Herndon’s analysis that Earth’s interior has a solid inner core that is not iron nickel metal but nickel silicide, a nickel-silicon alloy, matches, unlike the standard geophysics model, the aggregate accepted density for our planet. Moreover, such a composition is strongly supported by so-called enstatite chondrites, meteorites mostly ignored after the standard model of Earth’s composition and core became stratified, as it were, into geophysical thinking. Enstatite chondrites are distinct from the more common (“ordinary chondrites”) kind formed under more oxidized conditions on which the standard model of Earth’s origin and composition are based. They are more chemically reduced, closer to what we might expect of fragments left over from the relatively hydrogen-rich early solar system. Less available oxygen at Earth’s formation meant that certain “oxygen-loving” elements unexpectedly occurred in the core; calcium and magnesium would have combined with sulfur and floated upward to form the thin layers detected between the core and mantle; and uranium, most likely combined with sulfur, would have sunk to the center. In Herndon’s view silicon combined with nickel and sank to form an inner core of nickel silicide (not iron) and uranium concentrated at the center of Earth functioning as a nuclear reactor, while its churning layer of nuclear waste produced and continues to produce our planet’s geomagnetic field.15
Today Herndon adduces multiple lines of evidence to support his claims, including similarity of Earth-parts with corresponding parts of oxygen-starved enstatite–chondrite meteorites and similar thermodynamic condensation considerations; similarity of calculated georeactor-produced helium with helium observed coming from deep within Earth; historic geomagnetic field reversals on a time scale of weeks to years; simultaneous historical pulses of lava production on opposite sides of Earth in Iceland and Hawai‘i; and, more recently, deep-Earth geoneutrino measurements.16
Herndon’s comprehensive whole-Earth view extends beyond core composition to nearly all current geophysical processes. And it is buttressed by new discoveries from the international space program, which has detected Jupiter-sized exoplanets at distances from their stars similar to that of our Earth from the Sun.
Is it true? Did our little rock begin with something like planetary delusions of grandeur? If so, what should we call it, this lifeless monster, this fat paleo-planet whose gases bore down and compressed the rocky inner part of Earth to some 64 percent of its present diameter, before T Tauri eruptions swept those gases away, not only from our planet but from Mercury, Venus, and Mars as well, and set the stage for little neo-Earth as we now know her?
Perhaps we should call it Jaea, this big old globe that none of us had expected, naming this mother after a combination of Jupiter and Gaea, the massive planet and the old Greek word for Earth. Or Jupaea maybe, or Juvea (which has a nice connotation of youth in addition to merging Jove and Gaea), or Megaea, or more simply Mega or Colosso, this proposed super-Earth (but this last term has already been reserved for extrasolar planets slightly bigger than Earth but with masses far below gas giants).
And it is not trivial, this matter of the name in the reception of an idea. Bumper stickers say “Reunite Gondwanaland,” but the supposed supercontinent floating alone in the world ocean never existed if Herndon’s ideas (which fascinated my mother, of course, who encouraged Herndon to better explain them) hold true.
I think I like Jovea.
TO UNDERSTAND WHY, despite more than thirty-five peer-reviewed professional publications, Herndon continues to suffer rejection without valid criticism for which he would be grateful, Herndon delved into the history and philosophy of science. Although he was not a sociologist, anthropologist, or philosopher, he strove to understand why his colleagues refused to grant a fair hearing to what he considered his well-documented alternative and compelling concept of Earth’s formation.
Herndon blames, in part, the peer review system, instituted in 1951 at the end of World War II by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It removes personal accountability. In a shroud of anonymity, many reviewers nix projects that threaten work in a “thought-style” that differs from theirs. Does not admission of any error in a large shared theory ultimately threaten current authorities and, crucially, therefore menace funding?
“Prior to World War II,” writes Herndon, “there was little government financial support for science. Nevertheless, the 20th century opened and seemed to offer the promise of an unparalleled age of enlightenment and reason. Fertile imaginations put forth ideas that challenged prevailing views. New understanding began to emerge, sometimes precise, sometimes flawed, but tending toward truth they inspired more new ideas, continued debate and further imaginative creativity. Enthusiasm and excitement ensued in the general public and kindled the imaginations of the young. Although money for science at the time was in short supply, scientists maintained certain self-discipline. A graduate student who worked on his Ph.D. dissertation was expected to make a new discovery to earn that degree, even if it meant beginning again because another made the discovery first. Self-discipline was also in the scientific publication system. A new, unpublished scientist obtained criticism and endorsement of published scientists before submission of manuscripts. The repressive popularity-contest system of ‘peer review’ had not yet been born.”17 The facelessness, pseudonymity, and anonymity of the Internet are similar to peer review. Science thrives under a regime of openness, fair and accountable judgment, not corporate patents, self-interested censorship, and informational control.
How do we safeguard the scientific spirit that has been so prodigious in our understanding of ourselves and our material environment? That mode of inquiry, that mix of close observation, childlike curiosity, and critical thinking that has enriched our inner lives and asymptotically approached the elusive philosophical ur-goal of self-knowledge? Not only is this unique modern heritage, arguably culturally blind at its core but ethnically inflected—this scientific spirit that is a universal birthright of all human beings and which is ultimately bigger than humanity—not only is it fighting for its life, pushed and pulled, captured and abused, its knowledges horded and copyrighted and patented against its antisecrecy divulgatory essence; not only has it become the plaything of corporations and publicity stunts and media and manipulators and lawyers with no intrinsic allegiance to the truth over and above their clients’ cases and the accumulation of an all-too-human wealth; but by turns well-meaning, playful, and fashionable impulses within academia have also played into the hands of those who would willfully obstruct the search for open and universal knowledge. Without impugning their contributions, it is clear that the movements variously and collectively known as post-structuralism, deconstruction, and Continental philosophy have put scientific truth, to use one of their own terms, “under erasure.” Jacques Derrida’s able and in many ways useful critique of a “transcendental signified” is part of a climate where radically distinct perspectives are granted a sort of politically correct intellectual equality. While in some cases this may be a valued corrective to ideology posing as truth, it also provides a license for machinators and the benighted to claim ill-gotten gains. Add to this the difficulty of distinguishing between specialized discourse, the technical jargon of scientific specialties, and linguistic protectorates with in-crowd shibboleths, and we plunge into a dizzying abyss of unwatched watchers and incomprehensible experts.
The tension between the scientific attitude and the scientific reality is manifest in science’s status as a collective enterprise dependent for the most part on public funds. Corporate and state backing of the search for knowledge is problematic in part because collective human organizations, according to evolutionary logic itself, are in the business of self-perpetuation. Assuming even a multivalent, situated definition of truth, for example, a truth of relativity if not an absolute or absolutely relative truth, there is still no reason various levels of obfuscation and deceit can not only prevail but be incorporated into structures of group perception and survival. Epistemologically, truncation, editing, and abst
raction are necessary at even the most basic levels of perception. While the metaphor depends on contemporary technology, consciousness itself can be parsed as an “operating system” that hides the working innards of neurochemistry equivalent to wiring or hardware of a meat machine. The brain as interface, altered by electrochemistry, in this view would not command an absolute truth but a workable one. Here we encroach on the epistemological compromises elucidated by pragmatists in philosophy, to wit, that workability makes its own truth. If we cling to a classical definition of truth as an abstract ideal—certain, universal, necessary, and true in its mathematical ideal—we run afoul of the evolutionary process, which does not necessarily move in the same direction. This is especially true when one considers the holarchical or nested nature of groups consisting of perceiving individuals who or which may themselves be dispensable in terms of a collective survival enterprise. This is the aporia of evolutionary epistemology: that knowledge of truth in no way ensures survival. In fact, it can be directly inimical to it. Such is the background behind the legend of achieving complete knowledge only upon death, of stories where final secrets are revealed taking those to whom they are whispered with them. It is perhaps ironic that the emphasis on selfish genes in neo-Darwinism, and the virulence reserved for the supposedly mathematically untenable theory of group selection, are maintained by coteries of group-acting beings, that is, by old boy networks of the academic kind, intellectual cabals of browbeaters quick on the rhetorical draw and not above using straw men, ad hominem arguments, and other tricks of emotional persuasion in contradistinction to rational analysis.
Protecting the spirit of science and safeguarding its path are not trivial in our tribal species in the current politico-corporate and academic environments. The scientific attitude comes out of a deeper philosophical stance of curiosity and critical thinking, a stance that must face down dogma even at the risk of social disapprobation. In a media age, in a public relations state where science can and has been corrupted by corporate bottom lines and government-sponsored agendas, the philosophical heart of science—thinking things through for yourself and seeking the truth whether or not we like what we find—is increasingly in peril.
Groupthink intrinsic to tribal survival in combination with the displacement of the knowledge priesthood from the clergy to (courtesy of Bruno and company) lay and scientific authorities can make for a volatile—and distinctly scientistic, that is, antiscientific—mix. In the binary oppositions of the dichotomizing, such authority may seem to be the opposite of pseudoscience, but in fact it is equally the opposite of science, all the more dangerous for the institutional power of authority it wields.
No snowflake in a snowstorm ever feels responsible.
—Voltaire
NAMES ARE NOT THINGS, but they come mighty close.
“What’s in a name?” asks the star-crossed Juliet, feminine force of the play that bears her name. “Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?”
“Neither, fair maid, if either thee dislike.”
Juliet is right to worry about her lover’s name, and the contentious family history it signifies cannot just be wished away. There is the love of Romeo and Juliet, and there is what society makes of that love, and however much society betrays the essence of that love with its fatal expectations, those expectations, reinforced by would-be arbitrary names, cast a real pall over the young lovers’ romance.
The name, if not quite a magic word making something that was not yet there jump into existence, creates a kind of field, organizing our expectations and creating real-world effects, for better or worse, according to a logic of self-fulfilling prophecy. Romeo should be against Juliet because she is a Capulet; Gondwana and Pangaea, with their proper names, must refer to real supercontinents that once existed.
HIV is another, highly problematic, example. Leave aside any medical protocols that were broken (and that HIV’s founder, Robert Gallo, was censured; and that the discovery of the putative virus was never made according to the Koch postulates hitherto considered crucial in virology; and that there are apparently no electron micrographs of the virus; and that tests identify antibodies that can be to a variety of proteins; and that Peter Duesberg, whose career was effectively ruined for questioning the HIV-AIDS connection, offered to inject himself with HIV to prove his deep doubt; and that Luc Montagnier, one of the Nobel Prize winners for the discovery of HIV, has become a target for derision because he does not espouse the HIV-AIDS party line),18 and just for the moment consider the acronym: Human Immunodeficiency Virus. At once subtly and blindingly obviously, the name contains the answer to the question we are supposed to be still asking. Like Molière’s “dormitive principle” that was a sufficient explanation for why we sleep, but in a tragic rather than comic register, the name simply restates the desired answer while foreclosing the question. Now no one in their right mind wants to wade into the vat of retroviral sludge and priestly accusations of denialism and conspiracy theory and weak minds that is this politically loaded issue. That’s why I’m not going to get into this here. I have smaller fish to fry.
IN HERNDON’S VIEW, our planet’s decompression comes about as a natural rebound from the crushing compression caused by the great overburdening weight of the gas giant stage. Earth’s surface area must increase to accommodate expanded planetary volume, and it does so by “rifting,” forming surface-splitting cracks. Cracks with underlying heat sources produce lava that forms the midocean ridges and paves the ocean basins before ultimately falling into and in-filling cold decompression cracks observed as oceanic trenches in a process that explains ocean floor geology without assuming mantle convection. Moreover, georeactor-produced heat, channeled to the surface, powers hot spots such as Iceland and Hawai‘i and aids in continent fragmentation, such as presently occurs at Afar in the East African Rift System.
This last Herndonian tenet is especially contentious (for those who even know about it), because plate tectonics was itself a hard-won, revolutionary geological idea, itself one of the poster children of scientific revolutions. Bold scientific thinking seems to be somewhat addictive, as if removing the chains of institutional decorum allowed one to run free through the Elysian fields. One book by Herndon, emboldened by the prize-winning journalist Guy Gugliotta’s accolade that he is a “Maverick Geophysicist,”19 is even named Maverick’s Earth and Universe. (If you are interested in looking at other mavericks and their claims, and attempts to judge them outside received opinion, in a contemplative noncommercial setting, I recommend the website Science Guardian: Paradigms and Power in Science and Society.)20
Obviously the tenability of Herndon’s connected suite of geological ideas won’t be settled here, but a couple of aspects of them are highly relevant to the whole question of scientific epistemology, of science-in-the-making and how the layperson, or indeed specialized scientists themselves, are supposed to adjudicate new possibilities of “how things really are” in the modern environment of institutionalized, governmentally supported, and fundamentally conservative science.
The inertia of model making as opposed to fresh consideration of conflicting evidence is itself one of Herndon’s pet peeves. Although the division is no more ironclad than that between science and pseudoscience—Einstein initially dismissed quantum mechanics for its “spooky action at a distance” (a criticism that, when you think about it, might also be applied to Newtonian gravity!)—Herndon is keen to differentiate between model making and real science. And one signature of model making, with its emphasis on mathematical simulations, is the tendency for model makers to absorb would-be counterfactual evidence into their model by making ad hoc hypotheses to accommodate them. One of the more famous historical examples is from Ptolemaic astronomy. Observations of the outer planets from Mars to Neptune with Earth as the assumed solar system’s center must account for these planets appearing to move backward or “retrograde” (still familiar talk in astrology) for two to six months at a time.
This artifact of a “mistaken”
or at least not as elegant frame of reference is reminiscent of the wagon or car wheels appearing to spin backward in films, because of a discrete number of frames per second in which the wheels fall short of a complete revolution before being caught on film. In Ptolemaic astronomy the backward movements were handled by the ad hoc hypothesis of epicycles—perfect circles that moved around off-centered points (equants) of a circle (deferent) around Earth, with each planet having a separate set of parameters and the center of the orbit never exactly Earth itself. A good example of a model that reproduced observations but wasn’t really true, the Ptolemaic epicycles (though Copernicus also used them, because it wasn’t yet realized that the planetary orbits were elliptical) might be compared with a description of your car going backward or “retrograding” when another car passes you on the way to work: descriptively accurate with regard to your chosen frame of reference, but not exactly true.
Strikingly similar, one might argue, is Herndon’s still-heretical view, based on Earth’s enstatite–chondrite composition, addressing the density anomaly in the standard model, accounting for the tendency of the geomagnetic field’s polarity to flip (much easier if generated by a georeactor), which was published and developed before the discovery of Jupiter-sized extrasolar planets close to their suns. The discovery of such giant near-to-sun planets has caused some scrambling amid the well-funded planetary model makers. Herndon’s view is comparable in its intellectual housecleaning way to Copernicus’s repositioning of the Sun to be at the center.
The relevance for modeling here is that Herndon’s “heretical” but more elegantly integrative view does not require ad hoc notions such as recently proposed “planetary migration” (of big outer planets to close-to-sun orbits) to account for the new evidence of Jovian-size extrasolar planets traveling in the range of one astronomical unit, or about the distance of Earth from our Sun, around their stars. Indeed, recently detected antineutrinos with a nuclear reactor spectrum coming from inside Earth suggest that as much as 26 percent of deep-Earth heat from uranium and thorium is produced by the georeactor (15 percent, according to Italian data).21
Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science Page 18
