The 'solar system'

Dr. Neville Thomas Jones, Ph.D.

In commencing a discussion on the universe, it is probably wise to start close to home; namely, with the Sun.

The presently-accepted, nuclear-fusion-based solar theory, which assumes that the Sun is of the order of five milliard years old, predicts that a sizeable flux of neutrinos ought to be emanating from the Sun. That was why many neutrino detectors were built around the World, at huge public expense, at the bottom of disused mine shafts and so on.

Is the neutrino flux commensurate with what was predicted? Absolutely nothing close to it. There were so few neutrinos coming from the Sun that detector designs were being seriously questioned. Then came Supernova 1987A and all the detectors (including those on the other side of the World, because these sub-atomic particles are rarely stopped by matter) suddenly began registering hundreds of neutrinos per hour.

Before 1987A, there were thus three possibilities (and, of course, any combination of them) :

1. The detectors were faulty in some way;
2. The theory was wrong;
3. The Sun was nowhere near 5,000,000,000 years old.

Only number 1 was considered.

After 1987A, there are again three possibilities:

1. The theory is wrong;
2. The Sun is nowhere near 5,000,000,000 years old;
3. Solar neutrinos are somehow 'transmuted' such that they are not detectable.

Logical conclusions are rejected out-of-hand because they do not fit the overall paradigm. Such an approach is unscientific, but it is in harmony with the Western belief system.

Supernova 1987A demonstrated that the detectors were not faulty, nor of poor design or build quality. Hence, either the theory was wrong, or the Sun was much younger than claimed, or both. The paradigm-driven solution was to "amend" the theory, rather than to throw it out and rethink the problem.

Making the Sun the physical centre of the universe runs contrary to both our senses and our astronomical observations. For example, consider the following quote from Y.P. Varshni's 1976 paper, "The red shift hypothesis for quasars: Is the Earth the center of the Universe?", Astrophysics and Space Science, 43(1), 3-8: "[If quasar redshift is due to velocity, then] the Earth is indeed the centre of the Universe. The arrangement of quasars on certain spherical shells is only with respect to the Earth. These shells would disappear if viewed from another galaxy or a quasar. This means that the cosmological principle will have to go. Also, it implies that a coordinate system fixed to the Earth will be a preferred frame of reference in the Universe. Consequently, both the Special and the General Theory of Relativity must be abandoned for cosmological purposes."

Although it is almost universally accepted that the World orbits the Sun, this has never been shown by physics; on the contrary, famous experiments, such as the Michelson-Morley and Michelson-Gale series, prove the opposite. With this in mind, consider how the heavens look on a starry night, with or without binoculars or a telescope. Forget the textbooks. How do they look?

Now, there are only three ways to explain what we see:

1. The World is actually positioned at the very centre of the universe;
2. The World only appears to be at the centre of the universe; or
3. The universe is geobounded.

Number 2 is the secular view and accounts for what we see with our eyes by teaching that the centre of the universe can be assumed to be anywhere. This is the acentric (anywhere can be taken as the centre) cosmology. It is a mutation of the 'Big Bang' fairy tale, where the universe is said to be expanding into space (or rather, space-time) that is being created immediately ahead of it (this always reminds me of Grommit laying the railway track near the end of The Wrong Trousers animation film).

A potential infinity exists, but an actual infinity does not; it is merely a mathematical abstraction and has no basis in physics. Do away with the actual infinity and all the so-called paradoxes (contradictions, as I prefer to call them) disappear. Mathematics is only a tool that physicists use, though too many of them think that we are somehow governed by it (even the Nobel laureate, Prof. Paul Dirac, held that view). Besides, an infinite universe attempts to push God infinitely far away from us, both physically and spiritually.

This is the legacy of Kopernik, Galilei and Kepler, three men who paved the way for Darwin to reintroduce the old idea of organic evolution in 1859.

In order to fully appreciate just what has been going on over the last four hundred and fifty years, and particularly since Albert Einstein's famous 1905 paper, "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" (Annalen der Physik, 17, 891-921), we have to be prepared to abandon things that have become everyday misconceptions, and probably the best place to start is from the realization that a 'solar system' is only applicable if we adopt the acentric cosmology.

Summary

In a geocentric universe, there is no such thing as a 'solar system'.