What Causes Planets to Explode?

"... we are lead to ask 'Do planets explode?!'" -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"Our story continues when man has advanced to the point where he begins to rediscover evidence of the explosion -- the year 1772. ... The astronomer Daniel Titius notices a curious fact about the spacing of the planets: each of the six planets is roughly twice the distance of the previous one from the Sun, with only one exception, a gap between Mars and Jupiter. The gap is just the right size to hold exactly one additional planet." -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"Is there other evidence that comets and minor planets originated in the 'recent' explosion of a planet? Yes, a great deal. We can study the orbits of comets, and by using the laws of gravitation we can do what amounts to tracing these orbits back in time. We find a statistical tendency to emanate from a common point between Mars and Jupiter about three million years ago...." -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"... we know enough now to want to ask two very important questions: What caused the explosion? And why did it happen only three million years ago?" -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"It is intrinsically unsettling to conclude that planets explode because, after all, we live on a planet ourselves and are totally dependent upon it for survival. Nevertheless, we wish to know the truth." -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"Additional evidence for a recent and nearby nova or supernova (or planetary explosion) event exists in the form of excess Aluminum-26 in the local interstellar medium. The half life of this radioactive isotope is only about a million years, requiring a recent source to inject the abundant quantities we see today." -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"... the most natural way to produce the isotopic anomalies observed in meteorites, and supply abundant energy, is by a matter-antimatter explosion. This speculative possibility might result from magnetic separation and storage of the antimatter in a planet over billions of years before the explosion; or from some sort of chain-reaction high-energy antimatter generation process; or from the intervention of intelligent beings. In my opinion, the last possibility should not be dismissed out of hand." -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"'Intervention by intelligent beings' implies the existence of such beings in the first place, and secondly, implies their knowledge of a physics capable of blowing up a planet, and their possession of the technological means to do so. This is a consequently breathtaking statement for someone of Van Flandern's stature to make! Van Flandern is gingerly and delicately implying that his exploded planets might have been blown up in deliberate acts of war. Yet ... it is precisely this model that the abundance of ancient texts actually supports!" -- Joseph P. Farrell, author, 2007

Tom Van Flandern

Even though I get lost whenever I see the words gravitation or graviton, I relate to the words of the late Tom Van Flandern and I recently had the pleasure of meeting his oldest son (virtually)....=)

Here are my favorite quotes (so far) from Dark Matter Missing Planets and New Comets:

"In matters of religion, medicine, biology, physics, and other fields, I came to discover that reality differed seriously from what I had been taught. As a result of this questioning process, I was startled to realize how much of my 'knowledge' was indeed questionable. I was even more startled to discover a few 'extraordinary hypotheses' to be undeniably true, even while almost every reputable expert in those fields continued to deny that possibility." -- Tom Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"It has been my sad observation that by mid-career there are very few professionals left truly working for the advancement of science, as opposed to the advancement of self. And given enough people with strong enough interests, professional peer pressure takes over from there. Peer pressure in science, as elsewhere in society, consists of alternately attacking and ignoring the people who advocate a contrary idea, and discrediting their motives and/or competence, in order to achieve conformity." -- Tom Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"... many fields of knowledge contain widely accepted theories which are incorrect, not merely at the frontiers of knowledge, but in the fundamentals and from first principles." -- Tom Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"... please try to find a way to coexist with those of us who are not satisfied with the answers we now have, and want so much more." -- Tom Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"... there really are problems with the conventional theories which keep getting stranger and stranger." -- Tom Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"If you want to find evidence refuting Big Bang Theory, just point a telescope at the sky!" -- Tom Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993