Rating: 
Summary: Philosophically flawed, yet enjoyable alternate read
Review: 10-Point Rating: (7.0)
In the first chapter, the author makes several mistakes that render most of his philosophical conclusions without base. His entire Meta-Model framework, though admirable in its scope and approach, is dependent upon nebulous understandings of "nothing" and (more importantly) "substance". What this prima materia actually is is never addressed, leaving the foundation off the subsequent house he manages to build. Furthermore, the author seems to waver between treating his "primary unit(s) of substance" as divisible or not: at one point he says they are sizeless (i.e. have zero size), at another point he says all matter is divisible. Since his "substance" can be none other than matter, the author engenders a contradiction. The more empirically based discussion which dominates the bulk of the book is much more enjoyable, although the Meta-Model is always lurking in the background. All in all, a nice alternative read in cosmology/astronomy.
Rating: 
Summary: Exciting conclusions, good writing, difficult to follow.
Review: From the back cover: "Tom Van Flandern is both an insider and an outsider. A professional astronomer for twenty-five years, he is well versed in the customs of mainstream science. On the other hand, after a long review of the assumptions underlying a large portion of received truth in astronomy and cosmology, he has come to a radical conclusion: much currently accepted theory is wrong..." This is a hard book to read for the layman with little background in science, whether you have a good vocabulary or not; whether you are bright-normal, or not. It is difficult to read because it requires of you that you think while you are reading. It requires of you that you read the same passage over more than once, and then try to visualize what the author is saying. It requires of you that you use all of your intelligence, and then perhaps decide after struggling with the concept that you will go on and see what else he has to say, without fully grasping what he has just said. The author is a very bright gentleman, that much is obvious. And, as far as I could follow him, I found his reasoning to be impeccable. And his results, his conclusions, I found to be exciting. I hope he is right. He questions Einstein, and uses Einstein's own theory to prove him in error, and he does it without depending upon arcane mathematical formulae. He uses plain language and diagrams that any bright layman, who reads carefully, can follow. But, I warn you, the territory into which you will be drawn is not for sissies. He is saying that the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe is nonsense. He is saying that the speed of light is not the fastest thing around: That gravity makes it look like a slowpoke. That lightspeed is not the limiting speed. He is saying that the universe is both infinitely old, and infinite in size. There is no end to it in space, and it had no beginning in time. It is neither expanding, nor is it due to collapse. Space and time are infinite, and there are only five dimensions with which we may measure: Three of space, one of time, and one of scale. He is saying that there was once a planet, "Planet X," between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, which exploded and is now the source of the asteroid belt and of the comets that, from time to time, invade our solar system. He is saying that space is filled, not only with a light carrying medium (shades of Ether!) but also with a smaller, faster, universal gravity medium (C-gravitons) which push the planets and their moons and stars together by bombarding them, rather than their being drawn together by some mysterious force, and he demonstrates it with deductive reasoning which is, to say the least, very persuasive. If you have any curiosity about these things, this is the book for you. You will find it exciting and challenging. If, on the other hand, you are content to leave such esoteric matters up to those who are smarter and better qualified, and would rather play computer games with your spare time, join the multitude!
Rating: 
Summary: Let's have fun
Review: Hard reading? Techno-babble? The people must have read the wrong book! Reader, don't be scared. If you are a devotee to the subject, this is the book for you. It is easy, straightforward reading, no math required. As for shaky philosophy, the author is faithfully reproducing Ernst Mach's propositions - and even a certain Einstein found his inspiration in Mach's lectures. Personally I have no bones to pick with what I read, but if I ever had the inclination of writing such a book, I certainly would leave out a few things. Van Flanders has a lot to talk about: "Faster than light motion in time is possible / Gravitation progresses faster than light / the physical universe has five and only five dimensions / it is infinite in extent in all five dimensions / there was no Big bang to start the universe / the universe is not expanding / the universal microwave radiation is of nearby origin / there are no black holes in the universe / quasars are associated with our own and nearby galaxies / galaxies are arranged in waves in an immense medium /gravitational shielding is possible / the classical description of quantum entities is incorrect / the Bell inequality in quantum physics should be violated / There is no "Oort Cloud" of comets / comets and asteroids are quite similar in nature / comets and asteroids are accompanied by satellites / a former major planet exploded between Mars and Jupiter / this explosion occurred just 3 million years ago / this explosion was the origin of comets and asteroids / this explosion may be connected with the origin of man / the great pyramids in Egypt are perhaps 9000 years old / artificial structures may exist on the surface of Mars / tidal forces on the sun and giant planets are significant / there may be a sunspot-planet link / solar eclipses are best viewed away from the centre line / Mercury was originally a moon of Venus / our Moon originated from the Pacific basin of the Earth / the Moon no longer shows us the same face it used to / the Martian moons are the survivors of a great many moons/ a great rift on Mars is the impact site of a former moon / Jupiter's Red Spot is a floating impact remnanat / Saturn's rings are only a few million years old / Solar system bodies have received black carbon deposits / the moons of Neptune were violently disrupted / Pluto and Charon are escaped moons of Neptune / Another undiscovered planet probably exists beyond Pluto" Not that I or anybody has to agree to all this, but Van Flanders propositions his hypothesis as a true scientist, he is not preaching gospel. He deserves a fair hearing. If I try to imagine how his own peers may view this rich enchilada - oh well, at present the author must be living in the remotest Siberia. It's not about being right or wrong, and the author may very well be more often right than wrong, but it doesn't add much credibility where it counts most for a man of his qualifications. One has to hand it to him, Van Flandern has courage! But for us lay people and lesser mortals, this book is a fun ride, this much I can promise you.
Rating:
Summary: An Astronomical Bestseller!
Review: I have read this book twice already! For those of you interested in cosmology (the way the solar system and universe work) then this book is great. Tom Van Flandern cleary and succinctly puts forward his meta-model of the universe in a way that puts mainstream astronomy to shame. I have always believed that things can be logically explained and make sense in the cosmos around us. This book does just that. He makes a killer argument about an infinite universe in both time and scale, pointing out many reasons as to why the big-bang is a failure. Van Flandern discusses the speed of gravity by using the sun-earth-moon system to show that gravity must be travelling far quicker than the speed of light. I like how this book embraces many aspects of astronomy all in one. Best of all is his discussion regarding the basis of science, in that we should think of new models based on the existing evidence as opposed to fitting evidence to an old model. This book is a very worthwhile read and will open your eyes to what mainstream astronomy has been keeping from you.
Rating:
Summary: Asking Questions
Review: I read the first edition of Tom Van Flandern's book and it's excellent--a well written and absorbing work! While you may not agree with everything the author proposes (at least for now), you'll realize just how much intensive research and mathematical wizardy went into the author's exploration of current cosmology! Van Flandern is probably 100 years ahead of his time in the field of astronomy, especially in the re-examination of ideas like planetary breakups, the birth of the Earth-Moon system, and the origin of tektites. The author is a neo Kepler for the New Millennium, notably when it comes to rethinking science's blind faith in our present paradigm of the universe and solar system. (Especially fascinating is Van Flandern's discussion about the origins of asteroids and comets. How is it the majority of scientists have come to accept a concept like that of the so-called "Oort Cloud" based on little evidence?) If you don't mind having your scientific be! ! lief system rattled a bit, then get this book and read it!
Rating:
Summary: The best explanation of Very Long Period comets.
Review: If you want to know the very best explanation of the origin of the Very Long Period comets, this is where you will find it. If you combine the section on the Missing Planet, with a pile of album cover art by Roger Dean (on the YES album covers like Yessongs) you will know more about the history of the solar system then most professional astronomers. Is this hyperbole? No. Van Flandern is right about the origin of comets, but given the mindset of the astronomical community, protons will decay before they admit it.
Van Flandern is akin to A.C. Clarke in one way: Someone once said about Clarke that "if he had stuck to any one hypothesis, he would have been a dangerous man." Like Clarke, Van Flandern works many hypotheses. And if it is permissible to have a favorite Clarke book or theme, it is certainly also permissible to extol the virtures of DM,MP&NC on the basis of the MP&NC material alone.
Science will advance at four times the current pace when they stop ejecting people like Halton Arp and TVF from their ranks.
Rating: 
Summary: TECHNO-BABBLE
Review: This book sounded so interesting I couldn't wait to order a copy. I am not a scientist or mathematician but I truly enjoy reading scientific books, articles and watching science programs on the television. This book started loosing me in the self-ingratiating preface and by the first chapter I hadn't a clue what the author was droning on about. A PhD writes this book for people with PhD's. The author needs to come down off his high intellectual horse and put his fascinating and intriguing ideas in layman's terms that the common man can understand. The illustrations are unremarkable and uninformative. I can pick my way with great interest through a book like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History Of Time. I toughly enjoyed Issac Asimov's The Collapsing Universe and Walter Alvarez's T.rex And The Crater of Doom. They were written with the common man in mind. I cannot challenge Van Flandern,s ideas but I can take issue with his writting style. This book is just tedious techno-babble an impossible read. Save it for the university classroom. Give it a pass, wait for the Readers Digest condensed version, buy it if you need a sleep aid or better yet wait for the movie.
Rating:
Summary: Plenty of dubious ideas
Review: This book sure has some wild hypotheses! But I think they tend to show not imagination and courage but poor intuition.
Let's start with Van Flandern's idea that gravity propagates much faster than c, the speed of light. That is, does the Sun pull you towards where it is, or to where it was 8 minutes ago? I think Newton might well have agreed with Van Flandern's argument that were gravity to propagate at c, planetary orbits around the Sun would be gravitationally damped and unstable, and the Solar System would not exist.
But this argument is false. It is the same for electromagnetism. A charge moving at constant speed pulls you towards where it will be when the field reaches you. A charge moving with constant velocity does not radiate: the lowest order radiation term is the dipole term, corresponding to an accelerating charge. And gravitational radiation depends not on the dipole term, but the typically much smaller quadrupole term, which can become significant for a body with a changing acceleration.
Examinations of binary pulsars have indicated that a quadrupole moment does indeed lead to a gravitational damping and orbit decay. Not only that, the decay is consistent to within 1% of the speed of gravity equaling c. I find that convincing. Moreover, near-occultation observations of quasars may support this conclusion as well. And on top of that, a speed of gravity greater than c would transmit a signal backwards in time.
Van Flandern argues that there is nothing special about c, given that we use electromagnetic waves to measure time and length. He's wrong. As Swiatecki and others have illustrated, the constancy of c is a consequence of the local spacetime manifold. Imagine a number of very thin boards with identical rectilinear grids and identical synchronized stopwatches fixed at all gridpoints on all boards. Now let the boards slide around at varying speeds and directions. Then smash one of the watches on the top board so hard that it stops all the watches directly beneath it. Later, smash another one the same way. You'll quickly discover the differential interval between spacetime events, and that will give you the value of c. And we've found c without any reference to light or to Maxwell's equations.
Van Flandern supports the "fission" theory for the origin of the Moon, rather than the "giant impact" theory. While that's still possible, evidence is leaning heavily away from his idea.
Now, what about a recently exploding planet creating the asteroid belt? Well, sure, there are many asteroid orbits that are unstable over really long times. But there's plenty of evidence that some asteroids have been around since the beginning of the solar system, and that what we're seeing is simply lots of collisions, not explosions. Moreover, a recent explosion, without a clear mechanism no less, is a little provincial as a theory.
The funny part is that there are some wild phenomena, such as planetary migrations, especially in other stellar systems, which do bear plenty of investigation. We don't need to start by indulging in arbitrary and dubious speculations: explaining what's right in front of us is exciting enough!
I think Van Flandern's comments about the "face on Mars" once again showed poor intuition. That "face" looked awfully strongly like something with a natural origin.
Van Flandern does not like the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which he feels disregards the need for an underlying reality behind all the concepts. I think this actually may be a fair criticism, but there are alternative formulations of Quantum Mechanics which avoid such problems.
Finally, Van Flandern goes after the Big Bang theory of the origin of our Universe. I think that's a mistake. The evidence is overwhelming that the Universe was once much smaller and much, much hotter. We see that from the Hubble expansion, from the 2.7 K blackbody radiation, and most important, from the helium percentages in the visible universe corresponding to Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Complaining about the beryllium percentage is very poor intuition indeed: we'd still have that small, hot universe just as the Big Bang says. He'd have been better off attacking the Inflationary models of the early universe: these are still fair game.
Um, it could be that the accelerating expansion of the universe is heading towards a singularity (called the "Big Rip") in a finite time. Perhaps in a few billion years, spacetime will reach this. In the final million years, the galaxies would disperse, including our Milky Way. In the final months, our solar system would fly apart. In the final hours, the Earth would disintegrate, as gravity would no longer bind it together. At the end, all particles would explode as well. If you like wild ideas, this one is far more realistic than most of what Van Flandern proposes.
Rating:
Summary: Brand new thinking about timeless astronomical issues
Review: Tom Van Flandern's book adds a new dimension to cosmology--not only does it present a novel approach to timeless issues, it stands up to the closest scientific scrutiny. The author has a proven track record and top notch credentials, so when he begins his hard-hitting critique of the status quo it's a breathtaking read, for laymen and scientists alike. Let's be honest about the Big Bang Theory--even the most respected scientists today will readily admit it is full of holes. But it takes a new look, like Tom Van Flandern's book, to explain not only why the theory is wrong but what to substitute in its place. This is a significant book and if you read it you will get a thrill just as those who read Copernicus and Galileo must have gotten a thrill to realize they were reading about the future of science. Read it--you won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: One thing I know to be true is that Theory is not Reality
Review: Van Flandern points out that Oort himself views the mechanism of the Oort Cloud to be highly dubious. VF points out numerous ways in which VF's theories can be disproven, and states his openness to being proved wrong if by doing so, more truth is uncovered. One of his recurring themes is that we should always be willing to re-examine, re-evaluate and rescind theories which do not accord with observations rather than the more typical approach of the mainstream which is to either throw out the aberrant observations or devise ever more twisted additions to the status quo to accomodate the data which doesn't fit. Not just in Astronomy but in all things we should be open to new and challenging information, and willing to change our cherished beliefs if they are obviously at odds with reality. The mainstream probably considers VF a wacko, but then again, that's what they thought of Galileo.
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