Okay, I can see a few problems with that. One is that Fischer doesn't seem to know the meanings of the words he's using. For example, he glosses the phrase "positive gravity anomalies" with the unhelpful note "(sinking)". That's not what "positive gravitational anomaly" means.
One odd feature of the webpage is that much of it is a vast wall of quotes and paraphrases with no indication whatsoever as to what he thinks their significance are; whether they are meant to be in favor of "Shock Dynamics", or against plate tectonics, or what conceivable relevance they have to either. He does explain that the most important things are in red. Looking only at those, one is again unable to see a common theme narrower than "geology".
There's about 5,300 words of this rambling preamble without one word of what his hypothesis is or how any of his excerpts relates to it.
We then get a scant 800 words saying what "Shock Dynamics" is, with no mention of how it could conceivably relate to any of the observations made. And when I say 800, I'm being generous, because 200 words of that is another block of quotation with no indication of its relevance.
And then there's about 400 words of creationist nonsense about radiometric dating, consisting of a string of quotations from a most scholarly work, wait, I'll read that again, crudbucket, entitled
Shattering the Myths of Darwinism. As the author doesn't say why they're there, I am unable to conjecture.
So we've got about 600 words telling us what Shock Dynamics is, in the vaguest possible terms, and nothing at all to explain why we should think that it's right. There's no model, there's no predictive power, there's just a set of odd assertions.
There's not even much of an attempt to make his ideas look
explanatory. How, for example, does he explain subduction zones?
Like this: "The leading edges of moving continents produce thick lithosphere, mountains, and benioff ("subduction") zones; shock waves in the crust freeze at the threshold energy level, forming "subduction zones" in oceanic lithosphere."
Does that give you a picture, even a vague one, of what causes the earthquakes in a Benioff zone? Are they caused somehow by this frozen shock wave of which he speaks? How?
So we have what cranks usually come up with, an idea for an idea, the sort of thing one might think of in one's bath. Fischer simply hasn't tried to develop the idea sufficiently that one could relate it to the evidence. He has disguised this fact (possibly from himself) by producing his Big Wall O' Quotations. That is certainly a lot of evidence for ... something ... perhaps the proposition that geologists write a lot of papers, or that the Fischer knows how to copy and paste, but there's no attempt to relate it to his ideas --- for over 5,000 words, he produces slab after slab of this stuff without
mentioning "Shock Dynamics", let alone mentioning how the facts he cites could possibly relate to it one way or the other.
Let me give you an example. One thing he puts in red as being "most important for the new interpretation" is the phrase "the Tanzanian craton is unique". Looking at the surrounding context, which explains why it is unique (and which was not worthy of highlighting in red) we find that it is unique in that it has a "dramatic excursion to β=4.20+0.05 km/s at 200-250 km".
Now, Fischer's hypothesis, let's remind ourselves, is that: "The continental crust itself was likely formed by the grazing collision of a planetesimal with Earth. The differentiation and fractionation of the mantle allowed the lighter elements to rise to the top and solidify as a single "scab" of continental crust." Is there anything in that that suggests that the Tanzanian craton should be unique, either in possessing a "dramatic excursion" or in any other way? You can't see the connection, I can't see the connection, and if the author can see the connection he is curiously coy about mentioning it. So why is it "most important for the new interpretation"? Or even of tangential relevance to it?
What Fischer needs is an actual model. He should say how big the planetesimal was, how dense it was, how glancing the blow was, and when it hit; and he should say what the Earth was like before it hit. Then he should use the known laws of physics and chemistry to model the results of such a collision. And then he would have predictions which he could compare to observation. And then he would be doing science. As it is, he's just pretending to be doing science. I don't mean to impute deliberate deceit, it is very likely that he has fooled himself into thinking that he's doing science. But he is not.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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