DISCOURSE NO. 8



Copyright © Harold Aspden, 2001

WORLD IN PERIL: IMPENDING DOOM


The U.K. newspaper, THE TIMES, has today, August 29, 2001, alerted readers to the prospect of impending doom.

The report occupied most of page 7 of this broad sheet publication. Its first words declared:
"Britain is facing devastation from the largest wave in recorded history if a predicted catastrophic volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands occurs, according to scientific study."
One goes on to read:
"The scale of destruction, however, will be nothing compared with that in the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil. Here, a series of waves measuring up to 165 ft will pound into densely populated regions, virtually wiping out cities such as New York and Miami and inundating an area up to six miles inland. The natural disaster is predicted to be amongst the worst in history, with the total cost running to many trillions of pounds."
"A new prediction of the likely effects, by Simon Day of the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at University College London, suggests that this would create a giant tsunami, much larger than those begun by earthquakes, that would sweep the Atlantic with huge destructive power. Details of his research, conducted with Steven Ward of the University of California, are published next month in the journal Geophysical Review Letters".
"Within five minutes of the landslide, a dome of water about a mile high would form and then collapse, before the mega-tsunami fans out in every direction, travelling at speeds of up to 500 mph. A 330 ft. wave would strike the western Sahara in less than an hour."

Well, now, after reading all this along with the extensive accompanying text, even taking note of the attempt to reassure and avoid arousing panic, by the last paragraph which says: "It is unlikely to happen in the next century", I see the need to bring this series of OVERVIEW discourses to an end. I will, therefore, in this concluding Discourse No. 8, add a further prophecy of doom by pointing to a phenomenon connected with the aether itself, one that is rooted also in the geological history of past catastrophic events.

The theory of the aether which I have presented in these web pages and which I urge should be studied by energy-minded physicists, along with geophysicists concerned with hazards on the grand scale, involves what I have called 'space domains'. These are vast regions of space bounded by planar boundaries which separate what one might term regions of space and regions of anti-space. In physical terminology, the electrical polarities of whatever constitutes the aether and accounts for the Maxwell-type electrical displacement that accompanies electromagnetic wave propagation, are interchanged as between two sides of a domain boundary, meaning that positive charge becomes negative charge and vice versa. If mankind, along with body Earth, moves through space at our cosmic speed of several hundred km/s, then, once in a while these domain boundaries will need to be crossed, as the Earth takes of the order of a minute or so, depending upon the angle of approach, to traverse a boundary.

What, then, will happen? Well, I believe there will be a reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, hardly a traumatic event. But you may say that I am merely speculating about the existence of an aether of this domain-structured form and so doubt whether this warrants further interest. However, if you, the reader, are a geologist then perhaps you will be aware that reversals of the geomagnetic field feature as part of the history of record in rock formations at different strata levels. Along with that data there is evidence of upheaval and destruction, with occasional elimination of species of plant and life forms, seemingly coinciding with the geomagnetic reversals. One wonders if the Earth, in its long period galactic orbit, sometimes traverses a space domain boundary at such an acute angle that it takes several minutes to make the crossing. Consider then the consequences, given that the aether-based theory of gravitation that we discuss in these web pages, tells us that the force of gravity has a range confined to interaction between matter sharing the same space domain. You will then see that that geomagnetic reversal is accompanied by gravity between earthly matter switching-off, as it were, for a quite short period. Imagine the earthquakes and immense dust clouds that then result as the Earth's surface lifts up owing to the consequential loss-of-gravity expansion effects and centrifugal forces produced by Earth rotation.

The combination of earthquakes and tidal waves will be of indescribable magnitude and no part of the Earth will remain unaffected. One can only pray that the Earth's path will happen to be square-on (i.e. at right-angles) with respect to the planar form of the domain boundary, so that the transit period is not prolonged, as it will be if the crossing occurs at a low angle of incidence.

This, I fear, is the sad side of understanding the physics of the aether. It is as if Nature imposes a price for the intellectual enlightenment as to what constitutes the medium we call 'space'.

That insight into the future is something the hazard-risk-evaluating geophysicist needs to consider along with the prospect of volcanic disturbance. Exploring the doomsday scenario from this viewpoint has, incidentally, a spin-off benefit in the interim in that it could redeem the physicist's lost belief in the existence of a real aether. It opens the door on explaining gravity in terms of aether theory along with discovering how the aether with its domain structure built around a kind of fluid-crystal underworld can determine the most basic dimensionless constants of physics. That door, once open, will surely serve us well for some time yet by leading us to a new energy resource, the aether itself, given that its energy is used by Mother Nature to create all matter.

In ending, I suggest the reader, might like to know a little more about those geomagnetic field reversals and so I invite inspection of pages 168-174 of Chapter 8 of my book Physics Unified.

This ends this OVERVIEW section of these web pages. I have tried to present these eight DISCOURSES in an easily readable form, avoiding any specialized knowledge or mathematics and hope the reader has found them interesting.


H. Aspden
August 29, 2001