Thomas Huxley quotes

Along my wandering mind path today, I ran across Thomas Huxley quotes.  And, being me, I couldn’t help but comment on some of them.  I do not comment in any belief that they add to Huxley, but simply as thoughts I am voicing.

THIS Huxley was his era’s foremost proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. We have to remember that there was a time when evolution was not universally accepted by everyone except religious folks, and that IT was the upstart. It was also a time shortly after Lyell had established Uniformitarianism (gradualism) as THE reality of science – which reality is still in force today, with few exceptions. Science had only recently established an alternative to Noah’s Flood, with Louis Agassiz’s ice ages, knocking down that one last barrier to science and, in so doing, trumpeting the ultimate victory of science over religion. Before Agassiz, all the signs that are currently interpreted as evidence of ice ages were seen as evidence, instead, as proof of the Great Flood.  What God had built in 7 days Uniformitarian Nature had built in some ungodly number of eons.  Time became science’s “Deus ex machina” – the answer to all objections and solution to all problems.

So, in the early days of that victory Huxley the evolutionist was not – as would be the case today – the establishment. Some of these quotes, then, reflect that semi “outsider” status.

The quotes begin after the fold…

THE RUSSIAN METEOR – AN UNANSWERED QUESTION

I actually thought of naming this post “An Un-asked Question.”  What has it been?  Three weeks now?  There have been all sorts of astronomers and amateurs calculating that amazing final approach of the meteor that went south of Chelyabinsk, that even just missing an airliner by seconds (perhaps even less than one second) and not so many hundreds of meters.  And there have been several papers determining what the Apollo asteroid’s orbit was around the Sun and how it came up behind the Earth from a slightly low, elliptical path.

So there is a fairly well determined Phase 1 path, and there is a fairly consistent Phase 3 path as well, as shown below.

What no one has talked about is the Phase 2 path – the one that transitioned the meteor to its final approach to southern Siberia.  Let’s briefly point out the particulars of Phase 1 and Phase 3.

THE RUSSIAN METEOR – FLAKING & FLARING

We all know well enough by now the story of the Russian meteor. It was the biggest meteor since Tunguska.

It is called the Chelyabinsk meteor, but in reality its biggest flare occurred over a town called Yetluk/Etluc/Etluk (different spellings, depending on who is writing it).  Yetluk is south of Korkino, which is itself south of Chelyabinsk.

I have two specific things to blog on, and I should have been blogging on one of them long before.  I’ve got a bone to pick on that one.

But this post is going to be on the second one, one that just came to my attention and that has some ramifications of how we think about meteors.  Maybe nothing major, but still, interesting to me. . .

Okay, let’s get started on that one:

Take a look at this video.