Charles Fort

“ The astronomers like to tell audiences of just what gases are burning in an unimaginably remote star, but have never reasonably made acceptable, for instance, that this earth is round, to start with. Of course I do not mean to say that this, or anything else, can be positively proved, but it is depressing to hear it said, so authoritatively, that the round shadow of this earth upon the moon proves that this earth is round, whereas records of angular shadows are common, and whereas, if this earth were a cube, its straight sides would cast a rounded shadow upon the convex moon. ”

“ Upon the night of November 13-14, 1833, occurred the most sensational celestial spectacle of the nineteenth century: for six hours fiery meteors gushed from the heavens, and were visible along the whole Atlantic coast of the United States.
One supposes that astronomers do not pound the ground with their heads, and presumably they do not screech, but they have feelings just the same. They itched. Here was something to formulate. When he hears of something new and unquestionable in the sky, an astronomer is diseased with ill-suppressed equations. Symbols persecute him for expression. ”

“ Thirteen pages of errors in one standard astronomical work are reassuring; there is a likeable fallibility here that should make for better relations. If the astronomers were what they think they are, we might as well make squeaks of disapproval against Alpine summits. As to astronomers who calculate positions of planets—of whom he was one—Newcomb, in Reminiscences of an Astronomer, says—“The men who have done it are therefore, in intellect, the select few of the human race—an aristocracy above all others in the scale of being.” ”

“ Sounds that have roared in the sky, and their vibrations have shaken down villages—if these be the voices of Development, commanding that opinions shall change, we shall learn what will become of the Proctors and their “absolute demonstrations.” Lights that have appeared in the sky—that they are gleams upon the armament of Marching Organization. ”

“ If this denial that the calculi have place in gravitational astronomy be accepted, the astronomers lose their supposed god; they become an unfocussed priesthood; the stamina of their arrogance wilts. We begin with the next to the simplest problem in celestial mechanics: that is the formulation of the inter-actions of the sun and the moon and this earth. ”

“ If someone else should be convinced that a mistake has been made, and that the mountain is really Pike’s Peak, he has only to climb Pike’s Peak and prove that the most virtuous of all lands was once the Holy Land. The meaning that I read in the whole subject is that, in this Dark Age that we’re living in, not even such rudimentary matters as the shape of this earth have ever been investigated except now and then to support somebody’s theory, because astronomers have instinctively preferred the remote and the not so easily understandable and the safe from external inquiry. ”

“ SOUTHERN plantations and the woolly heads of negroes pounding the ground—cries in northern regions and round white faces turned to the sky—fiery globes in the sky—a study in black, white, and golden formations in one general glow. ”

“ That upon the wings of a super-bat, he broods over this earth and over other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to tip—a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. ”

“ When a comet is predicted to return, that means faith in the Law of Gravitation. It is Newtonism that comets, as well as planets, obey the Law of Gravitation, and move in one of the conic sections. When a comet does not return when it “should,” there is no refuge for an astronomer to say that planets perturbed it, because one will ask why he did not include such factors in his calculations, if these phenomena be subject to mathematical treatment. ”

“ But every consciousness that we have of needs, and all hosts, departments, and sub-divisions of data that indicate the possible requital of needs are opposed—not by the orthodoxy of the common Puritans, but by the Puritans of Science, and their austere, disheartening, dried or frozen orthodoxy. ”

“ In the Astronomical Register, 15-186, there are two diagrams by Flammarion: one is the orbit of the companion, as computed by Auwers; the other is the orbit, according to a mean of many observations. They do not conform fairly well. They do not conform at all.
I am now temporarily accepting that Flammarion and the other observing astronomers are right, and that the writers like Proctor, who do not say that they made observations of their own, are wrong, though I have data for thinking that there is no such companion-star. ”

“ They went on explaining and computing, year in and year out, and the planet Uranus kept on going somewhere else. Then they conceived of a powerful perturbing force beyond Uranus—so then that at the distance of Uranus the sun is not so dominant—in which case the effects of Saturn upon Uranus and Uranus upon Saturn are not so negligible—on through complexes of inter-actions that infinitely intensify by cumulativeness into a black outlook for the whole brilliant system. The palæo-astronomers calculated, and for more than fifty years pointed variously at the sky. ”

“ Stoney, instead of predicting failure of the Leonids to appear, advise watch for them several hours later than had been calculated.
I conceive of the astronomers’ fictitious paradise as malarchitectural with corrupted equations, and paved with rotten symbols. Seeming pure, white fountains of formal vanities—boasts that are gushing from decomposed triumphs. We shall find their furnishings shabby with tarnished comets. We turn expectantly to the subject of comets; or we turn cynically to the subject. We turn maliciously to the subject of comets. ”

“ Their ideal is Death, or approximate death, warmed over occasionally only enough to fringe with uniform, decorous icicles—from which there will be no escape, if, for the living and sinful and adventurous there be not San Salvadors somewhere else, a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance, coasts of sky-continents. ”

“ If silence be the only true philosophy, and if every positive assertion be a myth, we should easily find requital for our negative preferences.
Prof. Otto Struve was one of the highest of astronomic authorities, and the faithful attribute triumphs to him. Upon March 19, 1873, Prof. Struve announced that he had discovered a companion to the star Procyon. That was an interesting observation, but the mere observation was not the triumph. Some time before, Prof. Auwers, as credulous, if not jocular, as Newton and Leverrier and Adams, had computed the orbit of a hypothetic companion of Procyon’s. ”

“ Well, for instance, that it is this earth that moves, though the sun seems to, by the same illusion by which to passengers on a boat, the shore seems to move, though it is the boat that is moving. Apply this reasoning to the moon. The moon seems to move around the earth—but to passengers on a boat, the shore seems to move, whereas it is the boat that is moving—therefore the moon does not move. ”

“ An earth that rotates and revolves is simpler to conceive of than is a stationary earth with a rigid composition of stars, swinging around it, stars kept apart by some unknown substance, or inter-repulsion. But all those who think that simplification is a standard to judge by are referred to Herbert Spencer’s compilations of data indicating that advancing knowledge complicates, making, then, complexity, and not simplicity, the standard by which to judge the more advanced. ”

“ Because, if, in this existence of ours, there is no prestige higher than that of astronomic science, and, if that seeming of substantial renown has been achieved by a composition of bubbles, what of anything like soundness must there be to all lesser reputes and achievements?
Let three bodies inter-act. There is no calculus by which their inter-actions can be formulated. ”

“ Nobody can give good attention to the data, if diverting his mind is consciousness, altogether respectful, of the scientists who say that there are no other physical worlds except planets, millions of miles away, distances that conceivable vessels could not traverse. I should like to let loose, in an opening bombardment, the data of the little black stones of Birmingham, which, time after time, in a period of eleven years, fell obviously from a fixed point in the sky, but such a release, now, would be wasted. ”

“ In all minds not convinced that earnest and devoted falsifiers are holding back Development, the story, if remembered at all, will soon renew its fictitious lustre. We are centers of tremors in a quaking black jelly. A bright and shining delusion looks like beaconed security. ”

“ That the first part of a receding vessel to disappear should be the lower part may be only such an illusion of perspective as that by which railroad tracks seem to dip toward each other in the distance. ”

“ That it is within the power of anybody, who does not know a hyperbola from a cosine, to find out whether the astronomers are led by a cloud of rubbish by day and a pillar of bosh by night—
If, by the magic of his mathematics, any astronomer could have pointed to the position of Neptune, let him point to the planet past Neptune. According to the same reasoning by which a planet past Uranus was supposed to be, a Trans-Neptunian planet may be supposed to be. Neptune shows perturbations similar to those of Uranus. ”

“ Every now and then, somebody announces that he has solved the Problem of the Three Bodies, but it is always an incomplete, or impressionistic demonstration, compounded of abstractions, and ignoring the conditions of bodies in space. ”

“ He had at least heard of the planet Venus, because in the year 1882 he published a paper upon indications that Venus has an atmosphere. Largely because of an observation, or an announcement, of his, occurred the climax of Leverrier’s fiascos: prediction of an intra-Mercurial planet that did not appear when it “should” appear. My suspicion is that astronomers pardonably, but frailly, had it in for Lescarbault, and that in the year 1891 came an occurrence that one of them made an opportunity. ”

“ Every one of Barclay’s observations has something to support it. All conventional representations of Jupiter show encirclements by strings of rotundities that we are told are cloud-forms, but, in the Jour. B. A. A., Dec. 1910, is published a paper by Dr. Downing, entitled “Is Jupiter Humpy?” suggesting that various phenomena upon Jupiter agree with the idea that there are protuberances upon the planet. A common appearance, said to be an illusion, is Saturn as an oblong, if not mushroom-shaped: see any good index for observations upon the “square-shouldered aspect” of Saturn. ”

“ The astronomers explained. I don’t know what the mind of an astronomer looks like, but I think of a fizzle with excuses revolving around it. A writer in the American Journal of Science, 2-9-442, explains excellently. It seems that, when the comet failed to return, Mr. Barber, of Etwell, again went over the calculations. He found that, between the years 1556 and 1592, the familiar attractions of Jupiter and Saturn had diminished the comet’s period by 263 days, but that something else had wrought an effect that he set down positively at 751 days, with a resulting retardation of 488 days. ”

“ Nevertheless I am searching for some wider expression that will rationalize all of us—conceiving that what we call irrationality is our view of parts and functions out of relation to an underlying whole; an underlying something that is working out its development in terms of planets and acids and bugs, rivers and labor unions and cyclones, politicians and islands and astronomers. ”

“ If the basic fallacies, or the absence of base, in every specialization of thought can be seen by the units of its opposition, why then we see that all supposed foundations in our whole existence are myths, and that all discussion and supposed progress are the conflicts of phantoms and the overthrow of old delusions by new delusions. ”

“ NEVERTHELESS I sometimes doubt that astronomers represent especial incompetence. They remind me too much of uplifters and grocers, philanthropists, expert accountants, makers of treaties, characters in international conferences, psychic researchers, biologists. The astronomers seem to me about as capitalists seem to socialists, and about as socialists seem to capitalists, or about as Presbyterians seem to Baptists; as Democrats seem to Republicans, or as artists of one school seem to artists of another school. ”

“ Leverrier calculated that the hypothetical planet was at a distance from the sun, within the limits of 35 and 37.9 times this earth's distance from the sun. The new planet was found in a position said to be 30 times this earth's distance from the sun. The discrepancy was so great that, in the United States, astronomers refused to accept that Neptune had been discovered by means of calculation: see such publications as the American Journal of Science, of the period. ”

“ Not the strongest; not the cleverest—
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.
'Fitness' then, is only another name for 'survival.' ”

“ It will be important to us that the astronomers shall not be less unfortunate in their pronouncements upon motions of the stars than they have turned out to be in other respects. Especially disagreeable to us is the doctrine that stars are variable because dark companies revolve around them; also we prefer to find that nothing fit for somewhat matured minds has been determined as to stars with light companions that encircle them, or revolve with them. ”