Let me plagiarize my own book, Let's Talk Flying Saucers, about the evidence that was (and still is) being uncovered that indicates the biblical story of the flood is based on fact:
"The evidence is quite simple. The northwestern sides of mountains are scoured with what could only have been water filled with rocks and gravel. On the same sides of the mountains, indeed, in the valleys between mountains, and even composing whole islands above the Arctic treeline, huge drifts are piled up that could only have been left by receding waters. While the drifts contain sand and gravel, a chief component of the drifts are the remains of animals, insects, trees and plants, some from Asia, others from the Southern Hemisphere, still others from North America and Europe, all having one thing in common: While occupying the same place dead, the remains never occupied the same area of the Earth while alive. Further, these drifts are shoved deep into the fissures of caves, places they could reach only by the recession of massive floodwaters.
"More perplexing are the remains of underwater cities found anywhere from just beneath the waves to hundreds feet beneath the sea's surface.
"All of the evidence, clearly pointing toward the worldwide flood for which exist over 600 independent myths and traditions available from every point of the globe, had to be explained in terms other than a flood because to use the evidence of the flood to verify the flood would verify a biblical tale, endangering the objectivity of the scientific effort, an objectivity born of the need to make up different stories than those told to the ruling feudal nobility by the established religious authorities."
Empirical science justified abandoning the flood story on the basis that no one could explain where the water for the flood came from. However, to this day, no one can explain how something like the ice ages could have occurred, not to mention the small problem that glaciers flow like water, downhill, and not up mountainsides, as proponents of the ice age would have us believe with their fancy dummied up pictures of ice creeping down from the North Pole. Ever stop and think how dumb it is to think, just because the North Pole is up there, the ice simply comes down from up there down to here? Up there isn't up there unless Los Angeles could be considered up there to people in Kansas and believe me, no ice is going to flow over the Rockies.
However, the ice ages opened the floodgates for Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck's 1801 suggestion that animals evolved. Buffon had earlier suggested that animals could change form, but Lamarck believed the change was incremental, trait-by-trait, what I refer to as characteristic evolution. Curvier stepped in with a classification system for animals, notice the empirical mania for solving real problems by the use of names. This straight jacketed 19th Century thought with species thinking, eliminating characteristic evolution from the landscape for all time.
And that's what was needed, time, because if species morphed one from the other, they needed a lot of time to do so. Lyell then dreamed up the notion of uniformitarianism, that the Earth evolved slowly without any cataclysmic events to mar its slow development and he stole William Smith's stratiography thunder by claiming that the layers of earth found in cuts were actually sedimentary layers deposited over long periods of time. And there we have Darwin, with his species evolution taking center stage for the final battle of empirical science against biblical thought. None of this is based on anything factual, although there's a lot of truth to stratiography as the result of sedimentary deposits (see column 31-05). It all rests on the idiotic ice age fantasy made up to cover the fact that there actually was a flood of biblical proportions. Being anti something doesn't make you right, it just makes you as dumb as what you're arguing against.
The furor over Darwin towered over and therefore trumped all other scientific advancements, allowing for two disparate tracks of experiment to merge into the inane empirical fantasies that constitute our picture of reality in the 21st Century. The first involved the discovery of induction, the second, the mindless acceptance of Young's experiment as proof that light was like a water wave and therefore traveled through a medium, the aether.
After induction was discovered, ways to create electricity, and thus a steady current with which to experiment, led to the invention of the Crookes, or Cathode Ray tube, by Crookes in 1878. Note the rapid advancement of theoretical empirical science, almost half a century between the discovery of induction and the creation of a practical device to experiment with it. In the meantime, Edison, whose accomplishments have led to our modern world, and whose accomplishments empirical science seeks to lay claim, thereby sinking the name of Edison into the black hole of history, was creating the light bulb, a device he perfected a year after the invention of the Cathode Ray tube, but whose principle had been patented some years before the invention of the Cathode Ray tube.
The Cathode Ray tube was merely a filament that emitted electrons in a vacuum rather than a circuit providing the resistance needed to light up the vacuum. J.J. Thomson began to fiddle around with the Cathode Ray tube in 1897, and after twelve years of exhaustive experimentation, determined using these rays that atoms had nuclei. This led, in about 1910, to the picture of the atom that forms the basis for all chemistry. This is probably one of the most successful pictures empirical science has ever created because, unlike mass/gravity and some of the others we'll be talking about, it creates a positive picture that allows people think and experiment. I'd be inclined to go along with empirical science's claim that its concept of the atom has led to our modern world but for a little substance called Bakelite. What's Bakelite, you ask? Empirical science would probably answer, it's a substance invented by Dr. Leo Hendrick Baekeland. I'd answer, it's plastic, invented by said Baekeland over four years before Thompson discovered the nucleus of the atom. So, the basis of modern manufacturing, plastic, claimed to be an innovation of empirical science, isn't, and doesn't even owe anything to its theoretical musings. You'd think the name of the inventor of plastic would be well-known, but it's sunk in the same black hole that Edison is being shoved so as not to contradict empirical science's claim that it's fantasies are responsible for the modern world. If you don't believe me, ask the next ten high school kids you run into, who invented the light bulb (for that matter, ask the next ten people you run into). To see a really interesting story, delve into the way Baekeland was hounded into obscurity read Savage Grace by Natalie Robbins and Steven M. L. Aronson.
The stunning stupidity underlying Thompson's picture of the atom, of course, is it made absolutely no attempt to explain where light came from. In short, it didn't perform it's most basic function of connecting light to the matter that produced it, but that brings us back to the second thread of 19th Century idiocy that produced the empirical ignorance of the 21st Century. While Michelson was able to measure the approximate speed of light, a feat of some proportions, but a practical reality rather than a theoretical fantasy, when he set out to demonstrate the speed and direction of the Earth in the aether, which served as the medium for light, things went from silly to insane. After all, just thinking that light is like a water wave is silly. A water wave is the disturbance of a fluid surface held in place by gravity. The disturbance is two-dimensional in it occurs on the surface, even though the disturbance sets the surface moving in three dimensions.
Light, on the other hands, is a three dimensional phenomena. It does not involve a surface held in place by gravity, it does not take a belly flop to get it moving, but more to the point, when the troughs of waves cancel out their crests, there is still, for crying out loud, water there. When Young collected the light on his collection screen and found lines of light and no light, what the heck made him or anyone else analogize it to water waves? There's no light there, zip, nil, nada, whereas with the water wave, there's still water there. That's why the analogy is plain silly.
But because the silly analogy was accepted as scientific fact, empirical science invented the aether and Michelson and Morley set out to prove, with a very sophisticated contraption using split and recombined light in the style of Young's experiment, the absolute direction the Earth was traveling in. Wonder of wonders, nothing happened, no results. Any sensible scientist would then conclude that there was no aether, light was not a wave, let's go back to the drawing board and figure out what the heck light is. Not empirical science, though. It already had a fact, light was a wave, so that fact had to be accounted for. The only possibility was, the experiment was working, we just weren't seeing the results. Why weren't we seeing the results? Well, that's really quite simple to explain. The physical nature of the equipment is changing in the exact proportions necessary to compensate for the lack of a result. When the path is facing the aether, the dimensions of the equipment have become different than when the path is across the aether.
Get this? To account for one fantasy, empirical science manufactures another fantasy, that the actually physical reality, the rulers, change, grow longer or shorter, with speed. Contemplate this, because I realize everyone knows it's absolutely correct. It's been proven time and again. Put an atomic clock, one of those things that counts time by measuring atomic decay, set it with on on the ground and send it up on a satellite, and when the clock comes back, its time has slowed down. Just like the Cavendish joke of an experiment to prove mass/gravity, these jokers rig up a test using principles of radioactive decay they know nothing about, primarily, that the weaker the field, the slower the decay, then take a clock, send it up into a weaker field, where it's decay is slower, and use the slower decay as a measurement of time to prove that when we hold a ruler, it 12"s, but when we put it on a rocket to nowhere, it becomes shorter. Delusion is a wonderful thing.
The crazy notion that Michelson and Morley's equipment was changing dimensions was incorporated in 1895 by Lorentz into equations which eventually became the basis of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald Contraction, and while Einstein insisted he'd never heard of it, his theories, which empirical science claims solved all the unsolved mysteries of gravity (but, I guess, not what it is) mirror it and are high dogma today. Relativity added what might be the greatest piece of monkey see, monkey say to the picture of empirical dogma with what can only be called, monkey feel, monkey conclude. Because we are pressed to the floor when an elevator rises, and we are pressed to the Earth by gravity, acceleration is gravity, which takes us from Aristotle, things fall because the Earth is the center of the Universe to Newton's things fall because it's a property for them to fall, to our current wisdom, things fall because elevators rise. Einstein, however, contributed a little bit of reality that threw the empirical community into such a state of fantasy that even he couldn't go along with it. This reality was his discovery of the photoelectric effect, the fact that light striking surfaces produces electrons. This meant light must be a particle as well as a wave, and the photon was born. Here's where it really gets good, because these dolts had never bothered to connect light with its source, matter, and now, lo and behold, they had to do so.
Here's the fairy tale.
Because someone noticed that having protons in the nucleus of an atom would be impossible because likes repel, the strong force was created to overcame the repelling and quantum chromodynamics was born, creating the quarks that were, conveniently enough, unexaminable. Although empirical science remains clueless about the nature of magnetism and electricity, it now states the interaction of electricity and magnetism is combined into quantum electrodynamics. Enough said, because that's all that can be said.
Gravity has already been taken care of, so that leaves light. This gets into describing how neutrons can become protons or protons, neutrons, with surplus energy carried off by, guess what, another undetectable, and therefore unexaminable, particle called a neutrino. Make up this, make up that, and pretty soon, an impenetrable fence is built around the edifice of empirical science. In simple terms, because no one ever bothered to try and connect the source of light with light, guys with pointy star-filled hats and flowing robes with big hanging sleeves make up a bunch of gobbledygook and essentially say, the electron, the source of whose motion they refuse to discuss, is jumping up and down in its orbit, absorbing and emitting light and heat. To take care of the creation story, Hubble used what he measured as a red shift in stars to discover the universe is expanding and now astronomers can see from the beginning of time to the end of the universe. See column 11-05 for an amusing twist on this farce, and I do say farce because who the heck cares what the universe is doing, it has nothing to do with the production of our technology. But every great religion needs a creation myth, and empirical science is one of the greatest religions of all time. See column 01-06.
Now, because none of these theories is internally consistent, and none are consistent with each other, something definitely has to be done. Never fear, empirical ignorance is here. What pulls everything together? Why, string theory of course. What's string theory? Well, that's easy, because like the quark and the neutrino, it starts on the assumption that nothing is examinable or detectable and thus it must be accurate. But one thing is known for sure, the universe contains anywhere from seven to ten dimensions and also up to 10 to the power of 100 times an unknown constant, oh, what the heck, this gets so ridiculous, I'm better off writing science fiction.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com