Philip said:
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Percy, I mentioned several hundred 'gaps' (if you will) back in June '02.
I don't expect you to really debate any of these, just let you know gaps of scientific credulity exist as a problem for a mega-ToE model as based on your micro-ToE model (as you defined a couple days back).
I’m not Percy, but it would be difficult for anybody to debate these gaps as there are so many basic errors in fact that it is hard to know where to begin. The author’s thesis (which I assume is some variation of Gee whiz that’s complicated. Must be God) gets buried in the mass of erroneous statements. Some, but certainly not all of the most obvious ones are discussed briefly below.
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Why does the sun in the centre and the large planets at the outer edge, consist mainly of light gases while the group of smaller ones, ie. Mercury, Mars, Venus and Earth contain the heavy elements? Normally one would expect the original cloud of gas and dust rotating about its centre to have a distribution of material ranging from light in the middle to heavy at the outer edges.
This is basic high school astronomy. Gas giants have ice cores surrounded by lots of gas (Helium, Hydrogen etc). Close to the Sun; solar heat vaporized ices and prevented lightweight elements, like hydrogen and helium, from condensing. Therefore gas giants did not and cannot form close to the sun or any star.
Earlier the author states:
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Note that the laws of thermodynamics are regarded as the best established laws in science.
Then he shows that he has no understanding of the First Law of Thermodynamics as he thinks that collisions between dust particles result in them vanishing!!!
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The collection or accretion of dust particles by initially smaller bodies in order to grow to planet sizes, does not account for possible vaporization on impact.
Next in a long line of mistakes:
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Venus, Uranus and Pluto rotate in a direction opposite to that of the rest of the planets.
Only Venus rotates in a different direction. Again this is high school science.
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If there are to be a number of planets it would also be very clever to have large ones, like Jupiter and Saturn towards the outside, in order to shield the life supporting planet from dangerous comet bombardment.
If shielding the Earth from comet bombardment is clever, then the creator used a particularly poor means of doing it. For instance, as large as Jupiter is, it only provides direct shielding for about 0.0002 % of our sky in the planetary plane and no protection outside of this plane. Additionally, gravitational interactions between any of the gas giants and passing comets are just as likely to perturb a comet’s path toward the earth as away from it.
Next concerning placement of the planets within the solar system:
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Coming too close will result in gravitational interactions that will slow down the rotation of the planet about its own axis. The days and nights would become inordinately long as happened with Mercury and Mars. The extremes of boiling hot long days and subzero long nights would not be amenable to biological life.
Aside from the fact that the author apparently believes that Mars is closer to the sun than is the Earth, Mars’ rotational period is essentially the same as Earth’s, with a Martian day being just over 1/2 hour longer than one on Earth.
Our author confidently concludes, But, let’s face it, there is still no really satisfactory understanding of the origin of the solar system. This might be a more convincing statement if the author presented any evidence that he had actually tried to learn something about the current ideas on the origin of the solar system.
Then our author ventures off into Biology with disastrous results.
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Traditional biological classification (phyla, classes etc.) fits in with the Darwin model. A modern new system of classification called cladism has been developed in recent years. Cladograms deal with relationships amongst living and fossil species, but make no room for any common ancestors. The logic of this new approach cannot be faulted, but it is alien to the Darwin model.
This is as wrong as wrong can be. From the University of California at Berkeley website:
Introduction to Cladistics
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The basic idea behind cladistics is that members of a group share a common evolutionary history, and are "closely related", more so to members of the same group than to other organisms....
There are three basic assumptions in cladistics:
1. Any group of organisms are related by descent from a common ancestor.
2. There is a bifurcating pattern of cladogenesis.
3. Change in characteristics occurs in lineages over time.
There are indeed gaps in our knowledge of the natural world. However, using this author to define those gaps is a very poor choice.
Joe T.
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