“Moses Didn’t Write About Creation”, Herman Cummings
Posted on Nov 17 2007 | Tagged as: RIBs (Reviews In Brief)
A 400-page argument from ignorance.
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on 19 Nov 2007 at 5:19 pm 1 Herman Cummings said …
Hi.
on 19 Nov 2007 at 5:21 pm 2 Herman Cummings said …
Did you read the book?
on 19 Nov 2007 at 5:25 pm 3 Christopher White said …
I read the first chapter, which you have online. The bit headed “The Scientists” mostly made me want to cry.
on 19 Nov 2007 at 6:46 pm 4 Szwagier said …
Thanks very much. That gave me the best laugh of the day.
on 19 Nov 2007 at 6:52 pm 5 Herman Cummings said …
If that is all, you don’t have an understanding of the book. It declares the existence of prehistoric mankind to be earlier than sixty million years, as given in Genesis.
Herman
on 19 Nov 2007 at 9:39 pm 6 Christopher White said …
Szwagier: You’re very welcome.
Herman:
Yes, I’d grasped that much.
But given that your misunderstanding of physics is so utterly shocking (as demonstrated in the section headed “The Scientists”) I couldn’t bear/be bothered to read any further.
I say that not only because if that lack of intellectual rigor is maintained throughout then there’s probably very little reason to, but also because, given that opening, it’s as obvious as Santa’s beard that your entire thesis is based on a tremendously flawed premise.
In fact, the physics in your introductory material is so woefully misunderstood that it’s probably deliberate. But as both a journalist and Master In Astrophysics I feel obliged to attempt to correct some of your misconceptions, so I intend to post precisely why much of what [I’ve read of] what you’ve written is the most monolithic tripe as soon as I’ve dug out my old copy of The Universe for the Under Tens.
on 20 Nov 2007 at 1:27 pm 7 Christopher White said …
Right then.
Herman, the section to which I refer is a series of arguments of the type that assert that just because you don’t understand something, or because things aren’t achieved in the only way you can imagine, then they can’t possibly be so. That’s why I described it as an “argument from ignorance”. It’s actually really depressing reading.
The minor and petty quibbles first:
You write:
Recent experiments suggest it isn’t.
Elliptical galaxies display very little radial (what you erroneously call “spiral”) rotation and irregular galaxies don’t necessarily radially rotate at all.
The parsec is defined as the distance at which something 1AU in radius would subtend an angle of one arcsecond. It happens to equal 3.26 lightyears, but it isn’t defined as such. I realise that this is merely a matter of semantics.
In one paragraph you’ve revealed that you haven’t the first idea how science works. To take Wikipedia’s definition (because I can’t be bothered to go to my bookshelf for A Brief History of Time, which has a better one):
“In science, a theory is a mathematical or logical explanation, or a testable model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation.”
Minor quibbles done with.
Right then:
From Patrick Moore’s The Universe for the Under Tens:
“A spectroscope splits up light. What we usually call ‘white’ light is not really white at all, but is made up of a mixture of all the colours of the rainbow. […]
“Any body which is sending out light will produce a spectrum. If the source is a hot solid, liquid or dense gas it will give a rainbow spectrum, from red through to violet. But next, let us look at the spectrum of gas which is of much lower density. There will be no rainbow band at all, and all that will be seen are bright lines, separated from each other with no coloured background. We know that each line is the trademark of some particular element or group of elements.* Suppose we throw some salt into a flame? Salt contains sodium, and this produces two bright yellow lines (among many others). See these lines and you may be sure that they are due to sodium.
“The Sun’s surface is dense gas, so that in a spectroscope it gives a rainbow. Above the surface are thinner gases, which give separate lines. Because they are seen against the rainbow background, these lines show up as dark rather than bright, but the positions are the same. In the spectrum of the Sun we can see two lines in the yellow part of the rainbow. These must be due to sodium, so we can tell that there is sodium in the Sun.”
*These effects are, of course, well-known from labs on Earth.
I did an experiment involving spectra once, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was about.
Because that huge mass of hydrogen under that kind of pressure will inevitably begin fusing! Again, these effects are well-studied on Earth: it’s exactly the same principle that allows the building of thermonuclear bombs. And it’s the only way that “heavy” elements (heavier than Hydrogen and Helium) can be made — those in the Sun corresponding well to what we would expect from the well-understood process of fusion.
It also makes a definite, testable prediction. According to theories of nuclear physics, when two molecules fuse they release energy, form a heavier molecule, and also emit a neutrino. We can detect the neutrinos on Earth, which we have done (although initially only a third of what was expected).
You can’t see the wind, but you know that it’s there: you can observe its effects on its surroundings. It’s much the same with “dust” (by which we simply mean particles from a few molecules to about 0.1mm in size.
One simple way of detecting them is they block out starlight. For high-energy sources such as quasars, that emit x-rays as well as visible light, the x-rays tend to pass straight through while the visisble light is absorbed and causes the dust to heat up and emit predominantly at infra-red wavelengths. So if a celestial object is “bright” at x-ray and IR wavelengths and not in visible light, there’s probably dust in the way. That’s how I examined the dust content of active galaxies for my Masters research project.
Another way is from dust’s own emissive properties, which again are well-known from the lab. Wikipedia says:
“Dust particles can scatter light nonuniformly. Forward-scattered light means that light is redirected slightly by diffraction off its path from the star/sunlight, and back-scattered light is reflected light.
“The scattering and extinction (”dimming”) of the radiation gives useful information about the dust grain sizes. For example, if the object(s) in one’s data is many times brighter in forward-scattered visible light than in back-scattered visible light, then we know that a significant fraction of the particles are about a micrometer in diameter.”
We can’t really see Jupiter’s rings from Earth (mostly rock anyway, not dust, and so it behaves differently) because they’re not strongly lit. And no scientists claimed that Jupiter couldn’t have rings — they just didn’t know they existed.
From that second remark you appear to think that we can tell the ages of celestial bodies to the day, which is clearly nonsense. We can get an idea of their age because they evolve in a predictable way, similarly to how you tell that old people are old because, well, they look old. For stars you can use nucleocosmochronology, i.e. counting the proportions of different elements generated by the well-understood process of fusion, in much the same way as radiocarbon dating is used to determine the age of the Earth.
You’ve partly answered your own question. Our Sun is actually a third-generation star, and was formed from the remnants of an older one. There’s no “mysterious force” making it spin “this time”: its predecessor star will have been rotating as well. The only reason older stars might not acquire a planetary disk is because (rocky) planets are made of heavy elements which need to be manufactured inside stars in the first place.
Your question “What about the moons and comets?” is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Comets are probably captured, which is why they have eccentric elliptical orbits rather than circular ones; moons are just planet-like bodies orbiting another planet-like body rather than the Sun directly because they formed in the vicinity of a planet but didn’t accrete onto it.
“What was happening during those missing 10 billion years?” is another thoroughly foolish question. If I had a child at 30, you wouldn’t ask what was happening in the years between me being born and my kid being born. Stars were forming elsewhere in the galaxy during that time, just as other people have been reproducing during the whole time I’ve been growing up.
A star’s lifespan is largely determined by its size: larger ones burn brighter but burn out quicker. Small ones simply run our of fuel and stop shining. Big ones explode, like the runaway nuclear reactors that they in fact are. This is what supernovae are: stars exploding. In our galaxy they occur around once every 50 years.
Er, yes and no. The Big Bang model was formulated because the Galaxies are all racing away from each other, so extrapolating back into tha past they must have all been in the same place. You can’t really accept that the most distant galaxies are 12bn lightyears away and question the Big Bang model…
Not one small celestial body or an atom at all. Zero volume: a singularity. And there wasn’t actually any matter at this point; it came into existence later. Actually, matter pops in and out of existence all the time, but comes and goes again in less than 10-44 seconds (the ‘Planck-Wheeler time’). Under certain conditions these ‘virtual’ particles can become real, such as the Hawking Radiation emitted by black holes. Probably the extreme conditions immediately after the Big Bang would allow the same. And think you’ve made up the bit about the nebula.
I think you’ve made up the bit about a passing star as well.
What triggered the Big Bang in the first place is an open question. But trying to invoke a creator is both fallacious and tautological. It’s fallacious because it involves an infinite regress (who created the creator?). And it’s tautological because we’re trying to to explain why there exists something rather than nothing, and positing god is invoking a specific “something”, so saying the Universe exists because god created it is exactly the same as saying: “There exists something because there exists something”, which is patently meaningless.
Galaxies are simply collections of stars bound by gravity. Stars and the rest we’ve already discussed as being formed by the gravitational collapse of a rotating cloud of Stuff.
There’s some other obvious mistakes of biology/geology as well, but it’s not my area, so I won’t go into them.
I gather that this isn’t the principle point of your book, which seems mainly to be a revival of eighteenth/nineteenth-century Catastrophism crudely shoehorned into a contrived new interpretation of Genesis. But given that your entire worldview is informed by such a gross misunderstanding of the world, it undermines your entire thesis.
on 24 Nov 2007 at 4:34 am 8 Herman Cummings said …
Hi.
Read the book first, then you can criticize. Before then,
you are just letting out hot air.
Herm
on 24 Nov 2007 at 12:03 pm 9 Christopher White said …
Herman, I could equally say to you, “Go and study some science first, then critcise it. Before then you are just demonstrating your unparalleled ignorance.”
Your unwillingness to engage with what I’ve written about the bits that I have read is absolutely typical of people like you.
I’m not going to spend money on a book patently built on a flawed premise just to rip it apart further, any more than I would bother reading, say, a book questioning the validity of the existence of Continental Drift that starts by mockingly rubbishing the evidence for the Earth being round.
I know the first section — the one that you have online — is the most awful, inaccurate, (wilfully) ignorant nonsense; unless you turn into a genius 15,000 words in I don’t need to read the rest to know that it’s probably garbage. Your misunderstanding of basic, high-school science has left you with absolutely zero crediblity.