Creation Corner
Global Flood gains astronomical fix
The Center for Scientific Creation and the Creation Science Hall of Fame separately announced today that an astronomical date for the Global Flood is now available.
This date for the Global Flood is the date that the five most clock-like of all comets, that astronomers have observed three or more times, were all at perihelion in the same year. Or they would have been at perihelion if comets existed before the Global Flood. (Perhaps they were, anyway, if the Flood predated this common perihelion.)
Hydroplate Theory: comet matter launched at the Global Flood
Dr. Walter T. Brown Jr., Director of the CSC, explains the problem here. According to his Hydroplate Theory, the Global Flood began when a subcrustal ocean, once ten miles deep underground, broke confinement and rushed out of the bowels of the earth, at hypersonic speed. This enormous jet of water carried large amounts of rock and mud with it. Some of it – amounting to less than one percent of the earth’s mass – escaped into outer space at speeds up to (and sometimes faster than) 32 miles per second.
Anything moving faster than that, would go out of the solar system and never come back. But most of this material stayed in the solar system. Some of it, as it moved beyond the earth’s gravitational field, accreted into the dirty snowballs we call comets. The rock and mud tended to collect into the asteroids and meteoroids we see today.
Critics sometimes accuse Dr. Brown of saying that the Global Flood launched fully formed comets into the sky. This is not correct. What is correct is that the Global Flood launched into space the material that later formed the comets.
How to back-step comets
Back-stepping a comet usually means calculating a comet’s momentum and every force (usually of gravity) acting on it, and projecting where that comet must have been, one day earlier. One then repeats the process, day after day after day. Modern computers can do this for any comet – up to three thousand years into the past. They cannot project a comet’s path any further backward in time, or at least not with any usable degree of accuracy. Every such back-step is subject to an error, that grows exponentially.
So to back-step a comet further than three thousand years ago, one starts with the most ancient known perihelion, or closest approach to the sun, and subtracts the comet’s period (or “cometary year”) from that date, as many times as the problem needs. One introduces an error with every subtraction, equal to the standard deviation of the period. This error varies as the square root of the number of subtractions, according to the Central Limit Theorem.
One needs to observe and record a comet at least three times to compute the standard deviation of its period. The best five comets in the Catalog of Cometary Orbits of 2008, that have three or more observations and periods that do not change much between apparitions, are the Comets Swift-Tuttle, Halley, Pons-Brooks, Olbers, and Brorsen-Metcalf. For Comets Halley and Swift-Tuttle, Dr. Brown had available the results of computer simulations that accurately placed their earliest known perihelia well into the BC era.
Result: the most likely date of the launch of all cometary matter, and therefore of the Global Flood, is: 3344.5 BC, ± 1 year. Dr. Brown assigns better than 96 percent confidence to this date.
What this means
This date is actually “high summer of 3345 BC” and is the date for the closest approach to the sun. The true launch date would be in autumn of that year (or perhaps the year before then), when the courses (or “trajectories”) of the comets would all intercept the earth.
This date is within one year of a date your editor calculated for the Global Flood. To make this calculation, one works backward from 562 BC, the year of the death of Nebuchadnezzar II (“the Great”) of Babylonia. From that date one subtracts(or rather, adds):
- 450 years, through the histories of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, to the groundbreaking of Solomon’s Temple.
- 479 years (per I Kings 6:1) to the Exodus of Israel from Egypt.
- 430 years (per Exodus 12:40) to the entry of Israel (the nation and the man also known as Jacob) into Egypt.
- 290 years to the birth of Abraham.
- 130 years to the birth of Terah, Abraham’s father.
- 1000 years to the birth of Arpachshad (Arphaxad), according to the ages of Terah’s ancestors when each man sired his son, according to the Alexandrine manuscript of the Septuagint.
- 2 years to the Global Flood year, per Genesis 11:10.
Result: 3343 BC as the year that Noah and his family disembarked from the Ark. The Global Flood itself would have broken out a year earlier.
Settling of scholarly scores
This date settles many old scores in Biblical scholarship, especially about the chronology of the Bible. This essay sums up the details. Briefly:
- Edwin R. Thiele decided the chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah could not be straightforward, if King Ahab of Israel fought in the Battle of Qarqar against Shalmaneser III (853 BC), and if (as he supposed) King Jehu paid tribute to Shalmaneser III during his reign. But Dr. Thiele forgot one thing: forty-five names in the Assyrian Eponym Canon are missing. Tiglath-Pileser III struck them from the record. Martin Anstey worked out what must have happened. With Anstey’s account, Israelite and Assyrian histories do synchronize, with a straightforward reading of I and II Kings.
- Some scholars take Galatians 3:17 as saying that 430 years passed from Abraham receiving his covenant promise from God until the Exodus. In fact, God confirmed and repeated the promise to Jacob before he entered Egypt.
- The Seder Olam asserts that Abraham was born when Terah was 70 years old. This supposition never had a good warrant. Dr. Brown’s astronomical fix contradicts this.
- Finally: the translation of the Old Testament by Ptolemy Philadelphus’ Seventy Translators of the Great Library of Alexandria was accurate – and accurate to the year.
But this manuscript of the Septuagint, that too many scholars dismiss, is not the only thing that an astronomical fix for the Global Flood vindicates. This date, coming within a year of the calculated chronological date, vindicates the Bible itself. It also vindicates the Hydroplate Theory of the Global Flood. A Global Flood happened, and happened as Walter T. Brown says it happened.The “cluster of perihelia” of the five comets Dr. Brown examined, defies any “rational(ized) explanation.”
Within twenty years, other comets, that astronomers have so far observed only twice, will make their third apparition. If the Lord tarries until then, Dr. Brown will run his analysis again. He does not expect his analysis to change, except to raise the already-high confidence level in his Global Flood date even higher.
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Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.
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It’s amazing. Walt’s hydroplate “theory” – totally untested, non-reviewed, etc, etc – has been debunked time and time again on this very blog and yet you persist with this sort of thing.
It really is kinda sad. I’m guessing that the Oort Cloud is just a liberal myth then.
I wish you’d do the math – all the water to cover the highest mountain, plus fly off to the Moon, Mars, Mercury and create all the comets. Do you have any idea how much water that is – if it was all underground, then the planet would have been much larger, with much higher gravity, and there’s no way we could have survived in a higher gravity with our body shape.
Then again, from the last arguments about this, you said that vapour trails are proof that water at high pressure wouldn’t be superheated, so I’m not really surprised.
Also, calling yourself “the creation science hall of fame” is a bit presumptious, isn’t it? Where can we visit it?
You again.
For everyone else’s information, you can follow the link at the top of the article to the Creation Science Hall of Fame. Also for everyone else’s information, we are now a 501(c)(3) organization.
The rest of the comments here bespeak willful ignorance (see 2 Peter 3:5) of the Hydroplate Theory and of the initial conditions of the earth. The Himalaya chain formed when the earth’s crust had already broken up into the great Hydroplates. Three of them crashed into one another, and the Himalayas formed at Ground Zero. The other great mountain chains of the world formed as wrinkles on the plates as they settled to the bottom of the old subcrustal ocean with a crash.
It may interest most people (other than this – person) that you find sedimentary rock, and even sea fossils, atop the Continental Divide. And while no one claims that the water reached as high as that, Dr. Brown says the Divide didn’t exist until the Flood came.
Of course, I urge people who want to do more than rant and rave, to read the book. All of it.
The Oort Cloud is definitely a myth. Jan Oort came up with an excuse for the comets still shining after all the time he and other uniformitarians insist has passed. But as Dr. Brown shows, that theory falls to the ground on a number of deal-killers. How could comets even form that far out? How do you get ice on the Moon and Mercury? Why do cometary tales have crystalline dust? Why has no one ever observed a comet coming in toward earth on a hyperbolic path? How in the world does a comet, falling in from the distance of the so-called Oort sphere, dive inside the orbit of the earth around the Sun, as Comet Halley has been doing, faithfully, every 76 years since its launch? Why do you get a whole bunch of comets with very short periods, and another bunch of comets with very long periods, and almost no comets in-between? What’s with Jupiter’s Family of comets, that have aphelia not much further out from the Sun than Jupiter gets? What’s with the higher-than-usual concentration of deuterium in comets? (That might sound like a deal-killer for the Hydroplate Theory, until you read that the Flood event let loose a sea of neutrons, which the waters of the great deep absorbed – before they shot out into space and never returned.) Why the small comets?
Oh, and one more thing: the idea behind the Oort cloud is that a passing star disturbs it enough to send comets falling in toward the inner solar system. All right, Ms. Amateur Astronomer, suppose you tell us where we can point our telescopes to find that star?
In contrast, we have the five most clock-like comets in the catalog, all of which were in the same place at the same time, precisely (that is, within one year, the margin of standard error) when the Bible says the Global Flood happened. Read my calculations. I have told you where I got them, and (in one case) from what manuscripts, and where the confusion crept in. You can no more explain that away than you can fly under your own power (without the aid of any device of man, that is to say).
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Does this mean that Dr. Brown rejects the Ussher chronology? Ussher pegged the date of creation at 4004 BC.. So they both can’t be correct because that would mean that Adam was still alive (and Noah hadn’t even been born yet) at the time of the Flood.
Dr. Brown – and I – accept one part of James Ussher’s chronology: the lists of the Kings of Israel and Judah. Edwin R. Thiele foreshortened those by 45 years, to synchronize King Ahab of Israel (Northern Kingdom) with the Battle of Qarqar (against Shalmaneser III). I believe that battle took place. I believe that Ahab was part of an anti-Assyrian alliance that fought in that battle. But I also believe it took place 45 years earlier than most Assyriologists insist. Martin Anstey, more than 100 years ago, provided the key that everybody else discounted: 45 years of the Assyrian Eponym Canon are missing, after Tiglath-Pileser III struck them from the record. (History in those days was propaganda. The Egyptians were masters of altering their own history, but it is only logical to suppose that the Assyrians knew about managed history, too. Some people think things haven’t changed all that much from Tiglath-Pileser’s day, but that’s a story in another topic.)
We also accept Ussher’s assumption that Abraham was born when his father was 130 years old.
But: Dr. Brown and I do not accept the other assumptions that Ussher made, namely the Short Chronology of the Sojourn in Egypt, and the Masoretic Chronology of the Patriarchs from Shem to Terah. I found a translation of a manuscript (Codex Alexandrinus) of the Septuagint that gives each patriarch’s age when he sired his son. Those ages tot up to 1000 years. Which yields a result within one year of Dr. Brown’s cometary result.
Remember: he provided a convergence of cometary perihelia, which is the best proxy we have, with our current level of computing power, for a common cometary launch. I provided a retrocalculation of the date of the Global Flood from patriarchal and king lists, and two key epochal notes: “In the 480th year following the Exodus,” and “Now the sojourn of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was 430 years.”
In order…
First: congratulations on CSHF getting their tax exempt status.
Second: Isn’t history pretty much always propaganda? After all it’s written by the winners.
Third: Can we expect Dr. Brown to present his new findings in a scientific forum for analysis and review by the scientific community …. even creation scientists?
It sounds as though the perigees were plotted backward in time and a least-squares regression was used to find a date that had the closest ‘clustering’ of perigees; or perhaps the closest clustering within a certain time limit. The details of the method are not given, so I’m guessing. It also sounds as though some Monte Carlo resamplings were run with the perigees being shifted by up to half a period – perhaps one at a time, or maybe for all comets simultaneously. Can you provide us with more information?
How wide is the spread of perigees at 3344 B.C., by the way? Even if it is the tightest grouping, it looks as though it occurs over forty or more years, rather than all in one year. Doesn’t that represent a problem? That wide of a span means some comets are near apogee while others are at perigee, but in the Flood year they should have all been near perigee within months of each other.
You mean perihelia, I believe – no one ever said that comets orbit the earth; only that the material that went into their making, launched from earth. Of course, you could have said “periapsides” (plural of “periapsis”), and that would have done just as well.
I’ll pass that along. Dr. Brown is willing to share his math with anyone. In fact, as I believe I announced, the likely error is a year and a half. If you’re getting forty years or more for that spread, Dr. Brown would like to see your math.
Yes, me again – sorry I keep popping up and asking awkward questions. Strange thing is, my password was suddenly invalid and requests for a new password went answered. Glad to see the automated system is back up and running.
Now then, you base this on only 5 comets. Why so few? Or are these the only ones that you can squish into your theory? Also, where are Walt’s calculations (you’ll have to understand that I’ll start calling him Dr Brown when he starts acting like a scientist) that prove this “theory” – after all, there are a lot more comets than just 5.
And quoting the Bible to prove the Bible is such an unscientific method, that I actually laughed out loud when I read your bit about the Himalayas. I’d also forgotten that you don’t believe in plate techtonics, You also seem to have forgotten that if the water did indeed explode from beneath the earth at escape velocity, it wuld have been suoer-heated to the extent that it would have basically steam-cleaned the planet, including a bunch of people on a little wooden boat. Not to mention whatever was left in the sea.
Unfortunately, yelling “because I said so!” does not make a theory valid. Hopefully Walt will be submitting his findings – including how these comets came about in the first place – for independent review.
Oh and just another question on the Creation Hall of Fame – seeing as you favour the hydroplate theory, does that mean that anybody who is in favour of the water canopy theory is automatically excluded? After all, you can’t have people with wildly different – and untested, unproven, etc – theories in there. If only there was some kind of peer review within creation “science” circles – but there isn’t, so anybody can push any theory, not matter how contradictory.
The comets named are those having the least standard deviations – among those that have a standard deviation. To get a standard deviation, a comet must appear, and someone must record that apparition, three or more times. Statistical properties are never valid if you base them on just one or two instances.
Now in twenty years, a few more comets will come back to get on record for the third time. That is, if the Lord waits that long. But then again, the Creation Science Hall of Fame does not try to be the Last-Things Science Hall of Fame.
I cited certain verses that bear on chronology, to show that the astronomical date agrees with this chronology. We have that agreement, and that shows that we have our common launch date, unless anyone can definitely show otherwise.
As an aside: the Creation Science Hall of Fame recognizes those who accept Genesis 1-11 as a Valid Historical Record. Whatever scientific models they can propose, that would be consistent with that Record, do not bear on their inclusion or exclusion. Reputation, effort, and effectiveness in communicating the basic message – those are what matter. Of course we judge that by somewhat different rules than do you.
@ JT…
I’m new here, and I’m going to jump into this with a slightly off subject post, I do hope it’s welcome.
I ‘m not sure if you are a uniformitarian or a creationist who disagrees with Dr. Brown, but I make my living as a miner/prospector, so correct interpretation of my local geology is more than a passing interest, for me it’s survival.
(I’m going to comment directly on your post later, but first this.)
I’m presently working in Guyana, and in particular near Kaieteur falls on the river Potaro. You can easily check some aerial photos to confirm what I’m going to suggest here.
First, let me state that most of Guyana was evidently ‘scrubbed clean and smooth’ down to bedrock, IMHO by flood waters in rapid motion. Some computer modeling has suggested that if the landmasses were submerged high speed whirlpools would develop
through lunar /tidal forces. Only something along that line would explain thousands of sq miles of regularity in surface features. The ancesteral bedrock is now weathered to saprolite to 200-300 ft depth, but the surface of the saprolite when revealed shows amazing similarity of smoothness. This saprolite is generally covered with a quartz gravel ranging from a few inches to a few feet in thickness. Above the gravel is quartz sand seldom more than 30 feet thick, often much less, but sometimes deep. A good deal of this quite level surface hosts later volcanic extrusives, laterite, which form low hills, few hundred feet high usually. These laterites plus block faulting make up virtually all surface topography in the country now. The game changer is that the quartz gravel and sand wasn’t laid down in a streambed formation. This is what we mine, the gold shows up in the gravel near bedrock (saprolite now), and lesser in the sand, so this a subject of intense interest to me. So the takeaway here is that the only possible mechanism to explain this gravel/sand is the sorting by liquification that would take place if the continent were in fact sliding along at Dr. Browns suggest velocity. I propose that near the end of South Americas run west these deposits settled essentially as they are now, contemporaneously the laterites popped out and massive block faulting occurred, bringing us to Kaieteur Falls. I could write for an hour on how this impacts gold formation, but it’s more off topic and proprietary.
So, the lower Potaro River is now a sluggish 200 yd wide flow losing about 1-2 ft elevation per mile. Kaietuer Falls is 700 ft vertical drop (sheer vertical drop) from the upper Potaro block.
The upper Potaro is again, a 100-200 yd wide sluggish river, as the block sits nearly normal, level.
If you’ve found your air photos yet, notice the lower Potaro canyon is fairly short as it eroded it’s way into the upper Potaro block. Notice the near vertical walls and the sheer vertical walls at the actual falls. Notice the near perfect semicircle less than a mile wide delineating the canyon head and the tiny flow (in comparison) of the present Potaro river. Notice that the present river channel hasn’t cut the lip of the falls back, the river cascades off of a near perfect horizontal plane.
It’s pretty obvious that the lower Potaro (part of the upper block) channel was cut by a huge flow of water whilst the sediments were still unconsolidated (recently deposited, fully hydrated), and after the block faulting event. Then the block tilted a bit to send the remaining flood runoff back to the SW, allowing the upthrust block to consolidate (let the cement dry), at some later time, maybe quite recently, the block tilted back to the north, the present Potaro followed it’s old course, and we have a falls that looks like was sculpted yesterday.
Please feel free to comment on my observations.
Anyway, to your snarky comment re: creationist peer review.
The creationist field is in fact dominated by a few authors and organizations who staked out their claims before Dr. Brown showed up on the scene. These folks have, IMO, sadly failed in relenquishing the field to a far superior general theory due to (?).
Financial, prestige, pride, personalities????? All the above???
I don’t know, but I was half uniformitarian, half creationist for 20 years of field work, saw Browns work around 1990 and never looked back.
In other words, entrenched interests (think Galielio) will not relinquish the field without a fight. Now, consider the entrenched interests supporting uniformitarianism, and reason has no chance.
I can’t do any of the math recently cited here on the heat/energy release of the hypothetical hydrochambers, I just know that with small tweaks this model has served me well for many years. My best friends here were two PHD geologists recently departed to a nearby country running an exploration program for a Major…when comparing notes on field questions, I always felt hydroplate provided a more reasonable, simpler explanation.
Open your mind, welcome to the rabbit hole.
“Dr. Brown is willing to share his math with anyone.”
Except university astronomy and geology departments. If his findings are true, and they are confirmed, he’ll be the first creationist to win the Nobel Prize.
So why isn’t he publishing his findings?
And don’t say “It’s a conspiracy against us!” – they can’t debunk or prove a theory if you don’t submit it for peer review. In fact, this very lack of peer review is why there are so many conflicting creation and flood theories out there – anybody can come up with something and it doesn’t have to be based on previous work, or even reality. That’s why we get the hydroplate and water canopy theories (the latter which does allow for a far higher survival rate than the earth turning into a giant nuclear reactor).
If Walt is so sure about his work, let him step up and submit it to his peers – not write a book, or hold a debate – submit the data and his thesis.
otherwise, what does he have to hide?
Dr. Brown will not refuse to upload his work to anyone who asks.
Then again, I don’t expect geology or astronomy professors to ask. Because his conclusions threaten their cherished uniformitarian narratives.
I’m sorry – “to anybody who asks”
That’s not how it works. Einstein didn’t say “Oh I have this great theory about how mass is linked to energy. But I won’t show you, unless you ask..”
How can people ask to see a new theory, if they don’t know it exists. The key is that research is “submitted” for review, they don’t ask for it. When you ran your lab tests, did you provide them, or hang on to them, until somebody said, “Where’s the results of that test I asked for last week?”
I get the feeling that Walt (who once again isn’t acting like a scientist)) either didn’t say that and you’re acting as his spokesman, or he has something to hide.
Anyone who cares to know, knows that this new theory exists.
The trouble is: those university astronomy and geology professors will likely reject Dr. Brown’s theory out-of-hand, and for one reason only: it purports to show that the Biblical narrative played out exactly as written.
“The trouble is: those university astronomy and geology professors will likely reject Dr. Brown’s theory out-of-hand, and for one reason only: it purports to show that the Biblical narrative played out exactly as written.”
Seems like there’s a very easy way to test that.
We have.
Certainly the larger body of creation-oriented investigators have.
“All right, Ms. Amateur Astronomer, suppose you tell us where we can point our telescopes to find that star?”
Right Ascension: 14h 29m 42.9487s
Declination: -62° 40′ 46.141″
Apparent Magnitude (V): 11.05
That should do it.
“those university astronomy and geology professors will likely reject Dr. Brown’s theory out-of-hand”
They DEFINITELY will if he doesn’t submit it.
I suspect that the real problem here is the peer review process, which checks the methodology used. Given the unsafe and incorrect assumptions that riddle Brown’s work its chance of getting through peer review is nil. I assume he realises this, therefore he doesn’t submit it.
No, it has nothing to do with that.
It has to do with preserving The Narrative.
The Atheistic Narrative.
You wouldn’t notice that bias, because you share it. Sometimes to see the bias, you have to sit on the opposite side of the fence.
Proxima Centauri? Sorry. Too far away. Way too far away.
I thought at first you were going to give the purely hypothetical coordinates of the factitious star called Nemesis, that some say has shaken loose swarms of comets from the Oort Cloud every 26 million years to cause Extinction Level Events.
At least you gave the coordinates of an extant star. But no star that far away is going to create nearly as much disturbance as that. It is more likely to steal comets than to send them falling in.
“I thought at first you were going to give the purely hypothetical coordinates of the factitious star called Nemesis”
Ah, no. I don’t believe in mysterious invisible brown dwarves, rogue planets heading for Earth or anything like that.
“At least you gave the coordinates of an extant star. But no star that far away is going to create nearly as much disturbance as that. It is more likely to steal comets than to send them falling in.”
Actually that’s not particularly true. Proxima Centauri is certainly close enough to be gravitationally bound to our system. It couldn’t steal comets because the Sun’s gravity is far stronger until WAY out past the Oort Cloud. However gravity, for the purposes of calculating orbits, is an acceleration. An acceleration is a change in velocity. Change the velocity of an orbiting comet even a little bit and you can shake it loose. The gravity of a massive object, even at Proxima Centauri’s distance, is capable of being the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Then why is Proxima Centauri still called Proxima Centauri, or Alpha Centauri C? Why not call it Nemesis and discard the brown-dwarf theory?
In addition, the Oort Cloud theory has a larger number of deal-killers than the mere absence of a Nemesis.
“It has to do with preserving The Narrative.”
Nope. “Preserving the narrative” is absolutely the LAST thing scientists want to do. Prizes go to the scientists that blow the narrative apart and replace it with something entirely new. If there was anything in Walt Brown’s ideas scientists would be all over them. After a paradigm shift like that anybody involved with the work would find Nobels being handed out with the rations. It wouldn’t even be necessary to invoke god; they could find some other explanation for the hydroplate event.
The reason nobody would buy into Brown’s ideas is simple: they’re bonk. And unless he submits them for review they’re irrelevant bonk.
In any discipline in operational science, your assessment is correct.
But this is origins science. And that is fraught with bias.
Terry wrote:
Anyone who cares to know, knows that this new theory exists.
The trouble is: those university astronomy and geology professors will likely reject Dr. Brown’s theory out-of-hand, and for one reason only: it purports to show that the Biblical narrative played out exactly as written.
Geno answers:
Does that include the creation scientists as well? I know of at least two creation science journals that would be delighted to communicate these findings.
Didn’t you tell us Dr. Brown doesn’t want to publish in them because they won’t give Brown the last word? Since the discussion would open with Brown presenting his findings, doesn’t that mean Brown wants both first and last word?
In what way is that a fair or level playing field?
Not the last word. Merely a public forum so that everything would be out in the open.
You are entirely correct – I should have said perihelia.
It’s not difficult to reverse engineer Dr. Brown’s method here. If you go back, stepwise, from a given perihelion for these five comets, you can compare them to a test date and sum the squares of the differences, then look for a minimum in that sum. Do this with enough comets and you hope that the errors that gradually accumulate because of the method cancel each other out.
If you use Dr. Brown’s data from his Table 23 in the link you provided, that kind of regression indeed gives you a cluster of perihelia at 3344 BC, spread from 3341 to 3352 B.C.
But this method is sensitive to the period chosen, and to a lesser extent, to the starting perihelion. My initial 40 year spread, for example, started with a different choice of periods, and I don’t know where Brown gets his digital conversion of dates from – how is 9/15/1812 = 1812.90, for example? It should be 1812.7. If you choose the _mean_ period rather than the _oldest_ period, for example, the tightest clustering is at 2300 B.C., and not nearly as close. If you go with the oldest _observed_ perihelion (that means 239 BC for Halley and 69 BC for Swift-Tuttle) you get a clustering of perihelia at 2830 BC (perihelia from 2826 to 2835, nine years) that’s tighter than Dr. Brown’s 3344 BC cluster (eleven years). Doesn’t that make it a better candidate?
Does Dr. Brown have some reason to favor the choice of period that he used to perform these calculations? For the comets with only two observed periods, why prefer the older period when the newer one may or may not be more typical? If you are willing to discard all period data except the first period, why not include the comets with two perihelia observations and one period? Or use observed periods only, not projected ones? Did Dr. Brown perform any statistical tests to show that the growing uncertainty introduced by the stepping back of the perihelia was negated by the use of five comets? The author of one of Dr. Brown’s references did not want to extrapolate the motions of Halley’s comet back more than 1100 years from from the earliest recorded observation, even with the most advanced algorithm available; yet Dr Brown’s method blithely pushes back an additional 2000 years using only elementary school arithmetic. Peer review would likely have hammered this sort of thing out.
Dr. Brown might have chosen the autumnal equinox, rather than the hibernal solstice (or 1 January), as the turning-of-the-year.
I imagine he selected the oldest period on this theory: periods of comets do not cycle. Every new period results from a perturbation in the comet’s orbit – and that perturbation is not cyclic.
And he selected the oldest simulated period for the same reason: to jump off from a time nearest the launch event as possible, to avoid so many perturbations since.
He would much prefer, as would I, to run every comet back to launch by step-wise computer simulation, one day at a time. But as he told me, and as I wrote in the article, not enough computing power exists in the universe, even in The Cloud or in a “distributed network,” to run a simulation like that. Not yet, anyway. Should the Lord tarry long enough for Moore’s Law to bring that kind of computing power into existence, then maybe he, or his successor(s), will run that simulation. (But some might suspect that any computer powerful enough to run that kind of simulation, might also be powerful enough to become self-aware.)
“Then why is Proxima Centauri still called Proxima Centauri”
Why wouldn’t it be?
“Why not call it Nemesis”
WHY call it Nemesis? It has nothing to do with the hypothetical (but probably non-existent) Nemesis.
“and discard the brown-dwarf theory?”
It’s not a theory. It’s a hypothesis, and one that is neither good nor necessary.
“In addition, the Oort Cloud theory has a larger number of deal-killers than the mere absence of a Nemesis.”
Astronomers disagree, for a long list of very good reasons. The existence or not of Nemesis has no bearing on the existence of the Oort Cloud. The existence of the Oort Cloud, by the way, is a virtual certainty. Firstly, if it DOESN’T exist then the laws of physics are not at all like we think they are. Secondly we can see (so far) four objects in it. I hope to live to see probes exploring the Cloud and sending back data, perhaps 40 years from now.
You missed the point. If Proxima Centauri is bound by gravity to Sol, and not to Alpha Centauri A, then we would not be calling it Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri C. We would give it a name reflecting its identity as the second member of a double-star pair, with Sol as the primary.
“Peer review would likely have hammered this sort of thing out.”
Well, there’s your problem.
The problem is that the uniformitarian “reviewers” are determined never to review any paper that threatens The Narrative.
For a reason similar to that for which literary critics never review any self-published works. Or that traditional, print-in-advance publishers never accept for publication any work submitted by an unknown author lacking a recognized agent.
You should never think that you can fool me about gatekeeping.
“If Proxima Centauri is bound by gravity to Sol, and not to Alpha Centauri A”
It’s bound to both. However it’s part of the Alpha Centauri system.
Everything in the Local Group is gravitationally bound. That includes us, our entire galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy and several other smaller ones.
“The problem is that the uniformitarian “reviewers” are determined never to review any paper that threatens The Narrative.”
No Terry, that’s simply unfair. The reviewers are not reviewing Brown’s hypothesis because he isn’t submitting it for review. If he puts it in a paper and submits it, they’ll review it; no doubt about that.
They won’t accept it, of course, but that isn’t because of bias; it’s because his methodology is flawed.
How can I conclude anything other than that they refuse to consider anything that threatens The Narrative?
Did not the un-worthies at the Climatic Research Unit under Dr. Phil Jones behave in precisely this egregious, inappropriate, and unprofessional manner?
Since when has any investigator who supports the creation model been able to get a fair review of his work, rather than the a priori dismissal as “unscientific” or “pseudoscientific” that is the norm?
And: how can anyone submit only ten, or even twenty, pages of a theory as comprehensive as is the Hydroplate Theory, and even hope to do it justice.
Now I do not expect you, atheist that you are, to understand any of this. But don’t talk to me about fairness in this context. Not so long as such gatekeeping continues.
Dr. Brown has set forth the terms under which anyone may debate his work in an open and public forum. As you know perfectly well.