De Labore Solis 1

De Labore Solis

Airy's FailureReconsidered

"The whole history of scienceshows that each generation

finds the universe to bestranger than the precedinggeneration ever conceived

it to be." - Fred Hoyle

"There will be a revival ofChristianity when it becomesimpossible to write a popular

manual of science withoutreferring to the incarnation

of the Word."

- Owen Barfield(1)

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Published and Copyrighted, 1988© by the Author,

Walter van der Kamp,14813 Harris Road, Pitt Meadows,

B.C., Canada, V3Y IZI

Printed by Anchor Book & Printing Centre6886-192nd St., Surrey, B.C., V35 5M1

Cover Design: Cheri Mattila

NOTE (not part of this book)Author d.1998. See obituary accompanying this book copy.

Van der Kamp family grants permission to photocopy this book.

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ContentsAbstract ….…………………………………………. 5

Historical and Epistemological Synopsis………….. 9Preface …………………………………………… 9The Cosmic "Outside" Allows No "Insiders"……. 12The Armstrong Alert…………………………….. 13Geocentric? Heliocentric? The Janus-faced "Aberration" Can't Tell……... 19The Fancy Foundations in the Beyond………….. 20Aberration, Continued…………………………… 25The 1887 Cleveland Disenchantment…………….. 34The Dire Consequences………………………….. 36The Verdict of Logic…………………………….. 39Einstein to the Rescue?………………………….. 43Non-observables Prove Nothing…………………. 48The Unfailing Import of Airy's Failure………….. 52The Heart of the Matter………………………….. 60

Testing Einstein! Why? He Can't be Wrong!…… 67Some Desiderata Not to be Overlooked…………. 67The Discarded Image Vindicated Experimentally. 79Why Impossible?…………………………… …... 91

Bible and Science………………………………….. 114The Bible is Not a Scientific Textbook ……….. 114De Labore Solis………………………………… 119And That's the Reason Why!…………………… 126The Half Way House of Creationists…………… 127What If…?……………………………………… 131Science and the Christian Faith………………… 137Conclusively……………………………………. 143

Addenda……………………………………………. 152Notes…………………………………………….…. 162

(Page 4 left blank in original book)

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Abstract

When a scientific theory "saves the appearances"of certain phenomena with which it is concerned, there isno guarantee that such a theory has hit upon their trueexplanation, a proviso, incidentally, that holds for allphilosophical systems and religious dogmas. Certainlythe history of science bears out this limitation with its taleof many theories held as gospel truth once upon a time,but sooner or later disposed of by the impact of newlydiscovered data.

That appraisal certainly stands for astronomy, thequeen of the natural sciences. From Antiquity until 1543Ptolemy "fitted the facts"; then from about the first halfof the seventeenth century until 1919 Copernicus ruledsupreme, though never experimentally verified, let aloneirrefutably proven. From that year on, aided by therelativistic mindset of the age, Einstein has been in theascendant, and the tenets of modern astrophysicaltheories have become so tainted with anomalies that theydefy the mind which tries to evaluate them.

The present essay focuses on a few aspects of theSpecial Theory of Relativity that are seldom sufficientlyrealized. To be sure, if Einstein is right, neither theorbital, nor any other velocity of our Earth can bemeasured directly. And indeed, no one has everexperimentally demonstrated that the Earth circles thestar called Sun. Hence one might well conclude that infact Einstein is right.

That is, alas, an overhasty inference, resting, as itdoes, on an unwarranted generalization. Upon close,logical inspection the Special Theory of Relativityturns out to be no more than a lopsidedly supported

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hypothesis. For if in the Sahara no icefields can befound, this observation does not thereby prove thaticefields exist nowhere. If here on Earth the velocity oflight is the same for all observers, then that fact does notyet thereby confirm that this "apparent paradox", as theRidpath Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Space calls it, isequally valid for observers on the moon, which is inmotion relative to us. At least one control experiment isnecessary to make the paradox credible, and two simpletests for just that purpose are readily available. Both havealready been performed, the one by Hoek in 1868, theother by the author and his co-workers in 1982.Their outcome in a laboratory at rest on the earth indeedsupports Poincaré's "principle of relativity" squarely. Thisresult, however, does not deliver proof, logically. Onlyafter the same experiment has been executed in e.g. aConcorde or Space shuttle, and its results still upholdPoincaré's principle, will Einstein's Relativity havebecome a viable theory.

Yet even after such a verification it will still sufferfrom two incurable weaknesses. In the first place its twoaxioms cannot be observed except through the veryphenomenon they are invented to explain, i.e. a non-apprehensible Maxwellian demon manipulates themeasured data. What is worse, no one has ever proven theEarth to be in motion, and hence there remains thepossibility that this phenomenon of our moving throughspace, which Einstein considers "already proven", afterall does not even exist. Furthermore there are severaltheories, disregarded but extant, which addressthemselves to the enigma of Earth's seeming immobilityThey exhibit the same shortcoming as Einsteints

reworking of Mach's principle, but are logically less

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jarring and frustrating. One may, for instance, go backbeyond Mach to Leibniz, who appears to be the first oneto have argued a "no matter, then no space". And thenone may opt for Wilfred Krause's "Eigenspace"monadology, a proposal dialectically at least asacceptable.

In this paper the author goes back even further.Under the aegis of the prevalent astrophysical paradigm,the pre-Copemican geocentric view is after all "as goodas anyone else's, but no better", or, as a prominentastronomer privately expressed it, "scientificallyundisprovable, but philosophically acceptable".

This paper argues, however, that the longdiscarded Tychonian theory is in fact better on all counts.It is free of the defects that inhibit all the efforts toreplace it, because it is founded on the logicallyimpeccable modus tellendo tollens. In other words, this"unthinkable" cosmic model will be verified or disprovenby the same experiments to test special relativitydiscussed above. "If P, then Q", but "If no Q, then no P".In the event that the speed of light measured from a fastmoving platform turns out to be Einstein's earthlyabsolute "c", he stands vindicated. But if a change of c isobserved, equal to the speed of that platform measuredrelative to the Earth, then he will be discredited. Orgeometrically formulated, if that change in c is observed,then the Earth is at rest, and it is the standard of rest forthe light in the spatiality around us, whatever thatspatiality's properties and extension may be.

The consequences of such an unexpectedcorollary, which "saves the appearances" in the simplestway possible, are drawn and analyzed. Reasons aregiven for the fact that in all likelihood testing Einsteinfrom a moving platform will be deemed unnecessary by

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contemporary astronomers, while at the same time PopePaul II is urged to rehabilitate Galileo. If relativity werewrong, the whole modern Weltanschauung would be injeopardy. But is it scientifically correct to show logic thedoor, when it points to a possibility which a priori isjudged unacceptable? Is it right to conclude thatgeocentrism must be wrong because we do not want it?

The eternal silence of the Copernican-Newtonianspaces terrified Pascal. They terrified the writer, until hefound out that there is not one unassailable astronomicalobservation which compels acceptance of the rulinga-centric paradigm rather than any of the others putforward and believed in throughout human history. Thispaper argues that man sees what he wants to see, and thathe cannot avoid a metaphysical basis for his views, bethey religious or astronomical.

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Historical and Epistemological Synopsis

Preface

Does space know proper place and movement realrest? The answer depends, as with all answers to alltheoretical scientific questions, on convictions alreadypre-logically accepted and stubbornly adhered to. Or tosay it otherwise: the answer depends on "facts" weconsider to be self-evident, since from our tenderest yearswe are told and taught them so often that we have losteven the capability to doubt their truth.

The present paper endeavours to come to gripswith one of the most important of such "facts". And thefirst step this enterprise compels us to take is that we haveto decide which of the three methods available forapproaching the matter of celestial motions we shall use.Do we prefer to think in terms of mechanical andkinematical analogy or in those of mathematicalformalism? Or do we want to halt between those twoapproaches, switching from the first to the secondwhenever logical reasoning, leaning on the available

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data, obliges us to accept a conclusion that we a priorijudge to be unacceptable?

The first method is the classical one. The secondcannot be used in a simon-pure form, for it has still toreckon with immutable givens in rock-bound reality. Thethird possibility is our century's escape route from themorass of anomalies clustered around the notions ofdefinable cosmic movement and rest, a morass in whichat the turn of the century the practitioners of threehundred years of astronomical "New Science" foundthemselves bogged down. Now, such a hybrid approachmay not necessarily produce misleading cosmologicalmodels, but it surely can and does make room forinconsistent argumentation. Applying mathematics aspart of a process of elucidating matter-boundobservations is not the same as using these observationsfor the purpose of justifying matter-free mathematics.Newly discovered phenomena may compel scientists tochange their theories, but no thinkable theory is able tochange the "raw" phenomena. Furthermore, to acceptanything as "proven" is not the same as actually havingproved it. "Proof" and "disproof" in the commonlyaccepted sense of giving absolute truth may even beargued to be chimerical, since only omniscience wouldnot have to reckon with the possibility of unexpectedinput, always again spoiling our mortal certainties.

The discussion will in this paper be strictlyconfined to a kinematical inquiry, that is, to the questionwhether we do or do not have, or can find, a firmand absolutely coordinated hold on the space in whichwe observe motions relative to ourselves, a space to themodern mind only conceivable as infinite and nowa-days characterized as "unbounded". Only when such is

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unavoidable will theoretical deliberations aboutattributes, content, and extent of this space be touchedupon, since the chosen line of access presupposesadherence to the common-sense spatiality of workadaykinematics, that is, the spatiality - a circumstance oftenconveniently overlooked! - beyond which theorists canonly offer ingenious mathematical derivations thatsupersede our perceptible and perceived reality. Fornolens volens theorists can do no more then analogicallyexplain these derivations and the hypotheses extractedfrom them by means of "flat space" models, ironbound asthey are to the three dimensions and the untouchable, notto be manipulated by time, in which their minds arecreated and constrained to operate.

Many will claim the method used here to beoutmoded for any other than low-level workadayoperations. Maybe so, but we should not forget why,now almost a century ago, the flight into a fourthdimension, a so-called "space-time continuum", wasurged to be theoretically necessary. In the closing of theeighteen hundreds, experimental evidence and the rulingNewtonian world view had become increasingly difficultto reconcile. The Earth seemed at rest in the stellardomain, and this being "unthinkable"(2) in Newtonianterms, a way had to be found and a device adopted thatlogically forever would banish such an "impossible"state of affairs. Yet, however "unthinkable" and"impossible", this geocentric abomination is not"impossible" after the manner of a square circle. Fromour earthly perspective we experience it all the daysof our lives. Hence unless and until it logically leadsto antinomies, there are no valid reasons to prohibitand condemn the use of "flat-space" kinematics. For

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procedures, theories and hypotheses may rise and fall -thelogic employed in their construction is not subject tohuman whims, while on the other hand Einsteiniandemonstrations by means of analogies are never strictlycompelling. They may elucidate difficult postulates butdo not "prove" them.

The Cosmic "Outside" Allows No "Insiders"

Does the observable universe contain a pivot?Until Copernicus declared the Earth to be in motion therehad virtually been no problem on that score. Our home inthe Heavens clearly was the standard of rest andconsequently all motions relative to it were consideredabsolute. Though of necessity today still fruitfully used inevery applied science, this is a view that no scientistworth his salt considers actually "thinkable". Only amonguneducated obscurantists it still finds favour. However, itnormally escapes everybody's attention that until Heavenfalls there remains an ultimate uncertainty as well for thevery many who eschew, as for the very few who hold theold geocentric position, an uncertainty beyond the reachof science. "Whether the earth rotates once a day fromWest to East, as Copernicus taught, or the heavensrevolve once a day from East to West, as hispredecessors believed, the observable phenomena will beexactly the same", to quote the late Bertrand Russell,(1872-1970), whereupon he rightly remarks: "This showsa defect in Newtonian dynamics, since an empiricalscience ought not to contain a metaphysical assumption,which can never be proved or disproved byobservation".(3) And I add: hence a defect in allkinematics as well as in even the purest mathematical

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approximations, since we can neither prove nor disprovethe existence of an extra-cosmical reality, nor to the leastdegree be certain how things will look or interact, seenfrom such an "above". There may be "rumours oftranscendence in physics", but the most that can be saidabout the majority of these rumours is that "they raiseimportant questions about the nature of reality, but arehelpless to provide answers".(4)

Be this as it may, and as I deem it is: unavoidablywhen tackling the enigmas of motion and rest, "everyobject we perceive is set off by us instinctively against abackground which is taken to be at rest", to cite the lateMichael Polanyi (1891-1976).(5) Regrettably however, asC.S. Lewis remarks: "Instinct is a name for we know notwhat",(6) and scientific ukases issued from such a shakypoint of view are therefore, it seems to me, highlysuspect. Yet such ukases are the stock-in-trade of theruling astronomical paradigm. And easily, but also againand again inconsistently employed, they fudge Russell'sinadmissible metaphysical factor in virtually allcosmological deliberations and Gedankenexperimentsabout motion and rest.

The Armstrong Alert

"There are few words which are misused in physicsas much as 'observer'. Sometimes it seems to mean'receiver', sometimes 'bystander'”.(7) This trenchantremark by the late Harold L. Armstrong (1921-1985),which I for myself have dubbed the Armstrong Alert,we cannot take to heart enough when dealing withrelative versus absolute cosmic motions. To neglect it - Ispeak from sad experience! -- is to court defeat in debates

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and disaster in deductions. (Even when outlining thisessay, however much aware of the danger, I caughtmyself napping). A bystander is by definition notinvolved with, or a partaker in, the act or process he islooking at. And the point the Alert impresses on us is thatrelative to the Universe as a whole we can only be"inside" observers, not bystanders surveying thatUniverse in its entirety and determining its manner ofmotion - if any - from a platform at rest against abackground at rest. Yet the fact is that we ever and againunthinkingly slip into an attitude of mind that forgets thiscerebral trespass. Even worse: in our ratiocinations wemay jump from "inside" to "outside" and back againwithout realizing the fallacy of not taking this jump intoaccount. It will sometimes, and in the present paperunavoidably, become necessary to talk "as if" we werebystanders, but only for a Bystander, Who ever was, is,and will be, is the Universe truly an "object" transcendedby Him.

Two striking examples, culled from among themany that are readily available, will illustrate this everpresent fallacy. When Martin Gardner, enthralled byEinstein's theories, attempts to demolish the late HerbertDingle's arguments against the validity of the notoriousTwin Paradox, he is forced to admit that Dingle has apoint. Whether the spaceship with John aboard issupposed to move rapidly away from the Earth, or thespaceship is taken to be the fixed frame of reference andstay-at-home James is condemned to blast off into thewild blue yonder - it makes, there being no absolutemotion, mathematically no difference. Yet, Gardnerpontificates, Dingle is wrong when he therefore

does not accept the paradox. "Why wouldn't the same

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calculations, with the same equations, show that earth-time slowed down the same way? They would indeed if itwere not for one gigantic fact: when the earth movesaway, the entire universe moves with it" (Gardner'sitalics).(8)

Restricting the argument to the motions involved,we can only say something sensible about those when wejudge them against a background taken to be at rest."Inside" the box of the Universe modern scienceacknowledges no absolute motion to be observable. It ishence six of one or half a dozen of the other whether Johnleaves James or James leaves John behind - a backgroundagainst which to judge the matter is immanently not insight, and Dingle's conclusion can therefore kinematicallynot be faulted. However, our relativity apostle Gardnernow plays a "jack-in-the-box" game, and by doing thatsnatches, he thinks, victory out of the jaws of defeat.Apropos of nothing he propels himself in his imaginationout of our cosmical box to a place absolutely at restagainst a background at rest "outside" our Universe, fromwhich transcendent platform, he assures us, we shall seehis "gigantic" fact. Or if we prefer to state it otherwise:from a foothold "inside" the Universe, but independent ofit, taken to be at rest as observed from that extra-cosmicalplatform, he can show us the difference between theimmanently relative motions of spaceship and Earth.

What Gardner does not realize is that by using thenotion of a moving Universe he is de facto, as Russellwould say, fudging a metaphysical argument into thediscussion. And neither good, nor bad, nor bogus scienceshould be allowed to get away with such statementsabout observations that can only be made from the

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inaccessible regions beyond the starry dome - they are,alas, not in the province of physical science!

Earlier in the same context Gardner still reasonssoberly -- scientifically. "Do the heavens revolve or doesthe earth rotate? The question is meaningless. A waitressmight just as sensibly ask a customer if he wanted icecream on top of his pie or the pie placed under his icecream."(9) But does this tally with the position he takesin the Twin Paradox controversy? If it makes a giganticdifference whether either the Earth is moving or thespaceship, is it then meaningless to ask whether from theunattainable viewpoint Gardner adopts contra Dinglethere is no difference between an Earth at rest and anEarth rotating in at least a kinematic sense? Is it notinconsistent and unscientific to introduce an imaginaryextramundane observer when one is logically pinneddown, but to shy away from that tactic when one deems itexpedient to forego a "meaningless" metaphysical view?

"Is the universe rotating?" P.Birch has asked.(10)"Yes, of course", a Christian simpleton will answer,every day we see the stars revolve around us." Yet toohastily, I think, all and sundry will laugh this fellow outof court. For the term "rotation", if it is to meananything, presupposes an axis at rest against abackground at rest. But such a hold, 20th centuryscience acclaims, we do not have. Clearly the only sensein which Birch's question makes sense is that he isasking whether, from a rockbottom positionoutside" the Universe, or from a viewpoint extra-cosmologically guaranteed to be at rest "inside" it, thereexists an axis around which the starry dome, carrying allcelestial bodies, is seen to be rotating. This means that he

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is leaning on the broken reed of a metaphysicalpresupposition, which hence entails that, e.g. the "NewScientist", if it wants to judge justly, should vilify him asit vilified Hoyle for the invocation of supernaturalism inthe latter's "The Intelligent Universe". For Birch, byasking the above question, which is only extranaturallyanswerable, has, like Sir Fred, "betrayed the verystandard which the scientific community has beenbuilt".(11) Compared with Birch's unreachable and thereforenon-scientific point of view, that of the geocentricsimpleton is ergo on two counts slightly better founded.The latter, first of all, has the witness of everyman'sstraightforward observation on his side, and secondly, heopenly states that he accepts the metaphysical message ofthe Bible, which message, when read withoutpreconceived notions, takes the central position of theEarth to be simply self-evident. For, it reminds us, theCreator had in the Heavens already hung that Earth uponnothing three days before Sun and Moon, and the starsalso, were called into being. We may reject said messageas quasi-transcendent information, but it at least claimsthe support of a long and venerable preCopernicantradition in natural philosophy, whereas Birch, apparentlynot realizing what he is doing, sins against the centraltenet of post-Copernican, this-worldly "new science",which tenet does not allow a meta, a "behind", in therealm of physics.

I therefore hold and repeat that we shall do well tohave a careful look at the cavalier manner in whichtheorists manipulate rest and motion in their treatmentof the problems these concepts set them. What in onecontext, they assert really moves, is in another context

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said to be at rest, and vice versa. Worse, and I obstinatelywant to drive the charge home: in their deliberations theyinstinctively deem themselves the equal of Aristotle'sUnmoved Mover and have virtually succeeded inprompting all of us to join them in committing that folly.They look at the totality of being in the manner we aschildren have been brainwashed to look at drawings ofthe Solar System. Not to mention, later on, at the rotatingdiscus of a Milky Way of stars adrift among the countlessgalaxies contained in an astounding variety of models ofthe Universe! But that Universe is not an object which wecan observe against a background at rest, and thosemodels we cannot identify with the real. Findingourselves in a room of a large building we may drawblueprints of that building to our hearts' content; howeveronly after stepping outside shall we be able either toverify or to reject our fancy figurations. Nobody can turnaround and look objectively at the Universe he shall haveleft behind. The vacuity of the transcendent foundationalfiction that such extra-cosmical kinemetical judgmentsare possible disqualifies, soberly beheld, any confidentassertion about any body orbiting another one. As far asthis is concerned there is but one seemingly unblemishedastronomical and soberly-scientific approach: that of theanti-absolutist Ernst Mach (1838-1916), for whom onlyrelative motions existed.

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Geocentric? Heliocentric?The Janus-Faced Aberration Can't Tell

The present paper is intended to reconsider thereason why George Biddell Airy (1802-1892) ispresumed to have failed to resolve the quandary whetherastronomical aberration shows a starry dome very slowlyorbiting the Sun, and with this Sun orbiting the Earth, orwhether contrariwise we orbit a Sun, which for thatpurpose is taken to be at rest in said dome. It will onlydeal with the kinematical aspects of the affair and willdiscuss the subject matter from a modest pedestrianposition. That is from the celestial body on whichmankind finds itself, taking nothing a priori for grantedabout that body's status in the cosmos observable aroundit. And in doing that it will be earning - until furthernotice! - the "New Scientist's" accolade for not betrayingthe very standards on which the scientific community hasbeen built.

To begin with: non-astronomically informedpeople still cherish the tough untruth that Galileo, riskingmartyrdom for the sake of the true truth, irrefutablyproved that the Earth "goes around the Sun". Those whoare to some degree familiar with the history of astronomyknow better: the man had no unequivocal evidence at allfor his heliocentric model. Granted: at first sight andoverlooking the square and higher powers of theeccentricities of the planetary orbits, it seems simplerthan the Ptolemaic one, and Occam's razor henceadvocates the acceptance of the hypothesis. Yet,simplicity is decidedly not the hallmark of the GreatChain of Created Being. Galileo's observations showedhim that it was possible and attractive to look at the

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heavens heliocentrically, not that such was on anyaccount necessary. And today this is still, or better, againthe situation. "We can't feel our motion through space;nor has any experiment ever proved that the earth actuallyis in motion", says the author of a book that Einsteindeclared to be "a valuable contribution to popularscientific writing".(12) Furthermore: everyone who hasinvestigated the matter and its ramifications knows thatfrom the lifetime of James Bradley (1692-1762) until ourdays, (with their rising number of anti-relativists!) scoresof experts have applied themselves to the task of eitherdemonstrating the Earth's motions, or conversely, todevising theories that acceptably try to explain why thesemotions cannot be demonstrated. The latter surely beingquite an undertaking, because it first of all requiresincontestable evidence that Mother Gea is not onlyrelatively, but really in motion, and subsequently a proofthat proving that motion is impossible. For after all: todeclare an Earth at rest to be unacceptable is not the sameas authenticating it to be on the move!

The Fancy Foundations in the Beyond

I do not want to leave anyone in the dark aboutmy own position. Allow me to present it whilst from adifferent perspective exposing the ontological fallacyalready laid bare in the foregoing. On close inspectionRussell's defect in empirical astronomy, mentioned inthe beginning of this essay, is even more glaringlyoverlooked in post-Copernican hypotheses thanconsciously realized in its pre-Copernican theoreticalsuperstructure. However, from Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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until Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) the Earth's centralposition was in our western civilization openly or tacitlyacknowledged as in the last resort metaphysicallyfounded. Mother Gea's absolute rest in the middle of thematerial Universe was affirmed by natural philosophy,either as self-evident in relation to the Empyrean or elseas clearly assumed by the Bible, the trustworthy Messagefrom the Great Beyond of highest Heaven.

Galileo's and Bacon's "New Science", stillproclaimed from the rooftops, began - and at last nowpractically has completed - the wearying process ofbrushing away the lingering cobwebs of suchsuperstitions. The modern view, as Laplace alreadyassured Napoleon, does not need the hypothesis of anunprovable Creative Intelligence. Yet, unprovable is,logically appraised, not the same as disprovable, ordisproven, and to overlook that is an act of unforgivablyshallow self-deceit. Laplace, the "New Scientist", andtheir manifold epigones are "looking at" the Universe inthe manner in which they here below, comfortably seatedin their studies, can look at man-made celestial globes.Yet about the station and formation of those they are, bythe very nature of the case, competent to make onlyworthless, petty pronouncements. In their pridefulimagination they ascend to supermundane platforms,which they instinctively "know" to be at rest as surely asthey themselves are at rest relative to their desks.However, these extra-cosmical viewpoints they canneither actually point out to us, nor in any way prove toexist. We just have to believe them when they assure usthat observed from those chimerical lookouts the Earth isno more than a speck of dust among countless others, alland everyone resulting from a Big Bang set off by

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nobody in nothingness. In other words: they expect us tohail them as newly evolved gods, now effectivelyreplacing, they have convinced themselves, thatimaginary Ancient of Days in Whom their ancestors puttheir trust with regard to our position in His creation,before Galileo enlightened them.

However, comparing the credentials of theselatter-day self-made gods of flesh with those of an EternalCreator, Who after all may have revealed Himself andmight on a coming Dies Irae do this again? We shall, asPascal's wager puts it, lose nothing if we reject thepontificating puny idols with whom modern science hascornered the sublunar astronomical marketplace. Dust todust, ash to ashes! On the other hand - not so small achance, I reflect, when studying the all sciences andengineering encompassing wisdom displayed in theprecisely adaptive structures of the Solar System andevery living thing... on the other hand: what if there is anOmnipotent Being above all temporal being? A God ofgreat promises, Whose Suffering Son has told us aboutthose promises and the coming Kingdom? A God -to formulate it in a way a benevolent outsiderwould allow - Who during the present age of ourworld for His own omniscient good reasons seemsto confine Himself to only showing His handiworkupheld and trustworthily regulated by His laws forthe Universe that He has created? A God, Who isworking out a plan here below, and Who for itscompletion in a, for that purpose, amoral setting wants usto show our mettle in choosing between good and evil,radiating faith, hope, and love even in adversities andsorrows, instead of only looking after Number One? AGod, Who created all the lights, great and small, in the

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firrnament, to divide the day from the night and to be forsigns and seasons in behalf of mankind, to which He hasallotted an Earth that cannot be moved, whatever thoseephemeral tin-pot deities like a Gould, a Sagan, aJastrow, "reveal" to the contrary? And maintain AnnoDomini 1988 with a weird assortment of ad hocs, whichlogically evaluated are not truly testable and henceworthless?

I find the choice not difficult to make between a"sure" - we are assured! - nothing and a not impossiblesomething. It is easier for me - and that not only forpromptings of self-interest - to believe in a world subspecie aeternitatis than in the monstrous, meaninglessspace-time Universe depicted and preached by the self-levitated and self-supernaturalized mortal protagonists ofmodern astrophysics. And those who on this certainlymomentous issue label my words as wishful thinking Ianswer with a tu quoque: scientism's demi-gods of man'sdevising are nowadays in the same boat with regards tothe incontestable truth of their prophetic utterances. Forthe modern philosophers of science have at long lastagain become aware of a certainty that wise men havealways known: theories "saving the appearances" are atbest no more than logical possibilities without anytrustworthy claim on the truth. As one of them, LewisThomas, has succinctly expressed it: "Science is foundedon uncertainty... We are always, as it turns out,fundamentally wrong".(13) Because of wishfully hopingto escape from a teleological Universe, I add!

I crave the reader's indulgence for this seeminglyill-fitting digression. However, I do not apologize for it.In fact it fits and was necessary. Astronomy is the oldest

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of the sciences, and revolutions in its realm precipitateupheavals in all human thinking. For the first most simplepre-scientific question we can ask is at the same time thelast most profound ontological one that we can ask aboutall things visible. Is what we see and feel the true state ofaffairs or a deplorable illusion? Do the Heavens revolveor does the Earth rotate? Scientism, its prophets thinkingeverything except themselves away(14) and believingthey can sit in the Temple of God showing themselves tobe God, proclaims the second alternative. I proclaim thefirst. The difference - allow me to repeat it - between uswith regards to the matter here at hand is that thoseprophets are not aware of their self-made metaphysicalstarting point, or else prefer not to mention it when theyare hammering home their monistic meaninglessness ofall that is. On the contrary I freely and openly professHoly Writ to be my lodestar when I defend here ageocentric, astronomically pre-scientific, view.

To conclude: the choice between the Universe asseen by men arrogating to themselves a metaphysicalposition and as seen by Him, Who claims to be itsCreator, I find not difficult to make. Ever-changinghuman confabulations consistently dismissing formerviews as short-sighted after new discoveries - how cananybody trust those chancy guesses as scientific truth?Especially since those guesses subtly but steadily havebeen used to erode mankind's inborn conviction of amysterious meaning behind, beyond, and above ourmortal life? That erosion has now reduced us to blobs ofplasmatic matter, somehow having become sentientduring the senseless aftermath of a Big Bang. Copernicusmay not have foreseen the consequences of his

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theoretical dethronement of the Earth. But where is thehistorian who denies that the acceptance of Galileo'sfolly, its foundation laid by the Italian Renaissancepreceding it, has not totally changed the world-view ofcountless millions? And who does not realize that henceits demise might well cause many humans to re-assesstheir humanity as a precious gift with a glorious future inan age to come?

Aberration, Continued

In a short paper it is impossible to enumeratethose fruitless efforts of three centuries, all trying toestablish incontrovertibly the veracity of Galileo'slegendary "Eppur Si muove!". Those interested inparticulars will find them sprinkled throughout theextensive literature dealing with the issues involved.(15)For the purpose at hand we may restrict ourselves - as acursory view of history clearly intimates - to a crucialexperiment at the crossroads of classical and relativisticscience. To wit, as already mentioned, the test performedin 1871 by Airy, a test more than a century earliersuggested by a forgotten genius, Ruggiero GuiseppeBoscovich (1711 -1787).

Since the readers for whom this essay is intendedrange, professionally grouped, from interested laymen todoctors in astrophysics, I am compelled to be popularwithout sacrificing correctness and to elaborate wherefor those "in the know" a single sentence would suffice.Only one mental favour I must ask all of them to grantme. It is that for the sake of argument they suspend orforget for a few minutes a fact they already "know" orare convinced of, i.e. that the Earth is no more than an

De Labore Solis 27

Imagine somewhere on Earth a closed box ABCDwith a pinhole P in the top through which a light ray,from a source S stationed in a tower, touches the bottomDC in S. Now suppose that we set our box in motiontowards the right. Then the light in a straight line movingray SS still needs a fraction of time after passing throughthe pinhole to reach the bottom DC. But during this splitsecond the box has moved to position A1, B1, C1, D1, and"inside" the box S will hence have veered to S1 at the leftof S. Further: it is not difficult to see that, when we fastenour frame of reference on the box, the path of the lightray will show a slant.

Next we now fill the box with water and repeatour Gedankenexperiment. With light source and box bothat rest, relative to us and the Earth, nothing alters, but assoon as we again set the box in motion we observe achange. In water the speed of light is about three fourthsof its speed in air. Consequently the "wavicles" emanatedby S need more time to traverse the box. As seen by anobserver situated at the bottom of that box their trajectoryis, it follows, more slanted than it was on our first trialrun, and they will reach the bottom at S2.

So far, so good. However, now the action shifts inspace and time to a duo of astronomers who becameconvinced that they had found a phenomenon capable ofremoving the last lingering doubt whether Copernicushad indeed the right sow by the ear. In December A.D.1725 we see James Bradley and Samuel Molyneuxmanipulating a telescope fixed to a chimney stack anddirected at the star Gamma Draconis, almost verticallyoverhead. Neglecting for brevity's sake the finerpoints of the affair: prolonged observation showed thetwo stargazers that Gamma Draconis, relative to the

28 De Labore Solis

eartbound chimney of Molineux's house, in the course ofa year described a small circle. By the light of theforegoing their conclusion is easy to grasp and crystalclear: the Earth is moving, and in fact revolving relativeto Gamma Draconis and hence relative to all fixed stars,the Sun included. More: taking into account the speed oflight and the observed angle of aberration, simpletrigonometry shows our orbiting home to have exactly thevelocity that Bradley already "knew" it had of more thanone hundred thousand km/hr. The slightest skepticismremaining about the truth of Copernican astronomicalgospel could therefore be laid to rest.

Well, not totally! Logically considered, thisconclusion uses that invalid theoretical syllogism, themodus ponendo ponens. If situation P is the case, weagree, then we shall observe the phenomenon Q. Nowindeed we observe Q. Does it therefore follow that P isthe factual state of affairs? By no means necessarily, forQ may be caused by a variety of other circumstances. Asone of my textbooks of logic remarks: "We shall havefrequent occasions to call the reader's attention to thisfallacy. It is sometimes committed by eminent men ofscience, who fail to distinguish between necessary andprobable inferences, or who disregard the distinctionbetween demonstrating a proposition and verifyingit".(17) "Aberration", to quote van der Waals, "may equallywell be squared with the supposition that the stars indeeddescribe circlets. And though we find the latterexplanation improbable and prefer the first, the questionmay arise: is it in no way possible by means ofobservations to decide which of the two suppositions isthe right one?"(18) Boscovich, sensibly and objectively not inclined to

De Labore Solis 29

put all his theoretical eggs in Bradley's logicallybottomless basket, saw a chance to do just that. Andmany an astronomically non-conversant reader, havingfollowed the discourse thus far, may already haverealized that chance also. Fill a telescope with water andmeasure the aberration angle for any fixed star. If theangle in this manner obtained is larger than the onemeasured by Bradley, the Earth indeed orbits, relative tofirmament and Sun. If no different value is registered,then the starry sphere swings, with the Sun on which itappears to be centered, around that beautifully blue-and-white marbled "planet" Gea.

Unlike the conclusion of Bradley's invalidponendo ponens argument, which by affirming affirms,this reasoning in the modus tollendo tollens, the moodwhich by denying denies, cannot logically be faulted. IfP, then also Q, and hence if no Q, then no P. The outcomeof the experiment will settle the case unless, of course,we may not like the verdict and therefore refuse to acceptit!

For more than a century after Boscovichsuggested this verification of the heliocentric theorynobody of any astronomical consequence thought aneffort to execute it worth the trouble. Bradley, after all,had only and somewhat superfluously confirmed whaton the authority of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo --with Newton standing on the shoulders of those giants --everybody knew to be true. Why bother to lay bare theglaring untruth of Tycho Brahe's nonsensical scheme? Asfar as this is concerned we may for the ruling consensusfrom 1726 until today well quote the late (from relativistto anti-relativist converted) Herbert Dingle that "surelyno one in his senses would now maintain that the Earth

30 De Labore Solis

provided a standard of rest for all the light in theUniverse.(19)

Yet progress of the sciences during the nineteenthcentury evoked such a welter of conflicting theories aboutaethers, spaces, and motions(15) that in 1871 Airy, takinghis clue from Boscovich, decided for once and for all tomeasure that supposed alteration in the amount of stellaraberration by means of a water-filled telescope. He hadno great expectations about a decisive result, since trialsconducted by the German Klinkerfuesz and theDutchman Hoek - more about the latter later! - hadalready presaged a failure to find any alteration inBradley's 20".47 angle.(20) And indeed that failureturned out to be the case, wherefore the only remainingdifficulty was how to explain such a seeminglyPtolemaic result in Newtonian terms. Happily the meansto do this were available ready-made, for half a centuryearlier, after considering an experiment by Francis Arago(1786-1853),(21) the French physicist Augustin Fresnel(1788-1827) had devised a theory that offered theneeded solace.(22) Taking his clue from the fact thatthe square of the speed of sound in gases is in inverseratio to their specific gravity, and assuming an elastic-solid aether, Fresnel had obtained a formula for thevelocity of light in moving transparent mediainvolving a factor 1-(1/n2). This so-called "draggingcoefficient" was in 1859 tested by Fizeau (1819-1896),whose affirmative results, after much travail, were in1886 by Michelson and Morley found to be"essentially correct".(23)

De Labore Solis 33

kilometers - we cannot demonstrate that speed! Sparingthe reader the mathematics and neglecting minisculehigher-order terms: if we work it out we find Fresnel'sdragging coefficient adequate to explain Hoek's negativeresult. "If the aether carrying the light moves with avelocity w... then we find w = v(n2-1/n2), which is exactlythe aether velocity according to Fresnel."(26) After all,convinced as we are that his laboratory was not at rest inthe omnipresent aether, but was in any case with theEarth orbiting the Sun at V = 30 km/sec, this must be true.If the drag coefficient were not this 1-(1/n2), Hoek wouldhave observed some effect! Was this conclusion trulyinescapable? Unblushingly to overlook the not yet ruledout most plausible inference - that of the apparatus at restin space - bears testimony to a willful, prejudiced,unscientific short-sightedness. What if v=0 andconsequently w=0? To get ahead of the argument: only ifhere on Earth his hexagon moving at high speed also willstubbornly show no interference shall we have to affirmHoek's explanation. As yet, and without such a controlexperiment, it seems logically a too hastily acceptedconclusion.

Dutifully to follow the storyline taken in thestandard textbooks: "An entirely different piece ofexperimental evidence shows that Fresnel's equation mustbe very nearly correct. In 1871 Airy remeasured the angleof aberration of light using a telescope filled with water",and "it will be seen that if the velocity of the light withrespect to the solar system be made less by entering thewater, one would expect the angle of aberration to beincreased... Actually the most careful measurementsgave the same angle of aberration for a telescope filledwith water as for one filled with air."(27)

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It was, as said, feasible to explain this strangephenomenon with Fresnel's dragging coefficient, but "adifferent explanation is now accepted, based on thetheory of relativity".(28) Or to quote van der Waals: "It ispossible generally to prove how Fresnel's theory entailsthat not a single optical observation will enable us todecide whether the direction in which one sees a star hasbeen changed by aberration. By means of aberration wecan hence not decide whether the Earth is moving orrather the star: only that one of the two must be movingwith respect to the other can be established. Fresnel'stheory is hence a step in the direction of the theory ofrelativity."(29)

The 1887 Cleveland Disenchantment

Again: so far, so good. But we may ask ourselves:"If the aether reaches throughout space, does not ourEarth move with respect to it? Then there should be anoticeable difference in the speed of light along, andperpendicular to, the direction of motion of the Earth,because of the aether wind which blows unnoticed in ourears and eyes".(30) The reasoning is logically airtightmodus tollendo tollens. But so is - an omnipresent aetherpresupposed - the corollary: no aether wind, then nomotion!

As everyone knows: in 1887 Michelson andMorley, using an extremely complicated and sensitiveinterferometer, tried to measure this difference,(31) and --just like Airy -- drew a blank for the purpose of justifyingGalileo. "It appears…reasonably certain that if there beany relative motion between the Earth and theluminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough

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entirely to refute Fresnel's explanation of aberration (32)(emphasis added, v.d.K.). For this 1887 result "is inflagrant conflict with the hypothesis which was putforward to explain Fizeau's experiment. If one performsthe experiment in the air, for which the drag coefficient isequal to zero, (the refractive index is almost equal toone), then one expects a displacement, or conversely thenegative result points to a drag coefficient of one: theaether travels with the apparatus. There is no aetherwind.We see that all sorts of difficulties arise from the use ofthe concept of the aether, by which we understand someelastic material through which the light oscillationstravel."(33)

On the authority of Niklas Koppernigk it is, ofcourse, declared ultra vires to ask whether thesedifficulties do not disappear like snow under a hot sun ifwe consider the apparatuses of Arago, Fizeau, Airy, Hoekand Michelson and Morley to be at rest in a space thatknows place. The Earth, we have decided to know, isspinning through space. Hence, to cite a twentieth centurycomment on Airy's mishap: "If the Fresnel dragcoefficient be introduced into the calculation of theaberration, there emerges the fact that the aberration isthe same with or without water in the telescope. Thusconversely Airy's negative result confirms the validity ofthe Fresnel coefficient".(34) It of course does not whenlogically judged. That is: without the unscientific,instinctive, imaginary, and pseudo-metaphysicalviewpoint of the heliocentric and a-centric confessions ofastronomical faith. As until today all logically validtollendo tollens experiments after the style of Michelsonand Morley have shown: if there is a light-carryingaether, our instruments are not travelling through

36 De Labore Solis

that aether - the isotropy of space investigated from, orrelative to, the Earth has never as yet been seriouslycalled into question. Hence in Airy's case the dragcoefficient is absent and cannot be dragged into court tovindicate Copernicus.

Whichever way we turn: after 1887 there clearlywas the devil to pay with regard to the permissibleparticulars of the cosmic clockwork suspended in anyform of the luminiferous stationary aether. It is notnecessary to enter into details about the input and outputby Stokes, Fitzgerald, Lorentz, Poincaré, and a host ofminor celebrities, all of them trying to devise a way outof the cul-de-sac in which classical Copernicanism founditself. By 1897 Michelson aptly summarized the situationas follows.

The Dire Consequences

"In any case we are driven to extraordinaryconsequences, and the choice lies between these three:

1. The Earth passes through the ether (or ratherallows the ether to pass through its entire mass) withoutappreciable influence.

2. The length of all bodies is altered (equally?) bytheir motion through ether.

3. The Earth in its motion drags with it the ethereven at distances of many thousands of kilometers fromits surface."(35)

Now, first of all, it is strange that this lifelongagnostic Albert Abraham Michelson (1852-1931),(36)appears on one issue not in the least agnostic, but asfirmly a fundamentalist Copernican believer as thestaunchest Bible-reader who holds on to his Authorized

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Version. There is no place in Michelson's only partiallyagnostic tunnel-vision for possibility Number Four. Yet,aside from any appreciation of its value, a geocentricexplanation of the enigmas encountered in the search forthe true model of the cosmos... it stares, I repeat andmaintain, any open-minded down-to-earth scientist in theface when he surveys all those abortive efforts todisqualify it.

Apart from that, and too easily forgotten: none ofthese three theoretical attempts to save the appearances,nor sagacious variations on their themes, are withoutdrawbacks or contradictory experimental evidence evenwhen one observes them from the accepted, ifunattainable, heliocentric super-cosmical viewpoint.

Michelson's first extraordinary conclusion mayexplain his 1887 failure, but it resolutely disqualifiesFresnel. Even worse, for this being the case, Boscovich'slogically and classically impeccable test for pinning downthe true cause of aberration then shows the Earth to be atrest, independently from Michelson's own resultwitnessing to the trustworthiness of this conclusion.Otherwise Airy would have observed an increased angleof aberration for his water-filled telescope, in this casenot affected by such an evasive Fresnel-type aether wind.

The second option, the Fitzgerald-Lorentzian one,does not fare much better, and Michelson's "equally?" inbrackets reveals already its invidious shortcoming. If allbodies moving relative to a stationary aether wouldexpand or shrink at specific and hence presumablyunequal rates, we theoretically should, by usingmeasuring devices with different contraction coefficients,be able to pinpoint absolute motion. However, (e.g. in themany variations of the Michelson-Morley experiment

38 De Labore Solis

subsequently performed), not the faintest indication ofsuch an inequality has ever been found. Until a deviationfrom its general applicability will be observed the"equally" hence stands. But that means bolstering thecase by means of introducing unobservables. And toquote D.W. Sciama, there is a "fundamental reason forobjecting" to such a theory. If the length of all bodies isaltered equally by their motion through the ether, thenthese alterations "cannot be observed except through thevery phenomenon they were invented to explain".(37) AsLouis Essen, with a typical British understatement,comments on Lorentz' clever ad hoc: "This theory wasput forward very tentatively and was not generallyregarded as being entirely satisfactory." And let me add,to prevent an indignant "Yes, but…", Essen's nextsentence. "The Lorentz transformations are the basis ofthe special theory of relativity, but Einstein derived themfrom two assumptions of a general nature, which heraised to the status of principles "(38)

Michelson's third intimation looks, Copernicallyconsidered, the most promising. Subsequently it has beenand is being put forward in many variations on theoriginal theme by a G.G. Stokes (1819-1903) proposed"aetherosphere", which Michelson, until Einstein'sappearance on the scene, "was to revere above allothers".(39)

It cannot be denied that such semi-geocentrichypotheses take Hoek, Airy, and Michelson &Morley in stride. However, as long as the diameters ofthe envisaged Earth-bound aether "bubbles" are notexperimentally established and their structure - whetherhomogeneous, stratified, or vorticose - elucidated, theseexplanations of the unexplained suffer from the same

De Labore Solis 39

shortcoming as the Lorentzian one. Not yet in the leastverified ad hocs fail to qualify as arguments, let alone as"proofs". They are by themselves only woolly excuses.Worse: until logically incontrovertible test results in theirfavour will have come to the fore the skeletons ofPtolemy, Aristotle, and Tycho Brahe still rattle happily intheir cupboards. Just postulate not an "aetherosphere"embracing Mother Earth, but a "galactosphere"encompassing the stars. Then you will have come close toenthroning Tycho Brahe!

The Verdict of Logic

To the foregoing remarks an epistomologicaladdendum is, sadly, yet in order. In a survey of thetheoretical ratiocinations employed by all such classicalscientific defenders of the Copernican confession, oneaspect stands out for everyone to see: without exceptionthey either use the logically invalid modus ponendoponens (MPP) to escape from any valid modus tollendotollens (MTT), or else they take refuge in unverified orunverifiable ad hocs. A short digression may help tomake this clear.

Suppose that during a simple optical test I seea green light. I know a green source will produce greenradiation. However, if I reject the clear conclusion thatthe observed phenomenon is caused by a green lampbecause I believe only yellow lamps to be possible, then Ican adhere to my firm faith by presupposing thatsomebody is holding a panel of blue glass between meand the light source. The anyway overhasty MPPconclusion that this source is green therefore does notimpress me in the least.To my convictionof "yellowness

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alone" I may with perfect logic still stubbornly cling.The other way around: forsooth, a yellow lamp

will doubtlessly emanate yellow light. But I see a greenglow, and therefore its source cannot be yellow. Have nofear - I again postulate the blue glass and in doing thatneatly evade the scrape in which a valid MTT threatenedto catch me.

All jesting apart: those blue-glass ad hocs are, ofcourse, worthless exhibits of wishful thinking. Sober-scientifically they are without any value until I shall haveobserved these in-between panels of glass on the spot andin that way am able to demonstrate the actualness of myad hocs convincingly. And these considerations withregard to compelling verifications count for allhypothetical, logically-correct syllogizing. The strengthof conclusions drawn from straightforward interpretationsof observations depends squarely on the premises and theadditional ad hocs employed. If those premises and adhocs are unverified or non-verifiable, then theconclusions rest, ten to one, on quicksand. True scientistsshould shy away from prejudiced hypotheses of that kind,but they often do not. If they feel their Weltanschauungthreatened by what are for them unpleasant actualities,then any reasoning warding off such an unpleasantnesswill do!

Evaluating the cogitations of self-professedlyunprejudiced science before the tribunal of logic we findthis blue-glass trick, time after time, employed in the useof both theoretical syllogisms. For instance: theBoscovich-Airy reasoning is logically impeccable MTT.If P then Q - no Q, then no P. If we are on the move thenstellar aberration observed through water will be greaterthan that observed through air. Therefore in case we do

De Labore Solis 41

not observe this increase the Earth is at rest and the starrydome is revolving relative to us. But Airy had alreadydecided to know - be it on no experimentally observedsublunar solid and indisputable grounds whatsoever! -that this is not and can not be true. Hence he and hissupporters looked around and found applicable rationalevidence that obviated the horrendous necessity of sidingwith the Inquisition in the Galileo trial of 1633. Asalready shown: an aether drag only demonstrable forwater in motion relative to an observer provided thehelpful ad hoc. Alas - not at all. That ad hoc is obtainedby means of an MPP, an affirmation of the consequent.Before we can use it we shall have to demonstrate thatFizeau's experiment registered no more than a change in adrag already present in the water travelling with theEarth, for exactly that motion is on trial. True enough: ifthe Earth is moving through a luminiferous aether, orthrough a spatiality "at rest", however conceived ordefined, and Fresnel's coefficient hits the nail on thehead, then water-filled telescopes will not registerincreased aberration. No increase is observed, and hencewe may conclude that Airy's test result is in completeharmony with Newton's vision. Well and good, but for anEarth at rest relative to space (or whatsoever mysteriousentity it is in which or through which light travels at theconstant velocity c), the Fresnel drag inevitably isreduced to zero and does not affect our measurements ofstellar aberration as "explained" by Bradley.

The whole reasoning is a prime example ofbegging the question. Only after an experiment like thatperformed by Hoek in 1868, or that proposed by me forthe first time in 1968, shall have been performed in e.g. a

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Concorde or space shuttle, and then will have given anegative result, will I be obliged to accept Airy's verdict,because in that case it will have become clear that indeedFresnel's drag coefficient masks any change in motion ora change from rest to motion.

We shall therefore be well advised not to gobeyond the inductively well confined and never yetsuccessfully disputed absolute and constant velocity c oflight in vacuo as independent of its source and the samefor all Earth-bound observers. Disputed by measurementsin flat space, that is - the only space, we should notforget, in which we are able to measure! And then itbecomes difficult for Airy, et al, to vitiate their MTTreasoning. We may, as has been done and is done, throwin logically possible ad hocs, but so long as such ad hocsare not beyond doubt experimentally proven thatprocedure does not cut ice. No penny, no paternoster; nopay, no piper. If no fringe displacement correspondentwith the Earth's supposed velocity, then no orbital, letalone galactic, motion of our globe through a relative to itstagnant luminiferous aether.

In Michelson's heliocentrically preconditionedmind the obvious corollary, a simple straightforwardgeocentric hypothesis did not get a chance to rear itsunwanted head. A model effortlessly explainingBradley's, Hoek's, Airy's, and his own test results?... Nowor ever: never! Mortal men's habitat the gudgeon onwhich the Heavens turn?... Who can still believe such amedieval superstition? Referring the readers to thatblue glass panel that spoiled the simple syllogisms:Michelson searched for and found those three helpful adhocs, three pretexts able to ward off a disturbing andunwanted perspective. However, as I have shown: none

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of that MPP trio is strong enough effectively to disavowthe logically compelling MTT he himself and Morley hadconfidently applied when constructing theirinterferometers.

Einstein to the Rescue?

It is well known that Einstein at different timesand occasions, for understandably different reasons, gavedifferent answers to questions about the occurrences thathad prompted him to his views on motion, rest, andspace-time. "By his own account the experimental resultsthat had influenced him were the observations on stellaraberration and Fizeau's measurements on the speed oflight in moving water. 'They were enough,' he is reportedto have said in 1950."(40) Yes, and I think I understandthe sentiment motivating him. If we cannot prove whatwe a priori "know" to be true, then we have to find areason why such a proof eludes us.

Yet I will be the first one to admit that hisclarification of the enigma baffling Michelson and hisfollowers is a masterful movement of thought in a greatand subtle mind on a high level of abstraction. Giventhe post-Christian Weltanschauung of our time, it is forthose enmeshed in it pretty much mandatory to believethe relativity postulates. Surveying the struggle to keepGalileo enshrined, notwithstanding the accumulatingevidence to the contrary, and recognizing theinefficacious logical shortcomings of every argumentemployed, they cannot but side with Einstein. With himthey have to hail all those Copernican crusaders aspiringto a rational solution with an "A plague on both your

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houses!" For indeed, if the logical inference, time aftertime looming behind thought and test, is by all andsundry being declared impossible since unacceptable,then the only way out of the impasse is a move tosupersede logic. That is to say: nothing less than apremise capable of turning all evidence favouring ageocentric Universe into evidence for an a-centrichomogeneous one will suffice. But two wrongs don'tmake a right!

Permit me, before I pursue the matter any further,to quote a wise warning by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington(1882-1944). He himself certainly did not heed it whenhe presented the results of his 1919 SobralPrincipeeclipse expedition as hard facts, for today the scientificestablishment looks at those askance.(41) Yet Sir Arthur'swarning is thereby not disqualified. One man's failing isanother man's lesson - we should, and I shall, takeEddington's caveat to heart.

"For the reader resolved to eschew theory andadmit only definite observational facts, all astronomicalbooks are banned. There are no purely observational factsabout the heavenly bodies. Astronomical measurementsare, without exception, measurements of phenomenaoccurring in a terrestrial observatory or station; it is onlyby theory that they are translated into knowledge of auniverse outside."(42) So it is, and setting theory againsttheory in the quest for knowledge I hold that trulyobjective and unprejudiced appraisers will acknowledge aglaring datum. To wit: logically evaluated the contra-Copernican testimony willy-nilly obtained by level-headed classical experimental science is not over-whelming only for those who with open eyes decideto be blind. Airy and Hoek were compelled to

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accept as already proven what was - and is! - not yetproven: an omnipresent Fresnel drag caused by an at least30 km/sec aether wind in all transparent materials,whether water, glass, perspex, champagne, or castor oil.However, no observer at rest on the Earth's surface canmeasure this drag as such. Only a supposed "change" inthat drag becomes visible by setting these substances inmotion relative to such an observer. Michelson andMorley, on the other hand, found the luminiferous aethernearly unaffected by the motion of the matter that itpermeates. Hence it can be argued that Fresnel's theoryholds for transparent substances moving through anaether at rest and therefore can only be measured by anobserver at rest in that aether. Which is tantamount tosaying that Hoek and Airy, (observer and substance bothat rest), Fizeau, (observer at rest, substance in motion),and Michelson and Morley, all five of them have withone accord been vainly striving to show that the Earth isnot at rest. Unhappily: since 1905 this appraisal no longerpresents a definite plus for the geocentric theory. AlbertEinstein (1879-1955) came, saw, and conquered with hisspecial theory of relativity. Declared that the physicallaws are the same in all inertial frames of reference andthat the speed of light in a vacuum is hence constant forall observers regardless of the motion of the source orobserver. Then the controversial aspects that latenineteenth-century scientists had to wrestle withdissolve into thin air. As J. H. Poincaré (1854-1912) in1904 already formulated it: the laws of physical pheno-mena are such that we do not have and cannot have anymeans of discovering whether or not we are carriedalong in a uniform motion of translation.(43) Or to

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phrase Einstein's theoretical substructure for this principleof relativity popularly: to us it looks as if the Universe isgeocentric, but of course it is not. The Lorentztransformations, quantifying "equal" contractions that arenever directly observable but necessarily true, explainwhy this is the case. For one result of thesetransformations is "that the two velocities in coordinatesystems that are in relative motion do not add accordingto the methods used in classical mechanics. For example,the resultant of two velocities in the same line is not theirarithmetic sum".(44) Hushing up a few experimentalresults that do not fit too well in the Einsteinian-Lorentzian scheme,(45) this non-measurable but not to bedoubted "fact" again allows us (and that now non-classically!) to give short shrift to any effort aiming at ageocentric explanation of Airy's failure. The velocity ofthe light traversing the water-filled telescope "as seen bythe observer is changed by the fraction 1-1/n2... Noassumption of any 'dragging' is involved in the relativityarguments, nor is the existence of an aether evenpostulated."(46) Glory be, but this only if Lorentz' ipsedixit, which ipso facto cannot be shown to be true, reallyis true!

Gladly and without any mental reservations Iadmit that the theory of special relativity wonderfully"saves the phenomena". A summary of its prowess byPanofski and Phillips(47) almost convinces any doubtingThomas who peruses the evidence. Yet such a Thomasshall do well to bethink himself twice before becoming atrue believer. No question about it: if the STR is true thenthe logically understandable hierarchical and Earth-centered Universe of Antiquity and the Middle Ages wasa pipe dream. The problem remains the "if" in the last

De Labore Solis 47

sentence. Time and theoretical thought do not stand still;the Special Theory, after eleven years of gestation, gavebirth to the General Theory, a totally different kettle offish. "Historians of future generations, therefore, willlikely view the Special Theory more as a mark ofstunning intellectual brilliance, which presaged theGeneral Theory, rather than as a thing of value orpermanence in itself. Hindsight now discloses it to be butone of four imposing and permanent steps into the newera. First was the problem with which such as Lorentz,Larmor, and Poincaré wrestled regarding covarianttransformation between systems in relative motion whenthe instrumentation of experimental physics failed torecord the expected factor of Earth velocity relative tointerplanetary space... Fourth was Einstein's fascinationin turn for Minkowski's geometric approach, followed byhis determination to tackle the gravitational problems insimilar manner' involving acceleration and non-Euclidiangeometry in place of the flat space and constant velocityof the Special Theory, with the resulting General Theory.Among these four, only the climactic fourth is essential toEinstein's historical position in relativistic physics, theSpecial Theory being but one of the preliminary steps...No more value need therefore attach to the permanence ofthe Special Theory than to the discarded models ofLorentz and others, which preceded it."(48)

It seems to me that the author of this quote, Dr.Carl A. Zapffe, though bent on pleading his own cause,with these remarks may well be skirting a morepromising approach in astrophysics. With regard to theGeneral Theory as such: suppose the facile analogy ofspace as the frictionless surface of an expanding balloon,

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with all celestial bodies whirling around on it, to havevalue. Then Russell's metaphysical dilemma still stands.Einstein, in a haughty illusion "observing" the Universefrom a transcendental observatory, only immateriallyexisting inside his skull, prophecies that if we will justjoin him there "on high" we shall see how there isnowhere a hold on the curved Heaven. Yet what if therereally is an Almighty God looking at His creation from anth dimension, and revealing in His Message to mankindthat He has on this "balloon" established the Earth in sucha way that it cannot be moved?... Who of us here belowcan do more than believe the one or the Other?

In the present context I am satisfied with theundeniable actuality that though the STR presumablyallowed the astronomers to escape from a geocentricbugbear - and a daunting argument from design behind it!- the GTR has been compelled to declare the Earth-centered model "as good as anybody else's, but notbetter".(49)

There are, however, for a skeptic wary of buying apig in a poke, a few reflections that will cause him to takeEinstein's cure-all for the problems, sketchily paraded inthe foregoing, with a little less than total conviction.

Non-Observables Prove Nothing

First of all, and again: both of Einstein's theoriesassume as "proven" that which is not "proven": an Earthorbiting the Sun. But since, I must expect, all those whoread this sentence have with him been conditioned tobelieve that assumption as gospel truth, for them thisargument falls to the ground.

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A second consideration possibly carries moreweight. Metaphysics deals with unobservables, physicswith observables. Accept Einstein's "sacred cow within asacred cow",(50) the absolute velocity of light, that is.Furthermore take for granted that the Earth rotates andorbits a Sun, which is, as a nondescript member of theMilky Way, with this Way revolving relative to theaggregate of galaxies further out. Then the exigencies ofapplied physics and ineluctable logic force us to concludethat radiation reaching us from different directions willhere on Earth be clocked at different velocities. This isnot the case, and hence there must be a reason why.However that reason, actually Poincaré's "principle", is -allow me to repeat the sobering phrase - unobservableexcept through the very phenomenon it is invented toexplain. To introduce Maxwell's notorious demon: if Iaccount for the awkward Ptolemaic appearances bypostulating legions of little gremlins adjusting thevelocity of incoming light to the sacrosanct standardvalue c, then this preposterous theory and the found-ational assumption of the reigning relativity share,ontologically judged, the same nugatory status. To wit:both want us to accept an explanation that by clear-headed science should be eschewed as worthlessfantasy. A logician might even point out that equatingMaxwell's demons with the mysterious capability ofPoincaré's "principle" is not fair to those little nosee'ums.They are, after all, logically possible and henceadmissible. For homo sapiens, who in his thinking, anddoing, and research refuses to brush off the stricturesof logic and the laws of mathematics, it is not easyto accept that relativity. It needs a wrenching of themind "understandingly" to acknowledge that, though the

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Doppler effects are the same for sound waves and lightwavicles", an observer "at rest" in the trajectory of a lightray, and all observers, relative to him moving withwhatever speeds along that trajectory, yet will clock thatray's velocity relative to them at the constant velocity c.As science teachers know: when students for the firsttime are introduced to the special theory of relativity it isnot the dullards in the class who initially are oftenunwilling to reconcile themselves to it. Until, of course,they begin to realize that a refusal logically constrainsthem to part with Copernicus' system. Which system,thanks to Galileo and his apostles, they have beenbrainwashed to deem "obvious". And therefore seeing noother way out of the dilemma, no other acceptablepossibility in sight, they close their eyes and swallowwhat in their heart of hearts they know to be impossible,but gradually and under persistent peer pressure areconverted into believing as scientific and self-evidentlytrue truth.

Einstein himself, for that purpose designatinglogic as "common sense" once gave short shrift to thewhole matter. Objections against his theory, heproclaimed, result from "a deposit of prejudice laid downin the mind prior to age of eighteen".(51) I know that Iam banging my head against a wall, against a convictionpretty much ineradicably engraved on mankind's mind.Yet I cannot withhold myself from hoisting all relativistswith their own petard by asking them whether theirunshakable faith in Galileo's gospel is not just as wellsuch a deposit In Einstein's 1905 paper he considersrelativity for first order magnitudes "alreadyproven".(52)But where is that proof or anythingapproaching it? I have been searching for those for

De Labore Solis 51

twenty years and have found only syllogistically unsounddemonstrations, untestable and therefore questionable adhocs, circular reasoning, and Newton's laws,acknowledged not to be equal to the task of provingCopernicus when higher powers of the eccentricities ofthe planetary orbits are counted in.

Yes, I know: Einstein's relativity explains toCopernicus' disciples so many otherwise baffling physicalphenomena. I shall be the last to deny it, or to questionthe table of experimental bases(47) "confirming" itmentioned earlier in this essay. If we accept Copernicusthere is no way around it. The wearying trouble is that"if". Why do we have to side with him and Galileo, andon whose orders? Why do we remain unwilling level-headedly to realize that a fully, as well as any semi-geocentric, model will explain these phenomena just ascogently and should be added to the theories in that tablejust mentioned as relativity's equals on any score? Andthen that hackneyed combination of Einstein and the "E =mc2", endlessly bandied about in popular-scientificWestern folklore! True, it can be deduced from thetheory, but it does not prove STR, and does not dependon it, as Einstein himself has admitted. That formula hasbeen derived in at least three non-relativistic ways,(53)and abandonment of STR will leave that Bomb-equationunharmed. Even in a vague manner to think thatsomehow Hiroshima in a most horrible way hasconfirmed the theory to be right is unwarranted. Andmodus ponendo ponens "proofs" may try to buttress itssupposed veracity - in the nature of the case the logicallynecessary verification will be hard to come by.

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The Unfailing Import of Airy's Failure

Like everybody else I was of course, from mytender youth on, imprinted with pictures of an Earthgoing around the Sun and with assurances aboutcountless galaxies of similar great lights far away. But inmy adolescent years, after a long time of dodging thehaunting issue and postponing a decision, I "somehow"was compelled to realize that among all messagesclaiming to possess the truly transcendent answers to the"Whence, why, whither?" of our being only the Bible hada convincing, that is a fully immanent, systematiccomprehension surpassing, ring of truth. That Jesus - andHis good news of God's eternal Kingdom to come -verilyis the way, the truth, and the life I dared no longer deny.

Perusing and studying Holy Writ confronted me,however, with problems still requiring choices in relationto creation. That evolution a la Darwin is a piece ofpreposterous fiction I was already assured of in mywillfully agnostic years. Nobody ever needed to tell methat behind the scene a mysterious active Intelligencehad to be pulling the wires and calling the tune. Deaddust or something called "Nature", somehow endowedwith impersonal but pan-scientific expertise,"designing" and "adapting" countless forms of life andtransmitting by means of sperm and egg intricatepatterns from mortal generation to mortal generation - Inever saw, nor see, how a level-headed observer could,or can, accept such arrant nonsense. Still, under the swayof the prevailing varieties of theistic evolution in thecountry of my birth, the Netherlands, I began mypersonal pilgrim's progress. But reading and rereading

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Genesis in the context of the whole of Scripture I becamemore and more uneasy about glibly approving the mannerin which even orthodox theologians manhandled the firsteleven chapters of the sacred text to make it fit with the"facts" of science. That is, by treating the story as literalhistory from Abraham on, but declaring God's revelationabout our present world's origins to be expressed in a sortof non-factual mood. For try as I might: at no point in theBiblical story-flow could I find the slightest indication ofa change from poetic or mythical propensity into matter-of-fact history. Which made me conclude that for me theonly way of faithfully and reverently doing justice to itsinformative content was to take the Genesis accountliterally. And becoming aware, after my emigration toCanada, of the resurgence of such an old-fashioned viewon the subject, I eagerly jumped on the Creation Societybandwagon of Drs. Lammerts, Morris, et al.

Thinking, however, allows few standstills.Gradually it dawned on me that these brethren are stillhalting between two opinions. Rejecting secular scienti-fic theories about the origins of life on Earth, they stillgo along with those about our habitat's position in thecosmos. For apart from the trio of astronomers publish-ing their geocentric views in the Bulletin of the TychonianSociety, I still have to find one all-out creationist whotakes Genesis 1:1-19, minus the verse 11,12 and 13, justas straight-forwardly as Genesis 1:20-31. But sauce forthe goose is sauce for the gander: he who acceptsinstantaneous fiat creation of our planet's flora and faunahas with regard to cosmogony thereby committedhimself to a beginning of a Heaven containing nothingbut a primeval Earth. Which Earth only after being

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proclaimed fit for plant life and having brought forthgrass and herbs and trees, on the fourth day of theHexaemeron found itself surrounded by Sun, Moon andstars for signs and seasons, days and years. Popularlyformulated: a Bible-believing Christian cosmogony mustreject a Big Bang now having resulted in countless Suns,millions of them possibly surrounded by a set ofaggregates of matter, on many of which through aeons oftime, life may well have evolved. Contrariwise it has topostulate sudden emergence of, to quote Hoyle, "thebubble in which we live", and a dump of matter withoutform providing after five days of formation the dust outof which we are fashioned. Vexed by this exegeticalinconsistency with regard to the sacred text I felt myselfdriven to examine the solidity of the evidence on whichpresent day astronomers erect their multiform models.And found - to cut a long story short - that the old, inScripture assumed as self-evident, and until Galileo neverwidely or seriously doubted geocentric view of the worldhas never been disproven. Not only that: withoutexception all historians, secular as well as sacred, whom Iconsulted about the impact of Canon Koppernigk'sheliocentric turnabout on mankind's Weltanschauungstressed its far reaching consequences. To quote onecomment on the widespread effect of Darwin's Origin ofSpecies summarizing the whole matter: "The theory ofnatural selection brought home as nothing else could dothe radical change in man's status in the Universe andmade dramatically clear the attack on old values that hadactually been implicit in the whole scientific developmentbeginning in the sixteenth century."(54)

Granted: whether modern man is, or is not, morethan the still flawed product of a mega-evolutionary

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guided, or unguided, process is therewithal neitheranswered, nor settled. By what is called "natural light"and by the logic under the aegis of which man iscompelled to think - at his impartial best he has to judgethe contest between Creation and Evolution aninsurmountable draw To turn the clock back either sixthousand or six billion years is impossible. With regard togeology, fossilization, and biology it is therefore stilleach according to his acquired taste. If a transcendentalIntelligent Force at some moment in time past called allbeing into being, we shall see the world of life we see. Ifthe Darwinians, now by the scant supply of data pressedto posit a punctuated equilibrium, have hit the nail on thehead we shall see the same, yet still supposedly evolving.Only with regards to the specifics assumed to havehappened before the first amino acids arrangedthemselves in the murky soup-seas of the pristine Earthare we Anno Domini 1988 in a position to ask somethingsober-scientifically. To wit: is an Earth around which theHeavens revolve a superstitious fancy or a hard fact?Prior to Galileo's 1533 condemnation by the Church ofRome the latter view was taken for granted. From then onuntil 1916 the former one was imprinted on thinkers andnon-thinkers alike. But after Einstein in that year burst forthe second time upon the scene the tables were turnedagain: the geocentric model of the Universe, be itabsolutely unacceptable, science cannot show to bewrong.

If this were all that can be said regarding theobservable outcome of the world's developmentalhistory from the at the moment theoretically fashionableBig Bang until the emergence of the biosphere on ourplanet among planets, then debates about the origin of

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life as well as about the structure of the cosmos aredoomed to remain forever rationally undecided. And thepresent essay, I am fully aware of that, will be at best avoice crying in the wilderness, only convincing thealready convinced. For theoretical thinking andconcluding are not self-sufficient. When - as it hashappened! - a prominent astronomer tells us thatscientifically the Tychonian system of the world cannotbe disproven, but that philosophically it is unacceptable,then he bares thereby the pre-rational foundation of allhuman thought to be the starting point of his convictions.And that starting point determines his approach to hisscientific labours, whether he is fully aware of it or not.For his theoretical thinking does not lead him to hisphilosophical judgment, but his faith in human thinking'sself-sufficiency misleads him into believing that thisthinking can provide him with an unassailable truth.Which is an inference manifestly too feeble to build aworld view on. "For" - to quote the Dutch philosopherHerman Dooyeweerd - "if all philosophical currents thatclaim to choose their standpoint in theoretical thoughtalone, actually had no deeper presuppositions, it would bepossible to convince an opponent of his error in a purelytheoretical way But as a matter of fact, a Thomist hasnever succeeded by purely theoretical arguments inconvincing a Kantian or a positivist of the tenability of atheoretical metaphysics".(55) Only castles in the air needno foundation. Everything else has to start from and tobuild on something, on a belief beyond reason taken to beself-evident "because...". At bottom the clash is notbetween scientific theories, but between pseudocertaintiesconceived in mortal minds and - those minds

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will claim - trumped-up stories about ghosts in the worldmachine. On the one side we have a faith shored up bydeductions drawn from dumb data, which data during thesciences' development have often been manhandled to fitthe Procrustus bed of a ruling paradigm. Confronting thatfaith is any believer's firm conviction that mortal mancannot by his own bootstraps hoist himself above timeand space, but needs for origins, and for all knowledge,an Originator, Whose self-authenticating information hehas to accept on trust and is unable to verify. That theBible, and not Hesiod's Theogony, Mahomat's Koran, theVedanta, the Eddas, or any other revelation from Above,provides us with such axiomatic "gnosis" is hence astatement beyond any rational argument, but a case of"believe it or not".

And nobody can do more than decide what tobelieve - whatever the wind or the whim prompting himor her. To prevent an opponent from attacking a strawman of his own making, and to make assurance doublysure: in no way do I want to demean the Bible by using itas a scientific textbook. As history trustworthy, yes.However Joshua's "Sun, stand thou still!" and suchlikeutterances I do not come out with. I might as well"prove" relativity with the statement in the story of St.Paul's shipwreck that the sailors supposed some land"coming near to them". If this were all that could besaid...but it is not! For Einstein, I hold, is wrong. Neitherthe special, nor the general theory of relativity are soundsublunary and on that account sound sober-scientificconstructs. With an appropriate apology I quote for athird time the New Scientist's characterization of Sir FredHoyle's trespass into the realm of metaphysics:Einstein has "betrayed the very standards on whichthe scientific

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community has been built".(l1) And a question "of themost extreme simplicity", on which a backslidden truebeliever in relativity, the late Herbert Dingle, not evenafter thirteen years of asking it got a straightforwardanswer, demonstrates that effectively with regard to thespecial theory.

"According to the theory, if you have two exactlysimilar clocks, A and B, and one is moving with respectto the other, they must work at different rates, i.e. oneworks more slowly than the other. But the theory alsorequires that you cannot distinguish which clock is the'moving' one; it is equally true to say that A rests while Bmoves and that B rests while A moves. The questiontherefore arises: how does one determine consistentlywith the theory, which clock works more slowly? Unlessthis question is answerable, the theory unavoidablyrequires that A works more slowly than B and B moreslowly than A - which it requires no super-intelligence tosee is impossible. Now, clearly, a theory that requires animpossibility cannot be true, and scientific integrityrequires, therefore, either that the question just posedshall be answered, or else that the theory shall beacknowledged to be false. But, as I have said, more thanthirteen years of continuous effort have failed to produceeither response. The question is left by the experimentersto the mathematical specialists, who either ignore it orshroud it in various obscurities, while experimentsinvolving enormous physical risk go on being performed.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that thisquestion is exactly what it appears to be, with every wordand phrase bearing its ordinary, generally understood,meaning; it is not a profoundly complicated

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question, artificially simplified to bring it within thescope of the non-scientific reader's intelligence. It ispresented here in its full scientific reality, and theordinary reader is as fully competent to understandwhether a proffered answer is in fact an answer or anevasion as is the most learned physicist ormathematician".( 56)

I submit that there is a very basic reason why onthis question no straight answers have been forthcoming:the "riddle" simply cannot be solved on the scientificplane. And I sometimes ask myself whether maybe thesharp minds to which Dingle addressed his query werenot instinctively aware of this and therefore, evading theissue, have been confining themselves to circumlocutionsmissing the mark. He who takes the Armstrong Alert andRussell's Reminder to heart will realize this possibility.An observer "here below", supposedly with no hold onthe void around his home in the Heavens, is on thataccount at a loss. He may see the distance between thetwo clocks increasing, but try as he might he cannotmeasure the motion or rest of either of them absolutely.Poincare's "principle of relativity" denies the possibilityof doing this.

However, suppose we promote that observer tothe post of bystander, the one rashly assumed by Gardnerto authenticate the Twin Paradox, as outlined earlier.Then Dingle's question is easily answered. The clockmoving with respect to the starry dome may slow down,the one at rest relative to the Universe as a whole will not.Alas: such a promotion is not feasible. For it requires thata bystander at rest "outside" the Universe assures us thatour observer is also a bystander absolutely at rest "inside"the cosmos and not influenced

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by its motion. In short: the best Dingle's detractors can dois to obfuscate the affair and to fob him off with a Jekyll-and-Hyde device. And it is to their credit that all of themin their answer-no-answer game have shied away fromthe mortal sin of mixing metaphysics and orthophysics.Martin Gardner excepted, that is!

The Heart of the Matter

There is one consideration and there is anexperimental proposal capable of testing its validity,which strongly argues against the dictum that spaceknows no place and movement no rest. General Relativityruling the roost, the up-to~date astrophysical confessionassures us that whatever celestial body we prefer tosuppose as being at Heaven's centre will make nodifference in the overall theoretical structure deduciblefrom it. The cosmological conclusions derived from theobservable phenomena will be the same whether weselect Sirius, the Sun, or Earth as the solid point ofdeparture for our thinking and conclusions about thecosmic building code.

I disagree. The extrapolations originating from anEarth taken to be at rest in space and those followingfrom, e.g. a Sun for practical purposes assumed to occupysuch a preferred place - they are totally discordant. Thestargazer who takes his first clue from Copernicus will,historically tracing his way via Giordano Bruno, ThomasDigger, Newton, Mach, Lorentz, and Einstein, end upwith one of the many cosmological models andcosmological scenarios today the vogue. On the otherhand: the astronomer who begins to investigate thecorollaries and consequences of

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Tycho Brahe's geocentric view is in for a nasty shockwhen visualizing the emerging features of this model inclassical, three-dimensional "flat" space, the only space inwhich mankind non-analogically can visualize anything!

Allow me to explain why the geocentricexplanation of Airy's failure, never yet convincinglybanished, because not demonstrably falsifiable, leadsfrom one thing to another.

To begin with: the theoretical status of the Earth-centered concept is today under Einstein's regimen higherthan it has ever been since the 1687 publication ofNewton's Principia, the ruling model now "givingincreased respectability to the geocentric picture".(57)For the Ptolemaic and the Copernican view "whenimproved by adding terms involving the square andhigher powers of the eccentricities of the planetary orbits,are physically equivalent to one another".(58) TheTychonian system "is in reality absolutely identical withthe system of Copernicus and all computations of theplaces of the planets are the same for the twosystems".(59) Not only that: in calculating those planets'perturbations, "the mathematician is forced to adopt theold device of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, the discreditedand discarded epicycle. It is true that the name, epicycle,is no longer used, and that one may hunt in vain throughastronomical textbooks for the slightest hint of thepresent day use of the device, which in the popular mindis connected with absurd and fantastic theories. Thephysicist and the mathematician now speak of 'harmonicmotion', of Fourier's series, of the development of afunction into a series of sines and cosines. The namehas been changed, but the essentials

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of the device remain. And the essential, the fundamentalpoint of the device, under whatever name it may beconcealed, is the representation of an irregular motion asthe combination of a number of simple, uniform, circularmotions."(60) Laying out the course for, e.g., thatrendezvous between the Giotto satellite and Halley'scomet would have embroiled those old Greek savants in ageometric nightmare. It would have cost Karl FriedrichGauss (1777-1855) still hours and hours of laboriouscyphering to obtain all the necessary data, which thebatteries of computers in a modern space center now spitout in a split second. In fact, however, there is only onebasic ontological difference between the mathematicalprocedures applied before Copernicus and those usedafter Newton. In the days of yore the Earth was at rest inspace; in A.D.1988, whether the practitioners of the art ofcelestial kinematics like it or not, their home in theheavens must be supposed to be at rest.

There are, however, troublesome particulars,which should not be overlooked. Bertrand Russel'scontention that the observable phenomena will be thesame whether the Earth rotates or the Heavens revolve, aswell as Fred Hoyle's declaration that the geocentric viewis as good as anybody else's, but not better, they are onlytenable if certain presuppositions are assumed to be self-evident. Which they are not! For it is certainly not self-evident that the Earth is in motion relative to the spacesurrounding it.

Russell's view takes for granted a spacepinpointing places and hence allowing motion throughthat space to be real, though apparently not directly but

only relatively observable. Any drawing of the Universe

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unanswerable. If we tell them what viewed from adimension superseding theirs is "really" the case, they canaccept or reject our words but not verify them. Mutatismutandis, with regard to any and all foundationalinformation about how the cosmos around us came intobeing, is arranged now, and shall appear theoreticallythinkable billions of years in the future, we clearly have,to quote St. Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians, towalk by faith, not by sight. Faith in transcendentalinformation or faith in the truth of our own minds'constructs, which constructs history shows to be likegrass that today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven.Trusting, as I do, the self-authenticating Divine Messageof Holy Writ I feel therefore enjoined to prefer TychoBrahe's system of the world above the everchangingconfabulations of post-Galilean astronomy.Confabulations now, after Einstein, becoming so far-fetched that I cannot help but agree with W.R. Corliss:"As the structures of the cosmos and the subatomic worldbecome more and more foreign to everyday experience,we have to ask whether such bizarre constructions maynot be the consequence of incorrect physical theories,such as Relativity, the Big Bang hypothesis, and so on".Courageous words, to which he in his newest book addssupport by means of an impressive collection ofanomalies that are troubling theorists, but are seldomrightly given their due by the populizers of the Universewe are expected to believe in.(61)

Be this as it may, there is one result of these "freecreations of the human mind", to borrow a phrase fromEinstein(62) that concerns us here from the first to the lastsentence. To wit: Sir Fred Hoyle's "as good as, but no

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better". It is, in the light of the foregoing, not difficult tobecome aware how that assertion implies an unspokenconditional clause: "provided that Newton has beenpractically right about the mechanics of the Solar System,but the therefore real motion of the Earth is notstraightforwardly observable, a curious but undeniablefact, successively explained by Fresnel, by Stokes, byLorentz, and now completely and finally by Einstein'scure-all". To quote the latter great man himself:"According to the general theory of relativity space isendowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore,there exists an ether. According to the general theory ofrelativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in suchspace there would not only be no propagation of light, butalso no possibility of existence for standards of space andtime (measuring rods and clocks), nor therefore anyspace-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ethermay not be thought of as endowed with the qualitycharacteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of partswhich may be tracked through time. The idea of motionmay not be applied to it."(63) Or, as Martin Gardner putsit: "Indeed from the standpoint of relativity the choice ofreference frame is arbitrary. Naturally, it is simpler toassume the universe is fixed and the Earth moving thanthe other way around, but the two ways of talking aboutthe Earth's relative motion are two ways of saying thesame thing."(64) For him: yes, but also for an "outsideobserver"?

Well, simpler is not always better, Occam's razornotwithstanding. Many things dubbed at first sightsimple appear, more closely scrutinized, to be complex.Newton's solid atomic pellets have now been dissolvedinto quirky particles and his kinematics, for low

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velocities still approved by Einstein, may - who knows?be influenced by the starry dome above us in a Machianmanner not yet generally acknowledged or fullyunderstood!

Before continuing the argument I first, however,have to dispose of a red herring. A third apparentpossibility, moving the "Flatland Universe" around thepencil point, representing our globe at rest relative to us,does not work - it is an untenable model. For then,viewed by Earthlings, the Sun will remain in theconstellation of the Zodiac that it occupied when webegan to shift the paper.

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Testing Einstein! Why? He Can't be Wrong!

Some Desiderata Not to be Overlooked

From the foregoing it will have become clear thatthe reigning relativity can indeed not pillory an Earth-centered cosmology. Accepting the second elucidation -the pencil at rest - of the data observable "inside" theUniverse, I can stick to my geocentric guns. If Einstein isright the Tychonian quest amounts simply to forcing anopen door. But therefore not yet to a much ado aboutnothing! Its knights-errant may then rightfully insist on atheoretical Equal Rights Amendment. What is more -allow me to repeat it! - there is the undeniablecircumstance that their consistent all-out creationistposition, based as it is on faith void of proof, can only beattacked by a conviction based likewise on an act of faithforever void of proof. That a post-Christian societyshould in consequence take Tycho seriously is therefore,I am afraid, a pipe dream. Superstitions are out offashion in the Age of a Science Revered as Religion,except the basic faith assumption of Copernicus and

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Galileo. Only a demonstration that Einstein missed themark may accomplish something. That is: something ofindisputable value in the defense of at best a teleologicalworld view. For that, in the present age, without God-given faith and without accepting the self-authenticationof the Bible, mortal man can by reasoning progressbeyond a "self-evident" Deism or non-specific theism Ideem to be impossible. Only, to quote Pascal's well-known epigram, a heart having reasons that reason knowsnothing of - and not suppressing those! - may yet long fora God, Who is Love. Seeking Him behind the relentlessand unloving blind causality, which secular science mustattribute to the present phenomenal world. And then findthat God, because - again Pascal! - it would not seek Himif it had not found Him.(65)

And there, I readily admit, the matter will rest ifEinstein is right..., but he is not! At least not yet! A plainexperimental demonstration, as simple as Dingle'squestion for the Special Theory, may well put, I venture,the General Theory, as presently mathematized, outsidethe pale of responsible science. But before coming tothat, first of all something that cannot be stressedenough: the whole Einsteinian enterprise rests on alogical fallacy. Consider: an Indian in the Amazonianjungle will never see snow and therefore declare that thewhite man's nonsense about such a cold stuff is just that:nonsense. And only a trip to the Antarctic will effectivelyundeceive him. Draw the obvious parallel: on oursupposedly through space corkscrewing planet lightreaches us from all directions at the standard speed c.But this does not prove that measurements on the Moon,or on any satellite in motion with respect to us here on

Earth will also always give us that c. To extract from a

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localized phenomenon a universal application isunwarranted. Before we shall be constrained to assert thatwe move but cannot prove this, at least one controlexperiment is necessary aboard a platform rapidlymoving with regard to Earth-bound laboratories.

In the summer of 1982 three of us performed anexperiment, later published in the "American Journal ofPhysics", that I have been asking for since 1968.* Ourheavy apparatus, a modified version of the Rayleighrefractometer, equaled in simplicity of construction theset-up employed by Hoek in 1868, but had the advantageof applying a single unilateral laser beam instead of thefrom opposite directions returning two light rays, withwhich that Dutchman operated. Our instrument was ableto detect changes in the velocity of light, measuredrelative to itself, down to about 14.4 m/sec, andfurther refinements would have resulted in a still greatersensitivity.

Needless to say: rotating this refractometeremployed as an interferometer we drew a blank. Not theslightest fringe shift could be observed. The apparatus"stood still". (66)

A portable form of the heavy device wassubsequently constructed by our technician, Mr. M.Sanderse. And the proposal we now put forward will beclear: with this light-weight instrument the isotropypostulate should be tested on a fast-moving object, suchas an airplane, a satellite, or a space shuttle.

The data obtained by such a control experiment,even a child can realize this, will either at last putPoincare's and Einstein's principle of relativity on a firmfooting, or otherwise utterly disavow it. Now truescience, it is always loudly proclaimed, will not leave a

_______________*See Addendum 1

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stone unturned for a chance to disprove even its dearesttheoretical deductions. And if there is one thing whichamazes me then it is this that Einsteinians have nothurried to arrange such a trial as soon as it becamefeasible, but that - to name just a few - a Theocharis, aZappfe, and my co-workers and myself remain voicesclamouring in a wilderness of complacency and lack ofeven elementary logical insight. Yet on the other hand Iunderstand this unwillingness all too well. The fall of theruling paradigm will have such "unthinkable"consequences that for its adherents it is simply out of thequestion to envisage such a calamity. They cannot butbeforehand declare it impossible that any test will evertopple their theorems, and therefore conclude that anyeffort aimed at disowning those would be a waste of timeand money. However this prejudiced a priori "therefore"does not hold in the light of cold reason. Objectivelyappraised it represents an instance of ostrich policy, anact of willfully turning away from a contingency notwanted. For considering that contingency evokes thedaunting spectre of the geostatic Universe evidenced byall solid and practical experiments ever performed.Scuttling their relativistic dogma will confine the reigningsavants again, they realize, to the cul-de-sac out of whichthey by the grace of Einstein were delivered and compelthem to re-think the "unthinkable".

Staggering indeed, I do not deny it, are thefeatures of the model that emerges for an astronomy nolonger able to apply the Lorentz Transformations. I evenhesitate to catalogue those "unthinkable" integrantsfacing him, who bids Copernicus et al farewell - ten toone he will reject them out of hand. Yet I shall take the

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astronomy measures - its practitioners believe - thedistance to even the furthest distant stars. (That quasarsare now upsetting the applecart somewhat I pass by)Paring down the matter to its essentials, the procedure isthe following. Since the Earth annually describes, theythink, the ellipse AB around the Sun S, the comparativelynear stars S1 and S2 are yearly tracing very small, for theunaided eye imperceptible ellipses against thebackground of the more distant stars. Telescopicobservations of S1 and S2 from the Earth at A and sixmonths later at B, combined with the known length ofaxis AB, determine hence the two triangles. Simpletrigonometry provides us thereupon with the lengths ofSun - S1 and Sun - S2, that is, with the distance to thosestars. The angles at S1 and S2 are, of course, very small:even for the nearest star the total displacement is no morethan about 1".5, and only for some 700 stars theparallaxes are large enough to be measured withacceptable accuracy. The distances to most of them mustthus be found by other means, that is by less certainindirect and statistical methods. Which implies modusponendo ponens deductions that are in the nature ofthings not verifiable "on the spot". Listing the moreimportant of those methods the late George Abell uses inless than a page five times the adjective "apparent", threetimes the verb "to estimate", once the verbs "to infer" and"to assume", once the adjective "approximate", and lastbut not least the phrase "an intelligent guess".(67) I leaveit to the reader to appraise the trustworthiness of suchprocedures, and to calculate the probability of theobtained results being correct. Sufficient is it to say that,Copernicus being right, according to direct measurementthe nearest stars would be 4.3 light years away.

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Yet... "We know now that the difference betweena heliocentric and a geocentric theory is one of motionsonly, and that such a difference has no physicalsignificance".(68) Referring the reader to the elementarygeometric steps used in determining the distance to a starfrom a Sun-centered perspective, I hold that hencenobody can blame me for using the same steps in anEarth-centered model. Allow me for a few moments toreturn to that analogy of a super-scientific three-dimensional view on the two-dimensional "Flatland"paper Universe used in the foregoing. We - "bystanders"remember! - see the truth that the Earth-bound, viz. ourpencil-bound observers, cannot see. And like Sir FredHoyle assures us, we may in our turn assure an imaginaryTychonian down there on the paper that his view is "asgood as anyone else's - but no better". For, to quote Hoylea second time: "Since the issue is one of relative motiononly, there are infinitely many exactly equivalentdescriptions referred to different centers - in principle anypoint will do, the Moon, Jupiter.. "(69)

Suppose that we want the Flatland Universe wehave created with respect to us centered on the Martianmoon Phobos. Then it will be more difficult to shuffle thepaper accurately, but for an observer on Phobos nothingis different. Furthermore: if we change the analogy to theone of a frictionless expanding balloon representing theunbounded and yet finite curved space propagated byEinstein, then the same considerations hold. Only an"outsider" can "know" - "insiders" can only guess andbelieve or not believe what the "outsider" tells them.

Unhappily there is a fly in the ointment of such arelativistic treatment of the problem. Whatsoevermember of the Solar System we select to be the System's

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centre, that treatment requires this member to moverelative to the spatiality around it. Or, if we prefer to sayit the other way around: that spatiality must be taken tomove relative to the member in question. Returning to theEarth under our own feet: for the accepted explanation ofstellar aberration and parallax it is a conditio sine qua nonthat our home in the Heavens runs a near-circular trackthrough space, in which space light travels in a straightline through an aether to which, according to Einstein, theidea of motion may not be applied.

Apart from the question how we shall understandthese words; and leaving aside Stefan Marinov, et al., andtheir "chopping" of radiation results about absolutevelocities,(70) a fact is that not a single lateral motion ofthe Earth has been hard and fast experimentallydemonstrated. Not only that: Einstein's theories predictthat this is the case for all celestial bodies, whethernatural or artificial, moving with respect to us here below.Observers on all of them will always measure theabsolute speed of light c to be c, unless perhaps we travelto the stars in the far blue yonder.

Now suppose the control experiment hereproposed to have been performed and to haveproffered data effectively disqualifying the principle ofrelativity. That is to say: aboard an artificial bodymoving at V km/sec with regard to the surface of theEarth, the Sanderse interferometer did register a fringeshift compatible with an "aether drift" of this v km/sec.Hoyle's "as good as anyone else's, but no better", thenwill have to be rephrased as "not only better, but true"- a twist he may be loath to accept, yet will find difficultto refute. Referring the perplexed reader to the Flatland

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Universe depicted on page 63: the aberration of starlight,in his a-centric model still caused by the relative orbitalvelocity of the Earth, must now, I agree with van derWaals, be ascribed to a motion of the stars. Theastronomer on the Earth "at rest" in space has to accept aSun running the race through space that Copernicuserroneously assigned to our abode. What is more: he seesthe Moon monthly orbiting the Earth, and the planetsobeying Newton's laws in their trajectories around theSun. In short: he and we shall still observe the "facts"mankind always has observed.

For the votaries of Copernicus, I am aware, thereis then still a way out: a semi-Copernican solution afterthe fashion of Stokes, nowadays championed by theSchesis Theories of Theo Theocharis and Carl A.Zappfe.(48) Whether their hypotheses can really beconsidered to be outlawed by Latham and Last's dismissalof a "tied" aether I must leave undecided.(71) I dare tohope against hope that the artificiality of those schemeswill forestall their acceptance. An Easphere, rotating in aHeliosphere, carried along by a Galactosphere! Theirmodel is, properly speaking, Copernicanism with avengeance. That their Easphere is in motion they knowonly because everybody knows that the Earth is inmotion, and they introduce that sphere to steal a march onEinstein, whose postulates they rightly considerunacceptable. United, however, they and I clamour forthat long overdue space test. With them I will only be atloggerheads after our shared antirelativism shall havebeen vindicated. Not to mention many other anti-geocentric theorists, as, e.g., Stefan Marinov in hisEppur Si Muove, and W. Krause, in proposing anintriguing Leibnizian "Eigenspace".(70)

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So far, so good. Unhappily - or depending onone's point of view: happily - there is more that inevitablyfollows in this Tychonian scenario. And it will require acareful analysis just to make this "thinkable". For not tofence about the affair: if the Earth would be shown to betruly at rest in a - as it appears to us to be - by matterevoked or matter harbouring spatiality, then it may wellreside at the centre of a finite Spherical Universe boundedby a huge shell of stars. Whether finally the Heavensaround us diurnally rotate relative to the Earth or viceversa is, I agree with Bertrand Russell, a question thatastronomy in the present age and stage of God's GreatPlan cannot answer. I believe it is the Heavens, but anyorthoscientific evidence for that conviction I do not haveand cannot have.

Who, the reader will retort, is going to believesuch nonsense? I do - at least until the control experimentI insist on will have produced a negative result, and Ithereby am compelled to fall back on either Einstein'scosmic model or one of its Copernican rivals, evaluatedas belief systems by the light of Russell's Reminder andthe Armstrong Alert. That is to say: I shall still adhere tothe conviction that for the Creator, and only Bystander inregard to all things seen by us, the Earth is the unmovedfocus of spatiality. And be forced to admit that mankindin our time can only either believe or disbelieve thismetaphysical truth.

It has, however, as already intimated, not yetcome to such a fideist impasse. I may well be wrong, forin the last resort I only know that I am and ergo canthink, but not much more. Yet nobody can rob me of thecredential that according to the most hallowed scientificcode of behaviour I also here have proposed a simple

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experiment with which to prove me mistaken. For in myturn I unabashedly declare it nonsense without more adoto conclude that because on the Earth's surface we cannotmeasure motion in respect to spatiality, therefore wecannot measure this anywhere - the inference is logicallynull and void. From which follows firstly that untilfurther notice the theory of relativity, as already argued,is no more than a far-fetched hypothesis sorely in need ofextra-terrestrial confirmation, and secondly that theTychonian theory, with all solid evidences favouring it,should at least be granted a hearing.

These evidences, i.e. the observational facts thatin the present context play an indispensable role areaberration (from Latin "aberrare" - to diverge from astraight path) and parallax (from Greek "parallaxis" -mutual inclination of two lines forming an angle). Bothhave in the foregoing been referred to and explained, butin a geocentric Universe such a totally differentinterpretation applies to them that the term "aberration"becomes a misnomer.

Analogous to van der Waals' explanation ofaberration used in the foregoing, the customary expedientemployed in most textbooks is that of a man on awindless day walking in the rain and carrying a stovepipe. As long as he is standing still, holding the pipevertically, the raindrops will fall straight through thelength of the pipe. But if he starts walking he must tilt hiscrude apparatus slightly forward. Otherwise the dropsentering the top will be swept up by the pipe and notemerge from the bottom end. Furthermore: the faster ourman walks, the greater the necessary tilt. Also keep inmind the corollary: on a windy day the pipe will have tobe tilted when the observer is standing still, and that

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exactly to the same degree in respect to the wind speed asin the first case it had to be done in respect to his walkingspeed. Last of all: we can improve the quality of theanalogy by using in it a tube of, e.g., wire netting.

In the same manner, thus the reasoning goes,because of the Earth's orbital motion telescopes must betilted forward, with the result that the direction in whichwe observe any star will be slightly displaced from itsgeometric position. And the velocity of light being aboutten thousand times that of the Earth, a simple calculationwill tell us what the angle of the tilt will be, accuratelynow 20"496. Or to say it otherwise: this angle of 20"496is subtended by the semimajor axis of the tiny imaginaryorbit in which we should see all stars circling in thesource of a year. This is what the astronomers observe.Q.E.D.: the Earth goes around the Sun, and aberration iscaused by our 30 km/sec velocity.

That we have an invalid modus ponendo ponensconclusion here, I have already demonstrated. Startingfrom Einstein's point of view we may even go further. Itis twenty of the one or a score of the other whether weexplain aberration by means of us moving relative to thestars, or the stars moving relative to us. Agreed - but whatif we take the latter of these "either-or" models seriously?

The physical data then staring the astronomer inthe face are, I agree, staggering. Seen from the rulingpoint of view, that is. However, should the theoreticalcontext of "flat", i.e. three-dimensional space have to bereinstated in case Einstein's downfall will abolish hisspace-tirne continuum, then this "either-or" will fall withit. For then the logically and ergo kinematically bindingmodus tollendo tollens Boscovich reasoning compels us

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to conclude that stellar aberration is caused by stellarmotion. Unless - as already mentioned - we succeed indemolishing the disproofs for the existence of a "tiedaether" and opt for the ad hoc of a spaces-orbiting-in-or-around-spaces scheme after the style of Stokes and hispresent-day followers.

The Discarded Image Vindicated - Experimentally

Though, sadly enough, it has not yet muchinfluenced the understanding of lay people, the rank andfile of common college professors in general, andtemporizing theologians in particular - the relationbetween science and truth is no more what, until aboutthe Second World War, it since Newton was accepted tobe. Truly perceptive thinkers, at long last coming to theirsenses and recognizing the fatuity of a "we now know",slowly begin to attract a following. Slowly, for evenamong those who profess to admire the literaturepublished by these harbingers of a better era inhumanity's travel through time, today only a minorityhave already become fully aware of this new view's far-reaching impact. And this, I am inclined to think, becausethe sense of awe that modern technologicalaccomplishments are wont to make us look at theseaccomplishments as products of theoretical science -which in the commonly accepted sense of the term theyare not. These marvels result from trial and errortinkering, not from questioning - just read a biography ofEdison.

Canny inventors may devise machinerycapable of shooting men to the Moon and may fabricate

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microscopic tools for gene splicing, but this does notmean that therefore and thereby they can answermankind's greatest and deepest questions - those remainas elusive as before. Returning to the subject concerningus here: with regard to presenting us with truth intheoretical cosmology, technology is powerless. Mightytelescopes and super-sensitive scanners may deliverreams and reams of data - they deliver not a syllable ofunassailable interpretation. At bottom we always see, asWittgenstein put it, what we want to see. That is inastronomy: either a closed finite, an open infinite, or acurved unbounded cosmos. "Today", thus James Burke,"we live according to the latest version of how theuniverse functions. This view affects our behaviour andthought, just as previous versions affected those wholived with them…Like our ancestors we know the realtruth". And pondering the implications of the many shiftsof view history presents us with he asks: "Do scientificcriteria change with changing social priorities? If they do,why is science accorded its privileged position? If allresearch is theory-laden, contextually determined, isknowledge merely what we decided it should be? Is theuniverse what we discover it is, or what we say it is?"(72)In the same vein C.S. Lewis remarks: "The nineteenthcentury still held the belief that by inferences from oursense-experience (improved by instruments) we could'know' the ultimate physical reality more or less as, bymaps, pictures, and travel books a man can 'know' acountry he has not visited; and that in both cases the'truth' would be a sort of mental replica of the thing itself.Philosophers might have disquieting comments to makeon this conception; but scientists and plain men did notmuch attend to them."

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No, they did not, but today they begin to do it."We are all", Lewis adds, "very properly, familiar withthe idea that in every age the human mind is deeplyinfluenced by the accepted model of the universe. Butthere is a two-way traffic; the model is also influenced bythe prevailing temper of mind... Hardly any battery ofnew facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universehad an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardlyany such battery could persuade a modern that it ishierarchical "(73)

I am aware: the temper of modern man's mind Istill have against me. On the other hand the modestapproach of the rising philosophy of science gives me thecourage to speak my mind freely. Against all comers Itherefore declare that I side with Lewis' Greek. I hold thatthe finite Universe is hierarchical, ascending from man onthe Earth below to the Heaven of God Almighty abovethe stars. However, before placing my battery of facts inposition I have to prepare the ground for doing this.

Pertinent to the importance of the rightunderstanding of aberration: there has been more atstake with regard to its influence on the furtherdevelopment, and thereupon the demise, ofCopernican astronomy than at first sight will meetthe eye. That the publication of Newton's Principiacaused Tycho Brahe to be driven into oblivioncannot be denied; but forty years later Bradley appearsto have silenced almost without exception even the fewpercipient souls who cannot but have agreed, withBerkeley over against the great Isaac, that only in aspace knowing place, and in it the fixed stars atrest, the nation of an Earth orbiting a Sun has anyreal, unequivocal meaning. For aberration, as it is

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presently preached, requires an Earth at a "real" velocityof 30 km/sec describing an ellipse through space with aSun resting in one of its foci. A Sun in motion, carryingour Kepler's and Newton's laws abiding planet along,would cause that aberration to be inconstant andrevealing the Sun's speed at the moments of its maximumand minimum size. Therefore it is not difficult to see thateven these Berkeleyan doubters - reluctantly I suppose -began to go along with what everybody of name knew tobe true. To attribute the phenomenon to a synchronousand simultaneous motion of all the fixed stars was out ofthe question. It would have involved a retrogress ofastronomy to hoary Ptolemaic antiquity and to Kepler'slong already abandoned Stellatum, that is: a shell of starsenclosing a finite Universe. It is accordinglyunderstandable that no one judged a furtherconformation, as proposed by Boscovich, still necessary.

Yet already a decade before Bradley died thespeculations of a Thomas Wright, about the Milky Waypossible being a lens-shaped stellar system, commencedto set in motion a train of thought that, though inheringthe Newtonian view of spatiality, would make havoc ofmankind's still lingering parochial outlook with respect toour place in the totality of the visible cosmos.

Via, among many others, Herschel, Laplace, Kant,Doppler, and Kapteyn, the consequences drawn from thedenial of a Stellatum have led modern astronomers toaccept a theoretical stance, which convinces them thatthey "know" how we together with the Sun circle thecentre of the Milky Way. We do that with a velocity ofcirca 250 km/sec., while in the meantime our galaxy andits neighbouring stellar swarms may well hurtle at 600km/sec towards the Virgo cluster of star systems. Of

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course these supervelocities cannot in any way be directlydetermined, and do not expect aberration to reveal them.The fixed stars around us move along with us at distancesof many light years; and the countless galaxies thatexpand space by rushing away from us and each other, orif you prefer, are outward bound in that space - theexperts express themselves not too clearly on this point...those galaxies are so far away that centuries will have topass before we shall perceive sizable changes inpositions. There is with respect to aberration here even afitting parallel with Fresnel's aether drift: we are unableto observe the aberration caused by those galactic whirlsand swirls; only the change in it resulting from our goingaround our local Great Light the telescopes show us. Nowit is beyond dispute: unobservables may exist, but do nothave to exist. From which follows that when all is saidand done there may be nothing beyond and aboveBradley's miniscule angle. And if we take the Einsteinsolution seriously, holding that under its aegis thegeocentric theory according to Hoyle is "as good asanyone else's - but no better", then we are, I posit,saddled with a perplexing quandary, which quandary - asI have already hinted at - Sir Fred will simply haveoverlooked as irrelevant for a Universe ruled byrelativity. His adage, even a child can see this, surelyholds for a Solar System adrift in a space that knowsno place, and no handhold on the Heavens. However,his space-time continuum is a mental construct ofwhich, without as well as with the help of the mostelaborate instruments, his senses and those of all men canonly observe and apprehend the three dimensions of theeveryday world. A world, and we may do well torealize this, that allows us to fly to the Moon and to land

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instruments on Mars. And out of which we only at allcosts must try to escape into "unthinkable" curved space,if we do not want to live in the geocentric Universe thatall down-to-earth tests urge us to accept.

The triangulation of space, on which this todaygenerally accepted vista rests, starts from a base line thatno experiment can soundly show to be there. The"proofs" for its existence are too rashly drawn from a no-win situation. Under the constraints of classical sciencethis base line is the diameter of the ellipse that the Earthat a velocity of 30 km/sec describes around the Sun. Alas- that velocity cannot in any way be directlydemonstrated. One of its derivations, here the length ofsaid base line necessary to determine by means ofparallaxes the distances to the nearest stars, remains opento questions. And that the same must be said about thecard castle of extrapolations brought into play afterignoring this weakness, I have already laid bare.

Brushing these uncertainties aside by means of theprinciple of relativity introduces only another dubiety.We may be able in many ways to measure our averagedistance from the Sun to everyone's satisfaction - whetherthat 149.5 times 106 km radius has been measured fromthe focus of either Earth or Sun, or results from thesetwo bodies circling a common centre, Einstein cannottell us. Any conclusion as to that is as good asanyone else's - but no better. Again it is the momentous"Believe it, or not" - that verisimilitude of respectabilitybeyond which the oldest and yet newest philosophyof science does not permit us to proceed on the way totruly true truth.

The selfsame ambiguity confronts us with respectto aberration. Neither classically, nor relatively, does the

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phenomenon allow an astronomer to make a logicallydefensible choice between an Earth-caused or star-causedanswer. But in case Einsteinian relativity will be foundwanting, aberration becomes the trump-card in the neo-Tychonian game, restoring the Stellatum of old.

Suffer me - and this in the space and time beyondwhich mankind cannot measure motion or rest - to defendthis assertion, unheard of since Kepler and more than acentury ago so clearly suggested again by Airy's failure toconfirm Copernicus.

The first step in tackling the issue evenhandedly isto keep in mind Russell's Reminder and the ArmstrongAlert. For if there is a supernatural Bystander, for Whomthe Heavens and the Earth on which we find ourselves arethe first objects that He called into being and if since thenHe has constrained these by laws under which accordingto His will they operate - then He has the last word. Andwhether we, immanent observers and no more, have ouroptions about the Universe right or wrong, only Heknows.The question before all questions is in that case:does He share some of that knowledge with us, or doesHe leave us completely in the dark?

If our Universe is all there is, and if there are nohigher orders of existence, then the positivists are right incrying foul when "rumours of transcendence inphysics".(4) will begin to be seriously considered.

My position I have made clear. Even on thenatural level God has let mankind know enough to leavethem without excuse. And His message, conveyed to usin the pre-scientific, simply describing terms of GenesisOne, I accept without any reservation. That messageintimates the pre-eminence of the Earth as self-evident.

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Therefore our habitat is not a typical by-product of a bychance progressing cosmic mega-evolution, but theintricate multiform artifact, for the sake of which all othermaterial objects in Heaven's wide expanse are assignedtheir specific signal functions. The natural world hencemust be "rightly viewed as the backdrop for the world ofmen and women".(74)

On his own, as an observer of the world aroundhim, a man surely can, but does not have to, doubt thetruth of what he sees and feels. However, by accepting ametaphysical communication, which in no way can betested by us on its truth content, any doubt about thiscontent is for me out of the question. Backed up by thehighest authority thinkable I declare the Earth to be thefirm centre of creation and not a negligible globule-among-globules whirling through space. And I hold thatunbiased research will demonstrate that conclusioninescapable. Newton, accordingly, will be shown atbottom to have been right. Space knows place andmovement rest. In defining that space as God's sensoriumhe went too far, and his efforts to demonstrate absolutemotion by means of a rotating water-filled bucketBerkeley showed to be unconvincing. Yet both menbelieved in a Creator and Heavenly Father, whoseexistence they, be it unwittingly, alas, began to makesubject to doubt by their acceptance of Galileo's folly.

I must admit that from the positivist point of viewthe Earth and the life on it rather appear as a miscarried,or in its present stage, dangerously flawed evolutionarydevelopment That at first sight from a religious outlookit appears at best as a field on which good and evil, Godand devil fight a see-saw battle with the devil holding theupper hand, I also do not deny. Yet I do not believe

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that we Earthlings, are no more than the at the momenthighest evolved specimens of some long-time naturalcaprice. We are not by chance living on a blob of matteradrift in nothingness. We are, on an unmoved world untilthe end of the present era here below on trial - sons anddaughters of a Creator, whose glory the Heavens declare,and Who at His appointed Day will make all things newand forever abolish evil and death in an endless GoldenAge, for which the deepest dreams of all men everywherehave been and are longing. How, seeing the damaged butstill marvelous beauty, design, and order of everythingaround us, could this ever have come to be doubted?How, as clearly inevitable for the perfection of Hisultimate purpose by an Almighty and Omniscient Godallowed?

It cannot be repeated enough: nobody has everincontestably shown the Earth not to be at rest in thecentre of the Heavens. Numerous experiments haveconfirmed its stability, none have dislodged it But ratherthan at last again to confirm its unique position and toconsider the obligations this may impose on all we thinkand do, secularized astronomy has after 1905 welcomedrelativistic impossibilities. Even those - and their numberis growing - who have come to see that Einstein cannotbe right still, however, cling to the Copernican gospel,mightily toiling to uphold the fiction of Mother Gea'sinsignificance among the many links of the Great Chainof Being.(75)

Pro and contra the Special Theory of Relativity -they all are wrong. And the simple space trials proposedin the present paper will show it Mach may have declaredall motion to be relative, the true state is that all motion isabsolute, it being defined as such from an Earth at rest ina spatiality in and through which light - it is assumed -travels at constant speed. Assumed, to be sure - not

necessarily true!

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The question, then, quoted in the beginning of thispaper can be categorically answered. Is the Universerotating? Yes, it is, and we all can confirm this, walkingwith absolute motion on an Earth on which the bases ofour telescopes are absolutely at rest. And theextrapolations of that fact have to be grappled with.Aberration and parallax, that is to say, now accordinglyappear in a different light altogether. The former does notexist, the application of the latter has to be reversed.Furthermore: whether this Earth-centered Universe givesthe quietus to curved space of necessity invented to savethe appearances and the flat-worldly data? Maybesomething like it will appear to be the case - I do notknow. And whatever there is beyond the region of thestars I shall not even try to fathom. Living and thinking,as we are, in a space in which objects can only havelength, breadth, and height, it is only by playing withmeaningless marks on paper according to certain rules -asthe eminent German mathematician Hilbert once definedhis craft - that higher dimensions and elastic time becomefor theorists as easy as child's play.

The Universe, having been created, is hence, Ibelieve, finite. Following Aristotle I hold that whateverthere is "outside" of it is of such a kind as not tooccupy space and not to be affected by time.(76)Folly it is for mortal man to assume himself able,brushing aside Russell's Reminder, to ply us with anyultimate pronouncement about the way the Heavensgo. However, "inside" that Universe we are in a betterposition. The Earth is at rest, and drawing conclusionsfrom stellar data, thought to be obtained from a circlingplanet, is therefore beating the air. Those apparentaberration circlets are in fact real orbits. And since these

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orbits are practically of the same size, it follows that allthe stars are at about the same distance from us, with lessthan a thousand of them slightly closer by. Which is tosay that the Universe is bounded by a shell of stars - thatStellatum of Antiquity. Kepler, at least therein followinghis master Tycho Brahe, still defended this shell - twoGerman miles thick, he estimated - against GiordanoBruno and his infinity of Suns becoming stars by virtueof their distance.

It is at this point that Hoyle's "as good as anyoneelse's but not better" shows itself to be only tenable forhis relativistic model. As amply demonstrated earlier:whether we, elevating ourselves to the actuallyunattainable position of bystanders, assume the Earth tomove through star-studded space or that space throughthe Earth - it makes for Earth-bound observers nodifference in the celestial pageant. Contrariwise: if we areabsolutely at rest in "flat" space, that conclusion does notsquare with the accepted view of the stars' positions. For,as after Bradley's explication of their apparently equal-sized orbits nobody wanted reasonably to doubt anymore,those stars are taken to be randomly scattered through animmense emptiness. However, if the Earth is at astandstill, then there is no aberration in the prevailingsense. Now the overwhelming majority of the stars aredescribing real equal-sized orbits, as it appears, "in step"with the Sun. And their designless distribution can inconsequence solely be accounted for either byhypothesizing and artificial arrangement of orbitsproportional to distance, which is hard to believe, or by aStellatum, a layered shell of stars pat to the purpose.

Applying Hoyle's trigonometric handling ofstellar parallax(77) for such a Stellatum centered on the

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a trans-Plutonian "Black Star" to the Solar System. Thisenables them to postulate the axis of the System to betangential to the Earth, with the Earth revolving aroundthat axis annually.(78) So to say: for Newtonian reasonsthey are anti-Tychonian. Maybe - who knows? - they areright, but in case Einstein meets a downfall, the existenceof the Stellatum will become a hard to be dismisseddatum. Yet, that even then the Tychonian theory with thisStellatum, not centered on the Earth but on the Sun willbe unacceptable, I am fully aware.

Why Impossible?

"Impossible!", the enraged reader will exclaim. Iask: "Why impossible?" That is what we see everycloudless night, hence logic cannot fault such acontingency, and weighing the pros and contras there aresound data and common sense arguments favouring it.Allow me the time to tick off a baker's dozen of the mostsalient among those.1. Do not overlook the fact that the heliocentricinterregnum, still adhered to in an astronomically not up-to-date view, is actually a mare's nest of the past. In truththe choice is between Tycho Brahe and Einstein -Galileo, et al., are played out. On the one hand we canopt for a geocentric Universe, strongly intimating aDivine Designer; on the other hand we may prefer amegaevolutionary scheme. That is for a creation, maybeor maybe not, beginning with a Big Bang, leading to acosmos in which the Earth is a non-entity, and on whichwe are the still far from perfect product of blindchance. For me, I repeat, the choice is not difficult I amsure that I am not an offspring of a tree-climbing monkey.

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2. There is one consideration, echoing through andlingering behind all the pages of this essay: instinctivelyto objectify any extra-terrestrial event against abackground taken to be at rest is to misjudge it. Fromkindergarten on we may have been trained - better:brainwashed! - to do this. But to parrot the ubiquitous:"The Earth goes around the Sun" is even on Galileanpremises, let alone Einsteinian ones, an aphorism withouttruth content. Only when preceded by a conditionalsubordinate clause it should be considered seriously.Even then, to be sure, it does not rise above a wishfulhypothetical level, but at least makes clear what it meansto mean. That is: "Provided you allow that in principle inspatiality we can find a spot guaranteed and proven to beat rest, together with the Sun also solidly at rest, then Ipredict that we shall see that the Earth goes around theSun". But...do I have to repeat the philosophical and,more directly, logical objections against that statement?Apart from the scientifically unattainable certainties,semantics already dispatches the argument as an act ofbegging the question. Who can define "rest" withoutreferring to "motion"? Or talk about "motion" withoutpresupposing "rest"? Indeed: relativity is king unlesswe somehow somewhere find three points demonstrablyat rest. Searching as we may, not even one of thesepoints we shall ever find - it is a certainty as old asthe hills. Archimedes of old (287-212 B.C.) did not uttera profound new insight when he asked for a firm spotto stand on that would enable him to move the Earth. Thefirst members of the human race pondering the problemwill have realized the quandary. In concreto we cannoteven kick a football absolutely across a field unlesswe have first made sure that the field is absolutelyat rest. In abstracto it is easy to declare that we are

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corkscrewing through space at a velocity of hundreds ofkilometers per second. To make good that contention is adifferent story, and to assume the supra-spatial stance itpresupposes leads us astray.

However tiresome it may have become: since everand again without much ado this stance is assumed in allastronomical discourse, debate, and dissertation, I want toshow its absurdity and tainted origin from yet a different,historical perspective. The fallacy is an old Greek onefrom which, it seems to me, Aristotle wisely shied away.As C.S. Lewis puts it: the Stagyrite's standpoint, "thetimidity, the hushed voice, is characteristic of the bestPaganism".(79) Above his Primum Mobile he neverpostulates himself - whatever is there is of such a kind asnot to occupy space, nor thus time affect it. And duringthe first thousand years of the Christian era, whatever theslips of many a pedantic individual, Aristotle's modestdoctrine spoke "loud and jubilant".(80) It is Gerbert ofReims, Pope Sylvester 11(999-1003), to whom a Dutchphilosopher and historian, F. de Graaff - rightly I think -imputes the first moves leading to the emergency of thepost-Copernican mind set. "Modern science, of whichGerbert is possible the most important founder, is notdelineated by more factual knowledge, not by a moreaccurate observation, not by a broader and deeper insightthan the old sciences knew. No, modern science onlymeans a new relation to reality. The old knowledgeunderstood the immediate relation with the creation, thenew science only knows the abstract relation. Itsprinciple is: the creation is by means of its representationreduced to a recognizable and useful object... Thegoal of modern science is to be master of all that

exists. The representation that serves as a means to

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accomplish this is not an extract of reality but only animage that man projects on reality."(81) That is: itbrushes aside Russell's Reminder that a man cannot, andin science should not, arrogate a metaphysical viewpointspuriously allowing him to become a bystander viewingthe Universe against a background at rest. Or to borrowout of context a Pauline phrase: man cannot take a seat inthe temple of God.

As said: to do this will lead us astray, and aCanadian who did not, as his national anthem enjoinedhim to do "stand on guard", considered himself beatenwhen he was not beaten at all. Seven years ago in adebate following my reading of a geocentric paper at aChristian College at Amersfoort, the Netherlands, anopponent succeeded in keeping the audience and mechained to his pseudo-supernatural viewpoint ofobjectifying the cosmos. He won the disputation handsdown. Since then I have had to wrestle with this"objective" approach countless times. Often interestedexperts as well as laymen have driven me so handsomelyalmost into a corner that only in the nick of time Irealized how they were seducing me to go "outside"creation for a better look.(82)

I realize that I should stop my thematical harpingon this transcendental topic, the impact of which somepeople see immediately, but others just cannot get intofocus. Yet the vitium originis, the basic error of modernastronomical theorizing, I must make clear to the latter ifthe present essay is ever to accomplish anything.

A not to be overlooked crux of the matter in handis our understanding and application of the concept ofrelativity with regard to pure, a priori spatiality andthe vexatious problems posed by its constituents, if any.

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Leaving aside the Kantian conception, is there a matter-free space? Or is space no more than a consequence ofmatter, a relation between objects? Einstein clearlyaccepts the first option by according to empty spacephysical qualities and by asserting one absolute: theconstant velocity C of light in a vacuum. And deliberatelyset against the possibility of an Earth-centered cosmos hehas persuaded all those on that score agreeing with him toput their faith in an ontological impossibility. That is:with whatsoever speed we approach or leave a lightsource, our instruments register the appropriate Dopplershifts but measure the velocity of radiation received as ifwe are at rest with regard to the source.

Choosing the second, anti-Newtonian, Leibnizianoption makes Poincaré's principle, the Earth's apparentimmobility, at least understandable. In plain terms: thelight any photometer observes it observes in that meter'sown space in which that meter obviously is "at rest". Bothoptions, however have to be rejected if the space tests Ipropose were to give a positive result. Only "tied-aether"theories, may then still be fielded against the defenders ofTycho Brahe, provided that by the force of evidentialsupport they will be able to rise above their present, anti-Einsteinian, as well as anti-geocentric, wishful thinking.

Returning now to Airy's failure: we surelycannot look at anything unless from a point of view.And it is self-evident that there are only two ofthese points available to us. We can choose toobserve the Universe either from somewhere inspace or super-space, or else from the Earthunderneath our feet. The first possibility compels usto view that Universe against a background at restthat willy-nilly we must imagine to be there when

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we assign "motion" to anything. The Copernicans frombefore 1905, projecting themselves to a platform inclassical "flat" space and then declaring us to berevolving around the Sun, strenuously toiled tosubstantiate that revolution. Nobody can deny it: theyfailed miserably. The super-Copernican vision of Mach,prefiguring "the great theoretical vision of Einstein",sounds prima vista impressive. But anything about thelatter's four-dimensional mathematical model, itsadherents can only apply to our three dimensionalspatiality by means of an analogy. To with, by presentingit to us as happening on the friction-less surface of aglobe or torus. For cerebral super-space constructs cannotbe measured in the world we live in unless presented inthat world's terms. Not only that: never even in a millionmillion years will logic compel us to accept a propositionas confirmed by an analogy. If, as is nowadays generallybelieved, the planet Tellus is corkscrewing throughcurved space, then this has to be made good here onground level. To pontificate that something by definitionphysically measurable is true, yet cannot be measured isno more than a mere put-off. The heart of the matterremains this: anything will do if only it allows men toescape from a distasteful Earth-centered, and a GreatEngineer proclaiming, Chain of Being.

The second option, then, is to look at theUniverse from the Earth on which we live, and thereuponto investigate whether space knows place and whether,such being the case, our temporal home in the heavens isat rest. Which, on authority delegated to me by itsCreator, I hold to be the case. And data attesting to thiswill be obtainable by instruments capable of measuring

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velocities in meters and duration in seconds. Space-timecontinuum experiments are beyond our ken, therefore weshall have to work with means applicable to "our" spaceand "our" time. Neither Galileo, nor Einstein can deny usthe right to find out what model emerges from such ahard-nosed, common sense, and rational undertaking. Anunwillingness to do this, and under the aegis of Einsteinno longer even considering his stratagems to be possiblywrong, that I deem to be, as already said, the vitiumoriginis of present-day astrophysics.

Positioning therefore ourselves on our Earth,stellar aberration observed with terrestrial telescopesallows two completely different explanations (see figures7). And allow me to emphasize that "terrestrial". In whatfollows I do not instinctively look at the motions of eitherEarth or stars against a background taken to be at rest.The reasoning is strictly Earth-bound, and from a 49o

northern latitude the stellar motions are dextrorotatory.The accepted view of the phenomenon is the

following. As already by means of two differentanalogies elucidated: my telescope has to be tiltedslightly forward and observes the star as apparentlysituated at S2, this as a result of the Earth's 30 km/secvelocity. Keeping this in mind it is easily seen that whenthe Earth begins to move from A to B, the telescopebegins to swing to the left. That is to say: its topprojecting the apparent aberration circle on the night sky"shows" the star progressing from A1 to B1. Foraberration always displaces the stars toward the apex ofthe Earth's way.

The geocentric theory begs to differ from this

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Copernican explication. The Earth is absolutely at rest inspace, and the star is moving congruent with the Sun'smotion. As a result of this our telescope "catches" the starat point of its real aberration orbit when it is already atS1. Consequently: when, as in the Bradleyaninterpretation, the Sun is in position A between Earth andstar, this star is observed at A1 and so on.

The Copernican-Einsteinian and the Tychonianunderstanding of the phenomenon both "fit the facts".Therefore only experiments testing their inferences mayand must allow us to make a reasoned-out choice. As Ihave shown: without exception such experiments confirmor favour Tycho Brahe and censure or doubt Copernicus.Hence when around the turn of the century the patrons ofthat canon of Frauenburg ran out of plausible ad hocs theonly possibility left to them was to get on the STRbandwagon.

That their anti-geostatic persuasion could notbut constrain them to do this is understandable. TheAchilles' heel that until today only with modus ponendoponens arguments they have been able to bolster theircase is glibly and conveniently overlooked. Also itshould amaze nobody that only by ostracizing nay-sayers and relentless peer pressure on persistentopponents their establishment has succeeded inupholding relativity's preponderance - thus the worldwags. However, as soon as in the late sixties mannedsatellites offered the physicists the possibility to performa modus tollendo tollens experiment, they did not jump atthe obvious chance to verify their belief - and this I holdagainst them. True scientific spirits would have hastenedincontestably to confirm their faith in the a-centricaimless Universe they are hankering after. Why didn't

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they? Are they deep-down afraid of their ideal turning outto be an idol?

The point here is that aberration, if after anEinstein demoting space test it will have to begeocentrically understood, this indeed will makemincemeat of four centuries of progressive astronomy.According to Bradley the aberrational displacement is theangle between the star's geometrical direction and thedirection in which the telescope has to be pointed toobserve that star. According to the updated Tychonianview the displacement is the angle between the directionin which the star is observed and its geometric directionat the moment of this observation. Or to formulate itotherwise: for the ruling view the aberration orbits areapparent and the Earth's orbit actual, but for the viewactual here defended the former are actual and the Earth'sis non-existent. And thereby hangs a tale!To quote a standard astronomical college text aboutstellar aberration: "The effect is greatest when the earth ismoving at right angles to the direction to the star, anddisappears when the earth moves directly toward or awayfrom the star. A star that is on the ecliptic appears to shiftback and forth by a small amount in a straight lineduring the year, for during part of the year the earth ismoving in one direction compared to the star's, andduring the rest of the year the earth is moving in theopposite direction A star in a direction perpendicularto the earth's orbit appears to describe a small circlein the sky, for its apparent direction is constantlydisplaced in the direction of the earth's orbital motionfrom the direction it would have as seen from thesun. Stars in between these extremes appear to shifttheir apparent directions along tiny elliptical paths".( 83)

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improved and introduced, among others, the so-calledastrolabe (from Greek astron-star and larnbanein - totake), in essence the ancestor of the multiforminstruments now used to measure and, presumably,thereby in abstracto to master the architecture of thecelestial sphere around us.

In the museum at Torun, Poland: "There exists amost remarkable painting of Copernicus that allowsinsights on his background. It shows Copernicus prayingwith open eyes. On his right a crucifix with a corpus isportrayed. On the opposite side of the crucifixastronomical instruments are shown. Clearly set off is theastrolabe introduced by Sylvester II." And significant isCopernicus' prayer underneath the painting. "I do not askfor the grace granted to Paul, neither do I demand theforgiveness of Peter, but I incessantly pray for theforgiveness which thou on the wood of the cross hastgranted to the murderer."(85) Did Copernicus have aninkling of the consequences his theory would have? Inthe modern Universe God is a superfluous luxury. As faras up-to-date astrophysics is concerned He is dead andhas had His day. To quote Alexander Koyré aboutastronomy's progress after the wholesale acceptance ofCopernicanism: "The infinite Universe of the NewCosmology, infinite in Duration as well as Extension,in which eternal matter in accordance with eternal andnecessary laws moves endlessly and aimlessly in eternalspace, inherited all the ontological attributes of Divinity.Yet only those - all the others the departed God tookwith Him."(86) And when at the close of the nineteenthcentury it had become insuperable to reconcile theNewtonian celestial clockwork of that New Cosmologywith observational data, the most plausible inference wasleft out of consideration. The possibility of a basic

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misconception in the defunct system remained outside thetheoretical field of vision. Not for a moment did anybodybethink himself whether the clash between "new" factsand the fiducial - but never proven! -Galilean naturalphilosophy was, maybe, due to the sacrosanct Copernicanrevolution. Astronomy opted for an approach that madeshort shift with even those remaining ontological divineattributes by assigning irrational and impossible qualitiesto the Creation's mode of being. For when in their never-never land of relativity the distances between a number ofclocks are increasing a wondrous thing is happening, wemust conclude. Believe it or not: then each of thoseclocks works more slowly than all the others - which, Iam sure we will agree, is impossible in our realworld.(56)3. The Tychonian interpretation offers the simplestpossible solution among all those ever proposed ofOlbers' paradox - a given that they who like to operatewith Occam's razor may well take into account.4. Nothing, but nothing will change as far asobservations are concerned. When somebody onceremarked to him how stupid medieval men must havebeen in thinking that the Sun was orbiting the Earth,Wittgenstein is said to have replied: "I agree. But Iwonder what it would have looked like if the Sun hadbeen circling the Earth". In his excellent The Day theUniverse Changed , a book that everyone should read,James Burke, telling this anecdote, comments: "The pointis that it would look exactly the same. When we observenature we see what we want to see, according to what webelieve we know about it at the time".(87)5. What would drastically change are theextrapolations from our observations. I simply cannot

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withstand the temptation to repeat a warning byEddington, which I have already quoted. "For the readerresolved to eschew theory and admit only definiteobservational facts, all astronomical books are banned.There are no purely observational facts about theheavenly bodies (Eddington's emphasis, v.d.K.).Astronomical measurements are, without exception,measurements of phenomena occurring in a terrestrialobservatory or station; it is only by theory that they aretranslated into knowledge of a universe outside."(42)

You will say to me: "Physician, heal thyself. Yourweird scheme is a theory too, and certainly the weirdestpossible." Agreed, it is a theory, and if and when theexperiment I propose shall have put Einstein's ideas atlong last on a firm footing, I grant everyone the right tocall me a misguided fool. But not before this will havehappened! For I challenge until then, and therefore hereand now, all modern scientists to come forward with onenon-relativistic reasoning that, without affirmingconsequences and introducing ad hocs, succeeds inrebutting the straightforward theoretical conclusions heredrawn from the panoply of the celestial phenomena. Theycannot do this, and the foremost thinkers among themknow this all too well!

So far regarding the ratiocinations of those whorefuse to honour and accept any otherworldly input. Afew remarks over and above that I must add, moredirectly aimed at the men and women who with me havebeen impelled to believe that the Bible is the Book ofWisdom given to us by the Great Creator God in Whomwe live, and move, and have our being.6. "Nonsense", I have painfully found out, theyexclaim almost to a man. I ask: "Why nonsense?" Why

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should the oldest model, being the strangest, not be thetruest? Does the stupendous variety of life forms andlandscapes displayed within the Earth's tenuous biospherenot perfectly match with a likewise kaleidoscopicpanorama of a stellar sphere encompassing creation as awhole? Do these two Hebrew words "and (the) stars" bythe farthest stretch of imagination invite us to distill outof them a Divine act of such a size and grandeur that bycomparison even the creation of the so-called SolarSystem is less than a drop in a bucket?7. "Yes, but science..." - that theistic evolutionists ofall stripes demur I can understand. For them, with regardto the creation account, the time-bound results of everincomplete human research are first, and the Scriptures asecond-best, adapted as Genesis is, they allege or settlewithout word of mouth, to the understanding of HomoSapiens barely risen above the mental capacities ofmonkey-dom.

After the glorious appearance of modern sciencewe now "know” that we cannot read the Creation story asin any way factual to the first degree. To argue with thesebrethren before their hallowed secular masters will havebeen compelled to take a turn for the better may well bepouring water in a sieve. Creationists worthy of the name,from the cradle on conditioned to believe in thestereotyped cosmos of popular astronomical texts, may bewise to think twice, however, before they join the"Impossible" chorus of the Christian majority. Theysquarely differ from this majority with respect to botany,biology, and geology, but are less outspokenly ferventwith respect to astronomy, in which discipline they savethe appearances by means of an exegetical tour de force,

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together with fairly improbable and any way unprovablead hocs. Question: why should the ruling paradigm inthat oldest branch of natural philosophy still have any saywhatsoever in Creation science? Behind its public facadeit today hides a hodgepodge of far-fetched tentativemodels bristling with anomalies.(88) Just compare thedata by means of which the evolutionists on the grandestcosmic scale build their models with those of theevolutionists in a narrower, Darwinian sense. The latterhave at least deaf-mute bones they can examine and silentrocks they can analyze. The former have nothing outsidetheir observatories but untouchables that cause theiroptical instruments to exhibit spectra and their radiotelescopes to stutter clicks.8. It is always possible to impress some cleverpattern on random sets of givens. Biologists, constructingtheir genealogical trees, "show" in that manner howhumming birds and crocodiles are distant relatives, andthey expect us to swallow such cunning confabulations astestable actualities. In the same manner, but with evenless solid observations to build on, astrophysicists discussin their diagrams the life cycles of stars, theircomposition, and their distance from us. Why then docreationists soundly reject Darwin, but still kowtow toCopernicus? No man should serve two masters, shouldhe?9. I have as yet not been able to find one orthodoxtheologian willing to give me a serious hearing. This issomething that in the beginning hurt me. Gradually,however, I have come to realize how it had to beexpected. These people are so sure of the truth of their inthe nature of things fallible dogmatical extrapolationsfrom a Message they declare to be infallible in what it

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says, that apropos of nothing they excommunicate eachother for almost any doctrinal difference. Small wonderthat these theologians assume the articles of modernscientific faith to have the same kind of infallibility,which they take for granted in their own deductions fromHoly Writ. People for whom the Bible is no more than aquaint old book, and who therefore have no interest insaving it at the cost of scientific knowledge, gladly admitthat the Scriptures proclaim the preeminence of man in anEarth-centered Universe. To doubt or to deny it, they willaffirm, is to wrench the meaning of the Genesis text.Before modern science raised its arrogant head very fewcalled this truism in question. However, after Galileo wehave to reconcile the geocentric structure that Holy Writconsiders self-evident with the facts that for almost fourcenturies astronomy has professed to "know", but today isno longer too pertinently sure of. This momentum-gaining turnabout in the philosophy of sciencetheologians are not yet aware of and will surely be loathto take to heart, since such a new - in fact very old -concept of human knowledge cannot but begin to rattlethe foundations of their dogmatic certainties also.Anyway: caught between a hard rock and an immovableplace the defenders of the Infallible Word do with regardto Genesis 1:1-19 not shilly-shally: the literalness of thatperiscope is the loser. But the thing that baffles me to noend is that in relation to Genesis 1:11-13 and 20-31 thecreationists among these theologians defend tooth andnail its literalness. Why this measuring by two standards?

It is here not the place to elaborate on suchambivalence, but behind it hides the vexed issue ofanthropomorphisms in Holy Writ. "This is what the

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Word says, but we shall tell you what it means, for theDivine Author talks to us in the way a father talks to littlechildren, who cannot really understand him yet" Thus,from Calvin on, the speakers not being such children, butthey themselves being perfectly able to make clear to uswhat God could not make clear! Speaking aboutconceit...? With heliocentrism for many generations bredin the bone, and biological evolution, relatively spoken, anewcomer, a growing number of Christians again dismissthe latter. Why then that unwillingness to look at the out-dated Newtonian world picture with a grain of doubt? Letalone to doubt the weird hypotheses secular astronomyhad to betake itself to, now that picture has becomeuntenable?10. There are, but these beyond the restricted scope ofthe present paper, still at least three fields of enquiry leftthat may will come to play a part in future considerationswith regard to a geocentric cosmogony and cosmology.Lingering at the fringes of the theological-exegetical free-for-all is the vexed issue of the Gospel written in thestars,(89) and the impetus of a restored Stellatum on thatesoteric theme. Physically there remain the topics of along-time stability of the Solar System, and the neverabsolutely laid to rest likelihood - which I take seriously!- of a non-Newtonian theory of gravity.(90)

ii. Pascal, facing the inescapable outcome of aconsistent Copernicanism, has said that the eternal silenceof these infinite spaces terrified him. So did it me- until I became aware that there is not the slightest trulyscientific reason or evidence to take the modern view ofthe cosmos seriously.

Thankful I am for the Eternal Word that ridicules

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the idea of mankind being no more than a freakoccurrence in a boundless cold and dark void. Whichidea, therefore and of course, has been, is, and will becontradicted by every ad hoc -less rational experiment.12. "The Heavens declare the glory of God, and thefirmament shows His handiwork", David exclaims inPsalm 19. Indeed, they do - who on a clear night, seeingthe constellations slowly wheeling through the dark domeof space, does not stand in awe? Or does not feel himselfand the Earth under his feet to be insignificant minutiaeamidst a majestic pageant? From Antiquity on, thinkingmen have realized that "the earth, in relation to thedistance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size andmust be treated as a mathematical point"(91) For Ptolemyas well as for us, however, this does not compel us todownplay our importance in the totality of being:size and worth are not correlate. A rough diamond is anothing compared with a heap of pebbles, yet sell it, andyou can buy a gravel pit, and still have money to spare.To the contrary an object's place and station clearlyindicate its paramountcy. In Parliament the Speaker maybe a small man, but he is not hidden among thebackbenchers. If the present-day astronomical worldview would have come to the indisputable conclusionthat after all the Earth is an unique phenomenon in theHeavens, then there would have been less incentives torenounce its acts and facts. Such a pre-eminence granted,and keeping in mind Russell's Reminder that after all fora metaphysical bystander the Earth and not the Heavensmay be at rest, then the a-centric Universe of the Hoylesand Sagans could be considered as a model at leastbreaking with Newton's Copernicanism. For anorthodox reader of the Bible there would be fewer

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questions with regard to curved space than with regard tothe heliocentric vision that demoted our dwelling-place toone of a set of similars. The multiform parametersnecessary for the maintenance of the living Earth appearto have been minutely structured and combined for thatpurpose, the impact of their attunement equalled nowherein the Solar System's barrenness. Yet this attunement istaken to be no more than one of a number of lucky throwsin a macro-evolutionary roulette. Hence secular sciencelabours with might and main to find extra-tellurianevidence that will reveal life-bearing planets to be a notuncommon occurrence. An Interplanetary Society hasdedicated itself to that search, and countless sciencefiction novels and movies are brain-washing the hoipolloi with this doctrine of space harbouring a diversityof civilizations. For any connotation that the human raceis something special and has been assigned a peerlesshabit in the Heavens - it must, cost what it may, be keptout of mind. It might evoke the teleological spectre thatmodern man, come of age, wants, and has decided, to layat rest.

To believe that the first eleven chapters ofGenesis, if not literally then at least in meaningfulmyths, testify to the origins of the reality into which weare born, this, I maintain if not openly then at leastimplicitly, obliges Christians to acknowledge that theEarth is more than a typical throw-off from acondensing and spinning minor star. There arepeculiar people for whom Hebrew is no foreignlanguage, and for whom already more than threemillennia the Torah has been Wisdom above all wisdom.To them the ever-changing theories of science are, bycomparison, puerile prattle. A 1944 Nobel laureate, I. I.Rabi, born and bred among them, was as a boy

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accordingly a Tychonian until gentile information toldhim better things. "Because his family was Orthodox andfundamentalist in its Judaism, Rabi had not known thatthe earth revolved around the sun until he read it in alibrary book."(92)

Indeed: a library book. But astronomy books,misleading as - courtesy of Albert Einstein - theirheliocentric illustrations and explanations are, seldom orever spell out the a-centric concept to which theCopernican revolution has inevitably led. The Earth isnow for it no more than a typical pellet of mattersomewhere in an out-of-the-way corner of the Universe.How can orthodoxy, whether Jewish or Christian,reasonably harmonize this with an Earth according to thefirst chapter of the Old Testament already adorned withtrees, and flowers, and grass before Sun, Moon, and starssuddenly appeared in the emptiness of the Heavens?13. A last point: theistic-evolutionist Bible believershave, of course, no difficulty with a Big Bang and endlessages already elapsed before the Creator began biologicalevolution. with self~reproducing clots acurdling in aglutinous fluid. How do they reconcile the countless yearsrequired by such snail-slow processes with the promise ofa resurrection of all the dead long returned to dust in thetwinkling of an eye when the trumpet shall sound? If Godcan make that happen, why should or would He haveneeded many millions of years to get from unicellularcreatures to billion-cellular men? If I may believe St.Paul, then He will restore all the dead who ever havelived to life instantly. Or must I, maybe, my thinkingilluminated by the light of sciences, reverently understandthis as a twinkling of an eye of God, which for us takesfive hundred million years?

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In a recent article from the skillful hand of Dr.Stephen J. Gould he claims that the fact of evolution is aswell established as the revolution of the Earth around theSun. On the other hand he allowed that absolute certaintyhas no place in the lexicon of scientists.(93) Now itwould be an insult to assume that a scientist of his staturenever should have heard about a man called Einstein,according to whom we just as well may vouch for a Sunrevolving around the Earth. And this being the caseGould, on his own cognizance, cannot rule out creation.

Accordingly my anti-instant creationist brethrenwill do well not to exclude the possibility of change ofheart becoming necessary for them, since even Gouldadvises them not to take their present convictions tooabsolutely. And in case the Sun will be shown indeed tocircle the Earth, these brethren will be led, I hope, torealize what Holy Writ really affirms with regard tocosmology as well as with regard to biology.

Lastly, with reference to St. Paul's "twinkling ofan eye" an up-to-date item, reminiscent of such a Divineinstantaneous "Let there be" - and there is and there are!Secularist confabulators rhapsodize about their Big Bangof a dozen or so billion years ago as if it has been asundoubtedly factual as last year's pyrotechnics on theQueen's birthday. Well, that certainty these brethren maydo well to take with grains of salt. According to a newsclipping in the December 1987 Creation ResearchSociety Quarterly Alan Guth, professor of astrophysics atthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is saying thatthe Universe expanded to its present size and structure ofstars and galaxies, not in ten to twenty billion years aspreviously claimed almost dogmatically. Guth says "thewhole process lasted less than a second."

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Bible and Science

The Bible Is Not a Scientific Textbook

Wearily to ward off a hackneyed, and at least withrespect to me misdirected, accusation that I am usinghoary myths as scientific veracities, I yet must elaboratethis point somewhat more to make it clear that I do not.Sure, I have referred to Holy Writ time and time again asan ontological not to be undervalued metaphysical givenin deliberations about the ultimate ground of being. Agiven that hence by modest instrumentalist science shouldbe considered as information from a possibletranscendental Bystander. However, only as such it hasbeen introduced whenever I judged this necessary, but notas affirming anything more than the by its Makerproclaimed Earth-centeredness of His handiwork. A plainhistorical fact to be accepted in faith and "inside" thetotality of perceptible being amply confirmed.

The Good Book appeals to mankind as a wholethrough all historical time, and in no way expresslyendorses the scientific establishments' theories of oneor another quarter century. The most erudite up-to-dateprofessors of astrophysics and the last, not with their

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ephemeral dicta embued Papuans - the Divine Wordaddresses them on equal terms. Every morning, whenwaking up and looking around, all men find themselvessituated upon a solid, flat Earth around which theHeavens revolve. Whether or not they accept that thisEarth is the kingpin of the Universe - standing on it theydo neither feel it turning nor observe its curvature. Theysee the Sun rising and setting. Even the doughtiestdefender of the modern a-centric view ever expresses itotherwise, unless he is asked to catechize the uninstructedon celestial kinematics. The fact that this-worldlyoriented education urges us to discard such felicitoussimplicity does not in any way change our first-handcollective representations. And it is to theserepresentations that Scripture adapts itself. It speaks, so tosay, in a phenomenal mood, leaving with regard toastronomy, as well as with regard to biology, geology,and all other branches of scientific investigation, anytheoretical underpinning severely alone. To quote, asalready said, with Luther Joshua's "Sun, stand thou still"I consider therefore using the passage beyond itsintended import. Genesis One and Two, and in the natureof things - no humans being there yet - unverifiablereport by the God of Truth, I do not dare to doubt ortheoretically to twist around. However, apart from that Ishy away from any other "geocentric" text - well awarethat on this point I part company with virtually allfundamentalists and orthodox Catholics. The Bible, as Isee it, first and foremost presents us with a religious andethical message, expressed on the level of the highestcommon factor of human comprehension. From thepristine awakening of consciousness in the Garden ofEden to our age in which science purports to be capable

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of superseding Divine revelation. Therefore I waive, apartfrom calling upon it in the context of the Armstrong Alert,any use of its supra-scientific message as evidence in mydown-to-earth astronomical ratiocinations. Whichmessage sublunar wisdom in any case refuses to accept,either wrongly as of no value for solving the fathomlessriddle of life's destiny, or with some justification as notapplicable to investigative science. Logically even mymain Genesis 1:1-19 argument can, of course, easily beturned against me - as this is done, above all, by mytheistic and progressive evolutionist brethren in the faith."Precisely", it is retorted, "because these not yet in exactscience engaged Adamites could in no way be expectedto grasp Kepler's laws, Newton's gravitation, andEinstein's mathematical generalizations, the Bible tells anon-factual, attractive tale. But now we have beenallowed to know better, and should therefore be leery ofascribing to the opening verses of Genesis any strictdescriptive value."

I do not buy this specious argument. For behind itlurks, I hold, a conceit we should abhor. Even today lessthan one in a thousand humans has any clearunderstanding of the laws regulating the cosmicclockwork. Yet all of them, and the theologians of theInternational Council for Biblical Inerrancy to a man,believe just as firmly that the Earth goes around the Sunas their pre-Galilean ancestors were convinced of theopposite. If God had told - but He did not - the first menmade in His image and after His likeness that He hadused the creational procedure at the moment proclaimedto have been used, those men would have accepted thisjust as well as the world does this today... withoutbothering much about the brain-teasing intricacies of

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motions and forces. More important: the reasoning ofthese self-styled orthodox Christians, which I amattacking here, debases clear, intelligible divine wordsand exalts the A.D. 1988 believed-in human derivationsfrom deaf and dumb phenomena. Derivations that in theages past time after time were found just as fictitious asthe present ones tomorrow or next year will turn out tobe. I refuse to join such halting between two opinions, ofwhich the one is founded on the certainty that the God ofTruth speaks truth from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21,and the other rests on the quicksand of ever-incompleteand never-final human theorizing.

However, to leave this rueful aside: rather give methe manful "either-or" of people who at bottom at leastshow true respect for the revelation they have decided toreject than the waffling of in-betweeners who run withthe hare and hunt with the hounds. Those who havedone with all unobservable super-natural fancies willrightly remark that any report asserting to give us thestory how the starry Heavens and the living Earthemerged into being can only be adjudicated in two ways.Either the Biblical one is factual Revelation given by anall-wise, all-knowing, Almighty Creator, and then hewho tampers with it by means of human conjectures andrefutations is a fool of fools, or else the Hexaemeron isthe brainchild of self-styled visionaries, deserving to becomplimented on it. For so much must be admitted: itgives "a portrayal of the creational events of a powerfuland fundamental magnitude..., which by its level ofthought and conceptual frame stands in the sharpestcontrast with all other creation stories."(94) And 20th

century science, pursued by men come of age, has madethe choice to which Copernicanism in the long run could

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not but drive it: the Great Designer of Genesis is a day-dreamer’s fiction.

I concede: there is no way around the impediment.If I would try to win my case by means of the many Bibletexts that take in their message the attendant phenomena"as is", or would present poetical utterances as scientificendorsements, then I would go beyond my warrant ininvestigative astronomical discourse. As did, e.g. St.Boniface, who in 748 A.D. complained to Pope Zachariasthat Abbot Virgilius of Salzburg believed in the existenceof antipodes.95) Should I, with him, read Scripture as avademecum then I must admit that he and the few stillremaining "flat earth" theorists have a point. Even MotherGea's sphericity I cannot convincingly deduce from theinspired text. We should, however not debase the Bible toan encyclopedia of all this-worldly knowledge. I may aswell try to extract ethics from Euclid's Elements.

To get a hearing from the side of secular science Ihave to come with observable factual phenomena. And,alas, the same counts for the most solid creationistbelievers in an infallible Bible. They have been fromearliest childhood so through and through Copernicallybrainwashed that it is virtually impossible to make themsee that their childlike acceptance of Genesis 1:11-13 and20-31 is without rhyme or reason when compared withtheir understanding of Genesis 1:1-19. Which"understanding" is not child-like at all, but flies in theface of what a first and faithful simple reading impresseson a mind not already "knowing" better!

In short: the tenor of Holy Writ is, all itsphenomenalism granted, basically geostatic, I maintain.Agreed: to say this can - and will! - by judged as an

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example of credulous and infantile gullibility. Just letsecularists and theologians present me with rock-hardevidence that such is the case. Then I shall offer mypeccavi - but not earlier! And going two miles with theminstead of one: a simple manner to obtain such evidence Ihave already suggested.

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Tradition has it that, when he was visiting PopeInnocent II in 1139 A.D., St. Malachy O'Morgair,Archbishop of Armagh, Ireland, gave this Pontiff a list ofshort and enigmatic Latin phrases prophetically alludingto the Servants of servants still to come after him until theend of our age. About the value of these auguries per se Iwithhold comment. Yet in the context of a history ofastronomical science at least two of these mottoes appearto me singularly apt.

On April 4, 1615, during "what has beendescribed as the first process against Galileo"(96) the onlywise man in the trial, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), wrote a letter to the Carmelite monk Foscarini,who had published a book in defense of Copernicus.This well-known letter has generally "been interpretedas an assertion of the cognitive limits of scientifictheories",(98) in this case specifically with regard to thevalidity of the heliocentric hypothesis. It is enlighteningto read how the Study Group constituted by John Paul II,eager to see Galileo rehabilitated, plays down the force ofBellarmine's letter. "Historiography has commonlyaccepted Duhem's (1908) interpretation of the topics ofthe letter, although not necessarily his positiveevaluation of them."(99) Why not? - no arguments are

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given! "To demonstrate that the appearances are saved byassuming the sun at the centre and the earth in theheavens is not the same thing as to demonstrate that infact the sun is in the centre and the earth in the heavens",thus the Cardinal, "I believe that the first demonstrationmay exist, but I have very grave doubts about the second,and in case of doubt one may not abandon the HolyScriptures as expounded by the holy Fathers. "(100) Ifthere were a real proof, then, yes then..., but in 1615 therewas none. And today, I repeat, there still is not any.

In taking this "Wait and see" standpoint withregard to final conclusions about all celestial mattersterrestrially observable, the Cardinal echoed the so-called "instrumental" insights of, to name a fewauthorities, the heathen Claudius Ptolemy (c.100-170) inhis Almagest, the Jew Moses Maimonides (1135-1204),the Catholic Thomas Aquinas (1224-1275), and theLutheran Andreas Osiander (1498-1552), as the latterexpressed it in his anonymous foreword to Copernicus,De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Tersely to formulatethe opinion of these four distinctly heterogenousluminaries: a theory may be useful, but is therefore notyet truthful. There are only two methods that will enableus to overcome this limitation of all scientific endeavoursgroping for true facts behind the bare facts. Either aninfinity of affirmative test results without any outcomequeering the pitch, or otherwise the endorsing input ofOne Knowing Everything will offer us certainty. Sadlyenough, the former way of doing cannot be walked to itsend in potentially endless time, and the second optionrequires acceptance "in faith". For foolish is a pupilknowing less than his teacher who questions thatteacher's dicta. A man may consider himself the

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measure of all physical things about which he knowssomething, but a meta-metaphysical judgement seat fromwhere he will be authorized to affirm or disqualify amessage presenting itself as metaphysical... that seat ismust definitely not within his reach.

It is not only befuddled Biblicists, who professsuch a humble outlook. Bellarmine, siding with savantsof old, was also ahead of his time and now earnsposthumous approvals. For after three centuries of anarrogant "scientific method" being the vogue, things havecome full circle. Today "very few philosophers orscientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or canbe, proven knowledge",(101) a statement that, I hold andhave shown, needs no super-human intelligence for itsaffirmation. As John Paul II on May 9, 1983 warned anillustrious audience, including 33 Nobelists:epistemolo-gical frontiers impose indispensable rules anddelimitations on our questing towards that which isuniversal and absolute.(102) No explanation, notheoretical approach has ever been without more or lessplausible rivals. Hence for a final choice between them,hardheaded logic contends, the adjudicators will have tobe conversant with all possible choices - which they arenot. Myopic therefore is he who does not wisely alwayskeep a back door open for an as yet unknown solutionuntil he shall have found the philosopher's stone. Icertainly do this with respect to the nuts and bolts of theastronomical model I prefer!

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur - the worldwants to be deceived, therefore be it deceived! Everyattentive student of the Galileo affair knows that the manhad not a shred of positive evidence. His telescopicobservations made short work of Aristotle's ideas about

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the structure of celestial bodies, but nothing more, for"mountains on the moon prove it is not a perfectlycrystalline sphere, but they do not prove that the Earthmoves".( 103)

Be this as it may: the Chief Mathematician andPhilosopher of Cosmo II de Medici had his mind madeup, and therefore the sagacious words of Bellarmine fellon deaf ears. So equally did the latter's 1616 Declarationto Galileo Galilei , ostensibly on second thoughts toneddown to bare minimum by denying any abjuration onGalileo's part, but by implication warning him to keepscience as science and Revelation as Revelation.(104)

Unhappily, such a wise disengagement betweenthese two incompatible kinds of information was not keptin sight. Pro and contra a geostatic view, as is the way ofthe world, the attitudes hardened. Eighteen years later,twelve years after the Cardinal's death, and his astuteapproach fallen into oblivion, the outcome of the 1533Galileo trial put the Church of Rome in a corner sheshould have shunned at all costs. Pitting Revelationagainst human theorizing, the Inquisitors demeaned theformer and unduly exalted the latter. If they had expresslyallowed Galileo and his followers the use of theheliocentric theory as a working hypothesis but no more,then the Church's position would, from 1533 until todayand for all time still to come, have been and be logicallyuntouchable. Not only that: by unremittingly refusing tobudge unless faced with indisputable evidence, mankindmight have remained aware that Copernicus' model isonly one out of many - as during the first half of the 17th

century still was acknowledged.(105)However, cutting down Galileo's claim to its right

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and real proposition of "hypothetically - not absolutely",and consequently thereafter dismissing the case asirrelevant with regard to the accepted understanding ofthe Biblical view on the Earth's position?... DiehardAristotelians managed to keep that procedure, advocatedin Bellarmine's Foscarini letter, out of the inquisitors'deliberations. And Rome soon afterwards had cause toregret the short-sighted language of the Holy Tribunal.Among other missed opportunities it robbed the Vaticanof the chance to confront one of its arch-enemies,Newton, with a sound epistemological lesson, whichtoday would be acclaimed to have been ad rem and mighthave caused the great Isaac's epigones not to be overlycocksure. For a heliocentric-style orrery is a nice piece ofmachinery to play with, but when it comes to explainingthe fine points of calculation and prediction we have tostop the little brass ball representing our Earth and let,after the manner of Tycho Brahe, the Sun and itsattendant planets whirr around Mother Gea. "So what,why not?" Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) would havecommented, chiding as he did Newton's appeal to waterin a rotating bucket - a criticism now shared by all andsundry who believe in an Einsteinian Universe.(106) But indoing this they overlook the plain truth that a man findinghimself within a system he cannot escape from will, if heis wise, abstain from confident pronounce-ments aboutthe status of that system as a whole. Never neglect Russell'sCaveat and the Armstrong Alert : theory concocted byobservers "inside" and truth as seen by an "outside"bystander are two that the Holy Office should havemaintained. And thereafter the Church could have letGalileo and his credulous disciples happily alone withtheir guesses and proofs-no proofs!

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Today the clamour for that Mathematics Professorof Padua University's rehabilitation demonstrates to allwho want to see, and do not practice ostrich policy, thephilosophical mainspring activating the be-all and end-allof its advocates. Their ultimate aim was alreadyunderground at work long before and during the course ofthe Italian Renaissance. Still in disguise it began to cometo the fore in the 16th and 17th centuries by goading thescientific progress in a direction favouring a monisticmaterialist religion. From about 1750 on that finalpurpose has become more and more blatantly proclaimed.However, even in our time the sinister force thatprompted a hailing and hallowing of the "CopernicanRevolution" has not yet fully reached the end itdesperately has had in view - but will never reach! - sinceAdam's from eternity pre-ordained fall at the world'sbeginning. There are still Churches and Christians to beridiculed and pilloried for proclaiming a God, Who is aCreator and in His Risen Son, Jesus Christ, a LovingFather, Who wills that, as St. Paul reminded Timothy, allmen should be saved.

Observe what the wisdom of our age wants theBishop of Rome, John Paul II, to do: he must becompelled to admit and declare that those among hisflock are fools who prefer the Bible's information aboutthe whence of the world above all scientificconfabulations presently believed in. For by implicationthey may in the light of science then come to see howludicrous an orthodox faith is that treasures Holy Writ asheavenly Wisdom, and not discards it as a sop forsimpletons.* The Tychonian theory the foremost astrophysicistsnow declare to be - I have already quoted Hoyle on this__________________

See Addendum II

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score - "as good as anyone else's - but no better." YetJohn Paul II is urged to proclaim Galileo to have beencondemned unjustly for teaching the not to be doubtedtruth of a today no longer avowed heliocentric view. Whythis double-tongued insistence? A moment of reflectionon the doings and dicta of astronomers from Copernicusto Sagan will make this clear: the secularWeltanschauung, its abettors correctly sense, stands orfalls in the long run with the status of Mother Earth in theHeavens around her. Believe that Copernicus had the lastword about the issue, then you are logically bound to endup with a Universe in which we somewhere live on atrifling speck of dust. Believe that Tycho Brahe had hisoptions right, then we find ourselves in a uniquelypreferred place. Small wonder that Malachy laments thegenesis of "A Perverse Race" as characterizing the fifthPope Paul's (1605-1621) reign!

There is more. The rudimentary technology of the16th century could not yet provide Tycho Brahe withinstruments capable of measuring aberration orparallaxes. That great Dane should therefore not beblamed for concluding the Earth to be central in theroundelay of the stars. In this particular, as I have tried toshow, his model has to be corrected. In reality the Sun isleading the motion of the stars fastened far away on theheavenly vault. From the geocentric point of view it is theGreat Light, called into being on the fourth day of theHexaemeron, that, ceaselessly toiling, carries theUniverse's dome around us. Lo and behold, and wonder:"De Labore Solis" (the Labour of the Sun) will be such animportant astronomical concern during the episcopate ofPope John Paul 11(1979-...) that Malachy selects it tomark that epoch!

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And That's the Reason Why!

As the late Arthur Koestler, certainly not a Bible-thumper, saw it, "the cosmic quest set in motion byGalileo and his successors has destroyed the medievalvision of an immutable social order in a walled-inuniverse together with its fixed hierarchy of moral values,and transformed the European landscape, society, culture,habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a newspecies had arisen on this planet.”(107) So it is, and I stillhave to find one historian of whatever religious orphilosophical stripe who in essence disowns this appraisalor denies that the impact of the Copernican revolution hasbeen far-reaching in its corollaries. Even more to thepoint in summarizing the final results of the "NewScience" is Theo Löbsack, a German popularizer of theprogress mankind has been able to make after discardingthe Ptolemaic outlook of Antiquity and Middle Ages."Galileo's way of thinking laid 350 years ago thefoundation for the modern science and technology, andinto what crisis he since has brought theological thinkingis difficult to describe. Until today the Church fights foran inventory of religious truths that are no longercompatible with the insights gained by means of theinductive method: among them the dogmas and thenotion of a Supreme Being, an Almighty Father inHeaven.”(108)

In a 1987 trumpet blast by means of a circularletter, calling upon all friends of science to join his anti-creationist crusade, Isaac Asimov is also refreshinglycandid. The battle, he warns, is not only against anti-evolutionism in physics and astronomy. It also concernsthe fight against benighted dimwits "introducing

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inflexible concepts of sin, guilt, and a hierarchicalrelationship descending from God to man to woman tochild."(109) Indeed it does, and I am grateful to read inblack on white the motive lurking behind the vituperationand name-calling to which Asimov, et al. subject "therotting corpse of Christianity.”(110)

The Half-Way House of the Creationists

Unreservedly siding with the brethren by thosesecularists attacked, I must, however, confess that Iconsider the strength of the creationist position seriouslyflawed. The Bible is primarily concerned about thingsnot seen, less about the temporal things observable in thepresent age. If you will: the Scriptures tell us how to goto Heaven, not how the Heaven goes. The Good Booktakes for granted an Earth at rest with respect to God'sthrone in that Heaven, and the celestial host thereforerevolving around us. Details about the mechanicsemployed in this great design we have not been given.How its parameters are struck and the variables within itare circumscribed Genesis does not tell us. Hoyle,surveying the unending search for the "how” and "why"of the heavenly courses from the Babylonians to thetwentieth century's relativists, rightly remarks "that eachgeneration finds the universe to be stranger than thepreceding generation ever conceived it to be."(1) For "veilafter veil will lift - but there must be veil upon veilbehind".(111) Lifting those veils - that interesting task Godhas granted to the sons of men to be exercised therewith,Ecclesiastes informs us. God's Message, after giving usthe great outline, leaves further investigation to us.

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"What should we believe, and how then should we live?"Answers given by wisdom to such questions Holy Writoffers. For evidences in the natural sciences, I agree withJohn Calvin, we have to turn to textbooks dealing withthose matters. And when, as is the case, modernastronomy keeps our Earth still dethroned, we mayconfidently declare it to be wrong, but shall have to showthis by means of experiments. For scientism, thoughknowing the heliocentric dogma to be actually overtakenby new insights, still preaches that dogma to theuninformed as a "fact", to be accepted as gospel truth -and this, all logically valid evidences to the contrary. Butwhen we, who frankly trust Our Maker's lucidinformation "in faith", with all those evidences on ourside, hold on to a Universe called into being for the sakeof us here on Earth... well, then practically even thestaunchest believers in an inerrant Bible shake theirheads. And when asked to show me the errors of my way,about nine out of ten do not even deign me worthy of ananswer. Whilst the tenth refers me to Galileo. He has, hasn'the...?

Endlessly during eighteen years I have had torepeat the truth. No, he has not "proven" the Earth to bejust one of the planets circling the Sun. It is a piouslyadored untruth foremost among the many in the history ofwestern mankind's beliefs and disbeliefs. That Big Lieeven they unreservedly still honour, who are skepticalabout the truth-content of Darwinian theory old-style andall its out of embarrassments born modern re-formulations. Many of those skeptics are clearly, or atleast dimly, aware of the disastrous results to which"survival of the fittest", and that slogan's concomitantphilosophical theses, have led. However, for one minute

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to doubt Copernican truth, after 1916 by the generaltheory of relativity effectively demoted to a simpleillustration for the unlearned and no more - the possibilityof doing that has not yet even dawned on them.

To quote a well-informed doubter, the molecularbiologist Michael Denton, about the question ofevolution: "The acceptance of the idea one hundred yearsago initiated an intellectual revolution more significantand far reaching than even the Copernican andNewtonian revolutions in the 16th and 17th

centuries:"(112) And fifty-two pages later: "It wasbecause Darwinian theory broke man's link with God andset him adrift in a cosmos without purpose or end that itsimpact was so fundamental. No other intellectualrevolution in modern times (with the possible exceptionof the Copernican) so profoundly affected the way menviewed themselves and their place in the universe.(113)

I cannot see it otherwise: when making theseobservations this author is running with the hare andhunting with the hounds. Starting with Darwin's TheVoyage of the Beagle Denton titles the first chapterof his book "Genesis Rejected". I declare this to be amyopic choice. Yes, Genesis has been rejected. Yetnot just by Darwin, but already by Copernicus andhis self-styled prophet Galileo Galilei. The latteropened Pandora's box by brushing aside the clearinformation of Genesis 1:1-19. Small wonder thatconsequently the second half of the chapter in thelong run had to suffer the same treatment. Dentoncomes close to realizing this when much later inhis book he shows himself to be conscious of the impactthat an obvious extrapolation of the basic heliocentric

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scheme would have if it were confirmed. If our Earth isnot a unique creation, but just a sample of numberlesslikewise advantageously placed planets around other"Great Lights" in their millions, and hence life were toprove widespread, then this "would of course have a veryimportant bearing on the question how life generated onearth. For it would undoubtedly provide powerfulcircumstantial evidence for the traditional evolutionaryscenario, enhancing enormously the credibility of thebelief that the route from chemistry to life can besurmounted by simple natural processes, wherever theright conditions exist.”(114) True enough, but may Ireverse the direction of reasoning by asking if ever thechemical soup-to-ape fantasia would have been dreamt ofin any man's philosophy on an Earth, as our ancestorsfrom before 1543 knew it to be, at the visible Heavens'centre? Denton should remember John Donne's well-know lines written in 1611. "And new philosophy callsall in doubt.. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone."(115)Then already, and not only after 1859!

Of course I agree that the dethronement did notshow its inevitable corollaries immediately. A stonereleased to roll down a hillside has to accelerate beforeit can do much damage. Traditional restraints delayedthe death of Adam from Newton to Darwin(116), butdid not stop the decline, and today there are manythoughtful men who openly acknowledge that theemergence of Holocaust and Gulag, of racism andbreakdown of ethical norms, has been fostered, if notinitiated, by Darwin's monkey-to-still-evolving-monkeysyndrome. God died in the 19th century, and man isdying in the 20th century", Norman Geisler, a staunch

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defender of Biblical Inerrancy, declares.(117) I have noquarrel with this hyperbole: but would like to remind himof Schiller's proverbial lines:

"Truly, this is the curse of evil done: It must go on forever bearing evil. "(118)

Why did, as Geisler sees it, God die only after thepublication of The Origin of Species in 1859? The bookmerely articulated the logical outcome of a trend ofthought that began to infiltrate Western man's mind oncethe consequences of Newton's cosmic model came to berealized. "The Divine Antifex had therefore less and lessto do in the world. He did not even have to conserve it, asthe world, more and more, became able to dispense withthis service."(119) - thus Alexandre Koyré.

What if...?

Just meditate about it for a few minutes: what ifthe approach of Cardinal Bellarmine had won the day in1633, and the Catholic Churchmen had stuck to theirguns with a "Proof, please", challenging generation aftergeneration of astronomers to provide it? "For", asOsiander had put it in his foreword to Copernicus' book,"these hypotheses need not to be true nor even probable;if they provide a calculus consistent with theobservations, that alone is sufficient... the astronomerwill accept above all others the one which is the easiestto grasp. The philosopher will perhaps seek thesemblance of truth. But neither of them will understandor state anything certain, unless it has been divinelyrevealed to him...So far as hypotheses are concerned, letno one accept anything certain from astronomy, whichcannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas

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conceived for another purpose, and depart from this studya greater fool than when he entered it.”(130) To whichwords I cannot but add Hoyle's appraisal that they "agreeremarkably well with the outlook of modern theoreticalphysics, and are not at all inept, as earlier generationshave supposed."(121)

What if Tycho Brahe's view had been morestrenuously adhered to? His system "had the merit ofbeing theoretically equivalent to the Copernican, withoutthe apparent defect of ascribing motion to the Earth; itmade possible a scientifically adequate geostaticastronomy, irrefutable by any test of observation thatGalileo or anyone else could impose on it."(122) Toobject that Newtonian kinematics and Kepler's lawsdecidedly put an end to its tenability is not warranted.Jupiter's many moons circle, obedient to all thesegeneralizing laws, their wandering star whilst that planetin its turn just as law-abidingly describes steady orbitsaround the Sun. Until we have found a firm hold onspace, and consequently can pinpoint absolute motion, wemay put the fulcrum of the Solar System wheresoever itpleases us. Newton, fully aware of the difficulty, thoughtto have solved it for his mechanomorphic model bymeans of his well-known whirling water-filled bucket.However - as is now generally admitted - BishopBerkeley, preempting so to say Mach and Einstein,convincingly showed that this demonstration did notsettle the issue. The most and best we can do whenpositing a Sun immovably fixed in space is todemonstrate the Earth's 30 km/sec motion whilerevolving around it. So long as that has not beenaccomplished, Galileo may get a hearing, but no oneis compelled to take him seriously.

To argue that Bradley's discovery and his

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accounting for it would have provided Tychoniantheorists clear evidence for that motion of the Earth is, asI have shown, an overhasty conclusion. More: if then andthere after 1727 Boscovich' water-filled telescope hadbeen utilized to test Bradley's contention, that contentionwould have been found wanting. The only change in thegeocentric model necessitated by the outcome of theexperiment would have been the one advocated in thepresent essay: a starry dome not hinged on the Earth buton the Sun. Any stringent reason to exchange the provencosmic structure for an unproven heliocentric guessnobody could have postulated. Let me quote aknowledgeable, almost two centuries after Galileo not yetby the general opinion browbeaten, witness for the truetheoretical situation in his days: Alexander von Humboldt(1769-1859) still declared: "I have already known a longtime that we do not yet have proof for the system ofCopernicus, but I shall not take the risk to be the first oneattacking it.(123)

Even when a good hundred years after Bradley,three astronomers - Bessel, Henderson and Struve -detected the first parallaxes, their findings could, as isdone in this essay, without difficulty be accommodatedto the geocentric model. And surely the last devotees ofCopernicus would have been disconcerted after à laMichelson and Morley, in vain having tried to vindicatetheir prophet. To be sure, they would have been rescuedagain by the ingenious ad hoc of Poincaré’s "principle ofrelativity", as - utilizing Lorentz' equations - elaboratedby Einstein. However, and no mistake: every logicianwill agree with me: that principle - and that to thedetriment of its extrapolations - is no more than anad hoc, not to be taken too seriously, for it explains

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something by means of the very phenomenon it wasinvented to explain. That is: by taking, all three-dimensional data to the contrary, a whirlabout Earth forgranted.

In the wistful "what if" scientific fantasia I havemyself allowed the Tychonian astronomical establish-ment would, I envisage, have treated those erringCopernicans better than in the harsh climate of today'sblinkered secularism the stargazers treat the geocentrists.

My convinced geocentrists would have beenepistemologically prudent enough to forego the use of thequalification "unthinkable". They would have allowed aSun-centered Universe, adrift or not adrift in a- let us admit it! - strict definition eluding spatiality, alogical possibility. Therefore, wanting to be true,unbiased scientists, they would have been on the lookoutfor any chance to test the truth of their theory. Anddiehard Copernicans suggesting an experiment capable ofoverthrowing the Earth-centered paradigm, would haveimmediately been granted a serious hearing andenthusiastic cooperation in performing it.

A year before and a year after Einstein burst uponthe scene in 1905, a Lutheran pastor, F.E. Pasche,published books in defence of the pre-Copernicanview.(124) Whether the Germania Publishing Companyof Milwaukee found it a bad bargain to market thesebooks I do not know, but that no second printing becamenecessary stands to reason. Yet, I find the coincidenceremarkable. Geocentricity was apparently, at least amongscientifically mal-adjusted German immigrant circlesin Wisconsin, still alive and well on planet Earthwhen a German in Switzerland published a theory

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aimed at destroying the last shreds of its credibility.What careful experiments had not been able toaccomplish this "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegterKörper",(52) would once and for all do. For the"unthinkable" spectre, by test-results threateningly againconjured up out of the murky medieval depths ofsuperstition, the special theory of relativity effectively, itseemed, would exorcise. Small wonder that physicists ingeneral and astronomers in particular took to thisproposal as ducks to the water. However, I doubtwhether many of them sufficiently realized how thisundertaking, welcomed as a panacea par excellence forphysical theory, in fact would move the basic problemback to square one. That is to say: to the alternativesoutlined by Cardinal Bellarmine in his Foscariniletter. To declare that from Einstein's point of view bothTycho Brahe's and Copernicus’ models are "as good asanybody else's - but no better" is one thing - tosubstantiate this is another. I appreciate Hoyle'sconfession that after all Tychonians cannot be labeledoutright fools, but it is not good enough. Before I acceptSir Fred's judgement and am constrained to pronouncemyself satisfied with such an insubstantial equality, Iwant what is called "proof". On the prerequisites for sucha proof I agree with a creationist like RobertKofahl.(125) With him I concur that the quest has to beconducted in, and confined to, the empiricallyapproachable natural world. Do I then ask too muchwhen on these terms I challenge Hoyle, et al., toauthenticate their claim? By urging, nay: beseeching,them to perform the common sense extra-terrestrial, butstill sublunary, measurements of the speed of lightsuggested in this paper? Measurements of which the

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theoretical considerations suggesting them rest on amodus tollendo tollens that will make the outcomelogically binding? And if this outcome is found to besquarely contradicting Poincaré's principle of relativity -will it not have to be admitted already a century ago tohave been attested by Airy's failure?

No reasoning can start form nothingness. I hereposit the perception of spatiality shared by all sentientbeings as a given, beyond and above which ourunderstanding can not truly levitate itself. Furthermore Iaccept the constant velocity of light (on Earth) withrespect to that spatiality, whatever distinctive qualitiesand entities theorists may theorize both to have or hold.And then there are only far-fetched possibilities tocircumvent the principle of contradiction. To make nobones about it: in the event that Einstein turns out to bewrong the Earth either is at rest in a the starsencompassing space that knows place, and consequentlyabsolute motion, or the Earth is moving together with itstied-aether bubble. However, the spaces-moving-around-spaces postulates of the schesis theories of the type todaystill forwarded by Theocharis and Zappfe(39), I reject asdesperate artificialities without the slightest shred ofevidence supporting them that not even better fits thegeocentric model. Those theories are only devised coûteque coûte to save Copernicus.

It is either Einstein or Tycho Brahe. And with thatI rest my case!

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Science and the Christian Faith

There are, and I still have to dwell on these as yet,a few non-physical but for mankind's world viewcrucially important facets of the issue. If indeed thepositions of the Earth on the twenty-second days of Juneand December are an in principle measurable 299.106 kmapart, then the astronomical establishment has aformidable case. If this distance cannot be paced offbecause it does not exist, then its popularizers are talkingthrough their hats and preaching a world view of a valueless than null and void.

If Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was correct indeclaring the stars to be just far-away Suns, and JohannesKepler (1571-1630) plainly wrong in denying this, thenmacro-evolution from a Big Bang to advancedanthropoids fabricating Big Bombs acquires byimplication and extrapolation an attractive probability.There is then the immense Cosmos of so and somany billions of years and miles with uncountablegalaxies harbouring numberless varieties of stars andnebulae, all these without any truly apprehensible systemscattered through the unbounded Heavens. Somewherein an out-of-the way corner of that Universe on a coolingspeck of star dust circling a minor fireball we live ourlives, from now on as by benevolent chance notaborted younger than five-month fetuses, to certaindeath and decomposition. Whence it all came, why weare there, and how everything will end or be recycled -we shall never know. For who, after accepting theUniverse preached by the Sagans and Goulds, canwithout mindwrenching rational contortions still believein a Bible that already begins its message with a make-believe story of an in six days completed creation

of an unique Earth?

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Clearly: Genesis 1:1-19 is strangely withoutrhyme or reason when its account is compared with theafter the Copernican Revolution obtained "facts". Andstrangest of all are the rear-guard skirmishes ofcreationists staunchly believing the literal truth of theBiblical report, but only from Genesis 1:20 on. In onerespect I cannot blame them: from their tenderest yearson they have been bamboozled into believing Galileo tohave been a scientific prophet without peer. A five-yearold grandson of mine, for instance, attending a (Christian)kindergarten came up to me the other day and took me totask about the error he has heard his father and me talkingabout. "Grandpa”, he remonstrated, "teacher says that theEarth goes around the Sun." Yes, and two plus two equalsfour - never doubt it!

Therefore only after reading the opening verses ofthe Bible as interpreted and elucidated by the wisdom ofthe world, do the protagonists of a strictly orthodox six-day creation abound in fervent testimonies about theingenuous matter-of-fact manner Moses has employed innarrating to them the happenings during theHexamaeron's days five and six. And rare are theorthodox theologians who realize that by taking such anapproach to the plain text of Scripture they are haltingbetween two opinions. Forgetting how "the exegete mustexplain what is written and restrict himself to that"(126)they go to work by the light of questionable informationfrom science. By means of introducing poeticalhyperboles, sleight of hand glosses, doubtfulcomparisons, and by applying desperate scientific adhocs, they delude themselves into believing thatthereby they have God's report of His doings effectivelycramped on the passe-partout of secular astrophysics.

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Why does standard-creationism play this risky game? If"the things that natural science is positing lie hidden in orbehind the simple childish language of GenesisOne"(127), why then this "childish" - where are we toldthat is the case? - restricted to the first half of theRevelation's first chapter and not applied to the secondhalf? “The Lord means what he says, and says what Hemeans." If this adage does not apply to the beginning ofthe Torah , where remains then our certainty that the restof Scripture is plain truth? Time and again, in the NewTestament as well as in the Old, the authors refer toGenesis as a trustworthy historical text. Nowhere, neitherin the Bible's first ten chapters, nor in all that follows, dowe find the slightest hint or warning that the informationabout the creation of Heaven and Earth, of Sun, Moon,and the stars also, must not be taken as an eyewitness'report just as straighiforwardly as that of the creation ofman and beast.

If the proponents of modern astronomy have hitthe mark I can see how Biblical Christianity may wellappear to them as a soothing syrup for incurable parochialminds. As a faith by analogy equal to the tribalreligion of an untutored people, not yet touched bycivilization, among whom in days of old a few wisesouls concluded that for the purpose of keeping societallife on an even keel a with divine authority festoonedethics and a "pie in the sky" are practical necessities.For myself, if in the matter here at stake I am wrongand the modern picture of the Heavens will turn out to beincontrovertibly established... well, I shall hold the faith,but will also realize that the world with David Hume(1711-1776) may well characterize that faith to be "someunaccountable operation of the mind between disbelief

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and conviction, but approaching much nearer to theformer than to the latter."(128) However, to quote Pascalfor the last time: the heart has its reasons that reasonknows nothing of.

It has, happily, not yet come to that. Of thebelievers in the ruling varieties of cosmological models,all of them are bound to admit that the cornerstone oftheir imposing theoretical edifices - the Earth's motion -is on their own acquiescence not testable. Over andagainst this I have shown the scheme of Tycho Brahe -adapted to the "aberration" only having becomeobservable many years after his death - to be easilytestable. Hence I refuse until further notice to renouncethe conviction of that cantankerous Dane with his partlysilver nose. Until, that is, the experiment I insist on shall -be sure: it will not! - have given a result putting me in thewrong.

With due apology for harping on a final aspectof the epistemological string I have been twanging againand again: there is still an important considerationnot to be passed over or brushed aside. Even if thegenuineness of the geocentric theory were to bewarranted by the facts, the Goulds and Asimovs ofour age, I realize, would not be put out of countenancein the least. They might grant us the probable or apparentexistence of a Something or Someone, an Intelligenceacting in and through the Intelligent Universe.(129) Yet,trying to clinch my case by pointing a Hoyle, a Jastrow,and all their variegated compatriots to that analogy ofArchdeacon Paley's watchmaker will not make Christiansof these sincere seekers for supra-sensible truth. Theymay well with the Athenians of St. Paul's day becometheists paying homage to an Unknown God, to a Maker,but nothing more - if even that much! For when said

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Archdeacon finds a watch on crossing a heath(l30), hemay indeed infer that this object has been produced by awatchmaker, because he has seen, or has been told bytrustworthy witnesses, that watchmakers design andfabricate such timepieces. However: analogies, I mustagree with Hume, are not very compelling arguments. Awatch is not exactly a Universe, and who has ever noticeda Creator creating Universes? Furthermore: whether thenowhere to be seen artisan who made the watch in case isa scoundrel or a saint - Paley cannot conclude that fromhis find. Only after using it for a few days he will be ableto tell us whether the maker is an excellent craftsman or aclumsy niggler.

From the day of Cicero's De Natura Deorum toHume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, anduntil the end of our time and age, these defects alwaysdid and always will greatly diminish the force of theargument from design as a tool in Christian apologetics,which above all has to account for the origin of evil - atask natural theology is unable convincingly to tackle.Grant the Omnipotent and Greatest of all Watchmakershigh up there in the sky the creation of those constructsbuilt of subatomic particles everywhere around us,together with our sensorial ability to transform theseaggregates of quarks into collective representations, thatis: into the things we see. Yet, looking at His handiworkshere below, the secularists will say that in any case Hehas bungled the job. That this prima facie seems to betrue, I do not, as already said, deny. Disastrous "Acts ofGod" in nature, terminal cancer wards in hospitals,devilish deeds, hatred, famines, poisonous snakes,malformed babies - what loving Great Father wouldsubject His children to such calamities, which by

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definition He should be powerful enough to ward off?And even more to the point: consider the twentythousandplus Christian denominations, each of them claiming tobe right with regard to the doctrines on which all theother ones are wrong. It appears that His Spirit is noteven strong enough to keep His disciples in line. A realbenevolent all-wise and all-powerful Divinity ought to dobetter!

Agreed - again at first sight, that is. But the firstcue to a worthier and less hasty appraisal the atheists andquestioning theists have in that "ought”.(131) For fromwhere do we get, if not from a moral Maker, this standardthat a priori enables us to be sure what "ought" and"ought not" to be the case? Around us and in us, ourthoughts accusing or else excusing God and one another,and our own selves? Are there not even pains anddeprivations we gladly suffer for a desirable purpose?What, as Thomas Hardy heard Nature ask, if "some highPlan betides, as yet not understood, of evil stormed bygood?" What if He, Who knows the end from thebeginning, needed the presently damaged Creation as anecessary prelude and probation for the Golden Age tocome? What, as from Thomas Aquinas to our days manygood and wise men have maintained, the world that nowis must be the best possible way to achieve the bestpossible world into which we shall be resurrected by aGod, Who is love? When Hardy, in the line following theone just quoted, deems us to be "the Forlorn Hope overwhich Achievement strides", he is wrong. We are notexpendable pawns in an unknowable Great Game, butprecious in the sight of God.

Castles in Spain, dim-witted daydreams? I thinknot. However to expound the severe rationality of that

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"way", as the Bible calls it, is to engage in a theodicy.And to repeat a remark already made: such a theodicy is asubject too high for a paper which, when all is said anddone, merely pleads the desirability of a tentative this-worldly step aimed at underscoring the credibility of aGreat Plan. That which may be known of God, Hiseternal power and Godhead, is manifest in us andunderstood by the things that are made. His Great Planwe have to believe until it shall be revealed at itscompletion.

So far as the philosophical and religious aspectsof the issue are concerned, which - sound reason willacknowledge - cannot be solved by reason. On the otherhand I ask the reader to realize: Christianity is not onlywhat outsiders might well conclude it to be fromobserving the antics of the electronic soul-savers amongmy brethren in the faith.

Conclusively...

Not worthy of any serious refutation? I am awarethat this will be the verdict of virtually all readers whohave taken the trouble to follow me thus far in mydefense of Tycho Brahe. Well, to lecture me musttherefore be easy for them. Just let them present me withone astronomical observation that physically andlogically gives short shift to my thesis, and I shall retractevery word I have said. However, to save those readersfruitless efforts, let me - and this together with the trulyprominent pundits in the fields of science andphilosophy! - warn them that such an observation cannotbe found. At bottom it is my implicit medieval credulityagainst their equally credulous faith in the scientificmethod. And that is a controversy not susceptible to

proof, pro or contra.

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Allow me, as far as provability is concerned, tosummarize the whole matter. First of all: nobody candeny that at the end of the 19th century the Newtonianview of the cosmos was in dire straits, and that ultimatelyonly Einstein rescued astronomy out of the Ptolemaic cul-de-sac into which it had reasoned itself. However, as Ihave shown, that great man's ingenious theories are notonly inadmissibly tainted by a metaphysical stance, butalso scientifically suspect by reason of two elementarylogical fallacies. From the circumstance that here onEarth we cannot detect motion relative to space it doesnot follow that such is nowhere possible. I note in passingthat L. Essen challenges the "common view that thespecial theory of relativity is well supported byexperimental evidence, although this may not be true ofthe general theory".(132) More importantly: I considerthe sad actuality that all this evidence is obtained byaffirming the consequent and is therefore not in the leastcompelling. "If relativity is true we shall be doing this toobtain that . Here is the that, and therefore..."Fiddlesticks. There may be a quite different phenomenonbehind that outcome. Last but not least, I hold that thegeneral theory, as I have demonstrated, is in its presentform untenable. Looking at the star Alpha Centauri froman Earth circling the Sun, parallax measurements andtrigonometry would assure us that the two are 1.3 parsecs,or more than 4.2 light years apart. But looking from anEarth circled by the Sun, the distance turns out to be lessthan one twenty-fifth of that amount. Now these valuescannot both be true, and the theory's assertion that thesecond view is as good as the first, but not better, isconsequently wrong.

The desirability of a test is thereby certainly even

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more stressed, because it will logically and physicallysettle the matter. If a suitable modification of eitherHoek's experiment performed in 1868 or that proposed byme in 1968 produces a null result, Einstein will at last beacceptably verified. For the reasoning behind theseproposals is modus tollendo tollens and thereforelogically binding. On the other hand: if the result will bepositive and the observed interference consistent with thespeed of the used apparatus, then space knows properplace and movement real rest.

Yet will it settle the matter, logically andphysically?... Russell's Caveat, re-worded in a form hewould have scorned, must have the last word.

"Saving the appearances", that is promoting aplausible guess at what we prefer, or believe to be, thetruth behind the veil of the observations we are wont tocall "facts" - it is a game we can all play to our hearts'content. And astronomers, judging from their papers,enjoy it to the full.(88) However, without subsequentverification our guesses are no more than doubtabledesiderata, as yet binding no one.

For this-worldly science careful testing of alltheories is a sine qua non. Whether we build our modelsof the Universe on sacred or secular givens, our ideasremain tentative until duly verified. But even the mostsolid experimental affirmations and the failure of allefforts at falsification do not, I maintain, provide us witha final, a definite answer to the question how the Heavensgo. Our experimental set-ups may be impeccable and ourreasoning logically faultless - a not yet realized aspect ofthe natural world may one day come to the fore and upsetour tidy schemes. It has happened time after time, andwho can guarantee that it will not happen again?

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Is it therefore impossible to declare any model ofthe cosmos truly true? Is there not any unassailablelogical reasoning or physical observation compelling usto prefer in astronomy one postulate above all the otherones put forward and believed in throughout humanhistory? No, there is not. Man sees what he wants to see,but cannot prove his view to be correct. As Meno put it toSocrates: if you do not already know which view is thetrue one, "even if you come right up against it, how willyou know that what you have found is the thing youdidn't know?"

Socrates rebuttal of this argument is revealing: hehas to fall back on "men and women who understand thetruth of religion."(133) Precisely so: only a metaphysicalmessage from a Bystander, for Whom alone the cosmosis an object not participated in, will give short shift to anotherwise endless theorizing. I unconditionally acceptsuch a metaphysical input - the same that Tycho Brahedecided to believe in. Assuredly nobody can possibly domore than decide what to believe. And Homo Sapiensshould not forget to realize that he may not have come towhatever decision he takes uninfluenced by andindependently from everything else. For his mental make-up and logical capacity he has not himself created out ofnothing - he acquired it somehow from somewhere.

Let me repeat: I reject any effort to drag the Bibleinto court as a scientific textbook. To do that is to demeanits character. However, Genesis chronicles, as manymyths profess to do, how Earth and man came intoexistence and degenerated into their present fallen state.And this with a self-evident authority, not mincingmatters. As George Roche remarks: "We may think of

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Genesis as fanciful, but next to all other creation myths itis as prosaic as a newspaper report"(134)

I agree: there is neither the slightest mythical, norany scientific or theoretical flavour to the commonplacelanguage Moses employs. And this prosaic, plain, factualreport I believe. The Earth has no equal in the spacearound us, created as she was in the beginning, with onlyfrom the fourth day on Sun, Moon, and stars beginning toorbit her for signs, seasons, and days. The inspired textdoes not contain any hint that thereby the Earth wasdegraded to one of a set of specks of matter circling aminor star. Whatever astronomers assert to the contrary,they will never be able convincingly to demonstrate thisdownfall to have happened.

To repeat: I believe and ergo know - particularssubject to further investigation - that the Tychonian viewis the true one. But I admit, as already said, that anoutcome of my experiment favouring this view will notverify it absolutely. Even holding this outcome to betheoretically and practically untouchable won't help,for such a positive evaluation of the result also bringsgrist to the mill of all Stokes-type theories. On the otherhand: if the test will affirm Einstein's hypothesis, thenthis just as well keeps a number of anti-relativistictheories in the running. In short: whatever the dataacquired by any experiment: those who use these data tobolster their proposals will do well to attach a "maybe"rider.

I do not want anyone to be in doubt about myrock-bottom position on this vexing, insuperable last-ditch issue. Evidences in support of my geocentric theorymay come forward and multiply. However, I do not buildmy conviction on any or many affirmative data. We- "on our own" - cannot and never shall absolutely

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"know” astronomy. Or to reformulate Russell's Caveat :without accepting Divine input, the queen of the sciences,and all the other sciences also, will forever remain bereftof ultimates.

That input we have, and it being metaphysicallyqualified is surely not subject to verification. Take it, orleave it!

Even verifications have to be verified, and this inthe nature of things here below ad infinitum . Bradley'sdiscovery of aberration "verified" Newton's heliocentrictheory in the eyes of virtually all his contemporaries, andBerkeley's objections were brushed aside. But when Airy,already doubtful of the outcome, decided to verifyBradley's verification he got nowhere. That verification,courtesy of Fresnel, was taken to "verify" the obvious:either we move relative to the stars or the stars relative tous. Pro or contra Copernicus, it was decided, it hadsubstantially nothing to say. What it, and also theMichelson and Morley result, did was to throw doubt onNewton's neat and tidy model, and in doing that pave theway for Einstein's theories. Now, A.D. 1988, astronomylives by the grace of relativity, but is that relativity trulyverified by experiments? "Yes", say the modernequivalents of the Newtonian know-alls. "No", retort theBerkeleyans of today, and mightily they labour toproduce verifications of their dissection of thoserelativistic verifications.(75)

The matter reminds one of a well-know line fromJuvenal's Satires: "Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?" -But who is to guard the guardians themselves?"Whichever way we turn, we cannot escape an infiniteregress. Who verifies our verifications?

That this essay will be judged to be overly

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repetitive I realize. I confess: it is even purposely so. Thatmany questions remain I do not deny. But to answer thesebefore the central thesis here defended has beenvindicated would be premature. For almost twenty yearsof debate and of discussing the Tychonian theory havetaught me that many, if not most, people need time andreflection fully to grasp the crucial importance of theatheist Russell's Caveat and the Christian Armstrong'sAlert when contemplating the question "how the Heavensgo".

When C.S. Lewis tells us that his lifelong friend,Owen Barfield, "has read all the right books and has gotthe wrong thing out of everyone"(135), then I must on anumber of important issues agree with him. Yet when in aclosely reasoned thesis about mankind's relation toscience and God, Barfield castigates our mechano-morphical "new science” outlook, I think he says thingsrelevant to the geocentric approach in astronomy putforward by the present essay.

The modern worldview reducing us to ephemeralobjects among objects, to conglomerates of quarks and nomore, with at best allowing a distant God in a mode ofbeing not unlike our own... "if incalculable disaster is tobe avoided"(136), a re-awakening will have to be broughtabout of the medieval conception, realizing man to be amicrocosmos embedded in the macrocosmos surroundinghim. And not only that: the God beyond and above allsensory approach and yet closer to us than our own selveswill have to be adored and honoured in every man'sdoing. As St. Paul A.D. 51 told the Epicureans and Stoicsof Athens; "For in Him we live, and move, and have ourbeing". In Him, Who has revealed Himself by theIncarnation of the Logos, the Word."

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A reviewer of my Dutch book Houvast aan hetHemelruim (A Hold on the Spacious Heavens), publishedin 1985, writes that he has "learned from history that wemust place not too much confidence in the 'findings' ofscientists, including those of Galileo". Therefore he givesme "the benefit as well as the disadvantage of the doubt".And after confessing that he would be very surprised if Iwere right, he adds: "I almost hope he is right. It makesme feel a little bit more secure as a universe dweller toknow that the Earth is at the centre."(137)

My reviewer does not almost have to hope this.That the Earth, created in the beginning, hangsimmovably upon nothing in space, God's Revelationconsiders this for granted. Therefore science cannotdisprove this fact, and truly sagacious astronomers,whatever the ontological stance they prefer, very wellknow that a logically sound refutation of geocentricity isanyway unattainable.

During the night before October 24, Anno Domini1601, Tycho Brahe, lying on his deathbed, was frequentlyheard to exclaim that he hoped he should not have livedin vain.(138) He has not: that obstreperous Dane was onthe right track! Airy's Failure to discredit geocentricityhas shown this for all to see!

Deprive modern cosmology of the certainty of itsmathematical underpinnings - then there is not muchsolidity left. "Now Gödel's incompleteness theorem", thusStanley L. Jaki, "states that the proof of consistency ofany non-trivial set of mathematical axioms can be foundonly outside that set, and in that sense no mathematicalsystem can be an ultimate system... The mental road tothe extracosmic Absolute remains therefore fullyopen".(139)

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Tycho Brahe refused to leave that road in hiscosmological considerations. His help he found - as I do!- in the name of the LORD, Who made Heaven andEarth.

PSALM XCII, DOMINUS REGNAVIT

The LORD reigneth,he is clothed with majesty:

the LORD is clothed with strength,wherewith he hath girded himself:

the world also is stablished,that it cannot be moved.

Thy throne is established of old:thou art from everlasting.

The floods have lifted up, 0 LORD,the floods have lifted up their voice,

the floods lift up their waves.The LORD on high is mightier

than the noise of many waters, yeathan the mighty waves of the sea.

Thy testimonies are very sure:holiness becometh thine house,

O LORD, for ever.

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For the benefit of math-phobes I add aGedankenexperiment that will, I suppose, convey thebasic idea behind this outline.

Imagine two airplanes, A and B, flying past us ona windless day, first north-south and after that east-west.We measure their speeds relative to us and both timesfind these to be 300 and 225 km/hr. The ratio betweenthose two velocities is therefore 4/3. And this confirmswhat we know already: we are at rest. Next we stationourselves on a flat car of a slowly moving east-west trainand ask the pilots of the planes to repeat those twoperformances. That during their north-south flight theymust pass us slightly off course we may neglect.However, when the planes roar past parallel to therailroad tracks we find the ratio between their velocitiesto be 296/221. Question: what is the speed of our train?Remembering that for the first two fly-pasts the ratio was4/3, we easily find the answer: Hence our train rolls at 4 km/hr.

In the real experiment the air becomes space, thetwo ray rays of light, the one traveling through an emptytube, the other through a tube filled with water, the flat-car a space satellite or fast aircraft.

The first earth-bound test we have performed andit showed an Earth absolutely at rest in space. The secondwe would like to see performed. If then the ratio betweenthe velocities of the two rays (observable by a change ofthe light fringes) still turns out to be the same, the STRwill have been vindicated. If the fringe pattern agreeswith the speed of the satellite, that theory has beenfalsified, and the geocentric theory strongly favoured.

Hoek's 1868 experiment will serve too. But itobserves, as in the Michelson and Morley trial, two

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returning rays, and that will evoke (viz. the enormousliterature on the particular of that M. and M. probe)endless theoretical considerations and evaluations.

II. Galileo and the Church of Rome(Reprinted from Bulletin of Tychonian Society, no.35-36, Jan.-Aug. 1983)

Whether a rehabilitation of Galileo will have beenpromulgated by the Vatican, and if so what form it willhave taken, are questions without answer at the moment Iam writing these lines. There are, however, straws in thewind that presage possibilities. One of these straws is aspeech which the Pope, on May 9 of this year(1983),delivered to an audience of almost 200 scientists, amongthem 33 Nobel laureates and 22 cardinals in the SalaRegia of the Apostolic Palace in Rome.

To reproduce a translation of the complete Frenchtext, which recently has come in my possession throughthe kind offices of the Curia's Secretariat for Unbelievers,would demand too much of the Bulletin's cramped spaceand also be largely outside its scope. Suffice it here toquote the appraisal of Nature in the issue of May 12,1983. The critic, Robert Walgate, called it "a mostcautious and uncommitted speech on the subject", and "apiece of classic prevarication - no doubt enforced byultra-conservative elements in the Church." I canunderstand why Walgate gives these grudging comments,for the Pontiff's words indeed do not strongly prejudgethe issue. They still offer a ray of hope that the secularsciences will be shown the place where they belong:barely above the "raw" phenomena, but light-years lowerthan Divine Revelation.

Though John Paul's oration contains a carefullyworded paean on the sciences and a vaguely phrased

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apology from the side of the Roman Church - it stopsshort of specifics, and must almost certainly have irritatedmany of the zealots for Galileo's vindication among hisaudience. The convener of the meeting, ProfessorAntonino Zichichi, so concludes, for instance, the clearlydisappointed Nature, "will have to continue longer withhis efforts to persuade the Church finally to rehabilitatethe 'father of science'".

I of course hope that Zichichi will never succeedin those efforts. And to hope this is, it seems to me, nothopeless. For almost at the end of his discourse the Popeput a restriction on what he called science's "admirabletask." "To be sure," he told his hearers, "yourspecialization imposes on you indispensable rules andlimitations in your investigations, but let outside theseepistemological boundaries the inclination of your spiritcarry you to the universal and the absolute."

It is this sentence which compelled me to sendKarol Wojtyla, Bishop of Rome, the following letter.

Pitt Meadows, September 30, 1983

Your Excellency:Only recently I have been able to study the

complete text of your speech of May 9, 1983 aboutthe Galileo affair. A critic in the scientific periodicalNature of May 12 called it "a piece of classicprevarication", a sentiment, which from his point ofview I can understand, but do not share. Quite thecontrary. For, unless I completely misunderstand theclosing paragraph of your oration, I conclude from your

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mentioning the epistemological boundaries set to scienceand research that you, in concord with the instrumentalistviews of, e.g. Thomas Aquinas, Robert Bellarmine, PierreDuhem and virtually all modern philosophers of science,quietly wanted to remind and to warn your audience thatat bottom the Galilei case is not a physical but aphilosophical dispute. For the proud and myopicscientific realism of the Newtonian period with its"Science has proven that..." is not only lingering onamong laymen, but also among the learned cadres oftoday, notwithstanding the devastating criticisms of a SirKarl Popper, a Kurt Gödel, and their numerous discipleseverywhere.

Man will "on his own" never reach absolute truth.However rationally and emotionally compelling ascientific theory "saves the appearances", there may be abetter one that research has not yet stumbled on - to thisappraisal by the sages of the ages the modern philosophyof science happily again has returned.

You are undoubtedly aware that according to theprevailing Einsteinian adage the pre-Copernicanviewpoint, to quote Sir Fred Hoyle, is "as good as anyoneelse's - but no better", all motion at the present held to berelative in a finite but unbounded Universe of which thecircumference is nowhere and the centre everywhere.Inevitably however, any discussion about motion assumesa shared preconception of rest. Or, as the late philosopherof knowledge, Polanyi, with admirable candor,formulates it: "every object we perceive is set off by usinstinctively against a background which is taken to be atrest".

Overlooking the obvious question whetherastronomical statements procured on such a sub-logical

De Labore Solis 157

basis should ever be seriously considered, Christians,surely, have no need to build their cosmology on aninstinctive, unverifiable notion. They believe, andtherefore know, that there exists a higher mode of beingthan the one in which they temporarily find themselvesalive, and that only observed from that mode, from theGreat White Throne of Almighty God, the last Wordabout absolute motion and absolute rest can be excathedra proclaimed. And has been proclaimed!

During the first sixteen centuries of the EcclesiaChristi, she, on authority of the Divine Revelationentrusted to her, held on to an unmoved Earth hung uponnothing in the centre of the observable Universe, theunaided senses of all men daily attesting to the veracity ofthis proposition. Be it since 1822 hushed up, officiallythis is still your Church's position. And I submit that thereis not the slightest need for her to change this traditionalattitude. Empirical science has no voice in the matter,since, says the late atheist Bertrand Russell, it "ought notto contain a metaphysical assumption which can never beproved or disproved, by observation - and noobservations can distinguish the rotation of the earth fromthe revolution of the heavens".

On the immanent level Galilei was not completelywrong but only relatively right. Imagine the Earth as seenfrom the Sun, then she indeed revolves around it. Seenfrom the Earth it is contrariwise the Sun that runs theannual course Copernicus assigned to us. Their motionsare relative, and the irony of ironies certainly is that inGalileo's Dialogue not super-clever Salviati but simpletonSimplicio, during the discussion about revolvingsunspots, states this simple truth on which Einstein couldbuild his theories!

158 De Labore Solis

Much more could be adduced, on the transcendentas well as on the immanent, exegetical, and scientificlevels, to clinch the case for the ultimately geocentricposition that your Church has not yet abandoned. I amsure that you are aware of those data, (comprehensivelydiscussed in the Bulletins of the Tychonian Society,which, if so desired, I shall be happy to send you).

In 1633 your predecessor was right incondemning Galilei's unproven assertion, but the Churchhe unnecessarily exposed to the ridicule of menattempting to know what cannot be known, but onlybelieved on the authority of Him, Who cannot lie. Wiserwould have been to dismiss the affair and to cut it downto size by flatly stating that she had - and still has! -moreimportant things to do than busying herself with time-bound scientific theories that come and go ad infinitum.Andrew Dickson White's notorious History of theWarfare of Science with Theology could then not havebeen written, and today the sagacity of such a stancewould begin to compel the grudging respect due to itamong those again wise enough to realize that the truthbehind the veil of the facts - that is behind ourperceptions of reality, the only things we have - cannot beunveiled, but only revealed - if He is there! - by the God,Who created those facts and the laws of the modes inwhich they appear to us. None of mankind's "proofs", noteven in mathematics, finally touch bottom in the infinite.As Annie Dillard recently put it in a marvelous metaphorwhich, I am sure, you will appreciate: "I think scienceworks the way a tightrope walker works: by not lookingat its feet As soon as it looks at its feet it realizes it isoperating in midair."

De Labore Solis 159

Allow me to end with Bellarmine: only if not - asstill is the case - by means of an invalid modus ponendoponens, but experimentally it would be demonstrated thatthe Earth, moving through space, circles the Sun, "then itwould be necessary to proceed with great caution inexplaining the passages of Scripture, which seemedcontrary, and we would rather have to say that we did notunderstand them than to say that something was false,which has been demonstrated."

Until today that required hard-nosed and logicallyimpeccable demonstration has not been given, and isaccording to the ruling theory impossible to give. Whythen should the Bible have to buckle under the weight ofan hypothesis about a motion that cannot be shown to bea motion?

With the prayer that He, Who created theUniverse and Who is the only One for Whom thisUniverse is truly an object, may prevent you fromjudging the fallible word of man more trustworthy thanHis Infallible Word, I remain,

With due respect,

W. van der KampIn this letter I have restricted myself to the logical

point at issue. The Bulletin cannot tackle the frightfulcomplexity of all that is at stake in the matter which theSecretariat for Unbelievers and its advisors have to settle.Only a few remarks I allow myself.

I shall be the last to deny that the sciences haveimproved the human condition. But whether sub specie

160 De Labore Solis

aeternitatis, the ledger shows a credit balance?Interpreting Scripture with the insights we owe to post-Copernican research, the Bible is supposed to reveal to usthat God Almighty needed not six days, but six or morebillion years to produce people who, after about sixthousand years of steadily progressing civilization, noware capable of destroying themselves and their world. Forthe Day of Judgment, warningly foretold in God's Word,secular science also has a more pleasing substitute. Reada Jastrow and his compatriots: if humanity will take itsmarching orders from trustworthy scientific prophesy itmay confidently expect a glorious future and a kind ofimmortality in the extra-terrestrial conquests of itscomputer-programmed descendants.

Does the Pope really expect a harvest for Heavenfrom cooperation with these men? Does he think that bythrowing St. Bellarmine to the wolves they will becomesheep flocking to his Church - urging their followers tofollow them and to accept all those unscientific"essentials of the faith"?

The spirit of Vatican II was supposed to workgreat things. Indeed it did. Exactly what has happened tothe "liberalizing" major Protestant denominations nowhappens to the Roman Church: its adherents leave indroves, its seminaries lack the necessary novices, itsschools are closing, its priests preach higher criticism.Rehabilitation of Galileo - John Paul II must be blindednot to see this - will only accelerate this trend. Notreverse it!

Nobody can reasonably expect from a Calvinistthat he would mourn if the believers who turn their backson "modern" Catholicism would join one of the smaller"fundamentalist" denominations that still hold fairly fast

De Labore Solis 161

to the traditions delivered to them. These believers willnot, I am afraid. But if they did: how many among thosegroups are not infected by evolutionism, that latestpernicious consequence of the Copernican turn-about?And among those churches that still resolutely rejectDarwinism - how many dare to face the worldly ridiculeawaiting them for proclaiming with the Psalmist an Earththat cannot be moved? v.d.K.

162 De Labore Solis

Notes

1. Fred Hoyle, Astronomy and Cosmology, SanFrancisco, W.H.Freeman & Company, 1975, p.48.

Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances. New York, HarcourtBrace & World, Inc., Harbinger Book, p.164.

2. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein. The Life and Times. New York,Company 1971, p.80.

3. Quoted in D.W. Sciama, The Unity of the Universe. New York,Doubleday 1961, p.102-103.

4. William G. Pollard, Rumours of Transcendence in Physics, inAmerican Journal of Physics. 52(10), October 1984, p. 881.

5. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. New York Harper &Row,1964, p. 12.

6. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. London, Geoffrey Bles, 1956,p.26.

7. H.L.Armstrong, What Did the M.M. Experiment Really Show?,Bulletin of the Tychonian Society, May-June 1977, no.16, p.5.

8. Martin Gardner, The Relativity Explosion. New York, RandomHouse, 1976, p.135.

9. Ibid. p.87

10. P. Birch, Is the Universe Rotating?, Nature 1982,298. pp.451A54.

11. Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe. London, Michael JosephLtd., 1983, Criticism quoted in Creation Vol.3, no.9,1985, p.4.

12. Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein. New York,NAL,1959, pp.9 and 73.

13. Lewis Thomas, On Science & Uncertainty, Discover Oct.1980,p.58

14. George Berkeley, Works, London, Thomas Nelson and SonsLtd.,1951, Vol W, p.46.

De Labore Solis 163

15. See, e.g., Loyd Swenson Jr., The Ethereal Aether. Austin,University of Texas Press, 1972.

16. J.D. van der Waals, Ober den wereldaether. Haarlem, ErvenBohn,1929, pp.66-87.

17. Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Logic.New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962, p.98.

18. van der Waals, Wereldaether. p.74.

19. Herbert Dingle, Science at the Crossroads. London, MartinBrian & O'Keeffe, 1972, p.207.

20. G.B. Airy, On a supposed alteration in the amount ofAstronomical Aberration of light, produced by the passage oflight through a considerable thickness of Refracting Medium.Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, 1871, pp.35-39.

21. Quoted in Gerardus D. Bouw, With Every Wind of Doctrine.privately published, 1984, p.187.

22. Ibid. p.188.

23. Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley, InfluenceofMotionof the Medium on the Velocity of Light, AmericanJournal of Science. 1886, p.270.

24. A.C.S. van Heel and C.H.F. Velzel, What is Light. New York,McGraw-Hill, 1968, pp.179-180.

25. van der Waals, Wereldaether. pp. 78~80.

26. Ibid. p.81.

27. Francis A. Jenkins and Harvey E. White, Fundamentals ofOptics. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1957, p.397.

28. Loc.cit.

29. van der Waals, Wereldaether. p.78.

30. van Heel and Velzel, What is Light. pp.180-181.

164 De Labore Solis

31. Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley, On the RelativeMotion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether, AmericanJournal of Science. Third Series, Vol XXXIV No.203-Nov.1887, pp. 333-345.

32. Ibid. p.341.

33. van Heel and Velzel, What is Light. p.184.

34. S. Tolansky, An Introduction to Interferometry New York,John Wiley & Sons, 1973, p. 98.

35. Swenson, Ethereal Aether. p.118.

36. Bernard Jaffe, Michelson and the Speed of Light. Garden CityDoubleday & Company 1960, p.80.

37. Sciama, Unity. loc. cit.

38. L. Essen, The Special Theory of Relativity. London, OxfordUniversity Press, 1971, pp.4-5.

39. Swenson, Ethereal Aether. p.24.

40. Ibid., p.XXI.

41. Gardner, Relativity Explosion. pp.113414.

42. Quoted in Edward R. Harrison, Cosmology. CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981, p.226.

43. Quoted in Dean Turner & Richard Hazelett, The EinsteinMvth and the Ives Papers. Old Greenwich, The Devin AdairCompany 1979, p.154.

44. Jenkins & White, Optics. pp. 404-405.

45. A.A. Michelson & Henry G. Gale, The Effect of the Earth'sRotation on the Velocity of Light, Astrophysical Journal. VolLXI, April 1925, No.3, pp.137-145.

See also. Saignac, Ives, etc. in Turner & Hazelett, EinsteinMyth

46. Jenkins & White, Optics. bc. cit.

166 De Labore Solis

50. Anthony Standen. Science is a Sacred Cow. p.73.

51. Jaffe, Michelson. p.95.

52. A.Einstein, Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, Annalender Physik. Vol.17, 1905, p.86.

53. Carl A. Zappfe, A Reminder on E=mc2. Brainerd, Minn.,U.S.A., quoting A. Einstein, Out of My Later Years. NewYork, Philosophical Library,1950.

54. W.T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy New York,Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1952, p. XVIII.

55. Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought.Philadelphia, Presbyterian & Reformed publishing Co., 1953,Vol. I, pp.36-37.

56. Dingle, Crossroads. p.17.

57. Fred Hoyle, Nicolaus Copernicus. New York, Harper & Row,1973. p.87.

58. Ibid, p.88.

59. J.L.E. Dryer, A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler.New York, Dover Publications, 1953, p.363.

60. Charles L. Poor Gravitation Versus Relativity. p.32.

61. Science Frontiers. No.44, March-April 1986, p.2. See Note88.

62. Albert Einstein, Geometry and Experience, in Sidelights onRelativity. New York, Dover Publications, 1983, p.30.

63. Ibid, pp.23-24.

64. Gardner, Relativity Explosion. p.185.

65. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, IV: 277, VII: 553.

De Labore Solis 167

66. John Byl, Martin Sanderse, and Walter van der Kamp, SimpleFirst-Order Test of Special Relativity, American Journal ofPhysics. 53 (1), January 1985, pp.4345.

I only stand behind "A. The Galilean Transformation".Unhappily, Dr. Byl's "B. Fresnel Drag" contains an error alsomade by H.Aspden (Phys. letters, 85A, 411, 1981), who isproposing the use of a solid glass tube, which we in 1982already found to be unworkable.

Also see relevant articles in the Bulletin of the TychonianSociety

67. George Abell, Exploration of the Universe. New York, Holt,Rinehart & Winston, 1969, p.378.

68. Fred Hoyle. Astronomy & Cosmology, p.416.

69. Ibid, Copernicus. p.1.

70. See Stefan Marinov, Eppur Si Muove. Bruxelles, Belgium,C.B.D.S.,1977.W. Krause, "A Critical Note Concerning ConventionalContainer Space Concepts" in James Paul Wesley, Progress inSpace-Time Physics. 1987 Blumberg, Benjamin Wesley, 1987,p.51-56.

71. R. Latham and J. Last. "An experimental investigation of theprecessional couple on a gyrocompass as a function of depthbelow the Earth's surface, and its relevance to the hypotheticalexistence of a 'tied' aether", Proceedings of the Royal Society.A320, p.131-146, 1970.

72. James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed. New York,Little, Brown, and Company, 1985, Preface.

73. C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image. Cambridge, UniversityPress,1964, pp.216-222.

74. James M. Boice, "God and History", in Kenneth S. Kantzer,editor, Applying the Scriptures. Zondervan, Grand Rapids,1987, p.507.

75. J.P. Wesley, editor, Progress in Space~Time Physics. 1987Blumber, West Germany, Benjamin Wesley - Publisher.

76. Aristotle, De Caelo. 279 B.C, quoted in C.S. Lewis, TheDiscarded Image. p. 96f.

168 De Labore Solis

77. Fred Hoyle, Astronomy & Cosmology. pp.4647.

78. Yves Nourissat, La contribution de F. Crombette au progresde l'astronomie. Tournai (Belgique), Cercle Scientifique etHistorique,1985.

79. Lewis, The Discarded Image loc. cit.

80. Ibid.

81. F. de Graaff, Anno Domini 1000, Anno Domini 2000.Kampen, J.H. Kok, p.27.

82. Walter van der Kamp, Houvast aan het hemelruim. Kampen J.H. Kok, 1985, p.105.

83. Abell, Exporation p. 126.

84. See, e.g. John Warwick Montgomery, "Law and Justice" inKenneth S. Kantzer Applying the Scriptures. p.299-314.

85. de Graaff, Anno Domini. pp.167-168.

86. Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the InfiniteUniverse. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968, p.276.

87. Burke, The Day the Universe Changed. p.11.

88. W.R. Corliss, Stars: Galaxies. Cosmos. Sourcebook Project,P.O. Box 107, Glen Arm, Md, 21057.

89. See, e.g., E.W. Bullinger, The Witness of the Stars, GrandRapids, Kregel Publications, 1974, Joseph A. Seiss, TheGospel in the Stars, Grand Rapids, Kregel, Henry M. Morris,Many Infallible Proofs, San Diego, Creation Life Publishers,1975, pp.334-343, Ben Adam, Astrologv. the AncientConspiracy, Minneapolis, Bethany Fellowship, 1963.

90. Pierre Prevost, Traité de Physique Méchanique de Georges-Louis Le Sage, Deux Traités de Physique Méchanique,Geneve, J.J. Paschoud, 1818.

Also see the following treatises:L. W. Austin and Charles B. Tuwing, An ExperimentalResearch on

De Labore Solis 169

Gravitational Permeability, Physical Review, Vol.5, 1897,pp.294-300.Q.Majorama, Theoretical and Experimental Researches onGravitation, Philosophical Magazine Vol.39, 1920, pp.422-504.Maurice F. C. Allais, Should the Laws of Gravitation BeRecon- sidered?, Aerospace Engineering, Vol.18, Sept.1959,pp. 46-52.Erwin J. Saxl and Mildred Allen, 1970 Solar Eclipse as "Seen"by a Torsion Pendulum, Physical Review D: Vol. 3, No.3,1971,pp.823-825.Daniel R. Long, Why do we believe Newtonian Gravitation atLaboratory Dimensions?, Physical Review D: Vol.9, No.4,1974, pp.85O~852; Producing an Ultrahigh-UniformityGravitational Field, Vol.10, No.6, 1974, pp. 1677-1680;Experimental Examination of the Gravitational InverseSquare Law, Nature Vol.260, April 1976, pp.417-418.Anonymous, Inverse Square Law for Gravity?, Nature,Vol.260,No.395, April 1976.

91. Ptolemy, Almagest. Book I, Chapter 5, quoted in C.S. Lewis,God in the Dock, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1970, p.74.

92. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York,Simon and Schuster 1986, p.279.

93. S.J. Gould in Discover January 1987, quoted in NewsletterNo.42, Dec.1987 of the North American Creation Movement,p.3.

94. Richard Hönigswald, Vom erkenntistheoretischen Gehalt alterSchöpfungserzählungen. Stuttgart, W. Kohlhammer 1957,pp.155 and 182.

95. Dreyer Astronomy. p. 224.

96. Ugo Baldini and George V. Coyne, S.J.., The LouvainLectures (Lectiones Lovanienses) of Bellarmine and theAutograph Copy of his 1616 Declaration to Galileo. Citta DelVaticano, Specola Vaticana, p.5.

97. E.J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture,Oxford, University Press, 1969, p.385.

98. Baldini and Coyne, Louvain Lectures, p.4.

170 De Labore Solis

99. Ibid, p.24.

100. Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, New York, Grosset andDunlap, 1963, p.448.

101. Imre Lekatos & Alan Musgrave, ed., Criticism and theGrowth of Knowledge, Cambridge, University Press, 1976,p.92.

102. "Votre spécialisation vous empose, certes, des règles et desdélimitations indéspensables dans l'investigation, mais au-delàde ces ftontières épistémologiques, laisser l'inclination devotre esprit vous porter vers l'universel et l'absolu."

103. A. Rupert Hall, From Galileo to Newton. New York, DoverPublications, 1981, p.22.

104. Baldini and Coyne, Louvain Lectures. p.25.

105. Hall, Galileo, loc. cit.

106. Sciama, Unity, pp.97-98.

107. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers p.13.

108. Th. Löbsack, Wunder, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, München, C.Bertelsmann Verlag, 1976, pp.31-32.

109. Isaac Asimov in a circular promoting the Creation/Evolutionmagazine, December 1986.

110. John Dunphy in Humanist Magazine. Quoted by MargaretGriffioen, Humanist Teachings Increasing in Schools,Calvinist Contact, Oct. 24, 1986, p.1.

111. Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia, Book VIII.

112. Michael Denton, Evolution: a Theory in Crisis. Americanedition, Maryland, Adler & Adler, 1986, p.15.

113. Ibid.,p.67.

114. Ibid, pp.251-252

115. John Donne, An Anatomy of the World, 1611, lines 205 and213.

De Labore Solis 171

116. See John C. Green The Death of Adam, Ames, Iowa StateUniversity Press, 1959.

117. Norman L. Geisler in Update, Nov.1986, p.6.

118. F. von Schiller, Die Piccolomini, Act V, Scene I "Das eben istder Fluch der bösen Tat, Dasz sie fortzeugend immer bösesmusz gebähren."

119. Alexandre Koyré, Closed World, p.276.

120. Koestler, Sleepwalkers, p. 565f.

121. Hoyle, Copernicus, p.44.

122. Hall, Galileo p.22.

123. Quoted in F.K. Schultze's synopsis and translation of F.E.Pasche's Christliche Weltanschauuing.

124. F.E..Pasche, Christliche Weltanschauuing. Milwaukee,Germania Publishing Co., 1904.Ibid., Die Bible und Astronomy. 1906.

125. Robert E. Kofahl, Correctly Redefining Distorted Science,Creation Research Society Ouarterly, Dec., 1986, p.112.

126. W.H. Gispen, Schepping en paradijs Kampen, J.H. Kok1 1966,p.12.

127. Loc.cit.

128. Quoted in David Hume Dialogues Concerning NaturalReligion. ed. Norman Kemp Smith, Indianapolis, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Ninth Printing, p.19.

129. Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe.

130. William Paley, Natural Theology, reprinted by St. ThomasPress, Houston, 1972, p.1.

131. See C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, London, Goeffrey Bles,1956.

132. L. Essen, Relativity p.21.

172 De Labore Solis

133. Plato, Meno 80d.

134. George Roche, A World Without Heroes. Hillsdale CollegePress, HillsdaIe, Mich., 1987, p.113.

135. Douglas Gilbert and Clyde S. Kilby, C.S. Lewis: Images of

His World. Grand Rapids, W.B. Eerdmans, 1973, p.44.

136. Barfield, Saving the Appearances. p.85.

137. Editorial, "Hold on to Scripture... and your hat", CalvinistContact, Aug.23, 1985.

138. Dryer, Astronomy p.309.

139. Stanley L. Jaki, The Absolute Beneath the Relative:Reflections on Einsteins's Theories, The IntercollegiateReview, Spring/Summer 1985, p.36

Inside back-cover of book De Labore Solis

The Tychonian SocietyThe Tychonian Society holds that the only absolutely

trustworthy information about origin and purpose of all that existsand happens is given by God, our Creator and Redeemer1 in His infallibleWord, the Bible. All scientific endeavour which does not accept thisRevelation from on High without any reservations, literary,philosophical or whatsoever, we reject as already condemned in itsunprovable first assumptions.

We believe that Creation was completed in six twenty-fourhour days and that the world is not older than about six thousandyears, but beyond that we maintain that the Bible teaches us an Earththat cannot be moved, at rest with respect to the Throne of Him Who calledit into existence, and hence absolutely at rest in the centre of the Universe.

That is to say: we accept the model proposed by TychoBrahe and used in all the applied sciences (e.g., practical astronomy,oceanography, gyroscopic theory, and space travel) to be the truestone possible.

Lastly: the reason why we deem a return to such ageocentric astronomy a first apologetical necessity is that its rejectionat the beginning of our Modern Age constitutes one very important,if not the most important cause of the historical development nowresulting in a largely post-Christian world in which atheisticexistentialism is preaching a life that is really meaningless.

The Bulletins of the Tychonian Society have no subscription price.They are sent free to all those who request them. However, donationsto help cover the printing and mailing costs are gratefully accepted.

Editor: Gerardus D. Bouw4527 Wetzel AvenueCleveland, Ohio 44109 U.S.A.