False Vertical Comets, Interior-Earth Asteroids, and Shoemaker-Levy as a Military "Bomb". Bad Ideas, part 21.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 178

My friend Marty Weil, the Ephemera Emperor and connoisseur of liminal sublimities at ephemera.typepad.com wrote a way-too-nice post about the BAD IDEAS section of this blog.  There's thankfully not enough time to deal with the bad idea magma broiling away beneath our feet, but I do like to occasionally pick out some of the pretty ones and surface them from what is generally a deeply deserved dark place in the history of ideas.  And what came up this afternoon--and in honor of Marty's effort on my behalf-- was this little wonder (left): the title of this interesting, odd beauty is “Formation d’une Fausse Comete Verticale”, and it looks as though it was published in the 1872 or so, and engraved in Grenoble by Ph. Breton (for “aut” or the author of the paper, Maisonville (?)).     The nature of this illustration has flipped around quite a bit—the initial translation of the title sends it to the heights of uncompromising weirdness, “On the Formation of a False Vertical Comet”, except that the “false comet” part was really, I think, referring to an asteroid more so than, well, I don’t know.  (This “I don’t know” part can get very weird, as we’ll see below.)   So the title kind of gets back into line with the world of the possible (except for the “vertical” part); but from my reading, the content of the illustrations takes it back out, again.  The round object in the middle is the earth; and the curved parabolics leading towards it, and inside it (deep inside it), leaves me only with wonder, and without explanation.  It is entirely possible that I’m just not up to the task of interpreting this image, but the inner-earth cross-hatchwork of asteroids leaves me baffled, as does the "axe de l'essaim" ("stacked axis??), and the trailing atmosphere, and so on.  I really can’t find any key to this image. 

Getting back to the unforeseeable weirdness that “explain things”, I found the following statement from a website explaining the “true” nature of the Shoemaker-Levy comet—the writer claims that it wasn’t a comet, not a comet at all, but rather a false comet (“une fausse comete” redux), and actually a series of “bombs” built by the U.S. Army and delivered to the surface of Jupiter by NASA disguised “as cometary collisions”.  (“En 1997 parait sur le forum fr.sci.astronomie un étrange document anonyme. Ce texte soutient que l'étrange série d'objets appelé "Comète Schoemaker-Lévy 9" ou SL9, qui a frappé la planète Jupiter en juillet 1994 en provoquant des explosions colossales était en fait une expérimentation de bombes d'antimatières misent au point par l'armée américaine, lancées par les navettes spatiales de la NASA et déguisées en collisions cométaires.”)  I must say that this explanation stumped me—sounds like a long, long way to go over a long period of for an experiment to blow up gas on Jupiter, if you ask me...

Comments

[Rick]

It probably is not surprising, John, to hear that I knew Gene Shoemaker (same year I came to worship RP Feynman: 1971-2). Of course, it was actually his wife who was the "Shoemaker" of Shoemaker-Levy, but they were so much a team that the sharing of credit was automatic between them...except for Gene's horrifically bad driving skills, or lack of same.

I went to Great Meteor Crater with Gene and a couple of dozen geology students, and I noted that he was never allowed to drive on that trip from Caltech to the crater in Arizona.

He was, though, allowed to teach us tenderfooted acolytes the calculus of draw poker one night at his Arizona home, not ten minutes from the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately for him, he did not have the cards that night to make the lesson stick. I slept that night in the courtyard of his home, outside, and awoke the next morning to find three inches of snow atop my sleeping bag. It was a gloriously deep night of sleep, I have to say.

It was Gene's misfortune to be driving in the Australian outback when he met his end decades later. I never learned the details, but I was glad not to be there to witness it.

[John Ptak]

Thanks very much Rick for this great set of stories--wonderful images about Gene Shoemaker, especially the driving part! (Pretty good guy btw to survey Meteor Crater with....)

[Rick]

Yes, John--when we arrived at the crater, the visitor's center erupted with every single employee bursting forth.

I was so much not in the know that I had no idea, up until that moment, how revered he was among professional geologists for his seminal work on the crater. To me, he was just quirky Gene--he preferred students to call him 'Gene'--but to all those folks at the crater, he was DR SHOEMAKER! DR SHOEMAKER! with great big grins and excitement such as one seldom sees from geologists.

Clueless, yet learning...that was me on that trip!