Google Haley's Comet and you come up with the top references saying Comet Halley. I just moved, and in the process donated about 500 volumes, one of which was titled Halley's Comet, so I guess I'm just not keeping up with the ever-changing nature of empirical science, which is obsessed with naming things rather than understanding things.
Using the top reference, Comet Halley, takes me to dogpile.com, which immediately identifies it as Halley's Comet. Dogpile gives the following explanation (I've corrected a misspelling): "Halley's [HAL-lee] Comet has been known since at least 240 BC and possibly since 1059 BC. Its most famous appearance was in 1066 AD when it was seen right before the Battle of Hastings. It was named after Edmund Halley, who calculated its orbit. He determined that the comets seen in 1531 and 1607 were the same object that followed a 76-year orbit. Unfortunately, Halley died in 1742, never living to see his prediction come true when the comet returned on Christmas Eve 1758."
I thought I finished with comets in column 44-05, but it's just great that I never stop learning new things. I should point out that some of the stuff I'll cover in this column was mentioned in column 30-05. However, I'm going to focus this column directly on the comet rather than using the comet as an example of something else. I'm going to, as they say, put myself out there, crawl out on the proverbial limb, and, to tell the truth, I can no longer find references to some of the points I'll be making. The good point is, I'll be long dead before what I state can ever be disproven.
We first need to put this subject in context. The punch line of the column will jar the context, a context that I have never doubted, but just bear with me. Prior columns have dealt with Hooke and mentioned Halley in connection with Newton's theory of universal gravitation. At the time, the universal belief was that objects fell as a result of the Earth being at the center of the universe, Aristotle's heritage. However, the picture Copernicus painted of a sun-centered universe was slowly taking hold, and the newly established Royal Society did not buy into Aristotle in any way. This left the Earth winging its way around the sun, and no explanation for why everyone didn't simply fly off it's surface. A major effort was underway to explain why we were stuck to the surface of the Earth even though it wasn't the center of the universe. Pretty silly, the ideas that produced the major concepts that control our life and technology. It's unbelievable to me that empirical science is so crippled, it's incapable of revisiting primitive notions produced by ignorant people, but, hey, if your hundred thousand a year salary is based on those crippled notions, you're not going to make a peep.
Hooke, Halley, and Christopher Wren, known today as England's greatest architect, although if you look into it, Hooke was no slouch in this arena either, were sitting around discussing Kepler's laws of planetary motion which are based on inverse square mathematics. All members of the Royal Society, they were wondering, at Hooke's suggestion, whether the inverse square nature of Kepler's laws of planetary motion could be mathematically tied together with the Galilean computation of gravity as also having an inverse square computation in its operation. Hooke, who was not a mathematician, and had so many projects going he couldn't keep up with them, suggested that the Society offer a small reward for anyone who could mathematically make the connection. At the time, Newton, who had inherited the mathematical leadership at Cambridge, some travel distance at the time from Gresham College in London where the Royal Society operated, was already in dispute with Hooke over his theory of colors. Hooke was an experimenter in the real world, contributing a surprising amount of knowledge, without credit. Newton was looking at light coming out of a prism and saying white light is made up of all colors, a bald statement with no science behind it whatsoever. Newton had contributed some optics to the Royal Society, a reflecting telescope that was very innovative, so he expected his theory of colors to be accepted without question. When Hooke didn't go for it, the dour Newton never forgave him, although he feared him.
At this point in the story, Wren goes back to building buildings and Hooke goes back to his many undertakings. Halley, however, was a close, lifelong friend of Newton. Several months after the proposed award, he traveled to Cambridge and asked Newton if he could perform the necessary calculations. Newton, ego never in check, claimed he had already done so. When Halley asked to see it, Newton, ever the stutterer, dithered, not for a day or a week, or even a year, but for a decade.
The basic reason, in my view, that Newton spent so much time putting a simple nonsense concept into the incomprehensible Principia was his fear of Hooke's criticism that there was no foundation for his notion that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter. Newton created this vast mathematical contraption based on two idiot notions, that all matter was made up of uniform particles evenly spaced in the matter and that all matter travels in straight lines but for gravity, simply to dazzle, to obfuscate the fact that his notion was actually simple nonsense.
But Newton, by the time he finished his flawed work, had Halley on the inside of the Royal Society and Halley, in fact, self-financed the publication of the Principia, even though he made it appear that it was a Society publication. It wasn't exactly a success, and Newton still faced years of frustration and a breakdown before he was in a position to turn the work into what it is today, an unread masterpiece of mental deception. Newton had originally given Hooke some credit, but withdrew it immediately when Hooke rightly claimed that the originality in the book, the connection of Kepler's laws with gravity, was his idea.
Now we get to the point in the story that has crippled our technology, produced a distorted view of reality, a distorted technology, and the signpost to our demise as the unique life that evolved on this planet. Halley set out to prove Newton right. Newton's notion of gravity as the only force in the universe that changed the universal straight-line motion of the planets in the universe had to be demonstrated. Let's go back to Copernicus for a moment. Copernicus took the chart of the solar system, which, with the Earth as the center, had some eighty orbits, and by putting the Sun in the center, reduced the number of orbits to about forty. He diagramed the system on the front of his book, but he didn't let the book out until he was on his deathbed. The controversy that ensued was incredible, with the deadhead scientists of the time, much like our deadhead empirical scientists, refusing to entertain new ideas. It was only when Galileo pointed out the moons of Jupiter through his telescope that Copernicus gained some traction, and it was only in England, which had broken away from the church in Rome, that his description of the solar system was accepted as a reality.
The reason the Copernican picture took hold in England was because of Galileo's telescope and the picture it provided of a miniature solar system provided by Jupiter and it's moons. I'm not sure there really is a connection between Jupiter and proving the Sun is the center of the solar system, but Jupiter demonstrated the possibility and made Copernicus more real. As an aside, I'm not so sure the Foucault pendulum, which is taken as Copernican proof, is actually proof. To me, our space program is the absolute proof, although I would never, ever believe the Earth was the center of the universe.
The point, however, is that Jupiter and its moons were taken as proof of what was at the time the most controversial theory in science. So here we have the glimmerings of an idea being born, a fatal idea as it turns out. Halley said, if the system of moons around Jupiter convinced people of the Copernican view of the solar system, then he could come up with some way to demonstrate the truthfulness of Newton's view of how the solar system operated. He was formulating the idea that finding a fact in reality could validate a theory that predicted an unknown fact.
This is utter nonsense. Being treated to a visual view of Jupiter and its moons and then looking at the Copernican picture of the solar system might very well be convincing to ignorant people possessing little or no facts about reality, but taking the leap, that it proved the Copernican picture, is absurd. Anyone who thinks finding a fact makes an idea a fact is an idiot pure and simple.
And what Halley set out to use to prove Newton's hodge podge of stupidity was not an unknown fact, it was a known fact. Yet, he was able to get away with claiming it was a prediction. As noted above, the comet named after him was first recorded in the third century BCE, as they like to say today. All he did was say, this thing comes regularly, it will come once again in 1758, and when it does so, it will prove Newton's theory of Universal Gravitation. Of course, Newton hounded Halley his entire life to measure the orbit of the moon in a way that would prove his theory, and after Newton's death, after Halley's comet did in fact return, applying Newton's distorted math to other planets showed it didn't work anywhere in the solar system, our good buddy the overly religious Whewell (see column 06-05) claimed that Newton's truth was proved by the return of Halley's comet, cementing the notion that notions that predict unknown events become facts once the unknown events occur.
I want to put out the fact that startled me before I specifically describe my prediction, what I think happened to Halley's comet. I came across an interesting book, Astronomical Enigmas: Life on Mars, The Star of Bethlehem and other Milky Way Mysteries by Mark Kidger, published by Johns Hopkins of all places. Remember, now, that the entire basis of empirical science is that motion is historical, that the solar system was created five billion years ago and has remained unchanged, that Newton uncovered the law that made this possible and that the regular 76 year return of Halley's comet proves that law, regardless of the fact that the math never worked and the law is used to prove things that are not provable, what is in the center of planets. Kidger tracks down all 30 recorded appearances of the comet and finds, well, what do you know, that it doesn't return on a regular 76 year period, its period varies between 74 and 79 years.
In column 03-04, I said the 1986 pass of Halley's comet was the 9th known pass, so I was not only astounded that the passes weren't at regular intervals, I was astounded that Kidger came up with 30 passes. If the first sighting was in the 3rd Century BCE, I could have deduced 30 passes, but I was unaware that 30 passes had been recorded. What I want to underscore in the column is a speculation I made in column 03-04. Some comets break up into pieces and disappear the first time they pass close to the sun, others, such as Halley, pass around the sun many times. The inevitable future for any returning comet, however, is to break up into pieces.
This is not because it is made out of ice, it's because it's made out of the most complex matter in the universe and it eventually wears itself out and fractures under the intense field replacement that occurs when it is close to the sun. See columns 05-05 for field replacement and 45-05 for comets. With every passing of Halley, it became more fragile, the elements making up its surface breaking down. However, the 1986 pass was especially feeble. As the comet began to move away from the sun, it disappeared, passing out of a strong enough field to light it up. But then something very unusual happened. This is the event I can no longer find any mention of. When Halley was approaching the orbit of Jupiter, there was a gigantic solar flare on the surface of the sun.
Solar flares, of course, increase the field of the sun. They heat up the Earth, increasing its gravity and knocking satellites out of orbit. They also change the rotational rate of the Earth, sometimes causing events like earthquakes (there's little research into this connection because to empirical science, nothing can affect the rotation of the Earth, and as there is little research in the area, that is used as proof that there is no connection, typical empirical nonsense). What happened with this solar flare, it lit up Halley once again. It is my supposition that Halley, having cooled down from its passage around the sun, suddenly subjected to heat, broke apart and became the Shoemaker-Levy 9 which subsequently crashed into the surface of Jupiter (which isn't supposed to have a surface). We'll never see Halley' comet again.
NOTE 12/14/06: The material in the tail of Wild 2, the comet used in Project Stardust (described in column 30-06, has now been examined. Not only does it contain a multitude of elements, something to be expected if the comet is the most complex matter breaking down, it has demonstrated conclusively that the come contained no ice and never came into contact with water. Kind of destroys Celestial Mechanics, but hey, it's probably one of a kind.
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