is, that it cannot be wrong. (This follows clearly from their belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God; that God knows everything; and that, like George Washington, God cannot tell a lie.) In support of this thesis, the Fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the Earth and the Universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the Fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Toth Fairy has, but the Fundamentalists won’t accept that. By denying some scientific findings and distorting others, they insist that their silly beliefs have some value, and they call their imaginary constructions ‘scientific’ creationism. At one point, however, they draw the line. Even the most Fundamental of Fundamentalists would find it a little troublesome to insist that the Earth is fiat. After all, Columbus didn’t fall off the end of the world, and the astronauts have actually seen the world to be a sphere. If, then, the Fundamentalists were to admit that the Bible assumes a flat Earth, their entire structure of the inerrancy of the Bible falls to the ground. And if the Bible is wrong in so basic a matter, it can be wrong anywhere else, dnd they might as well give up. Consequently, the merest mention of the biblical fiat Earth sends them all into convulsions. My favourite letter, arriving in this connection, made the following three points: 1. The Bible specifically says the Earth is round (and a biblical verse is cited), yet despite this biblical statement, human beings persisted in believing the Earth to be flat for two thousand years thereafter. 2. If there seem to have been Christians who insisted the Earth was flat, it was only the Catholic Church that did so, not Bible-reading Christians. 3. It was a pity that only nonbigots read the Bible. (This, it seemed to me, was a gentle remark intended to imply that I was a bigot who didn’t read the Bible and therefore spoke out of ignorance.) As it happened, my letter-writing friend was well and truly wrong on all three points. The biblical verse he cited was Isaiah 40:22. I doubt that my correspondent realized it, or would believe it if he were told, but the fortieth chapter of Isaiah begins that section of the book which is called ‘the Second Isaiah’ because it was not written by the same hand that wrote the first thirty-nine chapters. The first thirty-nine chapters were clearly written about 700 B.C., in the time of Hezekiah, king of Judah, at the time when the Assyrian monarch Sennacherib was threatening the land. Beginning with Chapter Forty, however, we are dealing with the situation as it was about 540 B.C. in the time of the fall of the Chaldean Empire to Cyrus of Persia. This means that the Second Isaiah, whoever he might have been, grew up in Babylonia, in the time of the Babylonian captivity and was undoubtedly well educated in Babylonian culture and science. The Second Isaiah, therefore, thinks of the Universe in terms of Babylonian science, and to the Babylonians the Earth was flat. Well, then, how does Isaiah 40:22 read? In the Authorized Version (better known as the King James Bible), which is the Bible to the Fundamentalists, so that every last mistranslation it contains is sacred to them, the verse, which is part of the Second Isaiah’s attempt to describe God, reads: Tt is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth . . There you have it - ‘the circle of the earth.’ Is that not a clear indication that the Earth is ‘round?’ Why, oh why, did all those bigots who don’t read the Bible persist in thinking of the Earth as flat, when the word of God, as enshrined in the Bible, spoke of the Earth as a ‘circle’? The catch, of course, is that we’re supposed to read the King James Bible as though it were written in English. If the Fundamentalists want to insist that every word of the Bible is true, then it is only fair to accept the English meanings of those words and not invent new meanings to twist the biblical statements into something else. In English, a ‘circle’ is a two-dimensional figure; a ‘sphere’ is a three-dimensional figure. The Earth is very nearly a sphere; it is certainly not a circle. A coin is an exampe of a circle (if you imagine the coin to have negligible thickness). In other words, what the Second Isaiah is referring to when he speaks of ‘the circle of the earth’ is a flat Earth with a circular boundary; a disc; a coin-shaped object. The very verse my correspondent advanced as proof that the Bible considered the Earth to be a sphere is the precise verse that is the strongest evidence that the Bible assumes the Earth to be fiat. If you want another verse to the same effect, consider a passage in the Book of Proverbs, which is part of a paean of praise to personified Wisdom as an attribute of God: ‘When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth.’ (Proverbs 8:27). A compass, as we all know, draws a circle, so we can imagine God marking out the fiat, circular disc of the world in this fashion. William Blake, the English artist and poet, produced a famous painting showing God marking out the limits of the Earth with a compass. Nor is ‘compass’ the best translation of the Hebrew. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible has the verse read, ‘When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep.’ That makes it clearer and more specific. Therefore, if we want to draw a schematic map of the world as it seemed to the Babylonians and Jews of the sixth century B.C, (the time of the Second Isaiah) you will find it in Figure 1. Although the Bible nowhere says so, the Jews of the late biblical period considered Jerusalem the centre of the ‘circle of the world’ - just as the Greeks thought of Delos as the centre. (A spherical surface, of course, has no centre.) Now let us quote the entire verse: ‘It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers: that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.’ (Isaiah 40:22). The reference to Earth’s inhabitants as ‘grasshoppers’ is merely a biblical cliche for smallness and worthlessness. Thus, when the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness, and sent spies into the land of Canaan, those spies returned with disheartening stories of the strength of the inhabitants and of their cities. The spies said: . - we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.’ (Numbers 13:33). Observe, however, the comparison of the heavens with a curtain, or a tent. A tent, as it is usually pictured, is composed of some structure that is easily set up and dismantled: hides, linen, silk, canvas. The material is spread outward above and then down on all sides until it touches the ground. A tent is not a spherical structure that surrounds a smaller spherical structure. No tent in existence has ever been that. It is, in most schematic form, a semisphere that comes down and touches the ground in a circle. And the ground underneath a tent is flat. That is true in every case. If you want to see the heavens and Earth, in cross section, as pictured in this verse, see Figure 2. Inside the tent of the heavens, upon the flat-Earth base, the grasshoppers that are humanity dwell. Such a concept is reasonable for people who had not been very far from home; who have not navigated the oceans; who have not observed the changing positions of the stars during travels far north or south, or the behaviour of ships as they approach the horizon; who have been too terrified of eclipses to observe closely and dispassionately the shadow of the Earth upon the Moon. However, we have learned a lot about the Earth and the Universe in the last twenty-five centuries, and we know very well that the picture of the Universe as a tent curtain draped over a flat disc does not match reality. Even Fundamentalists know that much, and the only way they can avoid coming to the conclusion that the Bible is in error is to deny plain English. And that shows how hard it is to set limits to human folly. If we accept a semispherical sky resting on a flat-disc Earth, we have to wonder what it rests upon. The Greek philosophers, culminating in Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), who were the first to accept a spherical Earth, were also the first who did not have to worry about the problem. They realized that gravity was a force pointing to the centre of the spherical Earth, so they could imagine the Earth to be suspended in the centre of the larger sphere of the Universe as a whole. To those who came before Aristotle, or who had never heard of Aristotle, or who dismissed Aristotle, ‘down’ was a cosmic direction independent of Earth. As a matter of fact, this is so tempting a view that, in every generation, youngsters have to be cajoled out of it. Where is the youngster in school who, on first encountering the notion of a spherical Earth, doesn’t wonder why the people on the other side, walking around, as they do, upside down, don’t simply fall off? And if you deal with a flat Earth, as the biblical writers did, you have to deal with the question of what keeps the whole shebang from falling. The inevitable conclusion for those who are not ready to consider the whole thing divinely miraculous is to assume the Earth must rest on something - on pillars, for instance. After all, doesn’t the roof of a temple rest on pillars? But then, you must ask what the pillars rest on. The Hindus had the pillars resting on giant elephants, who in turn stood upon a supergiant turtle, which in turn swam across the surface of an infinite sea. In the end, we’re stuck with either the divine or the infinite. Carl Sagan tells of a woman who had a solution simpler than that of the Hindus. She believed the flat Earth rested on the back of a turtle. She was questioned . . . ‘And what does the turtle rest on?’ ‘On another turtle,’ said the woman, haughtily. ‘And what does that other turtle - ’ The woman interrupted, ‘I know what you’re getting at, sir, but it’s no use. It’s turtles all the way down.' But does the Bible take up the matter of what the Earth rests on? - Yes, but only very casually. The trouble is, you see, that the Bible doesn’t bother going into detail in matters that everyone may be assumed to know. The Bible, for instance, doesn’t come out and describe Adam when he was first formed. It doesn’t say specifically that Adam was created with two legs, two arms, a head, no tail, two eyes, two ears, one mouth, and so on. It takes all this for granted. In the same way, it doesn’t bother saying right out ‘And the Earth is flat’ because the biblical writers never heard anyone saying anything else. However, you can see the flatness in their calm descriptions of Earth as a circle and of the sky as a tent. In the same way, without saying specifically that the flat Earth rested on something, when everyone knew it did, that something is referred to in a very casual way. For instance, in the thirty-eighth chapter of Job, God is answering Job’s compaints of the injustice and evil of the world, not by explaining what it’s all about, but by pointing out human ignorance and therefore denying human beings even the right to question (a cavalier and autocratic evasion of Job’s point, but never mind). He says: ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the ! earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof.’(lob 38:4-6). What are these ‘foundations’? It’s hard to say because the Bible doesn’t describe them specifically. We might say that the ‘foundations’ refer to the lower layers of the Earth, to the mantle and the liquid iron core. However, the biblical writers never heard of such things, any more than they ever heard of bacteria - so that they had to use objects as large as grasshoppers to represent insignificance. The Bible never refers to the regions under the Earth’s surface as composed of rock and metal, as we shall see. We could say that the Bible was written in a kind of double-talk; in verses that meant one thing to the unsophisticated contemporaries of the biblical writers, but that meant something else to the more knowledgeable readers of the twentieth century, and that will turn out to mean something else still to the still more knowledgeable readers of the thirty-fifth century. If we say that, however, then the entire Fundamentalist thesis falls to the ground, for everything the Bible says can then be interpreted to be adjusted to a fifteen-billion- year old Universe and the course of biological evolution, and this the Fundamentalists would flatly reject. Hence, to argue the Fundamentalist case, we must assume the King James Bible to be written in English, so that the ‘foundations’ of the Earth are the objects on which the flat Earth rests. Elsewhere in the Book of Job, Job says, in describing the power of God: ‘The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at his reproof.’ (Job 26:11). Figure 3 It would seem these pillars are the ‘foundations’ of the Earth. Perhaps they are placed under the rim of the Earth where the sky comes down to meet it, as in Figure 3. These structures are then both the pillars of heaven and the foundations of the Earth. What do the pillars in turn rest on? Elephants? Turtles? Or is it pillars ‘all the way down’? Or do they rest on the backs of angels who eternally fly through space? The Bible doesn’t say. And what is the sky that covers the flat Earth like a tent? In the Bible’s creation tale, the Earth begins as a formless waste of water. On the first day, God created light and somehow, without the presence of the Sun, caused it to be intermittent, so that there existed the succession of day and night. Then, on the second day, he placed the tent over the formless waste of waters: ‘And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ (Gensis 1:6). The first syllable of the word ‘firmament’ is ‘firm’ and that is what the biblical writers had in mind. The word is a translation of the Greek stereoma, which means ‘a hard object’ and which is, in turn, a translation of the Hebrew rakia, meaning ‘a thin metal plate.’ The sky, in other words, is very much like the semi- spherical metal lid placed over the flat serving dish in our fancier restaurants. The Sun, Moon, and stars are described as having been created on the fourth day. The stars were viewed as sparks of light pasted on the firmament, while the Sun and Moon are circles of light that move from east to west across the firmament, or perhaps just below it. This view is to be found most specifically in Revelation, which was written about A.D. 100 and which contains a series of apocalyptic visions of the end of the Universe. At one point it refers to a ‘great earthquake’ as a result of which: ‘. . . the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together . . .’ (Revelation 6:13-14). In other words, the stars (those little dots of light) were shaken off the thin metal structure of the sky by the earthquake, and the thin metal sky itself rolled up like the scroll of a book. The firmament is said ‘to divide the waters from the waters.’ Apparently there is water upon the flat base of the world structure, the Earth itself, and there is also a supply of water above the firmament. Presumably, it is this upper supply that is responsible for the rain. (How else account for water falling from the sky?) Apparently, there are openings of some sort that permit the rain to pass through and fall, and when a particularly heavy rain is desired, the openings are made wider. Thus, in the case of the Flood: . . the windows of heaven were opened.’ (Genesis 7:11). By New Testament times, Jewish scholars had heard of the Greek multiplicity of spheres about the Earth, one for each of the seven planets and then an outermost one for the stars. They began to feel that a single firmament might not be enough. Thus, St Paul, in the first century A.D., assumes a plurality of heavensl He says, for instance: ‘I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago . . . such an one caught up to the third heaven.’ (2 Corinthians 12:2). What lies under the flat disc of the Earth? Certainly not a mantle and a liquid iron core of the type geologists speak of today; at least not according to the Bible. Under the flat Earth, there is, instead, the abode of the dead. The first mention of this is in connection with Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who rebelled against the leadership of Moses in the time of the wandering in the wilderness: ‘And it came to pass . . . that the ground clave assunder that was under them: and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished . . .’ (Numbers 16:31-3). The pit, or ‘Sheol,’ was viewed in Old Testament times rather like the Greek Hades, as a place of dimness, weakness, and forgetfulness. In later times, however, perhaps under the influence of the tales of ingenious torments in Tartarus, where the Greeks imagined the shades of archsinners to be confined, Sheol became hell. Thus, in the famous parable of the rich man and Lazarus, we see the division between sinners who descend into torment and good people who rise into bliss: ‘And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried: And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.’ (Luke 16:22-4). The Bible doesn’t describe the shape of the pit, but it would be interesting if it occupied the other semisphere of the sky,, as in Figure 4. It may be that the whole spherical structure floats on the infinite waste of waters out of which heaven and earth were created, and which represents primaeval chaos, as indicated in Figure 4. In that case, perhaps we don’t need the pillars of heaven. Thus, contributing to the waters of the Flood, were not only the windows of heaven opened wide but, at that time also: \ . . were all the fountains of the great deep broken up . . .’ (Genesis 7:11). In other words, the waters of chaos welled upward and nearly overwhelmed all of creation. Naturally, if the picture of the Universe is indeed according to the literal words of the Bible, there is no chance of a heliocentric system. The Earth cannot be viewed as moving at all (unless it is viewed as floating aimlessly on the ‘great deep’) and certainly it cannot be viewed as revolving about the Sun, which is a small circle GREAT DEEP (chaos) of light upon the solid firmament enclosing Earth’s flat disc. Let me emphasize, however, that I do not take this picture seriously. I do not feel compelled by the Bible to accept this view of the structure of Earth and sky. Almost all the references to the structure of the Universe in the Bible are in poetic passages of Job, of Psalms, of Isaiah, of Revelation, and so on. It may all be viewed as poetic imagery, as metaphor, as allegory. And the creation tales at the beginning of Genesis must also be looked upon as imagery, metaphor, and allegory. If this is so, then there is nothing that compels us to see the Bible as in the least contradictory to modern science. There are many sincerely religious Jews and Christians who view the Bible in exactly this light, who consider the Bible to be a guide to theology and morality, to be a great work of poetry - but not to be a textbook of astronomy, geology, or biology. They have no trouble in accepting both the Bible and modern science, and giving each its place, so that they: . Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s.’ (Luke 20:25). It is the Fundamentalists, the Literalists, the Creationists with whom I quarrel. If the Fundamentalists insist on foisting upon us a literal reading of the Genesis creation tales; if they try to force us to accept an Earth and Universe only a few thousand years old, and to deny us evolution, then I insist that they accept as literal every other passage in the Bible - and that means a flat Earth and a thin, metal sky. And if they don’t like that, what’s that to me? Chapter 17 The Armies of the Night I attended a New York gathering of Mensa last weekend, for I am International Vice-President, and it has become a tradition that I speak at the New York meetings. Mensa, as you may know, is an organization of high- IQ people and I have encountered many very bright and very lovable people there so that it is an absolute pleasure to attend the meetings. , However, I suspect that it is precisely as easy for a person with a high IQ to be foolish as it is for anyone else. Thus, a number of Mensans seem to be very impressed with astrology and other forms of occultism, and, on the evening on which I gave my talk, I was preceded by an astrologer who delivered some fifteen minutes of meaningless pap, to my considerable ennui. Moreover, that was not my only encounter with astrology that day. Mensans have the habit of challenging each other to all sorts of mental combat and I am a natural target for that, although 1 do my best to avoid it, and to do little more than fend off the rapiers when combat is unavoidable. Or, at least, I try. On this occasion, a young woman, quite attractive, approached me (knowing who I was, of course) and said, quite aggressively, ‘Where do you stand on astrology?’ She could scarcely have read much of my writing without knowing the answer to the question, so I gathered she wanted a fight. I didn’t, so I contented myself with a minimal statement of my position and said, ‘I am not impressed with it.’, She must have expected that, for she said at once, ‘Have you ever studied astrology?’ She felt safe in asking that, I suppose, for she undoubtedly knew that a hard-working science writer such as myself is constantly breaking his neck trying to keep up with legitimate science, and that I could scarcely devote much time to a painstaking investigation of each of the many fringe follies that infest the public. I was tempted to say I had, of course, for I knew enough astronomy to know that astrological assumptions are ridiculous, and I have read enough of the writings of scientists who have studied astrology to know that no credence need to be given any part of it. If, however, I had said I was a student of astrology, she would have asked if I had read some nonsensical book by jackass number one, and some idiotic tome by crackpot number two, and she would have nailed me as not only someone who hadn’t studied astrology, but who had lied about it. So I said, with an amiable smile, ‘No.’ She said, promptly, ‘If you studied it, you might find that you would be impressed with it.’ Still responding minimally, I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ That was what she wanted. Triumphantly, she said, ‘That means you are a narrow-minded bigot, afraid to shake your own prejudices by investigation.’ I should have simply shrugged, smiled, and walked away, but I found myself driven to a retort. I said, ‘Being human, miss, I suppose I do have a bit of bigotry about me, so I carefully expend it on astrology in order that 1 won’t be tempted to use it on anything with any shadow of intellectual decency about it.’ - And she stamped off angrily. l The problem, you see, was not that I had failed to | investigate astrology; it was that she had failed to investigate astronomy, so that she didn’t know how empty of content astrology was. It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense. They thus become part of the armies of the night, the purveyors of nitwittery, the retailers of intellectual junk food, the feeders on mental cardboard, for their ignorance keeps them from distinguishing nectar from sewage. In a way, though, my astrological adversary left prematurely. She had weapons left in her armoury that might easily have lured me into further argumentation of an entirely unprofitable sort. She might have pointed out that there were great early astronomers who believed in astrology. The great science fiction editor John Campbell once used that argument on me, for instance. Consider Johannes Kepler! He was an astronomer of the first rank and it was he who first worked out the proper design of the Solar System. - And yet he cast horoscopes. In those days, however, as in these, astrologers earned more money than astronomers did, and Kepler had to make a living. I doubt that he believed the horoscopes he concocted, and, even if he did, that means nothing. When Campbell used the argument on me, what I said in reply was: ‘Hipparchus of Nicaea and Tycho Brahe of Denmark, two of the greatest astronomers of all time, believed the Sun revolved about a stationary Earth. With all due respect to those two authentically great minds, I don't accept their authority on this point.’ The young lady might also have said that the Moon certainly affects us by way of the tides and yet for centuries most astronomers scouted that notion. One of their arguments was that every other high tide took place when the Moon wasn’t even in the sky. True enough. And had I lived in the time of Galileo, I might have ignored the influence of the Moon, too, as he did; and I would have been wrong, as he was. Still, the connection between the Moon and the tides was not an astrological tenet; the existence of that connection was proved by astronomers and not by astrologers; and once the connection was proved it did not lend one atom’s worth of credibility to astrology. The question is not whether the Moon affects the tides, but whether the Moon (or any other heavenly body) affects us in such a way as to persuade us that the minutiae of our behaviour ought to be guided by the changes in configuration of those heavenly bodies. We know, you and I, what astrology is. If you have any doubts, read any astrology column in any newspaper and you’ll find out. If you were born on a certain day, astrologers say, you should today be careful in your investments, or watch out for quarrels with loved ones, or have no fear of taking risks, and so on, and so on. Why? What is the connection? Have you ever heard an astrologer explain exactly why a particular birth date should influence your behaviour in some particular way? He might explain that when Neptune is in conjunction with Saturn, financial affairs (let us say) become unstable, but does he ever explain why that should be so? Or how he found out? Have you ever heard of two astrologers arguing seriously as to the effect of an unusual heavenly combination on individuals, with either advancing evidence for his own point of view? Have you ever heard of an astrologer making a new astrological finding or advancing astrological understanding in'this respect or that? Astrology consists of nothing but flat statements. The closest one comes to anything more than that is when someone maintains that the number of (let us say) athletes, born under the ascendency of Mars (or whatever), is higher than is to be expected of random distribution. Generally, even that sort of dubious ‘discovery’ fades on closer examination. Let’s take another example. Some years ago, a book came out entitled The Jupiter Effect. It advanced a complicated thesis involving tidal effects on the Sun. Such tidal effects do exist and Jupiter is the prime agent, though other planets (notably Earth itself) also contribute. Arguments were presented to support the view that these tidal effects influenced solar activity such as sunspots and flares. That, in turn, would influence the solar wind, which, in its turn, would influence the Earth and might, to a minor extent, affect the delicate balance of the Earth’s plate-tectonic changes. As it happened, the planets would be clustered more closely than usual in the sky in March 1982 and their combined tidal effects would be a bit more intense than usual. If the sunspot peak came in 1982, it would be higher than usual in consequence, perhaps, and the effect on Earth would be heightened. If, then, the San Andreas fault was on the point of slipping (as most seismologists believe it to be) the effect of the solar wind might supply just that last little straw and bring about an earthquake in 1982. The authors made no secret that the chain was a long and very shaky one. The publisher provided me with galleys and asked me for an introduction. I was intrigued by the thesis and wrote the introduction - which was a mistake. I had no idea how many people would read the book and, ignoring the caveats, take it very seriously indeed. I began to be bombarded by fearful letters asking me what would happen in March 1982. At first I’d send back postcards reading, ‘Nothing.’ Toward the end the message read, ‘Nothing!!!’ As it happened, the sunspot peak came well before 1982, and that spoiled everything. There was clearly no necessary connection between the planetary tidal activity and the sunspot cycle. One of the authors of the book promptly disowned the theory. (And even if he hadn’t, all he had claimed was that an earthquake that was going to take place anyway might just possibly happen a little sooner because of the planetary effects - in March, let us say, rather than in October.) By the time the author disowned the theory, however, it was too late. The Jupiter Effect had caught the attention of the armies of the night, and they became enamoured of the ‘planetary lineup.’ I gathered from the letters I got that they thought the planets would be lined up one behind the other, straight as a ruler. (Actually, they were spread out, even at their closest, across a quarter'of the sky.) They also thought this was an arcane development that happened only every million years or so. Actually such groupings take place about every century and a quarter. In fact, it wasn’t many years ago that there was an even closer lineup than the one in March 1982, but on that occasion some of the planets were on one side of the Sun and some on the other. From a tidal viewpoint it doesn’t matter whether planets are all on the same side of the Sun, or distributed on both sides, as long as all are in an approximate straight line, but to the lineup people, only the same side counted, apparently. Having them all on the same side made it seem that the Solar System would tip over, I suppose. What’s more, the planetary-lineup fans weren’t content to have an earthquake. The word was that California would slide into the sea. In fact, even the loss of California wasn’t enough for many. The word went out that the world would come to an end, and I presume many people woke up on the day of the lineup all set to meet whatever fate they were counting on when the great THE END appeared in the sky. I couldn’t help but wonder why they bothered to pin the lineup to a single day, by the way. The planets slowly moved across the sky on their separate paths and on one particular day the area within which all were to be found was at a minimum. The day before and the day after, however, the area was very little larger than that minimum, and two days before and two days after, very little larger than that. Whatever the material influence of the lineup, it could not have been very much greater at the moment of minimal area than at any time over a period of several days. I suspect, though, that the lineup addicts had the notion that the whole thing worked through some mystic influence that was exerted only when all the planets slipped behind each other to form an exact straight line (which never happened, of course). In any case, the day of the lineup came and went and nothing untoward took place. I knew better than to suspect that a single person would get up and say, ‘Gee, I was wrong.’ They’re all too busy waiting for the next piece of end-of-the-world chic. Halley’s Comet, perhaps. The illiterates don’t even bother to get the vocabulary right. A theory, when advanced by a competent scientist, is an elaborate and detailed attempt to account for a series of- otherwise disconnected and apparently unrelated observations. It is based on numerous observations, close reasoning, and, where appropriate, careful mathematical deduction. To be successful, a theory must be confirmed by other scientists through numerous additional observations and tests and, where this is possible, must offer predictions that can be tested and confirmed. The theory can be, and is, refined and improved as more and better observations are made. Here are a few examples of successful theories, and the dates upon which each was first advanced: The atomic theory - 1803 The theory of evolution - 1859 The quantum theory - 1900 The theory of relativity - 1905 Each one of these has been endlessly tested and checked since its first advancement and, with necessary improvements and refinements, has passed all challenges. No reputable scientist doubts that atoms, evolutionary development, quanta, or relativistic motion exist, though further improvements and refinements of details may prove necessary. What is a theory not? It is not ‘a guess.’ Many people who know nothing about science will dismiss the theory of evolution because it is ‘just a theory.’ No less a brain than Ronald Reagan, in the course of his 1980 campaign, when addressing a group of Fundamentalists, dismissed evolution as ‘just a theory.’ I once denounced one of these ‘just a theory’ fellows in print, stating that he clearly knew nothing about science. The result was that I received a letter from a fourteen- year-old who told me that theories were just ‘wild guesses’ and he knew this because that’s what his teachers told him. He then denounced the theory of evolution in unmeasured terms and told me proudly that he prayed in school because no law could prevent him from doing so. And he enclosed a stamped, self-addressed envelope because he wanted to hear from me on the matter. I felt it only fair to oblige. I dashed off a line asking him to consider seriously whether it might not be possible that his teachers were as ignorant of science as he was. I also suggested that in his next prayer he might implore God to grant him an education, so that he wouldn’t stay ignorant all his life. And that brings up a serious point. How can we keep people from being ignorant, when those who would teach them are so often appallingly ignorant themselves? Clearly there are flaws in the American educational system, and American schools are particularly weak in science for a number of reasons. One of the reasons, I suppose, is that good old pioneer tradition that has always held ‘book learning’ in deep suspicion, and felt that good old ‘horse sense’ was all that was really necessary. That the United States has got by and reached world leadership in science and technology has been thanks, in part, to its ingenious tinkerers - the Thomas Edisons and Henry Fords - and, in part, because of the influx of many who had already received European educations or who had absorbed a European respect for learning and saw to it that their children were properly educated. Adolph Hitler was responsible for literally dozens of top-flight scientists flooding into the United States in the 1930s, and the beneficial effects of their presence and of the pupils they helped develop are still with us and have helped to cushion the inadequacies of American education practices. This can’t continue forever. As our technology grows more complex, it becomes less and less likely that we can depend upon the independent tinkerer. And Hitler’s mistake is not likely to be repeated. The Soviets, for instance, go to great efforts not to allow anyone out of their country who might be of use to those they conceive to be their enemies. Yet over and above the general inadequacies, it would seem that the American school system has deteriorated enormously in the last twenty years. There are horror tales, constantly, of people getting into college without being able to write a coherent sentence. - And it is quite clear to anyone willing to look at the American scene with eyes open that we are rapidly losing our scientific, technological, and industrial leadership. Why is that? - Here is what I think. About twenty years ago, the Supreme Court decided that the American Constitution did not allow schools to be segregated on the basis of race, and the courts directed that children be transported out of their neighbourhoods to even out black / white ratios. There followed, as we all know, a white flight to suburbs and to private schools, with the result that public schools in most of our large cities are now heavily and increasingly black. With that, there came a rapid loss of interest in supporting public schools on the part of the white middle class, which supplied most of the financing, and most of the teachers, too. You must realize that it takes money to teach science well. You need rather elaborate textbooks, elaborately educated teachers, and elaborately equipped laboratories. As the money available decreases, science education suffers disproportionately. Nor does the outlook for the future look anything but bleak. The Reagan administration is steadily cutting support for the public school system and is proposing tuition credits for private schools. Well, then, you might argue, won’t the private schools teach science? Will they? The public school system is government-financed. The individual taxpayer cannot easily influence just what his taxes will be spent on, and the school administration, if it has any professional competence, will insist on a well- rounded education. Teachers, as civil servants, are difficult to fire for the crime of thinking, and the Constitution serves to prevent the more egregious abuses against freedom. (This was in the old days, before the public school system was virtually dismantled.) Private schools, on the other hand, are financed by parents’ tuition, and most parents, fleeing a public school system they don’t like for whatever reason, cannot easily afford the tuition they must pay on top of their school taxes. Naturally, they don’t want to add to the expenses needlessly. Since an elaborate science education means an additional hike to the tuition, parents are liable to see the virtues of fundamentals, the old, traditional ‘readin’, ritin’, and ’rifmetik.’ That’s a fourth-grade education, as it happens, but allowing a few frills such as the pledge of allegiance and school prayers, that ought to be enough. The private schools have to be responsive to the parents and their pocketbooks, so we can look to them for a safe education, something that will qualify people for the job of junior executive and develop their ability to handle three martinis at lunch. - But a good education? I wonder. I do not, however, want to divide the world into good guys and bad guys in a simplistic sort of way. Many a nonscientist is intelligent and rational. And, on the other hand, there are scientists, even great ones, who have turned off into the bogs and morasses, both in the past and the present. It’s not really surprising that this is so.' The scientific method is an austere and Spartan exercise for the brain. It represents a slow advance at best, gives rise to the Eureka phenomenon both rarely and only for the few - and even for those few, not often. Why shouldn’t scientists be tempted to turn away, to find some other route to truth? I was once a subscriber to a science magazine for high school students, and there came a time when I grew uneasy about it. It seemed to me that the editor was allowing himself to display marked sympathy for Veli- kovskianism and astrology. Once, when a number of astronomers signed a statement denouncing astrology, the magazine objected, and wondered if the astronomers had really investigated astrology. I was moved to write a strong denunciation of that silly remark. The editor responded with a long letter, in which he tried to explain that reason and the scientiic method were not necessarily the only routes to truth and that I should be more tolerant of competing methods. That irritated me. I sent him a rather brief letter that went (as nearly as I can. remember) something like this: ‘1 have your letter in which you explain that reason is not the only route to truth. Your explanation, however, consists entirely of an attempt at reasoning the point. Don’t tell me; show me! Convince me by dreaming at me, or intuiting. Or else write me a symphony, paint me a painting, or meditate me a meditation. Do something - anything - that will place me on your side and that isn’t a matter of reasoning!’ I never heard from him again. Here’s something else. Some months back. Science Digest was planning to publish an article about various present-day top-rank scientists, including Nobel laureates who have developed odd and mystical notions about the human mind, who are trying to penetrate the secrets of nature by meditation, who are strongly influenced by oriental philosophies, and so on. Science Digest sent me the manuscript and asked for my comments. 1 wrote a letter in response, which was included in a box (under the heading of ‘Science Follies’) and which accompanied the article that was published in the July 1982 issue of the magazine. Here is the letter, word for word: ‘Throughout history, many great scientists have worked on some farfetched ideas. Johannes Kepler was a professional astrologer. Isaac Newton tried to change baser metals into silver and gold. And John Napier, who invented logarithms, devised a monumentally foolish interpretation of the Book of Revelation. ‘This list goes on. William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus, thought the sun was dark, cool, and habitable under its flaming atmosphere. The American astronomer Percival Lowell insisted he saw canals on Mars. Robert Hare, a very practical American chemist, invented a device by which he could communicate with the dead. William Weber, a German physicist, and Alfred Wallace, co-deviser of the modern theory of evolution, were ardent spiritualists. And the English physicist Sir Oliver Lodge was a dedicated supporter of psychic research. ‘Knowing this track record, I would be enormously astonished if, in the year 1982, there were suddenly no great scientists who fell in love with speculative notions that seem, to lesser minds such as mine, to be irrational. ‘Unfortunately, most of these speculative theories cannot be tested in any reasonable way, cannot be used to make predictions, and are not presented with compelling arguments that could convince other scientists. In fact, among all these devoted imagineers, no two entirely agree. They doubt one another’s rationality. ‘It may be, of course, that out of all this apparent nonsense, some nuggets of useful genius will tumble out. That such things have happened before is enough to justify it all. Nevertheless, I suspect that these nuggets will be few and far between. Most of the speculations that seem to be nonsense - even when great scientists are the source - will, in the end, turn out to be nonsense.’ So there you are. I stand four-square for reason, and object to what seems to me to be irrationality, whatever the source. If you are on my side in this, I must warn you that the army of the night has the advantage of overwhelming numbers, and, by its very nature, is immune to reason, so that it is entirely unlikely that you and I can win out. We will always remain a tiny and probably hopeless minority, but let us never tire of presenting our view, and of fighting the good fight for the right. 1 Actually, every particle has its wave aspects, and every wave has its particle aspects, and, as in the case of so many dualities in nature, you can’t have one without the other. This was not understood in 1897, however. 2 He had received a share of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1927 for work he did on X rays. 3 More radical views are possible, as in Life Beyond Earth by Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro (Morrow, 1980), which I heartily recommend to all of you. 4 said, earlier, that silicon atoms are, in nature, most frequently found in combination with oxygen atoms. The oxygen atom is readily able to accept two electrons from another atom, combining each electron it accepts with one of its own. Two electron pairs are formed between the two atoms and this is called a ‘double bond,’ which we can represent in the following fashion: ‘Si=0.’ The silicon atom has four outer electrons, however, and it is 5 Short V please. I hear entirely too many people giving it a long ‘a' as though it were ‘Haley’ - an insupportable barbarism. 6 There is some variation in the interval of return because the influence of planetary attractions on passing comets can slow or speed their motions and thus somewhat change their orbits. There are occasions when a close approach of a comet to a planet - particularly Jupiter - can radically change the cometary orbit. 7 467 B.C. Persians and Greeks have been fighting for a generation and Comet Halley now gleams in the sky to mark the end. In 466, the Athenian Navy defeats the Persians in a great battle off the coast of Asia Minor and the long war is over. Comet Halley also marks a beginning, for in that same year, the democratic party wins control of Athens, and that city begins its Golden Age - 8 295. The period of anarchy came to an end in 284 with the coming to power of Diocletian, the first strong emperor to have a fairly long and stable reign since Septimius Severus. Diocletian set about reorganizing the Imperial Government, and made it into an oriental monarchy. The vestigial remnants of old Rome disappeared and in 295 Comet Halley was presiding over the coming of a revised empire in which, from now on, the eastern half would be dominant. It was almost like a return to Hellenistic times. 9 Those of you with nasty, suspicious minds will, I'm sure, check my calculations and catch me in arithmetical or conceptual errors. 10 The Latin plural is novae, but steadily lessening interest in Latinic minutiae has led to ‘novas’ as the usual plural. - We also say ‘formulas instead of ‘formulae,’ and any day I expect to hear people speaking of ‘two memorandums.’