Abiogenic Petroleum Origin, Abiotic Oil, Inorganic Geochemistry and Petrophysics of Mantle Hydrocarbons, Geology and Geophysics, Tectonics, Expansion Tectonics, Excess Mass Stress Tectonics, Seismology, Electric Earthquakes, Electromagnetism, Electric Universe, Matter and Energy, Astrophysics, Astrochemistry and Astrogeology, Gravity, The Myth of Gravitation, Plasma Physics, Plasma Cosmology, Catastrophism, Holocene Impacts, Atlantis In Antarctica, The Peak Oil Myth, And How To Profit From Them
"Everything I'm gonna present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school. And most of it was not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist and (all my earth science books) when I was a student I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at." -- Robert D. Ballard, geophysicist, May 2008
"Most of our planet does not feel the warmth of our sun. Most of our planet is in eternal darkness." -- Robert D. Ballard, geophysicist, May 2008
Talk of the Nation, July 3, 2009 · Deep-sea voyager Robert Ballard has discovered everything from 10-foot-tall tube worms to the Titanic on his ocean expeditions around the world. Ballard discusses his underwater finds and how new robotic technology allows scientists to explore the sea from ashore.
Charles W. Naeser was a nuclear chemist who made uranium hexaflouride for the Manhattan Project and was friends with Fermi, Gamow, and Teller.
"Much is known about Early Man in the Old World, where new discoveries continue to expand our knowledge base. Unfortunately, in the New World our knowledge is largely limited to Clovis and younger cultures. The study of potential pre-Clovis sites is not encouraged, and those who report a possible pre-Clovis site do so at significant risk to their career." -- Charles W. Naeser, chemist, April 2007
"As a scientist I am embarrassed that it has taken more than 30 years for archaeologists and geologists to revisit the bone and artifact deposits of Valsequillo Reservoir. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, data were presented that suggested Early Man had been in the New World much earlier than anyone had previously thought. Rather than further investigate the discoveries, which is what should have been done, they were buried under the sands of time, in the hope that they would be forgotten." -- Charles W. Naeser, chemist, April 2007
"I determined fission-track ages on zircons from two of the tephra units overlying the artifacted beds. The Hueyatlaco ash yielded a zircon fission-track age of 370,000+/-200,000 years, and the Tetela brown mud yielded an age of 600,000+/-340,000 years. There is a 96 percent chance that the true age of these tephras lie within the range defined by the age and the plus or minus value. Now, there were four different geological dating techniques that suggested a far greater antiquity to the artifacts than anyone in the archaeological community wanted to admit." -- Charles W. Naeser, chemist, April 2007
"The mind has lost it's cutting edge, we hardly understand the Ancients." -- Grégoire de Tours, historian, 6th century
I found someone who agrees with me that mankind gets less intelligent and more primitive over time the closer you get to the present. His name is Michael A. Cremo and he calls it Human Devolution. This is obviously the exact opposite of Darwin.
"Well, there's what I call a process of knowledge filtration that operates in the world of science. Discoveries that go along with the current consensus pass through this social and intellectual filter quite easily whereas reports of evidence (discoveries) that radically contradict the current consensus are filtered out, they don't pass through this filter so easily, which means many scientists and most of the general public don't know about these discoveries. So I think it's because of this process of knowledge filtration that we don't have a complete set of facts upon which to base our decisions and judgments about important questions such as the origin of the human species." -- Michael A. Cremo, author, 2005
"Well, and I think that's because of a double standard in the treatment of evidence. Evidence that goes along with the current theories is treated according to one set of rules whereas evidence that radically contradicts the current theories is judged by a much stricter standard. It's as if the rules of the game are suddenly changed, as if somebody were doing a high jump and one person jumps the five meter bar and then suddenly the next person who comes up doesn't just have to jump the five meter bar, they have to jump the ten meter bars. And actually the standards are so strict that even the evidence that goes along with the current theories could not possibly meet these same standards. So that's what I mean about a double standard in the treatment of evidence." -- Michael A. Cremo, author, 2005
"Who am I and where did I come from? ... For the past century or so the Darwinist scientists through their monopoly in the education system in most of the countries in the West have had the ability to dictate to us the answers to those fundamental questions." -- Michael A. Cremo, author, 2005
"I mean it [censorship] is really amazing because normally we're told that's not how the world of science operates. Well, we're told that always we're ready to consider new evidence and change our theories and it sounds very wonderful. In theory. But in practice sometimes it [science] doesn't work like that." -- Michael A. Cremo, author, 2005
"... once I spoke at the Russian Academy of Sciences because one of my books Forbidden Archaeology is available in that language and one of the anthropologists there had a copy of my book and told me, 'Well, I haven't read it but I'm sure everything in it must be a mistake or an illusion or a hoax.' And that illustrates the kind of attitude that I think doesn't really represent the highest ideals of science, namely I think one should look at the evidence and, if they think something is wrong with it, they should be able to demonstrate exactly what is wrong with it." -- Michael A. Cremo, author, 2007
Rick Crammond, age 52 of Canada, demonstrates how his invention, the Tesla CD Turbine, is a perfect electromagnetic model for planetary orbits and the reversal of retrograde rotation.
"The reversal which takes place from time to time of the motion of the universe. ... Of all changes of the heavenly motions, we may consider this to be the greatest and most complete. " -- Plato, philosopher, The Statesman, 360 B.C.
"There did really happen, and will again happen, like many other events of which ancient tradition has preserved the record, the portent which is traditionally said to have occurred in the quarrel of Atreus and Thyestes. ... how the sun and the stars once rose in the west, and set in the east, and that the god reversed their motion, and gave them that which they now have as a testimony to the right of Atreus. " -- Plato, philosopher, The Statesman, 360 B.C.
"Thus the whole period is eleven thousand three hundred and forty years; in all of which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt. Four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to experience; twice he came up where he now goes down, and twice went down where he now comes up." -- Herodotos, historian, Book II, ~440-420 B.C.
"The example of the magnet I have hit upon is a very pretty one, and entirely suited to the subject; indeed, it is little short of being the very truth." -- Johannes Kepler, astronomer/mathematician, 1609
"It is therefore plausible, since the Earth moves the moon through its species and magnetic body, while the sun moves the planets similarly through an emitted species, that the sun is likewise a magnetic body." -- Johannes Kepler, astronomer/mathematician, 1609
"But come: let us follow more closely the tracks of this similarity of the planetary reciprocation [libration] to the motion of a magnet, and that by a most beautiful geometric demonstration, so that it might appear that a magnet has such a motion as that which we perceive in the planet." -- Johannes Kepler, astronomer/mathematician, 1609
"...the great truth, accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed, is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball...." -- Nikola Tesla, physicist, 1904
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists have developed a "trojan horse" therapy to combat cancer, using a bacterially-derived nano cell to penetrate and disarm the cancer cell before a second nano cell kills it with chemotherapy drugs.
The "trojan horse" therapy has the potential to directly target cancer cells with chemotherapy, rather than the current treatment that sees chemotherapy drugs injected into a cancer patient and attacking both cancer and healthy cells.
Sydney scientists Dr Jennifer MacDiarmid and Dr Himanshu Brahmbhatt, who formed EnGenelC Pty Ltd in 2001, said they had achieved 100 percent survival in mice with human cancer cells by using the "trojan horse" therapy in the past two years.
The scientists plan to start human clinical trials in the coming months. Human trials of the cell delivery system will start next week at the Peter MacCullum Cancer Center at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and The Austin at the University of Melbourne.
The therapy, published in the latest Nature Biotechnology journal, sees mini-cells called EDVs (EnGenelC Delivery Vehicle) attach and enter the cancer cell.
The first wave of mini-cells release ribonucleic acid molecules, called siRNA, which switch off the production of proteins that make the cancer cell resistant to chemotherapy.
A second wave of EDV cells is then accepted by the cancer cell and releases chemotherapy drugs, killing the cancer cell.
"The beauty is that our EDVs operate like 'Trojan Horses' They arrive at the gates of the affected cells and are always allowed in," said MacDiarmid.
"We are playing the rogue cells at their own game. They switch-on the gene to produce the protein to resist drugs, and we are switching-off the gene which, in turn, enables the drugs to enter."
ScienceDaily (June 29, 2009) — Japan's BSI-TOYOTA Collaboration Center has successfully developed a system that controls a wheelchair using brain waves in as little as 125 milliseconds.
BTCC was established in 2007 by RIKEN, an independent Japanese research institution, as a collaborative project with Toyota Motor Corporation, Toyota Central R&D Labs, Inc., and Genesis Research Institute, Inc. Also collaborating in the research were Andrzej Cichocki, Unit Leader, and Kyuwan Choi, Research Scientist, of BTCC's Noninvasive BMI Unit.
Recently technological developments in the area of brain machine interface (BMI) have received much attention. Such systems allow elderly or handicapped people to interact with the world through signals from their brains, without having to give voice commands.
Dinosaur fossils are present in the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and Animas Formation in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico, and Colorado. Evidence for the Paleocene age of the Ojo Alamo Sandstone includes palynologic and paleomagnetic data. Palynologic data indicate that the entire Ojo Alamo Sandstone, including the lower dinosaur-bearing part, is Paleocene in age. All of the palynomorph-productive rock samples collected from the Ojo Alamo Sandstone at multiple localities lacked Cretaceous index palynomorphs (except for rare, reworked specimens) and produced Paleocene index palynomorphs. Paleocene palynomorphs have been identified stratigraphically below dinosaur fossils at two separate localities in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the central and southern parts of the basin. The Animas Formation in the Colorado part of the basin also contains dinosaur fossils, and its Paleocene age has been established based on fossil leaves and palynology.
Magnetostratigraphy provides independent evidence for the Paleocene age of the Ojo Alamo Sandstone and its dinosaur-bearing beds. Normal-polarity magnetochron C29n (early Paleocene) has been identified in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone at six localities in the southern part of the San Juan Basin.
An assemblage of 34 skeletal elements from a single hadrosaur, found in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the southern San Juan Basin, provided conclusive evidence that this assemblage could not have been reworked from underlying Cretaceous strata. In addition, geochemical studies of 15 vertebrate bones from the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and 15 bone samples from the underlying Kirtland Formation of Late Cretaceous (Campanian) age show that each sample suite contained distinctly different abundances of uranium and rare-earth elements, indicating that the bones were mineralized in place soon after burial, and that none of the Paleocene dinosaur bones analyzed had been reworked.
"I'm not trying to decry Leonardo [Da Vinci]. In my view he's the greatest genius that ever lived. He didn't actually invent anything as far as I could see." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, June 2008
"Well it's certainly plagiarism. Today obviously people would be horrified if previous authors were not acknowledged but I think in those days it was accepted. Now, just take Leonardo Da Vinci for a moment. He suddenly produces, out of the blue, drawings of helicopters, submarines, parachutes, machine guns, bazookas, underwater swimmers, paddlewheel ships, God knows what, as if by magic they appear in his brilliant and wonderful drawings. Well, as I explain in the book [1434], there is nothing there original. Everything which Leonardo drew were improvements on an earlier Italian, called Francesco Di Giorgio, whose notebooks Leonardo possessed and copied and improved on. And Di Giorgio was not original either. He copied everything from another Italian an earlier Italian called [Mariano] Taccola. Now my book then shows the link between Taccola and the Chinese. So none of of them, Taccola, Di Georgio, Leonardo, not one acknowledged where he got his information from." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, June 2008
"Not only did Columbus and Vespucci and Magellan not acknowledge Chinese, but neither did Copernicus, Galileo, or Leonardo [Da Vinci]. They all were completely silent on how they got their new information and I think this is most vividly illustrated by Copernicus. He suddenly produces this new system of the universe, how everything works, but there's absolutely no credit. How on Earth did he suddenly come across this? Whose previous work did he rely on? Completely silent." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, June 2008
"The source of Taccola and di Giorgio’s inventions was, of course, the Nung Shu passed on by Zheng He’s fleets in 1434. In the book, the first drawing was of two horses pulling a mill to grind corn, just as Taccola and Di Giorgio had done. Every variation of shafts, wheels and cranks “invented” and drawn by Taccola and di Giorgio are illustrated in the drawings of the Nung Shu. This is epitomised in the horizontal water powered turbine used in the blast furnace. Every type of powered transmission described by Taccola and di Giorgio is shown in the Nung Shu. By comparing Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings with the Nung Shu, each element of a machine superbly illustrated by Leonardo had previously been illustrated by the Chinese in a much simpler manual. In summary, Leonardo’s body of work rested on a vast foundation of work previously done by others. His mechanical drawings of flour and roller mills, water and saw mills, pile drivers, weight transporting machines, all kinds of winders and cranes, mechanised cars, all manner of pumps, water lifting devices and dredgers were developments and improvements upon di Giorgio's Trattato di Architettura Civil e militare and his rules for perspective for painting and sculpture were derived from Alberti's De Pictura and De Statua. His parachute was based on di Giorgio's and his helicopter modelled on a Chinese toy imported to Italy circa 1440. Leonardo's work on canals, locks, aqueducts and fountains originated from his meeting in Pavia with di Giorgio in 1490. His military machines were copies of Taccola and di Giorgio’s – but brilliantly drawn. Leonardo's three-dimensional illustrations of the components of man and machines are a unique and brilliant contribution to civilization -- as are his sublime sculpture and paintings. He remains the greatest genius who ever lived. However, it is time to recognise the Chinese contributions to his work. Without these contributions, the history of the Renaissance would have been very different ...." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2008
"Di Giorgio was, in fact, a wholesale plagiariser. Di Giorgio’s picture of a collapsing tower is almost identical to Taccola’s." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2008
"A culture will ask itself, 'Well, where did I come from?' It's a very important questions for humans. Because if we don't know where we came from then we don't know who we are." -- David Leeming, professor, 2007
"... once I spoke at the Russian Academy of Sciences because one of my books Forbidden Archaeology is available in that language and one of the anthropologists there had a copy of my book and told me, 'Well, I haven't read it but I'm sure everything in it must be a mistake or an illusion or a hoax.' And that illustrates the kind of attitude that I think doesn't really represent the highest ideals of science, namely I think one should look at the evidence and, if they think something is wrong with it, they should be able to demonstrate exactly what is wrong with it." -- Michael A. Cremo, author, 2007
"I determined fission-track ages on zircons from two of the tephra units overlying the artifacted beds. The Hueyatlaco ash yielded a zircon fission-track age of 370,000+/-200,000 years, and the Tetela brown mud yielded an age of 600,000+/-340,000 years. There is a 96 percent chance that the true age of these tephras lie within the range defined by the age and the plus or minus value. Now, there were four different geological dating techniques that suggested a far greater antiquity to the artifacts than anyone in the archaeological community wanted to admit." -- Charles W. Naeser, chemist, April 2007
"As a scientist I am embarrassed that it has taken more than 30 years for archaeologists and geologists to revisit the bone and artifact deposits of Valsequillo Reservoir. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, data were presented that suggested Early Man had been in the New World much earlier than anyone had previously thought. Rather than further investigate the discoveries, which is what should have been done, they were buried under the sands of time, in the hope that they would be forgotten." -- Charles W. Naeser, chemist, April 2007
"Much is known about Early Man in the Old World, where new discoveries continue to expand our knowledge base. Unfortunately, in the New World our knowledge is largely limited to Clovis and younger cultures. The study of potential pre-Clovis sites is not encouraged, and those who report a possible pre-Clovis site do so at significant risk to their career." -- Charles W. Naeser, chemist, April 2007
"I mean it [censorship] is really amazing because normally we're told that's not how the world of science operates. Well, we're told that always we're ready to consider new evidence and change our theories and it sounds very wonderful. In theory. But in practice sometimes it [science] doesn't work like that." -- Michael A. Cremo, author, 2005
"Who am I and where did I come from? ... For the past century or so the Darwinist scientists through their monopoly in the education system in most of the countries in the West have had the ability to dictate to us the answers to those fundamental questions." -- Michael A. Cremo, author, 2005
"Well, and I think that's because of a double standard in the treatment of evidence. Evidence that goes along with the current theories is treated according to one set of rules whereas evidence that radically contradicts the current theories is judged by a much stricter standard. It's as if the rules of the game are suddenly changed, as if somebody were doing a high jump and one person jumps the five meter bar and then suddenly the next person who comes up doesn't just have to jump the five meter bar they have to jump the ten meter bars. And actually the standards are so strict that even the evidence that goes along with the current theories could not possibly meet these same standards. So that's what I mean about a double standard in the treatment of evidence." -- Michael A. Cremo, author, 2005
"Well, there's what I call a process of knowledge filtration that operates in the world of science. Discoveries that go along with the current consensus pass through this social and intellectual filter quite easily whereas reports of evidence (discoveries) that radically contradict the current consensus are filtered out, they don't pass through this filter so easily, which means many scientists and most of the general public don't know about these discoveries. So I think it's because of this process of knowledge filtration that we don't have a complete set of facts upon which to base our decisions and judgments about important questions such as the origin of the human species." -- Michael A. Cremo, author, 2005
"Nobody remembers anything." -- Michael Connelly, author, 2004
"And as far as why he [Athanasius Kircher] wanted to connect so many different kinds of knowledge, um, you know, another word to associate with Kircher is pansophism. Right? Universal wisdom. Kircher truly, I think, believed that, as he says in one of his books on magnetism, 'The world is bound by secret knots.' Right? In other words, there are these kinds of hidden connections among all the things of the world, that, with the right understanding you might eventually discover." -- Paula Findlen, historian, 2004
"How can we know who we are if we don't know where we come from? It is clear from many fragments of evidence, traditions and lore that we have an incomplete picture of the earliest days of human civilization. It's possible that whole civilizations, some with advanced technology, have come and gone. At the very least, human culture reaches much further back in time than conventional history admits." -- Stephen Wagner, author, February 2004
"We get a sense that the significance of [Laird] Scranton's work, he is showing that, he is showing in a way that's practically incontrovertible, that the ancients had our science." -- John A. West, egyptologist, December 2003
"I expect they [Homo sapiens idialtu] were much more like us than we have given them credit for being." -- Susan Antón, paleoanthropologist, June 2003
"No firm evidence of conscious symbolic storage and musical traditions are found before the Upper Paleolithic. However, the oldest known European objects that testify to these practices already show a high degree of complexity and geographic variability suggestive of possible earlier, and still unrecorded, phases of development." -- Francesco D'Errico, paleontologist, et al., March 2003
"... now, you understand that in Hollywood, nobody reads and nobody remembers anything." -- Sue Grafton, author, 2003
"Is history what happened in the past, or is it what we think happened in the past?" -- Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, historians, 2002
"The methods of navigation employed by Zhu Di's admirals are revealed by one of the few documents of the era to have survived, the Wu Pei Chi. These Chinese sailing instructions, essentially a manual of the arts of seamanship and naval warfare, somehow escaped the purges of the mandarins. There were instructions, inscribed on a long, thin strip of paper, for each regular voyage they made, giving detailed directions including star positions, latitudes, bearings and the physical description of islands, prominent headlands, bays and inlets that would be clearly visible along the route. By studying these sailing directions, it is possible to deduce not only the course the Chinese had steered but the accuracy of their navigation and their ability to set a course by the stars. It is an invaluable document." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002
"The great Chinese fleets undertook scientific expeditions the Europeans could not even begin to equal in scale or scope until Captain Cook set sail three and a half centuries later." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002
"A new observatory would be at the epicentre of Beijing. Zhu Di took a personal interest in astronomy, and in the means by which he could build on the wonderful legacy he had inherited in this field. Chinese astronomers had well over two thousand years of experience of recordng events in the night sky. They had noted the appearance of a new star in 1300 BC, had charted every arrival of Halley's comet since 240 BC, and by 1054 were describing the remnants of the supernova explosion known as the Crab Nebula...." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002
"There was also a wealth of physical evidence: Chinese porcelain, silk, votive offerings, artefacts, carved stones left by the Chinese admirals as monuments to their achievements, the wrecks of Chinese junks on the coasts of Africa, America, Australia and New Zealand, and the flora and fauna transplanted far from their places of origin and thriving when the first Europeans appeared." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002
"They [China] had solved the problems of latitude and longitude and had mapped the earth and heavens with equal accuracy." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002
"I seemed to be looking at a series of the most incredible journeys in the history of mankind, but one that had been completely expunged from human memory, the majority of records destroyed, the achievements ignored and finally forgotten. These revelations were both astounding and horrifying." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002
"I decided to see if there were other charts like the 1424 map, showing continents that had been surveyed before the European voyages of discovery. The deeper I dug, the more bombshells I uncovered. I was astonished to find that Patagonia and the Andes had been mapped a century before the first Europeans sighted them, and Antarctica had been accurately drawn some four centuries before Europeans reached the continent. The east coast of Africa was shown on another chart, with longitudes that were perfectly correct -- something Europeans did not manage to achieve for another three centuries. Australia appeared on another map, three centuries before Cook, and other charts showed the Carribean, Greenland, the Arctic and the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of both North America and South America long before Europeans had arrived." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002
"Over ten years ago I stumbled upon an incredible discovery, a clue hidden in an ancient map which, though it did not lead to buried treasure, suggested that the history of the world as it has been known and handed down for centuries would have to be radically revised." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002
"It's something you learn here -- after a while nobody remembers anything." -- Joseph Kanon, author, 2001
"Taken together with recent finds from Klasies River, Katanda and other African Middle Stone Age sites the Blombos Cave evidence for formal bone working, deliberate engraving on ochre, production of finely made bifacial points and sophisticated subsistence strategies is turning the tide in favour of models positing behavioural modernity in Africa at a time far earlier than previously accepted." -- Christopher S. Henshilwood, paleoanthropologist, April 2001
"In Extinct Humans, Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz present convincing evidence that many distinct species of humans have existed during the history of the hominid family, often simultaneously. Furthermore, these species may have contributed to one another’s extinction. Who were these different human species? Which are direct ancestors to us? And, the most profound question of all, why is there only a single human species alive on Earth now?" -- Westview Press, 2001
"Nobody remembers anything." -- Joseph Kanon, author, 1999
"... nobody remembers anything, not even poems." -- Jaime Manrique, author, 1999
"At the temple of Seti I in the ancient city of Abydos, part of the plaster overhang crumbled, revealing some most remarkable underlying hieroglyphs. This is a very unusual frieze depicting what appear to be modern machines. This photograph is discussed on the internet, and shows what appear to be a helicopter in the upper left, a submarine in the upper right, a flying disc in the middle (right) and a plane in the lower right. These photographs and glyphs reveal that the Egyptian civilisation was far more mysterious than we have been led to believe." -- M.M. El-Gamili, archaeologist, et al., 1999
"As for Democritus, Plato notoriously fails altogether to mention either him or his writings, though (especially in the Timaeus) he arguably betrays knowledge of them, if only indirectly." -- Paul Cartledge, philosopher, 1999
"We are certainly not at the end of science. Most probably we are just at the beginning!" -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 1998
"The answers to all the scientific questions we could possibly ask are sitting right in front of our noses, yet we don't see them." -- Steve Grand, computer programer, October 1998
"Nobody remembers anything from the past." -- Makarand Sathe, playwright, 1998
"One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory." -- Rita Mae Brown, author, 1998
"Not only did secular scientists rout the Christian fundamentalists, they placed themselves in the posture of knowing more, on the basis of their own very short-term investigations, than the collective remembrances of the rest of humankind." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"I am convinced by the evidence that we are a species with amnesia. We have forgotten something of great importance from our own past." -- Graham Hancock, writer, 1996
"One of the greatest mysteries of mankind is: where did we come from? Scientists and philosophers alike have pondered this elusive question and put forth many explanations. But in truth, no one really knows. " -- Charlton Heston, actor, 1996
"The absense of evidence is not evidence of absense." -- Kenneth A. Kitchen, egyptologist, 1995
"... I think it's fairly clear that all reality has to respect all other reality. If you come to inconsistencies, they have to be resolved...." -- Charles T. Munger, philosopher, 1995
"...Worlds In Collision was the one book which lay open on Einstein's desk at the time of his death." -- Charles Ginenthal, historian, 1995
"Students will start finding history interesting when their teachers and textbooks stop lying to them." -- James Loewen, historian, 1995
"There are great ideas undiscovered; breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers. There are places to go beyond belief. Those challenges are yours. In many fields, not the least of which is space, because there lies human destiny." -- Neal Armstrong, astronaut, 1994
"We are told that the evolution of human civilization is a linear process -- that it goes from stupid cave man to smart old us with our hydrogen bombs and striped toothpaste. But the proof that the Sphinx is many, many thousands of years older than the archaeologists think it is, that it preceded by many thousands of years even dynastic Egypt, means that there must have been, at some distant point in history, a high and sophisticated civilization -- just as all the legends affirm." -- John A. West, egyptologist, 1993
"In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile Sisyphean struggle...." -- Matt Ridley, zoologist, 1993
"One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage." -- Matt Ridley, zoologist, 1993
"We are drowning in print, and yet (with a few rare and glorious exceptions) nobody remembers anything. In my darker moments I wonder sometimes whether anybody reads anything." -- Amy Clampitt, critic, 1991
"How often must I tell you that people never remember anything?" -- George S. Schuyler, author, 1989
"Here it is: people have atrophy of the memory. Nobody remembers anything. Everyone tries to forget everything as quickly as possible." -- Inna Varlamova, author, 1988
"The past isn't even dead. It's disintegrated, dispersed. This is America. Nobody remembers anything past twenty years ago. — Unless there's money or trouble in it. — Antique dealers and politicians take care of that." -- John W. Corrington and Joyce H. Corrington, authors, 1986
"Some people never remember anything further back than five or six years." -- James S. Gordon, physician, et al., 1984
"Many myths contain accurate or reasonable statements about past events, while all historical sources, both primary and secondary, originate in a given cultural milieu and are influenced by cultural practices and beliefs. Because of this, it can be said that all historical accounts, whether Aztec, European, Chinese, or Fijian, are to some extent 'myths' (see Sahlins 1983)." -- Michael E. Smith, historian, 1984
"How does a complex civilization spring full-blown into being? Look at a 1905 automobile and compare it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the process of 'development.' But in Egypt there are no parallels. Everything is right there at the start. The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a 'development', it was a legacy." -- John A. West, egyptologist, 1979
"The scientific community starts its annals with Newton, paying some homage to Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, unaware that the great ones of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries searched through classical authors of antiquity for their great discoveries. Did not Copernicus strike out the name of Aristarchus of Samos from the introduction to De Revolutionibus before he signed imprimatur on his work? Did not Tycho Brahe find the compromising theory of the Sun revolving around the Earth—but Mercury and Venus circling around the Sun—in Heracleides of Pontus, yet announce it as his own? Did not Galileo read of the equal velocity of heavy and light falling bodies in Lucretius; did not Newton read in Plutarch of the Moon removed from the Earth by fifty-six terrestrial radii and impelled by gravitation to circle around the Earth, the basic postulate of Newton’s Principia, and did not Halley read in Pliny about comets returning on their orbits?" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1974
"Why, the past is always changing — nobody remembers anything. " -- Arthur Miller, playwright, 1973
"Ancient historians would have been aghast had they been told that obvious things were to become unnoticeable. Aristotle was proud to state it as known that the gods were originally [wandering] stars, even if popular fantasy had obscured this truth. Little as he believed in progress, he felt this much had been secured for the future. He could not guess that W.D. Ross, his modern editor, would condescendingly annotate" 'This is historically untrue.' Yet we know that Saturday and Sabbath had to do with Saturn, just as Wednesday and Mercredi had to do with Mercury. Such names are as old as time; as old, certainly, as the planetary heptagram of the Harranians. They go back far before Professor Ross' Greek philology. The inquiries of great and meticulous scholars such as Ideler, Lepsius, Chwolson, Boll and, to go further back, of Athanasius Kircher and Petavuis, had they only been read carefully, and noted, would have taught several relevant lessons to the historians of culture, but interest shifted to other goals, as can be seen from current anthropolgy, which has built up it's own idea of the 'primitive' and what came after." -- Giorgio de Santillana, polymath, 1969
"Today expert philologists tell us that Saturn and Jupiter are names of vague deities, subterranean or atmospheric, superimposed on the planets at a 'late' period; they neatly sort out folk origins and 'late' derivations, all unaware that planetary periods, sidereal and synodic, were known and rehearsed in numerous ways by celebrations already traditional in archaic times." -- Giorgio de Santillana, polymath, 1969
"Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it." -- Raoul Veneigem, philosopher, 1967
"We are in the state of a victim of amnesia. Humankind is a victim of amnesia. And a victim of amnesia does not act responsibly, he acts irrationally. His technological progress outstrips his understanding of his milieu and of events in which his ancestors lived or succomed. And it is a dangerous situation when the victim of amnesia plays with thermonuclear war/weapons. He enters into conflicts for which there is no reason. And in many of our actions, even as single individuals, we are sharing in that course of amnesia, of not wishing to know, of preferring to forget, of opposing to a book that said nothing more than what [was] said already and told so many times in thousands of ancient sources. The very violence and opposition to that revelation is rooted exactly in this desire not to know, and thus I feel my obligation in going to campuses, speaking to the young, to tell them, 'what you are taught is not complete.'" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966
"No, if these things happened, really happened, they must be not only in Biblical source but also Egyptian source in the first place. Egyptian record. I looked for it; I found it. [An] Eyewitness [Ipuwer] describe[s] the catastrophe -- the very same plagues. Strange was to me that the translator of the papyrus [The Admonitions of Ipuwer] now in Holland in [the] museum of the University of Leiden and there since more than a hundred years, [the] papyrus translated in 1909 by Gardiner, he didn't even feel that the very same verses that he translate[d] in modern English he could read in the story of the plagues in King James Version. This was observed a case of some scotoma. But scotoma was with all of us. How is it that a book that was read more than any other book, translated into scores of languages, commented upon by commentators through so many generations, but none of them was seeing or reading stone for stone and fire for fire?" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966
"As I have shown in Worlds in Collision ('The Steeds of Mars') the poets Homer and Virgil knew of the trabants of Mars, visualized as his steeds, named Deimos (Terror) and Phobos (Rout). Kepler referred to the satellites of Mars as being 'burning' or 'flaming', the same way the ancients had referred to the steeds of Mars." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, ~1960-70
"The wondrous thing is: how could Kepler have known of the red spot in Jupiter, then not yet discovered? It was discovered by J. D. Cassini in the 1660’s, after the time of Kepler and Galileo. Kepler’s assumption that Galileo had discovered a red spot in Jupiter amazes and defies every statistical chance of being a mere guess. But the possibility is not excluded that Kepler found the information in some Arab author or some other source, possibly of Babylonian or Chinese origin. Kepler did not disclose what the basis of his reference to the red spot of Jupiter was — he could not have arrived at it either by logic and deduction or by sheer guesswork. A scientific prediction must follow from a theory as a logical consequence. Kepler had no theory on that. It is asserted that the Chinese observed solar spots many centuries before Galileo did with his telescope. Observing solar spots, the ancients could have conceivably observed the Jovian red spot, too. Jesuit scholars traveled in the early 17th century to China to study Chinese achievements in astronomy." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, ~1960-70
"Jonathan Swift, in his Gulliver’s Travels (1726) tells of the astronomers of the imaginary land of the Laputans who asserted they had discovered that the planet Mars has 'two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of [its] diameters, and the outermost Five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one-and-a-half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the center of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.'" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, ~1960-1970
"Swift, being an ecclesiastical dignitary and a scholar, not just a satirist, could have learned of Kepler’s passage about two satellites of Mars; he could also have learned of them in Homer and Virgil where they are described in poetic language (actually, Asaph Hall named the discovered satellites by the very names the flaming trabants of Mars were known by from Homer and Virgil); and it is also not inconceivable that Swift learned of them in some old manuscript dating from the Middle Ages and relating some ancient knowledge from Arabian, or Persian, or Hindu, or Chinese sources. To this day an enormous number of medieval manuscripts have not seen publication and in the days of Newton (Swift published Gulliver’s Travels in the year Newton was to die), as we know from Newton’s own studies in ancient lore, for every published tome there was a multiplicity of unpublished classical, medieval, and Renaissance texts." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, ~1960-1970
"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." -- Howard H. Aiken, computer engineer, 1961
"The history of cosmic theories can be called, without exaggeration, a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias, and the manner in which some discoveries have been made resemble the conduct of a sleepwalker, rather than the performance of an electronic brain." -- Arthur Koestler, polymath, 1959
"Don't know much about history. Don't know much biology. Don't know much about a science book." -- Sam Cooke, singer/song writer, 1958
"The difficulty is not that nobody remembers anything, but that everybody remembers, with wholehearted conviction, totally different and conflicting things." -- Margaret Webster, actress, 1955
"I have again read Worlds in Collision. It is a book of immeasurable importance, and scientists should read it." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, April 1955
"Scientists generally have little historical sense, so that each single generation knows little of the struggles and inner difficulties of the former generation. Thus it happens that many ideas at different times are repeatedly conceived anew, without the initiator knowing that these subjects had been considered already before." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, 1954
"... if some catastrophe had occured between the creation of the system and now, the structure of the system might have changed so much as to make futile any attempts to draw conclusions about its origin." -- Hannes O.G. Alfvén, physicist, 1954
"As is well known in all sciences there have been many important events which have not left any trace." -- Hannes O.G. Alfvén, physicist, 1954
"To trace the origin of the solar system is archaeology, not physics." -- Hannes O.G. Alfvén, physicist, 1954
"People never notice anything." -- J.D. Salinger, author, 1951
"Although man knows that he has lived on this planet for millions of years, he finds a recorded history of only a few thousand years. And even these few thousand years are not sufficiently well known." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on it's youth." -- Francis Picabia, poet, 1949
"Everything of importance has been said before, by someone who did not discover it." -- Alfred N. Whitehead, mathematician/philosopher, 1947
"The only thing new in the world is the history that you don't know." -- Harry S. Truman, politician, 194-
"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." -- George Orwell, writer, 1945
"History is written by the victors." -- Winston Churchill, historian, August 6th 1945
"Of course nobody remembers anything." -- Sy M. Kahn, soldier, November 21st 1944
"When it is noted how very close [Jonathan] Swift came to the truth, not only in merely predicting two small moons but also the salient features of their orbits, there seems little doubt that this is the most astounding 'prophecy' of the past thousand years as to whose full authenticity there is not a shadow of doubt." -- Charles P. Olivier, astronomer, 1943
"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." -- C.S. Lewis, author, 1942
"Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves." -- Black Elk, medicine man, August 1930
"... I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars." -- Black Elk, medicine man, August 1930
"You can see that it is not the grass and the water that have forgotten." -- Black Elk, medicine man, August 1930
"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." -- Alfred N. Whitehead, mathematician/philosopher, 1929
"History is more or less bunk." -- Henry Ford, entrepreneur, May 1916
"... what is myth to-day is often history to-morrow." -- Lewis Spence, translator, July 1908
"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana , philosopher, 1905
"It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible." -- Mark Twain, author, 18--
"Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again." -- André Gide, author, 1891
"I grieve to hear Humboldt is failing." -- Charles R. Darwin, naturalist, February 10th 1845
"I never forget that my whole course of life is due to having read & reread as a Youth his [Von Humboldt's] Personal Narrative." -- Charles R. Darwin, naturalist, February 10th 1845
"... none but those who have experienced it can understand— If it is to be done, it must be by studying Humboldt." -- Charles R. Darwin, naturalist, May 1832
"I formerly admired Humboldt, I now almost adore him;" -- Charles R. Darwin, naturalist, May 18th 1832
"I read & reread Humboldt, do you do the same, & I am sure nothing will prevent us seeing the Great Dragon tree." -- Charles R. Darwin, naturalist, July 11th 1831
"... in the morning I go and gaze at Palm trees in the hot-house and come home and read Humboldt: my enthusiasm is so great that I cannot hardly sit still on my chair." -- Charles R. Darwin, naturalist, April 28th 1831
"Alexander von Humboldt has been some hours with me this morning. What a man he is! Long as I have known him, he ever surprises me anew. One may say he has not his equal in knowledge and living wisdom. Then he has a many-sidedness such as I have found nowhere else. On whatever point you approach him, he is at home, and lavishes upon us his intellectual treasures. He is like a fountain with many pipes, under which you need only hold a vessel, and from which refreshing and inexhaustible streams are ever flowing. He will stay here some days; and I already feel that it will be with me as if I had lived for years." -- Johann W. Von Goethe, naturalist, December 11th 1826
"I consider him [Von Humboldt] the most important scientist whom I have met." -- Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary, 18--
"But what are we to say when we find Kant's most important and brilliant doctrine, that of the ideality of space and of the merely phenomenal existence of the corporeal world, expressed already thirty years previously by Maupertuis? ... Maupertuis expresses this paradoxical doctrine so decidedly, and yet without the addition of proof, that it must be supposed that he also obtained it from somewhere else [Aristotle and Leibniz!]. It is very desirable that the matter should be further investigated, and as this would demand tiresome and extensive researches, some German Academy might very well make the question the subject of a prize essay." -- Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher, 1819
"That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt." -- Immanuel Kant, physical scientist/philosopher, 1781
"Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." -- Samuel Johnson, author, 1777
"Nay, truly, I might carry this matter still higher, and if one planet must be made parent another, justly claim the principal place for Jupiter, probably above 200 times as big as our Earth, and the largest and most considerable of all the Sun's chorus...." -- William Whiston, mathematician, 1737
"... the natives say ... they do not know who made it [Tiahuanaco]." -- Garcilaso de la Vega, historian, 1609
"The mind has lost it's cutting edge, we hardly understand the Ancients." -- Grégoire de Tours, historian, 6th century
"Protagoras was a pupil of Democritus." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century
"Some authors also give a list of some separate treatises which they collect from his [Democritus's] Commentaries. A treatise on the Sacred Letters seen at Babylon; another on the Sacred Letters seen at Meroe; the Voyage round the Ocean; a treatise on History...." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century
"... a treatise on the Magnet. These are his [Democritus's] miscellaneous works." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century
"And Aristoxenus, in his Historic Commentaries, says that Plato wished to burn all the writings of Democritus that he was able to collect; but that Amyclas and Cleinias, the Pythagoreans, prevented him, as it would do no good; for that copies of his books were already in many hands. And it is plain that that was the case; for Plato, who mentions nearly all the ancient philosophers, nowhere speaks of Democritus; not even in those passages where he has occasion to contradict his theories, evidently, because he said that if he did, he would be showing his disagreement with the best of all philosophers...." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century
"He [Philolaus] wrote one book, which Hermippus reports, on the authority of some unknown writer, that Plato the philosopher purchased when he was in Sicily (having come thither to the court of Dionysius), of the relations of Philolaus, for forty Alexandrian minae of silver; and that from this book he copied his Timaeus." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century
"And as he [Plato] argued against almost every one who had lived before his time, it is often asked why he has never mentioned Democritus." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century
"And some people, (of whom Satyrus is one,) say that he [Plato] sent a commission to Sicily to Dion, to buy him three books of Pythagoras from Philolaus for a hundred minae; for they say that he was in very easy circumstances, having received from Dionysius more than eighty talents [$1.6 million in 2004], as Onetor also asserts in his treatise which is entitled, Whether a Wise Man Ought to Acquire Gains." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century
"Favorinus, in his Universal History, says that Democritus said of Anaxagoras, that his opinions about the sun and moon were not his own, but were old theories, and that he had stolen them." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, 3rd century
"He [Democritus] said that the ordered worlds are boundless and differ in size, and that in some there is neither sun nor moon, but that in others, both are greater than with us, and yet with others more in number. And that the intervals between the ordered worlds are unequal, here more and there less, and that some increase, others flourish and others decay, and here they come into being and there they are eclipsed. But that they are destroyed by colliding with one another. And that some ordered worlds are bare of animals and plants and all water." -- Hippolytus, priest, 2nd century
"This was Democritus of Abdera, son of Damasippus, who met with many gymnosophists [naked gurus] among the Indians and with priests and astrologers in Egypt and with the Magi in Babylon." -- Hippolytus, priest, 2nd century
"He [Anaxagoras] was the first [Greek] to determine the facts about eclipses and renewals of light." -- Hippolytus, priest, 2nd century
"Thales, having devoted himself to the system of the stars and to an enquiry into them, became for the Greeks the first who was responsible for this branch of learning. And he, gazing upon the heavens and saying that he was apprehending with care the things above, fell into a well; whereupon a certain maid by the name of Thratta [A Thracian woman] laughed at him and said: 'While intent on beholding things in heaven, he does not see what is at his feet.' And he lived about the time of Croesus." -- Hippolytus, priest, 2nd century
"Parmenides, accordingly, was the disciple of Xenophanes, and Zeno of him; then came Leucippus, and then Democritus. Disciples of Democritus were Protagoras of Abdera, and Metrodorus of Chios, whose pupil was Diogenes of Smyrna; and his again Anaxarchus, and his Pyrrho, and his Nausiphanes. Some say that Epicurus was a scholar of his." -- Clement of Alexandria, priest, 2nd century
"I spent much care upon the history of the Arcadian kings, and the genealogy as given above was told me by the Arcadians themselves. Of their memorable achievements the oldest is the Trojan war." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Arcadia, 2nd century
"Witness to this also are the wisest of the Greeks: Solon, Thales, Plato, Eudoxus, Pythagoras, who came to Egypt and consorted with the priests; and in this number some would include Lycurgus also. Eudoxus, they say, received instruction from Chonuphis of Memphis, Solon from Sonchis of Sais, and Pythagoras from Oenuphis of Heliopolis." -- Plutarch, historian, Ethika, ~1st century
"Many discoveries are reserved for the ages still to be when our memory shall have perished. The world is a poor affair if it does not contain matter for investigation for the whole world in every age . . . Nature does not reveal all her secrets at once. We imagine we are initiated in her mysteries. We are, as yet, but hanging around her outer courts." -- Lucius A. Seneca, philosopher statesman, 1st century
"... why did Plato travel through Egypt to learn arithmetic and astronomy from foreign priests? Why did he later visit Archytas as Tarentum, and other Pythagoreans: Echechrates, Timaeus and Arion at Locri? His intention was to combine Pythagorean doctrines with his portrayal of Socrates and take on board subjects that Socrates had scorned. Why did Pythagoras himself cross Egypt, and visit the Persian magi? Why did he roam on foot over vast foreign lands and sail across so many seas? Why did Democritus do likewise?" -- Lucius C. Piso, politician, 1st century B.C.
"Why are we so fascinated by the motions of the stars, and by contemplation of the heavenly bodies and all of nature's hidden secrets? Why do we like history so much? We enjoy pursuing the smallest points, worrying over areas we have left blank, and trying to fill in what is incomplete." -- Marcus T. Cicero, philosopher, 1st century B.C.
"One need hardly mention Pythagoras, Plato, or Democritus. We are told that their desire for knowledge propelled them to the four corners of the earth. Those who cannot understand this have never loved any great and worthy object of knowledge." -- Marcus T. Cicero, philosopher, 1st century B.C.
"Epicurus too, I consider, in physics at least, a mere pupil of Democritus." -- Marcus T. Cicero, philosopher, 1st century B.C.
"Thus when he [Epicurus] changes Democritus he makes things worse; when he follows Democritus there is nothing original." -- Marcus T. Cicero, philosopher, 1st century B.C.
"Having now given an account of these things, it remains we should declare how many wise and learned men among the Grecians journeyed into Egypt in ancient times, to understand the laws and sciences of the country. For the Egyptian priests, out of their sacred records relate, that Orpheus, Musaeus, Melampodes, Daedalus, Homer the poet, Lycurgus the Spartan, Solon the Athenian, Plato the philosopher, Pythagoras the Samian, Eudoxus the mathematician, Democritus the Abderite, and Oenopides the Chian, all came to them in Egypt, and they show certain marks and signs of all these being there. Of some, by their pictures; and of others, by the names of places, or pieces of work that have been called after their names." -- Diodoros, historian, 1st century B.C.
"And Pythagoras learned from Egyptians his teachings about the gods, his geometrical propositions and theory of numbers, as well as the transmigration of the soul into every living thing" -- Diodoros, historian, 1st century B.C.
"... he [Solon] asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old." -- Plato, philosopher, 360 B.C.
"There is no teaching, but only recollection." -- Plato, philosopher, 380 B.C.
"I have roamed over the most ground of any man of my time, investigating the most remote parts. I have seen the most skies and lands, and I have heard of learned men in very great numbers. And in composition no one has surpassed me; in demonstration, not even those among the Egyptians who are called Arpenodaptae, with all of whom I lived in exile up to eighty years." -- Democritus, polymath, 4th century
"ἵνα μαθὼν αὐτὸ ἀποθάνω [So that I may learn it then die]." -- Solon, philosopher, 6th century
"So he [Mars] spoke, and ordered Deimos and Phobos to harness." -- Homeros, poet, Iliad, XV:119, 8th century BC
"Where are the princes of the heathen become, and such as ruled the beasts upon the earth; They that had their pastime with the fowls of the air, and they that hoarded up silver and gold, wherein men trust, and made no end of their getting? For they that wrought in silver, and were so careful, and whose works are unsearchable, They are vanished and gone down to the grave, and others are come up in their steads. Young men have seen light, and dwelt upon the earth: but the way of knowledge have they not known, Nor understood the paths thereof, nor laid hold of it: their children were far off from that way." -- Baruch 3:16-21
"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." -- Ecclesiastes 1:9
"He [God]...hangeth the earth upon nothing." -- Job 26:7
"Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons' sons;" -- Deuteronomy 4:9
"...there is no man of yesterday." -- Ipuwer, scribe, Papyrus 1, date debated
"Older relatives from all cultures have survived many decades of change. History has passed before their eyes. They are keepers of ancient wisdom." -- Dancing Feather, historian, 2008
"Why was I born? Why must I die? What is my purpose in life? How can I interact with the universe? ... The First Americans who lived in the Golden Age of Prehistory had the same questions." -- Dancing Feather, historian, 2008
"The Bible is myth; Plato is myth; Immanuel Kant is myth; ...." -- Carolyn Merchant, revisionist historian, 2004
"Jews have no history, the Bible is nothing else than an account of fables." -- Moise Rahmani, revisionist historian, April 2004
"Your zionist nigger jew friends have brainwashed you to believe this lie. By the way, you sound like a zionist jew nigger. Pursley if you are a boot lickin negro, you are still a slave to the lowlife caucasian zionist jew niggers. May Allah destroy you and those who think like you." -- Al-Hajj Idris Mohammed, revisionist historian, May 2003
"It is widely known that the famous Florentine astronomer Paolo del Posso Toscanelli (1397- 1482) in 1474 sent Columbus two letters and a map of navigation virtually providing a roadmap to the “discovery” of America. Two biographers of Columbus, his son Fernando and Bishop Las Casas of Chiapaz, even praise Toscanelli as the first to conceive the bold new idea of sailing to India by the western route. Yet few, indeed, have learnt of Toscanelli’s own startling admission that he had a long conversation with a Chinese ambassador 'who told of their great feeling of friendship for the Christians' in 1433 during the papacy of Pope Eugenius IV (1431-1447). Even less accepted this as a historical fact. Much of the exciting intellectual interactions between Renaissance Florence and Ming China so far remained nevertheless buried in the sands of time. As a result, even now Renaissance Italy is widely viewed as some purely European event without any traceable influences from the Chinese technology and science particularly in navigation and astronomy, which were without a doubt the most advanced, anywhere in the 15th century world." -- Wang Tai Peng, historian, 2002
"The library of Henry V (1387-1422) comprised six handwritten books, three of which were on loan to him from a nunnery, and the Florentine Franceso Datini, the wealthiest merchant of the same era, possessed twelve books, eight of which were on religious subjects." -- Gavin Menzies, historian, 2002
"... science is no different from other mythologies, including Native American myths, all of which are equally valid ...." -- Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, historians, 2002
"How is it that so much physical evidence can come to be doubted? For that matter, how do we know anything happened in the past? Holocaust denial is a harsh lesson in historical skepticism gone down the slippery slope into nihilism." -- Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, historians, 2002
"The purpose of this book [Denying History] is to reveal the difference between history and pseudohistory by using Holocaust denial as a classic case study in how the past may be revised for present political and ideological purposes. In the process we thoroughly refute the Holocaust deniers' claims and arguments, present an in-depth analysis of their personalities and motives, and show precisely, with solid evidence, how we know the Holocaust happened. We use this case study to consider how we know any past event happened." -- Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, historians, 2002
"Historians are the ones who should be described as revisionists. To receive a Ph.D. and become a professional historian, one must write an original work with research based on primary documents and new sources, reexamining or reinterpreting some historical event -- in other words, revising knowledge about that event...." -- Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, historians, 2002
"My people [Lakota] once hunted for buffalo - now we hunt for knowledge." -- Chasing Horse, medicine man, March 1999
"We [NASA] are exploring the connections between recent space findings and traditional Lakota star knowledge." -- Richard Shope, science educator, March 1999
"If the tribal peoples actually represented Western origins at a much earlier time, it was exceedingly valuable that they should be studied intensely for clues about the nature and origin of human society. Consequently it was an injury to science and human knowledge to allow the military to simply exterminate them." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"... even when Indian ideas are demonstrated to be correct there is the racist propensity to argue that the Indian understanding was just an ad hoc lucky guess -- which is perilously close to what now passes for scientific knowledge." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"At the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago in 1992, there was a panel presentation of a new field called 'zoopharmacognosy,' which is a term describing the use of medicinal plants by animals. The panel got a laudatory review in a Newsweek article, which described fearless scientists spying on sick animals and observing them using certain plants to cure themselves. A Duke University primatologist was quoted as saying, 'If these work for primates, then they are potential treatments for humans,' this insight apparently being a startling departure from ordinary scientific logic. The article quoted Harvard ethnobotanist Shawn Sigstedt suggesting that bears may have taught the Navajos to use a species of the Ligusticum plant, just as they had claimed! For Western peoples, the announcemnet of zoopharmacognosy may be an exciting breakthrough on the frontiers of science, but getting information from birds and animals regarding plants is an absurdly self-evident propostion for American Indians. It gives substance to the idea that all things are related, and it is the basis for many tribal traditions regarding medicinal uses of plants. The excitement illustrates a point made above: Why didn't people take Indians seriously when we said that animals and birds give us information on medicinal plants? Why is such knowledge only valid and valuable when white scientists document and articulate it?" -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"But even labeling a site as astronomical is an improvement, since it partially sidesteps the old stereotype of Indians being primitive and ignorant savages." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"Lying by a scout was a dreadful act punished by death or banishment. A remarkably high percentage of scouts also became the great storytellers and were repositories of the oral tradition." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"Unfortunately, the day of the philosopher in Western society has passed ...." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"The bottom line about the information possessed by non-Western peoples is that the information becomes valid only when offered by a white scholar recognized by the academic establishment; in effect, the color of the skin guarantees scientific objectivity." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"In methodological terms there is a major problem in bringing non-Western traditions within the scope of serious scientific perspective, and that is the inherent racism in academia and in scientific circles. Some of the racism is doctrinaire and unforgiving -- for instance, the belief that, for a person and/or community possessing any knowledge that is not white/Western in origin, the data is unreliable. A corollary of this belief is that non-Western peoples tend to be excitable, are subjective and not objective, and consequently are unreliable observers. Other attitudes encompass the idea that non-Western knowledge, while interesting, is a lucky correspondence between what science has 'proved' and what these people discovered by chance." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"Some efforts have already been made in a number of fields to investigate the knowledge of tribal peoples and incorporate it into modern scientific explanations. Thor Heyerdahl was one of the first people to show, by repeating the event, that ancient peoples could well have travelled by sea to various parts of the globe. ... Recognizing that Indians may have been capable of building boats seems a minor step forward until we remember that for almost two centuries scientific doctrine required that Indians come by land because they were incapable of building rafts. Polynesian voyages of considerable distances have now been duplicated, giving credence to the idea that Hawaiian tales of sea voyages were not superstitious ways of discussing ocean currents. Critical in this respect is the fact that Hawaiians would not be believed until a white man had duplicated the feat." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"This book [Red Earth White Lies] deals with some of the problems created for American Indians by science. We will encounter a number of amazing inconsistencies in the manner in which science describes the world we live in and the role it has chosen for American Indians to play in a largely fictional scenario describing prehistoric North America. It is not enough, however, to demonstrate the fallacies of Western science. I will offer an alternative view of North American history as seen through the eyes and memories of American Indians." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"Scientists may not have intended to portray Indians as animals rather than humans, but their insistence that Indians are outside the mainstream of human experience produces precisely these reactions in the public mind." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"The stereotypical image of the American Indian as childlike, superstitious creatures still remains in the popular American mind -- a subhuman species that really has no feelings, values, or inherent worth. The attitude permeates American society because Americans have been taught that 'scientists' are always right, that they have no personal biases, and that they do not lie...." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"More important for our purposes, while not forgetting the horrors of some scientific behavior, is the impact of scientific doctrine on the status of Indians in American society. Regardless of what Indians have said concerning their origins, their migrations, their experiences with birds, animals, lands, waters, mountains, and other peoples, the scientists have maintained a stranglehold on the definitions of what respectable and reliable human experiences are. The Indian explanation is always cast aside as superstition, precluding Indians from having an acceptable status as human beings, and reducing them in the eyes of educated people to a prehuman level of ignorance. Indians must simply take whatever status they have been granted by scientists at that point at which they have become acceptable to science." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"A good many of our problems today are a result of the perpetuation of dreadfully outmoded beliefs derived from the Near Eastern/European past that do not correspond to what our science is discovering today or to the remembered experiences of non-Western peoples across the globe." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"As time passed I became an avid reader of popular scientific books, wanting to know as much as I could about the world in which I lived. Gradually I began to see a pattern of nonsense in much scientific writing. Scientific explanations given regarding the origins or functioning of various phenomena simply didn't make sense." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"Like almost everyone else in America, I grew up believing the myth of the objective scientist. Fortunately I was raised on the edges of two very distinct cultures, western European and American Indian...." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"Watch the newspapers for more startling admissions that all is not right in Western Hemisphere prehistory and ask your local scholar to provide evidence for the fantastic scenarios that are being passed off as 'science.' You will enjoy watching them squirm and change the subject." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"... Eurocentrism is the 'normal' consensus view of history that most First Worlders and even many Third Worlders learn at school and imbibe from the media." -- Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, anthropologists, 1994
"This they tell, and whether it happened or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true." -- Black Elk, medicine man, August 1930
"The Jews have no history -- or what may be termed real history ...." -- Jonathan M. Roberts, scientist, 1894
"... judging from the account of the Exodus of the Jews, which they have written themselves, we cannot credit it. The narrative is full of contradictions, and is so absurd and incredible, and even impossible, that we must regard it as a huge myth. There may have been an Exodus from Egypt, of which this account is an exaggeration, but it bears so many evidences of the fabulous that we cast it aside and are led to doubt whether the Jews were ever in Egypt except as tramps and vagabonds ...." -- Richard B. Westbrook, scientist, 1892
"I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows." -- Sitting Bull, medicine man, March 1879
"When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?" -- Sitting Bull, medicine man, March 1879
"You come here to tell us lies, but we don't want to hear them." -- Sitting Bull, medicine man, May 1877
"You know, my friend [Von Humboldt], the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the happiness of the aboriginal inhabitants in our vicinities. We spared nothing to keep them at peace with one another. To teach them agriculture and the rudiments of the most necessary arts, and to encourage industry by establishing among them separate property. In this way they would have been enabled to subsist and multiply on a moderate scale of landed possession. They would have mixed their blood with ours, and been amalgamated and identified with us within no distant period of time. On the commencement of our present war, we pressed on them the observance of peace and neutrality, but the interested and unprincipled policy of England has defeated all our labors for the salvation of these unfortunate people. They have seduced the greater part of the tribes within our neighborhood, to take up the hatchet against us, and the cruel massacres they have committed on the women and children of our frontiers taken by surprise, will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach." -- Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary, December 6th 1813
"The confirmed brutalization, if not the extermination of this race in our America, is therefore to form an additional chapter in the English history of the same colored man in Asia, and of the brethren of their own color in Ireland, and wherever else Anglo-mercantile cupidity can find a two-penny interest in deluging the earth with human blood." -- Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary, December 6th 1813
"... if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi." -- Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary, August 28th 1807
Eurocentric Newtonian Racism and Uniformitarian Nazism
"Biot (1846) and Humboldt (1850) were the pioneer western astronomers who firstly introduced the historical Chinese astronomical records to North America." -- Zhen-Ru Wang, astronomer, November 2006
"According to the legend, the ancient peoples [of Lake Titicaca] had been without light for many days." -- Clive L. N. Ruggles, archaeoastronomer, 2005
"It is said that in this province [Titicaca] the people of ancient times tell of being without light from the heavens for many days, and all of the local inhabitants were astonished, confused, and frightened to have total darkness for such a long time. Finally, the people of the Island of Titicaca saw the Sun come up one morning out of that crag with extraordinary radiance." -- Bernabé Cobo, historian, 1990
"The last of these catastrophic events occurred on 23 March - 686. Fortunately, men were not illiterate at the time of these catastrophes." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1979
"Physical scientists were outraged in 1950 when Immanuel Velikovsky published historical evidence from around the world suggesting that the order and even the number of planets in the solar system had changed within the memory of man. Ideas in nearly every field of scholarship were challenged, but most seriously challenged of all were certain dogmas in the field of astronomy which had only in recent centuries succeeded in convincing mankind that Spaceship Earth was a haven of safety. The emotional outburst from the community of astronomers that so blackened the name Velikovsky and so successfully - if only temporarily - discredited Worlds in Collision has been laid to many causes, from the psychological and the political to simple resentment against invasion of the field by an outsider. Whatever the nature of such intensifying factors, however, I believe it is only fair to acknowledge an underlying and totally sincere scientific disbelief in the historical record." -- Ralph E. Juergens, engineer, 1972
"Could the [American] Indians on this continent know the connection between the sun appearing over the horizon, Eastern horizon, dropping down, again appearing, dropping down, and all the continent, this continent, bursting in flame? How could they know the connection? So they could not invent the stories. Something must have happened." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966
"...it was accepted that the solar system has no history at all. So it was created if not 6000 years ago, then 6 billion years ago. But then for 6 billion years there was no change. Whether it was created or came into being by tidal action of a passing star which would be catastrophic as the tidal theory wishes or it is growing out of a nebula, the nebular theory which goes back to Kant and Laplace, but since creation there was no change. But if what I am telling you is truth, then there were changes, and very many, and very recently too." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966
"... the solar system may have changed so much since it was created that a study of the present state would tell us very little about it's origin." -- Hannes O.G. Alfvén, physicist, 1954
"In -747 [B.C.] a new calendar was introduced in the Middle East, and that year is known as 'the beginning of the era of Nabonassar.' It is asserted that some astronomical event gave birth to this new calendar, but the nature of the event is not known. The beginning of the age of Nabonassar, otherwise an obscure Babylonian king, was an astronomical date used as late as the second Christian century by the great mathematician and astronomer of the Alexandrian school, Ptolemy, and also by other scholars. It was employed as a point of departure of ancient astronomical tables. 'This was not a political or religious era.... Farther back there was no certainty in regard to the calculation of time. It is from that moment that the records of the eclipses begin which Ptolemy used.' [Cumont, F., 1912] What was the astronomical event that closed the previous era and gave birth to a new era?" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"In the tomb of Senmut, the architect of Queen Hatshepsut, a panel on the ceiling shows the celestial sphere with 'a reversed orientation' or the southern sky. The end of the Middle Kingdom antedated the time of Queen Hatshepsut by several centuries. The astronomical ceiling presenting a reversed orientation must have been a venerated chart, made obsolete a number of centuries earlier. 'A characteristic feature of the Senmut ceiling is the astronomically objectionable orientation of the souther panel.' The center of this panel is occupied by the Orion-Sirius group, in which Orion appears west of Sirius instead of east. 'The orientating of the southern panel is such that a person in the tomb looking at it has to lift his head and face north, not south.' 'With the reversed orientation of the south panel, Orion, the most conspicuous constellation of the southern sky, appeared to be moving eastward, i.e., in the wrong direction.' [Pogo, A., 1930]" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"The most incredible story." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"Uranus has the sun rising and setting neither in the east nor in the west. So it is not a law that a planet of the solar system must rotate from west to east and that the sun must rise in the east." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"If, occasionally, historical evidence does not square with formulated laws, it should be remembered that a law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with laws." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"The signs of the Chinese zodiac have the strange peculiarity of proceeding in a retrograde direction, that is, against the course of the sun." -- Hans S. Bellamy, author, 1936
"The Chinese say that it is only since a new order of things has come about that the stars move from east to west." -- Hans S. Bellamy, author, 1936
"The next reference to meteors is found in the Chinese annals for 687 B.C. It is given by Biot as follows: '(March 23), during the night the fixed stars did not appear, although the night was clear. In the middle of the night, stars (des étoiles) fell like rain.' The account is translated in another way by Abel-Remmat who makes the last part read: 'there fell a star in the form of rain.'" -- Charles P. Olivier, astronomer, 1925
"... when the Duke of Lu-yang [Huai-nan-tse] was at war against Han, during the battle the sun went down. The Duke, swinging his spear, beckoned to the sun, whereupon the sun, for his sake, came back and passed through three solar mansions." -- Alfred Forke, philosopher, 1925
"According to a different account, which found favour with the Latin poets, the sun reversed his course in the sky, not in order to demonstrate the right of Atreus to the crown, but on the contrary to mark his disgust and horror at the king for murdering his nephews and dishing up their mangled limbs to their father Thyestes at table." -- James G. Frazer, translator, 1920
"As told by Huaman Poma, five such ages had preceded that in which he lived. The first was an age of Viracochas, an age of gods, of holiness, of life without death, although at the same time it was devoid of inventions and refinements; the second was an age of skin-clad giants, the Huari Runa, or 'Indigenes,' worshippers of Viracocha; third came the age of Puron Runa, or 'Common Men,' living without culture; fourth, that of Auca Runa, 'Warriors,' and fifth that of the Inca rule, ended by the coming of the Spaniards." -- Hartley B. Alexander, historian, 1920
"Harakhte [The Sun] ... he rises in the west...." -- James H. Breasted, egyptologist, 1906
"The travelling toward the east [of the sun] and the disappearance in the east ... must be understood literally...." -- Eduard Seler, anthropologist, 1903
"Pour retrouver la plus ancienne histoire du globe, il fallait comparer aux antiques traditions de l’Asie et de l’Egypte celles des peuples primitifs de l’Amerique. [In order to rediscover the remotest history of the earth it is necessary to compare the ancient traditions of Asia and Egypt with those of the primitive peoples of America.]" -- Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, archaeologist, 1864
"The year 687 B.C., in the summer, in the fourth moon, in the day of sin mao (23rd of March) during the night, the fixed stars did not appear, though the night was clear [cloudless]. In the middle of the night stars fell like rain." -- Édouard Biot, astronomer, 1846
"The nations of Culhua, or Mexico, says Gomara, who wrote about the middle of the sixteenth century, believe according to their hieroglyphical paintings, that, previous to the sun which now enlightens them, four had already been successively extinguished. These four suns are as many ages, in which our species has been annihilated by inundations, by earthquakes, by a general conflagration, and by the effect of destroying tempests." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1814
"That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise." -- David Hume, philosopher, 1772
"In the lifetime of [Emperor] Yao the sun did not set for ten full days and the entire land was flooded." -- Johannes Hübner, evangelist, 1729
"Lord of the two Easts, and Lord of the two Wests!" -- Quran 55:17
"The inhabitants of this country [Egypt] say that they have it from their ancestors that the sun now sets where it formerly rose." -- Gaius J. Solinus, grammarian, 3rd century
"Soles fuerre quinque." [There were five suns] -- Lucius Ampelius, tutor, date unknown
"O all-enduring Phoebus, though thou didst shrink afar, and in mid-sky didst bury the darkened day, still thou didst set too late." -- Lucius A. Seneca, philosopher statesman, 1st century
"Whither, O father of the lands and skies, before whose rising thick night with all her glories flees, whither doest turn thy course and why dost blot out the day in mid-Olympus? Why, O Phoebus, dost snatch away thy face? Not yet does Vesper, twilight’s messenger, summon the fires of night; not yet does thy wheel, turning its western goal, bid free thy steeds from their completed task; not yet as day fades into night has the third trump sounded; the ploughman with oxen yet unwearied stands amazed at his supper-hour’s quick coming. What has driven thee from thy heavenly course? What cause form their fixed track has turned aside thy horses? Is the prison-house of Dis thrown wide and are the conquered Giants again essaying war?" -- Lucius A. Seneca, philosopher statesman, 1st century
"The Zodiac, which, making passage through the sacred stars, crosses the zones obliquely, guide and sign-bearer for the slow-moving years, falling itself, shall see the fallen constellations; the Ram, who, ere kindly spring has come, gives back the sails to the warm West-wind, headlong shall plunge into the waves o’er which he had borne the trembling Helle; the Bull, who before him on bright horns bears the Hyades, shall drag the Twins down with him and the Crab’s wide-curving claws; Alcides’ Lion, with burning heat inflamed, once more shall fall down from the sky; the Virgin shall fall to the earth she once abandoned, and the Scales of justice with their weights shall fall and with them shall drag the fierce Scorpion down; old Chiron, who sets the feathered shafts upon Haemonian chord, shall lose his shafts from the snapped bowstring; the frigid Goat who brings back sluggish winter, shall fall and break thy urn, whoe’er thou art; with thee shall fall the Fish, last of the stars of heaven, and the Wain, which was ne’er bathed by the sea, shall be plunged beneath the all-engulfing waves; the slippery Serpent which, gliding like a river, separates the Bears, shall fall, and icy Cynosura, the Lesser Bear, together with the Dragon vast, congealed with cold; and that slow-moving drive of his wain, Arctophylax, no longer fixed in place, shall fall." -- Lucius A. Seneca, philosopher statesman, 1st century
"The sun set in the East." -- Apollodoros, Scholium on the Iliad: Book II, ~143 B.C.
"The reversal which takes place from time to time of the motion of the universe. ... Of all changes of the heavenly motions, we may consider this to be the greatest and most complete. " -- Plato, philosopher, The Statesman, 360 B.C.
"There did really happen, and will again happen, like many other events of which ancient tradition has preserved the record, the portent which is traditionally said to have occurred in the quarrel of Atreus and Thyestes. ... how the sun and the stars once rose in the west, and set in the east, and that the god reversed their motion, and gave them that which they now have as a testimony to the right of Atreus. " -- Plato, philosopher, The Statesman, 360 B.C.
"Then, it was then that Zeus changed the radiant paths of the stars, and the light of the sun, and the bright face of dawn; and the sun drove across the western back of the sky with hot flame from heaven's fires, while the rain-clouds went northward and Ammon's lands [Egypt] grew parched and faint, not knowing moisture, robbed of heaven's fairest showers of rain." --Euripides, playwright, Electra, 408 B.C.
"... here also everyone bows down before him who reversed the circuit of the sun." -- Sophocles, playwright, Fragment 738, 410 B.C.
"Thus the whole period is eleven thousand three hundred and forty years; in all of which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt. Four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to experience; twice he came up where he now goes down, and twice went down where he now comes up." -- Herodotos, historian, Book II, ~440-420 B.C.
"Let not the sun go down and disappear into darkness." -- Homeros, poet, Iliad, Book II: 413
"Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:" -- Matthew 24:29
"Therefore night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a vision; and it shall be dark unto you, that ye shall not divine; and the sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark over them. Then shall the seers be ashamed, and the diviners confounded: yea, they shall all cover their lips; for there is no answer of God." -- Micah 3:6-7
"And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day:" -- Amos 8:9
"Behold, I will bring again the shadow of the degrees, which is gone down in the sun dial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward. So the sun returned ten degrees, by which degrees it was gone down." -- Isaiah 38:8
"And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz." -- II Kings 20:11
"And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed..." -- Joshua, 10:13
"Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day." -- Joshua 10:13
"Uniformitarianism was an eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century attempt to reconcile some form of eurocentric racism and antisemitism with the uncomfortable facts of the geological, astronomical, and fossil record." -- Me, noob, June 2009
"We know that there are many stars and planets throughout the cosmos so there may have been countless civilizations that were destroyed by gamma ray bursts." -- Stanford E. Woosley, astrophysicist, 2007
"With the collision of the Shoemaker comet into Jupiter, the era of uniformitarian orthodoxy must come to an end. Minds that have been closed for nearly half a millennium can now be opened to see what really has happened to our planet in the past -- and that past is not as distant as we might suppose." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"In common with many other cities of the Sumerian plain, Ur today is little more than a gigantic mound of rubble: ruin piled upon ruin as each generation simply constructed new houses and public buildings directly on top of the old ones which had crumbled with age...." -- Richard Milton, writer, 1992
"Isaac Asimov's 'Nightfall' tells the story of a civilization on a planet with six suns, where night comes only once every 2,049 years. Scholars of that world have uncovered traces of at least nine previous cultures, all of which reached a height comparable to their own and then vanished suddenly. Because of their viewing handicap, those scientists cosmology is faulty. At their most creative, they can imagine that their universe consists of perhaps a few dozen 'stars' -- mysterious lights that eccentric cultists are always talking about. When night does fall and myriad stars shine forth, their cosmology, and indeed the philosophical basis for their society, crumbles." -- Anthony L. Peratt, physicist, February 1992
"The ultimate cataclysm imaginable to man has always been the stroke from heaven." -- C. Warren Hunt, geologist, 1989
"The environmental anagram that is geology, is a brew of violence. Degradation by cometary wrecking balls on the one hand and endogeny on the other is balanced by growth and life. The search for the whole truth will surely be limited by man's time on Earth. Nevertheless, a search for solutions, an attempt to decode nature's anagram awards the individual with a sense of great fulfillment as new truths emerge from the chaos." -- C. Warren Hunt, geologist, 1989
"The Israelites lived on the same planet as the other peoples; the same world catastrophes impressed them as the other peoples. The cause of the catastrophes, as far as it was known to the Babylonians or Egyptians, must have been known also to them. Since the world catastrophes were caused by planets, each of these planets must have been deified not by a single people, but by all peoples, without exception." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1979
"Diogenes Laertius repeated the teaching of Leucippus: 'The earth bent or inclined towards the south because the northern regions grew rigid and inflexible by the snowy and cold weather which ensued thereon.' The same idea is found in Plutarch, who quoted the teaching of Democritus: 'The northern regions were ill temperate, but the southern were well; whereby the latter becoming fruitful, waxed greater, and by an overweight preponderated and inclined to the whole that way.' Empedocles, quoted by Plutarch, taught that the north was bent from its former position, whereupon the northern regions were elevated and the southern depressed. Anaxagoras taught that the pole received a turn and that the world became inclined toward the south." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"Facts are facts, and the Cult's so-called mythology has certain facts behind it." -- Isaac Asimov, writer, 1941
"We've located series of civilizations, nine of them definitely, and indications of others as well, all of which have reached heights comparable to our own, and all of which, without exception, were destroyed by fire at the very height of their culture." -- Isaac Asimov, writer, 1941
"In looking over this [Tunguska] account, one has to admit that many accounts of events in old chronicles that have been laughed at as fabrications are far less miraculous than this one, of which we seem to have undoubted confirmation. Fortunately for humanity, this meteoric fall happened in a region where there were no inhabitants precisely in the affected area, but if such a thing could happen in Siberia there is no known reason why the same could not happen in the United States." -- Charles P. Olivier, astronomer, July 1928
"Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice." -- Robert Frost, poet, December 1920
"...the fire of the palace [of Tiryns] was followed immediately by the erection of the temple." -- August H. Frickenhaus, historian, 1912
"The 'Popol Vuh' is the New World's richest mythological mine. No translation of it has as yet appeared in English, and no adequate translation in any European language. It has been neglected to a certain extent because of the unthinking strictures passed upon its authenticity. That other manuscripts exist in Guatemala than then one discovered by Ximenes and transcribed by Scherzer and Brasseur de Bourbourg is probable. So thought Brinton, and the present writer shares his belief. And ere it is too late it would be well that these -- the only records of the faith of the builders of the mystic ruined and deserted cities of Central America -- should be recovered. This is not a matter that should be left to the enterprise of individuals, but one which should engage the consideration of interested governments; for what is myth to-day is often history to-morrow." -- Lewis Spence, translator, July 1908
"No trace of 'Zoan' exists; Tanis was built over it, and city after city has been built over the ruins of that." -- Henry A. Harper, archaeologist, 1891
"If one finds it interesting to follow in the infancy of our species the almost eradicated traces of so many extinct nations, how could one not also find it interesting to search in the shadows of the earth's infancy for the traces of revolutionary upheavals which have preceded the existence of all nations?" -- Georges Cuvier, naturalist, 1825
"But it is also really important to note that these eruptions and repeated retreats were not at all slow and did not all take place gradually. On the contrary, most of the catastrophes which brought them on have been sudden. That is especially easy to demonstrate for the last of these catastrophes, which by a double movement inundated and later left dry our present continents or at least a great part of the land which forms them today. That catastrophe also left in the northern countries the cadavers of great quadrupeds locked in the ice, preserved right up to our time with their skin, hair, and flesh. If they had not been frozen as soon as they were killed, decay would have caused them to decompose. On the other hand, this permanent freezing was not a factor previously in the places where these animals were trapped. For they would not have been able to live in such a temperature. Hence the same instant which killed the animals froze the country where they lived. This event was sudden, instantaneous, without any gradual development. What is so clearly demonstrated for this most recent catastrophe is hardly less so for the earlier ones. The rending, rearranging, and overturning of more ancient layers leave no doubt that sudden and violent causes placed them in the state in which we see them. The very force of the movements which the bodies of water experienced is still attested to by the mountain of remains and rounded pebbles interposed in many places between the solid layers. Thus, life on this earth has often been disturbed by dreadful events." -- Georges Cuvier, naturalist, 1825
"... the surface of our globe has been the victim of a great and sudden revolution, the date of which cannot reach back much more that five or six thousand years; that in this revolution the countries in which men and the species of animals now best known previously lived, sank and disappeared; that conversely it laid dry the beds of the previous sea, and made it into the countries that are now inhabited; that since that revolution the small number of individuals spared by it have spread out and reproduced on the land newly laid dry; and that consequently it is only since that time that our societies have resumed a progressive course, that they have formed institutions, erected monuments, collected facts about nature, and combined them into scientific systems." -- Georges Cuvier, naturalist, 1819
"The whole globe appears to have undergone the same catastrophes. At a height superior to that of Mount Blanc, on the summit of the Andes, we find petrified sea shells; fossil bones of elephants are spread over the equinoctial regions; and, what is very remarkable, they are not discovered at the feet of the palm trees in the burning plains of the Orinoco, but on the coldest and most elevated regions of the Cordilleras. In the new world, as well as in the old, generations of species long extinct have preceded those, which now people the earth, the waters, and the air." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1814
"Etruscans, the Egyptians, the people of Tibet, and the Aztecs, exhibit striking analogies in their buildings, their religious institutions, their division of time, their cycles of regeneration, and their mystic notions. It is the duty of the historian to point out these analogies, which are as difficult to explain as the relations that exist between the Sanskrit the Persian, the Greek, and the languages of German origin...." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1814
"All of these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe." -- Georges Cuvier, naturalist, 1796
"Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride; They had no poet, and they died. In vain they schem'd, in vain they bled! They had no poet, and are dead." -- Alexander Pope, poet, 1738
"Silenus, in the first book of his Histories, says, that in the archonship of Lysanias a large stone fell from heaven; and that in reference to this event Anaxagoras said, that the whole heaven was composed of stones, and that by its rapid revolutions they were all held together; and when those revolutions get slower, they fall down." -- Diogenes Laertius, historian, Lives of Preeminent Philosophers, 2nd century
"He [Democritus] said that the ordered worlds are boundless and differ in size, and that in some there is neither sun nor moon, but that in others, both are greater than with us, and yet with others more in number. And that the intervals between the ordered worlds are unequal, here more and there less, and that some increase, others flourish and others decay, and here they come into being and there they are eclipsed. But that they are destroyed by colliding with one another. And that some ordered worlds are bare of animals and plants and all water." -- Hippolytus, priest, Refutation of All Heresies, 2nd century
"The graves of Sisyphus and of Neleus – for they say that Neleus came to Corinth, died of disease, and was buried near the Isthmus – I do not think that anyone would look for after reading Eumelus. For he says that not even to Nestor did Sisyphus show the tomb of Neleus, because it must be kept unknown to everybody alike, and that Sisyphus is indeed buried on the Isthmus, but that few Corinthians, even those of his own day, knew where the grave was." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Argolis, 2nd century
"The things worthy of mention in the city include the extant remains of antiquity, but the greater number of them belong to the period of its second ascendancy." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Argolis, 2nd century
"In the ruins of Mycenae is a fountain called Persea; there are also underground chambers of Atreus and his children, in which were stored their treasures. There is the grave of Atreus, along with the graves of such as returned with Agamemnon from Troy...." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Argolis, 2nd century
"There is also a temple of Messene the daughter of Triopas with a statue of gold and Parian marble. At the back of the temple are paintings of the kings of Messene: before the coming of the Dorian host to Peloponnese, Aphareus and his sons, after the return of the Heracleidae, Cresphontes the Dorian leader, of the inhabitants of Pylos, Nestor, Thrasymedes and Antilochus, singled out from among the sons of Nestor on the score of age and because they took part in the expedition to Troy." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Messenia, 2nd century
"Megalopolis was founded by the Arcadians with the utmost enthusiasm amidst the highest hopes of the Greeks, but it has lost all its beauty and its old prosperity, being to-day for the most part in ruins. I am not in the least surprised, as I know that heaven is always willing something new, and likewise that all things, strong or weak, increasing or decreasing, are being changed by Fortune, who drives them with imperious necessity according to her whim. For Mycenae, the leader of the Greeks in the Trojan war, and Nineveh, where was the royal palace of the Assyrians, are utterly ruined and desolate; while Boeotian Thebes, once deemed worthy to be the head of the Greek people, why, its name includes only the acropolis and its few inhabitants. Of the opulent places in the ancient world, Egyptian Thebes and Minyan Orchomenus are now less prosperous than a private individual of moderate means, while Delos, once the common market of Greece, has no Delian inhabitant, but only the men sent by the Athenians to guard the sanctuary. At Babylon the sanctuary of Belus still is left, but of the Babylon that was the greatest city of its time under the sun nothing remains but the wall. The case of Tiryns in the Argolid is the same. These places have been reduced by heaven to nothing." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Arcadia, 2nd century
"So temporary and utterly weak are the fortunes of men." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Arcadia, 2nd century
"After the capture of Elis he [Mars] marched against Pylus and having taken the city he slew Periclymenus, the most valiant of the sons of Neleus, who used to change his shape in battle. And he slew Neleus and his sons, except Nestor; for he was a youth and was being brought up among the Gerenians. In the fight he also wounded Hades, who was siding with the Pylians." -- Apollodoros, The Library: Book II
"And Egypt was nothing more than what is called Thebes, as Homer, too, shows, modern though he is in relation to such changes. For Thebes is the place that he mentions; which implies that Memphis did not yet exist, or at any rate was not as important as it is now." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.
"A marvellous forgetfulness of the former destruction would appear to have come over them." -- Plato, philosopher, Laws: Book III, 360 B.C.
"And animals, as we know, survive with difficulty great and serious changes of many different kinds when they come upon them at once. ... Hence there necessarily occurs a great destruction of them, which extends also to-the life of man; few survivors of the race are left ...." -- Plato, philosopher, The Statesman, 360 B.C.
"A former king built the Temple of the Seven Lights of the Earth, but he did not complete its head. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words. Since that time earthquakes and lightning had dispersed its sun-dried clay; the bricks of the casing had split, and the earth of the interior had been scattered in heaps. Marduk [Jupiter], the great lord, excited my mind to repair this building. I did not change the site, nor did I take away the foundation stone as it had been in former times. So I founded it, I made it; as it had been in ancient days, I so exalted the summit." -- Nebuchadnezzar II, king, ~6th century
"He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea's water, and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness, and on it all the constellations that festoon the heavens, the Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion and the Bear, whom men give also the name of the Wagon, who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion and she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean." -- Homeros, poet, Iliad, Book XVIII: 483-489
"...and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit." -- Revelation 9:1-2
"...there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters." -- Revelation 8:10
"And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind." -- Revelation 6:13
"And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken." -- Mark 13:25
"...thou hast destroyed cities; their memorial is perished with them." -- Psalms 9:6
"For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch." -- Malachi 4:1
"And they shall spread them before the sun, and the moon, and all the host of heaven, whom they have loved, and whom they have served, and after whom they have walked, and whom they have sought, and whom they have worshipped: they shall not be gathered, nor be buried; they shall be for dung upon the face of the earth." -- Jeremiah 8:2
"Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee. Behold, they shall be as stubble; the fire shall burn them; they shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame...." -- Isaiah 37:13-14
"Behold, I will send a blast on him..." -- II Kings 19:7
"...the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died..." -- Joshua, 10:11
"And the fish that was in the river died; and the river stank, and the Egyptians could not drink of the water of the river; and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt." -- Exodus 7:21
"And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose." -- Genesis 6:1-2
"Indeed, that has perished which yesterday was seen...." -- Ipuwer, scribe, Papyrus 4 & 5, date debated
"Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere." -- Ipuwer, scribe, Papyrus 2:5-6, date debated
"Forsooth, gates, columns and walls are consumed by fire." -- Ipuwer, scribe, Papyrus 2:10, date debated
"Indeed, the women are barren and none conceive." -- Ipuwer, scribe, Papyrus 1, date debated
"Ahura Mazda warns Yima, the first king of men, of the approach of a dire winter, which is to destroy every living creature by covering the land with a thick sheet of ice, and advises Yima to build a Vara, or an enclosure, to preserve the seeds of every kind of animal and plant." -- Zend-Avesta, Fargard II, 1000 B.C.
"It is sure that time will show us new pyramid discoveries in every corner of the world." -- Maxim Yakovenko, historian, 2008
"We live in the world of pyramids where pyramids are the whole world!" -- Maxim Yakovenko, historian, 2008
"We have found the stairs of this, much older pyramid. The (Aztec) timeline is going to need to be revised." -- Patricia Ledesma, archaeologist, December 2007
"This [Visocica] is definitely not a natural formation." -- Nadja Nukic, geologist, April 2006
"We’re talking about a huge construction effort here [Visocica]. The size of this pyramid will shock the archaeological world. It’s substantially higher than the Great Pyramid of Egypt." -- Semir Osmaganich, archaeologist, April 2006
"Almost 5000 years ago, ancient Peruvians built monumental temples and pyramids in dry valleys near the coast, showing that urban society in the Americas is as old as the most ancient civilizations of the Old World." -- Charles C. Mann, journalist, January 2005
"A Peruvian site [Caral] previously reported as the oldest city in the Americas actually is a much larger complex of as many as 20 cities with huge pyramids and sunken plazas sprawled over three river valleys, researchers report. Construction started about 5,000 years ago — nearly 400 years before the first pyramid was built in Egypt...." -- Thomas H. Maugh II, journalist, December 2004
"It [Caral] was the most incredible assemblage of archaeological sites that we had ever seen anywhere in the world. It was literally one of those double take moments when your mouth drops open and you go, 'My God. I've never seen anything like that in my life.'" -- Jonathan Haas, archaeologist, January 2002
"Archaeologists have discovered the world's oldest pyramids - on the Atlantic coast of southern Brazil." -- David Keys, journalist, November 1996
"Dating from 3000BC, the oldest of the Brazilian pyramids predate the earliest Egyptian example by several hundred years." -- David Keys, journalist, November 1996
"There are more than 16 pyramids spread over Greece. The oldest one is the Pyramid of Hellinikon. At the South-eastern edge of the plain of Argolid, near the springs of the Erasinos river (nowadays 'Kephalari') and on the main arterial road which in antiquity lead from Argos to Tegea and the rest of Arcadia and Kynouria, there is a small structure at present known as the Pyramid of Hellenikon. The Academy of Athens has published results of dating the Hellenikon pyramid ( 9-2-1995). Dating measurements were performed by the Laboratory of Archaeometry at Dimokritos Resarch Institute in Athens and by the Nuclear Dating Laboratory of the department of Physics at the University of Edinbourgh in Scotland. The method of Optical Thermoluminescence was employed to date samples taken from the pyramid. It was determined that the pyramid was erected at about 2720 B.C. It must be noted that, according to these results, the Hellenikon pyramid predates, by at least 100 years, the oldest Egyptian pyramid (Djoser - 2620 B.C.) and by 170 years the Great Pyramid of Cheops (Khufu - 2550 B.C.)." -- Ellie Crystal, metaphysicist, 1995
"Now, if the Nile inclined to direct its current into this Arabian gulf, why should the latter not be silted up by it inside of twenty thousand years? In fact, I expect that it would be silted up inside of ten thousand years. Is it to be doubted, then, that in the ages before my birth a gulf even much greater than this should have been silted up by a river so great and so busy? As for Egypt, then, I credit those who say it, and myself very much believe it to be the case; for I have seen that Egypt projects into the sea beyond the neighboring land, and shells are exposed to view on the mountains, and things are coated with salt, so that even the pyramids show it, and the only sandy mountain in Egypt is that which is above Memphis;" -- Herodotos, historian, ~430 B.C.
"The information collected there [Lake Issyk Kul] allows us to conjecture that local people had a socio-economic system hitherto unknown to historians. As a blending of nomadic and settled life, it either gradually evolved into something different or-more likely-was destroyed by one of the many local floods. Legends confirm the latter assumption." -- Nikolai Lukashov, archaeologist, January 2008
"Semyonov-Tianshansky embarked on a relentless but vain search for the shrine. To all appearances, the monastery was engulfed by water. Hydrologists have not to this day sufficiently studied the unique lake with regular shifts in its water level. Some changes are gradual, others sudden and disastrous since they are caused by earthquakes and torrents of water rush from lakes higher up in the mountains. Floods recede sooner or later, and people come back to the shores-only to become the victims of other floods 500-700 years later." -- Nikolai Lukashov, archaeologist, January 2008
"Four years ago, Columbia marine geologists William B.F. Ryan and Walter C. Pittman 3rd inspired a wave of archaeological and other scientific interest in the Black Sea region with geologic and climate evidence that a catastrophic flood 7,600 years ago destroyed an ancient civilization that played a pivotal role in the spread of early farming into Europe and much of Asia. This week, the leader of a National Geographic Society underwater expedition of the Black Sea offered astronishing evidence to support Ryan’s and Pitman’s theory: the discovery of well-preserved artifacts of human habitation more than 300 feet below the Black Sea surface, 12 miles off the Turkish coast." -- Suzanne Trimel, journalist, September 2000
"The extent of the Sumerian flood was very substantial: a deposit 8-feet thick covering an area some 400 miles long by 100 miles wide -- a total of many billions of tons of material. And it was this discovery that sent a buzz through the corridors of uniformitarian geology. For here, at last, was evidence of a real Homo diluvii testis -- man a witness to the flood. Because this catastrophic event had occured in recorded history then -- uniquely in the geological record -- here was direct evidence of a substantial sediment that must have been laid down rapidly and all at once, rather than slowly over millions of years. And if this stratum then why not others?" -- Richard Milton, writer, 1992
"Precipitation-induced weathering is seen on the body of the Sphinx and in the ditch or hollow in which it is situated." -- Robert M. Schoch, geologist/geophysicist, 1992
"Geologists from earliest days, but especially from the eighteenth century (Baron Cuvier and others) recognized that a 'flood' had spread a blanket of 'drift' over Europe. Thus, it comes as no surprise that an 'event' 11,000 years ago had the energy and fluid medium to broadcast erratics and other debris in a thick blanket over southern Canada, the Great Lakes region, New England, the prairies of western Canada and the American midwest. Anyone who has pondered the well-established sudden disappearance from the region of whole species of the larger ungulates (elephants, camel, horse, sloth, etc.) and their predators, while the same families of creatures continued, apparently unaffected, elsewhere in the world, will find the 'flood' interpretation of prehistory convenient for explaining the facts." -- C. Warren Hunt, geologist, 1989
"For many centuries, indeed until only a few generations ago, the story of Noah was accepted as a historical fact...." -- Leonard Woolley, archaeologist, March 12th 1953
"In the reign of Osorkon II of the Libyan Dynasty [22nd Dynasty] in Egypt, in the third year, the first month of the second season, on the twelfth day, according to a damaged inscription, 'the flood came on, in this whole land ... this land was in its power like the sea; there was no dyke of the people to withstand its fury. All the people were like birds upon it ... the tempest ... suspended ... like heavens. All the temples of Thebes were like marshes.'" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"The fragments of the Chaldean historian, Berosus, preserved in the works of various later writers, have shown that the Babylonians were acquainted with traditions referring to the Creation, the period before the Flood, the Deluge, and other matters forming parts of Genesis." -- George Smith, archaeologist, 1876
"I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the Chaldean account of the Deluge." -- George Smith, archaeologist, 1876
"The priests of Sais, for example, told Solon, about 550 BC, that since Egypt was not subject to massive floods they had preserved, not only their own records, but those of other people; that the towns of Athens and Sais had been built by Minerva; the former nine thousand years ago, the second only eight thousand; and to these dates they added the well known fable of the people of the island of Atlas...." -- Georges Cuvier, naturalist, 1825
"Living organisms without number have been the victims of the catastrophes. Some were destroyed by deluges, others were left dry when the seabed was suddenly raised; their races are even finished forever, and all they leave in the world is some debris that is hardly recognizable to the naturalist." -- Georges Cuvier, naturalist, 1819
"In the lifetime of [Emperor] Yao the sun did not set for ten full days and the entire land was flooded." -- Johannes Hübner, evangelist, 1729
"They make great mention of a deluge, which happened in their country ... The Indians say that all men were drowned in the deluge, and they report that out of Lake Titicaca came one Viracocha, who stayed in Tiahuanaco, where at this day there are to be seen ruins of ancient and very strange buildings, and from thence came to Cuzco, and so began to multiply." -- José de Acosta, priest, 1590
"In the life of Manco Capac, who was the first Inca, and from whom they began to boast themselves children of the Sun and from whom they derived their idolatrous worship of the Sun, they had an ample account of the deluge. They say that in it perished all races of men and created things insomuch that the waters rose above the highest mountain peaks in the world. No living thing survived except a man and a woman who remained in a box and, when the waters subsided, the wind carried them ... to Tiahuanaco [where] the creator began to raise up the people and the nations that are in that region." -- Cristóbal de Molina, priest, 1572
"And in the time of Crotopus occurred the burning of Phaethon, and the deluges of Deucalion." -- Clement of Alexandria, priest, Stromata, 2nd century
"Afterwards, when most of the inhabitants of Greece were destroyed by flood, and all records and ancient monuments perished with them, the Egyptians took this occasion to appropriate the study of astrology solely to themselves; and whereas the Grecians (through ignorance) as yet valued not learning, it became a general opinion that the Egyptians were the first that found out the knowledge of the stars." -- Diodoros, historian, ~1st century B.C.
"And so even to the Athenians themselves, though they built the city of Sais in Egypt, yet by reason of the flood, were led into the same error of forgetting what was before." -- Diodoros, historian, ~1st century B.C.
"...the time must come when this place will be flooded again." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.
"...the Egyptians (they said) first used the names of twelve gods (which the Greeks afterwards borrowed from them); and it was they who first assigned to the several gods their altars and images and temples, and first carved figures on stone. Most of this they showed me in fact to be the case. The first human king of Egypt, they said, was Min. In his time all of Egypt except the Thebaic district was a marsh: all the country that we now see was then covered by water...." -- Herodotos, historian, Book II, ~440-420 B.C.
"O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. ... in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon [Venus], the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; for which reason the traditions preserved here are the most ancient. The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed-if there were any actions noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by us of old, and are preserved in our temples. Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. As for those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word. For there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of heaven. " -- Sonchis of Sais, priest, ~594 B.C.
"When God caused the deluge upon earth, and destroyed all flesh, and four hundred and nine thousand giants, and the water rose fifteen cubits above the highest mountains, then the water entered into paradise and destroyed every flower;" -- III Baruch 4:10
"The greatest mass of an iceberg is hidden unseen beneath the surface of the water. And likewise, underlying the search for Atlantis are many deep unseen prejudices. Atlantis is a ‘where is here’ riddle. To unravel this riddle we need to be willing to challenge what we have been taught in school." -- Rand Flem-Ath, scholar, August 2008
"[In Antarctica] I saw for myself the scene of scattered whale bones, and human bones abandoned together..." -- Alan Alex, explorer, April 2008
"[The] Antarctic may hold the future of archaeology." -- Norman Hammond, archaeologist, February 2008
"[Seeing Antarctica] He [Werner Herzog] comes to the conclusion that nature will not put up with humans forever, sooner or later taking the Earth back from us." -- Mike Plante, writer, September 2007
"They [The Gamburtsev Mountains] are a big puzzle to the scientific community. They are the size of the Alps, so far as we know, and there's really no straightforward explanation as to how you get such high mountains in the interior of a continent." -- Michael Studinger, geologist, December 2006
"When the Soviets discovered the [Gamburtsev] mountains, it was a complete surprise. People assumed East Antarctica was just one big Archaean platform with very few features on it - just like the interior of Canada. It was such a remarkable discovery that you'd have thought people would have been out there investigating straight away; but the Soviets were on a traverse to a place called the Pole of Inaccessibility and that tells you everything you need to know - it's such a difficult place to get to." -- Charles Bentley, professor, December 2006
"The Ancient Africans were well known for their tight cosmological views; Sais (Egypt) was the intellectual center of the world." -- Emmanuel C. Eze, philosopher, 1998
"The thesis of this book [When the Sky Fell] is so simple and yet so startling that it will almost certainly earn Rand and Rose Flem-Ath a permanent place in the history of earth sciences. It can be summarized in seven words: Antarctica is the lost continent of Atlantis." -- Colin Wilson, philosopher, 1997
"If we compare Athanasius Kircher’s 1665 ancient Egyptian map of Atlantis with a modern map of ice-free Antarctica the similarity becomes astonishing!" -- Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, scholars, 1996
"I continued to work on it [cocaine mummies] because I wanted to be sure of my results, and after 3000 samples, I was absolutely certain that the tobacco plant was known in Europe and Africa long before Columbus." -- Svelta Balabanova, forensic toxicologist, 1996
"When I was informed that cocaine had been found in Egyptian mummies, I was absolutely astounded. It seemed quite impossible that this should be the case." -- Rosalie David, egyptologist, 1996
"The first thing you think of is that this is just mad. It's wrong. There's contamination present. Maybe there's a fraud present of some kind. You don't think that cocaine can be present in an Egyptian mummy." -- John Henry, toxicologist, 1996
"Data are presented on the biochemical findings in several intermal organs from an Egyptian mummy with a 14C-dating of approximately 950 B.C. By use of radio immunoassay systems and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, significant amounts of various drugs were detected in internal organs (lung, liver, stomach, intestines) as well as in hair, bone, skin/muscle and tendon. These analyses revealed a significant deposition of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), nicotine (and its metabolite cotinine) and cocaine in the tissue from the mummy." -- Franz Parsche, anthropologist, and Andreas Nerlich, pathologist, 1995
"Apart from an ongoing investigation of hallucinogenic drugs in ancient societies, this preliminary study reports the identification of cocaine, hashish, and nicotine in Egyptian mummies. We took samples of soft tissue, bone, and hair from nine mummies. Drugs were detected by radioimmunoassay and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry." -- Svelta Balabanova, forensic toxicologist, et al., Aug 1992
"French scientists examining the stomach of the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II found fragments of tobacco leaves. Further analysis of the 3,200-year-old mummy indicated the presence of nicotine in the body. Conventional wisdom has it that tobacco was unknown in the Old World until the Spanish brought it back from the Americas in the Sixteenth Century." -- William R. Corliss, physicist, 1979
"Crantor came to Sais and saw there in the temple of Neith the column, completely covered with hieroglyphs, on which the history of Atlantis was recorded. Scholars translated it for him, and he testified that their account fully agreed with Plato's account of Atlantis." -- Otto Muck, philosopher, 1978
"Crantor ... even, it seems, went to the length of sending a special enquiry to Egypt to verify the sources of the story, and the priests replied that the records of it were still extant 'on pillars.'" -- J.V. Luce, archaeologist, 1969
"Dear Professor Hapgood, Your request for evaluation of certain unusual features of the Piri Reis World Map of 1513 by this organization has been reviewed. The claim that the lower part of the map portrays the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud Land Antarctica, and the Palmer Peninsula, is reasonable. We find this is the most logical and in all probability the correct interpretation of the map. The geographical detail shown in the lower part of the map agrees very remarkably with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice-cap by the Swedish-British Antarctic Expedition of 1949. This indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice-cap. The ice-cap in this region is now about a mile thick. We have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed date of geographical knowledge in 1513." -- Harold Z. Ohlmeyer, Lieutenant Colonel USAF, 1966
"And immediately there is the problem of the climate. There were ancient climates that were very different from what they are today. If those corals grew where they were found, certainly the Earth was not travelling with the same elements of rotation and revolution which means not in the same orbit, not with the axis directed in the same position as it is today. If you don't believe it, try to cultivate corals on the North Pole." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966
"I think that the idea of Mr. Hapgood has to be taken quite seriously." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, January 14th 1954
"I find your [Charles Hapgood] arguments very impressive and have the impression that your hypothesis is correct. One can hardly doubt that significant shifts of the crust have taken place repeatedly and within a short time." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, May 8th 1953
"The priests of Sais, for example, told Solon, about 550 BC, that since Egypt was not subject to massive floods they had preserved, not only their own records, but those of other people; that the towns of Athens and Sais had been built by Minerva [Venus]; the former nine thousand years ago, the second only eight thousand; and to these dates they added the well known fable of the people of the island of Atlas...." -- Georges Cuvier, naturalist, 1825
"As for the whole of this account of the Atlanteans, some say that it is unadorned history, such as Crantor, the first commentator on Plato. ... He [Crantor] adds, that this is testified by the prophets of the Egyptians, who assert that these particulars are written on pillars which are still preserved." -- Proklos, philosopher, 5th century
"His [Solon's] first voyage was for Egypt, and he lived, as he himself says -- 'Near Nilus' mouth, by fair Canopus' shore,' and spent some time in study with Psenophis of Heliopolis, and Sonchis the Saite, the most learned of all the priests; from whom, as Plato says, getting knowledge of the Atlantic story, he put it into a poem, and proposed to bring it to the knowledge of the Greeks." -- Plutarch, historian, 75
"Have we of all mankind been deemed deserving that heaven, its poles uptorn, should overwhelm us? In our time has the last day come?" -- Lucius A. Seneca, philosopher statesman, 1st century
"On the other hand, he [Poseidonius] correctly sets down in his work [Histories] the fact that the earth sometimes rises and undergoes settling processes, and undergoes changes that result from earthquakes and the other similar agencies, all of which I too have enumerated above. And on this point he does well to cite the statement of Plato that it is possible that the story about the island of Atlantis is not a fiction. Concerning Atlantis Plato relates that Solon, after having made inquiry of the Egyptian priests, reported that Atlantis did once exist, but disappeared — an island no smaller in size than a continent [Antarctica]; and Poseidonius thinks that it is better to put the matter in that way than to say of Atlantis: 'Its inventor caused it to disappear, just as did the Poet the wall of the Achaeans.' And Poseidonius also conjectures that migration of the Cimbrians and their kinsfolk from their native country occurred as the result of an inundation of the sea that came on all of a sudden. And he suspects that the length of the inhabited world, being about seventy thousand stadia, is half of the entire circle on which it has been taken, so that, says he, if you sail from the west in a straight course you will reach India within the seventy thousand stadia. " -- Strabo, geographer, 7
"Solon, who was intending to use the tale [of Antarctica] for his poem, enquired into the meaning of the names, and found that the early Egyptians in writing them down had translated them into their own language, and he recovered the meaning of the several names and when copying them out again translated them into our language. My great-grandfather, Dropides, had the original writing, which is still in my possession, and was carefully studied by me when I was a child." -- Plato, philosopher, Critias, 360 B.C.
"This is in the temple of Athena [Venus], very near to the sanctuary, on the left of the entrance. The people of Sais buried within the temple precinct all kings who were natives of their district. The tomb of Amasis is farther from the sanctuary than the tomb of Apries and his ancestors; yet it, too, is within the temple court; it is a great colonnade of stone, richly adorned, the pillars made in the form of palm trees. In this colonnade are two portals, and the place where the coffin lies is within their doors. There is also at Sais the burial-place of one whose name I think it impious to mention in speaking of such a matter [Osiris]; it is in the temple of Athena, behind and close to the length of the wall of the shrine. Moreover, great stone obelisks stand in the precinct; and there is a lake nearby, adorned with a stone margin and made in a complete circle; it is, as it seemed to me, the size of the lake at Delos which they call the Round Pond. On this lake they enact by night the story of the god's sufferings, a rite which the Egyptians call the Mysteries. I could say more about this, for I know the truth, but let me preserve a discreet silence." -- Herodotos, historian, Book II:169-171, ~440-420 B.C.
"You are welcome to hear about them, Solon, both for your own sake and for that of your city [Athens], and above all, for the sake of the goddess [Venus] who is the common patron and parent and educator of both our cities. She founded your city a thousand years before ours, receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of your race, and afterwards she founded ours, of which the constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be eight thousand years old. As touching your citizens of nine thousand years ago, I will briefly inform you of their laws and of their most famous action; the exact particulars of the whole we will hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred registers themselves. If you compare these very laws with ours you will find that many of ours are the counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time. In the first place, there is the caste of priests, which is separated from all the others; next, there are the artificers, who ply their several crafts by themselves and do not intermix; and also there is the class of shepherds and of hunters, as well as that of husbandmen; and you will observe, too, that the warriors in Egypt are distinct from all the other classes, and are commanded by the law to devote themselves solely to military pursuits; moreover, the weapons which they carry are shields and spears, a style of equipment which the goddess taught of Asiatics first to us, as in your part of the world first to you. Then as to wisdom, do you observe how our law from the very first made a study of the whole order of things, extending even to prophecy and medicine which gives health, out of these divine elements deriving what was needful for human life, and adding every sort of knowledge which was akin to them. All this order and arrangement the goddess first imparted to you when establishing your city; and she chose the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons in that land would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who was a lover both of war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better ones, and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children and disciples of the gods. Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island." -- Sonchis of Sais, priest, ~594 B.C.
"The new fossils are from chronometrically controlled stratigraphic sequences and date to about 4.1–4.2 million years ago. They include diagnostic craniodental remains, the largest hominid canine yet recovered, and the earliest Australopithecus femur." -- Timothy D. White, paleoanthropologist, et al., April 2006
"The [Herto] skulls are not an exact match to those of people living today; they are slightly larger, longer and have more pronounced brow ridges. " -- Jonathan Amos, journalist, June 2003
"It [Homo sapiens idialtu] was a very large individual ...." -- Timothy D. White, paleoanthrologist, June 2003
"Intriguingly, very often polar invertibrates are giants when compared to closely related species living in warmer areas. Giant Sponges. Sponges (i.e. Rossellidae spp.) are a good example of this gigantism: In Antarctica they are up to two meters high (with a body wet mass of up to 500 kilogramme), while close relatives growing in the temperate climate of the coast of Vancouver Island (Canada) are no more than a couple decimeters high." -- Susanne Gatti, biologist, et al., July 2002
"Perhaps even more puzzling, all three of the deceased, and two other young males apparently included as sacrifices, were giants among the short-statured Moche people, whose empire flourished in the desert plain between the Andes and the Pacific from about AD 100 to 800." -- Thomas H. Maugh II, journalist, February 2001
"Scholars working with the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna continue to pass their personal fantasies off as science while becoming more absurd with each effort to come to grips with the problem." -- Vine Deloria Jr., historian, 1997
"William Zinsmeister used to scoff at the idea that an asteroid impact brought a catastrophic end to the age of the dinosaurs. 'Where's the layer of burnt and twisted dinosaur bones?' was his standard response. But the surprise discovery of a mass fish grave has forced him to change his tune. Zinsmeister, a palaeontologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, found the bed of fish bones while mapping fossil deposits on Seymour Island, Antarctica, earlier this year. He described his findings this week in New Orleans at a meeting of the Geological Society of America. The bones extend over more than 50 square kilometres and lie immediately above the iridium-rich layer of sediments that marks the end of the Cretaceous period. The iridium came from an asteroid that crashed to Earth some 65 million years ago on the coast of what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico." -- Jeff Hecht, writer, November 1995
"Other traits seem more clearly to be synapomorphies uniting Bodo [Homo heidelbergensis] with later Middle Pleistocene populations and recent humans. Cranial capacity is substantially greater than expected for H. erectus." -- Philip G. Rightmire, paleoanthropologist, June 1995
"Then he [Viracocha] began to make people to live in it, carving great stone figures of giants which he brought to life. At first all went well but after a time the giants began to fight among themselves and refused to work. Viracocha decided that he must destroy them. Some he turned back into stone ... the rest were overwhelmed with a great flood." -- Douglas Gifford, scholar, et al., 1995
"The marvellous [Baalbek] site in the valley on the junction of roads running to Hamath is a work of anonymous authors in unknown ages. It is as if some mysterious people brought the mighty blocks and placed them at the feet and in front of the snow-capped Lebanon, and went away unnoticed. The inhabitants of the place actually believe that the great stones were brought and put together by Djenoun, mysterious creatures, intermediate between angels and demons." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1975
"Since the first discovery of the type specimen of Meganthropus palaeojavanicus by von Koenigswald in 1941 in the Djetis beds of Java, this specimen has been the subject of much controversy and conjecture as to its taxonomic status. The jaw fragment and another found at Sangiran in 1939 were decribed by Weidenreich in 1945, and the former was considered by him to be the remains of an early giant stock directly ancestral to the Pithecanthropines." -- C. Owen Lovejoy, paleoanthropologist, June 1970
"I sat there gazing at them, and they were coming from the place where the giant lives (north)." -- Black Elk, medicine man, August 1930
"As told by Huaman Poma, five such ages had preceded that in which he lived. The first was an age of Viracochas, an age of gods, of holiness, of life without death, although at the same time it was devoid of inventions and refinements; the second was an age of skin-clad giants, the Huari Runa, or 'Indigenes,' worshippers of Viracocha; third came the age of Puron Runa, or 'Common Men,' living without culture; fourth, that of Auca Runa, 'Warriors,' and fifth that of the Inca rule, ended by the coming of the Spaniards." -- Hartley B. Alexander, historian, 1920
"Even this giant was not so tall as Posio and Secundilla, in the reign of Augustus Caesar, whose bodies were preserved as curiosities in a museum in the Sallustian Gardens, and each of whom measured in length ten feet three inches." -- Edward J. Wood, author, 1868
"Pliny says that by an earthquake in Crete a mountain was opened, and that in it was discovered a skeleton standing upright, forty-six cubits long, which was supposed to be that of Orion or Otus. The same author relates that in the time of Claudius Caesar there was a man named Gabbaras, brought by the Emperor from Arabia to Rome, who was nine feet nine inches high (about nine feet four inches and a half English measure), 'the tallest man that has been seen in our times.'" -- Edward J. Wood, author, 1868
"The belief in giants was part of the everyday life of the ancient Greeks and Romans." -- Edward J. Wood, author, 1868
"The body of Orestes, found at Tegea, was, according to the Greeks, upwards of ten feet, or as some say, eleven and a half in length." -- Edward J. Wood, author, 1868
"Plutarch mentions that Sertorius openened the grave of Antaeus in Africa and found therein a skeleton which measured sixty cubits in length." -- Edward J. Wood, author, 1868
"... some of them [giants] were crushed to pieces under mountains, others were flayed alive, others were beaten to death with clubs, and others were buried by thir conquerors under volcanic islands. Lempriere says the origin of the story of the Gigantes must be sought for in such physical phenomena as volcanic disruptions; and it is to be noticed that Homer and later writers place these monsters in volcanic districts." -- Edward J. Wood, author, 1868
"Berosus says that the ten antideluvian kings of Chaldea were giants." -- Edward J. Wood, author, 1868
"Giants are common to all nations, both ancient and modern; hence we find in the early and later writings of nearly every country which has a literature of its own some extraordinary accounts of these monsters." -- Edward J. Wood, author, 1868
"Have the subsequently introduced species consumed the food of the great antecedent races? Can we believe that the Capybara has taken the food of the Toxodon, the Guanaco of the Macrauchenia, the existing small Edentata of their numerous gigantic prototypes? Certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants." -- Charles R. Darwin, naturalist, 1834
"It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the American continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly, it must have swarmed with great monsters; now we find mere pigmies, compared with the antecedent allied races.... The greater number, if not all, of these extinct quadrapeds lived at a period and were the contemporaries of the existing sea-shells. Since they lived, no very great change in the form of the land can have taken place. What, then, has exterminated so many species and whole genera? The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America, and up to the Bering Straights, we must shake the entire framework of the globe." -- Charles R. Darwin, naturalist, January 1834
"When we compare the ruins of Baalbek with those of many ancient cities which we visited in Italy, Greece, Egypt, and in other parts of Asia (and Africa), we cannot help thinking them to be the remains of the boldest plan we ever saw attempted in architecture. Is it not strange then, that the age and the undertaker of the works, in which solidity and duration have been so remarkably consulted, should be a matter of such obscurity...?" -- Robert Wood, geographer/archaelogist, 1757
"The second sun perished when the sky fell upon the earth; the collapse killed all the people and every living thing; and they say that giants lived in those days, and that to them belong the bones that our Spaniards have found while digging mines and tombs. From their measure and proportion it seems that those men were twenty hands tall—a very great stature, but quite certain." -- Francisco L. De Gómara, historian, 1552
"This is the city which is mentioned in Scripture as Baalath in the vicinity of the Lebanon, which Solomon built for the daughter of Pharaoh. The place is constructed with stones of enormous size." -- Benjamin of Tudela, geographer, 1160
"There is also an ancient sanctuary called the altar of the Cyclopes, and they sacrifice to the Cyclopes upon it." -- Pausanius, geographer, Desciption of Greece: Argolis, 2nd century
"There still remain, however, parts of the city wall [Mycenae], including the gate, upon which stand lions. These, too, are said to be the work of the Cyclopes, who made for Proetus the wall at Tiryns." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Argolis, 2nd century
"The sculptures carved above the pillars refer either to the birth of Zeus and the battle between the gods and the giants, or to the Trojan war and the capture of Ilium." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Argolis, 2nd century
"Is the prison-house of Dis thrown wide and are the conquered Giants again essaying war?" -- Lucius A. Seneca, philosopher statesman, 1st century
"...a lordship...is the government which is declared by Homer to have prevailed among the Cyclopes." -- Plato, philosopher, Laws: Book III, 360 B.C.
"Such was Aias as he strode gigantic, the wall of the Achaians, smiling under his threatening brows, with his feet beneath him taking huge strides forward, and shaking the spear far-shadowing. And the Argives looking upon him were made glad, while the Trojans were taken every man in the knees with trembling and terror, and for Hektor himself the heart beat hard in his breast, but he could not any more find means to take flight and shrink back into the throng of his men, since he in his pride had called him to battle. Now Aias came near him, carrying like a wall his shield of bronze and sevenfold ox-hide which Tychios wrought him with much toil; Tychios, at home in Hyle, far the best of all workers in leather who had made him the great gleaming shield of sevenfold ox-hide from strong bulls, and hammered an eighth fold of bronze upon it. Telamonian Aias, carrying this to cover his chest, came near to Hektor and spoke to him in words of menace: 'Hektor, single man against single man you will learn now for sure what the bravest men are like among the Danaans." -- Homeros, poet, Iliad, Book VII: 212-227, 8th century B.C.
"... and between them Nestor the fair-spoken rose up, the lucid speaker of Pylos, from whose lips the streams of words ran sweeter than honey. In his time two generations of mortal men had perished, those who had grown up with him and they who had been born to these in sacred Pylos, and he was king in the third age. He in kind intention toward both stood forth and addressed them: 'Oh, for shame. Great sorrow comes to the land of Achaia. Now might Priam and the sons of Priam in truth be happy, and all the rest of the Trojans be visited in their hearts with gladness, were they to hear all this wherein you two are quarreling, you who surpass all Danaans in council, in fighting. Yet be persuaded. Both of you are younger than I am. Yes, and in my time I have dealt with better men than you are, and never once did they disregard me. Never yet have I seen nor shall again see men as these were, men like Peirithoös, and Dryas, shepherd of the people, Kaineus and Exadios, godlike Polyphemos, or Theseus, Aigeus' son, in the likeness of the immortals. These were the strongest generation of earth-born mortals, the strongest, and they fought against the strongest, the beast men living within the mountains, and terribly they destroyed them. I was in the company of these men....'" -- Homeros, poet, Iliad, Book I: 247-269, 8th century B.C.
"When God caused the deluge upon earth, and destroyed all flesh, and four hundred and nine thousand giants, and the water rose fifteen cubits above the highest mountains, then the water entered into paradise and destroyed every flower;" -- III Baruch 4:10
"There were the giants famous from the beginning, that were of so great stature, and so expert in war. Those did not the Lord choose, neither gave he the way of knowledge unto them: But they were destroyed, because they had no wisdom, and perished through their own foolishness. Who hath gone up into heaven, and taken her, and brought her down from the clouds? Who hath gone over the sea, and found her, and will bring her for pure gold? No man knoweth her way, nor thinketh of her path. But he that knoweth all things knoweth her, and hath found her out with his understanding:" -- Baruch 3:26-32
"Yet destroyed I the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit from above, and his roots from beneath." -- Amos 2:9
"And they gave them the city of Arba the father of Anak, which city is Hebron, in the hill country of Judah, with the suburbs thereof round about it." -- Joshua 21:11
"And unto Caleb the son of Jephunneh he gave a part among the children of Judah, according to the commandment of the LORD to Joshua, even the city of Arba the father of Anak, which city is Hebron." -- Joshua 15:13
"And the name of Hebron before was Kirjatharba; which Arba was a great man among the Anakims [giants]. And the land had rest from war." -- Joshua 14:15
"All the kingdom of Og in Bashan, which reigned in Ashtaroth and in Edrei, who remained of the remnant of the giants: for these did Moses smite, and cast them out." -- Joshua 13:12
"And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which was of the remnant of the giants, that dwelt at Ashtaroth and at Edrei," -- Joshua 12:4
"And the rest of Gilead, and all Bashan, being the kingdom of Og, gave I unto the half tribe of Manasseh; all the region of Argob, with all Bashan, which was called the land of giants." -- Deuteronomy 3:13
"For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man." -- Deuteronomy 3:11
"Then we turned, and went up the way to Bashan: and Og the king of Bashan came out against us, he and all his people, to battle at Edrei." -- Deuteronomy 3:1
"(That also was accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time; and the Ammonites called them Zamzummims;" -- Deuteronomy 2:20
"The Emims [giants] dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; Which also were accounted giants, as the Anakims; but the Moabites called them Emims.'" -- Deuteronomy 2:10-11
"And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight." -- Numbers 13:31
"And they ascended by the south, and came unto Hebron; where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the children of Anak [giants], were. (Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.)" -- Numbers 13:22
"And there came one [giant] that had escaped [Og], and told Abram the Hebrew; for he dwelt in the plain of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol, and brother of Aner: and these were confederate with Abram." -- Genesis 14:13
"And in the fourteenth year came Chedorlaomer, and the kings that were with him, and smote the Rephaim [giants] in Ashteroth Karnaim, and the Zuzims [giants] in Ham, and the Emins [giants] in Shaveh Kiriathaim," -- Genesis 14:5
"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." -- Genesis 6:4
Dinosaurs, Flying Lizards, and Fire-Breathing Dragons
"I'm not really concerned with whether Western science says that this animal can't exist. I'm more concerned with the fact that all of the local people say that it does exist." -- Ron Mullin, zoologist, 2009
"Dinosaurs had a lot of vegetable materials in their stomachs and it would have produced a lot of methane gas. Sea dwelling reptiles could have easily had it too, especially if they ate kelp and similar aquatic plants. So, here we would have a source of fuel for a fire breathing dragon." -- Grady S. McMurtry, theologian, 2009
"The Parasaurolophus, the 'Crested Lizard,' had a single bony crest rising from it's nostrils and going back over it's head, looking something like a very large horn. The males had a larger crest than the females. Inside the crests were very large nasal cavities, much larger than needed for smell." -- Grady S. McMurtry, theologian, 2009
"The notion of a 'fire-breathing dragon' is regularly held up to ridicule any relationship between dinosaurs and dragons. Actually, scientists would find it very easy to explain an animal that could literally breathe out flames. Many animals generate methane in their digestive tracts. Methane, or natural gas, is quite flammable, and there's a college prank (which I will not describe) based on setting human methane on fire! Some scientists think that dinosaurs belched so much methane that a 'greenhouse gas' may have helped keep the polar regions of the earth warm! Scientists also know of dinosaurs that had cavities in their skulls with tubular passages leading to the fronts of their mouths. Imagine such chambers contained an enzyme that would accelerate the chemical reaction between methane and oxygen. If the enzyme were injected just as the belching dinosaur opened its mouth, the methane blast would burst into a fiery stream of flame as the methane hit the oxygen in the air." -- Gary Parker, biologist, 2007
"No skeletal remains [of Draco Volans arabicus] have been discovered for the simple reason no one has taken the story seriously." -- John Sweat, historian, December 2004
"It is interesting that Charles Darwin coined the term 'living fossil' for other unexpected living species also found in the fossiliferous strata, though he noted that their occurence contradicted his theory (according to [P.D.] Ward ...." -- John Goertzen, engineer, 1998
"There is evidence that pterosaurs may have flown the skies a couple thousand years ago. There are numerous depictions precise enough to identify the pterosaur species, Scaphognathus crassirostris, from several cultures of antiquity. Since that species is the only long-tailed species with a head crest, it is readily identified." -- John Goertzen, engineer, 1998
"The fact that some prehistoric man made a pictograph of a dinosaur on the walls of this canyon upsets completely all of our theories regarding the antiquity of man. Facts are stubborn and immutable things. If theories do not square with the facts then the theories must change, the facts remain." -- Samuel Hubbard, paleoanthropologist, 1924
"... the ancients were extremely afraid of them [winged serpents]." -- Reginald A. Fessenden, inventor, 1923
"Herodotus describes them [winged serpents] correctly as having membranous and not feathered wings and of different colors. The authorities say that the colors are very vivid, blue, red, and yellow, and one naturalist says they look like immense butterflies, soaring through the air." -- Reginald A. Fessenden, inventor, 1923
"... the Egyptians thought that they [winged serpents] were killed by the ibis, but it was really due to the changes in the temperature and humidity, though the ibis may have been contributary by halting the migration." -- Reginald A. Fessenden, inventor, 1923
"They [winged serpents] are now found (only) in the islands of the Malay Archipelago, but when the land to the west was covered with trees and the climate was not so dry, they migrated in immense swarms as far as Egypt and the Caucasus. They never got actually into Egypt, but died in the ravines leading to the Egyptian plane." -- Reginald A. Fessenden, inventor, 1923
"... there is nothing for sure about the basilic, but we have heard talk, nevertheless, that there is a small serpent, as long as a palm branch, and thick like a small finger. It has a small piece of skin, like a crest, on its head and, in the middle of the back, two scales placed on one side and the other which serve as wings in order to advance more quickly. Large numbers of people have said that these serpents live in large quantities close to certain lakes in which the Nile has its source. People don't travel close to those lakes because of the well-known danger these serpents represent ... That is what is said by the Egyptians who travel in Ethiopia and in Nubia." -- Prospero Alpini, naturalist, 1592
"... there are said to be certain flying serpents in Ethiopia ...." -- Aristotle, philosopher, The History of Animals, 350 B.C.
"... the spice-bearing trees are guarded by small Winged Snakes of varied color, many around each tree; these are the snakes that attack Egypt. Nothing except the smoke of storax will drive them away from the trees ... So too if the vipers and the Winged Serpents of Arabia were born in the natural manner of serpents life would be impossible for men; but as it is, when they copulate, while the male is in the act of procreation and as soon as he has ejaculated his seed, the female seizes him by the neck, and does not let go until she has bitten through. The male dies in the way described, but the female suffers in return for the male the following punishment: avenging their father, the young while they are still within the womb gnaw at their mother and eating through her bowels thus make their way out. Other snakes, that do no harm to men, lay eggs and hatch out a vast number of young. The Arabian Winged Serpents do indeed seem to be numerous; but that is because (although there are vipers in every land) these are all in Arabia and are found nowhere else." -- Herodotos, historian, Book III, 440 B.C.
"I went once to a certain place in Arabia, almost exactly opposite the city of Buto, to make inquiries concerning the winged serpents. On my arrival I saw the back-bones and ribs of serpents in such numbers as it is impossible to describe: of the ribs there were a multitude of heaps, some great, some small, some middle-sized. The place where the bones lie is at the entrance of a narrow gorge between steep mountains, which there open upon a spacious plain communicating with the great plain of Egypt." -- Herodotos, historian, Book II, 440 B.C.
"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens? Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants? Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears? Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more. Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me? Who hath prevented me, that I should repay him? whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine. I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion. Who can discover the face of his garment? or who can come to him with his double bridle? Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal. One is so near to another, that no air can come between them. They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered. By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth." -- Job 41:1-21
"Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron. He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him. Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play. He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens. The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about. Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth. He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares." -- Job 40:15-24
"So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein." -- Psalm 104:25-26
"The burden of the beasts of the south: into the land of trouble and anguish, from whence come the young and old lion, the viper and fiery flying serpent, they will carry their riches upon the shoulders of young asses, and their treasures upon the bunches of camels, to a people that shall not profit them." -- Isaiah 30:6
"In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." -- Isaiah 27:1
"Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint;" -- Deuteronomy 8:15
"And the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died." -- Numbers 21:6
"In Worlds In Collision, MacMillan, 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky popularized the idea that Venus is a new planet, a fission product of Jupiter. And from about 1450 to 550 BCE, it participated in a series of close-encounters-of-the-worst-kind with Earth. His thesis was largely (and emphatically) rejected by the astronomical community. That rejection is still generally in effect. This, in spite of the fact, that his predictions about the Earth-Venus problem have been verified." -- Robert S. Fritzius, astronomer, December 2007
"We must therefore allow that Venus and Titan may both have new surfaces if planets and moons are not formed through accretion by impacts billions of years ago. The 'befuddlement' and 'mystery' may prove to be the result of an unquestioned belief in that hypothesis. Predictions based on that story have had no success in the space age. So we may be confident that planets did not accrete from a solar nebula." -- Wallace Thornhill, physicist, November 2004
"Of all the planets, Venus [Kukulkan/Gukumatz] is clearly the most important in Maya art, cosmology, and calendrics." -- Susan Milbrath, archaeologist, 1999
"Athena and Aphrodite were both planet Venus deities." -- Charles Ginenthal, historian, 1995
"The early people seemed obsessed that celestial visitation would bring disaster. Comets in particular were thought to augur catastrophe." -- C. Warren Hunt, geologist, 1989
"To be sure Velikovsky made some predictions that seemed to be close to what astronomers eventually discovered to be so ... For instance, Velikovsky stated that since Venus was formed from Jupiter's interior which must be very hot, Venus itself would be very hot. He said this in 1950, when astronomers believed that Venus' temperature, while warmer that Earth's might not be very much warmer." -- Isaac Asimov, writer, 1981
"Dr. Velikovsky pointed out that the collisions were not independent; in fact, if two bodies orbiting the Sun under the influence of gravity collide once, that encounter enhances the chance of another, a well known fact in celestial mechanics. Professor Sagan's calculations, in effect, ignore the law of gravity. Here, Dr. Velikovsky was the better astronomer." -- Robert Jastrow, astrophysicist, December 1979
"This Sagan assumption is so disingenuous that I do not hesitate to label it as either a deliberate fraud on the public or else a manifestation of unbelievable incompetence or hastiness combined with desperation and wretchedly poor judgement." -- Robert W. Bass, astronomer, 1976
"I who am a specialist in the field am moved to ask myself, 'Did this physician [Immanuel Velikovsky] writing in 1954 know more about physics of radio emissions than this physicist [Carl Sagan] writing 20 years later?'" -- James Warwick, astronomer, 1974
"Are you so impressed also by the planet Jupiter that you would regard it as a chief deity above Sun and Moon? And they worshipped those planets, those gods, in the planets themselves. They were lifting their hands, the Babylonians and the Indians, Hindu, and the Chinese, all, they were lifting their hands to those planets in worshipping them. And human sacrifice were brought to them. Even into recent times, among the American Indians, in the last century still, human sacrifice were brought to the planet Venus." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966
"And Venus must be hot if the history of the solar system is not the history of no change for billions of years. And Venus was found hot, not room temperature as was thought until 1959. In 1961 it was detected with radio means that it is like something like 600 Farenheit and Mariner 2 was sent out to find out true or not true? It was found that even more it is full 800 [degrees Farenheit]." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966
"... the surface of Venus is hot, far hotter than anyone had previously imagined." -- Carl Sagan, professor, 1966
"Venus experienced in quick succession its birth and expulsion under violent conditions; an existence as a comet on an ellipse which approached the sun closely; two encounters with the earth accompanied by discharges of [electric] potentials between these two bodies and with a thermal effect caused by conversion of momentum into heat; a number of contacts with Mars, and probably also with Jupiter. Since all this happened between the third and first millennia before the present era, the core of the planet Venus must still be hot." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"In an ancient Hindu tablet of planets, attributed to the year -3012 Venus among the visible planets is absent [Delambre, J.B.J., Histoire de l'astronomie ancienne I, Page 407, 1817: 'Venus alone is not found there.']." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"These four-planet systems and the inability of the ancient Hindus and Babylonians to see Venus in the sky, even though it is more conspicuous than the other planets, are puzzling unless Venus was not among the planets." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1950
"... the morning star [Venus] lives to give men wisdom ...." -- Black Elk, medicine man, August 1930
"Here you see the Morning Star [Venus]. Who sees the Morning Star shall see more, for he shall be wise." -- Black Elk, medicine man, August 1930
"Some Indian tribes of North-western America tell a story which bears a close resemblance to the story of Phaethon and the chariot of the Sun, his father. The tale of Phaethon is related most fully in Ovid." -- James G. Frazer, translator, 1920
"We are told, in the inscriptions, of the fall of the celestial being who appears to correspond to Satan. In his ambition he raises his hand against the sanctuary of the God of heaven, and the description of him is really magnificent. He is represented riding a chariot through celestial space, surrounded by the storms, with the lightning playing before him, and wielding a thunderbolt as a weapon. This rebellion leads to a war in heaven...." -- George Smith, archaeologist, 1876
"But this reign [The Reign of Quetzalcoatl], like that of Saturn, and the happiness of the world, were not of long duration...." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1814
"The sun, moon and stars, were such noble and glorious bodies, and so visible, so remarkable, so useful [to all] parts of the world; and the heathen nations so generally doted on the worship of them...." -- William Whiston, mathematician, 1737
"They have a most horrid and abominable custom which truly ought to be punished and which until now we have seen in no other part, and this is that, whenever they wish to ask something of the idols, in order that their plea may find more acceptance, they take many girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of these idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols, offering the smoke as sacrifice. Some of us have seen this, and they say it is the most terrible and frightful thing they have ever witnessed." -- HernánCortés, conquistador, 1523
"And in the time of Crotopus occurred the burning of Phaethon, and the deluges of Deucalion." -- Clement of Alexandria, priest, Stromata, 2nd century
"On leaving the market-place along the road to Lechaeum you come to a gateway, on which are two gilded chariots, one carrying Phaethon the son of Helius (Sun), the other Helius himself." -- Pausanius, geographer, Description of Greece: Argolis
"...consider what impetuous force Turns stars and planets in a diff'rent course. I steer against their motions; nor am I Born back by all the current of the sky. But how cou'd you resist the orbs that roul In adverse whirls, and stem the rapid pole?"-- Ovid, Metamorphoses Book II: Phaeton, 8
"The folded serpent next the frozen pole"-- Ovid, Metamorphoses Book II: Phaeton, 8
"The running conflagration spreads below. But these are trivial ills: whole cities burn, And peopled kingdoms into ashes turn."-- Ovid, Metamorphoses Book II: Phaeton, 8
"The stars were fled, for Lucifer had chased The stars away, and fled himself at last."--Ovid, Metamorphoses Book II: Phaeton, 8
"Some of the Italians called Pythagoreans say that the comet is one of the planets." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.
"...all the comets that have been seen in our day have vanished without setting, gradually fading away above the horizon; and they have not left behind them either one or more stars." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.
"Democritus however, insists upon the truth of his view and affirms that certain stars have been seen when comets dissolve." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.
"...the stars...fell from heaven at the time of Phaethon's downfall." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.
"As Zeus's daughter she'll be immortal and live in heaven with her brothers, Pollux and Castor, the heavenly twins, an extra star for ships to steer their courses by." -- Euripides, playwright, Orestes, 408 B.C.
"There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals." -- Sonchis of Sais, priest, ~594 B.C.
"As when the son of devious-devising Kronos casts down a star, portent to sailors or to widespread armies of peoples gliterring, and thickly the sparks of fire break from it, in such likeness Pallas Athene swept flashing earthward and plunged between the two hosts; and amazement seized the beholders, Trojans, breakers of horses, and strong-greaved Achaians." -- Homeros, poet, Iliad, Book IV: 75-80
"And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth:" -- Revelation 12:4
"For he [Manasseh] built again the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed; and he reared up altars for Baal [Venus the Lord of the Flies], and made an Asherah, as did Ahab king of Israel, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them. -- II Kings 21:3
"He [Tiamat] marked the positions of the wandering stars to shine in their courses, that they may not do injury, and may not trouble any one." -- Enuma Elish, Fifth Tablet of Creation
"Determination of absolute 'Earth-Moon' distances and Earth's palaeorotational parameters in the distant geological past from tidal rhythmite, however, is ambiguous because of the difficulties in determining the absolute length of the ancient lunar sidereal month." — Rajat Mazumder and Makoto Arima, geologists, July 2004
"Currently, the moon is moving away from the Earth at such a great rate, that if you extrapolate back in time — the moon would have been so close to the Earth 1.4 billion years ago that it would have been torn apart by tidal forces (Slichter, 1963)." — Dennis D. McCarthy, geoscientist, 2003
"The implications of employing the present rate of tidal energy dissipation on a geological timescale are catastrophic. Around 1500 Ma the Moon would have been close to the Earth, with the consequence that the much larger tidal forces would have disrupted the Moon or caused the total melting of Earth's mantle and of the moon." -- George E. Williams, geologist/geophysicist, 2000
"Newton’s gravitational theory is regarded as proved by the action of the tides. But studying the tides, Newton came to the conclusion that the moon has a mass equal to one fortieth of the earth. Modern calculations, based on the theory of gravitation (but not on the action of the tides), ascribe to the moon a mass equal to 1/81 of the earth’s mass." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946
"…it does not seem likely that it will ever be possible to evaluate the effective rigidity of the earth's mass by means of tidal observations." — George H. Darwin, physicist, 1907
"…in the course of our experiments, we were led away from the primary object of the Committee, namely, the measurement of the Lunar Disturbance of Gravity…." — George H. Darwin, physicist, 1882
"...the pre-Hellenic Pelasgian inhabitants of Arcadia called themselves Proselenes, because they boasted that they came into the country before the Moon accompanied the Earth. Pre-Hellenic and pre-lunarian were synonymous." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1851
"We shall commence with a few of the principal passages from the ancients, which treat of the Proselenes. Stephanus of Byzantium (v. 'Apkas) mentions the logographs of Hippys of Rhegium, a contemporary of Darius and Xerxes, as the first who called the Arcadians proselenous. The scholiasts, ad Apollon. Rhod. IV 264 and ad Aristoph. Nub. 397, agree in saying, the remote antiquity of the Arcadians becomes most clear from the fact of their being called proselenoi. They appear to have been there before the Moon, as Eudoxus and Theodorus also say; the latter adds that it was shortly before the labours of Hercules that the Moon appeared. In the government of the Tegeates, Aristotle states that the barbarians who inhabited Arcadia were driven out by the later Arcadians before the Moon appeared, and therefore they were called proselenoi." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1851
"The passages in Ovid as to the existence of the Arcadians before the Moon are universally known." -- Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, 1851
"In the remotest times, before the Moon accompanied the Earth, according to the mythology of the Muysca or Mozca Indians, the inhabitants of the plain of Bogota lived like barbarians, naked, without any form of laws or religious worship." --Alexander Von Humboldt, naturalist, Researches, 1814
"Among the great men who have philosophized about [the action of the tides], the one who surprised me most is Kepler. He was a person of independent genius, [but he] became interested in the action of the moon on the water, and in other occult phenomena, and similar childishness." — Galileo Galilei, physicist, 1632
"...surnamed Pelasgian from Pelasgus, son of Triopas, its founder, and not far from the sanctuary is the grave of Pelasgus." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Argolis, 2nd century
"It is said that it was in the reign of Pelasgus that the land was called Pelasgia." -- Pausanius, geographer, Description of Greece: Arcadia, 2nd century
"After this king the land was called Arcadia instead of Pelasgia and its inhabitants Arcadians instead of Pelasgians." -- Pausanias, geographer, Description of Greece: Arcadia, 2nd century
"These were Arcadians of Evander's following, the so‑called Pre-Lunar people." -- Plutarch, historian, Moralia: The Roman Questions #76, 1st century
"The stars did not yet revolve in the heavens; the Danaides had not yet appeared, nor the race of Deucalion; the Arcadians alone existed, those of whom it is said that they lived before the Moon, eating acorns upon the mountains." -- Apollonios Rhodios, librarian, Argonautica, ~246 B.C.
"Gravity has little if anything to do with the processes of star formation." -- Stephen Smith, writer, May 2009
"The only solution would be to reject Newton's classical theory of gravitation. We probably live in a non-Newton universe." -- Pavel Kroupa, astronomer, May 2009
"All physical experiments we do, at the surface of the earth, are done within the earth's electric field that has a quiet background value of about 100 Volts per vertical meter. Also these experiments are done in the earth's geomagnetic field, so this makes 2 EM fields we need to be aware of. If either of the two fields are constant during an experiment, then the experimental data have one sense of utility. If either of the fields change during the experiment, then the experiment might produce, what we call erroneous, data. If you are not aware of these EM fields, then your, to you, scientific explanations, are incomplete." -- Louis Hissink, geologist, February 2009
"Leibniz also disagreed with other aspects of Newtonianism, such as the use of gravity, which he held to be a revival of occultism, and Newton's use of space as an absolute. Leibnizian physics defined motion and therefore space as relational." -- William E. Burns, historian, 2001
"Leibniz held that the Newtonian universe was imperfect because it occasionally requires God to intervene to prevent it from running down." -- William E. Burns, historian, 2001
"Leibniz also attacked Newtonian physical ideas, including absolute space and time, [and] the Newtonian theory of gravitation, which he charged introduced an occult force...." -- William E. Burns, historian, 2001
"When first observed by Voyager, the spoke movements [of Saturn's Rings] seemed to defy gravity and had the scientists very perplexed. Since the spokes rotate at the same rate as Saturn's magnetic field, it is apparent that the electromagnetic forces are also at work." -- Ron Baalke, astrophysicist, 1998
"The law of gravity is racist." -- Marion S. Barry Jr., politician, 1997
"By applying an electric field across a spherical capacitor filled with a dielectric liquid, a body force analogous to gravity is generated around the fluid." -- James E. Arnold, geoscientist, March 1995
"The advantage of using this [Geophysical Fluid Flow Cell] apparatus is that it simulates atmospheric flows around stars and planets, i.e. the "artificial gravity" is directed toward the center of the sphere much like a self-gravitating body." -- James E. Arnold, geoscientist, March 1995
"The experiment verified that dielectric forces can be used to properly simulate a spherical gravitational field to drive thermal convection." -- James E. Arnold, geoscientist, March 1995
"Many Americans were part of Apollo. About one or two out of each 2000 citizens all across the country. They were asked by their country to do the impossible. To envisage, to design, and build a method of breaking the bonds of the Earth's gravity." -- Neil Armstrong, astronaut, 1994
"Experts were so convinced, on purely scientific [i.e. Newtonian] grounds, that powered heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible that they rejected the Wright brothers' claim without troubling to examine the evidence." -- Richard Milton, writer, 1994
"In one of those delightful quirks of fate that somehow haunt the history of science, only weeks before the Wrights first flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, Simon Newcomb, had published an article in The Independent which showed scientifically [i.e. gravitationally] that powered human flight was 'utterly impossible.'" -- Richard Milton, writer, 1994
"Gravitational systems are the ashes of prior electrical systems." -- Hannes O.G. Alfven, physicist, 1976
"Newton himself thought that he proved his laws from facts. He claimed that he deduced his laws from the 'phenomena' provided by Kepler. But his boast was nonsense, since according to Kepler, planets move in ellipses, but according to Newton's theory, planets would move in ellipses only if the planets did not disturb each other in their motion. But they do. This is why Newton had to devise a perturbation theory from which it follows that no planet moves in an ellipse." -- Imre Lakatos, philosopher, 1973
"It was only the downfall of Newtonian theory in this century which made scientists realize that their standards of honesty had been utopian." -- Imre Lakatos, philosopher, 1973
"Physical scientists were outraged in 1950 when Immanuel Velikovsky published historical evidence from around the world suggesting that the order and even the number of planets in the solar system had changed within the memory of man. Ideas in nearly every fie1d of scholarship were cha11enged, but most serious1y challenged of all were certain dogmas in the field of astronomy which had only in recent centuries succeeded in convincing mankind that Spaceship Earth was a haven of safety. The emotional outburst from the community of astronomers that so blackened the name Velikovsky and so successfully- if only temporarily- discredited Worlds in Collision has been laid to many causes, from the psychological and the political to simple resentment against invasion of the field by an outsider. Whatever the nature of such intensifying factors, however, I believe it is only fair to acknowledge an underlying and totally sincere scientific disbelief in the historical record." -- Ralph E. Juergens, engineer, 1972
"But then if there were events of this character, discharges between planets and so on, I put one of the most outrageous claims before the scientific readers, that in the solar system and in the universe generally, not just gravitation and inertia are the two forces of action but that also electricity and magnetism are participating in the mechanism. So the Lord was not just a watchmaker. The universe is not free of those forces with which the man makes his life easy already more than 100 years. They were unknown practically or little known in the time of Newton in the second half of the 17th century. But today we know that electricity and magnetism, these are not just small phenomena that we can repeat as a kind of a little trick in the lab, that they permeate every field from neurology into botony and chemistry and astronomy should not be free...and it was admitted by authorities that this was the most outrageous point in my claims. But the vengeance came early and swiftly. In 1960, already in 1955, radio noises from Jupiter were detected and this was one of the crucial tests that I offered for the truth of my theory. In 1958, the magnetosphere was discovered around the Earth, another claim. In 1960, the interplanetary magnetic field was discovered and solar plasma, so-called solar wind, moving rapidly along the magnetic lines and then it was discovered that the electromagnetic field of the Earth reaches the moon ." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966
"...it was accepted that the solar system has no history at all. So it was created if not 6000 years ago, then 6 billion years ago. But then for 6 billion years there was no change. Whether it was created or came into being by tidal action of a passing star which would be catastrophic as the tidal theory wishes or it is growing out of a nebula, the nebular theory which goes back to Kant and Laplace, but since creation there was no change. But if what I am telling you is truth, then there were changes, and very many, and very recently too." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966
"The picture of an atom began to look more like a miniature solar system with an atomic nucleus for the sun, and electrons for planets. The analogy with the planetary system can be further strengthened by these facts: the atomic nucleus contains 99.97 per cent of the total atomic mass as compared with 99.87 per cent of the solar system concentrated in the sun, and the distances between the planetary electrons exceed their diameters by about the same factor (several thousand times) which we find when comparing interplanetary distances with the diameters of the planets. The more important analogy lies, however, in the fact that the electric attraction-forces between the atomic nucleus and the electrons obey the same mathematical law of inverse square (that is, the forces are inversely proportionate to the square of the distance between two bodies) as the gravity forces acting between the sun and the planets. This makes the electrons describe the circular and elliptic trajectories around the nucleus, similar to those along which the planets and comets move in the solar system." -- George Gamow, physicist, 1961
"Which experiment would you [Velikovsky] like to have performed now? I know which experiment you would like now—the Cavendish experiment in a Faraday Cage." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, 1955
"Now in the same 1845, the year of this triumph, Leverrier calculated also the anomaly of Mercury, and by this caused to think that the Newtonian law of gravitation may be not precisely true. Leverrier first thought of some planet moving inside the Mercurial orbit or of a possible unequal distribution of the mass in the sun. You [Einstein] have used the fact of the anomaly to prove that the space is curving in the presence of a mass. About the same time—in 1913—G. E. Hale published his paper on “The general magnetic field of the sun” (Contr. M. Wilson Obs., #71), in which he estimated the general magnetic field of the sun as of 50 Gauss intensity. At this intensity “under certain conditions electromagnetic forces are much stronger than gravitation.” (Alfven) The last named author in his “cosmical Electro-dynamics” (Oxford, 1950, p. 2) shows that a hydrogen atom at the distance of the earth from the sun and moving with the earth’s orbital velocity, if ionized, is acted upon by the solar magnetic field ten thousand times stronger than by the solar gravitational field." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1952
"My book is as strange as the fact that the Earth is a magnet, the cause of which is indeterminate and the consequences of which are not estimated in the Earth-Moon relations." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1952
"Gravitation is an electromagnetic phenomenon." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946
"The moon does not 'fall,' attracted to the earth from an assumed inertial motion along a straight line, nor is the phenomenon of objects falling in the terrestrial atmosphere comparable with the 'falling effect' in the movement of the moon, a conjecture which is the basic element of the Newtonian theory of gravitation." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946
"The ingredients of the air—oxygen, nitrogen, argon and other gases—though not in a compound but in a mixture, are found in equal proportions at various levels of the atmosphere despite great differences in specific weights...Why, then, do not the atmospheric gases separate and stay apart in accordance with the specific gravities?" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946
"Ozone, though heavier than oxygen, is absent in the lower layers of the atmosphere, is present in the upper layers...Nowhere is it asked why ozone does not descend of its own weight or at least why it is not mixed by the wind with other gases." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946
"Water, though eight hundred times heavier than air, is held in droplets, by the millions of tons, miles above the ground. Clouds and mist are composed of droplets which defy gravitation." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946
"All planets revolve in approximately one plane. They revolve in a plane perpendicular to the lines of force of the sun’s magnetic field." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946
"According to our present view every atom consists of a small heavy nucleus approximately 1O^-12 cm in diameter sur-rounded by a largely empty region 1O^-8 cm in diameter in which electrons move somewhat like planets about the sun." -- Hendy D. Smyth, physicist, 1945
"The mathematical proofs of Newton are completely erroneous." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1942
"The phenomenon (why not questioned at all?) that Nitrogen lighter than Oxygen does not move to the higher level in the atmosphere, though the air is a mixture and not a compound, is another fact of disobedience to the ‘law’ of gravitation. Also water, in small drops, is lifted then dropped by electrical charges and discharges." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, November 1942
"If an atom is built as a microcosmical model of a solar system, elements arriving from interatomic space, also travelling from one atom to another must be in existence. Contacts between elements, increase in numbers of electrons, polarities, change of orbits, all must take place. Change of orbits and emitting of energy at these moments were supposed by Bohr." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, November 1942
"Supposing you had a universe in which there was a planet with only one sun. The planet would travel in a perfect ellipse and the exact nature of the gravitational force would be so evident it could be accepted as an axiom. Astronomers on such a world would start off with gravity probably even before they invented the telescope." -- Isaac Asimov, writer, 1941
"But what do you know about gravitation? Nothing, except that it is a very recent development, not too well established, and that the math is so hard that only twelve men in Lagash are supposed to understand it." -- Isaac Asimov, writer, 1941
"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians." -- John M. Keynes, economist, 1936
"An atom differs from the solar system by the fact that it is not gravitation that makes the electrons go round the nucleus, but electricity." -- Bertrand Russell, physicist/philosopher, 1924
"...what is really wanted for a truly Natural Philosophy is a supplement to Newtonian mechanics, expressed in terms of the medium which he suspected and sought after but could not attain, and introducing the additional facts, chiefly electrical—especially the fact of variable inertia—discovered since his time…" -- Oliver J. Lodge, physicst, February 1921
"Magnetism is possessed by the whole mass of the earth and universe of heavenly bodies, and is an essence of known demonstration and laws. By adopting it we have the advantage over the gravity theory by the use of the polar relation to magnetism. A magnetic north pole presented to a magnetic south pole, or a south pole to a north pole, attracts, while a north pole to another north pole or a south pole to another repels. This gives to us a better reason than gravitation can for the elliptical orbit of the planets instead of the circular. It also gives us some light on the mystery of the tides, the philosophy of which the profoundest study has not solved. Certain facts are apparent; but for the explanation of the true theory such men as Laplace and Newton, and others more recent, have labored in vain." -- C.H. Kilmer, historian, October 1915
"Since Newton announced his universal law of gravitation, scientists have accepted and educators taught it, and rarely has it been questioned. Occasionally one has the temerity to say that gravitation is a myth, an invented word to cover scientific ignorance." -- C.H. Kilmer, historian, October 1915
"The form of the corona and the motion of the prominences suggest that it [the sun] is a magnet." -- George E. Hale, astronomer, 1913
"What we call mass would seem to be nothing but an appearance, and all inertia to be of electromagnetic origin." -- Henri Poincaré, physicist, 1908
"...inertia is exclusively of electromagnetic origin...." -- Henri Poincaré, physicist, 1908
"...the great truth, accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed, is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball...." -- Nikola Tesla, physicist, 1904
"If it be true that every atom occupies the same volume of space, then gravitation might seem to be an effect depending on the crowdedness of electrons; but when an atom, breaks up into unequal parts, the smaller portion must in that case undergo considerable expansion, and that would be inconsistent with the constancy of gravitation, if it depended on crowdedness: hence I think it more probable that it depends on some interaction between positive and negative electricity, and that it is generated when these two come together, that is whenever an atom of matter is formed." -- Oliver J. Lodge, physicist, 1904
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, gravitational physicist, 1895
"If we were to assert that we knew more of moving objects than this their last-mentioned, experimentally-given comportment with respect to the celestial bodies, we should render ourselves culpable of a falsity." -- Ernst Mach, physicist, 1893
"...it is not necessary to refer the law of inertia to a spacial absolute space. On the contrary, it is perceived that the masses that in the common phraseology exert forces on each other as well as those that exert none, stand with respect to acceleration in quite similar relations. We may, indeed, regard all masses as related to each other. That accelerations play a prominent part in the relations of the masses, must be accepted as a fact of experience; which does not, however, exclude attempts to elucidate this fact by a comparison of it with other facts, involving the discovery of new points of view." -- Ernst Mach, physicist, 1893
"...certain theoretical investigations ... appear to me to throw doubt on the utility of very minute gravitational observations." -- George H. Darwin, physicist, 1882
"The long and constant persuasion that all the forces of nature are mutually dependent, having one common origin, or rather being different manifestations of one fundamental power, has often made me think on the possibility of establishing, by experiment, a connection between gravity and electricity …no terms could exaggerate the value of the relation they would establish.'' -- Michael Faraday, physicist, 1865
"The Emperor has no clothes!" -- Hans C. Andersen, writer, 1837
"Thus, thinking as Newton did (i.e., that all celestial bodies are attracted to the sun and move through empty space), it is extremely improbable that the six planets would move as they do." -- Pierre L. Maupertuis, polymath, 1746
"...to establish it [gravitation] as original or primitive in certain parts of matter is to resort either to miracle or an imaginary occult quality." -- Gottfreid W. Leibniz, polymath, July 1710
"Meanwhile remote operation has just been revived in England by the admirable Mr. Newton, who maintains that it is the nature of bodies to be attracted and gravitate one towards another, in proportion to the mass of each one, and the rays of attraction it receives. Accordingly the famous Mr. Locke, in his answer to Bishop Stillingfleet, declares that having seen Mr. Newton's book he retracts what he himself said, following the opinion of the moderns, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to wit, that a body cannot operate immediately upon another except by touching it upon its surface and driving it by its motion. He acknowledges that God can put properties into matter which cause it to operate from a distance. Thus the theologians of the Augsburg Confession claim that God may ordain not only that a body operate immediately on divers bodies remote from one another, but that it even exist in their neighbourhood and be received by them in a way with which distances of place and dimensions of space have nothing to do. Although this effect transcends the forces of Nature, they do not think it possible to show that it surpasses the power of the Author of Nature. For him it is easy to annul the laws that he has given or to dispense with them as seems good to him, in the same way as he was able to make iron float upon water and to stay the operation of fire upon the human body." -- Gottfriend W. Leibniz, polymath, 1695
"When formerly I regarded space as an immovable real place, possessing extension alone, I had been able to define absolute motion as change of this real space. But gradually I began to doubt whether there is in nature such an entity as is called space; whence it followed that a doubt might arise about absolute motion." -- Gottfried W. Leibniz, polymath, 1695
"That gravity should be innate inherent and essential to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by and through which their action or force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to the consideration of my readers." -- Isaac Newton, mathematician, February 1693
"Since we have already proved through geometrical considerations the equivalence of all hypotheses with respect to the motions of any bodies whatsoever, however numerous, moved only by the collision with other bodies, it follows that not even an angel could determine with mathematical rigor which of the many bodies of that sort is at rest, and which is the center of motion for the others." -- Gottfried W. Leibniz, polymath, 1689
"...lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, he [God] hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another." -- Isaac Newton, mathematician, 1687
"And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which spirit the particles of bodies attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the neighboring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be explained in few words, nor are we furnished with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates." -- Isaac Newton, mathematician, 1686
"I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses..." -- Isaac Newton, mathematician, 1676
"The present does not seem to be the proper time to investigate the cause of the acceleration of natural motion [i.e., gravity], concering which various opinions have been expressed by various philosophers, some explaining it by attraction to the center, others to repulsion between the very small parts of the body, while still others attribute it to a certain stress in the surrounding medium which closes in behind the falling body and drives it from one of its positions to another." -- Galileo Galilei, physicist, 1638
"The example of the magnet I have hit upon is a very pretty one, and entirely suited to the subject; indeed, it is little short of being the very truth." -- Johannes Kepler, astronomer/mathematician, 1609
"It is therefore plausible, since the Earth moves the moon through its species and magnetic body, while the sun moves the planets similarly through an emitted species, that the sun is likewise a magnetic body." -- Johannes Kepler, astronomer/mathematician, 1609
"But come: let us follow more closely the tracks of this similarity of the planetary reciprocation [libration] to the motion of a magnet, and that by a most beautiful geometric demonstration, so that it might appear that a magnet has such a motion as that which we perceive in the planet." -- Johannes Kepler, astronomer/mathematician, 1609
"... some of the fixed stars too get a tail. For this we must not only accept the authority of the Egyptians who assert it, but we have ourselves observed the fact. For a star in the thigh of the Dog had a tail, though a faint one. If you fixed your sight on it its light was dim, but if you just glanced at it, it appeared brighter." -- Aristotle, philosopher, 350 B.C.
"According to electric star theory, neutron stars belong in the same category with invisible pink unicorns." -- Stephen Smith, physicist, November 2008
"He [Einstein] thought black holes and quantum mechanics were too weird to be true." -- Tim Folger, physicist, March 2008
"A study published in 1995, based on Hubble Space Telescope observations of 15 quasars, showed that 11 of them had no surrounding material that could fall into any hypothesized black holes, yet they were somehow producing intense radio emissions." -- Aard Bol, physicist, 2004
"Even mainstream scientists admit that at singularities the ‘laws of physics’ break down. It would be more accurate to say that their own theories break down." -- David Pratt, natural philosopher, 2005
"I have little faith in the usual treatment of the black hole problem." -- Fred Hoyle, cosmologist, 1972
"...the 'Schwarzschild singularities' do not exist in physical reality." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, 1939
"The essential result of this investigation is a clear understanding as to why the 'Schwarzschild singularities' do not exist in physical reality. … The 'Schwarzschild singularity' does not appear for the reason that matter cannot be concentrated arbitrarily. And this is due to the fact that otherwise the constituting particles would reach the velocity of light. This investigation arose out of discussions [with Robertson and Bargmann] on the mathematical and physical significance of the Schwarzschild singularity. The problem quite naturally leads to the question, answered by this paper in the negative, as to whether physical models are capable of exhibiting such a singularity." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, 1939
"I am inclined to think that physicists will not be satisfied in the long run with this kind of indirect description of reality, even if an adaptation of the theory to the demand of general relativity can be achieved in a satisfactory way. Then they must surely be brought back to the attempt to realise the programme which may suitably be designated as Maxwellian: a description of physical reality in terms of [electromagnetic] fields which satisfy partial differential equations in a way that is free from singularities." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, 1931
"...in the present state of our experimental knowledge, nothing entitles us to suppose that singular points (in four dimensions) may exist in the Universe." -- Marcel Brillouin, mathematician, January 1923
"...the basic knock against general relativity would be that it's geometry, it's not physics, and so I think this is a 300-pound gorilla that's sitting in the room with redshift written on him and nobody sees him and this is why they don't see it." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, June 2007
"Einstein’s theory of gravity is the craziest explanation of the phenomenon imaginable." -- Wallace Thornhill, physicist, 2001
"All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question, 'What are light quanta?' Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, 1954
"Even the Greeks had already conceived the atomistic nature of matter and the concept was raised to a high degree of probability by the scientists of the nineteenth century. But it was Planck's law of radiation that yielded the first exact determination - independent of other assumptions - of the absolute magnitudes of atoms. More than that, he showed convincingly that in addition to the atomistic structure of matter there is a kind of atomistic structure to energy, governed by the universal constant h, which was introduced by Planck. This discovery became the basis of all twentieth-century research in physics and has almost entirely conditioned its development ever since. Without this discovery it would not have been possible to establish a workable theory of molecules and atoms and the energy processes that govern their transformations. Moreover, it has shattered the whole framework of classical mechanics and electrodynamics and set science a fresh task: that of finding a new conceptual basis for all physics. Despite remarkable partial gains, the problem is still far from a satisfactory solution." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, 1950
"You can imagine that I look back on my life's work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, March 1949
"All matter is immersed in it and it penetrates everywhere. No doors are closed to ether." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, 1938
"The theory [General Relativity] is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king ... its exponents are brilliant men but they are metaphysicists, not scientists..." -- Nikola Tesla, physicist, July 1935
"With regards to the general theory of relativity, space cannot be imagined without ether." -- Albert Einstein, mathematician, May 1920
"Theorem 20: If in any triangle the sum of the three angles is equal to two right angles, so is this the case for every other triangle." -- Nikolai I. Lobachevsky, mathematician, 1840
"Let the following be postulated: ... Postulate 5: That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles." -- Euclid
"Let the following be postulated: ... Postulate 2: To produce a finite straight line continuously in a straight line." -- Euclid
"Definition 23: Parallel straight lines are straight lines which, being in the same plane and being produced indefinitely in both directions, do not meet one another in either direction." -- Euclid
"It seems the toughest thing for scientists to grasp - that a cherished paradigm like the big bang can be wrong." -- Wallace Thornhill, physicist, May 2009
"...there were four quasars with the 10 meter telescope at Keck and they reported a redshift for this quasar, and nobody said anything, and then somebody said to Margaret Burbridge, 'you know, I was looking at that spectrum and I think there's another spectrum in there with that object', and so, we looked at it, and sure enough, there were two redshifts, much different, 0.30 and 0.7 - something like that - ... vastly different. So, there just happened to be a good HST photograph of it which split the two, I mean, they're only a quarter of an arc-second apart -- it's just incredible -- and then we -- another lucky stroke -- there was a high resolution radio map of the thing, and you could see the radio contours joining these two objects together and you could see the radio contours showing you that the quasar was being ejected along... in a certain direction; you could see the motion in the contours, and we figured out the probability of that being an accident -- or that probability of that being a coincidence -- and it came out 10^-14. Well, you know 10^-9 is one chance in a billion, 10^-5 is a hundred thousand so a one thousand billion to one chance it was an accident. We had a hell of a time getting it published. It finally did get published in a professional journal, but it's been absolutely ignored since then." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, June 2007
"Astronomer Halton Arp has played a pivotal role in bringing redshift anomalies and galaxy ejection processes to light – and he has paid a very heavy price in his professional career. Arp’s own colleagues at the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories became so disturbed and disbelieving of the results he was getting that in the early 1980s they recommended that he should not be allowed to make any further use of these telescopes to pursue his ‘worthless’ observing programme. This recommendation was implemented, and after taking early retirement, Arp moved to Germany, and now works at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik. One leading astronomer objected that if Arp’s results were correct, we would have no explanation for the redshift. Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar comment: In other words, if no known theory is able to explain the observations, it is the observations that must be in error! ... Thus, Arp was the subject of one of the most clear cut and successful attempts in modern times to block research which it was felt, correctly, would be revolutionary in its impact if it were to be accepted." -- David Pratt, natural philosopher, 2005
"...the Oscar for egocentricity goes to the currently dominant theory of the universe." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 2004
"The tradition had always been for the Astrophysical Journal to routinely publish the Russell Prize Lecture. So Fred [Hoyle] sent his manuscript in shortly after the meeting. To everyone's utter amazement, sometime later he received a referee's report from the editor! Fred was angry and simply never replied to the editor. When I asked where the paper would appear he merely indicated that he was interested in other matters." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 2003
"During the years I visited with Fred [Hoyle] from time to time to show him the newest observational results which were struggling to get published. He would instantly size up the results and say something like, 'Well Chip, they will certainly have to admit now that their assumptions are wrong.' After a while we both knew that it would not be accepted in the foreseeable future. He never dwelt on the lost effort, money or the dismal state of the science. He was always trying to think ahead to the next insight, the next synthesis of physics. It will always be a pleasure and inspiration however to look back and read his clear, courageous logic and also sad to think how far ahead we might be now if more people had joined in the discovery of new understandings instead of insisting on complexifying and patching up their commitment to old dogma. I can still hear him saying, 'They defend the old theories by complicating things to the point of incomprehensibility.' We should have crossed over that bridge to a more correct physics that Fred pointed to so clearly more than three decades ago." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 2003
"The disproof of the Big Bang is already nearly 40 years old. Halton Arp's first major paper on discordant redshifts was submitted to the The Astrophysical Journal in 1966, at a time when he had just finished his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and was listed by the Association of Astronomical Professionals as 'most outstanding young astronomer' and among the top 20 astronomers in the world. The editor, Chandrasekhar, rejected that paper because of its subject, without even being submitted to peer review." -- Amy Acheson, physicist, 2003
"Conclusive evidence that the expanding universe was not correct and that the redshift distance law was not correct and that we had some way of creating new galaxies with high redshifts." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 2000
"There's a large body of work going on, observational work, theoretical work, which is based on the assumption that quasars are at their cosmological distances. If it turns out seriously that we're right, then all that work is in vain. We don't know anything like as much as we think we do by saying that quasars are far away, and that's another huge problem for people to face up to." -- Geoffrey Burbridge, astrophysicist, 2000
"What's really happening in these systems is the centers of galaxies are the places where the creation is taking place...." -- Geoffrey Burbridge, astrophysicist, 2000
"I myself have had always problems with this point of view [The Big Bang] because they are somewhat against the principles of physics, the most basic principles of physics, which are related with the conservation of matter and conservation of energy." — Andre K. Assis, plasma physicist, 2000
"Actually the 3 degree radiation, to me, has not a cosmological view. It is observed in any cosmology. In any cosmology you can predict the 3 degree radiation. So it's a proof of no cosmology at all if it can be predicted by all of them." -- Jean-Claude Pecker, astronomer, 2000
"There's no explanation at all of the cosmic microwave background in the Big Bang Theory. All you can say for the theory is that it permits you to put it in if you want to put it in. So you look and it's there so you put it in. That's it; it isn't an explanation." -- Fred Hoyle, cosmologist, 2000
"When you read the text books, they don't tell the whole story. They don't present these figures: five, greater than five, seven, fifty, and then that they did find three. So that's very strange how the textbooks they hide a part of history." -- Andre K. Assis, plasma physicist, 2000
"The Big Bang Theory collapsed under it's own weight of assumptions." -- Jayant V. Narlikar, astronomer, 2000
"The Big Bang is predicated on the assumption that from the point of view of physics there are no surprises in store for us. Which is very unlikely." -- Fred Hoyle, cosmologist, 2000
"Well, the most obvious fact, of course, is people commit their career to certain assumptions and then they find they're very reluctant to give up those assumptions. It's disadvantageous and so forth; there's a great natural inertia. That's an obvious answer to the question. There's a deeper answer which I think is actually more interesting and challenging and that is, everyone realizes, I think, that there is this evidence against the Big Bang and a lot of people think the Big Bang is finished and so forth, but if that's accepted then the question is what replaces it." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 1998
"...their theory is incorrect but they don't have an accepted theory to replace it and that I think is very psychologically bothersome to particularly scientists who have gone into science in order to be certain about the world, to be sure that they're right and so forth, and it's a very insecure position. Some scientists have joked that, well, a scientist would rather be wrong than uncertain. We sort of have to live with uncertainty which is, well, it's an interesting and challenging situation." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 1998
"If you want to find evidence refuting Big Bang Theory, just point a telescope at the sky!" -- Tom Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993
"The Big Bang never happened." -- Eric J. Lerner, physicist, 1991
"The Big Bang theory predicts the density of ordinary matter in the universe from the abundance of a few light elements. Yet the density predictions made on the basis of the abundance of deuterium, lithium-7 and helium-4 are in contradiction with each other, and these predictions have grown worse with each new observation. The chance that the theory is right is now less than one in one hundred trillion." -- Eric J. Lerner, physicist, 1991
"...from 1966 onward, observations began to accumulate that could not be explained by this conventional picture [Big Bang Cosmology]. Some extragalactic objects had to have redshifts which were not caused by velocity of recession. At the very least, it seemed that some modification had to be made to the current theory. The reaction against these discordant observations among some influential specialists was very strong: It was said that they 'violated the known laws of physics' and must therefore be incorrect. Alas, it seems that in the intervening years the useful hypothesis had become dogma. Translated plainly, this dogma simply states 'At this golden moment in human history, we know all the important aspects of nature that we will ever know. In spite of a long record of fundamental revolutions in human thought, there are now no more surprises, there is now an end to this history.'" -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 1987
"It is clear that when scientific results are prevented from appearing or being discussed in standard journals, the only alternative is to publish a book." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 1987
"I believe in order to gain the most fundamental knowledge of which we are capable it is necessary to continually and sincerely question our assumptions and test our theories. In a sense, the way we do science is more important than the exact results at any given moment. I have stated the results as correctly as I can in this book but one must always face the possibility that one's current understanding is more or less completely wrong. So, even if my thesis were mistaken -- which I consider to be unlikely in view of the evidence -- it may still have been valuable to have discussed how the process of astronomical discovery is actually conducted. The most important thing for us to recall may be, that the crucial quality of science is to encourage, not discourage, the testing of assumptions. That is the only ethic that will eventually start us on our way to a new and much deeper understanding." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 1987
"There is nevertheless a nagging suspicion among some astronomers, that all may not be right with the deduction, from the redshift of galaxies via the Doppler effect, that the universe is expanding. The astronomer Halton Arp has found enigmatic and disturbing cases where a galaxy and a quasar, or a pair of galaxies, that are in apparent physical association have very different redshifts...." -- Carl Sagan, professor, 1985
"If Arp is right, the exotic mechanisms proposed to explain the energy source of distant quasars—supernova chain reactions, supermassive black holes and the like —would prove unnecessary. Quasars need not then be very distant. But some other exotic mechanism will be required to explain the redshift. In either case, something very strange is going on in the depths of space." -- Carl Sagan, professor, 1985
"The present observations are used inductively to conclude that the compact objects originate in the nuclei of large galaxies where the physical conditions approach singular values and that their excess redshifts are related to their young age as measured from this event. In my opinion, of the kind of explanations that the current observations require, one of the simplest is one along the lines of [Fred] Hoyle's suggestion that electrons and other atomic constituents can be created with initially smaller mass. Then smaller hν emissions result from a given atomic transition, and radiation from all objects in the new galaxy is shifted to the red. As the galaxy ages, its atomic parameters asymptotically approach that of older matter." -- Halton C. Arp, astronomer, 1972
"... it seems likely that redshift may not be due to an expanding Universe, and much of the speculations on the structure of the universe may require re-examination." -- Edwin P. Hubble, astronomer, 1947
"... red-shifts are evidence either of an expanding universe or of some hitherto unknown principle of nature." -- Edwin P. Hubble, astronomer, 1947
"The assumption that red shifts are not velocity shifts but represent some hitherto unknown principle operating in space between the nebulae leads to a very simple, consistent picture of a universe so vast that the observable region must be regarded as an insignificant sample." -- Edwin P. Hubble, astronomer, 1942
"... if redshifts are not primarily velocity-shifts, the picture is simple and plausible. There is no evidence of expansion and no restriction of time-scale, no trace of spatial curvature, and no limitation of spatial dimensions." -- Edwin P. Hubble, astronomer, 1937
"[Ernest] Lawrence had a project going up the hill to devise a way to separate U-235 from U-238 electromagnetically -- the project that developed the calutron electromagnetic separators that the Manhattan Project eventually operated at Oak Ridge." -- Robert Serber, physicist, 1992
"I took over part of the time of the group that was working for [Ernest] Lawrence. They still had to do what Lawrence wanted done -- he was paying them -- but actually, I'd say two thirds of their time was being diverted. They came up with a much better [neutron] diffusion theory. They said, here, we have exact solutions to it. This was Eldred Nelson and Stan Frankel. I don't know if they solved the problem themselves or they looked through the literature and found the solutions. It doesn't matter, the point is that they introduced better methods into the project, and got us a better estimate. I worked on the hydrodynamics too -- the question of how things blow up. I don't know whether the exponential shockwave is still called the Serber shock. That's what people called it then. There was a paper from Dirac on the subject, and somehow he got it wrong. We got it right." -- Robert Serber, physicist, 1992
"Richard Tolman had the other idea that was really important, though it's importance wasn't fully realized at the time. Tolman came to me one day and talked to me about implosion -- blowing the pieces of nuclear material together with high explosives to assemble a critical mass. We discussed it that summer and wrote a memorandum on the subject. We didn't have the idea of compressing solid material, of increasing the density of solid material by sqeezing it. We were thinking of imploding a shell, of assembling a critical mass by changing the geometery from a shell to a sold sphere. That was the primary idea. The memorandum we wrote got lost after the war, but two other memos by Tolman exist, and notes of a March 1943 meeting show Compton and Bush advising Oppy to pursue the method. So the story of Seth Neddermeyer the lone genius coming up with implosion on his own is all hokum. He heard implosion discussed during the Primer lectures. The drawing in the Primer showing pieces being blown together by a ring of high explosives is a version of implosion (see page 59). Neddermeyer didn't think it up himself. It was Richard Tolman who brought the idea into the project." -- Robert Serber, physicist, 1992
"On Edward Teller's blackboard at Los Alamos I once saw a list of weapons -- with their abilities and properties displayed. For the last one on the list, the largest, the method of delivery was listed as 'Backyard.' Since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it elsewhere." -- Robert Serber, physicist, 1992
"One part that came to maturity in the pauses between ping pong games is also perhaps the most important from the point of view of general interest. The name of this particular discovery is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It takes a strange position in regard to an ancient question, determinism. Is the future really predictable? If we knew the situation at the present with complete accuracy, then the laws of physics say that the future should be completely predictable. What Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says is that it is impossible to know completely accurately what the present is." -- Edward Teller, physicist, 1990
"Actually we had those ping pong evenings once a week. There were all kinds of peculiar people there, even three Americans who later got the Nobel Prize: van Vleck, Mullikan, and Rabi. Maybe a dozen people all together. And they would talk about the whole world, including the incredible change that had been going on in physics. Niels Bohr had started to explain what makes an atom stable. In 1925, Heisenberg essentially completed the theory. Then, during the next two years, together with Niels Bohr, he explained what the new theory meant. Without any doubt in my mind, of all the strange and important things that I witnessed in my life, this was the most strange and the most important." -- Edward Teller, physicist, 1990
"...one evening he [Heisenberg] asked me, 'Haven't you done enough of it?' I said I could work on it another year. He said, 'I think you have done enough of it. Just write it up. It will make a nice Ph.D. thesis.' I sometimes suspect that I got my Ph.D. in order that the computing machine should not disturb Heisenberg's sleeping." -- Edward Teller, physicist, 1990
"I had met Leo Szilard many years before in Budapest. In London, he came to me and told me he had worked with the recently discovered neutrons. Since they have no [electric] charge, they can approach a nucleus, which no other nucleus can do. Thus, you might cause reactions in that nucleus that produces two neutrons." -- Edward Teller, physicist, 1990
"Ted [Taylor] took [Robert] Serber's course in neutron diffusion theory, and he planned a doctoral thesis predicting the characteristics of the scattering and absorption of neutrons by nuclei." -- John McPhee, writer, 1974
"The bomb was a sphere within a sphere within a sphere within a sphere. The small sphere in the center was called the initiator and was designed to give off millions of neutrons when squeezed. Around the initiator was the ball of fissile material, metallic uranium-235 or plutonium-239, in which the neutrons from the initiator would make fissions. Around the uranium or plutonium was the reflector (also called the tamper). It was made of natural uranium or some other heavy metal [e.g. Tungsten Carbide or Beryllium] to prevent neutrons from getting out and to contain the explosion just long enough to produce the fission chain reaction and to produce a greater yield. Around the tamper was ordinary high explosive, the bulk of the bomb. Basically TNT, its purpose was to squeeze the uranium or plutonium from a subcritical density to a supercritical density, squeezing the initiator at the same time and creating an instant fireball." -- John McPhee, writer, 1974
"Fifteen seconds after Scorpion flashed, Ted [Taylor] reached down to the parabolic mirror beside him and took from behind it a smoldering Pall Mall. He drew in a long, pleasing draught of smoke. He had lit a cigarette with an atomic bomb." -- John McPhee, writer, 1974
"...the Puny Plutonium Bomb. The test of that last one was called 'the P.P. shot,' and it was the first known complete failure in the history of nuclear testing. 'Now you're [Ted Taylor] making progress,' Fermi said. 'You've finally fired a dud.' The bomb had plenty of high explosive around an amount of plutonium so small it remains a secret, for the figure is somewhere near to the root question: How small can an atomic bomb be? In the absense of precise numbers, the answer would have to be: Pretty small. Fiddling around on this lightweight frontier, Taylor once designed an implosion bomb that weighed twenty pounds, but it was never tested." -- John McPhee, writer, 1974
"...he [Ted Taylor] was not much interested in gun-type bombs. The Hiroshima bomb, which had been designed by committee, was overloaded with uranium, and Taylor's summary description of it was that it was 'a stupid bomb.' Possibilities were so much greater with implosion systems." -- John McPhee, writer, 1974
"The Nagasaki bomb's nuclear core had been designed by Robert Christy, who taught physics and astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology, and returned frequently to Los Alamos as a consultant. Taylor, in his own words, would "light up" when he found that Christy had come to town." -- John McPhee, writer, 1974
"...he [Ted Taylor] said that Carson Mark once pointed out to him, a number, a fact, that brought with it the most astonishing realization he had ever experienced in physics. It had to do with binding energy, and it was that when Fat Man exploded over Nagasaki the amount of matter that changed into energy and destroyed the city was one gram -- a third the weight of a penny."-- John McPhee, writer, 1974
"He [Ted Taylor] was the first man in the world to understand what you can do with three or four kilograms of plutonium...." -- Freeman Dyson, physicist, 1974
"Very few people have Ted's [Ted Taylor's] imagination. ... I think he is perhaps the greatest man that I ever knew well. And he is completely unknown." -- Freeman Dyson, physicist, 1974
"We've looked into [Ted] Taylor. The man is a genius. He can't come here." -- Pennsylvania atomic plant manager to Carl Goldstein, physicist, 1974
"All I can say is this: They had known all along that the way to get more energy into the middle was to hit the core harder." -- Theodore B. Taylor, physicist, 1974
"If one wanted to, I suppose, one could imagine a single superbomb that would kill all things on earth, that would deliver a hundred thousand roentgens to every part of the world and leave life below ground ecologically strangled. Such a bomb would be a quarter of a mile long, though, and five hundred feet high. It would probably have to be deeply buried to keep from blowing off the top of the atmosphere and dissipating too much energy into space, but not so deeply that the explosion would be contained. It would make a crater perhaps a hundred miles in diameter. The yield would be many millions of megatons." -- Theodore B. Taylor, physicist, 1974
"I have known hundreds of people in science, and he [Ted Taylor] is one of the very few most impressive and inventive." -- Stanislaw Ulam, mathematician, 1970
"Take this paper. Burn it. Never recall it." -- J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist, 1948 (to Ted Taylor)
"I viewed the [Trinity] test, with the Coordinating Committee expedition, from a point about twenty miles away. At the instant of the explosion I was looking directly at it, with no eye protection of any kind. I saw first a yellow glow, which grew almost instantly into an overwhelming white flash, so intense that I was completely blinded. There was a definite sensation of heat. The brilliant illumination seemed to last for about three to five seconds, changing to yellow and then to red; at this stage it appeared to have a radius of about twenty degrees. The first thing I succeeded in seeing after being blinded by the flash looked like a dark violet column several thousand feet high. This column must actually have been quite bright, or I would not have been able to distinguish it. By twenty or thirty seconds after the explosion I was regaining normal vision. At a height of perhaps twenty thousand feet, two or three thin horizontal layers of shimmering white cloud were formed, perhaps due to condensation in the negative phase of the shock wave. Some time later, the noise of the explosion reached us. It had the quality of distant thunder, but was louder. The sound, due to reflections from nearby hills, returned and repeated and reverberated for several seconds, very much like thunder. A column of white smoke appeared over the point of the explosion, rising very rapidly, and spreading slightly as it rose. In a few seconds it reached cloud level, and the clouds in the immediate neighborhood seemed to evaporate and disappear. The column continued to rise and spread to a height of about twice the cloud level. There was no appearance of mushrooming at any height. A smoke cloud also was spreading near ground level. The grandeur and magnitude of the phenomenon were completely breath-taking." -- Robert Serber, physicist, July 1945
"The object of the project is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast neutron chain reaction in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear fission." -- Robert Serber, physicist, 1943
"All this discovery [Martian lightning] does is confirm The Plasma Model. The Martian dust storms are electrically generated vortices." -- Louis Hissink, geologist, June 2009
"As any first year electrical engineering student knows, a stream of charged particles is an electric current." -- Stephen Smith, writer, May 2009
"Embarrassingly little is known about terrestrial lightning, although it strikes the Earth about 3 million times per day." -- Tom Wilson, biologist/engineer, February 2009
"We are unfamiliar with plasma because we are blind to it. Modern astrophysicists are in this sense correct to claim that 90% of the universe is undetectable 'dark' substances. Their error is to fill in the blank with mathematical extrapolations from familiar theories and to leave their thinking blind to plasma." -- Mel Acheson, physicist, December 2008
"I interviewed him [Velikovsky] several times at his home, and remain convinced that although he is most likely wrong on specifics, he will be remembered by history as a genius and pioneer." -- Clark Whelton, historian, December 2008
"These researchers have demonstrated certain inescapable conclusions. They have shown that Velikovsky was wrong on numerous specifics. But on several of his most fundamental claims, all of the evidence accumulated by historical investigation and by space age exploration lines up in Velikovsky's favor. This is the fact that the zealots for 'consensus' science do not want you to know." -- Michael Goodspeed, journalist, October 2008
"Seeds of active interest are now present within most of the major divisions of NASA, in plasma science laboratories, and in numerous universities. Many have never read Velikovsky, nor even heard his name in some instances. Some would prefer that Velikovsky never be mentioned, due to the public relations success of Velikovsky's critics in the mid-seventies. In numerous ways the present movement has left the Velikovsky question behind -- though it would be senseless to imagine that the truth about the Velikovsky controversy could remain hidden forever. " -- Michael Goodspeed, journalist, October 2008
"There is also the Plasma Model, first proposed by Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Hannes Alfvén in 1965. It is rapidly gaining wide international support from the scientific community, due in no small measure to it's rock solid empirical base and the weight of observational evidence on it's side. The predictions of Plasma Cosmology have passed every single test that has come from empirical evidence over a period of forty years. Makes you think, doesn't it?" -- Hilton Ratcliffe, astronomer, 2007
"An offshoot of Plasma Cosmology is a vibrant hybrid known ... as Electric Universe (EU). It is a theory full of promise -- who can deny the electrical nature of events at every scale?" -- Hilton Ratcliffe, astronomer, 2007
"It's not that most of the matter and energy in the universe is dark, but that most cosmologists are totally in the dark about the real nature of the universe." -- Wallace Thornhill, physicist, October 2006
"Anyone interested in astrophysics needs to become aware of the properties of the electric plasma that fills more than 99% of the universe. Ours really is an Electric Sky." -- Donald E. Scott, electrical engineer, 2006
"Hannes Alfvén is the central figure in the emerging electric plasma cosmology." -- Donald E. Scott, electrical engineer, 2006
"Gravity was the focus of 20th century astronomy. For the 21st century, it will be electromagnetism and plasmas in addition. This forthcoming scientific revolution is presaged by the rapid pace of discoveries about our own star, the Sun, and its total plasma environment, and discoveries about the nature of the interstellar medium." -- Timothy E. Eastman, astrophysicist, 2006
"James Clerk Maxwell may well be the most important scientist in the world in terms of what he covered in his short life. It is a real shame that some members of the Scottish public do not know he existed." -- Phil Lavery, historian, 2006
"Freund's (2003) experimental work confirms the infrared radiation emission nature of such geodynamic anomalies and processes. It is therefore logical that Earth's geodynamics are driven by electro-motive force (EMF), or rather, electromagnetic anisotropic concentration processes, and surely not by the conventional physically inadequate heat-engine bulk convection formalism. In other words, volts and amperes control tectonism and all geodynamic phenomena...." -- Stavros T. Tassos (seismologist) and David J. Ford (geologist), 2005
"Newton was unaware of plasma. Today his disciples spend years in training, learning when and how to shut their eyes to it." -- Mel Acheson, physicist, 2001
"The cosmology as a science has begun one century ago with Einstein's theory. So in one hundred years you cannot produce a theory of everything. This is crazy. Even from a philosophical point of view and historical point of view. We have begun one hundred years ago. In 1920 we thought that the Milky Way was all the universe and now they want to produce the belief that in 80 years or something you have produced the theory of all the universe from the beginning to now. This is incredible. And not very objective." -- Martín López Corredoira, astronomer, 2000
"... the word ‘cosmologist’ should be expunged from the scientific dictionary and returned to the priesthood where it properly belongs." -- M.J. Disney, physicist/astronomer, September 2000
"But peer pressure operates throughout life, not just among the young; and it is prevalent among scientists, who would even mount an international boycott of a publisher of a radical hypothesis (Velikovsky's) rather than address its scientific merits (which didn't happen for a quarter of a century, because of peer pressure.)" -- Tom Van Flandern, astronomer, 1999
"When I entered the field of space physics in 1956, I recall that I fell in with the crowd believing, for example, that electric fields could not exist in the highly conducting plasma of space. It was three years later that I was shamed by S. Chandrasekhar into investigating Alfvén's work objectively. My degree of shock and surprise in finding Alfvén right and his critics wrong can hardly be described. I learned that a cosmic ray acceleration mechanism basically identical to the famous mechanism suggested by Fermi in 1949 had [previously] been put forth by Alfvén." -- Alex Dessler, physicist, 1995
"...the universe is 99.999% matter in the plasma state." -- Anthony L. Peratt, physicist, May 1995
"Maxwell's importance in the history of scientific thought is comparable to Einstein's (whom he inspired) and to Newton's (whose influence he curtailed)." -- Ivan Tolstoy, physicist, 1982
"Some 'scientists' attempted to suppress Velikovsky's ideas. The supression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system and the history of our study of the solar system shows clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources." -- Carl Sagan, cosmologist, 1980
"Torquemada was evil; Velikovsky's academic enemies, merely foolish." -- Stephen Jay Gould, biologist, 1977
"How our solar system was formed is a question that attracts as much interest as the problem of the Creation did in the past. In many theories advocated today, the basic approach to this problem remains remarkably similar to what it was in ancient times: The author hypothetically assumes some specific primordial configuration of matter and then deduces a process from which some significant features of the present state emerge. When the basic assumption is unrelated to actually observed phenomena, chances are that the result will be the same over thousands of years: a model which, by definition, is a myth, although it may be adorned with differential equations in accordance with the requirements of modern times." -- Hannes O.G. Alfvén and Gustav Arrhenius, physicists, 1976
"Our debate ended on Friday, April 8, 1955, only nine days before Einstein’s death. I think I was the last person with whom he discussed a scientific problem. On that day I brought him the published news that Jupiter sends out radio noises; ten months earlier, in a letter to him, I had offered to stake our dispute on this my claim of an as yet undiscovered phenomenon..." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1976
"Over twenty years have passed since the figure that dominates this narrative [Einstein] left the abode of men. With the passing years many phenomena have come to light, and today it is sometimes difficult for a scientist to reconstruct his own and his colleagues’ attitude of 1950 or 1955. And it is even more difficult for the young generation to envisage the stand of science in those years, almost a generation ago. Since then, many discoveries of the Space Age have completely changed our understanding of the structure of the solar system, and radioastronomy has brought home a new and exciting picture of cosmic spaces and of the forces that act in them. It is easy to be misled into thinking that this knowledge was already common in the early fifties; thus whom better to quote than Einste
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