frustration. Finally a German admirer, Ilse Fuhr, who was later to publish a fine work dealing with comets in early times, with courage and persistence obtained 25 grams of three different bits of wood from the tomb of Tutankhamen. V. was delighted and expected the results to show -820, not the conventional -1350. In another letter he did worry over the effects of original atmospheric contamination of the samples owing to a catastrophe. The University of Pennsylvania laboratory performed the tests and came up on the middle, between the conventional and heretical dating. Bruce Mainwaring had used his strong ties with the University to help arrange the tests.

Seven years later the British Museum tested reed and palm nut kernels of Tutankhamen's tomb and emerged with dates of about 846 and 899 B. C., both of which dates were never published and then seemingly lost or misplaced them. Other dates of the 18th Dynasty appeared in time, not so definite and reliable as to dismiss V.'s claims, but not such as to please him.

By this time, Deg had read Melvin Cook's article of 1970 in which, retrocalculating the Cl4 in the atmosphere, using the rates of Libby, Cook figured that the atmosphere would have had to have been constituted (or reconstituted) some 13,000 years ago. Deg's deduction was that a series of catastrophes would have created the same effect. Further, Deg observed increasingly wild fluctuations as well as a secular swing of the C14 dates from "known" dating and bristlecone pine dates as time marched backwards, and, without straining the discrepancies overly much, he could conclude that carbonating would be both invalid and unreliable before 3000 years ago, which ushered in the Venusian Age (in his terminology). Deg was further impressed by the studies of John Lynde Anderson and George Spangler, which he read in 1974, not long after their publication, that challenged the very constancy of the radiocarbon component of the atmosphere. Thenceforth he paid small heed to earlier radiocarbon readings, whether they seemed to support or oppose his theories. On the other hand, V. who had expected salvation in Cl4, could not readily denounce the system afterwards, and played on occasion the game of using Cl4 dates when convenient to do so, nor did he ever renounce Cl4 in principle.

To this day, Deg has not been able to understand how V., having succeeded in restructuring the chronology of Egypt to the end of the 18th Dynasty, could then have made further drastic changes needlessly, displacing forwards the great Kings Ramses II and III. Deg had so much confidence in V.'s ability and so little knowledge of later Egyptian history that he accepted the new chronology in toto as it came to him by word of mouth, by hasty readings of manuscript pages, and by the published volume of Peoples of the Sea when it appeared in 1977, after many years in manuscript and printer' proofs. Very soon thereafter doubts were heard coming out of the "British Connection," from persons whom Deg had come to respect. None of the Americans around V., nor V. himself, had met any of the British and were inclined to put on airs or to rant against them.

Deg did not try to follow the controversy, which was based upon close historical analysis. He thought to wait until the dust would settle. He was made uneasy by a lurking contradiction in V. 's position. The great catastrophist seemed to be putting aside catastrophism in ordering the centuries. In early 1972, William Mullen had written in Pensée that

The second point is at issue here. Deg agreed with Mullen. For example, he made the following note :

Not until 22 December 1981, do we find Deg at the denouement of his doubts; writing to Derek Shelley-Pearce (S. I. S.) in England, Deg says:

He goes on to write:

There were to be four volumes of Ages in Chaos. The first scored a large success with a group of competent heretics. The second and third volumes, not treating of catastrophe, but of chronology and archaeology, failed to persuade most of the heretics and their dates were soon replaced by a new reconstruction that tied into the first volume very well.

The reviews in the orthodox media were bad, usually attacking V. for the wrong reasons. The fourth volume was held up indefinitely by Elisheva and her daughters. Deg advised that it be printed, even if it held a basic flaw, because V., though increasingly doubtful, intended that it be ultimately published, and because V., though increasingly doubtful, intended that it be ultimately published, and because V., even when he was wrong, was more instructive than most people when right.

None, among the anti-heretics, seemed to notice that V. 's supporters, supposedly so slavish, had quickly and thoroughly analysed and rejected two thirds of his general theory of Egyptian chronology. Indeed the opponents would still proceed as before, talking of his cult and his claque. There was restraint among the heretics in attacking V.'s newer books, and Kronos hardly attended to them at all. Evidently, the heretics could also ignore books that they didn't like. Or is this what one ought to do with books that are neither catastrophic nor correct?

For a catastrophist to limit his concerns is difficult. Once you have the planets misbehaving, you must acknowledge that it may have been their wont in earlier times as well. V. decided that he had better investigate the earthly effects of prior cosmic disasters; if prehistoric catastrophes could be demonstrated to have occurred, then historical ones might become more believable. So he wrote Earth in Upheaval. V. did not set up a timetable of catastrophes. However, he adduced more evidence that the -1450 to -687 periods suffered grand natural disasters, and he introduced doubts ranging backwards. He paid little attention to the burgeoning science of radiochronometry aside from carbonating, nor did he ever exert his powers in this area. To strengthen the case for late catastrophism, he brought forward instead the studies of others on glacial melting rates, sudden ocean level drops, very recent alpine orogeny, rapidly drying lakes, waterfall cutbacks, late fossil assemblages, surprisingly recent Cl4 datings, the simultaneous devastations of civilization (using Schaeffer), excavations of warm-weather life forms and human settlements in impossibly cold zones of today, Indian traditions of orogeny and other quantavolutionary events, changes in magnetic orientations, and the large-scale ash levels on ocean bottoms.

He did not know Otto Schindewolf's work, then appearing, which tied the great periods of biosphere destruction to cosmic events and consequent radiation storms. He followed Dunbar's Historical Geology in examples of very early disastrous effects. He advanced the idea that coal was formed from biosphere masses propelled and dumped by huge tidal waves, without specifying which waves and when, and used Heribert Nilsson's studies of German coals to prove his case. He relied heavily, too, upon the early English catastrophists. He used also the work of American creationists.

In a few lines, he expressed his feeling that the uneven lengths given to the ages were "basically wrong;" The remark is strange, cryptic, confused. He "does not suggest either a lengthening or a shortening of the estimated age of the earth or the universe," and then adds irrelevantly and naively that a religious mind should not be upset by great ages. It was all rather humanistic and old-fashioned.

Deg found that the accretion of evidence of catastrophes was much easier than the application of a time scale to them. V. had not set himself to demolishing the new techniques of radiochronometry, possibly because he believed them valid, possibly, too, because he felt that he could obtain the right to his catastrophes down to Noah (6000-9000 years ago) without contending with radiochronometry, which does not begin to operate, except for Cl4 and certain tests still in the realm of the exotic, until 100,000 years back. Also V. had done practically all of his writing before the issues of radiochronometry came forward, before several of his supporters engaged in its study on their own accord, and before the creationists had worked to discredit it.

Deg set himself two tasks. One was to set up a model of past catastrophes, hence of the ages. The second was to classify and survey all existing techniques of measuring geological time, and to state the grounds for believing them invalid. He had always to bear in mind that one of them -- he ultimately included over fifty measures -- might be valid, even if grossly valid, and thereupon would seriously damage his model of natural history and at the worst render the model only an intriguing metaphor. He was surprised repeatedly as he went from one test to another to discover that none existed without a flaw or a question, either of which might be fatal to its validity or reliability.

His major teacher was a man he had not met, Melvin Cook, who went on a rampage among the uranium-lead, potassium-argon, and other tests, pointing out inconsistencies, contradictions, incompatibilities, and arbitrary assumptions. Cook was not an exoterrestrialist. His attacks are almost all from the materials of geology and chemistry. His exoterrestrialism, such as it is, comes in estimating intakes and outputs of gaseous elements from the earth's atmosphere.

Perhaps the valuable critics of radiochronometry number no more than a score. Deg could name a half-dozen besides Cook whose work he regarded as heroic and essential to establishing and maintaining his perilous stance. I mentioned Anderson and Spangler on Cl4. There was reliable Juergens who showed theoretically that the electrical environment could effect enormous changes in radiation rates, such as to annihilate time. There was N. J. G. Sykes who, in a simple test published in the S. I. S. R., gave grounds for believing that a changing magnetic field would augment or diminish radioactive decay rates. Then, too, there came Roy Mckinnon, also writing in the S. I. S. R, and Thomas G. Barnes, writing in 1977 on the recent origin and decay of the earth's magnetic field.

R. V. Gentry and his team repeatedly showed, to everyone's astonishment, that extremely short-lived polonium halos occur in the absence of parent uranium, evidencing that the host rock was formed very quickly. Coal was examined that seemed to have formed in days instead of millions of years.

Deg began to treat the longer-range radioclocks as he did radiocarbon dating, an indicator at best of relative time, and vulnerable to the kind of electro-chemical turbulence that is inherent in natural catastrophes that begin with disorders in the sky. Essentially this freed him to consider together all factors that could have left some indicator of time upon or around a specimen rock or site. Since no technique appeared by itself to be a tamper-proof, independently set, and auto-operative clock, every technique or test had to take its place in the group of indicators of time, some of which were carried into the setting to measure its time and others of which were inherent in the geology and circumstance of the setting. All too often, geophysicists came to believe that there is scientific validity in what is a purely administrative and industrial axiom -- that tools and products should be standardized in as few forms as possible -- and therefore they assumed that there must be some true superiority in a tool like potassium 40-argon 40 radiochronometry because it can physically be applied to any strange igneous (and now metamorphic) rock that is carried into the laboratory.

Deg came to rely, too, upon some very general ideas in concluding that the time of the world and of the ages may have been very short. These had an air of philosophy or, worse, homespun reasoning about them that is infuriating to technicians intercepted on their way to their laboratories and machines. For example, Woodmorappe's painstaking survey, published in the Creation Research Quarterly, of the successive occurrences of the earth's several eras, as denoted by its surface rocks, shows a preponderance of discontinuities through the series of eras. Also, the macrogeography of the Earth seems to call for a giant micro-chronic integrated episode.

Inevitably, then, the mind was jostled to close up time radically in the period between hominid and man in the face of evidence that the hominids were human-like, and very little time was required to achieve a culture. Thus, microchronism lent itself to Deg's theory of Homo Schizo.

Then, upon arriving at the notion that the earth had been recently ravaged, Deg began to wonder how the earth could have survived for very long if it had begun to suffer one after another disaster through four billion years; this led two ways; first, to shorten time in order to admit the fact that the earth still exists and has a biosphere even if, like the old grey mare of the song, "she ain't what she used to be," and, second, to postulate, even then, some backward limit in earth history to a beginning of the period of disasters, and thereupon he asked himself what might have been the first great catastrophe to threaten the world, and what started it -- giving him Super-Uranus, and a binary system in throes of disintegration, a baseline of perhaps 14,000 years for the first great destruction, and an initial electrical explosion arising naturally from a pre-existing electromagnetic system.

When Milton and he sat down to discuss the system before the age of catastrophes (now compressed into the Holocene of 14,000 years), they found no need in their binary system, with its highly productive, enormous, magnetic tube, for more than a million years to accomplish all that was new under the sun. Their model of the solar system probably included errors of great magnitude; it might have major system failures; and it might even be basically wrong: both he and Milton freely acknowledged this; but they were ready to race it against any other model in the field.

Having spent much of his life in building (not inheriting) a science, that of the study of political behavior, Deg did not take kindly to inference or statements that he did not know what science was all about. He replied sarcastically on occasion that indeed he did know what science was about and it was up to no good.

When Chaos and Creation appeared, he sent a copy of it to the University of California physicist, Walter Alvarez, in appreciation of the study his team had published, exhibiting the existence of an iridium layer that might have fallen out from a meteoroid explosion, contributing to the demise of the dinosaurs. He took the occasion to ask "whether you remain convinced of the validity of radiometric dating, granted the possibility of catastrophic radiation and heavy subterranean heating."

Alvarez replied, "In answer to your question: I consider radiometric dating to be an excellent tool that gives reliable dates. The systematics are well understood in all except the current frontier areas, and serious practitioners are well aware of the possible sources of problems and how to avoid them."

From which answer, we may all take heart. In accepting kindly the book, Alvarez wrote "It helped me appreciate clearly the difference between the basically anti-scientific, Velikovskian approach and the way a scientist would seek to understand nature." Need I say more?