I am here to pay homage to an old friend already 22 years dead, Immanuel Velikovsky. His books of fifty years ago, however, are very much alive.
I also see this conference as an occasion to pay my respects to Professor Emilio Spedicato, who has given a unique impetus to the quantavolution movement at the University of Bergamo and around the world.
And third, I am privileged here to tell something about my own work.
If you will permit me now, I would like to define the term Quantavolution. Afterwards, I can proceed to introduce the theory of Solaria Binaria.
Quantavolution refers to great changes of both inorganic and organic realms of existence happening swiftly, powerfully, and on a large scale.
The means of quantavolution are largely electromagnetic. That is, the theory of dynamic physics may eventually treat most or all natural energy operations as originating in electricity. Gravitation has lost prestige as an all-explainer in physics and astronomy, and might conceivably be dispensed with in quantavolution theory.
Quantavolutions are catastrophes, but they are constructive as well as destructive. For example, if you prefer mammals to dinosaurs as your pets, then possibly you would regard the comets or meteoroids that struck the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous and put an end to the dinosaurs as a stroke of good luck, a quantavolution that was on the whole favorable from a mammalian and human point of view.
When a quantavolution occurs, the phenomena of air, water, earth, and existence change sharply. Logically, then, every science is concerned with quantavolutions, past and future. Every sphere of being is affected, so we can say Q is holospheric.
Thousands of plant and animal species extincted with the famous dinosaurs. The stratigraphy of much of the Earth changed. The atmosphere changed. The motions of the Earth changed, how much we do not yet know. As a matter of fact, we know very little yet about the events and changes that took place when the dinosaurs felt the disastrous effects of falling bodies from outer space. But name me a field of learning, and I will give you a suitable subject for a dissertation in that field on a problem of quantavolution.
Linguistics, for another instance, finds every language loaded with ancient words of disaster and electricity and punishing gods. A study by Hugh Crosthwaite tells us that about 15% of the words of Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Egyptian are connected in some fashion with electricity.
Quantavolution is not a theory that I can express mathematically. It is a cognitive theory, or perhaps only a heuristic theory. I can writeit in signs, as if it were a formula. This might help to remember it.
Q = C(SISa)x × 3(a...n) where
Q = quantavolution
X = exponential rising and subsiding
C = change x 3 = multiplied by the sum of
S = suddenness a..n = all phenomena affected
I = intensity
Sa = scope
Thus: If a meteor (or comet) strikes at
"Chassenon, France" and is 1.5 km in diameter, striking with a speed of 20
k/second, coming from the Northwest, it will burst open, within seconds, a great
crater, and shoot up a towering column of fire, gas, and debris, a terrestrial
tsunami whose swells will become arcs of hills, and all forms of rocks for 20 km
around will be metamorphosed, while practically all life forms will be extincted
up to a radius of 500 km, and most habitats around the world and the atmosphere
everywhere will be affected to different degrees but markedly.
A new world will be soon established over the vast area , and when humans come to inhabit it a long time afterwards, they will not recognize its nature and learned scientists will call it a volcano, until they finally realize that the strange rocks providing the natives with beautiful stone for building are not sedimentary, and then finally, 17 years after a book called Worlds in Collision raises a hullabaloo, a leading French scientist will visit colleagues in Germany at the Ries crater; he will change his mind, and initiate 27 years of research and persuading other scientists that they are dealing with an exoterrestrial meteoritic phenomenon . In 1994 a conference called specially for the purpose, gives its blessing to the site, and in 1995 a geological map of the area is produced.
The earlier tale of the discovery of the catastrophic origin of the horrendous scablands of Washington State by Professor J. H. Bretz, and the acceptance of his findings, took several decades.
Similar stories can be told about an increasing number of places around the world. Old volcanoes are turning into meteor craters. I wonder whether Italian geologists could be wrong in regarding Lago di Bolsena as a typical extinct volcano crater. The Roman encyclopedist Pliny said that it was the spot where a Jovian thunderbolt had destroyed the Etruscan city of Volsinium.
Today I can introduce these matters without being contradicted. Fifty years ago, if I said them to a respectable audience, I would be regarded as a strange character who belongs to the fringes of outer space.
Immanuel Velikovsky had much to do with this change of paradigm, as you will be hearing today and tomorrow. He had much to do with my partial shift in mid-life from a social historian to a universal natural historian, or, maybe I should say, a cosmologist.
I would add, however, that the new paradigm of quantavolution was bound to happen, with or without my old friend Velikovsky. All history is that way, is it not? -- political history, social history, the history of science? History can be pushed forward a bit or dragged back, but it cannot be cut out of whole cloth by any man or woman. It should not surprise anyone, then, that predecessors can be found for most of the elements of Velikovsky's work, and these forerunners keep turning up from odd quarters.
When I reoriented my intellectual telescope, I could perceive what appeared to me new large regions for investigation. I might even see in old facts a remarkably new history of the solar system. And so, around 1975, I invented the theory of Solaria Binaria.
I began to imagine the history of the solar system as the career of a speeding, electrically charged star that destabilized when it entered upon a region of space that supported a markedly different electric charge. The Sun then underwent a nova explosion and fragmented into a double star that evolved into our present planetary configuration.
The Sun, I imagined, threw off a large fragment, about 7% of its mass. It bound the fragment to itself at a proper distance, however, that is, a distance that would enable it to maintain a powerful electric arc and an associated magnetic field. What can be done in a child's playroom may be true of the cosmos. A magnetic field of dust and debris circled around the electric current and was kicked back into the larger bodies or formed smaller bodies, the dense planets.
The area of magnetic forces was enormous and I called it the magnetic tube, which constituted what I called a plenum of charges, gases, and rock. You can see how this plenum of electrified plasma would provide millions of times the area for experimentation with forming life than might be found on the little planet Earth.
The plenum provided 60 million times the volume of the Earth's oceans and atmosphere today, as a breeding ground for living organisms.
The electrical energy liberated by the central arc into the plenum would also have been exponentially greater than the electrical energy available today for experimentation in the forming of living organisms. It was in this plenum that organic forms might originate and develop before they landed on Earth, or before they were domiciled on the planets as the plenum diminished in size.
The time factor must also be examined. Here just the nova explosion itself, in a few months before creating the system, would have liberated a creative energy equivalent to two billion years of Earth history. All in all, Solaria Binaria would appear to be millions of time more effective in producing the living species of today than mainstream science theory would provide.
Still, my collaborator Earl Milton and I were dissatisfied, because the probabilities of life originating in any conceivable volume of plasma are far beyond the opportunities afforded even by the Solaria Binaria system. Therefore we had to become cell engineers and reconstruct how electrical energy working with various chemical elements could build an organism that could ingest and excrete, meanwhile reproducing. Certain accidents that occur often in these processes turn out to be helpful and are retained. I think that our scenario is convincing, even if too elaborate to detail here.
Too, there is an element of teleology in our theory. I conjectured that any gene that mutates for any reason signals all the genes of the organism to assist in living with its change. If they can cooperate, the other genes do so, and an organic change takes place and is included in successful reproductions. Perhaps because I felt Napoleonic at this moment, I called this gene that gives the acceptable signal to all the other genes, the 'leader gene,' and compared the gene with the common soldier of the armies of Napoleon: "Every soldier," he is reported to have said, "carries the baton of a Marshal in his knapsack."
The binary partner of the Sun I called Uranus after the nebulous first Great God of the Greeks. When Uranus developed an instability and lost mass, its greater remaining part could be called by us 'Saturn,' and when a nova exploded Saturn, the larger part was identified by me as what would be called 'Jupiter.' Distances between the dense and gaseous plants and the Sun stretched out as the electric current diminished, and at the same time the planets moved ever closer to the arterial center of the great electric current, until they were agreeably on the same plane, called now the plane of the ecliptic, and there the motion that they had in circling around the current in the magnetic tube turned into the motion that we know as their rotation.
I had already placed the dinosaur disaster and other quantavolutions of the solar system into the memory of early mankind, so I could not contradict myself by using the long conventional time scales. And how could I extract the Moon from the Pacific Basin in the memorial time of human beings? It would take years before I could settle upon an age to give to for Solaria Binaria. Then, with my comrade Earl Milton aiding and abetting me, the question was asked: how much time would be reasonably enough to do everything that had to be done with the sun and its descendants down to today, employing the huge energy of electricity, incomparably more forceful than the puny strength of the force of gravitation. We chose the round figure of a million years for the history of the solar system, from when the Sun went nova down to the present time.
In the 18 years since SB was published, evidence supporting its principal theses has expanded greatly.
In regard to Quantavolution itself, I would guess that the number and proportion of scholars and scientists who accept in large part the formulation of Q=c(SIS)x 3(A...n) has increased from 10,000 to 6,000,000 or 600 times, and represents 60% of the 10,000,000 scholars and scientists of the world. This has happened despite the fact that they do not even know the word Quantavolution.
In view of this increased open-mindedness (or is it gullibility?) for novel theories, the literature of Q has increased greatly. When I first entered the field, Velikovsky's work and a few other items of the period from 1927 to 1963 constituted the relevant bibliography. For the rest of one's references, one had to go to collections of ancient myths and to early Greek and Roman philosophers, to holy scriptures of the Jews, Persians, Hindus, and to rare writers of the last thousand years. The most important were Whinston, a little-read disciple of Newton; Boulanger a Frenchman of the Enlightenment a century later, whose books were called to Velikovsky's attention by Livio Stecchini, an unrecognized great historian of science whose works have yet to be published, although he has been dead for decades; to a brief monograph by Xavier Kugler on the erratic behavior of Venus and the weird language of the Sibylline oracles, which came late to Velikovsky, and was also introduced to us by Stecchini; to the work of Melvin Cook, which also came late to Velikovsky; to the Hoerbigger School, that Velikovsky avoided because he felt Hoerbigger was a proto-Nazi; and to Claude Shaeffer, who worked with the French resistance and wrote his books on comparative archaeology in London during World War II. My bibliography of 1981 in Chaos and Creation may have been the largest; I put into it any item that gave a glimmer of hope to my theories.
There has been also an expansion of evidence in support of specific theses of Solaria Binaria.
That there are many binary and other multiple-partner systems is now universally admitted. There may be millions of them in our single galaxy. These are recent discoveries. Many stellar binaries have planets that move in some relationship to the principal partners.
Many craters exist everywhere in the solar system. Even asteroids can carry craters.
Electrical effects are widely remarked. A web site called Intersect and a Web magazine called Thoth, both under the lively direction of astronomer Amy Acheson, pursues the issue of the electrification of the universe.
The development of plasma physics has speeded up and has found many applications to cosmology. I might note that, in 1963, I wrote of Velikovsky: "He found space a vacuum and has made it a plenum." When I conjectured the plenum of Solaria Binaria, I could have used the new language of plasma physics. Instead, Milton and I used other words for essentially the same phenomena. The filling of space by astrophysicists has proceeded until some 99% of the matter in the universe can be characterized as plasma. It is a forceful confirmation of the tube, sac, and plenum proposed in Solaria.
The threatening habits of asteroids and comets and their frequently unexpected behavior reminds one of our reconstruction of the many "erratic" movements of the solar system bodies in history.
The bewildering movements of magnetic fields of the earth as a whole and in its parts over history, a mystifying subject, can be simplified and better understood if the short-term reconstruction provided in Solaria Binaria is pursued.
A proliferation of splendid photographs of space objects of all kinds and of all regions of the Earth has given us countless occasions to confirm the pages of Solaria Binaria, none of substance to deny it, so far.
The collection of myths applicable to Q theory has been expanded, much of it represented in the work of David Talbott in regard to the planet-god Saturn.
The genome projects that have decoded thousands of genes have lent some support to the 'leader gene' theory I proposed in Homo Schizo and again with Milton in Solaria Binaria. There may well be a system within the genome for following the leader when a mutation is proposed.
Discoveries of many correct fits between widely separated continental masses have continued while the theory of a land-covered Earth until the blow-out of the Pacific Basin have in no way been affected adversely.
Discovery of relationships among all the languages circling the basin from which the Moon emerged and correlating with the Ring of Fire of earthquakes and volcanism indicate that a community of language families existed before lunagenesis and/or that a recent event emptied the vast region of people and then quickly allowed their repopulation thereafter by related peoples.
The willingness to advocate and accept theories of the origin of life forms in the plenum of solaria binaria has grown with the increase in similar theories of the origin of life in space and atmospheres or its transit from comets from other worlds.
The critical transactions between Jupiter and its system of moons were expected under the Solaria Binaria model, including the explosion of large cometary fragments on Jupiter a few years ago.
The rapidity of stratification of large masses and differently composed materials after a quantavolution or even isolated natural disasters, so as to mimic old age, is a deserving topic in search of compilers employing statistical methods.
The radical reconstruction of human history from the origin of mankind to the present epoch has held its own in general, but is awaiting a rigorous editing in the view of writings by Gunnar Heinsohn, Peter James and other critics. The work of Mandelkehr and others evidencing a quantavolution of worldwide proportions around 2250 B.C. tends to support the events attending the so-called Mercury Period of Solaria Binaria.
Debate over the age of the Earth and the accidents befalling it has expanded. A far-reaching controversy deals with the response of radioactive elements to electromagnetic currents; laboratory experiments are especially needed. To the trenchant critiques of Melvin Cook against the constancy of radioactive decay measures are now added a new type of criticism, based on the idea that the speed of light is not constant and therefore atomic time is not constant, and therefore the radioactive decay measures that are correlated to the atomic clocks cannot be valid. A billion years can become a thousand years if the speed of light has changed, but is used in a measuring instrument as if it were a constant. The astronomer Barry Sutterfield has been pressing the case for this theory. I would not wish to commit myself on it yet.
To continue my listing, evidence of catastrophically-induced diffusion of cultures and artifacts has piled up.
Outside the solar system, in numerous instances, bodies composing multiple star systems have been observed to shift erratically their positions. Examples are now available of electromagnetic arcs between large bodies that resemble the electric axis or arc that Solaria Binaria once possessed.
There have been convincing comparisons of the solar wind with a drastically weakening and dying electrical connection between the sun and its planets along the ecliptic.
Barbieri and others have confirmed that drastic shifts in the axis and orientation as well as rotational and orbiting patterns of the earth and other planets are far from impossible, therefore permitting the movements of planets proposed in Solaria Binaria.
The accretion of evidence of lunagenesis out of the Pacific Basin now includes studies of the intense heat, life forms, and topography of the abyssal floors, which can be interpreted to indicate youth.
So there is where we stand today. And if any of you are inclined to join the battles of science, I can assure you that many places for volunteers exist, and that you will, like every other soldier of science, carry a marshal's baton in your knapsack.