Tom Van Flandern

Biography

Van Flandern graduated from Saint Ignatius High School in Cleveland. While there, he helped start the Cleveland branch of Operation Moonwatch, an amateur science program initiated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to track satellites. He also helped found a Moonwatchers team at Xavier University, and this team broke a tracking record in 1961.

Van Flandern graduated from Xavier University cum laude with a B.S. in Mathematics in 1962 and was awarded a teaching fellowship at Georgetown University. He attended Yale University on a scholarship sponsored by the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO), joining USNO in 1963. In 1969 he received a PhD in Astronomy from Yale, with a dissertation on lunar occultations.

Van Flandern worked at the USNO until 1983, first becoming Chief of the Research Branch and later becoming Chief of the Celestial Mechanics Branch of the Nautical Almanac Office. His espousal of highly non-mainstream beliefs, particularly the exploded planet hypothesis, eventually led to his separation from the USNO. He later said, "This forced me to the 'fringes,' areas of astronomy not accepted as credible by experts of the field".

Following his separation from the USNO, Van Flandern started a business organizing eclipse viewing expeditions, and promoting his non-mainstream views in a newsletter and web site. Shortly after his death in 2009, the asteroid 52266 Van Flandern was named in his honor because of his prediction and analysis of lunar occultations at the U.S. Naval Observatory and publications of papers on the dynamics of binary minor planets.

Mainstream scientific work

During the mid-1970s, Van Flandern believed that lunar observations gave evidence of variation in Newton's gravitational constant (G), consistent with a speculative idea that had been put forward by Paul Dirac. In 1974, his essay "A Determination of the Rate of Change of G" was awarded second place by the Gravity Research Foundation. However, in later years, with new data available, Van Flandern himself admitted his findings were flawed, and the conclusions were contradicted by more accurate findings based on radio measurements with the Viking landers.

Van Flandern and Henry Fliegel developed a compact algorithm to calculate a Julian date from a Gregorian date that would fit on a single IBM card. They described this in a letter to the editor of a computing magazine in 1968. This was available for use in business applications.

With Kenneth Pulkkinen, he published "Low precision formulae for planetary positions", in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement in 1979. The paper set a record for the number of reprints requested from that journal.

In 2003, developed the Van Flandern-Yang hypothesis with Xin-She Yang after observations made during the Solar eclipse of March 9, 1997.

Non-mainstream science and beliefs

Van Flandern described in his book how he had become increasingly dissatisfied with the mainstream view of science by the early 1980s. He wrote

In his book, on blogs, lectures, newsletter and web site, Van Flandern focused on problems with cosmology and physics theories. He alleged that when experimental evidence is incompatible with mainstream scientific theories, that mainstream scientists refuse to acknowledge this to avoid jeopardizing their funding.

Deep Reality Physics

Van Flandern espoused a set of principles for assessing ideas, and dubbed theories that he deemed compliant with these principles as "Deep Reality Physics." He claimed that mainstream scientific theories, especially the prevailing theories regarding the big bang, solar system formation, relativity, and electrodynamics, left unanswered questions and therefore did not meet his criteria and often advocated his own replacement theories. Van Flandern's seven principles were:

Minor-planet satellites

Following claims by David Dunham in 1978 to have detected satellites for some asteroids (notably 532 Herculina) by examining the light patterns during stellar occultations, Van Flandern and others began to report similar observations. His non-mainstream 1978 prediction that some asteroids have natural satellites, which was almost universally rejected, was proven correct when the Galileo spacecraft photographed Dactyl, a satellite of 243 Ida, during its flyby in 1993.

Exploding Planets

In 1976, while Van Flandern was employed by the USNO, he began to promote the belief that major planets sometimes explode. In his "Exploded Planet Hypothesis 2000" he lists as possible reasons for explosion either a runaway nuclear reaction in uranium in the core, a change of state as the planet cools down, creating a density phase change (like water to ice) and causing it to implode or explode, or absorption of heat from gravitons. In his book Van Flandern described the negative reception of his ideas about exploding planets among mainstream scientists. Van Flandern also speculated that the origin of the human species may well have been on the planet Mars, which he believed was once a moon of a now-exploded "Planet V".

Le Sage's theory of gravitation and the speed of gravity

Van Flandern supported Le Sage's discredited theory of gravitation, according to which gravity is the result of a flux of invisible "ultra-mundane corpuscles" impinging on all objects from all directions at superluminal speeds. He gave public lectures in which he claimed that these particles could be used as a limitless source of free energy, and to provide superluminal propulsion for spacecraft. He also speculated that the ultra-mundane flux caused the explosion of a major planet once located between Mars and Jupiter.

In 1998 Van Flandern wrote a paper asserting that astronomical observations imply that gravity propagates at least twenty billion times faster than light, or even infinitely fast. These claims were dismissed by mainstream physicists.

Face on Mars

Van Flandern was a prominent advocate of the belief that certain geological features seen on Mars, especially the "face at Cydonia", are not of natural origin, but were produced by intelligent extra-terrestrial life, probably the inhabitants of a major planet once located where the asteroid belt presently exists, and which Van Flandern believed had exploded 3.2 million years ago. The claimed artificiality of the "face" was also the topic of a chapter of his 1993 book. He also gave lectures on the subject, and at the conclusion of the lectures he described his overall conception:

When it was first imaged, and into the 21st century, the "Face" is near universally accepted to be an optical illusion, an example of pareidolia, and theories that it was an artificial artifact were considered to be pseudo-science. After analysis of the higher resolution Mars Global Surveyor data NASA stated that "a detailed analysis of multiple images of this feature reveals a natural looking Martian hill whose illusory face-like appearance depends on the viewing angle and angle of illumination".

Rejection of Big Bang Cosmology

Van Flandern was a vocal opponent of the Big Bang model in cosmology, and supported instead a Steady-State cosmology. He compiled a list of what he regarded as problems for the Big Bang model. It began as a list of "Top 10" problems, then expanded to the "Top 30", and ultimately by 2008 had reached the "Top 60". In 2008 he was an organizer of a conference of individuals who oppose the Big Bang cosmological models. Van Flandern did not reject General Relativity as some have asserted, but rather rejected its geometrical interpretation. He said: "General relativity has a geometric and a field interpretation. If angular momentum conservation is invoked in the geometric interpretation to explain experiments, the causality principle is violated. The field interpretation avoids this problem by allowing faster-than-light propagation in forward time."