CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
If a fossil whale standing on its tail can disprove "millions of years" of sedimentary accumulation, perhaps a live animal can try to do the same. Igor Akimushkin tells us how "The cepola fish... may sit still for hours on the crooked end of its tail, with its wide-open jaws turned upwards expectantly, waiting patiently for heavenly manna to fall into its mouth." ' [1] The cepola is a fish of the abyssal ocean, where it lives in perpetual darkness.
If it feeds this way for twelve hours a day and collects one millimeter of material with its mouth, in which enough nourishment is contained, then in a year it might be said that a column of 365x 2 millimeters will be striking the ocean floor. This would amount to a column of 730 meters in 1000 years, assuming that inedible waste and compression cancel each other out. Since the ocean sediments average one kilometer, and our live precipitation meter may be at a typical location, the column will reach the average depth of sediments in about 1350 years, under uniformitarian suppositions. With a negatively exponential fall-out, cepola would have once fed more quickly than he does today. So the ocean bottom cannot be older than 1350 years, and ethology becomes the queen of clockmakers.
Quantavolution should be embarrassed to joke so, if science were not on some occasions a theatre of the absurd. One can reflect upon the history of geology when, blessed by the nihil obstat of Lyell, geologists would simply draw upon time without end to do away with complexities and perplexities. When Poulett Scrope prepared his famous studies of the volcanoes of Auvergne (France), his theories might be liberated from temporal restraints, such that a recent commentator on his work, Rudwick, could refer to "unlimited drafts upon antiquity" as his necessary and useful tool [2] .
Continuing until today, the time scales have been even more expanded, much more, so that many a geologist has felt free to mount his facts into any frame of time that can hold them; the duration itself would scarcely be accosted for proof. Owing to recent discoveries such as the youngness of the ocean bottoms, and to late criticism of biostratigraphy, the license to capture time has become more restricted. But radiochronometry, newly developed, reigns supreme over time and is dizzied by success.
Conventional chronology today gives about 15,000 years to the Holocene and latest period, and about two million years to the Pleistocene. Then some 35 my go to the Tertiary, with its Pliocene, Miocene and Eocene; 55 my to the Cretaceous; 27 my to the Jurassic; 23 the Triassic; 33 the Permian; 74 the Carboniferous; 72 the Devonian; 22 the Silurian; 57 the Ordovician; 92 the Cambrian; and some 2000 million years (or much more) to the Precambrian era.
By this point, the reader is well-aware of our scandalous departures from the conventional text. We have been arguing, in the whole of our Quantavolutionary Series (and see page 497 below), that all of the preceding ages probably have occurred within a million years, and especially that major elements of the Holocene, Pleistocene, Tertiary, Cretaceous and Carboniferous have occurred within the time usually allotted to the Holocene, namely some 15,000 years or less. The great disparity has occurred, we maintain, owing to the displacement of time by catastrophe. And to denote these catastrophic intervals, we have used certain disruptive episodes that we have tied into astronomical events, bringing a sequence of periods that we begin with the Pangean, and then go on the Uranian, Lunarian, Saturnian, Jovean, Mercurian, Venusian, and Martian, each marked by catastrophe, until the present or Solarian period to which only some 1600 years are allotted.
Many salient events are disallowed to quantavolution theory by conventional science not because they take too long to happen, not because they did not happen, but because they happened very long ago. Notable among such cases are the fission of the Moon from the Earth, the transportation of hydrocarbons by comets, the prolonged great heat of Venus, the desolation of Mercury and Mars, and other impliedly catastrophic occurrences, whose number is surprisingly large -even determining -when plucked out of the pages, for example, of the special account of the solar system contained in the Scientific American for September, 1975.
Some fifty-nine techniques of determining prehistoric duration and fixing distant events were summarized by the present author (1981) and deemed faulty in one or more regards. This, even when taken together with the sources to which it refers, does not constitute definitive disproof of the validity of long-time chronometry. However, it does permit us to entertain a short-term model of solar system history. The evidence of Solaria Binaria is such that all previously existing tests offering macrochronic conclusions are either modified to suit our model, or declared invalid.
With regard to geological and biological tests that assert long duration of processes, evidence is accumulating rapidly that quantavolutionary transformations are physically possible. Independent of historical argumentation, geological and biological time are collapsible in theory and in the laboratory. Astronomers figure time in light-years over vast distances, but this is a convenience, not a measure of history. Empirical tests are, however, also theory-dependent, as, for example, the "thermonuclear" Sun whose dynamics are invisible, and the potassium-argon radioactive decay tests performed upon moon soil that presume a three-billion-years-old Moon, or the radiocarbon test that believes in a practically constant atmosphere.
Every discipline advancing long-time claims would today be in a defensive posture were it not for the heavy investment, both intellectual and material, in radiochronometry, which is believed to be paying rich dividends. The bedrock defense of radiochronometry is that radiodecay rates of known elements are regular and inalterable by any conceivable environmental force. Lately, this view has been challenged.
Once the quantavolutionary hypothesis is substituted for the evolutionary hypothesis of uniform and gradual changes based upon the change rates of recent centuries, the majority of tests simply is nullified. The reason is that the constituents of time- measurement are nature-dependent -the time-makers are, like undisciplined and free workers, able to speed up or slow down and hence cannot be counted upon for an indefinitely long series of regular movements or changes.
If there are 59 different measures of time, say, each one will have to know enough about a certain changing phenomenon of nature to guarantee that it has given off a set of signs or signals throughout a specified period, that these signals composed intervals translatable into current understanding such as solar years or millennia or some usable sequential juxtaposition, and these signals that were once given off can be reliably reproduced, observed, or inferred when recently or currently the signals were registered and/ or interpreted.
Considering the prevalence of scientific opinion on the side of a universe, solar system, Earth biosphere, and hominoidal presence, each of long duration -say, of 6 gigayears, 5 gigayears, 3 gigayears, and five million years -the challenge which short-time chronologists present to the time-keepers of science should be easily disposed of: these need only provide one incontrovertible proof of long duration where short duration is claimed. Should it be demanded that the short-time advocate offer his proofs first, one may plead that the long-time chronometrician is rich in experimental resources, hence noblesse oblige.
The stakes in radiochronometry are very high: all of the natural sciences have a stake in the game, plus ancient history, pre-history, anthropology, archaeology, indeed all of the humanities and, in the end, philosophy, theology, cosmology.
At Valsequillo (Mexico) human occupation is evidenced by sophisticated stone tools but the horizons occupied have been dated by the fission-track method on volcanic material and by uranium dating of a camel's pelvis at 250,000 years of age [3] . At least one of the team believes the age to be "essentially impossible."
North of the border, at the Calico site, California, early humans occupied premises and employed several categories of tools. Uranium-thorium tests yielded a date of 200,000"20,000 years for the artifacts [4] . Meanwhile, in Israel, at the 'Ubeidiya site, previously dated to 700,000 years, fossil mammals were redated to a human site containing Acheulian artifacts at two million years, "500,000 years older than any record of Early Acheulian artefacts or Homo Erectus in Africa." [5]
These claims support my attack in Homo Schizo I upon the hominid chronology asserted in such studies as those of R. Leakey and Johanson in East Africa. That is, all datings of hominids and early man are far too old, and the so-called hominids were probably human. They also support the thesis of Chaos and Creation that assigns an ecumenical culture, worldwide, to Pangea, prior to the breakup of the continents.
In the realm of legend, challenges to radiochronometry emerge as well. The following abstract from Catastrophist Geology may be quoted in its entirety [6] :
Lake Bosumtwi (diameter 8 km) in Ghana is by geologists generally interpreted as the impact scar of an extraterrestrial body, and the Ivory Coast tektite field has been correlated with it on chemical and geochronological grounds. The Dogons, who live 800 km away in Mali, preserve an ancient tradition attributing the Lake to the fall of a fiery metallic mass of unusual dimensions. This legend is also an integral part of the cosmogony of many other West African peoples, such as Mandingoes and Bambaras. Many priests make a pilgrimage to the Lake or to the nearby town of Kumassi, and also many blacksmiths visit the Lake before initiation to their sacred profession. Glass from the impact rim around the Lake has been radiometrically dated at 1.3 to 1.6 million years, a period when Africa was inhabited by Australopithecines.
The moment is opportune for some scholar to compile such victories of oral traditions. No less than eight hypotheses of this book are combined in and supported by this single story. And who dates the Australopithecines and how? The problem is global.
Every proposition that supports exoterrestrial influence on Earth threatens radiochronometry. Radiochronometry has meanwhile thrown biostratigraphical chronometry into disrepute. Vita-Finzi, for example, places his hopes for quaternary geochronology on radiochronometry [7] . Richer in his turn writes:
Radiochronometric dating thus laid to rest once and for all the idea that rocks can be dated, even in a gross way, by their lithology or by the extent of their deformation and metamorphism. Radiometric dating also revealed that Precambrian time was far greater than anyone previously imagined." [8]
(Precambrian time is accorded 80% of all rock time and Precambrian rock by one estimate surface over 17% of the Earth.) Fossil-time is heavily theory-dependent. Alter the assumed speed of evolution and one alters fossil-time, and the dating of its associated sediments. Evolution-time, once we dismiss the pretensions of natural selection (adaptation and survival of the fittest), and microevolution (neo-darwinism) and introduce quantavolution, can be calibrated on practically any time-scale, allowing only a perceptible succession and superposition of species.
The boundary times between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods are increasingly recognized to have been catastrophic. From tall mountains to the deep abyss, notable turbulence occurs. Asteroids or comets have been called forth to explain the phenomena, which are holospheric. One study [9] concentrated upon a single core drilled at 4805 meters of ocean depth off Africa into a fan of a submarine canyon cut into the Walvis Ridge; at about 205 meters below the bottom the C/ T boundary was ascertained and its materials analyzed. Numerous anomalous chemical conditions were discovered, leading the 20 authors to support conclusions, some suggested elsewhere, that the state of carbon dioxide, oxygen, iridium, platinum, cyanide, osmium, arsenic, calcium carbonates, terrestrial ejecta dust, and exoterrestrial dust indicated and/ or caused general decimation of marine invertebrata, and, by extension, as suggested elsewhere, insufferable conditions for flora and fauna of the continents, with magnetic disturbances, a rise in temperature of 8 degrees centigrade, flash-heating of the atmosphere at the explosive moment, difficulty in photogenesis, and starvation. The mixing of C/ T fossils above the boundary for two meters led to an unresolved question as to whether bioturbation or a prolonged extinction process was proceeding after the extincting event. There was only a film of sedimentary clay to work with at the boundary. Above lies core material ending with lower Eocene fossilized ooze at the surface: thus, most of the Cenozoic or recent period is unrepresented. Basalt is first struck at 280 m subbottom depth, below which it alternates to 340 meters with volcanoclastics, clay and sand. Above the latest basalt occur the same, with fossils at intervals intermingled with a sandstone marl, and, toward the present, chalks, cherts, limestones, and ooze. A layer of ash is found at -200 meters just above the C/ T boundary transition and another at -60 meters.
There is an obvious sequence from older to newer nannofossils, but there is also a gnawing doubt as to the length of time which the total deposition, even in its presumably truncated form, actually required. If, for instance, in the 280 meters of postbasalt deposits, some 7 meters consist of ashes, which must fall rapidly, then ashes amount to about one-fortieth of the column, but they must have dropped in a matter of days.
If, too, the submarine fan was laid down turbulently from its parental canyon, and, all the while, heavy volcanic fall-out was occurring, one might conjecture again in terms of days, or months, or years, but hardly in millions of years. The sudden cessation of deposition at the Lower Eocene of 50 million years ago suggests a bottom of prolonged stillness, but then what comes before as here must suggest a brief turbulence. The sequence of fossils could extinct and proliferate in centuries or millennia, or, less likely, occur by instant turbulent crossbedding from different sources.
The authors and others are looking for a medium-sized astrobleme that would have been the disastrous Intruder of the C/ T boundary; a 25 km/ diameter crater at Kamensk (S. Russia) is alluded to. By our theory the Earth may have suffered numerous meteoroid explosions at this time. In earlier pages, the exponential rate of astrobleme discoveries was noted. There is no chance of finding a solitary culprit. Cretaceous craters will be numerous, and if time is compressed, distinction among the ages of most astroblemes may be vitiated. All of this is ominous. If geology and geophysics are so ready to sell out biostratigraphical chronology, on which natural history has depended almost entirely from the beginning of its modern phase 150 years ago, then those disciplines, if not bankrupt, are poor. One cannot be blamed for addressing them with alternatives.
Moreover, one must consider whether radiochronometry would ever had developed if geochronology had not already felt the need to posit macrochronism. The presuppositions of radiochronometry are such that it would have had hard going against a microchronism. Basic among these uncertainties of radiochronometry are, first, the setting of zero time for the start-up of radioactive decay of the measuring elements such as 238- uranium, second, the need to assume a constant intake of exoterrestrially produced elements during a long Earth history, and third, the belief that electric charges within the crust and their magnetic fields are either constant or do not affect rates of radioactive decay of the elements whose decay is used as a measuring rod.
As Cook has argued, the early state of the Earth is hardly empirically known or deducible. Yet radiochronometry must proceed as if it were, and, furthermore, somehow, whatever is found now as the result of decay was not present in the beginning but finds its only source in the decay process [10] .
There is a basic weakness of all radioactive decay methods of chronometry that is too frequently ignored. All these methods must assume a given composition of species at zero time. For example, in the original 'lead method' it was assumed that the total 'chemical' lead was zero in uranium-thorium minerals at their time of origin. In later lead 'isotope' methods the decay isotopes were assumed to be absent in the original sample. Later work showed that such assumptions were very doubtful if, indeed, not untenable. Any such method would seem on its surface to be invalidated as soon as one obtains evidence regarding an appreciable abundance of decay products at zero time unless some means were available to determine the zero time concentration of the radioactive decay products. Unfortunately, one may only guess these concentrations, and the age results thus obtained can be no better than this guess. The apparent hopelessness of this situation is exemplified by relative lead isotope abundance data presented in extensive tables by Faul and Kulp (Landsberg, 1955).
Cook proceeds to the second problem, that of cosmically produced nuclear transformation of the isotopes being used to measure time.
A few years ago radioactive decay processes were the only natural ones known. Perhaps all of the nuclear reactions previously described as 'artificial' as well as many others involving energies quite outside the range of artificial transmutations actually occur probably at appreciable rates in the earth. Puppi and Dallaporta (Landsberg, 1955) showed that the average star (cosmic ray-promoted nuclear explosion) rate is about 2/ cm 2 /s or 10 19 /s in the atmosphere alone. George (Landsberg, 1955) gave star count data which would suggest possibly about another 10 25 inside the earth. Moreover spontaneous uranium fission alone should produce 10 26 stars/ year inside the lithosphere. Since a particles emitted from radioactive elements have enough energy to penetrate the coulomb barrier in nuclei of atomic number Z up to at least 20, perhaps upwards of 10 -4 of these particles (geometrical cross-section about 0.02 barns) should produce secondary nuclear transmutations. If this is the case, natural decay processes should effect at least 10 29 - 10 30 secondary transmutations in the earth's crust each year.
This would be enough to disjoint the radio clocks. Jean Perrin, as noted by Baranov [11] , has gone farther than Cook to argue that radioactive decay is not spontaneous, but is caused by ultrahard radiation coming in from exoterrestrial sources. That is why "natural" radioactivity is concentrated within the crust of the Earth.
We have stressed that exoterrestrial bombardments of the Earth by particles from nova explosions and other sources of hard radiation have been repeatedly experienced by the crustal rocks of the Earth. The present state of the Earth must be receiving a small fraction of its historical radiation. Yet scientists who have provided some of the chemical proof of these catastrophes have been, inconsistently, strong advocates of timing their own disproofs of cosmic particle equilibrium by the very radioactive levels being simultaneously disproved. Like the proverbial military headquarters, they issue bulletins that "the situation is developing well; our troops are withdrawing on all fronts."
A similar problem is to be seen in the separation of electricity from radioactivity. Ignoring the electrical state (or, better, the electrical history) of the Earth may foreclose alternative life-experiences of radioactive materials. But we have intimated earlier that the Earth has had heavy periodic electrical transactions with exoterrestrial bodies and plasmas. Further, the Earth has had electric potentials differing from its potential today.
Sykes placed a standard radioactive cobalt-60 specimen between the poles of a magnet with an estimated flux-density of 0.1 Tesla, positioned a gamma radiation detector in proximity, and took readings of the emissions when the magnet was on and when it was off. The "decay constant," which is supposed to be invariable if it is to be used to clock geological time, speeded up about 2% when the magnetic field was applied. He concluded that "the thesis of decay constancy under all environmental conditions cannot be maintained." [12]
These experimental results move in the direction theorized by Juergens and experimentally indicated by Anderson and Spangler [13] . The half-life of radioactive isotopes appears vulnerable to external electromagnetic influences. Since the strength of the Earth's magnetic field has been diminishing, along with that of magnetized rocks, the radio clocks within the rocks will have been slowing down. Further, it is not alone a matter of a long-term trend. In any quantavolution, strong electromagnetic forces are likely to be applied to crustal rocks causing sharp increases in the speed of passage of "radio-time."
Furthermore "electric discharges of cosmic proportions should be capable of creating new elements; even atmospheric lightning is credited with producing radionuclides, and all artificial element-creation starting with the first fusion reaction ever achieved in the laboratory -producing technetium from molybdenum, in 1937 -has involved harnessing the forces of the electric discharge." So writes Juergens [14] . Tesla, his biographers recall, once began experiments to make of the whole Earth an accumulator of induced atmospheric charge; in 1982 an immense electrical current was traced from its North Pacific origins through the Strait of Georgia behind Vancouver Island past Tacoma (Wash.), into Oregon, paralleling a fault line [15] .
"What role," Juergens goes on to say, in passages cited briefly in our chapter on lightning, "might environmental electrification play in setting the rules for nuclear stability, radioactive-decay rates, and energies of particle-emissions in decay processes?" The ambiant electrical stress would be different, whether continuously or for short periods of time. "It would seem to follow that decay rates for radionuclides might well differ radically from today's norms. Polonium isotopes now exhibiting very little stability [referring to Gentry's experiments] might then acquire -briefly, but long enough, half-lives in keeping with the evidence of the Earth's crustal rocks." Gentry had shown the existence of short-lived polonium without evidence of association with uranium-decay, whereas polonium has been considered an essential link in the chain of decay that ends in 206 lead. Critics of Gentry objected that his findings would cause "apparently insuperable geological problems."
Juergens proceeds farther. Following experiments by Gamow in wave mechanics, he describes the nucleus as having a well-potential or '" potential-well" out of which alpha particles must climb to "decay," mustering sufficient energy to escape. He regards the Earth's electric charge as a principal "well-builder." "The Earth appears to be strongly charged with negative electricity, so that its surface potential is low, which is to say, highly negative."
Suppose, then, that Earth potential is suddenly lowered by just 1 million volts -this, in all likelihood, is an almost negligibly small fraction of the planet's 'normal' negative electric potential. Alpha particles could, so to speak, climb out of the well readily. "Any abrupt lowering of Earth potential by a mere million volts could be expected to produce rampant radioactivity, with consequent lethal or at least strongly mutational effects on all forms of life."
Even presently, under quiet cosmic conditions, the possibility of electrical intervention in radioactivity is not to be ignored. Radioactive radon is released from rocks in earthquakes [16] . This is revealed by a sudden decrease, followed by a sharp increase, in the radon content of the water table just prior to an earthquake. The mechanism is obscure, but it can be conjectured that the electrical fields being generated in the area of the faulting play a role in the phenomenon. When these occur under conditions of a largely quiet exosphere (though we bear solar-storms correlations with seismism in mind) piezoelectricity is to be suggested, as rock is being recrystallized under pressure and heat.
What happens to cause a radon deficiency in the subsurface rock may be happening to other radioactive elements as well, including uranium and potassium isotopes. If so, such rocks may be incapacitated to serve as radiometric clocks, supposing, for example, that potassium 40 is under the same stress. It will either leak out of the rocks, or decay rapidly into the more stable form of Argon 40. If it leaks, and Argon 40 remains, the rock will become promptly "older" in K/ A testing. If the Argon 40 leaks disproportionately from the rock, the rocks will become "younger." More likely, the ratio of the two will change and establish itself in a false gradation within the local geological column that will, upon testing, confirm relative age differences with perhaps little more chronological information than is supplied by simple superpositioning of the strata. But what is "local" is probably large-scale, inasmuch as rocks everywhere have been involved in seismic disturbances.
A treatise or symposium negatively critical of the macrochronal pretensions of radiochronometry would be welcome and is overdue. The objections raised here cannot be sustained without much more elaborate treatment. Nor can we more than mention the problems of radiocarbon dating, so important to holocene and pleistocene geology with which we deal heavily in these pages. As I have written elsewhere, the fragility of this index of time is such as to make it less useful beyond 2500 years ago [17] .
As with every radiochronometric process, various fluxes of cosmic and terrestrial electricity, large fluctuations of the gaseous and radiation intake of the atmosphere, and biospheric conflagrations all contribute to radiocarbon disequilibrium. Given, for instance, that a solar magnetic storm of the 1950's was observed to add 1% to Carbon 14 of the atmosphere, hence the intake of the biosphere, the probably much heavier solar storms associated with several kinds of atmospheric turbulence of antiquity might seriously affect dating, which, indeed the studies of H. E. Seuss have proven [18] . We bear in mind, too, the calculations of Cook, which, retrojecting the small but perceptible increase in Carbon 14 in the atmosphere under uniformitarian conditions today, come out with a figure of zero-carbon in the air some 13,000 year ago. [19]
Like every radiochronometric process, with its half-life calculations, radiocarbon decay is figured at a declining exponential rate. The mathematics of exponentialism subjects the process to time collapse; exponential rates in chronology are an unreliable ally of uniformitarian rates in biostratigraphical measures of time and of macrochronism generally. In the clamor of debate over the significance of the multitudinous mammoth (and antelope, rhinoceros, and other) fossils of recent times, the long spread of Carbon 14 dates assigned to the finds has attracted attention, but their meaning for carbondating has been ignored. If frozen mammoth finds are dated from 44,000 years ago at one extreme to 2500 years ago at the other extreme, an impossible pattern of climatic changes has to be developed, all allowing some of the cadavers to persist unthawed during the whole period, while letting others cadavers give all signs of eating warm-weather plants just before death [20] . The Carbon 14 dates must be invalid. The same dates, if collapsed and rendered simultaneous, then support an abrupt event, as opposed to an event occupying many thousands of years. The same reasoning would apply to other Carbon 14 problems of the end of the ice ages. Here then, one would refer back to the last chapter and its stress upon the abruptness of biological and geological change.
Is there then nothing whose history when retraced on an exponential rate of development must still have been of long duration? Most likely to limit the microchronic concept of quantavolution are certain biological phenomena. Thus, if a living bristlecone pine tree shows annual growth rings now, and if these go back in time for hundreds of years on the same tree, and these live trees are positioned above a locality of fossil trees, which exhibit the same many rings, and in turn connect with the rings of other trees obviously buried continuously below them, a lengthy period of time begins to develop which, founded upon the need for the species to have evolved beforehand, would begin to push time back by thousands, if not many thousands, of years. Proof of such retrogression is not quite satisfactory yet.
With an enthusiasm born of religious convictions and impelled by many years of frustration at playing the other fellow's game, a group of creationist geologists, without spending much time at the task, can readily explain the history of the world's landforms in terms that allow only a few thousand years. That they can do so constitutes in itself a formidable challenge to conventional geology. Still, even granted that they can do so, are they correct?
If they pursued the line of thought that I follow in my books, they might first dispose of the missing half of the Earth's crust by removing it, in a major incident, from the Pacific Ocean hemisphere. They can place the removed crust on the Moon and in planetary space. Then the minor oceans of the world open up to let the continents raft into their present position. Practically all of the ocean bottoms are of recent lava.
Next, they tackle the waters, which descend largely from the heavens, and from boiling metamorphosizing basalt foundations. Next they fashion the rivers from the world's infinite cracks and faults, big rivers from big faults. The mountains are folded and thrust up forward and aft of rafting continents. Huge tides create deserts and fill some lakes. Precipitation fills others. The ice comes from precipitation in darkness, and from exoterrestrial falls.
The sedimentary rocks are ground up from the turbulence of winds, tides, and the friction of moving land masses. Their fossils, when they occur, denote rapid deposition. Volcanoes spurt up along the forward edges of movement in vast numbers and volcanic fissures vent even more than cones. All of the sea and some of the land is lava-covered, an igneous composition. Another large part of the land and ocean shelves is of the original basalt base of the earlier all-land system and is called shield rock or Precambrian exposures. The biosphere that has been destroyed by drowning, burning, burial, poisoning, and freezing exhibits itself largely in a few assemblages, as fossils, coal, fusain, and some types of oil. The metals coming from earlier explosions among the planets fall in dust or globules, mixing with the turbulence as deposits. Repeated falls of dust, terrestrial and exoterrestrial, mingle with the slowing floods to give the Earth its patina of soils in favored places. Here, and also at one time in the drowned slopes of debris off the shores of continents and around submerged volcanic heights, most of the surviving and adapting biosphere found its home.
Who needs more time than several thousand years to explain all this, they may well say? I would say that we need at least a little more time for all of this work, another ten thousand years perhaps. Even then, we would need an additional longer period for the creation of the solar system, the planets, the Earth, and the land and biosphere that were worked upon in the scenario just presented. In an accompanying volume, Solaria Binaria, a million years is given. (See page 497.)
Only a small fraction of the operations and product of the earth sciences and biology depends directly upon the chronologies that have been developed in natural history. Determining whether the dinosaurs were exterminated five thousand or fifty million years ago may have little to do with deciding whether the mammals had reptilian ancestors. King Kong may still be alive in some jungle for all the difference it would make to primate zoology. The protozoans are alive and studied without reference to the discovery of similar Precambrian species.
Even the science of radiology is independent of its use to measure time; geophysicist Melvin Cook, following upon his trenchant criticism of radiochronometry, is prompt to praise other uses of radiation physics in geology. Similarly Dudley attacked vigorously the idea of stability of radioactive decay measures even though he was a professor of radiation physics in medicine and quite aware of the value of radiation science [21] . When asked to comment on tests by Anderson indicating the non-random and unreliable decay of C14, "scientists said that it could be possible to accelerate or control the release of energy from decaying nuclei... This could lead to..." [22] It's an ill wind indeed, that blows no good.
When a group of scientists and philosophers, perhaps the most notable of them being Albert Einstein, radically criticized the notion of time, the progress of physics is said to have been assisted. Even when time is conceived to run backwards in certain physical, chemical and astronomical theories, the idea is treated as possibly a positive contribution to the solution of perplexing issues.
Nor does the radical alteration of other hard-shelled concepts throw the sciences into unhealthy turmoil. For some time now, the gravitational constant has been assailed as an inconstant, possibly diminishing on the Earth and in the cosmos, following the work of Dirac, Dicke, and others. In an accompanying volume, Earl Milton and the present author, in a history of the solar system, seek to dispense with the concept of gravitation entirely, save for the notion of inertia. At the same time, we seek to work with the concept of a single charge in electricity, endeavoring to solve cosmogonical problems without the two-century- old idea of positive and negative charges.
Why, then, does it matter at all when, in looking upon a mountain or dealing with a human being, one person says he is looking at a historical creation of a great many millions of years while another person says he is observing the creations of a few thousand years? Each sees beauty in the sight, let us grant; each understands the morphology; each commands techniques for mastering problems that arise in connection with the mountain and the human. Indeed, each may exclaim, "What wonders hath God wrought!" -God taking much time to the first observer, little time to the other.
But, now the second person adds that he believes in the validity of certain scriptures that purport to convey the word of God, among which are some sentences that describe how God made the world, including a time-schedule of the construction. The first person has no interest in these same scriptures except as possible scientific testimony, and as such he finds them almost totally incorrect, and says so. Now an issue is joined. But note that the issue concerns time only incidentally. The issue is whether a body of writings can be the words of God; many other parts of the scriptures are at issue which do not concern time at all, such as, for example, a statement forbidding the eating of pork and shellfish.
The issue of sacred authority is beyond the method of the present work (and is treated in my book, The Divine Succession) unless, as a consequence of this book, either the one or the other person derives support from it, which he can then use in proving that the alleged words of God do or do not conform to a historical reality, proved by other means.
However, it is deemed permissible to employ the scriptures in a secular sense here, as a source of facts, allegations, and hypotheses about natural history; in so doing, we submit the scriptures to the same respectful treatment we give to all the rare ancient documents treating in their own way of scientific subject-matter, such as Hesiod's Greek Theogony and the Hindus' Rig-Vedas.
Therefore, questions of the elapsed time for accomplishing the present surface of the Earth have to be answered with a set of intellectual instruments called the scientific method, which are presumed useful to all persons engaged in seeking such answers. The primary tools are the empirical proposition, the testing of this by factual evidence, and some control of reality under the government of the propositions -that is, hypothesis, proof, and application (prediction being one form of such).
This is all elementary, but leads us to ask about time. If the duration of historical time is unimportant and inconsequential in most of the work of the earth sciences, why should it be important in natural history? If it can be shown that natural forces could have provided all of natural history through the agency of hundreds of millions of years, why trouble oneself with showing that they could provide the same in a few thousand years?
There are two answers, not identical even though usually correlated: one set of solutions may be more consonant with reality; further, one set may be more useful. A satisfactory explanation of those answers (apart from the problem itself) would require a volume of philosophy on the true and the useful. We might, for instance, find ourselves concluding that the short and long chronologies are both equally true, but the short answer is useful for people who wish to correlate perfectly their natural philosophy about the empirical world with their beliefs in the words of their sacred scriptures.
Alternatively, we might discover that the long-term view is really true and we might as well accept the reality principle as our guide, instead of the sacred doctrine. Since this is a fairly weak view (why hold to reality if it doesn't make pay-offs?), it is often strengthened by a historical, acquired fear of negative experiences in treating with persons holding to the scriptural text. Taken together with various sociological forces -such as professionalism and bureaucracy -truth per se and historical fear can generate a strong sense of the utility of the truth. The stage is then set for an enduring struggle between creationists and gradualists.
Here we end up in a distinctly different position. We wish no quarrel with anyone; yet, in a sense, we have to quarrel with everybody. We say that, properly understood, natural forces can have created the present world in a vastly compressed span of time. Too, they may have done so. In arguing that they may have done so, we probably lend a hand to creationists; we do so, too, by according respect to ancient holy writ, as we find this source of evidence shabbily treated in both scientific and humanistic circles.
On the other hand, we see no divine miracles in a nature operating by quantavolutions over a short time. Nor do our time schedules and calendar of events correlate fully with the sacred ones that we know. Nor, finally, unless I underestimate my work, do our explanations facilitate the introduction of an animate divine intelligence into natural history.
Indeed, "creation science," as is called the systematic effort to validate the natural history of the Bible, may be self-defeating. It lets a holy statement, which might better be believed as a different kind of truth-telling and saving instrument, enter into competition in the contests of science, where the rules, the umpires, and the rewards are greatly different. I say this while expressing appreciation of the distinctive contributions that creationists have continuously made to the earth sciences, and realizing that, were it not for their religious zeal, their scientific interests alone would not have given birth to their hypotheses and research.
Supposing that a respectable case has been made for its actuality, what utility does mini-temporal natural history possess? It displaces time as dictator of events. Although it does not abolish historical time, it allows natural forces to play flexibly with time in history.
It lends historical stimulus to inventive ideas that would be hopeless if time were by its very slackness a limiting factor. We see this kind of idea now seeking realization in such fields as elemental physics and genetic engineering. Third, it permits the amalgamation of the earliest records of mankind into the natural sciences, makes man a creature and creator of nature in a holistic sense, helps understand the human story and uses that story to help explain nature.
Here arises the theory of which Velikovsky was the leading exponent, that the morale and behavior of the human race would be improved if humans would appreciate their catastrophic history. Once recalled and realized, the catastrophic record would keep mankind alerted to its compulsion to repeat its past. The racial death-wish could better be kept under control, especially now that racial suicide is facilitated by nuclear armaments.
Since there exists a high correlation between millennialist attitudes (the expectation that world-destruction is imminent) and support for catastrophist scientific theories, I doubt that a therapy for the unconscious compulsion to destroy the world is to be found so easily. "If one is going to go to heaven, the sooner the better." More complicated solutions will be addressed in another work concerning religion. It is conceivable that quantavolution offers possibilities of a new effective synthesis of religion and science, which existing creationism and evolutionism cannot afford.
Beyond such utilities rest the several advantages that a microchronic model provides in association with the other elements of the theory of quantavolution: such as the negative exponential principle, the holistic principle, and the transactions of exoterrestrial and terrestrial forces. For example, moon-eruption theory (G. Darwin, Fisher, Pickering et al.) was first posited as occurring in early stages of the Earth's formation by macrochronic reckoning.
When Wegener advanced his continental drift theory, he was impelled by paleontology to place the rifting continents in the Cretaceous period. An opportunity to join lunar outbursting and continental drift was lost because of vast differences in timing the two events. Both theories, moon-eruption and continental drift, were placed in abeyance for many years.
Then, when Wegener's theory was revived, an elaborate mechanism of tectonic plates moving by convection currents was devised (Hess et al.). Again an opportunity was lost. But microchronism, together with its allied quantavolutionary principles, brings all three events together: paleontological ecumenicalism, the moon-eruption, and continental cleavage and rafting.
For propagandistic purposes, one might take advantage of the credibility that attends long time scales: granting quantavolution, may I not still allow a few millions of years for the resurfacing of the Earth, or only a million, or even a hundred thousand? Or use the Pleistocene, that period of "ice ages" which can be stretched from 100,000 to 2,000,000 and has as many climates and ice advances as we have fingers and toes, thus to avoid a furor of reproaches? Why do I crowd the Holocene so?
I reject this admittedly tempting idea for one large reason alone. As is demonstrable fully in my books on Chaos and Creation and the rise of Homo Schizo, I find evidence in the earliest behavior and beliefs of mankind that I cannot dismiss, which attests to human experience with every form and scale of quantavolution. At this point in the study of quantavolution, I would lengthen the time scales only if some incontrovertible proof of a relevant far-distant event were offered, or if it were to be discovered that the earliest humans whom we know about were survivors of earlier advanced civilizations whose true long natural historiography was handed down in garbled form. Neither seems likely.
Notes (Chapter Thirty-one: The Recency of the Surface)
1. Animal Travellers, loc. cit., 87.
4. Ruth D. Simpson, "Updating Early Man, Calico Site, California," 20 Anthro. J. Canada 2 (1982), 8.
6. E. Guerrier, "Le Forgeron Venu du Ciel," 17 Kadath (1976), 30-6.
10. Prehistory and Earth Models, loc. cit., 24.
11. In Interaction of sciences in the Study of the Earth, loc. cit., 221-2.
13. 77 J. Phys. Chem. (1973), 3114.
14. III Kronos (all, 1977), 3-17, 11.
16. Hiroshi Wakita et al., "Radon Anomaly..." 207 Science (22 Feb. 1980), 882-3.
17. A. de Grazia, Chaos and creation, loc. cit., 51, and Chapter 3 generally.
18. 4 Radiocarbon Geophysics 3( 1980), 113-7, 117.
19. "The Radio Carbon Method," 39 Utah Acad. Sci. Arts Letters, Proc. (1961-2). 11-5.
20. Cardona, I Kronos (Winter 1976) ' 77-85; Ellenberger, op. cit.