Meteorites: Acceptance Of Their Aerial Origin

[Mighty_Emperor]

This thread is being established to address the acceptance of rock falls as actual events - the classic and oft-cited example of damned facts being validated as scientific realities.

Tue 30 Mar 2004

Five-billion-year-old rock quarrymen didn't expect
IAN JOHNSTON

THERE was a rumble of thunder and then a bolt from the sky struck the earth with such force onlookers thought Judgment Day itself had come.

Scotland’s first recorded sighting of a meteorite in 1804 stunned workers at the High Possil Quarry in Glasgow.

But after scientists came to investigate the lump of curious black rock unearthed by workmen, it proved to be the final proof that rocks did indeed come from outer space.

Previously it had been thought meteor strikes were the result of stones thrown up by freak weather conditions like tornadoes or water-spouts or were the result of God’s wrath.

But a spate of observed meteor strikes at the turn of the 19th century, including the High Possil case, finally convinced scientists what was really happening.

A fragment of the meteorite, as old as the solar system itself at nearly five billion years, will go on display at Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum from Friday to celebrate the bicentenary.

It was the morning of 5 April, 1804, when a series of bangs was heard between Falkirk and Glasgow. A short time later, a smoking trail crashed into the ground at High Possil, witnessed by a group of workmen and other witnesses, including two boys and a dog.

The quarrymen found a hole about 18in deep and 15in wide, and at the bottom there was a black rock, which they threw aside as they had been expecting to find a cannonball.

But later a party of professors from the University of Glasgow, together with the landowner, interviewed the witnesses, and recovered parts of the stone.

It was subsequently examined by scientists in Scotland and England and recognised as a meteorite.

There had been previous falls in Yorkshire in 1795 and at l’Aigle in France in 1803, but early scientists who claimed stones did fall from the sky were dismissed as cranks.

Dr John Faithfull, the curator of geology at the Hunterian, said: "This was one of the very first meteorites that was known to be a meteorite. After the one in Yorkshire, one guy got obsessed with the idea but people thought he was mad. But after the ones in France and High Possil, it became accepted thunderbolts and everything else had nothing to do with it."

‘This particular kind of meteorite is one of the very oldest things on earth’
DR JOHN FAITHFULL

Dr Faithfull is examining whether there are tiny particles of material from before the formation of the solar system.

"This particular kind of meteorite is one of the very oldest things on earth. They are about the same age as the formation of the solar system and sometimes you can find tiny diamonds which are older even than the solar system."

Asteroids, the larger version of meteors, are now thought to have caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and earlier this month mankind had its closest known encounter with an asteroid when a 100ft-wide piece of rock came within 26,500 miles of the Earth.

A newspaper report from the time described how the impact of the Possil meteorite was witnessed by workmen, boys, a man up a tree and a dog. It was heard "to resemble four reports from the firing of cannon, afterwards the sound of a bell, or rather of a gong, with a violently whizzing noise".

The newspaper reported: "The dog, on hearing the noise, ran home, seemingly in a great fright. The [quarry] overseer, during the continuance of the noise, on looking up to the atmosphere, observed in it a misty commotion, which occasioned in him a considerable alarm. He called out to the man on the tree: ‘Come down, I think there is some judgment coming upon us’, and says that the man on the tree had scarcely got upon the ground, when something struck with great force ... splashing mud and water for about twenty feet around."

John Davies, of Edinburgh’s Royal Observatory, said the loud bangs in the sky could well have been caused by the meteor breaking the sound barrier.

"Huge amounts of material arrives from space every day. Most of it is very fine material that burns up in the atmosphere. But grapefruit-sized objects can survive and reach the ground," he said.

"This does happen fairly regularly, but a lot of it lands in the sea, in uninhabited areas or at night.

"No-one has ever been killed by a meteorite that we know about, but there was a lady in Alabama in the 1950s who was hit. She got a nasty bruise on her leg after one came through the roof."

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=363992004

 

[krakenten]

Once, the idea of a meteor provoked loud guffaws, scorn, and that peculiar self-rightous contempt so typical of the intellectual elite.

Jefferson once said, "Rocks cannot fall from the sky because there are no rocks in the sky!"

This might have come from the idea of the 'thunderstone'. Stone arrowheads and shark teeth were often called thunderstines, and indeed, to this day lightning bolts are sometimes drawn with a sort of triangular tip. This was known to be false.

In 1803, there was a fall of stones in France, which got the idea studied again. The answer?

Cthulhu!

 

[Cryptosausage]

I remember reading that the great French chemist, Antoine Levoisier once pronounced "There are no stones in the sky, therefore stones do not fall from the sky."

Searching for the quote, I found a reference in Book of the Damned, chapter 2 where the words above are written, but not as a quote, and a few lines later Levoisier is mentioned as having been on a committee that proved that a recently fallen stone had not, in fact, come from the sky but had been struck by lightning.

Am I conflating the words and the name? Or did Levoisier actually say these words (or similar)?

I would welcome any help in this.

Cheers to all,

Cryptosausage

 

[rynner2]

Quite a useful page here:

http://www.sott.net/article/238325-Scie ... Meteorites

'Age of Reason' and 'The Enlightenment', roughly within the 18th century, were terms used and cherished by those who believed in the power of mind to liberate and improve. Reviewing the experience in 1784, Immanuel Kant saw emancipation from superstition and ignorance as having been the essential characteristic of these times. Philosophers and scientists alike pursued these ideals with enthusiasm and vigour and especially so the Académie Française des Sciences, Europe's leading rational authority. To them may be attributed a strange anomaly that exists in the world today - in museums and collections there is scarcely a single specimen of meteorite that predates the year 1790.

The idea that stones can fall out of the sky was scornfully denounced by the Académie as an unscientific absurdity. Antoine Lavoisier, for example, the father of modern chemistry, told his fellow Academicians, "Stones cannot fall from the sky, because there are no stones in the sky!" The concept of meteorites was thus condemned as nothing but medieval illusions and old wives' tales. Embarrassed museums all over Europe, wishing to be seen to be part of this enlightened 'Age of Reason', hurriedly threw out their cherished meteorite collections with the garbage as humiliating anachronisms from a superstitious past.

Although the last two decades of the eighteenth century saw scientists such as Peter Pallas and Ernst Florens Chladni, risking ridicule by the scientific community through the serious investigation of meteorites, most scientists shared Isaac Newton's view that that no small objects could exist in the interplanetary space. An assumption that left no room for rocks or stones falling from the sky.

Farmers who came to the Académie with samples of meteorites were laughingly shown to the door and denounced as superstitious ignorant peasants. On the night of the 26th of April 1803 however, perceptions started to change. On that night the people of L'Aigle were rudely awoken from their dreams by the thunderous noise of more than 2000 rocks falling from the sky. This undeniable display of meteorites also woke up the Académie Française who were compelled to take notice. They appointed a commission to investigate the event, the result of which was finally a reluctant admission that stones could indeed fall from the sky. Museums, freed from the stigma of non-conformity , started creating meteorite collections once again.

No references are given, but the story is very widespread, and if it wasn't true then presumably the Académie Française and Lavoisier would have denied it.

 

[Cryptosausage]

Thank you for a speedy and most excellent reply.

CS.

 

[EnolaGaia]

This 2001 Fortean Times article provides a good overview of the 'meteor controversy', the acceptance of meteor impacts as actual occurrences, and what this 18th / 19th century shift may mean for Fortean studies.

Cosmic Debris
The story of how scientists came to accept the existence of meteors provides a good model for how the institutions of science face and deal with the problems of paranormal and strange phenomena, argues Mike Jay.
By Mike Jay
February 2001

In 1790, the idea that meteors actually fell from the sky was regarded as a superstitious delusion. By 1805, it was accepted by the scientific community as an indisputable fact. It ’s hard to think of any other paradigm shift which has ever taken place this quickly and conclusively. ...

As such,the meteor controversy is the most significant precedent for the work which thousands of researchers have undertaken on dozens of ‘parascientific’ subjects for the last hundred years or more. The inaugural address of the Society of Psychical Research in 1882 laid out its intention to “remove the scandal [of ]… the dispute as to the reality of these phenomena”; but over the last century, this “scandal” has both deepened and widened, spreading beyond ghosts and mediumship to telepathy, telekinesis, UFOs, ‘over-unity’ energy devices and dozens of other supposedly physical phenomena.

Given the spectacular lack of scientific acceptance of all of the above,it seems worth taking a step back to consider whether the kind of paradigm shift which is being pursued has ever actually happened.

And it’s here that the meteor controversy comes to our rescue:it is a bona fide example of this type of transition from scientific heresy to universal acceptance. This has, of course,not been lost on the parascientific community: believers in the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs, in particular, routinely quote the dogmatic nay-saying of the scientists of the 1790s who rubbished the idea of meteors having a cosmic origin, along with the deathless “they ’ll never get it off the ground ” pronouncements of the sceptics of heavier-than-air flight a century later.

But a careful autopsy of the meteor controversy shows that it’s not the clear precedent which UFO apologists like to believe. It’s a story full of paradoxes: collisions of the ancient world with the modern,of witness reports with prevailing theories, and both a triumph and an embarrassment for the practitioners of the emerging scientific method. ...

FULL STORY (From The Wayback Machine):
https://web.archive.org/web/2008021....com/features/articles/504/cosmic_debris.html