Cripes, this is SO bizarre ...<br><br>Seriously, I don't know what to make of this. I see a rush on Neal's part to interpret 'evidence' that supports his scheme, and an unwillingness to acknowledge compelling information (in leu of asserting they're unequivocably 'factual') that disproves it -- but he's a fighter. I gather his theory involves a kind of 'potential' matter like the universe's 'dark matter' that is involved in the physical 'growth' of planets. moons, stars, and suchlike 'stuff' -- so in this way his theory goes a long way beyond the ideas of 'ordinary' growing-earth adherants like Lawrence S. Myers from the expanding-earth website.<br><br>I've read about and brainstormed such concepts as Hoyle's 'steady-state' theory that suggests matter is always being spontaneously created, and the universe is slowly expanding -- inflating -- as a result (tho without showing any measurable evidence -- since even measuring instruments are increasing at the same rate). But this 'rate' of expansion could account for the missing mass of the universe, in the form of a kind of atomic potential-energy acceleration. As far as that goes -- couldn't the vacuum-energy account for the universe's missing mass, ie., cold dark matter?<br><br>But that's a bit of a departure from Adams.<br><br>I'm intrigued by his cosmic/atomic-nuclear ideas, less-so in his premise that the continents show the earth is 'growing' from the core -- I think he discounts the role of the pacific midoceanic rift in explaining how the western-american plates 'seem' to correspond with the eastern asiatic plates -- as 'proof' that the earth was once some 40 percent smaller. Some 200 million years ago, the pangea continent wasn't necessarily an unbalanced mass on the earth as he suggests <br>-- what is now the pacific ocean may have been where a mars-size asteroid struck, with ejected-material condensing to form the moon -- perhaps triggering the core convection-current-driven plate-tectonics subduction that caused pangea to split and the continents to drift.<br><br>Before a mars-size asteroid struck the earth, I'd suppose the earth might have been about 60 percent its present size. Offhand, I don't recall what dates this asteroid impact is thought to have occurred -- although I think this theory of moon-formation is now commonly accepted.<br><br>I guess I have trouble with Adam's kind of 'empirical evidence' re: his critique against continental drift driven by convection currents and accompanied by subduction zones -- while his atomic theories are more intriging. But then -- As little as ten years ago, earth scientists didn't accept a 'crackpot' theory that the majority of earth's water fell as hundreds of house-sized cosmic snowball comets hit the upper atmosphere every day, water-vapor settling to the earth's surface and over eons forming lakes and oceans.<br><br>Starman<br>******<br><br>Re: Adams -- from interview in Wired article:<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/adams.html">www.wired.com/wired/archi...adams.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>--except--<br>... a radical scientific theory he dreamed up, one he believes is supported by an undersea map published in 1996 by the National Geophysical Data Center, a division of the US Department of Commerce. The map illustrates that nowhere on Earth is the seafloor older than 180 million years. This has Adams very excited. If Earth is more than 4 billion years old, as most experts believe, how could the ocean floor be so young? <br><br>The answer, Adams says, is simple - and it forms the core assertion in his new, 28-years-in-the-making book, A Conversation Between Two Guys in a Bar OR A New Model of the Universe. The map is proof - proof! - that Earth is growing, steadily increasing in mass and volume. The planet isn't just getting older; it's getting bigger. <br><br>It should be noted up front that Adams isn't a scientist. He's a self-taught science buff, a man operating in the grand outside-the-academy tradition that has produced both greatness (Thomas Edison, Steve Wozniak) and not-so-greatness (Erich von Daniken). Adams has been fascinated by science for as long as he can remember, and he travels between disciplines like a car zigzagging on the freeway. For him, the notion of a growing Earth is just a starting point on the way to debunking not only a core principle of geology - plate tectonics - but the very underpinnings of geophysics, cosmology, particle physics, even Einstein's assertions about the speed of light. If the Earth is growing, he insists, this means the total amount of matter and energy in the universe is increasing - which means matter is infinite, not finite like big bang theorists believe. Adams doesn't even believe there was a big bang. It was more like a whimper, a birthing cry to herald what's really been going on ever since: Matter is being created all the time, in astounding quantities. The Earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the entire universe - it's all growing. Not just expanding relative to one another through space. Growing. <br><br>It's all explained in the book and accompanying video, which Adams plans to sell for $60 to $80 at
www.nealadamsentertainment.com and in comic book stores around the country. The initial print run is 10,000, but if he can generate enough buzz he'll print a lot more and try to airdrop his theories into scientific institutions, school libraries, and bookstore chains. Because information this hot, Adams believes, should not be kept from the masses. <br><br>If the book's title seems unlikely to appeal to academics, so does the format. It's a 125-page graphic novel, complete with frames, speech bubbles, and any number of self-conscious puns. Nor is it a natural for the legions of fans who remember Adams mainly for his pulp comics. The illustrations are amazing, and the implications fantastic, but the actual story line is pretty dry and repetitive. Two table-pounding scientists - a radical theoretician and a straw man - work their way through a loooong conversation en route to a telegraphed conclusion: Everything we know is wrong. It's like My Dinner With Andre costarring L. Ron Hubbard. <br><br>For Adams, the book is a personal mission. If he succeeds, his elaborate theories will get a hearing in the scientific community, and he'll go down as a modern Galileo. "There's all kinds of things that can come from this," he says. "I want to see it get past the point where it's ridiculed, to a point where people are considering it so we can see what happens. I want to see antigravity. I want to see intergalactic communication. If I'm right, those things will happen." <br><br>Of course, he's probably not right, and Einstein is likely to remain standing on his pedestal, frizzy and unbowed. But that doesn't mean Two Guys isn't worth a look. Though it may never win Adams a Nobel Prize, the book is audacious, crotchety, and eye-popping. What more could you ask from an aging comics genius? <br><br>. . .<br>His interest in geology dates back to the early '70s, a few years after researchers accepted the notion that the continents rest on tectonic plates that drift slowly around the globe. Adams was struck by the Pangaea theory, which holds that all of Earth's landmass once existed as part of a single supercontinent, until roughly 200 million years ago. He didn't buy it. "Put yourself in my place," he says. "You listen to this and as an artist you try to visualize it. And it occurs to you that this is totally wrong." <br><br>First problem: The whole arrangement - with the übercontinent Pangaea on one side of the globe and empty ocean on the other - looked lopsided. "The Earth is spinning," he reminds me. "When you spin something, everything on it evens out." Second: It's obvious that the landmasses bordering the Atlantic fit together - South America into Africa, North America into Europe, et cetera. But it was obvious (to him, at least) that the lands bordering the Pacific would also match up if you pushed them together. The Pangaea theory couldn't account for this fact, and no one dared acknowledge it, Adams reasoned, because it would be impossible for the continents to be joined along both the Atlantic and Pacific seams at once. Unless ... <br><br>He began tracing the continents and pasting them on basketballs to see if they might all fit together into a single sphere, and ... it worked! Yes, he decided, Pangaea once existed, but it wasn't a big lump surrounded by water. Instead, it was a shell that covered the entire planet. From this insight sprang Adams' revolutionary theory: The planet was once a third the size it is today, and it's been growing ever since. He believes that in another 200 million years, Earth will be the size of Neptune. <br><br>The big bang was just a birthing cry. Matter is being created all the time, in astounding quantities.<br><br>To get a fair hearing for this somewhat twisted geological theory, Adams knew he'd have to explain where all this new matter - the extra stuff necessary to fuel Earth's growth - was coming from. He started reading physics textbooks to learn about the atomic structure of matter. Along the way he decided that the universe contains a fundamental building block that scientists haven't yet discovered, an electromagnetically balanced neutral particle that he calls "prime matter," which makes up 90 percent or more of our cosmos. This undetected particle, Adams contends, affects everything that passes through it. For example, it controls the speed at which light travels - which means, among other things, that the speed of light is not a constant, as presupposed by Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2. <br><br>As Adams describes it, prime matter sounds a bit like the ether, a pervasive physical essence that 19th-century physicists believed was the propagating medium for light. But it may have more in common with so-called dark matter, a mysterious particle, first theorized more than 50 years ago by Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky. Scientists have observed dark matter through its effects on celestial bodies, and recently they've begun attempts to isolate and deconstruct an actual particle. This effort promises to be one of the great scientific stories of our time. <br><br>Adams already knows what those scientists will find when they isolate dark matter: potential. Dark matter, prime matter - call it what you will, Adams says it's nothing more than "matter in waiting." Given billions of years and the right conditions - like those at the center of the Earth and on the sun - it will evolve into the various elements of the periodic table. <br><br>Adams insists that this supposedly impossible phenomenon - the creation of something out of nothing - has been recorded many times. He cites the experiments of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carl David Anderson, who in 1932 discovered the positron - a positively charged version of an electron that appeared seemingly out of nowhere while he was trying to photograph a cosmic ray in a cloud chamber. Today, the positron is considered a form of antimatter, because at the nanomoment it appears, it searches out an electron and the two essentially cancel each other out, leaving behind a trace of gamma radiation and, Adams believes, an infinitesimal amount of extra energy as the only evidence of their existence. "They call it antimatter," Adams says, "because they say it destroys matter. But that's not what it is." <br><br>Almost five hours into Adams' dissertation, my mind begins to wander. He notices me looking bleary-eyed. "Stay with me," he commands, "because I'm about 10 minutes away from really fucking up your brain." <br><br>He launches into a round of rhetorical questions: What if the positron isn't antimatter at all? What if it destroys itself in scientific experiments only because it's close to an electron? What if the positron couldn't find an electron? What would it do? Adams holds that a positron attracts - if there are no electrons nearby, it will seek out something else. But what? <br><br>His answer is that the positron will attract particles of electromagnetically neutral prime matter. Once these particles join with the positron, they become "neutron material." Maintaining the positron's positive charge, the prime matter will build in layers around it until the whole arrangement is 1,998 times larger than the positron - exactly the size of a proton, which is what the thing has become. <br><br>Now, when the proton encounters an electron, the positron at the proton's core is so insulated that the two won't snuff each other out. Instead, the electron will orbit the larger proton. And voilà! You have matter. <br><br>his book, Adams goes into exhaustive detail about how these first particles of matter assemble into hydrogen molecules, then add protons and electrons to form helium and, ultimately, every other element in the periodic table. But he realizes that many people will get bogged down in all the pages of physics. So he's producing a fun Two Guys companion video - an animated Nova -style docudrama that depicts the growth of the Earth over the past 400 million years. He's also rendered the growth of the moon. Why the moon? Because there you can see the stretch marks - the geological features called mares - left by its growth over time. Adams is certain that this visual aid will blow people away. "Everyone I've ever showed this to has said, 'How could it be any other way?'" <br><br>. . .<br>Adams is trying to shake up the scientific world, but he's hardly the first layman to arrive on the scene with earth-shattering theories. Publishers, universities, and academic scientists receive countless manuscripts written by lone-wolf visionaries who howl that the establishment is deluded about evolution or cold fusion or the nature of gravitation. Looking for guidance, I set up a meeting with Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in El Cerrito, California, and a fellow with the Committee for the Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal. She evaluates fantastic claims all the time, and I want to ask her where Adams fits on the continuum. <br><br>For Scott, the primary indicator of weird science is a reference to conspiracy. "Real scientists don't convince you by telling you that others are lying," she says. By that measure, Adams is definitely out there. He claims the scientific community speaks a language of exclusion in order to lock out the layperson - and that it discourages alternative thought with ridicule. He doesn't consider these actions intentionally malicious; he realizes that it's easier to go along with the status quo. "People tend not to want to question dogma," he says. "But I'm afraid of dogma." <br><br>If I really want to deconstruct Two Guys, Scott tells me, I should read "A Consumer's Guide to Pseudoscience," a classic essay by James Trefil, a physics professor at George Mason University. One of Trefil's key indicators of fringedom is a simple question: Are established scientists putting in time on the alleged phenomenon? <br><br>That's difficult to judge with Adams, because his theories are so vast. So I narrow my search to scientists who share his fundamental idea that the Earth is growing. As it turns out, unbeknownst to Adams, there is a faction of active growing-Earth theoreticians, many of whom live in or near Australia. The Australia cluster may owe a lot to the influence of S. Warren Carey, the godfather of the theory and founder of the geology department at the University of Tasmania. <br><br>As a scientist, researchers say, Adams draws really great comics. His secret weapon: massive amounts of enthusiasm and verbiage.<br><br>I talk to James Maxlow, one of Carey's disciples and a PhD candidate at Western Australia's Curtin University. Maxlow is finishing up a dissertation called "Global Expansion Tectonics," and when I tell him about Two Guys, he gets very excited by the prospect that the book might draw attention to the cause. Maxlow says he's not qualified to comment on Adams' physics, but he thinks Adams has a lot of the geology right. He's even thinking about jettisoning the word "expansion" in favor of "growth" - because growth has a better ring to it. <br><br>All of which is good for the Adams cause. Unfortunately, though, Maxlow sometimes reaches into the conspiracy grab-bag himself when he's making a case. "A lot of funding for research is going into plate tectonics," he says, "so scientists are reluctant to have me stir the pot." <br><br>As it turns out, that's about it for supportive colleagues. By and large, the university researchers I speak to say that as a scientist, Adams draws really great comics. At UC Berkeley I visit a geophysics professor named Mark Bukowinski whose reaction to Two Guys leaves little room for interpretation: "We do all kinds of measurements," he says. "The Earth is not growing." <br><br>Stephen Hsu, a physics professor at the University of Oregon (and a childhood fan of Adams' comics), says Adams' physics is entirely wacky, that he just picked a conclusion and backfilled the proof - much like he brought Professor X back to life. "I admire Adams' enthusiasm," Hsu says, "but there's a reason why physics is a professional subject." <br><br>To give Adams an opportunity for rebuttal, I propose a conference call with Hsu. After the introductions, Adams launches his secret weapon: a massive amount of verbiage. He recounts the history and breakdown of his book, with nary a beat for Hsu to step in, and says dark matter's discovery bolsters his assumptions. Hsu admits that he has doubts about whether geologists are right about everything. "To us hardcore scientists," he begins, "it seems like they just make up stories." <br><br>That sends Adams into a 15-minute tirade against plate tectonics that ends with: "Anyone who raises their head above the morass will have to say that the Earth grew." <br><br>But it goes downhill from there. Hsu cites ongoing experiments that measure movement in the Earth by tracking the distance between light beams at three different stations, at a rate of accuracy measured in angstroms. "If the Earth was expanding, that would show up," he says. Also, if the Earth and moon were growing in circumference, they'd be growing closer together. They're not. <br><br>Adams and Hsu go back and forth for two hours. It's a polite exchange that roams from Einstein's theories to the structure of a proton to the fact that when an electron and a positron emerge from a cosmic ray, all the energy they produce is accounted for in the byproduct: gamma radiation. This final assertion floors Adams, who believes that there's an extra bit of energy that incites the prime-matter-to-matter evolution process. <br><br>"I never heard that before," he says. "I don't have an explanation for that." <br><br>After hanging up, Adams claims he held his own. But when I arrive at Continuity the next morning, Marilyn tells me he was up until the wee hours, searching the Web for evidence that all the energy is indeed accounted for when a positron and electron split out of a cosmic ray. <br><br>Adams is eager to discuss the conversation. At my request, he starts sketching a picture of Batman, while bouncing back and forth between explanations of the difference between the way Asians and Westerners use their drawing instruments and the molecular makeup of iron. <br><br>I ask him why he's so concerned about whether all the energy can be accounted for in the gamma radiation, and he tells me that the extra bit of energy is necessary to incite the transformation from prime matter to matter. Without it, he says, the process doesn't seem possible. <br><br>It's strange that he's been deflated by this bit of scientific "dogma" even as he strives to disprove the accepted theory of the history of our universe. <br><br>As he puts the final swoosh at the bottom of Batman's cape, Adams sticks out his chest and says, in the sort of baritone that you might expect from Batman, "I wantyou for the Batman army." <br><br>"Hey, Neal," I say, as he turns the chair toward me and holds up the drawing, "what if you didn't need that energy?" <br><br>"What do you mean?" he asks. <br><br>"What if it's not energy as we understand it that makes it happen?" I say. "Maybe there's something called prime energy that starts the whole process." <br><br>He lifts his eyebrows a bit and smiles. "Maybe," he says softly, just before he spins his chair back toward his desk. <br><br>--end--<br><br> <p></p><i></i>
by nomo » Fri Mar 17, 2006 6:06 pm 