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Tom Van Flandern

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Tom Van Flandern
Tom Van Flandern
Born(1940-06-26)June 26, 1940
Cleveland, Ohio, United States
DiedJanuary 9, 2009(2009-01-09)
Seattle, Washington, United States
ResidenceSequim, WA, United States
NationalityUSA
Alma materXavier University (B.S. 1962); Yale University (Ph.D. 1969)
Known forgravity, relativity, cosmology, Exploded Planet Hypothesis, speed of gravity
Scientific career
FieldsAstronomer, celestial mechanics
InstitutionsU.S. Naval Observatory; University of Maryland; Meta Research, Inc.

Thomas Charles "Tom" Van Flandern (26 June 1940 – 9 January 2009) was an American astronomer and celestial mechanician who became one of the most visible and most credentialed critics of mainstream astrophysics in the late twentieth century. Trained at Yale and employed for twenty-one years at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where he rose to Chief of the Celestial Mechanics Branch of the Nautical Almanac Office, Van Flandern used that professional grounding to mount sustained challenges to four pillars of the received view: that gravity propagates at the speed of light, that the Big Bang describes the origin of the universe, that Einstein's relativity is the correct interpretation of the experimental evidence, and that the asteroid belt and comets formed by accretion rather than by the destruction of a planet.

He founded Meta Research, Inc. in 1990-91 expressly to fund and publish "worthy ideas not otherwise supported solely because they conflict with mainstream theories in astronomy" — a mission statement that captures both his diagnosis of the field and his method. He edited the Meta Research Bulletin, wrote the widely read Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets, and was a familiar speaker at dissident-science gatherings including the Natural Philosophy Alliance.

Van Flandern's career is a useful test case for how the astronomical community handles a well-qualified insider who declines to defer. His non-mainstream 1978 prediction that asteroids carry natural satellites was ridiculed at the time and confirmed fifteen years later when Galileo photographed Dactyl orbiting 243 Ida; his equally non-mainstream work on the speed of gravity and the Big Bang remains contested. The asteroid 52266 Van Flandern is named for him.

Biography

Education

Van Flandern took a B.S. in mathematics cum laude from Xavier University, Cincinnati, in 1962, then held a teaching fellowship at Georgetown University (1962-63) before moving to Yale. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from Yale in 1969, specializing in celestial mechanics — the theory of orbits — with a dissertation on lunar occultations.

U.S. Naval Observatory (1963-1983)

He joined the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. in February 1963 and remained twenty-one years, becoming first Chief of the Research Branch and then Chief of the Celestial Mechanics Branch of the Nautical Almanac Office. This was orthodox, high-precision work of exactly the kind that leaves no room for hand-waving: ephemerides, occultation timings, orbit determination, and the practical computational tools the field runs on.

His departure from the USNO in December 1983 followed his increasingly public advocacy of the exploded planet hypothesis and of a variable gravitational constant. Van Flandern's own account was that he had become dissatisfied with the mainstream by the early 1980s and had found that institutional astronomy would tolerate his competence only so long as his conclusions stayed inside accepted bounds. The episode is frequently cited on this wiki as an illustration of how theory-conformity is enforced in practice, without any formal mechanism ever being invoked.

VF Associates, Meta Research and the University of Maryland

Between 1982 and 1991 he ran VF Associates, Inc., a microcomputer manufacturing company — a period of financial independence that funded the next phase of his research life. In September 1990 he founded Meta Research, Inc., becoming its president, and from March 1992 edited the Meta Research Bulletin, a journal devoted specifically to reporting anomalies and evidence that do not fit standard theories in astronomy.

From May 1992 to July 2000 he was a Research Associate in the Physics Department of the University of Maryland, College Park, and a consultant to the Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland, working on improving the accuracy of the Global Positioning System. The GPS work is important to his later arguments: it gave him direct, practical familiarity with the one operational system in which relativistic corrections must be applied every day, and it is the empirical basis for his series of papers on GPS, clock synchronization and the twins' paradox.

Later years and death

He taught astronomy at the University of South Florida (1981-82) and to Navy Department employees, consulted for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, appeared in the public-television series Project Universe, and gave ten to twenty invited and public lectures a year. In 2005 he and his wife moved to Sequim, Washington, to be nearer their children and grandchildren. In 2008 he organized the Crisis in Cosmology conference for researchers opposed to Big Bang cosmology.

Tom Van Flandern died of colon cancer in Seattle on 9 January 2009, aged 68.

Scientific work

Celestial mechanics

Van Flandern's orthodox contributions are substantial and remain in daily use. With Henry Fliegel he devised the compact algorithm for converting calendar dates to Julian dates that has been reimplemented in countless astronomical and computing applications. His "Low-Precision Formulae for Planetary Positions" (1979) set reprint records for the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. His 1974 essay on the possible variation of the gravitational constant took second prize in the Gravity Research Foundation competition, and in 1974-76 he was elected to the Council of the American Astronomical Society's Division on Dynamical Astronomy. He was an invited author for Scientific American (1976), held the Sydney S. Negus Lectureship of the Virginia Academy of Sciences (1978), and received the Astronomy Award and Fellowship of the Washington Academy of Sciences in 2000.

In 1978 he predicted, on dynamical grounds arising from his exploded-planet work, that asteroids should possess natural satellites. The prediction was almost universally rejected; asteroid moons were held to be dynamically implausible. In 1993 the Galileo spacecraft photographed Dactyl orbiting the asteroid 243 Ida, and satellites of asteroids are now routine discoveries. This is the clearest single instance of a Van Flandern prediction from a rejected framework being vindicated by observation.

The speed of gravity

Van Flandern's best-known challenge to relativity begins with an old and simple observation: gravity shows no aberration. Light from the Sun arrives from where the Sun was about 8.3 minutes ago; if gravity propagated at the same finite speed, the Earth would be pulled toward the Sun's retarded position rather than its instantaneous one, producing a torque that would measurably expand planetary orbits within a few thousand years. The orbits are stable. Working the bound backwards from the precision of modern ephemerides, Van Flandern concluded that "Newtonian" gravitational force must propagate at least 2 × 1010 times the speed of light — twenty billion c — or be effectively instantaneous.

He set this out in "The Speed of Gravity — What the Experiments Say" (Physics Letters A 250, 1-11, 1998) and developed it with Jean-Pierre Vigier in "Experimental Repeal of the Speed Limit for Gravitational, Electrodynamic, and Quantum Field Interactions" (Foundations of Physics 32, 1031-1068, 2002). The argument extends beyond gravity: he held that the same reasoning applies to electrodynamic and quantum-field interactions, and that the light-speed limit is a limit on the propagation of waves and matter, not on the propagation of forces.

The standard reply, given most fully by Steve Carlip ("Aberration and the Speed of Gravity", Physics Letters A 267, 81-87, 2000), is that in general relativity the aberration is almost exactly cancelled by velocity-dependent terms in the interaction, so that a light-speed propagation speed produces a nearly instantaneous-looking force. Van Flandern's counter — one he pressed for the rest of his life — was that this cancellation is an artifact of the formalism rather than a physical mechanism: the terms are arranged to cancel because the theory was built to reproduce the observed stability, and no causal account is given of how a delayed influence knows where the source will be. Critics from the wiki's own community, including Petr Beckmann and other contributors to the alternative-gravity literature, have generally sided with Van Flandern that the cancellation is a post-hoc repair rather than an explanation.

The Meta Model and push gravity

Van Flandern did not stop at criticism; he proposed a positive model. He revived and modernized the eighteenth-century Le Sage theory of gravitation, in which gravity is not an attraction at all but the net residual push of an isotropic flux of tiny fast-moving entities — Le Sage's "ultra-mundane corpuscles", Van Flandern's gravitons — which are absorbed or scattered by matter, so that two bodies mutually shadow one another and are pushed together. He added a second medium, which he called elysium, a light-carrying medium responsible for propagating electromagnetic waves and for the effects usually attributed to curved spacetime.

The attraction of the model, for Van Flandern, was that it is causal and mechanical: every effect has a local contact mechanism, nothing acts at a distance without an intermediary, and the superluminal graviton speed required by the aberration argument is a feature rather than an embarrassment. He organized this into what he termed the Meta Model and, more broadly, into a set of methodological rules he called "Physics Has Its Principles" — a list of criteria (causality, no true infinities, no creation ex nihilo, no non-physical entities in physical theories) which he argued modern theoretical physics had quietly abandoned. That paper is among his most-cited within the dissident community and is the clearest statement of what he thought had gone wrong methodologically, as distinct from empirically.

The Exploded Planet Hypothesis

Building on Michael Ovenden's work, Van Flandern argued from 1976 onward that the asteroid belt, the comets, and much of the small-body population of the solar system are the debris of one or more planets that exploded. His initial evidence was that the orbits of some sixty long-period comets traced back to a common point of origin in space and time. He went on to assemble a long list of otherwise disconnected anomalies the hypothesis explains in one stroke: the mass distribution of the asteroid belt, the existence of asteroid satellites, the chemistry and structure of meteorites, the "new" comets that appear to be arriving for the first time, the extreme hemispheric asymmetry of Mars, and the heavily cratered surfaces of bodies in the outer system.

In its later revisions the hypothesis held that Mars was originally a moon of a much larger planet, "Planet V", whose explosion stripped and scarred one Martian hemisphere and left Mars in its present orbit. Van Flandern accepted that the hypothesis required a physical explosion mechanism that is not well understood, and treated this as the principal open problem of the theory rather than as a reason to abandon a framework with so much explanatory reach.

Criticism of the Big Bang

Van Flandern was among the most systematic critics of Big Bang cosmology. His "The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang" (2002), later expanded to "The Top 50 Problems with the Big Bang" (2005), catalogues empirical and logical difficulties: the horizon and flatness problems and the ad hoc character of inflation invoked to solve them, the proliferation of unobserved entities (dark matter, dark energy) required to keep the model fitting, objects apparently older than the universe ("A Universe Older Than Itself?"), the failure of the model to make risky predictions that could have falsified it, and the repeated pattern of retrodiction being counted as success. He was a supporter of Halton Arp's anomalous-redshift observations and, with Eric J Lerner, Hilton Ratcliffe and others, part of the network of researchers who organized the Crisis in Cosmology conferences.

GPS, relativity and the twins' paradox

His Army Research Laboratory work produced a distinctive series of papers arguing that the Global Positioning System — routinely cited as a triumphant confirmation of relativity — in fact supports a preferred-frame interpretation. His point was that GPS is operated with a single, universal, Earth-centered-inertial coordinate time to which all satellite and ground clocks are referred; the system does not use, and could not function using, the relativity-of-simultaneity that Special Relativity asserts. He argued that this makes GPS an operating demonstration of a Lorentzian rather than Einsteinian reading of the same equations: real physical slowing of clocks relative to a preferred frame, not reciprocal appearances. From this he resolved the twins' paradox without appeal to acceleration, and argued that "Lorentz Contraction" and time dilation are physical effects of motion through a medium.

Cydonia and anomalies on Mars

Van Flandern's most controversial position, and the one that cost him most support even among fellow dissidents, was his advocacy of the artificiality of certain surface features in the Cydonia region of Mars — the "Face" and associated structures. He treated it as a statistical question about the a priori improbability of the observed geometry, and argued that the artificiality hypothesis fitted naturally into his exploded-planet framework, in which Mars was once a satellite of a habitable body. Later high-resolution imaging is generally taken to have settled the matter against him.

Reception

Van Flandern occupies an unusual position: his credentials, his publication record in mainstream refereed journals (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Physics Letters A, Foundations of Physics, Astrophysical Journal Supplements) and his practical contributions to celestial mechanics are beyond dispute, while his conclusions were largely rejected. Mainstream commentary tends to file his later career under "fringe" and treat the divergence as a decline; the view better supported by the record is that the same qualities that produced the Julian date algorithm and the asteroid-satellite prediction — a refusal to accept an unexplained coincidence, and a willingness to follow a dynamical argument where it led — also produced the speed-of-gravity argument and the exploded planet hypothesis.

Within the dissident community he was, and remains, a central figure: a rallying point for researchers who hold that twentieth-century physics substituted mathematical formalism for physical mechanism. His insistence that a theory must supply a causal account, not merely a fitting function, aligns him with Petr Beckmann, Ricardo Carezani, Matthew R Edwards (whose collected volume on Le Sage gravitation includes Van Flandern's contribution), Toivo Jaakkola and Halton Arp. His speed-of-gravity papers are among the most frequently cited works in the entire relativity-criticism literature, and his "Physics Has Its Principles" is regularly invoked as a methodological charter.

He also drew criticism from within the dissident camp, chiefly for the Cydonia advocacy, which many argued handed opponents an easy means of dismissing his far stronger gravitational and cosmological arguments by association.

Publications

Selected journal articles

  • T. C. Van Flandern, "A determination of the rate of change of G", Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 170, 333-342 (1975)
  • H. F. Fliegel and T. C. Van Flandern, "A machine algorithm for processing calendar dates", Communications of the ACM 11, 657 (1968)
  • T. C. Van Flandern and K. F. Pulkkinen, "Low-Precision Formulae for Planetary Positions", Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series 41, 391-411 (1979)
  • T. C. Van Flandern, "The Speed of Gravity — What the Experiments Say", Physics Letters A 250, N1-3, 1-11 (1998)
  • T. C. Van Flandern and J. P. Vigier, "Experimental Repeal of the Speed Limit for Gravitational, Electrodynamic, and Quantum Field Interactions", Foundations of Physics 32, N7, 1031-1068 (2002)

Abstracts

Books

Media

See also

References

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