Sunday web surfing and amazon.com

My favorite Sunday pastime is web surfing.  It seems no matter where I start, I end up at Amazon.com.

Today it started half way through watching CBS Sunday Morning when Osgood ran a 20-minute piece on Steig Larsson, author of the Millennium Trilogy.  I paused the TiVo and went to the web to read more about his relationship with Eva Gabrielsson, his domestic partner.  There I saw a comment that he was the second best selling author in the world, after Khaled Hosseini, who I was forced to look up.  Ah yes, The Kite Runner.  Now I know who he is. Turns out he does have a new novel called A Thousand Splendid Suns released in October, 2010.

Next stop was the Best Seller List in the New York Times.  It occurred to me that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, so I looked for him (in vain.)  The list has nine categories, all self-explanatory except the last which is called "Graphic Books."

Graphic Books appear to be highly illustrated books that don't fit well under children's books, like the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.  His second book, The Marvelous Land Of Oz, is on the best selling graphic books list. That thought that odd; he's dead. So I went Wikipedia and sure enough, he died in 1919. But I did discover that it was the second book in his ten-book canonRuth Plumly Thompson who wrote 19 Oz books, all considered to be in the canon. about Oz.  There I learned about

By this time I needed a better definition of canon, so I Googled "define literary canon"  which lead me to Protocanon and ultimately to Deuterocanon, and Apocrypha.  Aha!  I had never thought of the connection between literary canon and canonization of saints. Makes perfect sense.  Along the way, I ran into the term Septuagint, or LXX. That same Protocanon Wikipedia article has a nice to know piece of trivia regarding why the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible is called LXX.  (No mention of why it was called LXX instead of the Greek number οϝʹ, but I had digressed enough by then and didn't try to find out.)  But there was an interesting bit of trivia associated with LXX.

"King Ptolomy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: 'Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher. 'God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.'"

Well, I guess LXX means 70-ish.  Still, I had to ask about which Ptolemy.  Turns out he was Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the king of Ptolemaic Egypt from 283 BCE to 246 BCE and the son of the founder of the Ptolemaic kingdom.  Hmm, and who was Cleopatra's (and Antony's) son?  He turns out to be Ptolemy Philadelphus, too, named after his distant, but not direct, ancestor.

At this point I had about five browser tabs open that I had yet to visit.  You've Won The Nobel Prize -- Wait, Don't Hang Up! and a bunch of Amazon.com links.  One was to The Marvelous Land of Oz.  Turns out that this is the 100th anniversary of the first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. Reading the customer reviews, I saw " I just finished reading this one, a chapter each night, to my preschool age son. He loved it." So I put it on my wish list as a reminder to get the first two books for my granddaughter when she is five or six.

The other Amazon tabs?  One was The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Sorry, I don't agree with Mr. Harris that scientifically determined values can replace religion.  Improve it, perhaps, but for my money, I like the threat of eternal damnation. Maybe it doesn't affect me, but there are a lot of folks out there who need better self-control.

Why do I always end up at Amazon?  Probably because that's where the ultimate references still point.  The web has not replaced books, but it has made them more accessible in a variety of formats, including immediate download.  So why is the publishing business declining?  Turns out that the decline is in advertiser-supported publications.  The book publishing business seems to be thriving despite the new costs of converting to digital equipment. 

The Electric Sky

Surfing the web, I ran across The Electric Sky by Donald E. Scott.  It is a fresh breeze in cosmology and astrophysics.  Dr. Scott is an electrical engineer who thinks that physical scientists have gone astray with their theories of galactic and solar theory.  The key word is plasma.  Many astrophysicists ignore the existence of plasmas in space.  Dr. Scott thinks this is a serious problem.

Before the space program it was assumed that space was empty.  Space probes have shown that not to be the case.  Space is full of plasmas, fields of atoms in random shapes.  The technical definition is that a plasma is a fourth state of matter distinct from solid or liquid or gas and present in stars and fusion reactors; a gas becomes a plasma when it is heated until the atoms lose all their electrons, leaving a highly electrified collection of nuclei and free electrons. "Particles in space exist in the form of a plasma."

From Amazon.com's review of the book: "A Challenge to the Myths of Modern Astronomy. It is clear that electric plasma research affords simpler, more elegant, and more compelling insights and explanations of most cosmological phenomena than those that are now espoused in astrophysics. This book contains astronomical science for the expert written for the public."

At the heart of it, Scott is saying that astrophysics has lost its way.  They are inventing many, many particles (dark matter, dark energy) and ideas (like black holes) that cannot be seen or measured to explain elements of atomic and galactic theory when a far simpler explanation exists. His most amazing conclusion (in my opinion) is that the sun is not driven by fusion reactions.  The sun gets its energy from the electrical power in the Milky Way. The fusion reactions near the sun's surface are incidental to the overall power of the sun.  There is also some suggestion that the Big Bang never happened.

We know that Newtonian physics cannot explain the universe.  Newtonian gravitational theory does not explain the shape of galaxies. Gravity is simply too weak to contain a galaxy.  Furthermore, the motion of galaxies makes no sense.  Stars in the outer limbs of the galaxy should be moving faster then those closer to the center. But they don't.  They move at the same rate.

Scott shows over and over that the only explanation for what we observe is electromagnetic phenomena, not gravity,

I recommend this book to anyone who wants an educated layman's view of the controversy.