Existence of Large Australian Dinosaur Queried

Australia’s biggest carnivorous dinosaur forced to take a walk

Hypothesised reconstruction of the large Lark Quarry track-maker. Illustration by Anthony Romilio, The University of Queensland.

Hypothesised reconstruction of the large Lark Quarry track-maker. Illustration by Anthony Romilio, The University of Queensland.
Doubt has been cast over the only known piece of evidence that large carnivorous dinosaurs once roamed Australia, following new research by The University of Queensland (UQ).

A set of footprints at Lark Quarry Conservation Park, south of Winton in central-western Queensland, was the only evidence that Australia was once home to large carnivorous theropod dinosaurs as big as Tyrannosaurus rex or Allosaurus fragilus.

For the past 30 years, these footprints were believed to show a large meat-eating dinosaur chasing a herd of smaller dinosaurs. The site is world famous as it is also thought to be the only example of a dinosaur stampede.

However, a new study by palaeontologists from UQ has shown that these tracks probably don't belong to a large theropod at all, and were most likely left by a large herbivore akin to Muttaburrasaurus.

UQ's School of Biological Sciences PhD candidate, Anthony Romilio, led the research, which has been published in the latest issue of the journal Cretaceous Research.

Mr Romilio made the discovery after comparing the lengths and other characteristic measurements of the famous footprints.

“Making the distinction between the three-toed tracks of herbivorous ornithopod dinosaurs and the three-toed tracks of carnivorous theropod dinosaurs can be quite difficult,” Mr Romilio said.

“This confusion has lead to numerous ornithopod dinosaur tracks being incorrectly identified as belonging to theropods, and vice versa.

“Since 1979, the large three-toed tracks at Lark Quarry have been regarded as being similar to Tyrannosauropus footprints from the US.

“As the name implies, these tracks were thought to have been made by T. rex. But in 1994 it was shown that they most likely belonged to a large ornithopod dinosaur, not a theropod,” Mr Romilio said.

“Ironically, these were probably similar to the dinosaurs upon which T. rex preyed.”

The UQ researchers took measurements from all eleven footprints at Lark Quarry and compared the shape with other ornithopod and theropods footprints from around the world.

Threshold values for specific foot proportions enabled them to distinguish between the tracks made by each type of dinosaur.

“The footprint analysis shows overwhelmingly that the Lark Quarry tracks were made by an ornithopod dinosaur,” Mr Romilio said.

“The best preserved prints show a remarkable similarity in overall size, shape and claw outline to ornithopod tracks from Canada named Amblydactlyus gethingi. These features mean that we need to re-name the large Lark Quarry tracks Amblydactlyus cf. A. gethingi.

“The footprints were probably made by a large ornithopod, standing over 2.5 metres tall at the hips. The claw impressions indicate that it was one of the more primitive members of this dinosaur group. Based on the age and location of Lark Quarry, we propose that the track-maker may have been a dinosaur similar to Muttaburrasaurus langdoni.”

Fossils of Muttaburrasaurus are known from similarly aged rocks near Muttaburra and Hughenden, both of which are only a few hundred kilometres from Lark Quarry.

Mr Romilio's supervisor, Dr Steve Salisbury, said the previous identification of the Lark Quarry tracks as belonging to a T. rex- or Allosaurus-sized predator was central to the interpretation of the track site as a stampede.

“The approach of the large dinosaur was thought to have triggered the stampede of 150-170 smaller dinosaurs across a mud flat nearly 100 million years ago,” Dr Salisbury said.

“Whether the presence of a large herbivore like Muttaburrasaurus was enough to spook a herd of smaller dinosaurs into a stampede is now unclear. Further research on the actual nature of the stampede itself is what we are now focusing on.”

For further information about dinosaur research at UQ, visit www.uq.edu.au/dinosaurs.

Media: Anthony Romilio (+61 7 3365 1398 or + 61 430 514 169; a.romilio@uq.edu.au); Dr Steve Salisbury (+61 7 3365 8548 or + 61 407 788 660; s.salisbury@uq.edu.au); or Kathy Grube (+61 7 3346 0561, k

A Scientific Imperialism

... contrary to the generally-held media-imposed assessment of things, there is very little real science these days. Instead, we labor beneath a scientific imperialism which, having usurped the place of theology and of metaphysics in the true hierarchy of sciences, puts upon unwitting school children and witless TV addicts, its own preferred heliocentric-evolutionary ideology into which it bends every empirical fact. This monstrous establishment of academic sophistry lords it over every aspect of intellectual life today and has succeeded in convincing almost everyone that this science falsely so called is the sole possessor and distributor of all truth and rationality.

But the truth is irrepressible and will break forth from under the dead weight of error willy-nilly ....

Taken from Net article, The 'Rotating' Earth. http://sites.google.com/site/abafte/geo

Physicist Stephen Hawking Thinks to Replace God with an M-Theory

The Hawking and Dawkins assault on our belief in the existence of God.





Following on from the determined efforts by one of the most famous atheistic scientist of our times, Richard Dawkins, to discredit religion once and for all in his book God Delusion, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has declared that his latest work shows that there was no creator of the universe.



Stephen Hawking solemnly declared, prior to the publication of his brand new book The Grand Design (September 2010), that God did not create the universe. The point is, he says, that our universe followed inevitably from the laws of nature.


Does Hawking’s ‘scientific encyclical’ finally pronounce doom upon all theology, just as Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was said to have done in the case of metaphysics, thereby bringing it completely to an end?


And just what are these alleged ‘laws of nature’? From whence did they emanate?


The German scientist-philosopher Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), though he probably retained his belief in God, was forced to conclude - due to the logic of his quirky epistemology (or how knowledge is acquired) - that all intellectual proofs for the existence of God were invalid and that all metaphysical contentions were groundless. Richard Dawkins, by contrast, is a virulent atheist who is on a hell-bent mission to destroy all belief in God.


Stephen Hawking for his part, who has met with the most recent two popes, is perhaps more ambiguous than Dawkins. Hawking has, in his search for the ‘theory of everything’ - a preoccupation of scientists today - referred to ‘God’ in such fashion that one might have been led to conclude that he does actually think that God exists.


Thus prize-winning author, Graham Farmelo, has commented:

It is perhaps a bit rich for Hawking to make God redundant after granting him/her/it a celebrity cameo at the end of his multi-million selling A Brief History of Time. In his famous conclusion to the book, Hawking wrote that if scientists could find the most fundamental laws of nature "then we should know the mind of God".
But then Farmelo adds: “To be fair, he was writing metaphorically – we all know what he meant”.
Hawking, according to Dr. H. ‘Fritz’ Schaefer of the University of Colorado,

… is probably the most famous living scientist. His book, A Brief History of Time, is available in paperback …. It has sold in excess of 10 million copies, and I think he sold about five million before the paperback version. For a book to sell so many copies is almost unheard of in the history of science writing.


There has been a film made about the book. The film is also good. There has even been a book made about the film. Hawking has a wonderful sense of humor. He writes in the introduction of the second book, "This is the book of the film of the book. I don't know if they are planning a film of the book of the film of the book." [Schaefer’s 1994 lecture, University of Colorado, “Stephen Hawking, The Big Bang, and God”]



A Brief History of Time is considered to be the most popular book about cosmology ever written.


Stephen Hawking has claimed in his writings that "the actual point of creation lies outside the scope of presently known laws of physics," and a less well-known cosmologist, Professor Alan Guth from MIT, says the "instant of creation remains unexplained." Indeed, the kind of science done by Stephen Hawking and others has an almost religious ring to it. He and his colleagues are trying to find the patterns in the basic fabric of reality – the mathematical laws that they believe govern the workings of nature at its finest level.



But can physics, which admittedly has delivered such great technological benefits to our modern world, serve also to determine for us whether or not God exists?


And are the new physical scientists legitimately able to take the place of the theologians and the metaphysicians?


Should we now consider that the traditional view of a rational knowledge above (supra) physics and serving as a handmaid to theology has been rendered obsolete, just as scientists tell us has been the fate also of the traditional cosmology?


Certainly Richard Dawkins would say so.


________________________________________


Dr. "Fritz" Schaefer is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize and was recently cited as the third most quoted chemist in the world. "The significance and joy in my science comes in the occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, 'So that's how God did it!' My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan." --U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 23, 1991.




But Dawkins’s virulence is now starting to annoy even his fellow atheists. Thus David Penberthy, writing for Sydney’s Daily Telegraph (16th September, pp. 66-67), and entitling his article, “Atheist zealots a heavy cross to bear”, contrasts the approach of Dawkins with the milder form of American physicist Bobby Anderson, who has mischievously suggested that Earth has been created by a flying spaghetti monster, and who has requested for his ‘religion’, which he calls Pastafarianism, to be included in the Kansas curriculum:

For Anderson, what started as the highly specific ridicule of teaching theological nonsense as science has now ballooned into a more generalised form of juvenile abuse towards anyone who believes in God. ….
Yet Anderson is a paragon of non-believer civility compared to the brilliant English scientist and celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and other books on human evolution and natural selection.
A few years ago Dawkins fired off a particularly narky text – The God Delusion – which became a best-seller ….


The God Delusion starts off promising a reasoned and scientific examination of why there is no God and can be no God, but soon descends into schoolyard teasing of the flying spaghetti monster variety.
Anyone who saw Dawkins’ bullying effort on the ABC’s Q & A last year would recall the manner in which he continually interrupted and shouted down other panellists who disputed his view.


The irony here is that the thing which has always fired up atheists, such as me, is a dislike of the righteousness which many religious people display.


There is an impertinence at the centre of religion, namely the conviction that your God is the one and only and that everyone else is deluded in following a rival God or no God at all.


But this spiritual impertinence can be found in equal measure among many atheists, with the latest entrant to their number being none other than Australia’s own Koran-smoking Bible-inhaler [Brisbane legal academic Alex] Stewart.
… If [all] this is the best atheists can do it’s no wonder some of us are thinking about taking our non-faith and quietly returning to the closet.

Stephen Hawking apparently has no intention of doing this. Whilst being less bullying than Dawkins and less blatantly offensive than Alex Stewart, Hawking has now emphatically joined their chorus, if he wasn’t there already before. According to Farmelo’s assessment, God and all that pertains to Him has been rejected by Hawking, and has been replaced with Hawking’s view of a scientific explanation:

[Hawking] now suggests that the search for this particular Holy Grail is over, now that scientists have come up with a type of theory, known as M-theory, that may describe the behaviour of all the fundamental particles and force, and even account for the very birth of the universe. If this theory is backed up by experiment, it might perhaps replace all religious accounts of creation – in Hawking's capacious mind, it already has.

But: “One problem with the theory”, Farmelo believes, “is that it looks as though it will be extremely difficult to test, unless physicists can build a particle accelerator the size of a galaxy”. Yes that is quite a problem.
And Farmelo adds: “Even if the experimenters find a way round this and M-theory passes all their tests, the reasons for the mathematical order at the heart of the universe's order would remain an unsolvable mystery”.
But Farmelo, despite his caution, can still say:

There is plenty of evidence that these [scientific] laws hold good all the way back to the beginning of time, which is how scientists have put together an extremely detailed and well-tested theory of the Big Bang, the first few minutes of the universe. The Large Hadron Collider will soon be reproducing, at will, the conditions in the universe within a billionth of a second of the beginning of time.

And hence, he believes, the tendency for scientists to theologise:

This has led writers to invest these experiments with a theological significance. The distinguished experimenter Leon Lederman labelled the Higgs particle, being sought at the Collider, as the God Particle, with no good reason except as a hook to promote his book, which he named after it.

“Yet these experiments will tell us nothing about God”, Farmelo concludes. “They will simply steer us towards an improved theoretical understanding of our material universe, ultimately in terms of principles set out in mathematics”.
Such are the firm opinions of scientists and even apparently of those who consider that God does exist. And even certain scientists who like to regard themselves philosophically as Thomists, or vice versa, can be found amongst those who think that the laws of theoretical physics are actually uncovering the secrets of nature.
But are they?
Though scientists with a firm belief in God would place Him above all this, so Farmelo believes:

Even religious scientists – and there are still a few – never use the God concept in their scientific work. Perhaps it is time for a moratorium on the use of the concept in popularisations, too? This would avoid mixing up scientific and non-scientific statements and put an end to the consequent confusions. I think it wise for scientists and religious believers to keep out of each other's territory – no good has come out of their engagement and I suspect it never will.

Indeed, the matter is far too vast to be explained by a popular writer such as Farmelo. And so he is forced to a pacifist kind of conclusion that the best tactic is for scientists and people of faith just to stay right out of each other’s way and thereby avoid an almighty clash.
A philosopher of scientist, on the other hand, will need to face the key issues squarely and try to provide answers to the kinds of questions being posed in this article; for example, whether scientists really are entitled to go as far as they are now going in terms of theologising? This question takes us to the very heart of modern science.
The world in which the typical physicist moves is a world of great order and beauty. And it has its own distinctive mathematically based language. But is it also the real world, as the physicists are now claiming - given their pontifications - and is the language that they talk, and use to communicate amongst themselves, really a grammar of nature? Are scientists really discovering laws about nature, or are they in actual fact writing their own laws into nature? This has become a fundamental question of our age, the answer to which is imperative if we are to defend - or are still to see the need to bother to defend - all of the bygone traditions. And Dawkins and Hawking, who have brought the science-religion debate right back into the limelight, and who seem to be carrying the day, have made all the more urgent the answer to such questions, touching on the very nature of modern physics.
Since these are philosophical questions, it would be normal to expect that only those well schooled in philosophy would be in a position to tackle them. Physics is a highly rigorous and demanding world of its own, and one must wonder if someone as fully absorbed in it as a Stephen Hawking could have the time and the inclination also to master philosophy. Can such people be objective enough about their own science to be able to philosophise about what it really is? We know that creative people, such as artists and writers, can sometimes be the worst people to commentate about their own output - so immersed are they in what they are doing. It is often necessary for informed critics instead to provide that objective assessment of their creative work. And the very same applies to physics. Those who do physics are not necessarily those who know what physics is. To explain it, to classify it properly in the order of being, is the task of genuine philosophers of science. About two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant, a professional philosopher (though by no means a Thomist) with a deep knowledge also of science and mathematics, was able to make such an assessment and to say what the new physicists were actually doing. These, he said were actively imposing their a priori laws of nature upon the world (as opposed to the traditional scientists who had looked to study the world as it is). Thus the new physicists were, contrary to what they themselves imagined, engaging with nature only at the end rather than at the very beginning (if at all).
So the answer to our questions concerning whether or not physicists such as Stephen Hawking and his colleagues, in their trying to find the patterns in the basic fabric of reality, are actually revealing true laws of nature, and whether the new physics can justifiably be said to render obsolete God and theology, is an emphatic No. These people, as physicists, live in their own little theoretical worlds and communicate the one to the other with their fantastic mathematics and complex equations. It is to a great extent a world of science fiction. Perhaps it is fitting, therefore, that that other scientist (non physicist though) whom we have had cause to mention, Richard Dawkins, is married to an actress, Sarah “Lalla” Ward who became known from her appearances as Time Lady Romana in the British science fiction favourite, DR WHO.
Rather fittingly, then, John Cornwell tells that “the encomiums on the dust-jacket [of The God Delusion] feature a line-up of writers in the realm of fantasy fiction” (Darwin’s Angel, p. 10). The mathematical laws devised by physicists like Hawking are not laws of reality, but laws by which nature can be quantified and harnessed for utilitarian and scientific purposes. This was well understood by another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (d. 1951), when he wrote in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (6.341), in relation to the science of Sir Isaac Newton, that the Newtonian mechanics tell us nothing about the world: but what does tell us something about the world is the precise way in which it is able to be described by these means.
The real existence of many of the elements and particles so fundamental to modern science has never been proven. The same applies to Dark Matter. Recent newspaper articles carried headings such as “Dark matter discovery hopes raised at US mine”, but nothing has been proven. These elements belong to the world of artifacts, partly included in the ancient notion of entia rationis, or objects of thought incapable of existing outside the mind. It is a very low platform level of being indeed from which to presume to mount a Tower of Babel-like challenge against God the Supreme Being.
In time one great system of physics, such as Newton’s - in its day considered to be set in stone - will be rendered obsolete and will be replaced by another, more practically useful (for prediction purposes) model.
That is proof enough that modern physics is not fixed.
Farmelo (op. cit.) says somewhat similarly:

Science and religion are about fundamentally different things. No religion has ever been rendered obsolete by facts or observations, but this happens to most scientific theories, at least in the long run. Science advances over the wreckage of its theories by continually putting theoretical ideas to experimental test; no matter how beautiful a theoretical idea might be, it must be discarded if it is at odds with experiment. Like any other human activity, science has flaws and does not always flow smoothly, but no one can seriously doubt the progress it has made in helping us understand the world and in helping to underpin technology. A useful characteristic of a scientific theory is that it must be possible, at least in principle, for experimenters to prove it wrong. Newton and Darwin, two of the greatest theoreticians, both set out ideas in this way, putting their heads on Nature's chopping block. In Newton's case, at least, his ideas have been superseded after proving inadequate in some circumstances. Unlike many religions, science has no final authority; the Royal Society, the UK academy of sciences, expresses this neatly in its motto "Take nobody's word for it". No religion has ever been set out in terms of scientific statements.
….
The most famous atheist scientist of our times is the fearless Richard Dawkins, whose God Delusion set out to discredit religion once and for all. For him, it was Darwin's theory of evolution that dealt the fatal blow to religious belief. Powerful and eloquent though it was, religion continues to flourish, and scientists (albeit a minority) continue to go to church, just as Galileo, Newton, Faraday and others have done in the past. I suspect that none of them would have abandoned their respective faiths after reading Dawkins (admittedly, not a scientific statement). Religions will survive so long as they steer clear of making statements that can be shown to be factually wrong.
Yet this is where religion can sneak back into the picture. Einstein, to the frustration of many of his colleagues, was fond of referring to God when he was talking about the laws expressing the fundamental harmonies of the universe. As Dawkins rightly stresses, it is quite clear that Einstein did not think of God as a white-bearded benefactor capable of interfering with the functioning of the universe. Rather, Einstein followed closely the views of the philosopher Spinoza, for whom the concept of God is an expression of the underlying unity of the universe, something so wondrous that it can command a spiritual awe.
Einstein's views were largely shared by his acquaintance Paul Dirac, the greatest English theoretician since Newton. Dirac, like Newton and Hawking, held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University. For Dirac, the greatest mystery of the universe was that its most fundamental laws can be expressed in terms of beautiful mathematical equations [sic]. Towards the end of his life, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Dirac often said that mathematical beauty "is almost a religion to me".
As a young man, he was an outspoken atheist, drawing his colleague Wolfgang Pauli to comment, "There is no God and Dirac is his prophet." Decades later, in 1963, Dirac was happy to use theological imagery: "God is a mathematician of a very high order." He was speaking metaphorically, but we know what he meant.
Yet I think it is misleading, especially when talking about science to non-specialists, to play fast and loose with the idea of God.

Scientists can tend to re-cast ‘God’ according to their own mathematico-scientific proclivities.
A very good account of the limitations of modern science, and how it can lead us away from reality, can be found in the Internet article beginning on p. 23 below, “The ‘Rotating’ Earth”. For, as will be argued there:

Heliocentricity not only remains unproven, but the Newtonian physics which [was] its main support [is] being openly questioned, if not discredited, ever since Maurice Allais and others have shown experimentally that Newton’s theory of gravity can no longer account for proven facts. ....
Whether the earth rotates once a day from West to East as Copernicus taught, or the heavens revolve once a day from East to West, as his predecessors believed, the observable phenomena will be exactly the same. That shows a defect in Newtonian dynamics, since an empirical science ought not to contain a metaphysical assumption which can never be proved or disproved by observation.

Stephen Hawking is complex. He had married a Christian, Jane, who made the statement in 1986, "Without my faith in God, I wouldn't have been able to live in this situation;" namely, the deteriorating health of her husband. "I would not have been able to marry Stephen in the first place because I wouldn't have had the optimism to carry me through and I wouldn't have been able to carry on with it." After she and Hawking divorced in the early 1990s she revealed that one of the reasons was his scorn for religion.
Hawking has met with two popes. Here is his account of a meeting with John Paul II:

Stephen Hawking says pope told him not to study
beginning of universe

HONG KONG (AP) – World-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists that they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God.
Hawking, author of the best-seller, A Brief History of Time, said that that John Paul made the comment at a cosmology conference at the Vatican. ....
Hawking quoted the pope as saying, “It’s OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God”.
The scientist then joked that he was glad John Paul did not realize that he had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began.
“I didn’t fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo”.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-06-15-hawking_x.htm

John Paul II was quite right. Hawking and his colleagues will never replicate the beginning, nor understand it through their physics. Our world is the poorer for, not science with its fascinations and triumphs, but for today’s complete obsession with the very lowest levels of being to the detriment of our studying the far more fascinating realm of higher being, of all that pertains to God and things spiritual.

The “Rotating” Earth Theory, Fact or Fiction?

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!

--Sir Walter Scott


Taken from: http://sites.google.com/site/abafte/geo


Throughout ancient times it was obvious that the moon went around the earth. This is still accepted today. But in the past it was just as obvious that the sun went around the earth as well. This was not because men in those days lacked fantasy and forgot to imagine non-existent movements of themselves and their surroundings. It is because they did their homework and examined all the evidence before them, that they came to the understanding that the earth was a firm, motionless sphere, neither in rotation around itself nor wandering through space around another body.

This geostatic and geocentric nature of the earth was repeatedly tested and verified as being factual for a quite some time (going back thousands of years) by knowledgeable, civilized, free people of all stripes, i.e. those who were supposed to know, like astronomers, natural philosophers (a.k.a. scientists), explorers, teachers, traders, seamen, navigators and various other free and educated men (as opposed to schooled, wage enslaved, homogenized, "experts" of modern times who wouldn't dare bite the hand that feeds them).

Then, all of a sudden, just 400 plus years ago, a band of court astrologers started pushing this idea that the earth was orbiting the sun this time, and that the sun was standing still at the center (hence the claim of the system being a 'solar' system). Nevertheless this new claim was not accompanied by any new proof. It was simply invoked and declarations were made that the fixed nature of earth needed to be disapproved.

Then, various kinds of earth movements were claimed to have existence and, subsequently abstract calculations were made of the speed and other attributes of these imaginary movements - presenting the results as if they have measured an actual motion. The major and in fact the only reason that was brought up for advancing this whole idea was that the then mainstream Ptolemaic model of the universe was deemed inconvenient in explaining and predicting the movements of the planets as they appear in the sky (especially one particular kind of movement: the retrograde motion of the planets in the sky).

But all along it was (and still is) a fact that a stationary earth, situated at the center of the universe also accounts for those retrograde motions, as shown by astronomer Tycho Brahe for example. And, although Ptolemy's epicyclical system was the long established one, it did not have exclusive monopoly. There were many ideas and models in circulation - like those of Pythagoras, Philolaus, Jean Buridan, Martianus Capella, Nicholas of Cusa and René Descartes to name a few.

After all, even Copernicus' own system was by his own admission (read his original, i.e. the first edition of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) nothing more than a synoptic rehash of the already-existing diverse (part geocentric, part heliocentric, fire centric, animal centric...) ideas of men like Hicetas, Ecphantus, Heraclides and Aristarchus.

So then, all those years - and right up to now – nobody has ever succeeded in showing or even detecting any movement of the earth in space. However this complete lack of scientific evidence is not admitted. Instead a smokescreen of hearsays, popular opinions, organizational rulings, majority votes, superficial analogies, "expert" testimonies, personal convictions and such other means of persuasion (none of which qualify as scientific proof) are proposed and presented in order to support the heliocentric theory.

Heliocentricity is not a logically plausible (let alone irrefutable) theory that is based on scientific data but is actually, purely based on a series of assumptions that were built-up over the last 200 years. For example many (but not all) of the assertions regarding astronomical distances between celestial bodies are based on the necessary assumption that the earth must be revolving around the sun.

But at the same time, these assumed distances have another function whereby they are deployed as some sort of supportive argument for the "trueness" of the heliocentric hypothesis. For example we are told that sun is too big to revolve around the earth, despite the fact that the sun's size was determined in the first place by assuming how big it must have to be in order to allow a heliocentric premise! .... Other needed assumptions include:

■ the bendover earth (alleged 'tilt' of the earth's axis - a desperately needed heliocentric variable that has no basis in the physical world where the sun simply spirals from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn annually. Both of these tropic latitude lines are not tilted - they are at a 0° angle (= parallel) to the equator. The word "tropic" itself comes from the Greek term tropos, meaning turn, referring to the fact that the sun "turns back" at these lines that aren't tilted in any way,

■ the earth supposedly jittering around the sun at various speed levels (it orbits at a faster speed at one time, and then it goes relatively slower at another - then back faster again) but somehow, all this alleged speed-change remains unnoticeable),

■ the moon also being dragged along exactly at those same speed levels (100% complete synchronization with the wobbly earth despite being hundreds of thousands of miles away from it(!) Now how about that?,

■ even atmospheric gas (the air) being attached to the earth's surface (again completely synchronized but somehow (simultaneously) free-flowing enough to blow in every direction).

These are just samples of the never shown, never detected, never scientifically observed absurdities that are required to save the appearances of the heliocentric model.

Facts are facts

Heliocentrists have been known to point to certain geophysical and astronomical features as arguments which they claim supports their sun-centered view. For example they claim that the Cape Canaveral area in Florida is chosen as a site for NASA's rocket launch center because it is one of the more southern points on the U.S. mainland and therefore closest to the equator.

The same argument comes up regarding the reason why Europe's rocket launch center is located in French Guyana (in South America). There is supposed to be an advantage to being close to the equator when the goal is to get a vehicle into orbit: the "rotating" earth supposedly creates a centrifugal force that supposedly "lifts" the missiles. Well, the truth is that there is no real advantage: China's Jiuquan space center is found all the way up in the far north of the country (Inner Mongolia province). Why did the Chinese choose this site, when they have vast territory much further south which is closer to the equator? In fact, portions of southern China are closer to the equator than to the northern cosmodrome, from where they toss their taikonauts into orbit. The Russians are also reported to be developing a new space launch facility, which will be located much north of the current Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This all means that a rocket launched tangentially from the Earth's equator doesn't really provide a more advantageous escape-velocity!

Getting closer to the supposed existence of an "equatorial centrifugal force" on the surface of the "rotating" earth (and other bogus heliocentric claims) is like getting closer and closer to an apparent pool of water in the desert: it dissolves and disappears right before your eyes in a spectacular fashion!

Another bogus argument that some solar system advocates bring up from time to time is inertia and momentum. What is it that the moving-earth theorists believe is the substance (or the vector field) that supposedly exerts a huge gravitational force on air molecules which prevents the atmosphere around the earth from trailing behind the allegedly speeding earth (as is the case for comets)? Their answer?: Nothing. Instead, heliocentrists usually propose a fraudulent analogy of how the earth's motion is comparable with some person walking inside a moving train. They claim that since the walker inside the train feels more or less the same as he or she feels when walking on the ground that somehow is supposed to reassure us that the earth could also be moving without we feeling it.

The problem with this analogy is of course the fact that once the person inside the train opens a window and faces the elements, he or she will feel it soon enough what the real speed is that the train is traveling at! Therefore the only correct analogy for someone walking on the ground of earth is someone walking in an open train or better yet - on the roof of a moving train. What will happen then?

Well, the person will instantly encounter a force that is proportional and in opposite direction to the moving train. But why? Isn't the surrounding air supposed to be following the train, just as we are told the atmosphere is allegedly doing so by keeping-up with the supposedly faster-than-bullet rotating earth? Looks like heliocentrists have decided to suspend the laws of physics (aerodynamics) just for this case of a badly needed moving earth theory!

But still somehow, this law of motion is supposed to apply in all other cases of moving things in the universe?! This contradiction is quietly adopted in order to hide the fact that there is a force that is causing an air drag or friction that wasn't there before the train arrived. The friction with the earth's surface wasn't there because, unlike the train, the earth didn't move!

Getting to the top (and bottom) of it

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

... modern non-applied science has become nothing more than manipulative indulgence in fancy "thought experiments" and abstract, fuzzy math which have no relation to reality.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The star whose location is closest to the point vertically above north pole (= celestial pole) is Polaris, a.k.a. the North Star, around which all the other stars appear to rotate (as visible during the night). Now, why is it that only one single star is a pole star throughout the whole year? All kinds of other stars should have taken turn to become pole stars if the earth was slinging around the sun. But since that is not the case and Polaris remains the most northerly of the stars all year round, as seen on photographs of star-trails (see below), it can only mean that the earth is not orbiting the sun. Moreover, a moving and orbiting earth would have caused the paths of stars to appear as (spiral) lines instead of fully circular tracks that we observe night after night, and consequently the shapes of the constellations would have changed considerably over the course of a single year. So what we're looking at is what is real - WYSIWYG: stars orbiting the Earth once a sidereal day, i.e. the time it takes for a celestial object to rotate 360°. For the stars around the Earth this is: 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds.

Truth has a way of being indestructible. It may or may not be popular at any given time, it may even be barely noticeable, but it is always there. And it turns out that the truth actually gets in the way of "science"! Modern theoretical (non-applied a.k.a 'pure') physics is not really science-driven but agenda-driven. It is populated with heavily politicized academia. It has become nothing much more than a sham propaganda-exercise of empty eloquence with false authority. The inventor of the electric world we live in, Nikola Tesla was spot-on when he remarked that modern non-applied science has become nothing more than manipulative indulgence in fancy "thought experiments" and abstract, fuzzy math which have no relation to reality. Instead of the theories being made to fit reality, what we have is the opposite: reality being adjusted or in fact completely overthrown, in order to fit agenda-driven theories and models.

A case in point is the time when an astronomer called James Bradley (1693-1762) used his colleague/boss Samuel Molyneux's telescope and had proposed that during one year a star that was right over where he was based in London (called Gamma Draconis) traced out a small ellipse. This was used to support the heliocentric argument that the earth had an elliptical orbit around the sun. The physicist, astronomer and mathematician Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich (1711-1781) wanted to find out if Bradley's hypothesis was correct and proposed that a telescope filled with water (where light will travels slower in the water) and directed at the star should result in the observed ellipses becoming larger at the same rate of times if the Earth was moving. (Consequently if it would make no difference then the earth would be stationary).

This scientific experiment wasn't carried out though. Another scientist, François Dominique Arago (1786-1853) put a sheet of glass under his telescope and observed that when he moved the glass, the starlight image that he was looking through refracted and moved along with it. Arago expected that there would be a range of different angles of refraction since the earth is supposedly on the move, i.e. there should be a variety of different movements because of the positions and velocities of the earth at different times of the day and year.

The result however contradicted the expectation: there were no variations at different times of the year. Then sometime later one George Biddle Airy (1801-1892) decided to try out Boscovich's idea of a water filled telescope in order to test Bradleys heliocentric aberration theory about a century after it was first proposed. He discovered that there was no change in the aberration through the refracting water in a supposedly "moving" earth. Airy didn't observe a larger eclipse and subsequently the experiment was declared a "failure". So that's why it is now commonly called Airy's Failure. Funny that - it was of course a failure in terms of failing to prove heliocentrism. So what did it show then? It showed that only one side was moving and since that was the star side, it means the earth was stationary all along! In 1887, was one of the most important experiments in the history of physics and was performed by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at what is now Case Western Reserve University. This interferometer experiment is usually referred to as the Michelson–Morley experiment.

Since the Earth is in motion, it was expected that the flow of aether across the Earth should produce a detectable aether drift, which the specially built interferometer would measure. Although it would be possible for the earth's motion to match that of the ether at one moment in time, it was not possible for the earth to remain at rest with respect to the aether at all times, because of the variation in both the direction and the speed of the earth's motion. The so-called null result of the experiment could not be reconciled with the assumption that the earth was moving. Similar other experiments were subsequently carried out (eg. the Trouton–Noble experiment). After 17 years of crisis (the only and dreaded alternative being admitting that the earth is at rest) an obscure office clerk from Basel, Switzerland offered a third way "final solution" to the sun-warped Victorian world at the dawn of a new century: the end of physical reality in physics!

But contrary to many superficial assumptions the geostatic and geocentric view never died out. For example, right up until after World War I (1920) there were organizations out there which openly refused to accept the Copernican/Galilean perspective. The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod was one of those to whom the sun-centered-universe idea didn't held sway.

In other words it took a civilization-devastating world war in order to finally push Geocentric cosmology out of mainstream view in the developed world. But that was only a prelude to the resurgence of it during the postwar period by many distinguished professionals: Walter van de Kamp (The Heart of the Matter), Gerardus D. Bouw (With Every Wind of Doctrine & De Labore Solis ), Marshall and Sandra Hall, Malcolm Bowden, James Hanson (A New Interest in Geocentricity), Paul Ellwanger, Richard G. Elmendorf (Heliocentric Humbug! A critical investigation of the Foucault Pendulum), Edward F. Hills (Space Age Science), Robert Bennett, Robert Sungenis... and so on. The following is a description on the recent history of the systems of the cosmos by a woman author, Paula Haigh:

"To begin with, there are presently at least five good sources for obtaining the truth on this important matter of geocentricity. The first of these is included in the extensive scientific work of the French Catholic scholar, Fernand Crombette (d.1970). His works have not yet been translated but some of them have been expounded in English, and all may be obtained from the Cercle Scientifique et Historique [CESHE]. 'The Bible does not make mistakes' was the watchword of this gifted Catholic scientist.

Secondly, there is the first-rate paper by Solange Hertz entitled Recanting Galileo. Mrs. Hertz's work always possesses a spiritual dimension not to be found anywhere else. It is her unique gift. Thirdly, there is the work of the Dutch [-Canadian] Protestant scholar, Walter van der Kamp (d 1998), founder of the Tychonian Society (Canada) and its quarterly journal, The Biblical Astronomer, formerly known as The Bulletin of the Tychonian Society. Mr. Van der Kamp has published a book entitled De Labore Solis: Airy's Failure Reconsidered [1988]... Fourthly, a disciple of Mr. Van Der Kamp, Dr. Gerardus Bouw, professional astronomer, computer scientist and current editor of The Biblical Astronomer, has authored a book entitled With Every Wind of Doctrine: Biblical, Historical, and Scientific Perspectives of Geocentricity. One must beware, however, of Dr. Bouw's very anti-Catholic prejudices, which sometimes cause him to distort history.

Lastly, there has recently appeared The Earth is Not Moving by Marshall Hall. His is a quintessentially popular treatment of this difficult subject, and he must be given much credit for bringing the arena of modern mathematical physics down to the level of us scientifically illiterate mortals. Whatever may be the shortcomings of Hall's book, it is impossible not to enjoy his literary panache.

Needless to say, none of these works is known beyond a very limited circle of interested people because, contrary to the generally-held media-imposed assessment of things, there is very little real science these days. Instead, we labor beneath a scientific imperialism which, having usurped the place of theology and of metaphysics in the true hierarchy of sciences, puts upon unwitting school children and witless TV addicts, its own preferred heliocentric-evolutionary ideology into which it bends every empirical fact. This monstrous establishment of academic sophistry lords it over every aspect of intellectual life today and has succeeded in convincing almost everyone that this science falsely so called is the sole possessor and distributor of all truth and rationality.

But the truth is irrepressible and will break forth from under the dead weight of error willy-nilly, sometimes here, sometimes there, as in a footnote in Bernard Cohen's The Birth of a New Physics. Artfully hidden among some details of Galileo's life, we find this gem of an admission: 'There is no planetary observation by which we on earth can prove that the earth is moving in an orbit around the sun.' Sir Fred Hoyle is quoted by Walter van der Kamp in his book as admitting that the geocentric model of the universe is no worse and no better than the heliocentric one. The works listed above cite many other similar admissions of like nature by scientists of our time."

Dr. Robert Sungenis highlights the sophistry that is required in order to maintain the current absurd belief in Heliocentrism:

"The 'quasars' are what led people like [Stephen] Hawking to notice that the Earth was in the center of the universe. [James Clerk] Maxwell said there was absolute space, the basis of Geocentrism, and his equations prove it. Einstein said no. You argue with them. As for Einstein, if you want to believe that lengths shrink when an object moves, time changes in the process, and its mass increases, just so you can explain the anomalies of Michelson's experiment, that's your privilege, but I'd just assume to answer it by saying that mass, time and length stay the same and the Earth isn't moving, and I'm just as "scientific" as you for saying so." ....

The truth is... stranger than fiction. --Lord Byron

Readers are encouraged to read the entire article: http://sites.google.com/site/abafte/geo

An end to Black Holes

The "Rotating" Earth..

Theory, Fact or Fiction?

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive! --Sir Walter Scott



Throughout ancient times it was obvious that the moon went around the earth. This is still accepted today. But in the past it was just as obvious that the sun went around the earth as well. This was not because men in those days lacked fantasy and forgot to imagine non-existent movements of themselves and their surroundings. It is because they did their homework and examined all the evidence before them, that they came to the understanding that the earth was a firm, motionless sphere, neither in rotation around itself nor wandering through space around another body.



This geostatic and geocentric nature of the earth was repeatedly tested and verified as being factual for a quite some time (going back thousands of years) by knowledgeable, civilized, free people of all stripes, i.e. those who were supposed to know, like astronomers, natural philosophers (a.k.a. scientists), explorers, teachers, traders, seamen, navigators and various other free and educated men (as opposed to schooled, wage enslaved, homogenized, "experts" of modern times who wouldn't dare bite the hand that feeds them).



Then, all of a sudden, just 400 plus years ago, a band of court astrologers started pushing this idea that the earth was orbiting the sun this time, and that the sun was standing still at the center (hence the claim of the system being a 'solar' system). Nevertheless this new claim was not accompanied by any new proof. It was simply invoked and declarations were made that the fixed nature of earth needed to be disapproved.



Then, various kinds of earth movements were claimed to have existence and, subsequently abstract calculations were made of the speed and other attributes of these imaginary movements - presenting the results as if they have measured an actual motion. The major and in fact the only reason that was brought up for advancing this whole idea was that the then mainstream Ptolemaic model of the universe was deemed inconvenient in explaining and predicting the movements of the planets as they appear in the sky (especially one particular kind of movement: the retrograde motion of the planets in the sky).



But all along it was (and still is) a fact that a stationary earth, situated at the center of the universe also accounts for those retrograde motions, as shown by astronomer Tycho Brahe for example. And, although Ptolemy's epicyclical system was the long established one, it did not have exclusive monopoly. There were many ideas and models in circulation - like those of Pythagoras, Philolaus, Jean Buridan, Martianus Capella, Nicholas of Cusa and René Descartes to name a few.



After all, even Copernicus' own system was by his own admission (read his original, i.e. the first edition of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) nothing more than a synoptic rehash of the already-existing diverse (part geocentric, part heliocentric, fire centric, animal centric...) ideas of men like Hicetas, Ecphantus, Heraclides and Aristarchus. So then, all those years - and right up to now - nobody has ever succeeded in showing or even detecting any movement of the earth in space.


However this complete lack of scientific evidence is not admitted. Instead a smokescreen of hearsays, popular opinions, organizational rulings, majority votes, superficial analogies, "expert" testimonies, personal convictions and such other means of persuasion (none of which qualify as scientific proof) are proposed and presented in order to support the heliocentric theory.




Heliocentricity is not a logically plausible (let alone irrefutable) theory that is based on scientific data but is actually, purely based on a series of assumptions that were built-up over the last 200 years. For example many (but not all) of the assertions regarding astronomical distances between celestial bodies are based on the necessary assumption that the earth must be revolving around the sun.



But at the same time, these assumed distances have another function whereby they are deployed as some sort of supportive argument for the "trueness" of the heliocentric hypothesis. For example we are told that sun is too big to revolve around the earth, despite the fact that the sun's size was determined in the first place by assuming how big it must have to be in order to allow a heliocentric premise! Go figure. Other needed assumptions include:




■ the bendover earth (alleged 'tilt' of the earth's axis - a desperately needed heliocentric variable that has no basis in the physical world where the sun simply spirals from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn annually. Both of these tropic latitude lines are not tilted - they are at a 0° angle (= parallel) to the equator. The word "tropic" itself comes from the Greek term tropos, meaning turn, referring to the fact that the sun "turns back" at these lines that aren't tilted in any way,

■ the earth supposedly jittering around the sun at various speed levels (it orbits at a faster speed at one time, and then it goes relatively slower at another - then back faster again) but somehow, all this alleged speed-change remains unnoticeable),

■ the moon also being dragged along exactly at those same speed levels (100% complete synchronization with the wobbly earth despite being hundreds of thousands of miles away from it(!) Now how about that?,

■ even atmospheric gas (the air) being attached to the earth's surface (again completely synchronized but somehow (simultaneously) free-flowing enough to blow in every direction). These are just samples of the never shown, never detected, never scientifically observed absurdities that are required to save the appearances of the heliocentric model.



Facts are facts


Heliocentrists have been known to point to certain geophysical and astronomical features as arguments which they claim supports their sun-centered view. For example they claim that the Cape Canaveral area in Florida is chosen as a site for NASA's rocket launch center because it is one of the more southern points on the U.S. mainland and therefore closest to the equator. The same argument comes up regarding the reason why Europe's rocket launch center is located in French Guyana (in South America). There is supposed to be an advantage to being close to the equator when the goal is to get a vehicle into orbit: the "rotating" earth supposedly creates a centrifugal force that supposedly "lifts" the missiles. Well, the truth is that there is no real advantage: China's Jiuquan space center is found all the way up in the far north of the country (Inner Mongolia province). Why did the Chinese choose this site, when they have vast territory much further south which is closer to the equator? In fact, portions of southern China are closer to the equator than to the northern cosmodrome, from where they toss their taikonauts into orbit. The Russians are also reported to be developing a new space launch facility, which will be located much north of the current Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This all means that a rocket launched tangentially from the Earth's equator doesn't really provide a more advantageous escape-velocity!



Getting closer to the supposed existence of an "equatorial centrifugal force" on the surface of the "rotating" earth (and other bogus heliocentric claims) is like getting closer and closer to an apparent pool of water in the desert: it dissolves and disappears right before your eyes in a spectacular fashion! Another bogus argument that some solar system advocates bring up from time to time is inertia and momentum. What is it that the moving-earth theorists believe is the substance (or the vector field) that supposedly exerts a huge gravitational force on air molecules which prevents the atmosphere around the earth from trailing behind the allegedly speeding earth (as is the case for comets)? Their answer?: Nothing. Instead, heliocentrists usually propose a fraudulent analogy of how the earth's motion is comparable with some person walking inside a moving train. They claim that since the walker inside the train feels more or less the same as he or she feels when walking on the ground that somehow is supposed to reassure us that the earth could also be moving without we feeling it.


The problem with this analogy is of course the fact that once the person inside the train opens a window and faces the elements, he or she will feel it soon enough what the real speed is that the train is traveling at! Therefore the only correct analogy for someone walking on the ground of earth is someone walking in an open train or better yet - on the roof of a moving train. What will happens then?



Well, the person will instantly encounter a force that is proportional and in opposite direction to the moving train. But why? Isn't the surrounding air supposed to be following the train, just as we are told the atmosphere is allegedly doing so by keeping-up with the supposedly faster-than-bullet rotating earth? Looks like heliocentrists have decided to suspend the laws of physics (aerodynamics) just for this case of a badly needed moving earth theory!



But still somehow, this law of motion is supposed to apply in all other cases of moving things in the universe?! This contradiction is quietly adopted in order to hide the fact that there is a force that is causing an air drag or friction that wasn't there before the train arrived. The friction with the earth's surface wasn't there because, unlike the train, the earth didn't move!



Getting to the top (and bottom) of it


The star whose location is closest to the point vertically above north pole (= celestial pole) is Polaris, a.k.a. the North Star, around which all the other stars appear to rotate (as visible during the night). Now, why is it that only one single star is a pole star throughout the whole year? All kinds of other stars should have taken turn to become pole stars if the earth was slinging around the sun. But since that is not the case and Polaris remains the most northerly of the stars all year round, as seen on photographs of star-trails (see below), it can only mean that the earth is not orbiting the sun. Moreover, a moving and orbiting earth would have caused the paths of stars to appear as (spiral) lines instead of fully circular tracks that we observe night after night, and consequently the shapes of the constellations would have changed considerably over the course of a single year. So what we're looking at is what is real - WYSIWYG: stars orbiting the Earth once a sidereal day, i.e. the time it takes for a celestial object to rotate 360°. For the stars around the Earth this is: 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds.





Truth has a way of being indestructible. It may or may not be popular at any given time, it m ay even be barely noticeable, but it is always there. And it turns out that the truth actually gets in the way of "science"! Modern theoretical (non-applied a.k.a 'pure') physi cs is not really science-driven but agenda-driven. It is populated with heavily politicized academia. It has become nothing much more than a sham propaganda-exercise of empty eloquence with false authority. The inventor of the electric world we live in, Nikola Tesla was spot-on when he remarked that modern non-applied science has become nothing more than manipulative indulgence in fancy "thought experiments" and abstract, fuzzy math which have no relation to reality. Instead of the theories being made to fit reality, what we have is the opposite: reality being adjusted or in fact completely overthrown, in order to fit agenda-driven theories and models.



A case in point is the time when an astronomer called James Bradley (1693-1762) used his colleague/boss Samuel Molyneux's telescope and had proposed that during one year a star that was right over where he was based in London (called Gamma Draconis) traced out a small ellipse. This was used to support the heliocentric argument that the earth had an elliptical orbit around the sun. The physicist, astronomer and mathematician Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich (1711-1781) wanted to find out if Bradley's hypothesis was correct and proposed that a telescope filled with water (where light will travels slower in the water) and directed at the star should result in the observed ellipses becoming larger at the same rate of times if the Earth was moving. (consequently if it would make no difference then the earth would be stationary). This scientific experiment wasn't carried out though. Another scientist, François Dominique Arago (1786-1853) put a sheet of glass under his telescope and observed that when he moved the glass, the starlight image that he was looking through refracted and moved along with it. Arago expected that there would be a range of different angles of refraction since the earth is supposedly on the move, i.e. there should be a variety of different movements because of the positions and velocities of the earth at different times of the day and year.



The result however contradicted the expectation: there were no variations at different times of the year. Then sometime later one George Biddle Airy (1801-1892) decided to try out Boscovich's idea of a water filled telescope in order to test Bradleys heliocentric aberration theory a about a century after it was first proposed. He discovered that there was no change in the aberration through the refracting water in a supposedly "moving" earth. Airy didn't observe a larger eclipse and subsequently the experiment was declared a "failure". So that's why it is now commonly called Airy's Failure. Funny that - it was of course a failure in terms of failing to prove heliocentrism. So what did it show then? It showed that only one side was moving and since that was the star side, it means the earth was stationary all along! In 1887, was one of the most important experiments in the history of physics and was performed by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at what is now Case Western Reserve University. This interferometer experiment is usually referred to as the Michelson–Morley experiment.



Since the Earth is in motion, it was expected that the flow of aether across the Earth should produce a detectable aether drift, which the specially built interferometer would measure. Although it would be possible for the earth's motion to match that of the ether at one moment in time, it was not possible for the earth to remain at rest with respect to the aether at all times, because of the variation in both the direction and the speed of the earth 's motion. The so-called null result of the experiment could not be reconciled with the assumption that the earth was moving. Similar other experiments were subsequently carried out (eg. the Trouton–Noble experiment). After 17 years of crisis (the only and dreaded alternative being admitting that the earth is at rest) an obscure office clerk from Basel, Switzerland offered a third way "final solution" to the sun-warped Victorian world at the dawn of a new century: the end of physical reality in physics!



Bet contrary to many superficial assumptions the geostatic and geocentric view never died out. For example, right up until after World War I (1920) there were organizations out there which openly refused to accept the Copernican/Galilean perspective. The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod was one of those to whom the sun-centered-universe idea didn't held sway. In other words it took a civilization-devastating world war in order to finally push Geocentric cosmology out of mainstream view in the developed world. But that was only a prelude to the resurgence of it during the postwar period by many distinguished professionals: Walter van de Kamp (The Heart of the Matter), Gerardus D. Bouw (With Every Wind of Doctrine & De Labore Solis ), Marshall and Sandra Hall, Malcolm Bowden, James Hanson (A New Interest in Geocentricity), Paul Ellwanger, Richard G. Elmendorf (Heliocentric Humbug! A critical investigation of the Foucault Pendulum), Edward F. Hills (Space Age Science), Robert Bennett, Robert Sungenis... and so on. The following is a description on the recent history of the systems of the cosmos by a woman author, Paula Haigh:
"To begin with, there are presently at least five good sources for obtaining the truth on this important matter of geocentricity. The first of these is included in the extensive scientific work of the French Catholic scholar, Fernand Crombette (d.1970). His works have not yet been translated but some of them have been expounded in English, and all may be obtained from the Cercle Scientifique et Historique [CESHE]. 'The Bible does not make mistakes' was the watchword of this gifted Catholic scientist. Secondly, there is the first-rate paper by Solange Hertz entitled Recanting Galileo. Mrs. Hertz's work always possesses a spiritual dimension not to be found anywhere else. It is her unique gift. Thirdly, there is the work of the Dutch [-Canadian] Protestant scholar, Walter van der Kamp (d 1998), founder of the Tychonian Society (Canada) and its quarterly journal, The Biblical Astronomer, formerly known as The Bulletin of the Tychonian Society. Mr. Van der Kamp has published a book entitled De Labore Solis: Airy's Failure Reconsidered [1988]... Fourthly, a disciple of Mr. Van Der Kamp, Dr. Gerardus Bouw, professional astronomer, computer scientist and current editor of The Biblical Astronomer, has authored a book entitled With Every Wind of Doctrine: Biblical, Historical, and Scientific Perspectives of Geocentricity.



One must beware, however, of Dr. Bouw's very anti-Catholic prejudices, which sometimes cause him to distort history. Lastly, there has recently appeared The Earth is Not Moving by Marshall Hall. His is a quintessentially popular treatment of this difficult subject, and he must be given much credit for bringing the arena of modern mathematical physics down to the level of us scientifically illiterate mortals. Whatever may be the shortcomings of Hall's book, it is impossible not to enjoy his literary panache. Needless to say, none of these works is known beyond a very limited circle of interested people because, contrary to the generally-held media-imposed assessment of things, there is very little real science these days. Instead, we labor beneath a scientific imperialism which, having usurped the place of theology and of metaphysics in the true hierarchy of sciences, puts upon unwitting school children and witless TV addicts, its own preferred heliocentric-evolutionary ideology into which it bends every empirical fact. This monstrous establishment of academic sophistry lords it over every aspect of intellectual life today and has succeeded in convincing almost everyone that this science falsely so called is the sole possessor and distributor of all truth and rationality. But the truth is irrepressible and will break forth from under the dead weight of error willy-nilly, sometimes here, sometimes there, as in a footnote in Bernard Cohen's The Birth of a New Physics. Artfully hidden among some details of Galileo's life, we find this gem of an admission: 'There is no planetary observation by which we on earth can prove that the earth is moving in an orbit around the sun.' Sir Fred Hoyle is quoted by Walter van der Kamp in his book as admitting that the geocentric model of the universe is no worse and no better than the heliocentric one. The works listed above cite many other similar admissions of like nature by scientists of our time."


Dr. Robert Sungenis highlights the sophistry that is required in order to maintain the current absurd belief in Heliocentrism:
"The 'quasars' are what led people like [Stephen] Hawking to notice that the Earth was in the center of the universe. [James Clerk] Maxwell said there was absolute space, the basis of Geocentrism, and his equations prove it. Einstein said no. You argue with them. As for Einstein, if you want to believe that lengths shrink when an object moves, time changes in the process, and its mass increases, just so you can explain the anomalies of Michelson's experiment, that's your privilege, but I'd just assume to answer it by saying that mass, time and length stay the same and the Earth isn't moving, and I'm just as "scientific" as you for saying so."


The following excerpt is by Jewish columnist Amnon Goldberg:
"Bertrand Russell admitted that 'whether the earth rotates once a day from west to east as Copernicus taught, or the heavens revolve once a day from east to west, as his predecessors held, the observed phenomena will be the same; a metaphysical assumption has to be made'. Yet today everybody 'just knows' that the Earth goes around the sun (heliocentrism).
We cannot feel our motion through space, nor has any experiment ever proved that the Earth is actually in motion', admit Einstein's leading disciples. Invoked 'proofs' such as the phenomenon of the earth's oblateness (slight flattening at the poles), the Doppler Effect (the apparent change in frequency of light as it moves towards or away from the observer), the Sagnac Effect, stellar aberration and [stellar] parallax, nutation, Herschel's star streaming, the Coriolis forces (the cause of water tending to drain clockwise in the northern hemisphere, anticlockwise in the southern), and Fouccault's Pendulum (which can be seen in the entrance of the Science Museum, S. Kensington), are more easily and comprehensively explained by the entire universe rotating about the Earth every 24 hours. No experiment has ever been performed with such excruciating persistence and meticulous precision, and in every conceivable manner, than that of trying to detect and measure the motion of the Earth. Yet they have all consistently and continually yielded a velocity for the Earth of exactly ZERO mph (...)

Hundreds of experiments have failed to detect even a smidgen of the purported 67,000 mph translational and 1000 mph rotational velocity of the Earth. Not only can it not be disproved that "the Earth stands forever" (Ecc. 1:4) and has no velocity; it cannot be disproved that the Earth is the center of the universe. And the toil of thousands of exasperated researchers, in the extremely varied experiments of Arago, De Coudre's induction, Fizeau, Fresnell drag, Hoek, Jaseja's lasers, Jenkins, Klinkerfuess, Michelson-Morley interferometry, Lord Rayleigh's polarimetry, Troughton-Noble torque, and the famous 'Airy's Failure' experiment, all conclusively failed to show any rotational or translational movement for the earth, whatsoever."


Here is an excerpt from Recanting Galileo by Catholic writer Solange Hertz:
"Speaking of the limitations of the experimental method in arriving at certainty, Pierre Duhem, the eminent French physicist, wrote back in 1908:
"Suppose the hypothesis of Copernicus were able to explain all known appearances. What can be concluded is that they may be true, not that they are necessarily true, for in order to legitimate this last conclusion, it would have to be proved that no other system of hypotheses could possibly be imagined which could explain the appearances just as well."


Long ago Alexander von Humboldt admitted:
"I have already known for a long time that we have no proof for the system of Copernicus. . . but I do not dare to be the first one to attack it."


In other words, the notion that the earth revolves around the sun having become dogma, its denial spells automatic excommunication from the scientific establishment. As for the unthinking masses, a lie need only be systematized in textbooks to pass for truth. When confronted with demands for substantiation of their claims, heliocentricity’s adepts are not above taking refuge in ad hominem arguments, relegating the geocentrist to the fundamentalist snake-handling contingent, the lunatic fringe or gratuitous membership in the Flat Earth Society. The fact remains that the well-known Michelson-Morley experiment, mounted in 1887 to prove the theory, backfired and actually seemed to support geocentricity, or at least an earthly inertia which cannot be overcome.



No significant progress has been made in that direction since. Heliocentricity not only remains unproven, but the Newtonian physics which were its main support are being openly questioned, if not discredited, ever since Maurice Allais and others have shown experimentally that Newton’s theory of gravity can no longer account for proven facts. Creationist scientists worldwide like those organized by CESHE 1 in Belgium and France, are making serious headway against the old myths, which even atheists are beginning to abandon."


Here are some details on that from The Heliocentric Hoax by James V. Forsee:
"One wishing to explore man’s efforts to prove God wrong should investigate the following: the supposed revolution of the earth around the sun can be studied by Bradley' experiment, the parallax of stars, the annual loop of Pluto, the intensification of meteors after midnight, annual Doppler shifts of stars, and so on. The supposed rotation (spinning) can be studied by reviewing the earth’s oblateness, the wind patterns, the force of projectiles and spacecraft, force of air falling bodies, the direct observation from the moon, the Coriolis effect, and so on.



The Foucault pendulum has been proven to be a fabrication, which proves nothing. Is the earth actually moving or are the heavenly bodies doing the moving? Or to use the nebulous phrase of science: 'Is there some unexplained phenomenon to consider?' Study them all. Cold reason should cause you to acknowledge that no conclusive proofs exist to prove Galileo’s theory. Even our most powerful instruments conclusively prove movement only - but movement of what? Perhaps the most notable experiments are "Airy’s failure" and the Michelson-Morley experiment. These two are a ‘must’ for any serious study of this intriguing subject. The Astronomer Royal of England, George Biddel Airy (1801-1892), in 1871 performed a star-gazing experiment which came to be known as "Airy’s failure". The simple solution to all the problems raised in this experiment was that the earth is at rest, immobile, in absolute space (...) But the crushing blow to heliocentrism was the Michelson-Morley experiment, and all those who tried to imitate or perfect it.



Their classical experiment of 1887 was [ironically] another effort designed to vindicate Galileo. But it also backfired. They bounced a beam of light off two mirrors in perpendicular directions and reflected the light back to their source. The lights returned simultaneously, regardless of location, season, elevation or orientation of instruments. The expected result was that the beam of light running parallel to the "supposed" path of the orbiting earth would return more quickly. For those desiring detailed, scientific information on experiments that favor geocentrism, research the Fresnell drag experiments and Arago’s experiment (Livingston). Study the Trouton-Noble experiment, the [self-]induction effect (Des Coudres), the test for rotation of polarized light (Strutt), the Ahranov-Bohm effect (Erlichson), and the phase shift of electrons in a superconductor (Jacklevic)... In De Labore Solis Walter van der Kamp exposes Einstein’s fallacies quite handily.



For those wanting to explore this more thoroughly, you are referred to pp39-51 of that remarkable work. Einstein’s theories do not disprove geocentrism. At the end of a letter in the Bulletin of the Tychonian Society, No. 54, Charles Long, Ph.D. of Minnesota, cogently explains the lack of definitives: 'Einstein is the fellow who went on to compose the General Theory of Relativity. The basis of this theory is that all motion is relative! Einstein wrote his equations describing how the Universe works. If the Earth spins and the stars are at rest – the equations explain all observations. But if the Earth is at rest and stars whirl – the equations still explain all observations. They must, for the theory begins with the assumption that all motion is relative. You can’t say positively that anything is at rest. Take your choice – the equations of General Relativity come out the same. Einstein put Mach’s (Principle) into mathematical form and what emerged is surely one of the ultimate creations of the human mind. Like Galileo, Newton the alchemist, and many others who support godless science, Einstein proved nothing. Even the atheistic philosopher, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), correctly asserts:
Whether the earth rotates once a day from West to East as Copernicus taught, or the heavens revolve once a day from East to West, as his predecessors believed, the observable phenomena will be exactly the same. That shows a defect in Newtonian dynamics, since an empirical science ought not to contain a metaphysical assumption which can never be proved or disproved by observation.
These occult-influenced scientists have trespassed into the sacred realm of metaphysics, that lofty philosophy which seeks to methodically explain ultimate realities. And this crime, in the 16th century, immediately set off alarms heard in the Church, especially by those scholastically sensitive and educated. Having no competence to function in a metaphysical consideration, science’s failure could be predicted from the start; its effort to prove geocentrism wrong failed. But to continue - the very name ‘Einstein’ (savior of heliocentrism) is ‘sacred’ and synonymous with ‘genius’, thanks to the conspiratorial propaganda so thoroughly disseminated.



And in addition to his fallacies as detailed in De Labore Solis, not to mention the common fallacy among writers who confuse Newton’s relativity with Einstein’s, the latter’s fantasy cannot be reconciled with the Sagnac effect. This experiment reveals that the speed of light is not the same in every direction, while the theory of relativity relates that it is the same in every direction. (...) And there is the "quasar distribution problem." In 1976 a heliocentrist of sorts, Y. P. Varshni, analyzed the spectra of three hundred eighty-five quasars (the farthest known stars from earth). One hundred fifty-two of them fell into fifty-seven groupings, all of which had the same red shift. This red-shift hypothesis is not debated among astronomers. To quote Varshni, who arrives at the paradoxical conclusions:
"The Earth is indeed the center of the Universe. The arrangement of quasars on certain spherical shells is only with respect to the Earth. These shells would disappear if viewed from another galaxy or quasar. This means that the cosmological principle will have to go. Also it implies that a coordinate system fixed to the Earth will be a preferred frame of reference in the Universe. Consequently, both the Special and General Theory of Relativity must be abandoned for cosmological purposes."


Exit, Einstein.



In short, modern textbooks lie when they claim proof for heliocentrism. After four hundred years it ‘appears’ that God is right. Have we not now ‘evolved’ full circle to the pre-16th century world view? St. Robert Bellarmine saw no proof nor does Van der Kamp, who said: "Numerous experiments have confirmed its (geocentrism’s) stability; none have dislodged it." Before concluding the scientific section of this study, consider for a moment the supposed antiquity of the earth, ranging into the billions of years, the evolution and descent of man from lower life forms, the abstract theory of relativity, the expanding universe, ‘black holes’, life on other planets -- the entire panoply of organized myth. Each of these theories, masquerading as truth, has its origin in the Father of Lies. The supposed implied existence of life forms on far-away planets are a natural offshoot of heliocentrism. This myth, too, is heretical and dates to at least the time of St. Boniface in the 8th century. These supposed beings (precursors of homo sapiens) in an expanding, vast (nay, limitless) universe, according to the contemporary view in astronomy (which is "acentric" -- no center), would not be descendants of Adam and hence could not be ransomed by the suffering and death of Christ on the Cross. The entire incarnation is in jeopardy."


Malcolm Bowden summerised all the body of evidence as such:

(A) The Sagnac experiment [a.k.a. the Sagnac Interference] proved that there was the ether which could be used as a reference frame for movements. This demolished Einstein's theories of Relativity;

(B) Using the aether as a frame of reference, the Michelson-Morley experiment showed that we were NOT going round the sun;

(C) Airey's experiment proved that the starlight was already coming into the earth at an angle, being carried along by the rotating aether;

(D) The Michelson-Gale experiment [also called the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment] showed that the aether was going round the stationary earth 1 rotation per day. (The alternative that the earth was spinning 1 rotation per day inside a stationary aether is disproven by Airey's experiment. Note - to be pedantic, Airey's experiment involved measurments of a small angle due to the high 30 km/s "speed of the earth around the sun". The rotation of the earth at the equator is only 0.45 km/s and is too slow to register any angle change.)




In their own words


Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz (of the Lorentz translation equations, foundation of the General Theory of Relativity) noted that:
"Briefly, everything occurs as if the Earth were at rest..."
His great contemporary Henri Poincaré confessed:
"A great deal of research has been carried out concerning the influence of the Earth's movement. The results were always negative (...) We do not have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in a uniform motion of translation..."


Arthur Eddington dared to contemplate that:
"There was just one alternative; the earth's true velocity through space might happen to have been nil."


Wolfgang Pauli admitted:
"The failure of the many attempts to measure terrestrially any effects of the earth's motion on physical phenomena allows us to...[Pauli gives up looking for experimental evidence and moves on to the abstract 'escape hatch' theories of Einstein]"


Lincoln Barnett agrees:
"No physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion."


And one of the chief participants in the experiment that bears his name (Albert A. Michelson), stunned by the results that went counter to his own heliocentric reflex:
"This conclusion directly contradicts the explanation... which presupposes that the Earth moves."


Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle says:

"Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is "right" and the Ptolemaic theory is "wrong" in any meaningful sense (...) Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published in a journal today, you will run up against a paradigm, and the editors will turn you down."



Conclusion


The geostatic, geocentric system of the universes is a proven, demonstrable and predictable reality - which makes the heliocentric view nothing but a surreal flight of fancy. Or as Friedrich Nietzsche put it:
"...While Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does NOT stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing that "stood fast" of the earth: the belief in "substance", in "matter", in the earth-residum and particle-atom - it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth."


Aha! Somebody is finally honest. So what it all comes down to is this: when mankind succumbs to his urges and rebels against his creator, he becomes a runaway - a drifter ("God is dead", "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law"...) and that [inevitably] brings about "liberation" from sense itself! So then this natural science theory of a 'moving earth' is neither scientific, nor theory, just nonsense.




The truth is... stranger than fiction. --Lord Byron


…



Taken from: http://sites.google.com/site/abafte/geo

Is Geocentrism Possible?

Taken from: http://www.geocentrism.com/possible.htm

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This book demonstrates, using classical mechanics in a Machian framework the equivalence betweena rotating earth in a staionary universe and a stationary earth in a rotating universe. Examples demonstrated include Foucalt's pendulum.

Is Geocentrism Possible?
by Mark Wyatt
April 10, 2008

Every experiment ever designed to detect the motion of the earth has failed to detect earth's motion and/or distinguish it from relative counter motion of the universe. So much so that this failure has become the bedrock of relativity theory. See Galileo Was Wrong for a full explanation of these experiments.
Many, many observations tell us that we are in or very near the center. But science applies unproven assumptions to make this go away (i.e., isotropy). They say that every where looks like the center. But they do not know that- they have never been anywhere else (anywhere in the solar system is our backyard). Stephen Hawking (In A Short History of Time) claims we make that assumption out of modesty (while verifying that there is no scientific evidence for it).
Frankly, we just do not know. Science has its theories (based in naturalism and materialism- i.e., excluding the possiblity of God's intervention). Until we can step outside the universe and look in we cannot know. See Geocentrism 101, parts I and II for discussion of some of these issues.
On the other hand, Scriptures, the Church fathers, and a number of popes do tell us that the earth is stable and that the sun moves [around the earth]. See Geocentrism 101, part III and the supplement for discussion of the religious aspect of geocentrism.
A Few Quotations
Note these are based on general relativity, but not all evidence for geocentrism requires general relativity. It must be pointed out that Einstein set out to include Mach's Principle in general relativity, and to some degree succeeded. Mach's Principle is a basic statement about inertia, which supports the possibility of geocentrism.
Max Born said in his famous book,"Einstein's Theory of Relativity",Dover Publications,1962, pgs 344 & 345:
...Thus we may return to Ptolemy's point of view of a 'motionless earth'...One has to show that the transformed metric can be regarded as produced according to Einstein's field equations, by distant rotating masses. This has been done by Thirring. He calculated a field due to a rotating, hollow, thick-walled sphere and proved that inside the cavity it behaved as though there were centrifugal and other inertial forces usually attributed to absolute space. Thus from Einstein's point of view, Ptolemy and Corpenicus are equally right.
Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, p.212 (p.248 in original 1938 ed.); Note: CS = coordinate system
The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, 'the sun is at rest and the earth moves,' or 'the sun moves and the earth is at rest,' would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.
George Ellis, a famous cosmologist, in Scientific American, "Thinking Globally, Acting Universally", October 1995
People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations,” Ellis argues. “For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations.” Ellis has published a paper on this. “You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”
Sir Fred Hoyle,Astronomy and Cosmology - A Modern Course, (San Francisco:W. H. Freeman & Co.), p. 416,1975.
We know that the difference between a heliocentric theory and a geocentric theory is one of relative motion only, and that such a difference has no physical significance.

© 2008 Conceptula LLC

Turin Shroud - New Evidence of Authenticity

New Evidence Confirms in Favour of Shroud

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Taken from: http://www.newgeology.us/presentation24.html

The Shroud of Turin - Evidence of authenticity Below is a summary of scientific and historical evidence supportive of the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin as the ancient burial cloth of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. by John C. Iannone THE SHROUD AS AN ANCIENT TEXTILE

The Shroud is a linen cloth woven in a 3-over-l herringbone pattern, and measures 14'3" x 3'7". These dimensions correlate with ancient measurements of 2 cubits x 8 cubits - consistent with loom technology of the period. The finer weave of 3-over-1 herringbone is consistent with the New Testament statement that the "sindon" (or shroud) was purchased by Joseph of Arimathea, who was a wealthy man. Also, Leviticus 19:19 speaks of the mixing of linen and cotton, but prohibits linen and wool or the mixing of vegetable and animal. In 1969, Dr. Gilbert Raes of the Ghent Institute of Textile Technology in Belgium noted that there are traces of cotton (identified as Gossipium herbaceum) in the linen of the Shroud. [Photo] In June 2002, the Shroud was sent to a team of experts for restoration. One of them was Swiss textile historian Mechthild Flury-Lemberg. She was surprised to find a peculiar stitching pattern in the seam of one long side of the Shroud, where a three-inch wide strip of the same original fabric was sewn onto a larger segment. The stitching pattern, which she says was the work of a professional, is quite similar to the hem of a cloth found in the tombs of the Jewish fortress of Masada.

The Masada cloth dates to between 40 BC and 73 AD

This kind of stitch has never been found in Medieval Europe. 1988 CARBON-14 TEST REFUTED Several studies have challenged the validity of the 1988 Carbon-14 tests done at Oxford, Zurich and Arizona Labs.1. A Jan 20, 2005 paper in the professional journal ThermoChimica Acta by Dr. Ray Rogers, retired Fellow with the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and lead chemist with the original science team STURP (the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project, involving approximately 35 scientists directly examining the Shroud for five days), has proven conclusively that the sample cut from The Shroud of Turin in 1988 was taken from an area of the cloth that was re-woven during the middle ages. Here are some excerpts: "Pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the shroud." "The shroud was badly damaged in a church fire in 1532 AD. Nuns patched burn holes and stitched the shroud to a reinforcing cloth that is now known as the Holland cloth." This probably occurred in 1534. "As part of the shroud of turin research project (STURP), I took 32 adhesive-tape samples from all areas of the shroud and associated textiles in 1978." "It enabled direct chemical testing on recovered linen fibers and particulates". "If the shroud had been produced between 1260 and 1390 AD, as indicated by the radiocarbon analyses, lignin should be easy to detect. A linen produced in 1260 AD would have retained about 37% of its vanillin in 1978... The Holland cloth, and all other medieval linens gave the test [i.e. tested positive] for vanillin wherever lignin could be observed on growth nodes. The disappearance of all traces of vanillin from the lignin in the shroud indicates a much older age than the radiocarbon laboratories reported." "The fire of 1532 could not have greatly affected the vanillin content of lignin in all parts of the shroud equally. The thermal conductivity of linen is very low... therefore, the unscorched parts of the folded cloth could not have become very hot." "The cloth's center would not have heated at all in the time available. The rapid change in color from black to white at the margins of the scorches illustrates this fact." "Different amounts of vanillin would have been lost in different areas. No samples from any location on the shroud gave the vanillin test [i.e. tested positive]." "The lignin on shroud samples and on samples from the Dead Sea scrolls does not give the test [i.e. tests negative]." "Because the shroud and other very old linens do not give the vanillin test [i.e. test negative], the cloth must be quite old." "A determination of the kinetics of vanillin loss suggests that the shroud is between 1300- and 3000-years old. Even allowing for errors in the measurements and assumptions about storage conditions, the cloth is unlikely to be as young as 840 years." "A gum/dye/mordant [(for affixing dye)] coating is easy to observe on... radiocarbon [sample] yarns. No other part of the shroud shows such a coating." "The radiocarbon sample had been dyed. Dyeing was probably done intentionally on pristine replacement material to match the color of the older, sepia-colored cloth." "The dye found on the radiocarbon sample was not used in Europe before about 1291 AD and was not common until more than 100 years later." "Specifically, the color and distribution of the coating implies that repairs were made at an unknown time with foreign linen dyed to match the older original material." "The consequence of this conclusion is that the radiocarbon sample was not representative of the original cloth." "The combined evidence from chemical kinetics, analytical chemistry, cotton content, and pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry proves that the material from the radiocarbon area of the shroud is significantly different from that of the main cloth. The radiocarbon sample was thus not part of the original cloth and is invalid for determining the age of the shroud." "A significant amount of charred cellulose was removed during a restoration of the shroud in 2002." "A new radiocarbon analysis should be done on the charred material retained from the 2002 restoration." Raymond N. Rogers. 20 January 2005. Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the shroud of turin. Thermochimica Acta, Vol. 425, Issue 1-2, Pages 189-194. 2. The Fire-Model Tests of Dr. Dmitri Kouznetsov in 1994 and Drs. John Jackson and Propp in 1998, which replicated the famous Fire of 1532, demonstrate that the fire added carbon isotopes to the linen. 3. Dr. Leoncio Garza-Valdes (microbiologist) discovered a bioplastic coating of bacteria and fungus on the linen fibers (60% by weight) caused by living microbes that absorb and add C-14 to the Cloth and thereby skew the date by at least 1300 years. These microbes were not known at the time of the test and were not removed by the C-14 cleaning protocol. 4. Consistent problems with the dating of linens (Egyptian Bull Mummy; Mummy 1770 Manchester Museum; Ibis Bird Mummy) call the accuracy of linen testing into question.

BURIAL CONSISTENT WITH ANCIENT JEWISH BURIAL CUSTOM

The burial is consistent with ancient Jewish burial customs in all respects, including the use of cave-tombs, attitude of the body (hands folded over loins), and types of burial cloths. The Sindon (Shroud) enveloped the body. The Sudarium was a face-cloth used to cover the face out of respect during removal from the cross through entombment. It was then removed and placed to one side. There was also a chin-band holding the mouth closed. The Othonia were bandages used to bind the wrists and legs. All are mentioned in the New Testament and evidenced on the Cloth. Such cloths are spoken of in the Misnah - oral traditions of the Rabbis written down in the second and third century. The Cave-Tombs were carved out of sides of limestone hills. The presence of Calcium Carbonate (limestone dust) on the Cloth was noted by Dr. Eugenia Nitowski (Utah archaeologist) in her studies of the cave tombs of Jerusalem. Optical Engineer Sam Pellicori noted in 1978 the presence of dirt particles on the nose as well as on the left knee and heel. Prof. Giovanni Riggi noted burial mites. Dr. Garza-Valdes discovered oak tubules (microscopic splinters) in the blood of the occipital area (back of the head) as well as natron salts. Traces of aloe and myrrh have also been identified on the Cloth. These are consistent with Jewish burial customs of antiquity.

IMAGE FORMATION vs WORK OF AN ARTIST

No one knows for sure how the images were created. The images are scorch-like, yet not created by heat, and are a purely surface phenomenon limited to the crowns of the top fibers. The Shroud is clearly not a painting. There are no signs of penetration. The blood was on the Cloth before the image (an unlikely way for an artist to work). There is no outline, no binders to hold paint, no evidence that paint, dye, ink, or chalk created the images, and there are no brush strokes. According to world-renowned artist Isabel Piczek, the images have no style that would fit into any period of art history. The images show perfect photo-negativity and 3-dimensionality. It is not a Vaporgraph or natural result of vapors. Note: some microscopic particles of paint exist on the Shroud, but these do not constitute the image. During the Middle Ages, a practice called the "sanctification of paintings" permitted about 50 artists to paint replicas of the Shroud and then lay their paintings over the Shroud to "sanctify" them. This permitted contact transfer of particles, which then migrated around the cloth with the folding and rolling of the Shroud when it was opened for exhibit and closed again afterwards. STURP determined that the image was caused by rapid dehydration, oxidation and degradation of the linen by an unidentified process, coloring it a sepia or straw yellow. Several Physicists, including Dr. John Jackson of the Colorado Shroud Center, suggest that a form of columnated radiation is the best explanation for how the image was formed, leaving a scorch-like appearance (the scorch caused by light versus heat, as the image does not fluoresce). Dr. Thomas Phillips (nuclear physicist at Duke University and formerly with the High Energy Labs at Harvard) says a potential miliburst of radiation (a neutron flux) could be consistent with the moment of resurrection. Such a miliburst might cause the purely surface phenomenon of the scorch-like (scorch-by-light) images, and possibly add Carbon-14 to the Cloth. As Dr. Phillips points out: "We never had a resurrection to study" and more testing should be done to ascertain whether a neutron-flux occurred.

BLOOD EVIDENCE (vs PAINT THEORY)

The blood on the Shroud is real, human male blood of the type AB (typed by Dr. Baima Ballone in Turin and confirmed in the U.S.). This blood type is rare (3.2% of the world population, according to Dr. Leoncio Garza-Valdes of the University of Texas Health Science Center), and is found mostly in the Middle East, with the highest percentage being in northern Palestine. Blood chemist Dr. Alan Adler (Univ. of Western Connecticut) and the late Dr. John Heller (New England Institute of Medicine) found a high concentration of the pigment bilirubin, consistent with someone dying under great stress or trauma and making the color more red than normal ancient blood. Drs. Victor and Nancy Tryon of the University of Texas Health Science Center found X & Y chromosomes representing male blood and "degraded DNA" (approximately 700 base pairs) "consistent with the supposition of ancient blood."

PATHOLOGY OF THE WOUNDS OF CRUCIFIXION AND THE SIGNATURE OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS

Numerous surgeons and pathologists (including Dr. Frederick Zugibe (Medical Examiner - Rockland, New York), Dr. Robert Bucklin (Medical Examiner - Las Vegas, Nevada), Dr. Herman Moedder (Germany), the late Dr. Pierre Barbet (France), and Dr. David Willis (England)) have studied the match between the Words, Weapons and Wounds, and agree that the words of the New Testament regarding the Passion clearly match the wounds depicted on the Shroud, and that these wounds are consistent with the weapons used by ancient Roman soldiers in Crucifixion. Specifically, the scourge marks on the shoulders, back, and legs of the Man of the Shroud match the flagrum (Roman whip) which has three leather thongs, each having two lead or bone pellets (plumbatae) on the end. The lance wound in the right side matches the Roman Hasta (4cm x 1 cm spear wound). Iron nails (7" spikes) were used in the wrist area (versus the palms as commonly depicted in Medieval art). These marks, combined with the capping of thorns which is not found anywhere else in Crucifixion literature of ancient Roman (Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Elder or Pliny the Younger) or Jewish historians (Flavius Joesphus, Philo of Alexandria) create a unique signature of the historical Jesus of Nazareth.

THE SUDARIUM CHRISTI - THE FACE CLOTH OF CHRIST

In the Cathedral of Oviedo in northern Spain is a linen cloth called the Sudarium Christi, or the Face Cloth of Christ. It is often referred to as the Cloth of Oviedo. Modern studies by the Spanish Centre for Sindonology (Dr. Jose Villalain, Jaime Izquierdo and Guillermo Heras of the University of Valencia, as noted by Oviedo scholar Mark Guscin) using infrared and ultraviolet photography and electron microscopy have demonstrated that this Cloth, along with the Shroud of Turin, both touched the same face. Tradition and historical information (now supported by contemporary scientific research) support the belief of millions of people that the face touched by both cloths was that of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The two cloths are believed to have touched the same face at different points in the burial process. The Oviedo Cloth was placed around the head from the time death occurred on the Cross till the body was covered by the Shroud in the Garden Tomb. Then it was removed and placed to one side (John 20:7). Mark Guscin notes that the practice of covering the face is referenced in the Talmud (Moed Katan 27a). He adds that Rabbi Alfred Kolatch in NY talks of the Kevod Ha-Met or "respect for the dead" as the reason for covering the head. Rabbi Michael Tuktzinsky of Jerusalem in his Sefer Gesher Cha'yim (Volume 1, Chapter 3, 1911) offers as a reason that it is a hardship for onlookers to gaze on the face of a dead person. The Sudarium Christi is a poor quality linen cloth, like a handkerchief, measuring 84 x 53 centimeters. Unlike the Shroud of Turin, it does not have an image. However, it does have bloodstains and serum stains from pulmonary edema fluid which match the blood and serum patterns and blood type (AB) of the Shroud of Turin. The length of the nose on both cloths is 8 centimeters (3 inches). Pollen grains found on the Cloth of Oviedo by Dr. Max Frei in 1973 and 1978 and studied also by Monsignor Giulio Ricci match pollen grains found on the Shroud of Turin. Dr. Uri Baruch (expert palynologist from the Israel Antiquities Authority) has indicated that one of these pollen matches is Gundelia tournefortii - a thorn/thistle bush that is indigenous to the Holy Land. Dr. Avinoam Danin (botanist and expert on the flora of the Holy Land who teaches at Hebrew University in Jerusalem) reports that Gundelia tournefortii serves as a "geographic and calendar indicator" that the origin or provenance of the cloths is the Holy Land. The Sudarium Christi has a well-documented history. One source traces the cloth back as far as 570 AD. Pelayo, Bishop of Oviedo in the 1100's, noted in his Chronicles that the Oviedo Cloth left Jerusalem in 614 AD in the face of the Persian attack led by King Chosroes II, and made its way across North Africa to Spain. It was transported to Oviedo in a silver ark (large box) along with many other sacred relics. The fact that both cloths touched the same face, and that the Oviedo Cloth can be traced historically to a date as early as 570 AD are further proof that the Carbon-14 dating of the Shroud to between 1260 -1390 AD cannot be correct. Those wishing to read the work of Oviedo scholar Mark Guscin may read The Oviedo Cloth - The Luttenworth Press 1998, Cambridge, CT. ISBN 07188-2985-9.

PRESENCE OF POLLEN GRAINS AND FLORAL IMAGES

In 1995, Israeli botanist and expert on the plant life of Israel Dr. Avinoam Danin, a Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, confirmed findings by Dr. Alan Whanger, Professor Emeritus at Duke University in North Carolina, of floral images on enhanced Shroud photographs. They were joined by Dr. Uri Baruch of the Israel Antiquities Authority, a palynologist and expert on Israel's pollen. Danin studied the plant images and Baruch analyzed the pollen grains found by the late Swiss criminologist and botanist Dr. Max Frei via the sticky tape collection of materials that Frei had taken from the Shroud in 1973 and 1978. The team has identified, the "inflorescence of the crown chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum coronarium)"; the Rock Rose (Cistus creticus) lateral to the left cheek of the figure on the Shroud; a bouquet of bean caper plants (Zygophyllum dumosum); and a thorn tumbleweed (Gundelia tournefortii) which Whanger speculates comprised the Crown of Thorns. Danin indicates that the pollen grains serve as "geographic and calendar indicators" demonstrating that the origin or provenance of the Shroud was definitely the Holy Land, and more specifically an area in and around Jerusalem. Zygoplyllum dumosum, for example, grows only in Israel, Jordan and the Sinai. Evidence also suggests that the flowers on the Shroud were picked in the Spring. Danin notes that "...they could have been picked fresh in the fields. A few of the species could be found in the markets of Jerusalem in the Spring of the year" - a period consistent with the time of the Passover and the Crucifixion. It appears that bunches or bouquets of flowers were once placed on the Shroud, leaving pollen grains and imprints of plants and flowers on the linen cloth. It provides important evidence regarding the origin of this cloth in the Holy Land, and indicates that the Man of the Shroud was entombed with flowers from the waist up to the head.

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

There are many historical references. Among them are the ancient Abgar Legends which place the cloth in the City of Edessa (Turkey), 400 miles north of Jerusalem during reign of King Abgar V, somewhere between 30 - 40 AD. Pollen finds confirm the presence in Edessa (Anatolian Steppe). Ancient historians Eusebius and Evagrius speak of the Cloth moving with disciple Thaddaeus to Edessa. The Acts of Holy Apostle Thaddaeus (6th Century) speaks of the tetradiplon (cloth doubled-in-four). Dr. John Jackson's raking light test of 1978 confirms fold marks matching tetradiplon. The Byzantine Greeks speak of the Acheiropoietas: image not made with human hands. There is a reference by a Chronicler of the 4th Crusade (Robert de Clari) that the "sindoine" disappeared from Constantinople in 1204.

SHROUD ILLUSTRATED IN PRAY MANUSCRIPT

In the Budapest National Library is the Pray Manuscript, the oldest surviving text of the Hungarian language. It was written between 1192 and 1195 AD (65 years before the earliest Carbon-14 date in the 1988 tests). One of its illustrations shows preparations for the burial of Christ. The picture includes a burial cloth with the same herringbone weave as the Shroud, plus 4 holes near one of the edges. The holes form an "L" shape. This odd pattern of holes is found on the Shroud of Turin. They are burn holes, perhaps from a hot poker or incense embers.

ANCIENT COINS OF PONTIUS PILATE?

3-D imagery of NASA's VP-8 Image Analyzer (Dr. John Jackson, Dr. Eric Jumper and Rev. Kenneth Stevenson in 1978) shows "dense, button-like objects over the eyes" about the size of a U.S. dime. Macrophotography (by the late Fr. Francis Filas, S.J. of Loyola U. in Chicago), and digitalization of the eye area (Dr. Robert Haralick , U. of Virginia Spatial Data Analysis Lab) suggest coin-lettering consistent with the Lepton (Widow's Mite) minted by Pontius Pilate between 29 - 32 AD. Specifically, Filas makes a case for the letters "UCAI", which are on the lepton, and Haralick's digitalization appears to confirm these four raised letters. They are consistent with the "U" of Tiberious and "CAI" of Caisaros (Tiberiou Caisaros) printed on the coins. Normally, coins would be minted with Greek lettering and we would have anticipated "UKAI". However, many leptons were misspelled with Latin "UCAI". Original Text Copyright 1999-2001 John C. Iannone. All rights reserved.
Text supplemented in 2004 and 2005, and clarified in 2009 by J.M. Fischer.
Shroud photos courtesy of Barrie M. Schwortz. 1978

For an in-depth scientific analysis of the Shroud, see Dr. Rogers' FAQ