Russia’s Invisible Genius

Any illiterate fool can reel off the name of Albert Einstein, even though his convoluted theories of relativity sought to explain how gravity can be propagated through a vacuum. Yet for the past almost 70 years we have known that the universe is permeated by ionized gas plasma, which means none of Einstein’s pretentious and purely imaginary theorizing was necessary in the first place. Space is not a vacuum. And it was never a vacuum. Therefore, we do not need to imagine an unvarying speed of light at 186,000 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) that cannot be either accelerated or decelerated by any other force – which is an inherent absurdity to the entire realm of physics in any case.

In contrast to the absurdly deified Einstein, the name of Sergei Konstantinovich Vsekhsvyatsky, 1905-1984, and director of Kiev Observatory from 1939 to 1952, hardly drips off the tongue. To add to the confusion, in Ukraine, where much of his work was carried out, he is remembered and referred to as Serhiy Vsekhsvyatsky. The Universe Space tech website rightly describes Vsekhsvyatsky as a “an outstanding popularizer of science and a world-renowned comet researcher, author of the most complete comet catalog of his time. He was a man who was not afraid to put forward strange and unexpected scientific hypotheses, which were later confirmed by spacecraft studies.”

Although a couple of his extraordinarily prescient papers were recorded more than a half a century ago in published Harvard University indexes, he has always been totally unknown in the Western World. Unlike the famous catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky, Vseskhvyatsky has never even risen to the level of being endlessly debunked, ridiculed, slandered and falsified. Quite simply no one has ever heard of him. Even in his native Russia, and in Ukraine where he worked for much of his long and prominent professional life, Vsekhsvyatsky remains a virtual unknown.

Yet by the 1950s, Vsekhsvyatsky had deduced purely through the tedious old technique of a quarter century of careful observations that comets did not originate in a vast belt no one had ever seen of millions of them out beyond the orbits of Neptune or Pluto. He had proven most if not all of them must have erupted from within the giant gas planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. See, for example, S.K. Vsekhsvyatsky, “New Works Concerning the Origin of Comets and the Theory of Eruption,” Publications of the Kiev Observatory, 5 (1953), Pages 3-57. Vsekhsvyatsky also boldly departed from both Newton and Einstein in declaring that the gas giant planets were not peaceful and inert but pulsating with violent energy and with dramatic chemical and physical and even electrical processes regularly erupting and interacting within them.

As Soviet astronomer E.M. Drobyshevski acknowledged back in December 1979, “in the past 50 years, only Vsekhsvyatsky has actively considered modern volcanism on planets, in particular on Moon-like bodies. He proceeded from the concept of eruptive origin of comets.” The early Voyager missions to Jupiter half a century ago provided first confirmation of this. And since over the past 20 years, US and European missions to Saturn have discovered similar massive atmospheric and sub-atmospheric upheavals particularly in an enormous rotational cyclone around Saturn’s North Pole that goes at least 200 miles down in the atmosphere and may be caused by dramatic processes far deeper.

Vsekhsvyatsky also successfully predicted that even the longest duration comets would only remain brilliantly luminescent over two or three centuries at the most. He correctly predicted therefore that the eagerly anticipated return of Halley’s Comet in 1986 would prove to be a huge cosmic disappointment. And it was. He explained that older claimed observations of them, such as claims that Halley’s Comet was already a powerful vision in the sky 1,800 years ago, were just imaginary back-projections when other comets or cosmic objects entirely were being seen. In addition, Vsekhsvyatsky predicted 60 to 80 years before it could be proved that comets would be found to be largely composed of hydrocarbons and to be hot rather than cold ice balls that were composed of frozen water. Every mission and close encounter by unmanned spacecraft to comets in our Space Age has entirely confirmed these predictions too.

Who was this extraordinary man? He was an ethnic Russian. He was the son of Orthodox Church priest. He himself was a passionate scientist. He was active in the field from 1922 for more than 60 years until his death in 1984. He was the founder of the Kiev Planetarium. Yet it remains to this day virtually impossible to get any of his seminal papers in English. I was first introduced to boot-legged copies of a couple of them at a catastrophism conference at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada half a century ago in May 1974.

Yet today Vsekhsvyatsky remains totally ignored and unknown in the West. There are many reasons for this. First, Vsekhsvyatsky was Russian. He did all his work during his long half century and more career on the wrong side of the Cold War for Western scholars. Perhaps most important of all, his name was so long and difficult for Westerners to remember that none of them ever bothered to do so – including Einstein. But in the worst of all his terrible sins, Vsekhsvyatsky carefully amassed his meticulous measurements of the orbits, patterns of luminescence and periods of return of thousands of comets. And he came to conclusions that were anathema to Western myths about the nature of the Solar System that are now 300 years old.

For ever since Isaac Newton in the so-called Age of Enlightenment at the start of the 18th century, Western liberal uniformitarian romantics masquerading as scientists have clung to their beloved fantasy of a perfect clockwork university of unwavering predictability and regularity. However, starting in the early 1930s, Vsekhsvyatsky, over the decades, slowly, steadily and methodically amassed the most exhaustive analytical data base of the orbits and recurring appearances of comets that has ever been assembled. And from this enormous treasure trove of data, he drew a series of impeccably documented conclusions.

First, the orbits of most short-term comets clearly showed they almost all originated from within the four gas-giants planets of the Solar System – Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. This in turn meant that the four gas giant planets had to be immensely energetic, filled with rotational energies. Among the handful of Western individuals who ever bothered to pay any attention to Vsekhsvyatsky’s work at all, his concept that comets originated by volcanic or eruptive processes from the heart of the gas giant planets appeared simply absurd. Where could all that energy come from and be generated? Today, of course, we know – or rather, ought to know – that Vsekhsvyatsky, like so many other geniuses, was simply generations or centuries ahead of his time.

Trillions of electrical discharges occur continually in the upper atmospheres of the gas giant planets – and in the outer corona sphere of the Sun itself – at temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius. And these are more than capable of smashing hydrogen atoms together to form far denser ones by nuclear fusion processes – and the heavier elements thus created must then inevitably sink to augment the dense rocky cores of these planets. Once the cores reach critical mass – they would then fission out into space, incandescently hot and with long trails of flaming gases. In other words, comets.

Vsekhsvyatsky never got as far as exploring the concept of fusion processes comparable to those in the outer layers of the Sun’s atmosphere triggered by endless electric discharges to create the dense elements that were later erupted from growing and unstable planetary cores. He only referred to “volcanic processes” at work within the gas giant planets. But he pointed the way ahead when no one else did, and his own work was never based on any speculation whatsoever. It was all derived from the enormous data base of cometary observations that he compiled during his long career – the greatest ever made.

Now recall that even through the 1950s and well beyond, it was an Article of Scientific Faith that all comets were cold, that there was no carbon element in any of them, that they were composed of snow and ice-balls and that they all came from a great big, slowly rotating belt called the Kuiper Belt, after the self-promoting Netherlands-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper who imagined the idea. Certainly, through the 1980s, this concept was still universally believed, and the myth of the Kuiper Belt still holds true to this day though no hard evidence for it even now has ever been found. And of course, beyond the imaginary Kuiper Belt supposedly lies the realm of the wondrous Oort Cloud, named after yet another enterprising Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, which is also more mythical than the Land of Oz. A handful of asteroids and comets have been recorded outside the orbit of Neptune, and they were duly named the Kuiper Belt in 1992. Where tens of thousands or even millions of comets that Kuiper and Oort imagined had been thrown off by a gently rotating gas cloud that created the Solar System, that has never been found and simply does not exist.

It is striking that Kuiper and Oort lived in comfort and acclaim as the exact contemporary for the hard-working and outside the Soviet Union totally ignored Vsekhsvyatsky. Yet Vsekhsvyatsky lived to be 79, long and apparently happy life with his wife, children and many colleagues and students. Photographs show a determined bulldog of a man.

By all accounts Vsekhsvyatsky was meticulous and gentlemanly in all his scientific presentations. But he never backed away from a heretical or controversial conclusion once he was satisfied that the evidence proved it. He was the very model of an Aristotelian and empirical scientist, deducing his general conclusions from an enormous mass of meticulous confirmed and cross-checked evidence. And he refused to let fear, prejudice or the stranglehold of old false ideas get in his way.

Millions of close-minded and complacent bigots across the entire English-speaking world will without doubt continue to revel in their ignorance about the true nature of the Solar System and Universe in which we live that Vsekhsvyatsky revealed. However, the rest of us need not remain so contemptible and blind.