CHAPTER THREE
It would appear that someone has stolen the rocks of the Earth. In North America, 35 epochs, comprised in 250 rock formations which are formed of a great many less thick and distinct strata, have been recognized as composing the geologic column back to the "beginning of life," the Paleozoic of 570 million years ago [1] . [Lately a billion years.] The Pre-Cambrian before this is thought to have consumed 2,000 or perhaps even 4,000 million years [2] .
But the formations are never present for inspection in one place. If every different stratum that was ever labelled were heaped up in its maximum deposited thickness, the pile would tower into the stratosphere. According to the accounts rendered of the world Geologic Column, there should be 400,000 feet or 80 miles thick of sediments [3] . Furthermore, the heap should cover the whole globe, unless somebody else has been digging rock from the oceans and carrying it up the continental shelves For the ocean bottoms are scarcely sedimented [4] . And they are of a different rock than the continents. "In the whole of geophysics there is no other law of such clarity and certainty as... that there exist two preferred levels in the Earth's crust." [5] Or perhaps someone has been burning sediments to make granites for the sial. The origins of granite are mysterious [6] .
If this seems to be nonsense, the nonsense may be in the idea, not in the telling. There is no such heap, no complete geologic column. And a geologist would be foolhardy to defend its historical presence.
Eighty miles up is 75 miles above Mt. Everest. Eighty miles down probably everywhere on Earth, one has passed through the plutonic rocks, is well beyond the critical Moho discontinuity, and is deep into the molten mantle. To account for all such presumed material, one would have to be an extreme catastrophist. For, allowing that continental land (or sial) covers only 40% of the globe and the sediments lay on the average only 4 miles thick upon the 20 mile thick sial, which is one-fourth of 80 miles, then 4/ 80 of 40/ 100 = two per cent. Ninety-eight per cent of the Earth's sediments have disappeared.
There is a kind of saving argument which is, however, self-defeating. The layers added together to reach 80 miles are of known maximum deposits, not average ones. Sheer guessing might halve the maxima, making the total column 40, not 80, miles in height. So the 2% would become 4%. Then 96% of the sediments are missing. Adding abyssal sediment would hardIy matter.
These crude estimates are perhaps adequate to solve the mystery of the great land robbery. Half of the stolen sediments were never there. Great forces, operating in short periods of time, have fluxed the crust of the Earth so thoroughly that a great many strata of false identity and false age have been created. The other half of the sediments was stolen by "Uranus Minor" and stashed away on the Moon: the method will be explained in Chapter 7.
RAPID SEDIMENTATIONRates of sedimentation are usually estimated on the basis of contemporary rates. Allowances are made for demonstrable past events but these are interpreted on gradualist lines. If the Grand Canyon's age is calculated as an eroded river channel, its age is great. But if it is regarded as a transverse branch of the fissure-fracture of the East Pacific followed by deluge and tidal erosion, then it could be of holocene age [7] .
Ocean sedimentation recently examined under conventional premises (with the "help" of potassium-argon techniques), have dated the present ocean basins at nowhere more than 200 million years, incomparably younger than by former calculations [8] . The sediments were found to be astonishingly meager. Yet, contrary even to this new dating, the ocean sediments could be provided readily from catastrophic sources in a thousand years after the basins formed, as Chapter Seven will show. Furthermore, the ocean bottom, which is under enormous pressure, contains only unconsolidated sediments, a sign of newness [9] . And if the oceans had once been land and the land ocean, then certainly great rock formations should line the bottoms.
In addition, at the rate at which uranium is now flowing into the oceans, the oceans and their sediments have accumulated a supply representing less than 100,000 years of flow, and when the flow off the continents is calculated as a negative exponential curve, the age of the ocean becomes holocene [10] . For most sediments would have been dropped or transported in the earliest years.
Sedimentary rocks are given very great ages in part because the "normal" visible rates of deposit are slow. But a single cometary train might lay down a "hundred million years" of till or detritus-clay and gravel-in a day [11] . A coal deposit can be launched by a high-energy "bulldozer" in a matter of hours, covered over the next day by clay and baked until ready; it does not need the "millions" of years of development insisted upon by uniformitarian sedimentary calculations [12] . Petroleum deposits are not proof of long ages, whether terrestrial or extra-terrestrial [13] .
Geologist E. M. Larrabee studied a deposit of maximum thickness of one meter [14] . It was laid down by the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers at Harper's Ferry (Va.) between 1861-64. Over 100 strata could be identified. Historical research suggested that two or three floods, each lasting a few days, produced them.
In the history of geology anomalous discoveries in supposedly old sedimentary deposits are numerous: a Roman coin ploughed up from the prairie of Illinois [15] ; a doll sucked from under till and lava in Idaho [16] ; a fossil fish below hundreds of feet of Wyoming shale pirouhetted among many layers of annual varves [17] ; a "4000 year-old" log ensconced in a "billion year-old iron deposit of Labrador;" [18] a fossil 80-foot skeleton whale poised upright amidst some "million years" of diatomaceous (organic) deposits [19] ; a fossilized set of startled extinct "bullheads" in English lower Old Redstone marking millions of years [20] ; a 100-foot diameter boulder nestling in a large pure clay deposit in Timor [21] ; a house-high muck of smashed bones in Alaska [22] ; human bones and sophisticated artifacts amidst extinct animal remains and Tertiary fauna under California lava [23] ; and so on. Each one warns: "Stop the clock!" All together, they say, "Question all deposits as alternatively quantavolved and evolved."
Shelton's marvelous, though uniformitarian, photographic book of geology should be quoted here. After remarking that laminated clay deposits (varves) can permit a time estimate of each layer, he says
"For the common sediments... we have no accurate knowledge of how long individual beds took to accumulate or of how much time elapsed between the deposition of each... Some thick beds accumulate in a short time, some thin ones take much longer, and in all probability the period of nondeposition that separate most layers represent far more time than is represented by the strata. As Charles Darwin pointed out over a hundred years ago, with far fewer facts to go on than we have today, from the standpoint of time, the sedimentary record is very incomplete - just an entry now and then with long pauses between." [24]
How did Darwin know the pauses were long? How long is long? Indeed Darwin's idea of "long" is "short" according to today's scientists.
Again I quote Shelton: "Unfortunately most sediments do not contain reliable clues to how fast they were deposited --- or to the duration of intervals between layers... Observed rated of sedimentation range from almost immeasureably small fractions of an inch per century to many feet per hour and make it almost impossible to estimate the average for my large deposit..." [25]
Among the most complex challenges to quantavolutional geologists, uniquely related to sediments, would appear to be the coral reefs of the world, both living and fossil. An ordinary statement of the conventional case in the following:
"Because the coral polyp's existence is tied to that of the algae, coral reefs can grow at depths no greater than around 180 feet -- below this not enough light penetrates to permit algae to carry on the process of photosynthesis. The brittle material we call coral is the polyps' protective external skeleton. The tiny animals absorb calcium salts from the ocean, allowing them to build these calcium carbonate structures around their bodies. New generations of coral polyps attach themselves to the skeletons of dead polyps. In this way the coral reef grow larger - layer upon layer, generation upon generation. Expanding at the rate of only few centimeters a year, some present-day reefs have been developing for 100,000 years and more." [26]
The author does not mention fossil coral found at considerable depths beyond 180 feet. One must suppose a land-sinking or that the water level was rising as the coral grew; the lower coral would die, the higher would grow faster. Suppose the water temperatures were higher; the coral might grow faster; Suppose the amount of calcium salts in the water increased; the polyps would flourish. The opaqueness of sea-water is not an absolute, nor, for that matter, is the radiance at the surface. The algae supply has many variables determining it, including species adaptations and mutations that may cause greater or lesser light requirements. Can coral polyps feed upon bluegreen algae? Do shallow warm lava bottoms and new limestone accelerate coral growth? All those questions can make the coral reef an "anomaly" in short-time reckoning, reminding one of the "anomalies" that are similarly handled by uniformitarians in regard to apparently catastrophic phenomena such as vast "river-formed plains" or the "gradual" erosion of the Grand Canyon.
Even by conventional dating, long-term and carbondating-assisted, the seas are supposed to have been over 100 meters lower 20,000 years ago, before the "great ice melt", and, before then, the sea-level was abruptly higher and the coral could not have survived [27] . Hence a continuous coral reef vertical development "for 100,000 years" would be highly improbable. Further, the 180-foot live-depth figure may be more nearly half that -- or 80 feet maximum live depth [28] . The vertical growth rate of coral can be from 1 to 12 meters per thousand years. The lower limit is actually zero, depending upon thermal, chemical, nutritional, wave-energy, and pollution conditions. The highest rate, for all we know. may be limited only by the speed with which the sea-level is rising.
Fossil coral, not heretofore mentioned whether beneath coral growth of the past eleven thousand years, or separately discoverable, as in the Arctic Circle, or at depths of hundreds of meters elsewhere may have originated in the swamps and shallow seas of Pangea, the wholly continental Earth-crust that we postulate in this book. Some of the fossil coral beds may, like the continents, have been displaced and rafted to new locations.
Much of the reasoning employed in the case of coral growth here may also be used to argue the case of limestone caves and their stalactites. That is, subject to discussion in a forthcoming volume, the limestone caves of the world may be taken to be largely new, a product of large-scale electrical discharge of the Earth, water-accelerated. Arguments may be advanced farther, to wit, that the drip-formed stalactites and stalagmites can be grown in short times under non-uniformitarian conditions and yet be strong enough to stand against heavy seismic shock [29] .
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin, 1824-1907) estimated in 1899 that the Earth might be no older than 24 million years if its matter were chemically inert and its heat only the primordial remnant. Other scientists disagreed, opting for longer durations to accomplish evolutionary processes.
How uncertain were the stratigraphic estimates of time that geologists relied upon before new radiometric techniques came into use a generation ago is revealed in their quick surrender to radiometry: it is common joke that the earth has aged a billion years per decade for several decades, all owing to new tests of time by radiochronometry [30] .
Certain elements, such as potassium-40 and uranium-238, which are to be found in rocks of the crust of the Earth, especially at or near surface levels, are radioactive. They are sometimes called "parent elements" insofar as they decay into "daughter" elements by giving up electrons or by other means [31] . They began their decay as soon as they were formed. One calculates their life-span by figuring backwards from today's rate of decay as witnessed in a sample of the element. A rock matrix presumably will contain the parent element and the daughter element in proportion to its age, unless it had undergone some exceptional experience. The dozen or so transformations used for dating purposes include uranium-238 decaying into lead-206, of potassium-40 decaying into argon-40, and of rubidium-87 decaying into strontium-87 [32] .
None of these methods is useful directly for the period since 14,000 B. P. because the decay into daughter elements is too slow to detect over the short time. However, radiodating challenges our model of quantavolution indirectly when it produces long-term dates where short-term dates are expected. For example if, by potassium-40 argon-40 dating, the ocean floor appears to be 100 to 200 million years old, then it cannot have been formed between 13,000 B. P. and 9,000 B. P. Also, when igneous rocks associated with hominid bones of the Olduvai gorge, dated by the same technique, produce an age of about 1.75 million years, then the bones cannot be of the holocene epoch.
Major problems occur with radiodating. One is in the setting of a rate of decay and therefore setting a date for "time zero" within a reasonable margin of error. Regarding the "time zero" problem, the radio "clocks" work on vast ages, from one billion to five billion years of age. Adjustments in the so-called decay constant may move all tested rocks up and down the time scale by many millions of years. Although such adjustment never approach a short-term position, they cause doubts as to whether there is in fact a constant rate of decay to be discovered.
A second kind of difficulty deals with high-energy events. Radio-chemical methods of determining pre-historic age are extensions of the uniformitarian premise that the chosen chemical elements have remained unchanged in a closed system, save for the decay process, since the clock started to tick. They assume that nothing would affect the parent or daughter element, apart from the expected normal decay from one to the other; nothing could tamper with the clock. Recent studies cast doubt upon this theory; high forces can break and enter the clock.
The concept of "half-life" is used in radioactive decay time measurements. The half-life of an aggregate of an element is the length of time required for half the atoms of the aggregate to decay into the new element. The half-life of uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, calculated backwards from presents rates of decay. Can the process of decay be so regular [33] ? Decay is the losing of an electron from an atom that is unstable; it therefore amounts to a transmutation. The occasion of the decay is a force. The force is another particle from another statistical aggregate. This force is regularly and randomly applied to the "A" aggregate causing a regular rate of loss. Each "A" atom has an equal chance of being hit in the bombardment. Hence whatever affects the bombarding aggregate will affect the rate of decay of "A".
And all "A's" may not be identical. Some "A's" may be "harder to hit," "resist cleavage," or "repel the projectiles." Still, as an aggregate, "A" might respond uniformly to the force causing is transmutation.
Radiation physicist H. C. Dudley [34] has insisted that the equations describing radioactive decay rates were crudely derived long ago: "Bluntly, they are incorrect; but they nonetheless appear in our latest textbooks... Studies have varied the decay characteristics of 12 other radionuclides [besides 7Be and 90Nb] with changes in the energy state of the orbital electrons; by pressure, temperature, electric and magnetic fields, stress in molecular layers etc.," citing G. T. Emery.
Dudley further asserts that in certain cases, the "decay event A is causally related to decay event B occurring later, such that the time distributions of all decay events were no longer truly random, as required by current theory. There appears to be a chain type reaction operating... similar to that observed in neutron induced sustained nuclear fission," here citing chemists J. L. Anderson and G. W. Spangler. Dudley asks for the incorporating in decay theory of "the energy state of the entire atom [not just the nucleus] and on parameters of interaction with an energy-rich subquantic medium."
The work of Anderson Spangler and Dudley implies this for revolutionary primevalogy: decay rates for radioactive elements are dependent upon high-energy forces in the environment, and may be varied little or much. Radioactive decay can be compared with chain reactions in nuclear fission. Hence, at certain points in time, especially when the phenomenon of the catastrophic tube occurred, time pressures (based on today's retrojections) would have been instantly and completely disrupted.
We are conjecturing further, here, that major disturbances in the parent-daughter relationship may occur as a result of radiation storms and typhonic impact explosions. Lesser and more localized in effect, and often inter-connected with radiation storms are jovian bolts, phaetonic atmospheric penetration, titanic large body encounters, and dense material fall-outs. These operate as follows:
Cosmic radiation consists of high-energy particles that bombard the earth sufficiently at the present time to permit the presence in the atmosphere of atoms of all chemical elements. Both the particles striking earth and the transmutations of particles are varied. When, according to quantavolutionary theory, age-making and age-breaking episodes occurred, the earth passed near to heavily radiating bodies and was also subjected to heavy radiation storms from a distance. In fact, every change in the earth's atmosphere lessened or increased the reception of radiation: the cloud canopies, the lowering or dropping of canopies, the rising of exploded vapors, the destruction of biospheres and the loss or gain of atmosphere from comets, meteors and planets.
In all of this, the parent and daughter elements involved in radio clocks have experienced a turbulent history. No pair of elements can be granted to have remained locked in their crystallized rock interior since the beginning of its time. There is no way of commencing the history of potassium and argon at the bottom of the sea. The bottom formed in a turbulent atmosphere and hydrosphere, first wet, then drowned shallowly. then deeply submerged but all the while actively spreading. The waters that poured in came directly from the skies, through skies via the sea and earth evaporation, and through runoffs loaded with detritus.
Under such circumstances the clocks might be deemed invalid. They were set wrongly to begin with. They have maintained a semblance of agreement of very old ages by first of all having had similar recent experiences within their rocks, and through laboratory fudging of tests and samples back and forth.
Yet even "normal" experience of today's solar system presents a severe problem. Nitrogen contained in air and in radioactive mineral undergoes a considerable transmutation of isotropic elements. Lead undergoes the same. The cause is neutron-promoted transmutations. As a result, the decay process of uranium into lead is paralleled by neutron-to-lead activity. When as in certain Katanga and Canadian ore bodies, a neutron-promoted corrective factor is introduced into the uranium-to-lead decay process, the daughter element that isowed to uranium decay is so reduced as to produce a zero age result [35] .
This kind of problem is rendered even more difficult under solarian conditions by problems of selecting and sampling rocks, by the fluxing and painting of the surfaces of rocks where trace elements aggregate, and by the need to transfer (with dubious validity) the findings of a test in one part of the lithosphere to conclusions about tests in other parts.
Problems of leaching and fluxing are severe. Rivers carry an estimated average of 6 x 10 10 grams per year of uranium down to the oceans. If the lead is left behind in the rocks this escaping uranium is effectively turning back the clock [36] . Parents are leaving their daughters, and the remaining parents are being charged with their existence. The amount of uranium in the ocean, moreover, is so small (10 to the 17the power grams) as to have been produced even under non-exponential solarian conditions within about 10 million years. With quantavolutionary theory, the exponential rate of deposit would eradicate even this time calculation.
Helium in the atmosphere is originated radioactively from the uranium and thorium in the lithosphere and from cosmic rays from the galaxy and beyond. Conventional ages of the
lithosphere require that 10 20 grams of helium should have been released into the atmosphere whereupon some of it would escape into outer space. However, the rate of escape is too slow under solarian conditions to explain why so little helium exists in the atmosphere. Given the amount of helium present there, it has been calculated that the age of the atmosphere must be only 12,000 years [37] . That is, some 12,000 years ago, the atmosphere was reconstituted.
Radioactivity was discovered a century ago but time-measures of radioactivity are largely a post-World War II development. Despite the shortness of its life, changes in the field have been numerous and radical. Its leaders turn quickly in new directions whenever problems are encountered, introducing new half-lives, slicing experimental rocks differently, and giving their favor now to one, and again to another technique.
Potassium-argon dating has become highly favored recently, for reasons too byzantine to develop here. For, the criticisms that can be addressed to uranium-lead dating hold also against 40K/ 40A dating. Indeed, argon (one of the "noble gases" whose exclusiveness or slipperiness gave them their name) is generally to be suspected of vagrancy. Also, the stability of potassium is in question. "Potassium can be made to diverge widely form conventional abundance by countercurrent electromigration." [38]
Argon-40 will be present in a rock if potassium-40 is present and has had time to decay. Only igneous, and certain types of once-melted metamorphic rock, can be tested. Sediments cannot. The half-life of 40K is so long (1.3 billion years for half the decay to occur) that almost no argon-40 is to be found in a young rock, and therefore tests are not yet considered valid for less than 100,000 years. Dates produced by related tests are often discordant. Material taken from the Salt Lake Crater on Oahu, Hawaii, dated from 200 to 3,300 million years [39] ; the Moon has been dated as older than the universe [40] ; and 200-year old lavas, that should show zero Argon, produced enough to allow 12 and 20 million-year old dates at Kilauea, Hawaii [41] . I shall only mention that, under such circumstances, in other cases, the problems of full and open reporting may become serious in the field of chronometric science; as in public affairs, there arises a temptation to dismiss, "fudge" or even conceal some of the evidence [42] .
Argon, like uranium and radioactive trace elements generally, tends to rise to the surface of the Earth. Hence surface rocks (and these include all that have been measured) will be high in argon content. Argon also can be infused into hot rocks from the air and kept there as the rocks cool. This could have happened to Earth if Mars, thought now to be rich in atmospheric argon, encountered Earth 2,700 years ago; the same Martian argon may be what is making Moon samples, so young in some respects, so old by 40K -40A dating [43] . The U. S. Venus probe of 1978 found astonishing quantities of argon-36 and possibly argon-40 in the burning atmosphere.
Argon, being "exclusive," "slippery," and "noble," leaks. It escapes into the atmosphere; it flows horizontally. It prefers rocks of certain types to other rocks. On the Island of Naxos, Greece, Poul Andriessen found side by side metamorphic rocks which, in tests performed in his Dutch laboratory, produced ages of 5 to 15 million, and of 200 million years (amphibolite ultrabasic rock) [44] . Australian tektites have given 700,000 to 860,000 years by the 40K -40A method in 7 to 20 thousand-year- old strata [45] .
Funkhauser and Naughton, faced by the Hawaiian incongruities, speculated that excess argon could be held in crystal irregularities and imperfections such as grain boundaries and dislocations in the rocks. This likely theory would appear to throw the K-A ratio upon the mercy of petrology rather than chronology. Granted argon is more abundant in rocks nearer the surface, a lava flow will erupt melted surface rock first, than lower rock, then still lower rock. This may falsely date a set of lavas, although the law of superposition is correct. As the law demands, the strata of lava on top will be younger (and hold less argon) than the strata below (with more argon); moreover all will be very old for the reasons given above. As matters stand, it would be a grave risk for geology to rearrange the phanerozoic scale according to 40K -40A dating principles.
Radio-chronometricians pass restlessly from one measure to another, despite their elaborate equipment, which critics have alleged to be too burdensome to discount and abandon (over 100 laboratories exist today for carbondating alone). While continuously asserting the validity of the great time intervals they have discovered - and indeed imposing this belief upon the geologists and anthropologists - nevertheless they are engaged in a quest for improvements and for new tests that are less vulnerable to complaint.
There are at least a dozen parent-daughter, radioactive decay tests, each with its problems of the type already displayed in the discussion of 40K-40A tests. Discordant time readings within and among individual tests, demonstrable leaking and leaching of elements, and proven possibilities of elements being created under catastrophic heats and pressures are vexing problems, even more than the problems of sampling and contamination.
If, to this time, the restlessness of chronometricians has been excused as a search for technical perfection, that excuse has now worn out its acceptance. The reduction of the uniformitarian ideology is permitting a clear view that elements in varied isotopic forms can and have been engendered by natural and human forces.
The implications of various studies, writes Melvin Cook, are that "apparently all the elements are available in cosmic radiation at very high energies as bombarding particles, and that the synthesis of high mass atoms in large decrements of mass increase is possible. It is therefore only necessary for our earth (or its accretion materials) to come close enough to the source of cosmic radiation to effect a complete equilibrium distribution of atoms. At present, the earth itself is too far away form the source of cosmic radiation (owing possibly only to the protecting influence of its atmosphere and magnetic field) to maintain nuclear equilibrium in respect to U, Th, K 40 , Rb 87 , and other radioactive atoms [46] .
These remarks should be taken in connection with the possibilities of catastrophic typhoons or tubes, described in the last chapter, and fluctuations in solar activity recently discovered.
The studies of R. V. Gentry are especially threatening to radiochronometry [47] . He examined over 100,000 radiohalos in the decade just ended. A radiohalo (or pleochroic halo) is a spherical colored ring around a radioactive nucleus denoting the escape of an alpha-particle and its ionizing of a surrounding zone. The ring's size is determined by the speed of escape. When uranium (U238) decays, it does not decay immediately into lead (Pb 206) but produces seven other isotopes en route, from thorium, radium, radon and polonium. There occur, then, with decayed U238 eight concentric rings, of which five are distinguishable.
Gentry discovered, however, that many halo systems begin with polonium; they exhibit no uranium or other supposedly preceding halos. And polonium 210, the longest lived of the polonium isotopes, has a half-life of 140 days. If some of the oldest rocks of the world contain this isotope, without a uranium-thorium predecessor, it follows that the host rocks must have been formed in days. Promptly, then, one would have to drop a billion years from the history of the Earth, for the original rocks are supposed to have taken a billion years to crystallize.
Parentless polonium atoms may be primordial, as are uranium-238 and thorium-232 atoms, but this would imply that polonium halos "represent evidence only a brief period between 'nucleosynthesis' and crystallization of the host rocks." [48] Incredibly, rocks would form immediately upon the synthesis of the elements in them. Reporting upon a telephone interview, Stephen Talbott says that Gentry "finds compelling reasons to question the entire dating scheme which undergirds our concept of geological time." [49]
Other studies of coalified wood from the Colorado Plateau, buried in rocks of the Jurassic-transition, evidenced such an abundance of uranium and lack of lead that ages of at most 100,000 years had to be assigned to the coal. Then Gentry, in examining the radiohalos, had to report that the coalification required only days, not millions of years [50] .
Sykes has shown by experiment that a magnetic field of the flux density of 0.1 tesla is enough to increase the mean decay count of radioactive cobalt-60 and to skew the distribution of decay incidents from the normal. The "decay constant" was increased by about 2%; correspondingly, the half-life of cobalt-60 decreased [51] .
Cosmic rays of the galaxy strike and explode atoms of the atmosphere. These give off neutrons that interact with nitrogen of the air to make carbon-14 or 14C. This passes into carbon dioxide and then into plants and other living organisms through their food supply. Living organisms also ingest carbon-12 which does not decay. When anything that has lived dies, it ceases to ingest radioactive carbon-14, and the carbon-14 within its cells begins to decay into nitrogen-14. Half of it might decay in 5,730 years, the other half in another 85,000 years, according to conventional theory.
Thus, any once-living organic substance can be tested for the amount of 14C that it now contains in relation to the amount that was originally ingested. The carbon-12 level can be used as the base of measurement. However, not all species ingest 14C in the same amounts, so that specific rates must be calculated for different species. More importantly, "the amount that was originally ingested" may vary [53] .
All that has been said about the effects of high-energy forces upon the atmosphere applies to carbon-14. How much nitrogen was in the primeval atmosphere is unknown and is presumed on today's measure. The carbonization (burning) of the biosphere and the sudden proliferation of flora will directly affect the rate of generation of 14C. Also, if carbon-14 was heavily generated in the atmosphere by electrical phenomena and radio storms, in the times when Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter were worshipped, it was ingested extensively by organisms. Matter of this period would test as "younger" today, provided that several other "constants" remained constant.
As disasters diminish in intensity following chaos, relatively less 14C would be created; matter would grow "older." Several disasters involved the desiccation or saline ruination of large areas of the world; this would cause less carbon dioxide to discharge from plants. During short periods of burning, great amounts of non-radioactive carbon are discharged into the air and waters, and therefore contribute to a temporary "aging" of the new life of the time that follows. Whenever both a cosmic brilliancy and a conflagration occurred, today's tests would be contradictory, and averages would mislead. (see Figure 5.)
Libby and Lukens have estimated a "perturbation of about 1%" occurring in the production of radiocarbon of tree rings by lightning bolts [54] . This represents a neutron supply added to the supply produced by cosmic rays. The estimates are based upon present-day assumptions, also upon highly varied conditions and inexact knowledge of the extent of lightning or its effects [55] . It does not consider lightning discharges occurring solely in the atmosphere, and especially the mega-bolts that can be a thousand times more powerful than the average earth-striking bolt and were recently discovered by satellites.
Aside from what is happening in the biosphere, a fixed 14C component of the atmosphere, upon which the test is based, depends upon a constant encounter rate between cosmic particles and nitrogen that produces 14C. Since radiation storms occurred and long-term radiation levels were diminished and increased from time to time, intervals of the 14C scale must have been rendered invalid, except for mere coincidence. Only in the years from about 500 B. C. TO A. D. 1900 might the amount taken in by organisms have acquired some constancy. Even so, strange aberrations of the 14C/ 12C ratio occur, as with shellfish and coral growths.
Figure 5.
RADIOCARBON DATINGS AS INDICATORS OF ECOLOGICAL STRESS.
The left-hand scale (s) registers the standard deviation of the "true" curve from the trend curve -- the number of years by which the radio carbon dates of each 250 year period deviate from the average of the whole group of dates of that period. The bottom scale represents the years before the present (taken as 1950 A. D.). As the chart shows, the dates begin to be erratic increasingly around the time of the Martian encounters (-2687 B. P. by this book's 2000 B. P. standard). The time scale goes to -6750, and thus carries one through the Martian, Venusian, Mercurian, and Jovean ages. However, even the erratic swings shown here do not portray the true extent of atmosphere and ecological disturbance, because, as the text asserts, a succession of quick changes in the atmosphere is possible, from low to high radiocarbon intake therefore by the biosphere, and this phenomenon would cause an evening-out of still a second and possibly much more serious form of deviation. Within a time of several years, an organism could ingest widely varying amounts of 14 C. Hence I suggest that radiocarbon dating may be useless before about 2500 years ago and there may have been a completely different radiocarbon cycle, as M. Cook maintains, before the Lunarian catastrophes.
(Source: Damon et al, extended and applied [47] by G. W. Oosterhout Half-life is 5730 years.)
There are many anomalies in C14 dating, a few of which are mentioned elsewhere in this book. Artifact dating has become quite common, with most of the apparent successes occurring on artifacts and substances of the recent historical past. But it is precisely the problem of C14 dating that, by our theory, it is almost surely wrong in the earlier periods when the tests are most needed.
A group of scientists recently excavated "Little Salt Spring, Florida: A Unique Underwater Site." Among many remains they found in a lower level a tortoise carapace, which provided a date of 13,450 ± 190 B. P., and a wood stake used to pry open the animal, which gave a date of 12,030 ± 200. Some 1400 years of difference. Yet this is not the only problem. The whole range of time may be in question. For a base of a carved oak mortar was discovered and dated to 9080 B. P. and then declared to be similar in style to a piece recovered at Key Marco, 130 km to the South, and dated at about 1200 years ago [56] .
The quantavolutionary hypothesis is disruptive of carbondating, as it has been conceived. An adjusted curve is impossible because the revolutions of the atmosphere in precisely the most critical millenia in primevalogy cannot be positioned and defined sufficiently well for them to be employed in weighing the scale intervals. The 14C method will be useful for dating the past 2,400 years, when allowances are made for short-term atmospheric fluxes owing to extraordinary cosmic, volcanic, solar, industrial, nuclear explosional, or other activity disturbing to the atmosphere.
Mysteriously, corroboration of some of our conclusions comes from a retrogressive calculation by Melvin Cook of the amount of 14C in the ancient atmosphere. Granted the present level of carbon-14 and the fact that it is rising slightly, he found that all the 14C would have had to arrive in the atmosphere within the past ten to twelve thousand years [57] . Far from being constant, prior radio-carbon was at this point wiped out statistically and theoretically a new atmospheric accumulation began. This would appear to be about the time of the climactic Lunarian catastrophe. However, this calculation, as Dr. Cook might grant is more useful as a reductio ad absurdum than as a plotting of the true history of atmospheric carbon.
Dendrochronology has discovered only one tree whose rings can be used to date associated events back into periods of interest to primevalogy. Such is the hard bristlecone pine, which may achieve 5,000 years of age by ring count. By matching fossil pine with living pine, the ages may be traced back further; perhaps 8000 years B. P. have been claimed by matching . (if conditions of fossilization were uniform millions of years of matching would be theoretically possible!) It is assumed that rings have always grown on an annual basis. Not surprisingly, quantavolutionists have adversely criticized the technique [58] .
"Annual" is a relative standard, presently derived from a revolution of the tilted globe of the Earth around the Sun. Changes in astronomical motions can change the number of rings; if a "year" is shortened, the rings may be increased within the normal lifetime, something that may have caused the Methusalah phenomenon in early reported human ages of the Bible and elsewhere [59] . Also, the rings may increase or decrease if climatic conditions introduce a doubling of seasonal cycles within the same year-time.
The tree has to be matched with human or natural objects of known age, or used to calibrate radiocarbon dating. But tests cannot calibrate each other without reference to a third test. This third test is often a historical date, but such dates rarely exceed 3000 years and even before then are hotly disputed. Furthermore, there occur in the cross-matched trees gaps of rings that may correspond to revolutionary incidents in the arboreal environment. Electron microscopes can find exceedingly thin rings, but cannot explain aberrations among them.
Despite all of this, if bristlecone pines could be calibrated over a span from 5000 to 8000 years, this would mean that the solar system has existed that long in a form not radically different from its present form. Also, no important element of the atmosphere or climate affecting rather similar biological organisms would have changed. Further no major annual motion of the Earth respecting the Sun must have changed (orbital distance; orbital speed; rotational speed of the Earth); or all three motions, if changed, must have added up to the same total solar-exposure time.
When rocks are near melting, they are stamped with the direction of the magnetic pole. When cooled, they keep this directional stamp. If reheated, they lose it and acquire whatever new stamp is indicated by the current magnetic pole. Also, if a rock changes its position, its magnetism will point away from the location of the magnetic pole towards which it was originally oriented. If also it is heated in a new position, the imprint will be oriented differently upon the rock. Paleomagnetism studies the changed magnetic orientation of rocks. It also judges the ages of rocks, but within severe limits [60] .
Great belts of ocean basin rocks are imprinted with a polarity that is reversed from today's. Moving away from the great hot ocean ridges, alternating belts of reversed polarity occur. It is believed that these reversals occur at intervals, whether a few thousands or millions of years apart. It has been shown that the belts grow older (by fossil record, by inference from land studies, and by 40K-40A tests), as they move outwards from the ridges. It is believed that many millions of years show up in the magnetic bands.
But magnetic reorientation depends upon the last heating of the rocks that contain the imprint and upon their movement. If the ocean bottom is moving much faster than assumed, then the time between reversals is shortened in proportion. And vice versa, if the reversals occur rapidly, then the ocean bottom must be moving much faster then believed. Probably both have occurred: the ocean bottom moved rapidly and magnetic reversals occurred repeatedly, both within a period of several thousand years, probably between ten and thirteen thousand years ago, or so we shall argue in a later chapter.
Magnetic reversals occur for reasons unknown. Why they should happen at long intervals of time rather than short intervals is also unknown. Short-time intervals between reversals are probably connected with an impulse towards or an actual change of the axial inclination (now 23°+) of the Earth. Impulses were frequent in revolutionary ages. I shall be proposing later, with the support of legendary and geological evidence that the Earth's axis probably tipped on various occasions, both gradually and sharply.
After each abrupt change, the globe may have rocked for a time before stabilizing. The rocking took many years; the multiplex worldwide legends of Hamlet's Mill [61] may reflect this perceived motion. In that case, the belts of differently imprinted rocks would represent rapid growth of ocean basins with a rocks would represent rapid growth of ocean basins, with a slowly wobbling axis of spin and a reversing magnetic field.
A prior period of wobbling of the axis could even produce, in a period of accumulating ice, a succession of seeming advances and retreats (or the illusion of the "ice ages"). But also, pluvial intervals would occur, with melting in-between. The penchant of early man and mammals for living near ice-fields is understandable only because the Earth beyond the ice was not cold (since the ice might come from above). However, it is too early here to take up a position on the "ice ages," which are dealt with in the third volume of this work.
Two terms are used to discuss magnetized rock: natural remnant magnetism and thermal remnant magnetism. Geophysicist T. Nagata of Tokyo has shown that the two are the same. Remnant magnetism, furthermore, will occur and increase with any temperature increase above 200° C.
Magnetism decays. The exact coefficient of decay is unknown. The half-life of paleomagnetism may be only 5,000 to 10,000 years; all magnetism, according to M. Cook, may be less than 70,000 years old [62] . (Nagata guesses 1 million years.) Therefore, paleomagnetic bars of the ocean bottoms or land cannot well be used to measure time. Any considerable intensity must record a young age. A priori paleomagnetic ocean bottom measurements showing millions of years of age must be wrong. The position here taken is that any magnetism of the crust is primordial except where the crust has suffered a melt or welled up as new crust from the interior magma.
Organisms that die in a mineralizing setting may become fossils that are recognizable unless subsequently melted or crushed. Fossils are the principal means of dating sedimentary rocks, and, by inference, such igneous and metamorphic rocks as may be connected to them. If two rocks, no matter where they are found, contain the same fossils, the rocks are usually from the same period of time. The more numerous the identical species of the two fossil assemblages, the surer their common age. When the rocks appear to be in superposition, the fossils help to assign them a relative date. Once this is done, if afterwards the same rocks occur in isolation or not in superposition, the fossils which they contain enable their dates to be inferred.
A fossil may be wrongly dated. The record of its period and species may be incomplete. Or the fossil assemblage of various species may have been zoned and then have been transported to another area and placed, say, above a younger assemblage. Or the method of dating may be fallacious. For example, at the Schefferville (Canadian) iron mine, fossil wood specimens, radiocarbon dated at 4,000 years and largely unchanged chemically, were found imbedded (but not intrusively) in iron ore of pre Cambrian age (" over a billion years ago" and before trees evolved) at depths of several hundred feet [63] .
Attempts at correlating results of radiodating with established fossil dating have not helped. They have thrown the phanerozoic scale into disorder. Acceptance of radiodating provides numerous anomalies in traditional fossil successions. Basic difficulties in both methods come out of high-energy processes that devastate the atmosphere, build sediments and transport life forms quickly.
Plant and animal species require time to adapt to environments (life niches), to proliferate and to become extinct. So long as high-energy expressions are absent, it is reasonable to assign long periods to these processes and long life to the species. Originally, evolutionists were composing calendars that were under 100 million years in all. The discovery of natural mutation introduced a dynamic of change, but a successful mutation turned out to be, in theory at least, a most rare event. So more time was needed.
Now a billion years or more is allotted for the evolution of species. But quantavolutionary theory permits short mutation intervals, quick and widespread extinction, the opening up of a great many life niches for pre-existing and new species, and the possibility of less restricted and therefore exponential growth of population. Hence all the time may not be needed to explain evolution, even as evolution is understood by neo-Darwinians today.
That the world was created, destroyed, re-created and destroyed again, repeatedly, has never been doubted by any culture anywhere or anytime, except by the modern uniformitarian culture [64] . Five great ages are found in ancient Greece, India, Tibet, Peru and Mexico. Seven ages are put forth in another Hindu source; in Mazda; in Hebraic sources; in the Sybilline oracles; among the Mayas. The Hawaiians and Icelanders count nine; the Chinese reported ten ages up to Confucius. All may be taken as valid relative to localized definitions and experiences. All may be regarded as authentic challenges to the ages set by geochemistry and radiochronometry thus far. There occurs, nevertheless ,an urge to straighten or blend cycles into a helix, even in mythologies obsessed by repetitive chaos of creation.
"The final step in Aztec speculation, as indicated by their great Stone Calendar, is to assign the four earlier world ages to the four world directions, with the satisfying result that the present age belongs to the center of the world, the place where man likes to think of himself existing... The terror of experiencing a derangement of the cardinal points is transmuted by systematization into the comfort of knowing that all resulted in placing man at the center". [65]
Very recently, however, it has become clear that the competition for chronological veracity is going to be framed in the ancient cyclical - or, as I have termed it here, helical - mode. Natural scientists are becoming "helicalists". Writes Umbgrove, "What creature is this that breathes so heavily every 250 million years [66] ? He refers to the Earth and to the cycles of "death and resurrection" that characterize so many earth processes. As we have seen, paleontologists, ice age specialists, solar experts, diastrophists, and electromagneticists - each in their own way - are discerning helices of the ages [67] .
Also York and Farquahar, radiometricists:
"Radiometric dates obtained on rocks from a single continent tend to cluster into definite groups. Ages are not uniformly distributed in time."
Furthermore, the timing of the groups seems to be similar over all continents. One can guess from their data that quantavolutions recur and affect the whole Earth [68] .
Every cycle began with a kind of creation or rebirth. There was little of regularity on earth. Life was a continuous commotion. An obsessively fearful race projected itself into the sky. When planet Saturn became the great god, he was king of man and destroyer of man, but also bringer of wisdom and bountiful food. The Saturnalia began and have persisted to this day in jubilee days that follow days of sorrow and fasting. The Jovean anniversaries took over the Saturnalian. The Venusian and Martian came then in the spring near the vernal equinox while the old anniversaries centered around the shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere).
From full moon to full moon gave an easy method of counting in the Age of Saturn and it could usually be observed in the often misty nights. Moon calendars, sun calendars, and planetary calendars were often possible in the periods between changes of motion and place. A lunar month can, and does, change its length, without requiring a major social change except to revive terror and encourage religious ritual and related behaviors. Not until the last of the disasters had ended, in 2687 B. P., did a stable moon or sun calendar that was correct by present standards appear. Long afterwards and even until this day in many parts of the world, nothing in the order of skies is taken for granted, and, for calendar anniversaries, for festivals, and for public policy decisions, expert moon-watchers of the priesthood decide precisely when a moon should be termed full or new. Practically all human constructions that have survived from earliest times are temples, temple-connected, or astronomical. The megaliths, found in many the age of surviving records, that is, the Middle Bronze (Mercurain) and Late Bronze (Venusian) Ages, scientific observations of solar, lunar, stellar, and planetary movements were recorded in several countries; they differ from the observations that scientists today would make of the same movements.
The ancients numbered scientific observers among them, and states were sometimes dominated by astronomer-theocrats. Water-clocks, that measured time by the passage of water, and sun-dials were built; specimens have been found; they mark a time, however, which differs from the present day.
These early observations were made by dedicated, highly-disciplined corps of observers and are to be trusted. If they were dedicated and disciplined, it was ultimately because the skies could not be trusted; humans, god-driven, harnessed themselves to the observation of the skies, their pragmatic distrust reinforced by the ever-present subconscious illogic: "To watch is to control."
The quantavolutionist offers his tests of time. They usually lack tubes, needles and gauges and require a general vision of history. The quantavolutionist looks amiably upon tests that mix human evidence with natural evidence, joining an ancient legend or an invention with a change in appearance of the Moon or Mars. To the evolutionist, the quantavolutionist appears fuzzy-minded, gullible, and fanciful. But to the quantavolutionist the evolutionist seems narrow-minded, technocratic and historically lame-brained.
The quantavolutionists say this: Consider all the great natural forces that operate today. Read the ancient myths and accounts to discover how much greater were the expressions of these forces in the beginning. Extrapolate the effects of these forces as known. Then state what must have been the condition of the skies, the earth, and life in the earliest days of human recollection. Then, if interested, go back even farther, to what might have happened before.
The evolutionist offers his tests of time. When these tests are applied, we see time as very long and change as very slow, point-by-point, drop-by-drop.
The tests are very many. It would take an encyclopedia to discuss them properly. But on the chart of tests (Figure 6 on pp. 60-67), I have displayed four things: the test itself, a brief phrase on its unique quality, the main position of evolutionists in respect to its validity and the contrasting position of the quantavolutionists.
Although it is beyond the capacity of this book to carry explanations and analyses of the fifty-eight listed measures of time, the major objections to their evolutionary interpretation can be set forth. I shall do so, following the categories of the chart, with apologies for the necessary exaggerations and exclusions.
The main objection to accepting the evolutionary explanation of the prominent features of the Earth's surface in Category I is that they are all based upon unproven constancies in the forces working to form the surfaces. High heat and pressures, hurricane winds and tides, or movement of the Earth's crust can form all of these features in short intervals of time. One can move over the surface of the Earth and offer an alternative quantavolutionary explanation of all singular features.
The main objection to the biological measures of evolutionism is again that they may all occur through quantum jumps under high energy impulsion. Once granted that mass extinctions and arrivals of species occur in correlation with catastrophes, then it is only necessary to point out that "successful" mutations themselves are so rare that large numbers of mutations are required, which implies that atmospheric catastrophes are needed. Biological and geological quantavolutions are the basis of the ecological changes that produce the evolution of species.
The third category of radiochronometry almost entirely depends upon a constant radioactivity of certain elements over great stretches of time. Very recent studies have shown, however, that (a) we do not know the original state of the elements and hence the history of their radioactivity, and (b) undecayed and decayed elements have become separated somehow, sometime, and their ratio cannot be now regarded as a measure of time. In the case of item 8, the uranium elements are not found in expected oceanic and atmospheric abundances for a long time record. In the case of item 11, catastrophically produced materials such as water and natural gas are found in an abundance under high pressures that long-term effects should have erased [69] .
Of the astronomical motions, the fourth category, it can be said that (a) proof of constancy of motion is only available for a very short time; (b) even if the laws of motion suggested a history of motion, they do not write the history; (c) some motions are mysterious in origin and best explained as fossil motions from some radically different ancient motion; (d) evolutionary science has been loath to consider the history, presence, and effects of electricity in regards to star systems, solar systems, and the Earth (as to both its external and internal force fields).
In the fifth category, evolutionists have wrongly, yet persistently, defied a multitude of ancient voices even when these voices are in consensus on events and time sequences, They have blighted the growth of the science of mythology. Moreover, they have not considered catastrophes in the explanation of discontinuities of excavations, whether strata were disrupted or erased entirely. As Claude Schaeffer declared in his monumental survey of Near East excavations, "Our inquiry has often been rendered difficult by the rarity in most reports of observations on beds of destruction.... Some reporters have regarded these beds as a nuisance or of little interest." [70]
It should be clear, therefore, that the hints given in Figure 6 can be expanded into major criticisms of each category of tests. In addition, several general criticisms may be directed at off categories. One may object to the frequent unwarranted claim that the skies, air, waters, rocks and biosphere have changed always at the same rate and under the same conditions as we see them charging today. Inconstancy afflicts most gauges of time. The more that the quantavolutionary hypothesis is insisted upon, the more that the past processes seem to deviate from present ones - geological, biological, chemo-physical, astronomical or cultural. The planet Jupiter, for example, has become more and more of an ogre since Velikovsky predicted its radio noises in 1950, and a scientific dragnet is now out to trap all indications of its stormy past, present, and future behavior.
A second reproof is that evolutionists have committed often the same scientific misdemeanors that they accuse the quantavolutionists of. Possessed of two results, each based on a common or different debatable assumption, they claim that the results, since they agree, are certainly true. They have concealed anomalies, allowed the contamination of samples, exaggerated the certainty of their observations, generalized from insufficient data, pleaded their premises as proof, selected the evidence, used special cases as proof, and been thoughtless when it comes to larger theories.
Moreover, observations are often uncertain and unreliable in the tests of time. Significantly, progress in instrumentation many have the effect of disclosing hitherto unobserved phenomena that tend to nullify the aim of the measurement. For example, C14 dating aimed at using a constancy to establish dates, but it has helped greatly in discovering inconstancies. The brilliant and thorough attempts to perfect radiocarbon dating have already given some needed proof of the Martian and Venusian catastrophes" [71] and may paradoxically end up as a most valuable source of information on the ravaging of the atmosphere before Solarian times.
Also, the search for pure samples to test for dates has sometimes shed more light on other problems than upon time. Analysis of Thera( Aegean Sea) explosions ash samples has led to studies distinguishing earlier eruptions of Ischia (Italy) and casts doubt upon various cultural modes of dating for the Eastern Mediterranean [72] . Hydrocarbons from widespread fires have lately been discovered in "normal" land and off-shore cores drilled in the eastern United States [73] .
Frequently a lack of data hampers conclusions about time. Whole realms of nature are missing from the annals of times past. Catastrophic events not only compress time but also destroy the evidence of time. Floods, tides, and hurricanes can erase levels of the biosphere completely; it is permissible to argue that all centers of civilization of the Saturnian age to be described later were completely eliminated, that all "neolithic" discoveries are of survivors, especially of peripheries of cultures - just as the Hebrews, Sumerian, East Indian, and other legends declare. Then, too, the subsequent Bronze Ages chronology for the ancient Near East has lately been shown to be awry, largely because catastrophic premises provoked a re-examination of the domestic and international problems of the dynasties of Egypt [74] .
Finally, the evolutionary theory has had the services of practically all scientists and scholars of all disciplines for 150 years. By contrast, quantavolutionary theory has survived without media or funds and only enough scholars to make rare guerrilla forays into opposition-held country. From lack of focused case studies, the revolutionary time-tables have been excessively imaginative, including that which is to come in the next chapter.
It is fair to say that the five classes of time-tests of Figure 6 include practically all techniques of telling prehistoric and ancient time. One should stress that tests on a given site or material or problem are often multiple, as they should be, to see whether the tests support one another. If they do, of course, the probability of validity is increased. It may seem appropriate to annual or ignore the results of one test on particular or general grounds such as contamination or even general theory; but it is hard to knock out several tests on the same grounds. Nevertheless, one should bear in mind the set of general problems confronting tests of time, the special problems inherent in each category, and the particular problems inherent in each testing technique as indicated in the chart. In the case of several areas - sedimentation, potassium-argon tests, radiocarbon dating, tree-ring dating, paleomagnetism and the fossil record - my comments have been sufficiently extended to show that the debate is generally complex and ramified in respect to all types of time-testing techniques.
I have by no means exhausted the range of criticism. For instance, I credit thermoluminesce dating, involving its decay since the last high heat of its matrix, with "promise." Yet the pioneers of the field are commonly frustrated: " There is a gross discordance between the TL age and the radiocarbon age.." of sedimentary samples baked by lava from the Massif Central's Chaine des Puys (France), the one giving 26,000 years, the other about 11,000 years [75] .
Still I can sympathize with the person who, after all is said and done, consults the conventional time-tables and reasons as follows:
"Thousands of scientists of many fields have worked with one or more of some fifty tests. Even if nobody is an expert in more than a couple of test areas, the scientists all lean on each other. And all agree on the long-range thrust of the many tests. Their agreement should add up to a certainty for either long-range evolutionism or long-range revolutionism. Short-range revolutionism must be wrong."
In reply, I can only stress what has already been said above and elsewhere in the book:
"Every test has its problems of design, administration, reading, and interpretation. Fifty problems do not make a solution. I could readily declare that ancient catastrophes are absolutely proven because not 50, but 150 or 500 cultures unanimously declare that they survived universal disaster. But more than this proof by agreement of sources is needed, in my view."
THE DISSOLUTION OF TIMEThe idea of long-range time is the bedrock of present-day intellectualism. It is ideological. It performs a great, but fundamentally non-rational, service. By extending time to inconceivable lengths, one makes of it, in effect, a constant, which need no longer be accounted for in factoring the causes of ancient events. Nevertheless, every ideology or "ism" is at best a model, at worst a blinded mule, pacing a circle endlessly.
Of the 58 tests listed, only 1 (one) does not depend upon the empirical experiential proposition that the processes of nature have been proceeding at a constant pace with only minor lapses.
The one exception is the principle of superposition of strata (I. 3). It is a logical principle. It can only come into effect when natural and human material is laid down; it is only valid when the material is not overturned or undermined by igneous or over other intrusions.
The reluctance of "Nature" to tell her true age is perennially a frustration. In a day when even solar time is not accurate enough for some functions and tests, and when even star-time is introduced, the fact that some people must be wrong by hundreds of millions of years in telling historical time cannot help but make one wonder if the minority, at least, is not mad, or whether the whole of science is a sham. Neither is the case.
Knowing how wobbly and weak a grip the human mind has upon time it should come as no surprise that "Nature's" time is disconcerted and disparate. Only by the greatest exertions and mutual discipline and only at the highest peak of group organization are we able to hold a tenuous grip upon a schedule of time; even then, the individual's psychological as well as active deviations from the severely imposed bonds of time are very many and dominant, if one were to be brave enough to count the undisciplined vagaries of time in relation to the ordered ones.
If this temporally disordered mind has difficulty in ordering time in relation to the ordered ones time in its immediate contexts of group cooperation, it is not to be expected that its farthest expeditions into space, species, and events could establish a nice clockwork. Historians like to tell a story: God, according to Isaac Newton, had set the machinery of the world to move like a clock, but had to intervene upon occasion to make adjustments in its regularity, (an idea that reminds us forcibly of Plato's God at the tiller of the world ship). Whereupon Leibnitz was prompted to remark that Newton had not only made of God a clock-maker, but a poor one at that.
If, as the preceding pages imply, there may be a general failure and collapse of long-term methods of time-reckoning, a need for a radically alternative chronology arises. But where lies the possibility of such ?
Quantavolutionism brings to bear on the problem the abilities of great forces to compress astronomical, geological and biological time. By adding human testimony to anomalous current scientific findings, enriching these with new evidence, especially of an electrical nature, and integrating them within a new hypothetical structure, it can propose a new chronology of the holocene period.
There is little chance that a single technical device. a test, will calibrate the ages. A holistic method must prevail. A thing to be dated must be evaluated by every technique available, in as broad a context as possible; and, even while it is being tested, it is testing the test. For example, Carbon-14 presents us with dates between 30,000 B. P and 21,000 B. P. on three different frozen mammoths; then, for the carbon-14 dates to be acceptable, Siberia must have remained frozen for the duration of the period, else two of the carcasses would have rotted [76] . But then the mammoths would have suffered three catastrophic time-points of sudden death and sudden preservation, by asphyxiation and deep-freezing. A peculiar repetitive kind of disaster would have to characterize this long period of time. If we believe that the species was exterminated at once, then the carbon-14 method cannot be at all valid here. We must still await a definitive study of this long-discussed puzzle. Its solution is important; the utility of carbondating hangs upon it.
Another case involves the fossilized resinous exudation of dead pine forests, amber. The Greeks cherished it for its beauty and its electrical properties; its name was "electron." At Pylos, a Mycenaean city, whose buildings collapsed under intense heat, large stores of amber were found [77] . The substance was in ancient times transported by well-known routes sacred to Apollo from the coastal towns of the Baltic Sea [78] . There it was being washed ashore from vast sunken pine forests. Recent radiocarbon dating of pollen conflicts with conventional belief, according to which the Baltic basin was filled 70 million years ago, and places the flooding of the Baltic Sea in the middle of the second millennium [79] , a catastrophic period that will be described in the tenth chapter story of Venus. Presumably, only after several hundred years was the amber fossilized, exuded, washed ashore, evaluated, and incorporated into international trade.
Isaacson has independently established the burning of Pylos in the period of cosmic perturbation involving the newly great god Mars, that is, the eighth and seventh centuries [80] . Fossils themselves tend to be proof of local or general disaster. The abandonment of a precious store of amber also indicates natural disaster, not an aftermath of a battle or accident or ordinary earthquake. Might it not be that no one was left to dig up the treasure? It would appear that all evidence can be put into a mutually supportive context that is much broader and convincing than a set of dates contributed by single technique. Reasoning from the sacred, the commercial, the behavioral elements, one has grounds for disputing the geological theory that assigns millions of years of age to the Baltic inundation; how could amber have been so abundant that it was still washing ashore in quantities sufficient to support a thriving business? The origin of the mysterious amber was carried in Greek myth: the Heliades, sisters of Phaeton, who drove uncontrollably the solar chariot and was sent crashing to Earth by a bolt of Zeus, wept amber tears in grief for their brother [81] .
Still another type of reasoning can be shown in relation to Schaeffer's demonstration of widespread concurrent site destructions in the second millennium B. C. [82] . Schaeffer follows conventional Egyptian chronology and dates the periods of destruction by the association of Egyptian artifacts with the site level artifacts under scrutiny, whether at the site or elsewhere [83] . That is, the Egyptian chronology was regarded as absolute, just as the radiocarbon dates were once so regarded, and still are given significant shifts and weights. The revision of Egyptian chronology by Velikovsky, now being completed, shifts whole centuries forward and about, and shifts the whole Greek-Near East chronology with it [84] . For the moment, confusion reigns, and there is bitter resistance. But soon it will become clear that innumerable historical and archaeological problems will be solved simply by switching to the new chronology. Thus, all that Schaeffer "automatically" consigns to the end of the Middle Bronze Age, at around 1750 B. C. I assign to the same time, but dated at about 1450 B. C. The many destructions that he consigns to 1200-1300 B. C., I assign to 800-700 B. C., granting special consideration to exceptional cases.
The results are remarkable. Suddenly, the vast "hiatus" between "13th century" destruction and 6th century proto-classical times becomes only a brief hiatus. It is clear that the vast movements of "the peoples of the seas" were a fiction [85] employed by scholars to explain the widespread natural disasters of the 8th and 7th centuries, the Mars disasters of our calendar.
It is tempting to conclude this discussion of current problems of chronology with remarks made lately about Lord Kelvin's three methods of arriving at the age of the Earth in the 19th century. "All three methods employed unproved assumptions and very shaky estimates; nevertheless, they conveniently agreed on the age of the earth." Geologists promptly adjusted their figures to his lead and although "it was not a case of 'fudging', it still took a lot of lively imagination for all those different scientists using different dubious methods to come up with the same erroneous result." [86]
Since Kelvin's day, chronometricians have overlept one another in their eagerness to add time. Even most catastrophists have been catapulted into the race. Long-term catastrophists heap scorn upon short-time catastrophists in order to keep in the running. They may be warned, however, that long-term catastrophism is thus asking for more and more time to do nothing. L. J. Salop [87] has discussed the effects of a 1% increase in the solar constant which causes an increase of ultra-violet, hard radiation by 100,000 times. There would occur one of the many vast destructions that mark the history of the biosphere. A natural catastrophe may not require as rare a combination of events as is believed even by non-uniformitarians. Hence, the greater the success of the long term catastrophists in proving historical disasters, the more implausible is it that these disasters were separated by hundreds of millions of years of time. The catastrophist theory will itself demand a compression of geological and biological time.
Should the moment arrive when the far-flung outposts of time represented by radiochronometry have to be pulled back, they will probably not be able to pause at chronological defenses of the old geology; all the troops of tests would retreat to the confines of short-time chronometry.
With this, I think enough has been said in this chapter of the tests of time to obtain permission to try in this book and its successors a radical calendar that largely disregards radio chronometry; that treats carbondating as exponentially erroneous as it moves backward in time; that subjects geological stratigraphy to catastrophic premises; and that regard human legendary reports to be correct and reliable in the large. Since all long-term measures of time have become suspect, we can proceed by using only as much time as we need for the accomplishment of the studied events. Whereupon 14,000 years delimits our temporal structure.
Notes (Chapter Three: Collapsing Tests of Time)
1. "Dating" (1974), V Encyclopedia Britannica, 490 ff.
2.
Figure 34*
A GENERALLY ACCEPTED TIME-SCALE
Inapplicable to the present work
| Age | Duration (In Million Years) |
Cumulative Total From Present to Beginning (in million years) |
|---|---|---|
| QUATERNARY | ||
| Recent (Holocene) | . | 0.015 |
| Pleistocene | 1.7 | 1.715 |
| . | ||
| TERTIARY | ||
| Pliocene | 13 | 15 |
| Miocene (oligocene) | 13 | 33 |
| Eocene (paleocene) | 9 | 42 |
| . | ||
| CRETACEOUS | 55 | 108 |
| JURASSIC | 27 | 135 |
| TRIASSIC | 23 | 155 |
| PERMIAN | 33 | 158 |
| . | ||
| CARBONIFEROUS | ||
| Pennsylvanian | 41 | 191 |
| Mississippian | 33 | 232 |
| . | ||
| DEVONIAN | 390 | 304 |
| SILURIAN | 22 | 326 |
| ORDOVICIAN | 57 | 383 |
| CAMBRIAN | 92 | 475 |
| . | ||
|
PRE-CAMBRIAN (from crustalformation to first life) |
2000 | 2475 |
*Note: This table appears at the end of the printed version of this book.
4. Heezing, Thorp, and Ewing, 1959.
5. Jordan, quoting (chap. III) Defaut.
6. Juergens (Fall 1977), fn. 29, p. 17.
8. Heezing and Hallister, 633.
11. This is Donnelly's "Age of fire and gravel" in Ragnarok (1883) cf. Beaumont (1925) 162, 176.
13. Velikovsky (1950) 54-8, 67-8 et passim; (1955) 218-9, 261-2; Wilson (1962).
15. Corliss (1974) Vol. MI, 104.
17. Walworth and Sjostrom (1977) 33-4.
18. Cook (1966); (1963) letter Nov. issue, p. 5.
29. Williams and Herdklotz (1977).
30. The joke may be originally Knopf's 85 Sci. Monthly(1957), 225.
31. Cook (1966); York and Farquahar (1972); Wager (1964) for a history.
32. On rubidium-strontium see Wright (1972).
33. Anderson and Spangler (1974); Dudley (1972); Mackinnon (1977).
38. Robins (1978), citing Rankama.
39. MacKinnon (1977) 11 citing Funkhauser and Naughton (1968).
41. Mackinnon (1977) citing Noble and Naughton.
42. E. g. Treash (1972); Ash (1973-4); Ransom (1976) 175-8, 200.
43. Ransom (1976) 134-6; II Kronos 1, 105.
44. Personal conversation, June, 1976, Naxos.
46. (1966) 26; Juergens as quoted in Ransom (1966) 183-4.
47. S. Talbott (1977); Gentry (all); MacKinnon (1977); Juergens (1977).
49. Gentry (1975) quoted by Talbott (1977) 6.
50. MacKinnon (1976) 15, citing et al (1976).
53. Damon (1972); Oosterhout (1976).
55. Komarek (1964), (1971); "Lightning Superbolts...." (1977).
56. Clausen et al. (1979), 611.
58. Ransom (1976) 157-64; Sorenson (1973).
60. Sullivan (1974), ch. 6; Juergens (1978); Cook (1966), Hapgood (1970) 36.
67. See e. g. Schindewolf (1963).
72. Cadogan et al. (1972); Vitaliano (1969); infra, chap. X, p. 233.
73. Blumer and Youngblood (1975).
74. Velikovsky (1952) (1967) (1968).
75. Huxtable et al. (1978) 208.
77. Graves no. 148-11, p. 222.
82. See Geoffrey Gammon in IV SISR (Spr. 1980), upcoming.
83. Schaeffer (1948) 19 et passim.
84. Velikovsky (1952); (1977); (1979, in press).
86. Ransom (1976) 32, quoting 44 Am. J. Physics (May 1970) 495-6.