Hubbard the Scientist
by Chris Owen
| From | Chris Owen <chriso@lutefisk.demon.co.uk> |
|---|---|
| Subject | More gloriously daft scientific howlers |
| Date | 1998/10/01 |
| Msg-ID | <8e0h0LA$f+E2EwHg@lutefisk.demon.co.uk> |
| Newsgroups | alt.religion.scientology, sci.physics |
L. Ron Hubbard claimed to be "one of the first nuclear physicists in the United States" but he perpetrated some of the funniest and silliest scientific howlers I've ever seen. Here's another priceless batch, showing Hubbard's mastery of physics. Feel free to demolish, ridicule etc. at will.
It's hard to beat Hubbard's howlers in Battlefield Earth — OK, it's fiction, but it has the worst science of any science fiction book ever written. For example:
a spaceship has a "slight mark" where an atomic bomb hit it;
the baddies have a completely different periodic table, with completely different elements;
my favourite, this one: electrolysis involves lumps of metal travelling through a solid wire and passing out the other end.
Let's face it: he was profoundly ignorant of even basic science and he was a grossly lazy researcher. Mind you, it's hard to beat the statements he makes in his lectures on radiation (later compiled into the book All About Radiation):
Hubbard on ionizing radiation
"You know, [radiation] kills the human body very, very dead, but it'll go through a sixteen foot wall! A gamma ray'll go through a wall, very easily. How does this hurt the body? Nobody can tell you. A wall can't stop a gamma ray, but a body can. And we get down to our number one medical question. Gamma rays go through walls but don't go through bodies … I can tell you, fortunately, what is happening here. Resistance! The wall doesn't resist and the body does. The gamma ray does not really settle in the body. It goes on through, but its passage creates some kind of sensation which, if too recurrent, is resisted on the part of the cells of the body."
"Today we throw a few rays at somebody and tomorrow we throw a few rays at the same man … and all of a sudden he dies — as though he had been shot with a bullet. In other words, the effect of radiation is cumulative … With gamma … you get 300 Roentgen and then you get another 300 Roentgen and it doesn't matter if they're a year apart or three days apart — they add!"
[L. Ron Hubbard, "Radiation and the Scientologist", lecture of 13 April 1957]
Hubbard on quantum physics
"Radiation is either a particle or wavelength - these things become the fad or fashion …. One moment everybody says it is a wavelength and the next they say it is a particle. This has been going on since 1932."
[L. Ron Hubbard, "Radiation and the Scientologist", lecture of 13 April 1957]
Hubbard on atmospheric physics
"Nikolai Tesla also did certain ground wave experiments that demonstrate that radio waves, FM waves, any other type of waves that he could isolate at that time, will travel just as easily along the surface of the ground as they will travel through the air. In fact, air is a pretty good conductor…
"The bomb goes off in Australia, and a 360-degree sphere of ionosphere (which is up there not too far above your heads, not too many miles) flashes. In other words, the flash in Australia, the ionosphere flashes. People get a secondary kickback from the ionosphere just as though they were standing next to the bomb, don't you see?
"So you could say maybe a bomb burst down there in Australia and you get a momentary flash over the entirety of [the] Earth, don't you see? Something like that could act as a conductor. This has not been studied.
"Now, all America sits in front of television sets and those television sets exude, I am sorry to say, a considerable amount of radioactive material. It's not huge, you know, but it's enough so that people who have made a habit of watching TV … get the TV radiation."
[L. Ron Hubbard, "The Scale of Havingness", lecture of 29 Nov 1959]
Hubbard on stellar physics
"In my basic physics textbooks, to show you how opinions have changed, when I was at modern high school, they used to teach that the sun was combusting on hydrogen. There was an inexhaustible supply of hydrogen and they calculated the length of life of the sun on hydrogen, and this was very, very nice but it didn't work. Because if its length of life was calculated on hydrogen, then you would get a difference in the heat of the sun from day to day because it was burning out. This didn't happen, so the theory was eventually abandoned and people finally owned up and said that they didn't know why the sun kept on burning. It was only when nuclear physics became dominant in men's thinking that they've explained sunlight, and sunlight is occasioned by a continuous fission going on, on a sphere called the sun."
[L. Ron Hubbard, "Radiation and Scientology", lecture of 13 April 1957]
Hubbard on nuclear weapons
"The way you make an atomic bomb is very interesting … You take a piece of plutonium here and a piece of plutonium there and you put a stick between them, you see. You fix the back piece of plutonium so that it'll slide up and hit the front piece of plutonium when the stick hits something, and then you simply throw the stick. When the front piece of plutonium hits the ground, the back piece of plutonium hits the front piece of plutonium and it goes. And that's a bomb. And when it goes it releases a tremendous amount of gamma and many other items much too lengthy to catalogue."
[L. Ron Hubbard, "Radiation and the Scientologist", lecture of 13 April 1957]