Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (19 page)

Herndon’s analysis is not just academic: If Galileo was sufficiently cagey and diplomatic to espouse his views without (except for a little house arrest) undue fuss and ultimate acceptance, Herndon has not (so far) been so “lucky”: Herndon’s carefully articulated, evidence-based revision of the commonly accepted view of the geophysical history of our planet and its inner composition has until now been ignored or rejected by his professorial peers. Although quite complex in detail—his work dovetails astronomy, geochemistry, geophysics, and nuclear physics—Herndon’s basic idea is both radical and simple.

He believes that Earth began its existence in roughly its present distance from the Sun but as a gas giant the size of Jupiter. The T Tauri solar wind, associated with the Sun’s thermonuclear ignition, early on blew off Earth’s atmosphere. This left a rocky kernel still compressed from the weight of about 300-Earth masses of primordial gases. Earth then began to decompress, driven primarily by energy stored from that great compression, energy that eventually split the surface into continents and wrinkled the crust to form mountain ranges. Herndon dubs this process, which corrects and extends plate tectonics, whole-Earth decompression dynamics (WEDD).

Herndon’s picture of our Earth and its origin is a radical departure from the one that has been promulgated since the late 1930s. In 1936 the Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann, tracking changes in the angle of propagation of earthquake shock waves, discovered that Earth’s core was separated into an outer liquid and an inner solid region. In 1976 Herndon published a paper, communicated by his teacher, the Nobel Laureate Harold C. Urey, a world expert in the cosmic composition and distribution of chemical elements who was an adviser in Stanley Miller’s famous origins-of-life experiments, in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.
After publication Lehmann sent a complimentary letter to Herndon. She was impressed by the logical development of his decompression idea, supported by meteoritic evidence unknown at the time that the standard geochemical model of Earth’s origin and composition became accepted.

In the decades since he received the letter from Lehmann, never known to suffer fools gladly, Herndon has been hard at work investigating and developing his views. Inside Earth, he argues, the molten iron core is not simply cooling and solidifying as taught in textbooks, but its components and energy production derive in part from radioactive elements incorporated during its origin. The inner core, Herndon argues, is nickel silicide, and at its center is a “georeactor”—a powerful subcore of naturally fissioning uranium surrounded by a subshell of nuclear waste. It is this georeactor, and not the crystallization of iron leading to convection, that produces our planet’s geomagnetic field as well as much of the heat affecting our planet’s surface. With a mass only one ten-millionth that of the fluid core, the georeactor is capable of quickly switching the polarity of Earth’s magnetic field. Indeed, it is capable of doing it far more quickly than if we assume, as standard geochemistry does, that geomagnetic field production takes place in Earth’s massive fluid core.
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Herndon’s analysis that Earth’s interior has a solid inner core that is not iron nickel metal but nickel silicide, a nickel-silicon alloy, matches, unlike the standard geophysics model, the aggregate accepted density for our planet. Moreover, such a composition is strongly supported by so-called enstatite chondrites, meteorites mostly ignored after the standard model of Earth’s composition and core became stratified, as it were, into geophysical thinking. Enstatite chondrites are distinct from the more common (“ordinary chondrites”) kind formed under more oxidized conditions on which the standard model of Earth’s origin and composition are based. They are more chemically reduced, closer to what we might expect of fragments left over from the relatively hydrogen-rich early solar system. Less available oxygen at Earth’s formation meant that certain “oxygen-loving” elements unexpectedly occurred in the core; calcium and magnesium would have combined with sulfur and floated upward to form the thin layers detected between the core and mantle; and uranium, most likely combined with sulfur, would have sunk to the center. In Herndon’s view silicon combined with nickel and sank to form an inner core of nickel silicide (not iron) and uranium concentrated at the center of Earth functioning as a nuclear reactor, while its churning layer of nuclear waste produced and continues to produce our planet’s geomagnetic field.
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Today Herndon adduces multiple lines of evidence to support his claims, including similarity of Earth-parts with corresponding parts of oxygen-starved enstatite–chondrite meteorites and similar thermodynamic condensation considerations; similarity of calculated georeactor-produced helium with helium observed coming from deep within Earth; historic geomagnetic field reversals on a time scale of weeks to years; simultaneous historical pulses of lava production on opposite sides of Earth in Iceland and Hawai‘i; and, more recently, deep-Earth geoneutrino measurements.
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Herndon’s comprehensive whole-Earth view extends beyond core composition to nearly all current geophysical processes. And it is buttressed by new discoveries from the international space program, which has detected Jupiter-sized exoplanets at distances from their stars similar to that of our Earth from the Sun.

Is it true? Did our little rock begin with something like planetary delusions of grandeur? If so, what should we call it, this lifeless monster, this fat paleo-planet whose gases bore down and compressed the rocky inner part of Earth to some 64 percent of its present diameter, before T Tauri eruptions swept those gases away, not only from our planet but from Mercury, Venus, and Mars as well, and set the stage for little neo-Earth as we now know her?

Perhaps we should call it Jaea, this big old globe that none of us had expected, naming this mother after a combination of Jupiter and Gaea, the massive planet and the old Greek word for Earth. Or Jupaea maybe, or Juvea (which has a nice connotation of youth in addition to merging Jove and Gaea), or Megaea, or more simply Mega or Colosso, this proposed super-Earth (but this last term has already been reserved for extrasolar planets slightly bigger than Earth but with masses far below gas giants).

And it is not trivial, this matter of the name in the reception of an idea. Bumper stickers say “Reunite Gondwanaland,” but the supposed supercontinent floating alone in the world ocean never existed if Herndon’s ideas (which fascinated my mother, of course, who encouraged Herndon to better explain them) hold true.

I think I like Jovea.

TO UNDERSTAND WHY, despite more than thirty-five peer-reviewed professional publications, Herndon continues to suffer rejection without valid criticism for which he would be grateful, Herndon delved into the history and philosophy of science. Although he was not a sociologist, anthropologist, or philosopher, he strove to understand why his colleagues refused to grant a fair hearing to what he considered his well-documented alternative and compelling concept of Earth’s formation.

Herndon blames, in part, the peer review system, instituted in 1951 at the end of World War II by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It removes personal accountability. In a shroud of anonymity, many reviewers nix projects that threaten work in a “thought-style” that differs from theirs. Does not admission of any error in a large shared theory ultimately threaten current authorities and, crucially, therefore menace funding?

“Prior to World War II,” writes Herndon, “there was little government financial support for science. Nevertheless, the 20th century opened and seemed to offer the promise of an unparalleled age of enlightenment and reason. Fertile imaginations put forth ideas that challenged prevailing views. New understanding began to emerge, sometimes precise, sometimes flawed, but tending toward truth they inspired more new ideas, continued debate and further imaginative creativity. Enthusiasm and excitement ensued in the general public and kindled the imaginations of the young. Although money for science at the time was in short supply, scientists maintained certain self-discipline. A graduate student who worked on his Ph.D. dissertation was expected to make a new discovery to earn that degree, even if it meant beginning again because another made the discovery first. Self-discipline was also in the scientific publication system. A new, unpublished scientist obtained criticism and endorsement of published scientists before submission of manuscripts. The repressive popularity-contest system of ‘peer review’ had not yet been born.”
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The facelessness, pseudonymity, and anonymity of the Internet are similar to peer review. Science thrives under a regime of openness, fair and accountable judgment, not corporate patents, self-interested censorship, and informational control.

How do we safeguard the scientific spirit that has been so prodigious in our understanding of ourselves and our material environment? That mode of inquiry, that mix of close observation, childlike curiosity, and critical thinking that has enriched our inner lives and asymptotically approached the elusive philosophical ur-goal of self-knowledge? Not only is this unique modern heritage, arguably culturally blind at its core but ethnically inflected—this scientific spirit that is a universal birthright of all human beings and which is ultimately bigger than humanity—not only is it fighting for its life, pushed and pulled, captured and abused, its knowledges horded and copyrighted and patented against its antisecrecy divulgatory essence; not only has it become the plaything of corporations and publicity stunts and media and manipulators and lawyers with no intrinsic allegiance to the truth over and above their clients’ cases and the accumulation of an all-too-human wealth; but by turns well-meaning, playful, and fashionable impulses within academia have also played into the hands of those who would willfully obstruct the search for open and universal knowledge. Without impugning their contributions, it is clear that the movements variously and collectively known as post-structuralism, deconstruction, and Continental philosophy have put scientific truth, to use one of their own terms, “under erasure.” Jacques Derrida’s able and in many ways useful critique of a “transcendental signified” is part of a climate where radically distinct perspectives are granted a sort of politically correct intellectual equality. While in some cases this may be a valued corrective to ideology posing as truth, it also provides a license for machinators and the benighted to claim ill-gotten gains. Add to this the difficulty of distinguishing between specialized discourse, the technical jargon of scientific specialties, and linguistic protectorates with in-crowd shibboleths, and we plunge into a dizzying abyss of unwatched watchers and incomprehensible experts.

The tension between the scientific attitude and the scientific reality is manifest in science’s status as a collective enterprise dependent for the most part on public funds. Corporate and state backing of the search for knowledge is problematic in part because collective human organizations, according to evolutionary logic itself, are in the business of self-perpetuation. Assuming even a multivalent, situated definition of truth, for example, a truth of relativity if not an absolute or absolutely relative truth, there is still no reason various levels of obfuscation and deceit can not only prevail but be incorporated into structures of group perception and survival. Epistemologically, truncation, editing, and abstraction are necessary at even the most basic levels of perception. While the metaphor depends on contemporary technology, consciousness itself can be parsed as an “operating system” that hides the working innards of neurochemistry equivalent to wiring or hardware of a meat machine. The brain as interface, altered by electrochemistry, in this view would not command an absolute truth but a workable one. Here we encroach on the epistemological compromises elucidated by pragmatists in philosophy, to wit, that workability makes its own truth. If we cling to a classical definition of truth as an abstract ideal—certain, universal, necessary, and true in its mathematical ideal—we run afoul of the evolutionary process, which does not necessarily move in the same direction. This is especially true when one considers the holarchical or nested nature of groups consisting of perceiving individuals who or which may themselves be dispensable in terms of a collective survival enterprise. This is the aporia of evolutionary epistemology: that knowledge of truth in no way ensures survival. In fact, it can be directly inimical to it. Such is the background behind the legend of achieving complete knowledge only upon death, of stories where final secrets are revealed taking those to whom they are whispered with them. It is perhaps ironic that the emphasis on selfish genes in neo-Darwinism, and the virulence reserved for the supposedly mathematically untenable theory of group selection, are maintained by coteries of group-acting beings, that is, by old boy networks of the academic kind, intellectual cabals of browbeaters quick on the rhetorical draw and not above using straw men, ad hominem arguments, and other tricks of emotional persuasion in contradistinction to rational analysis.

Protecting the spirit of science and safeguarding its path are not trivial in our tribal species in the current politico-corporate and academic environments. The scientific attitude comes out of a deeper philosophical stance of curiosity and critical thinking, a stance that must face down dogma even at the risk of social disapprobation. In a media age, in a public relations state where science can and has been corrupted by corporate bottom lines and government-sponsored agendas, the philosophical heart of science—thinking things through for yourself and seeking the truth whether or not we like what we find—is increasingly in peril.

Groupthink intrinsic to tribal survival in combination with the displacement of the knowledge priesthood from the clergy to (courtesy of Bruno and company) lay and scientific authorities can make for a volatile—and distinctly scientistic, that is, antiscientific—mix. In the binary oppositions of the dichotomizing, such authority may seem to be the opposite of pseudoscience, but in fact it is equally the opposite of science, all the more dangerous for the institutional power of authority it wields.