Hydroplate Theory, what is your opinion?

Caitlin.ann · Feb 27, 2009

"Hydroplate theory" is a creationist hypothesis - adapted in 1995 by Walter Brown from many centuries of conjecture - that the antediluvian Earth had huge chambers of water that encircled the planet's mantle. Earth's crust floated on these chambers (rock floats on water!). Walls and tendrils connected the mantle and crust, allowing the inner and outer reaches of the planet to rotate on its axis at the same speed.
Antediluvian Earth had one super-continent - similar in concept to, but not the same as, Pangaea - that covered about 75 percent of the surface. Oceans, if you could call them that, were really giant lakes (like the sea of Galilee, the Red Sea, etc.). Earth's mountains rarely reached more than 5000 feet (1524 meters) above what was then sea level. (Emphasis to be explained in the following paragraphs.). The highest mountain was probably much lower than 9000 feet (2743 meters).

Link

Opinions please.

Nathan45 · Feb 27, 2009

from the article:

Pseudoscience Alert
This topic is a pseudoscience, and is not accepted by the scientific community as a valid discipline.
Although it may use scientific terminology, it does not use scientific methodology.
Remember: just because it sounds right doesn't mean it's actually right.

couldn't have said it better.

Caitlin.ann · Feb 27, 2009

Nathan45 said:
from the article:

couldn't have said it better.

Hehe my opinion too though I have a Christian trying to argue its validity with me on a Pagan forum so I thought I'd try to get better opinions here. Personally I do not believe it myself, I find many issues with it.

Nathan45 · Feb 27, 2009

it's also idiotic. "rock floats on water"? Are they serious? What the hell kind of rock floats on water? Probably some types of "rocks" do, the term "rock" is rather broad, but certainly hardly any of the rocks that make the majority of the earth's crust are denser than water or else you would see all kinds of rocks floating around the top of the ocean.

and aside from being completely impossible this "hypothesis" has no evidence for it whatsoever.

sbvera13 · Feb 27, 2009

Where is all the sulfur and minerals brought up from the depths of the Earth from the subterranean floodwaters?

Where are the channels through the crust that such massive amounts of water traveled through to reach the surface?

How did the water withstand the heat, pressure, and its own natural buoyancy that would force it to the surface?

How did the water get stuck down there in the first place?

Where are the signs of global cataclysm that would have occured if the crust of the Earth suddenly shrunk in diameter by 1-2 miles (the depth of modern oceans) as the water moved from under the surface to over?

Why did the surface of the Earth fail to melt, and the oceans fail to boil under the release of that much energy (ie, friction between moving plates and reshaping rock as the Earth shrinks)? Why was the atmoshpere not poisoned by gasses and heavy metals carried aloft by the steam? How could a boat float on a boiling ocean?

In short, the idea is total BS. The fact that we, or anything at all, is alive proves it.

Hespera · Feb 28, 2009

here is the guy who got it right (lol)

Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision

Reading something they can understand, that seems to make sense, that presents itself as technically competent, non-scientists are easily gulled by fake science. --Henry H. Bauer
The less one knows about science, the more plausible Velikovsky's scenario appears.... --Leroy Ellenberger
I would not trust any alleged citation by Velikovsky without checking the original printed sources. -- Michael Friedlander

In 1950, Macmillan Company published Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, a book which asserts, among many other things, that the planet Venus did not exist until recently. Some 3500 years ago in the guise of a gigantic comet, it grazed Earth a couple of times, after having been ejected from the planet Jupiter some indefinite time earlier, before settling into its current orbit. Velikovsky (1895-1979), a psychiatrist by training, did not base his claims on astronomical evidence and scientific inference or argument. Instead, he argued on the basis of ancient cosmological myths from places as disparate as India and China, Greece and Rome, Assyria and Sumer. For example, ancient Greek mythology asserts that the goddess Athena sprang from the head of Zeus. Velikovsky identifies Athena with the planet Venus, though the Greeks didn't. The Greek counterpart of the Roman Venus was Aphrodite. Velikovsky identifies Zeus (whose Roman counterpart was the god Jupiter) with the planet Jupiter. This myth, along with others from ancient Egypt, Israel, Mexico, etc., are used to support the claim that "Venus was expelled as a comet and then changed to a planet after contact with a number of members of our solar system" (Velikovsky 1972,182).

Furthermore, Velikovsky then uses his Venus-the-comet claim to explain several events reported in the Old Testament as well as to tie together a number of ancient stories about flies. For example,

Under the weight of many arguments, I came to the conclusion--about which I no longer have any doubt--that it was the planet Venus, at the time still a comet, that caused the catastrophe of the days of Exodus (181).
When Venus sprang out of Jupiter as a comet and flew very close to the earth, it became entangled in the embrace of the earth. The internal heat developed by the earth and the scorching gases of the comet were in themselves sufficient to make the vermin of the earth propagate at a very feverish rate. Some of the plagues [mentioned in Exodus] like the plague of the frogs...or of the locusts, must be ascribed to such causes (192).
The question arises here whether or not the comet Venus infested the earth with vermin which it may have carried in its trailing atmosphere in the form of larvae together with stones and gases. It is significant that all around the world people have associated the planet Venus with flies (193).
The ability of many small insects and their larvae to endure great cold and heat and to live in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen renders not entirely improbable the hypothesis that Venus (and also Jupiter, from which Venus sprang) may be populated by vermin (195).

Who can deny that vermin have extraordinary survival skills? But the cosmic hitchhikers Velikovsky speaks of are in a class all of their own. How much energy would have been needed to expel a "comet" the size of Venus and how hot must Venus have been to have only cooled down to its current surface temperature of 750 Kelvin during the last 3,500 years? What evidence is there that any locust larvae could survive such temperatures? To ask such questions would be to engage in scientific discussion, but one will find very little of that sort of discussion in Worlds in Collision. What one finds instead are exercises in comparative mythology, philology, and theology, which together make up Velikovsky's planetology. That is not to say that his work is not an impressive exercise and demonstration of ingenuity and erudition. It is very impressive, but it isn't science. It isn't even history.

What Velikovsky does isn't science because he does not start with what is known and then use ancient myths to illustrate or illuminate what has been discovered. Instead, he is indifferent to the established beliefs of astronomers and physicists, and seems to assume that someday they will find the evidence to support his ideas. He seems to take it for granted that the claims of ancient myths should be used to support or challenge the claims of modern astronomy and cosmology. In short, like the creationists in their arguments against evolution, he starts with the assumption that the Bible is a foundation and guide for scientific truth. Where the views of modern astrophysicists or astronomers conflict with certain passages of the Old Testament, the moderns are assumed to be wrong. Velikovsky, however, goes much further than the creationists in his faith; for Velikovsky has faith in all ancient myths, legends, and folk tales. Because of his uncritical and selective acceptance of ancient myths, he cannot be said to be doing history, either. Where myths can be favorably interpreted to fit his hypothesis, he does not fail to cite them. The contradictions of ancient myths regarding the origin of the cosmos, the people, etc. are trivialized. If a myth fits his hypotheses, he accepts it and interprets it to his liking. Where the myth doesn't fit, he ignores it. In short, he seems to make no distinction between myth, legends, and history. Myths may have to be interpreted but Velikovsky treats them as presenting historical facts. If a myth conflicts with a scientific law of nature, the law must be revised.

If, occasionally, historical evidence does not square with formulated laws, it should be remembered that a law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with laws (11).

One of the characteristics of a reasonable explanation is that it be a likely story. To be reasonable, it is not enough that an explanation simply be a possible account of phenomena. It has to be a likely account. To be likely, an account usually must be in accordance with current knowledge and beliefs, with the laws and principles of the field in which the explanation is made. An explanation of how two chemicals interact, for example, would be unreasonable if it violated basic principles in chemistry. Those principles, while not infallible, have not been developed lightly, but after generations of testing, observations, refutations, more testing, more observations, etc. To go against the established principles of a field puts a great burden of proof on the one who goes against those principles. This is true in all fields which have sets of established principles and laws. The novel theory, hypothesis, explanation, etc., which is inconsistent with already established principles and accepted theories, has the burden of proof. The proponent of the novel idea must provide very good reasons for rejecting established principles. This is not because the established views are considered infallible; it is because this is the only reasonable way to proceed. Even if the established theory is eventually shown to be false and the upstart theory eventually takes its place as current dogma, it would still have been unreasonable to have rejected the old theory and accepted the new one in the absence of any compelling reason to do so.

the scientific community's response to Velikovsky

Velikovsky was bitterly opposed by the vast majority of the scientific community, but the opposition may have been elicited mainly because of his popularity with "the New York literati" (Sagan 1979, 83). It is doubtful that many scientists even read Velikovsky, or read very much of Worlds in Collision. A knowledgeable astronomer and physicist would recognize after a few pages that the work is pseudoscientific twaddle. But the New York literary world considered Velikovsky a genius on par with "Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Freud" (Sagan, ibid.). To the scientific world it might be more accurate to say he was a genius on par with L. Ron Hubbard. A number of scientists even threatened to boycott Macmillan's textbook division as a sign of their disgust that such twaddle should be published with such fanfare, as if the author were a great scientist. According to Leroy Ellenberger, "when the heat was applied by professors who were returning Macmillan textbooks unopened in protest and declining to edit new textbooks Macmillan gave the book over to Doubleday, which had no textbook division."

Velikovsky is certainly ingenious. His explanations of parallels among ancient myths are very entertaining, interesting and apparently plausible. His explanation of universal collective amnesia of these worlds in collision is highly amusing and equally improbable. Imagine we're on earth 3,500 years ago when an object about the same size as our planet is coming at us from outer space! It whacks us a couple of times, spins our planet around so that its rotation stops and starts again, creates great heat and upheavals from within the planet and yet the most anyone can remember about these catastrophes are things like "....and the sun stood still" [Joshua 10: 12-13] and other stories of darkness, storms, upheavals, plagues, floods, snakes and bulls in the sky, etc. No one in ancient times mentions an object the size of earth colliding with us. You'd think someone amongst these ancient peoples, who all loved to tell stories, would have told their grandchildren about it. Someone would have passed it on. But no one on earth seems to remember such an event.

Velikovsky explains why our ancestors did not record these events as they occurred in a chapter entitled "A Collective Amnesia." He reverts to the old Freudian notion of repressed memory and neurosis. These events were just too traumatic and horrible to bear, so we all buried the memory of them deep in our subconscious minds. Our ancient myths are neurotic expressions of memories and dreams based on real experiences.

The task I had to accomplish was not unlike that faced by a psychoanalyst who, out of disassociated memories and dreams, reconstructs a forgotten traumatic experience in the early life of an individual. In an analytical experiment on mankind, historical inscriptions and legendary motifs often play the same role as recollections (infantile memories) and dreams in the analysis of a personality (12).

The typically unscientific theories and fanciful explanations of psychoanalysis seem even less credible when applied to the entire population, yet to the New York literati, in love as they were with all things Freudian, speculations such as these guaranteed one's genius.

It is not surprising that when one thumbs through any recent scientific book on cosmology, no mention is made of Velikovsky or his theories. His disciples blame this treatment of their hero as proof of a conspiracy in the scientific community to suppress ideas which oppose their own. Even now, more than fifty years later, after all of his major claims have been rejected or refuted, Velikovsky still has his disciples who claim he is not being given credit for getting at least some things right. However, it does not appear that he got anything of importance right. For example, there is no evidence on earth of a catastrophe occurring around 1500 B.C.E. Former Velikovsky disciple Leroy Ellenberger notes that

the Terminal Cretaceous Event 65 million years ago, whatever it was, left unambiguous worldwide signatures of iridium and soot. The catastrophes Velikovsky conjectured within the past 3500 years left no similar signatures according to Greenland ice cores, bristlecone pine rings, Swedish clay varves, and ocean sediments. All provide accurately datable sequences covering the relevant period and preserve no signs of having experienced a Velikovskian catastrophe.*

................................"

Molal · Feb 28, 2009

Seismic data (both research and for-profit research) provides ample evidence that this idea is simply incorrect. I would recommend googling siesmic acoustic impedance and review the literature on why the hydroplate idea is null.

M

Cabal · Feb 28, 2009

"What else floats?"
"Very small rocks!"

Hespera · Feb 28, 2009

Not just small rocks. See, it was all pumice at that time. so it floated.
Also, the rocks we have now are all pumice-based. The water squirting up eroded the sides of the cracks. So it made a lot of mud. There was lots of earthquakes and stuff that melted it too and the water washed it all over the place. Then it settled down and here we are! Simple.

PS I have some pumice I used for scrubbing my feet. Its so totally awesome that i can scrub my feet with a piece of the original earths crust before the flood.

pgp_protector · Feb 28, 2009

The Water was ice before it came up, rocks can stay on top of ice easily

AV1611VET · Feb 28, 2009

sacredsin said:
Opinions please.

Sounds plausible to me --- but then, I'm scientifically-challenged.

AV1611VET · Feb 28, 2009

Nathan45 said:
it's also idiotic. "rock floats on water"?

I don't know if it's technically called "floating", but water under extreme pressure could indeed hold the mantle up.

Take a test tube and fill it 3/4 full of water, then place a steel cork (or ball) in it that just fits.

Will the water hold the cork up?

Sure it will --- (unless the test tube bursts).

Take a spool from a roll of toilet paper and close one end off with just a piece of cellophane or plastic wrap.

Fill the tube 3/4 way with sand.

Place a plunger in the open end and whack the plunger with the palm of your hand.

What happens?

Nothing --- even though you'd expect the cellophane to burst and create a sandy mess on the floor --- nothing.

The energy from the blow is dispersed evenly throughout the sand, and channeled outward in all directions.

Cabal · Feb 28, 2009

AV1611VET said:
I don't know if it's technically called "floating", but water under extreme pressure could indeed hold the mantle up.

Take a test tube and fill it 3/4 full of water, then place a steel cork (or ball) in it that just fits.

Will the water hold the cork up?

Sure it will --- (unless the test tube bursts).

Take a spool from a roll of toilet paper and close one end off with just a piece of cellophane or plastic wrap.

Fill the tube 3/4 way with sand.

Place a plunger in the open end and whack the plunger with the palm of your hand.

What happens?

Nothing --- even though you'd expect the cellophane to burst and create a sandy mess on the floor --- nothing.

The energy from the blow is dispersed evenly throughout the sand, and channeled outward in all directions.

Kinda like how an arch works? The plates press into each other sideways confining the water?

(General question to all) I guess the problem that springs to my mind is, if the inner layers of the Earth are made of liquid water, how would it allow for shear waves in earthquakes (unless they're confined to the crust)?

juvenissun · Feb 28, 2009

AV1611VET said:
I don't know if it's technically called "floating", but water under extreme pressure could indeed hold the mantle up.

Take a test tube and fill it 3/4 full of water, then place a steel cork (or ball) in it that just fits.

Will the water hold the cork up?

Sure it will --- (unless the test tube bursts).

Take a spool from a roll of toilet paper and close one end off with just a piece of cellophane or plastic wrap.

Fill the tube 3/4 way with sand.

Place a plunger in the open end and whack the plunger with the palm of your hand.

What happens?

Nothing --- even though you'd expect the cellophane to burst and create a sandy mess on the floor --- nothing.

The energy from the blow is dispersed evenly throughout the sand, and channeled outward in all directions.

Hey, AV. You do have an excellent scientific mind. Good job. Join me for an NSF proposal?

juvenissun · Feb 28, 2009

Cabal said:
Kinda like how an arch works? The plates press into each other sideways confining the water?

(General question to all) I guess the problem that springs to my mind is, if the inner layers of the Earth are made of liquid water, how would it allow for shear waves in earthquakes (unless they're confined to the crust)?

Think about this: The rock contains diamond "had" "a lot of" water. This is a fact which a first-year graduate student in petrology will learn.

The idea of hydroplate can be justified with some modifications. For example, replace the "liquid water" with "OH", and replace the "are made of" by something like "having 1%". That may solve your (and Molar's) problems.

juvenissun · Feb 28, 2009

sacredsin said:
Link

Opinions please.

A very very good idea. This demonstrates how precious the Creation Science could be. It goes hundreds of years ahead of the current science.

AV1611VET · Feb 28, 2009

Cabal said:
Kinda like how an arch works? The plates press into each other sideways confining the water?

(General question to all) I guess the problem that springs to my mind is, if the inner layers of the Earth are made of liquid water, how would it allow for shear waves in earthquakes (unless they're confined to the crust)?

The water would be gone now.

AV1611VET · Feb 28, 2009

juvenissun said:
Hey, AV. You do have an excellent scientific mind.

juvenissun said:
Good job.

Thank you!

juvenissun said:
Join me for an NSF proposal?

What's an NSF proposal?

Cabal · Feb 28, 2009

juvenissun said:
Think about this: The rock contains diamond "had" "a lot of" water. This is a fact which a first-year graduate student in petrology will learn.

The idea of hydroplate can be justified with some modifications. For example, replace the "liquid water" with "OH", and replace the "are made of" by something like "having 1%". That may solve your (and Molar's) problems.

AV1611VET said:
The water would be gone now.

My mistake, I misunderstood the concept - I thought it was an entire layer of water, not underground reservoirs of water.

However, given the amount of water one would need to store underground in order to flood the entire planet, I'm unconvinced due to the effect the crust's pressure would have on it.

Hespera · Feb 28, 2009

QUOTE JUV

Think about this: The rock contains diamond "had" "a lot of" water. This is a fact which a first-year graduate student in petrology will learn.

The idea of hydroplate can be justified with some modifications. For example, replace the "liquid water" with "OH", and replace the "are made of" by something like "having 1%". That may solve your (and Molar's) problems///////QUOTE

Hespera sez>>>>>>>>>>>>

"The rock contains diamond "had" "a lot of" water. "

Sorry juv this is not something that anyone ever learned, not even you. Tthis is one of the weirdest things I have read on this forum.

Though "replace liquid water with OH" is a good contender. Maybe that is the weirdest thing ever. Zero meaning.

The 'hydroplate theory' requires a near total scientific illiteracy* and credulity. I really thought it was a parody when i first saw it on youtube. You could hardly design something more suited to discredit creationism and any of its followers.

* "The rock contains diamond "had" "a lot of" water. This is a fact which a first-year graduate student in petrology will learn. "

Hydroplate Theory, what is your opinion?

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