Word: alfven
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Neither the "steady-state" nor "expanding" universe theory fully satisfies Swedish Physicist Hannes Alfven. What bothers him is that both ignore the existence of antimatter. "It seems logically unsatisfactory," writes Alfvén in the current Reviews of Modern Physics, "that cosmological theories should be based on the assumption that the universe contains only matter." Recent subatomic-physics research has disclosed the existence of an antiparticle for every particle of ordinary matter, he says, thus there is every reason to assume that half the celestial objects in our universe are made of antimatter...
...Alfven's theory reaches back to a time when the moon was not yet a satellite of earth, when it soared around the sun like any other planet on its own independent orbit. Trouble was, its orbit took the moon near its large neighbor, the earth. In Icarus, International Journal of the Solar System, Alfven suggests that eventually the moon ventured too close and was captured by the earth's gravity...
...along a mildly deformed circle. Such a course would be explainable for a satellite that was moving in the opposite direction from the earth's rotation at the time it was captured. But the moon now revolves in the same direction, and to prove his theory correct. Dr. Alfven somehow had to account for the change...
When the moon was first captured. Dr. Alfven believes, it did indeed curve through space in the opposite direction from the earth's rotation. And, as expected of such a satellite, it drew gradually closer to the earth. Its orbit became circular. About 2.5 billion years ago, the earth-moon system passed through a violent crisis. The approaching moon exerted more and more gravitational pull on the earth's oceans. Tides miles high swept around the globe in a few hours. At last the moon reached Roche's limit,* the closest that a satellite can come...
...support this fast-spinning theory, Alfven points out that the earth's continents are made of comparatively light granitic rock that floats on the heavy basalt underlying the oceans. The basalt, he says, may be the original earth. But the buoyant granite of the continents has about the same density as the moon and nearly equals the moon's present mass. He suspects that it is moon-stuff that dived to earth through the fiery atmosphere 2.5 billion years...