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Introduction
Man's vision of Nature is a mosaic of memes. Whereas a gene is a self replicating organic unit, a meme is a self-replicating mental concept. Richard Dawkins coined the term meme, which starts from observed fact and is extended by intuition or faith to embrace apparent greater truths as a creed.
The flat Earth concept is a meme. In the beginning it was natural to believe it. The concept was passed on from person to person as an article of faith. Nothing seemed to gainsay it. It replicated for millennia. Until Pythagoras saw the shadow of the Earth as it eclipsed the moon, and concluded that the Earth was round. But the flat-Earth meme lives on in some minds even to this day! On the far side of a spherical Earth rain would have to fall upward, lakes could not be, and people would stand with their feet in the air! Several generations passed before the round Earth was generally believed.
The cargo cult meme is believed by some Melanesian tribes today. The white man's ships bring marvellous things which they believe really belong, not to the colonist, but to them-guns, engines, cinemas, radios, fabrics, exotic foods in cans. Their existence is real, but their source and ownership is faith, confirmed belief, not susceptible to argument.
Primitive tribes bred many memes - deities for each mystery and for each wish in war or peace. The single God of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, is a meme - a creed, a faith. It explains and justifies so many things otherwise in mental vacuum. It assuages fear of death. It offers reward for virtue and punishes the lack of it. Hell may be under our feet, in the sky, on the moon, in the galaxy, or beyond--or perhaps only in our minds. Twentieth century priests still solemnly exorcise evil spirits, and bless the fishing fleets, and pray for fair weather and safety from hazards of the deep. Opposing priests of the same faith pray for victory for their own in war.
The fact that the concept of God is a meme does not itself indicate truth nor falsity. A meme may be absolutely true or quite false; but it is born from intuitive faith, not logical reason. Science began with memes, which explained the obvious but un-explainable behaviour of the heavenly bodies (Sun, Moon, stars, and planets, and occasional terrifying interlopers like comets and meteors) and the ever-present mysteries of life and death.
Through the Middle Ages, the spherical Earth of Pythagoras and Aristotle, now blessed by the church, remained stationary at the centre of the Universe. If the Earth were moving, we would feel it. If we jumped, we would land farther back. Individual crystal spheres bore the Sun, Moon, and stars in their daily rotation around the static Earth. Planets had a looping course, so they had additional crystal spheres which gave them epicyclic motions about the Earth.
Clocks were
placed in cathedrals which reproduced the motions of Sun and Moon about
the stationary Earth and gave correct 24-hour time, sunrise, sunset, and
the phases of the moon (Figure 1).
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So precise was the Ptolemy mathematics meme that eclipses, transits, and oppositions could be predicted accurately far into the past or into the future. Such elegant mathematics could not be wrong! Everybody knew that they were right.
In the sixteenth century, Copernicus finally deduced that everything was much simpler if the Earth rotated daily, and Sun, Moon, and planets appeared to move across the sky as the Earth turned. Rejection of this absurd and blasphemous idea by the establishment and by the church was so strong that Copernicus published it in another state just before he died. So entrenched was the meme that Bruno was burned at the stake for repeating Copernicus' blasphemy, and Galileo was forced to recant. The Copernican model had been proposed two millennia earlier by Aristarchus, but rejected, and even 3,000 years before that by Sanskrit savants, who were ignored by Egypt and Greece.
Meanwhile, the astrology meme was universally believed. The precise position and mutual relationships of the planets at the moment of a birth determined character and fortune. Every king had his professional astrologer and sought advice for every important action. As did Nancy Reagan, wife of the President of the United States, and 80% of the citizens! Every modern newspaper and magazine has its regular astrology page. Great astronomers like Kepler earned their livelihood by casting horoscopes for their rulers. The mathematical computations were precise and rigorous, ensuring prestige to the operators, but their application to human affairs remained the pure creed of the meme.
In 1718 George Stahl, a Bavarian professor of medicine, solved the mystery of burning phlogiston was a substance possessed by all combustible substances, which they release when they burn. This meme caught on, and soon became the standard creed. Half a century later, Lavoisier showed that burning substances gained in weight as they combined with the newly discovered active component of air (oxygen). Lavoisier was fiercely opposed by British Royal Society scientists including Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley, who argued that the mass gain implied that phlogiston had negative mass. Besides, they knew that French science was inferior to British!
Lavoisier, when shown by some peasants a meteorite they had witnessed to fall, kindly told them that stones can't fall from the sky - there are none up there.
Goethe, when told of Newton's rainbow rings, said that the idea of white light being a mixture of coloured lights is childish twaddle - quite unconceivable!
Newton's alchemy meme was more important to him than his physics. But this did not lead to any great harm and stimulated others to probe deeper. When he formulated his law of gravitation to explain Kepler's elliptical orbit of Mars, Newton extended it from fact to meme when he applied it to the scale of the cosmos. Although his data did not extend beyond the solar system, those who followed him applied his law to infinite distance.
This extension
by creed could be right, but could be false if there were another term
that increased with distance, far too small to be detected on the scale
of the solar system, but swamping other terms on a cosmic scale. As
we will see, there is indeed such a term, which nullifies much of modern
astrophysics.
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Werner's eighteenth century meme, that all rocks were sediment deposited in succession with granite, the oldest, at the base, reigned supreme for decades, and such was his oratory, and exposition and knowledge of the mines of the Erzgebirge, that students flocked to Freiberg from all leading countries to learn from the great master But his facts were based on the stratigraphy of his limited region of Bohemia; which he extrapolated to the world. It was his own reverent disciples, von Humbolt, d'Aubuisson, von Buch, and others, who sadly proved him wrong.
Lord Kelvin, master physicist of his generation, calculated that the Earth is only 20 million years old, and taunted geologists that even on extreme assumptions the Earth could not be more than 100 million years old. His mathematics was faultless, but involved his meme, that gravity is the only ultimate source of energy, which nullified his conclusion.
Early this century, the world's greatest geologists were agreed on the meme of the permanence of the continents and oceans. When Wegener shocked the world with his argument that South America originally conjoined Africa, that North America had been contiguous with Europe, and indeed that all the continents of the world were separated parts of a single Pangea in the latest tenth of geologic time, it was rejected by the establishment-a pipe-dream, a seductive fairy tale!
From the beginning, a few of us had shared the stigma and supported Wegener's continental dispersion. We agreed that the oceans had been and were rapidly growing along their medial ridges1 which was compensated by consumption at the ocean trenches. In the mid-sixties the establishment turned about to agree that this was indeed so, but in doing so adopted the new American name "plate tectonics" because continental drift", the name invented to discredit Wegener, was tarnished.
A modern meme is the creed that an asteroid slammed into the Earth 65 million years ago, and caused gross climatic changes which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and some other biota. The linch-pin of the argument was the discovery of a thin zone rich in iridium at the transition of the Cretaceous to the Tertiary Systems, found to be repeated at several localities around the world, together with "shocked" quartz, and the silica minerals, coesite and stishovite1.
When Einstein reintroduced relativity and modelled the Universe with constant velocity of light, the normal meme was that the Milky Way was the Universe, so he introduced his cosmic constant, lambda, to yield a Universe stable and closed in four dimensions. But in the early 'thirties Hubble showed that many visible nebulae, hitherto thought to be part of it, were far outside the Milky Way, and were themselves great Milky-Way siblings in a vast family of galaxies. Further, Hubble demonstrated that these galaxies were receding from us and from each other at a rate that increased with distance, which implied an expanding Universe.
Expanding from what? George Henri Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, later Director of the Pontifical Academy of Science, proposed in 1927 that the Universe had begun from a single hyper-atom which he called ylem. Meanwhile, several cosmologists had shown that models derived from Einstein's equations were unstable, expanding or contracting according to the value assigned to the cosmic constant.
Dirac (1937) then pointed out that if we reverse the recession record and look back in time, the further back we go, the nearer all the galaxies become:
Dirac's error was his assumption of the constancy of mass. Had he contemplated that mass increases with time in accordance with its own concentration his "massive point" and Lemaitre's 'ylem' would have zero mass!
Dirac's model triggered Gamov's meme, that the Universe had an explosive beginning at a single point some 20 billion years ago and has been blowing apart ever since, hence the universal expansion observed by Hubble. Gamov predicted that the residual flash of this initial explosion should still exist, extremely attenuated and at a temperature near 50o K.
This big-bang theory was received sceptically until in 1965 Wilson and Penzias fortuitously discovered a background radiation near absolute zero, which was soon found to be uniform from all directions. (This background cosmic hiss had been observed in l942 by Karl Jansky). The Hubble expansion and the universal background radiation were then accepted by most as confirmation of the validity of the big-bang meme. A derivative nucleosynthesis model yielded the observed relative abundance of hydrogen and helium.
Very little was known about Venus' geology until the complete radar coverage by the Venus-orbiting Magellan satellite. A summary of the radar interpretation was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, and a spate of papers have since appeared in that journal and elsewhere. It is unfortunate that these interpretations were made by American teams who, instead of letting Venus tell her own story then comparing it with Earth and other planets, sought in Venus what they believed to be Earth's history - an absolute faith in the plate-tectonic model of an Earth of constant radius and compressional tectonics. Rather than the present Earth, the surface of Venus should have been compared with a Permian Earth (minus the hydrosphere and water-laid sediment) before the beginning of dispersion of the continental blocks, when the Earth was in about the same expansion stage as Venus is today (that is when Earth was already 90% of its present age). The American interpreters could not miss the universal tensional faulting nor the universal diapirism, but their creed blinded them to the fact that this meant that Venus' tectonics is identical to Earth's.
The first shock was that the surface altitudes of Venus were unimodal, not bimodal as on the present Earth. For example, a histogram of the heights of all males in the world is unimodal, with a high peak at the most common height, falling away to the very tall males on one side and the very short males on the other. Likewise for all females. But a histogram of all people in the world is bimodal with a male and a female peak. In fact Earth had been unimodal for the first 80% of geologic time before the Jurassic beginning of the great oceans, but their creed had not yet recognized this. It was the meme that was wrong, not that Venus was unusual.
Next, the surface of Venus was universally broken by thousands of rifts extending globally, which appeared so different from Earth. Actually non-folded rocks on Earth are universally jointed (Figures 98-99), which creed endeavors to interpret as the result of compression, whereas they are the final stage of an hierarchy of extension from continental dimensions down to centimeters (see pp.111-115). It is not Venus that is odd, but our Earthly creed.
Next, diapirism was universal on Venus on every scale, whereas creed maintained that compressional stresses were universal on Earth. Diapirism is universal here too (chapter 2).
Next the atmosphere of Venus was dominated by nitrogen and CO2, just as Earth's atmosphere had been for the first three quarters of its existence. It was the late rare development of a self replicating complex that initiated life on Earth and led to our quite unusual oxygen-rich atmosphere. Venus is the norm, not Earth.
Search as they might, no sign was found on Venus of great sedimentary accumulations such as dominate the surface of the Earth. True, this was due to the absence of water on Venus or any evidence that there ever had been. This may simply be due to the higher intensity of solar radiation. Hydrogen does steadily escape from Earth, but the rate must have been substantially greater from Venus throughout time. Tessera platforms, the oldest visible surface on Venus, were eagerly interpreted as ancient sediment intensely compressed to schist and gneiss. Is this correct or just another derivative of creed? I have never seen air photos or other images of terrestrial shield rocks that anastomose as do tessera linears (see p.136).
If Venus had been studied in her own right to learn what had happened there, without preconceived paradigms as to what should be there, fundamental progress could have been made in ridding Earth models of false concepts.
Many memes spring from "divine revelation" during disturbed sleep. Electro-encephalograms have established that we have two distinct kinds of sleep, periods or more of rapid-eye-movement (REM sleep) in which the mind is very active with dreams, separated by longer stretches of "hibernating" sleep, when all activity drops to a low level.
Normally, the mental scenario of REM sleep is random, meandering through fantasies, anxiety over worrying things on our minds, or exotic dreams of a recurrent pattern. But long ago, I found that by guiding and reguiding my mind to a particular matter during the transient stage of dropping off, the mind would continue ranging over this subject perhaps all night. The solution would crop up to a problem that waking concentration had failed to solve. I suggest that this is because during REM sleep, the mind is much less constrained by the things we think we know, the dogmas and memes which mold our minds.
I used this during my years in New Guinea before World War II, and was able to see the answer to geologic problems that I had failed to solve during the day. In recent years I have deliberately done this on a regular basis, and again and again I have seen during my REM sleep the answer to fundamental problems, where the answer was screened from me by conventional dogma and "wisdom".
But nothing is new! Two millennia ago, when King Hiero II, the tyrant of Syracuse, ordered Archimedes to determine whether the royal crown was really solid gold or gold-plated lead (under threat of losing his head if he failed), it was in his bath that the solution came to him, when he observed that his submerged leg weighed less than when he lifted it out of the water. "Eureka", he shouted, "I've found it, and saved my life!"
Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, became deeply introverted with religious faith as a child, but at her puberty she failed to mature, and, triggered by her aborted menses, had monthly REM dreams with her childhood heroes, Saint Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine. She no doubt believed absolutely the reality of their admonition that she must deliver her country from the English invader In superstitious France of the fifteenth century, the Governor of Vaucouleurs and his advisers believed her earnest appeal, and sent her forth in male dress and a white suit of armour mounted on a black charger to lead 6000 men to the relief of Orleans from the English siege. In due course, it was the English who burnt her as a witch.
Friedrich August Kekyule von Stradonitz (1829-1896), the great German chemist had puzzled for years about the structure of benzene until the closed-chain answer came to him while dozing before the fire, and opened the door to development of aniline dyes and the dominance of the German dyestuff industry. Twenty-five years after he had published his classical paper on the ring structure of the benzene molecule, he reminisced:
Ancient Egyptians believed dreams were inspired by the supernatural, for good or evil, or frivolous, or oracular. In the Bible, Joseph interpreted the Pharoah's dream of seven famine years. Throughout history, people of deep religious conviction of many kinds have claimed to have had divine visions and have convinced others and in many cases themselves, that God had communicated with them.
Most religions are founded on such "divine" visions which seem to have been REM experiences of persons of high morality, who may have finally really believed that God had called them. In the fifth century, St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, stated in his confessions that he repeatedly received such divine communications and instructions during his sleep. He no doubt believed that God had inspired him.
A century later, Mohammed was a melancholy, introspective, solitary child, interested in theology. He was 35 when he entered a cave in Mt. Hira to meditate, and to drift into trances of REM sleep, where he had visions and religious ecstasies, and the Angel Gabriel appeared and spoke to him. He was accepted as a prophet. In his trances he uttered messages, which were written down (he himself could not read or write).
In retrospect, through the long vistas of the history of science, philosophy, and the world's great religions and faiths, the role of the revelations of REM sleep have been paramount. I have tried to deliberately channel and harness it. Aldous Huxley used Mescalin, others the "magic" mushroom, to achieve similar results.
To multiply l444 by 3888 is quite easy, but to multiply MCDXLIV by MMMDCCCLXXXVIII (the same numbers in Roman notation) is very difficult, but the difficulty stems only from the unsuitable notation. The Roman notation is perfectly valid, and for some purposes might be the ideal notation.
Ptolemy's geocentric description of the Universe gave simple motions for the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, but the paths of the planets became complex epicyclic orbits, which were measured and defined only after centuries of meticulous observation and calculation. We still do not know the absolute motions of any of these bodies, only their relative motion. By shifting the origin of co-ordinates from Earth to Sun, however, Copernicus reduced the motions to simple terms. But there is little inherently false about the Ptolemaic observations and equations, which correctly predicted conjunctions and eclipses, but with Ptolemy's notation our sums become un-necessarily complicated.
Achilles' race with the tortoise is another example. There never was such a race, but philosophers loved to argue about the outcome. As the problem goes, Achilles had to give the tortoise a substantial start, and clearly a definite time must elapse before Achilles reaches the tortoise's starting point, and in that time the tortoise must surely have made some progress. So more time must elapse before Achilles reaches that point, and in this time the tortoise must have made some more progress, so some more time must elapse before Achilles ... I need a broken record to keep repeating this forever. And so, the philosophers argued, Achilles can never reach the tortoise because whenever Achilles gets to where the tortoise was last, that wily reptile has gone a bit farther, and there never would be an end to it!
We have stated the problem in the form of an infinite series, and there are as many terms as we have time and patience to state, with still infinitely more terms ahead of us. All this is very simple and naive. We have stated the problem in a form which is quite valid, but we can never reach an answer because we have side-tracked ourselves into an infinity.
Einstein's geometric model of space-time is a notation - albeit a most useful and fertile one. Mass distorts the rectangular field, so that parallel lines converge. The greater the convergence, the greater the gravity acceleration. But what is distorted? - only our aether (or space-time, or space, or whatever you choose to call it). But this is only a notation which helps us to visualize (and calculate) the gravity field from a geometric model. World lines exist only in our visual notation.
Theorists send identical twins on different space journeys and on returning home Find their ages differ. Any closed loop journey would surely cancel algebraically (notwithstanding the Dingle-McCrea debate), even outward accelerations negated by reverse returning accelerations so however the loops differed, their difference on return would be zero.
But the problem may not be as simple as that. Physicists, with their intense mathematical training, reduce everything to their billiard-ball Universe. Do they really understand time as applied to biochemical processes?
Mathematicians enjoy themselves in five, ten, twenty dimensions. Fine, unless they apply it to physical hardware! Mathematics is a fine notation, but false memes, no matter how elegant the operations, yield only teratoid paradigms.
In Roman arithmetic, Achilles' tortoise, Copernicus' geocentric Universe, and quantum mathematics, the complexity is not essential to the problem, but is introduced by our manner of thinking about it, even though our reasoning is valid and logically defensible. The Romans made an unsuitable choice of notation. Ptolemy chose an unwise origin of co-ordinates, the Achilles debaters chose an infinite (although terminating) series. Quantum theory did not recognize the universal tension of the cosmos and that Planck's constant is its measure [chapter 10]. For any wave be it an electromagnetic wave of light or a soliton wave of "matter", the fundamental must resonate with the background tension, followed by second and third harmonics, and onward. To Einstein's photoelectric effect, this seemed to indicate quantum steps, and from that the quantum theory grew - to his astonishment, and disbelief!
Philosophically, the matter runs much deeper. An anatomist sees man as an articulation of bones; a physiologist sees an interplay of organs; a psychologist unravels a mind; a politician sees a potential vote; a priest, a soul! Man is a symphony of them all. The physicist sees the Universe as a mathematical abstraction! The "theory of everything" (on the verge of enunciation according to some) is an elegant equation! [The eligant equation would dictate that] mind, consciousness, self-awareness, passions have no reality!
As Pickering (1993) points out, physicists, so grounded in the sophisticated mathematics of their apprenticeship, could do no other than model their experimental observations in mathematical terms. How real are their imagined quarks and gluons? Would a different culture, devoid of mathematical indoctrination, have evolved a wholly different Universe in full harmony with experiment?
Contemplating the evolution of human belief over the centuries, we find that at any point there was a general creed, accepted as truth by the establishment, but one by one specific elements of it have been discarded, though in most cases still held by a stubborn minority. This process has continued right up to the present day.
The flat Earth was abandoned a couple of millennia ago. The stationary Earth at the centre of the solar system was universally believed until the sixteenth century. That blood circulated was adopted at about the same time. Phlogiston was only abandoned two centuries ago. It's only 90 years since Kelvin insisted that the Earth could not be as much as 100 million years old. The permanence and fixity of continents and oceans was only abandoned in the middle of this century. Astrology is still rife, even believed by many educated people! What about the present creed of the establishment? The big bang is universally taught as fact. So is subduction. So is the constant radius of the Earth, the permanence of mass. Stars are fixed in their ordinates on the Russell- Hertszsprung sequence.
In our fabric of standard belief, are there still false fundamental strands that have been with us from the beginning?
The exercise I have attempted, is to survey our classical dogma of geology, which is part of the wider fabric of astronomy, to ask whether some of the things we are taught as facts, indeed which I myself taught, are really valid.