Petersen's New Insights, replies to Morton and van Meurs

Joseph Mastropaolo (mastropaolo@net999.com)
Tue, 01 Sep 1998 11:09:31 -0700

Hi Pim:

If the loessian nodules had been formed by any of the mechanisms that
you have listed then there would be no problem, but clearly they were
not. To begin with these nodules have no nucleus, although they are not
exactly hollow on the inside like geodes. In fact, you could make a
very close approximation to one of these objects for yourself if you had
at your disposal for a short time a gravity-free environment, some water
and a quantity of powdered calcite and silt mixed together. The recipe
prodeeds as follows: To 1/4 cup of water add powder to make a thin dough
with the consistency of thin pancake batter. Form this batter into an
irregularly shaped globule and let it hang freely in space. Then proceed
to dust the surface with powder until it becomes so dry (at the surface)
that additional powder will no longer adhere. Finally, set this object
aside until all the included water has had a chance to seep to the
surface and evaporate. The resulting object would be hardly
distinguishable from a loessian nodule. If you would cut it open you
would find an irregularly shaped void on the inside left by the lost
water. The above recipe violates no physics in itself, but when snails
are added to the picture one must recognize frank materialization out of
a fourth dimension to account for the details that are actually
observed.

Hi Glenn:

I am bit surprised and dismayed that you would offer such a simplistic
mechanism to account for the loessian nodules. Certainly this reasoning
would carry no weight whatever before an audience that had Plates 32 to
40 of Petersen's book before them.
Concerning Barrow and Tipler's Anthropic Cosmological Principle: If
they concluded that our communications in three spatial dimensions could
not traverse into the fourth dimension, they would be correct because
our carriers are three dimensional and thereby constrained. If you are
saying that because we can't send email they don't exist, then of course
that is false. Or if you are saying that given four dimensions there
could be no communication in three, that also is false.
Joseph