Self-publishing to avoid peer review is now available to just about everyone. Indivisible Earth nicely demonstrates a lot of what can go wrong.
Indivisible Earth: Consequences of Earth's Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant, by J. Marvin Herndon, edited by Lynn Margulis. Published by Thinker Media. Available for Kindle for $3.99.
Reviewed by John Timmer.
Peer review is an inherently conservative process. New ideas are compared to what we think we already know and, if they don't match up well, then the ideas' proponents can be in for a very rough time. Those on the fringes of science, who may struggle for years to get a single paper published by a journal, will often paint peer review as a stifling process that does little more than enforce a mindless orthodoxy.
If you wanted to do an end-run on peer review and put your ideas out for public consideration, your options used to be pretty limited: pay a lot of money to self-publish a book that no one would buy.
Digital media has changed that. Web pages are cheap, and can make psedoscience seem very polished. (Just look at the Electric Universe site, where a bunch of "comparative mythologists" will try to convince you that gravity has little to do with the large-scale structure of the cosmos.). And, as Amazon (and later Apple) opened the door to self-published eBooks, anyone with an idea that isn't getting respect via peer review could now place it before the a large potential audience.
J. Marvin Herndon has done just that. Herndon is a physicist by training who, after spending time in the private sector, has turned his attention to planetary science. He has some ideas that, to put it mildly, are pretty fanciful. But, thanks to eBooks, he's now able to let those ideas float free of the burden of peer review. Indivisible Earth is one of several of the books Herndon has on offer, and its subtitle lays out why the scientific peerage might not greet it kindly: "Consequences of Earth's Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant."
The number of established scientific ideas Herndon would like to overthrow is staggering. Current models of planet formation (both rocky and gas giant)? Completely incompatible with Indivisible Earth. The formation of our Moon via collision? Presumably never happened (the Moon is never mentioned in the book). The composition of the Earth? We've got it all wrong. Plate tectonics? A big mistake. The mantle convection that drives the plates and volcanic hot spots like Hawaii? Doesn't exist. The plate motion that creates earthquakes? There is no plate motion, silly.
Oh, yes, and most of the Earth's uranium has sunk to the core, where it's acting as a massive reactor, powering the planet's magnetic field. Herndon doesn't think small.
The writing itself is fine, in that it's easy to follow these ideas. It's just that the scientific reasoning has gaps you could drive an aircraft carrier through. I'll give just a few examples.
At some point in the past, Herndon realized that certain measurements of the Earth's properties matched up well with those of a class of meteorites called enstatite chondrites. Therefore, he concludes, Earth must have formed by the aggregation of these materials. To back this up, he shows a graph of the properties of enstatite chondrites vs. ordinary chondrites.
But the graph itself makes one thing very obvious: ordinary chondrites, as their name implies, are much, much more common than enstatites. Suggesting the Earth somehow selectively aggregated from rare meteorites would, I would think, seem to demand some mechanism by which that selectivity took place. Herndon, apparently, considers mechanisms optional.
That's just warming up — he's still got all of plate tectonics to get rid of.
Current models of gas giant formation indicate that these giant planets require a rocky core with a mass about 20 times that of Earth's before they can start a runaway accumulation of gas. Rather significantly, the Kepler planet-hunting telescope has recently found empirical evidence that these models are correct: gas giants only seem to form when there's a lot of rocky material around. Herndon thinks the early Earth must have been part of a gas giant and, to get there, he's forced to rely on a model that was state-of-the-art in 1944. Everything we've learned since is simply ignored.
Once the Earth was at the center of a gas giant, Herndon thinks the intense pressure of the massive atmosphere compressed the gas giant's rocky core so that it shrunk to the point where its surface was completely covered by what we now call continental plates. In other words, the entire surface of our present planet was once much smaller, and all land mass.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of this, figuring out the radius of a sphere that would have the same surface area as our current land mass. It was only half the planet's present size. Using that radius to calculate the sphere's volume, it's possible to figure out the density (assuming a roughly current mass). That produced a figure six times higher than the Earth's current density — and about three times that of pure lead. I realize that a lot of the material in the Earth can be compressed under pressure, but I'm pretty skeptical that it can compress that much. And, more importantly, if Herndon wants to convince anyone that it did, this density difference is probably the sort of thing he should be addressing. He's not bothered; the idea that the continents once covered the surface of the Earth was put forward in 1933, and that's good enough for him.
To get rid of the gas, Herndon posits that our Sun went through what's called a T Tauri phase, where the process of gravitational collapse drives a strong stellar wind that could blast off the gas giant's atmosphere. But that phase often takes place before planet formation (half the T Tauri stars we know about still have protoplanetary disks). Did our own Sun go through this phase after planet formation was complete? Who knows — Herndon certainly doesn't feel compelled to provide any evidence.
With the gas gone and its pressure relieved, the Earth could expand, with the continents separating out as it did. This, for Herndon, creates the illusion of continental drift. The mid-ocean rifts? They're just cracks left over from this expansion. The subduction zones deep in the ocean? Same thing. The former subduction zones that have ended up being driven to the surface by tectonic action? Well, those would be hard to place within Herndon's model, so they never get mentioned.
There are so many issues like that that it's not even clear that Indivisible Earth belongs at Download the Universe —we're focused on science eBooks, and this clearly isn't part of the scientific process that most of us recognize. At the same time, crackpots and fringe ideas have been a part of the social activity we call science for so long that I suspect they predate the use of the term. In that way, the book could provide a valuable example: This is what crackpottery looks like, and shows why peer review is important.
It's also an interesting footnote in the history of fringe ideas. For reasons that aren't at all clear (given that she was ostensibly a biologist), the book was edited by the late Lynn Margulis. Margulis is rightly famous for taking a fringe idea — eukaryotic cells contain compartments that were once free-living cells — and, with the backing of data she and others generated, making it a central part of modern biology.
Armed with the prestige that she rightly earned, however, Margulis spent much of the rest of her career poking her thumbs in the eyes of the establishment that had given her a hard time, pushing forward fringe ideas even when they were obviously incompatible with data we already had. She suggested that HIV might not be infectious and pushed through a paper that suggested insects have an evolutionary history that's is impossible to square with what we know of their genomes. Her willingness to advance the clearly off-target ideas in Indivisible Earth is a classic example of Margulis in action, and provides an interesting case study in that sense.
She wasn't alone in helping Herndon, though, as the book is credited to a publisher, Thinker Media, Inc. As near as I can tell, Thinker has a nice Facebook page, but hasn't bothered to actually set up a company website yet (see update below). The company claims to provide various services to authors for a cut of the profits, rather than for a payment from the author, as is the case with traditional vanity presses.
If its business model has been updated for the digital age, the services the company provides haven't. On some levels, Indivisible Earth fails as an ebook. It's got a number of color diagrams and images, all of which have extensive captions. But its primary platform appears to be the Amazon Kindle, which means it really should be readable on a black-and-white e-ink screen. The diagrams are not, and their captions are displayed in a light grey that's nearly impossible to make out on the screens. I ended up having to download it onto my phone to complete the review.
Indivisible Earth is thus a bad ebook with bad scientific content. But for someone wanting a glimpse into what goes on at the far fringes of the scientific endeavor, it might be worth the low cost of entry.
UPDATE: Someone who works with Thinker Media informed me that they recently changed their domain name, and that the company's new site is up and running.
John Timmer spent 15 years doing scientific research before deciding he'd rather write about it. He's now the science editor of the technology news site Ars Technica. He received a Kindle on the day Amazon first introduced them, and has been following eBook and eReader technology ever since.
Jonathan Badger says:
This certainly sounds like a dreadful book, but you are conflating two very different kinds of gatekeepers — peer review, which only exists for academic papers, and the decision of traditional publishers to publish a book or not based in their opinion on whether it is profitable. Traditional publishers don’t really care if a book is crackpottery or not if they think it has a market (think of all the Creationist and New Age literature out there for sale in any Barnes & Noble).
twitter.com/AJCann says:
Not a problem. Well, not a problem with a little education. Post publication peer-review (such as your article above) sorts this out. Crackpottery pales into insignificance compared with the damage done by self-appointed gatekeepers delaying and blocking the progress of science and education, (a) based on the outmoded print model they were raised with, (b) for commercial gain.
Eperlste says:
Thanks for the thoughtful post.
I think honest brokers, which are most scientists in academia, aren’t trying to end run peer review. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that they’re trying to do an end-run around the artificial editorial gatekeeping that drives Impact Factor hyperinflation.
My Twitter feed alone is a miraculous sieve that lets in flecks of knowledge and keeps out most detritus. Filtration systems exist and will improve.
Self publish or perish!
Davidpeterhaugen says:
Please note that Thinker Media and Thinker Books are part of BestThinking, with websites here http://www.bestthinking.com/ and here http://store.bestthinking.com/default.aspx
Karl Bunker says:
Very interesting article. It got me to wondering about the psychology behind this sort of thing. The _followers_ (as opposed to originators) of fringe beliefs are generally ignorant folk who are unfamiliar with the processes of critical thought. But to explain the formation of “theories” like the one in this book, it seems some other mental mechanisms must be in place. Just as the book is an end run around peer review, the educated and presumably-mostly-rational author must be using some really interesting thought processes to make an end run around his own critical-thought capabilities.
David Whitbeck says:
An isolated example is not strong evidence of anything. Peer review is vital for science, but extremely overpriced journals/gatekeepers are not. Those journals can be cut out of the equation if you simply add to the preprint server a karma system only accessible to those that actively do research in the area the paper is submitted too. We need change not knee jerk response articles in support of moribund publishing.
John Timmer says:
I think people are overinterpreting what i’ve written a bit. I’m not in any way saying that book publishers should be peer reviewing these sorts of works; if people want to write and publish them, they have every right to. I’m also making no claims about what the most efficient form of peer review is. All i’m trying to do is illustrate what can go wrong when people don’t subject their ideas to critical review of some sort.
Mherndon says:
Download The Universe can make a valuable contribution. There is some craziness out there that a critical reviewer, such as John Timmer, might highlight. But the credibility of Download The Universe comes into question when he mistakenly paints an individual’s work with the wrong brush and in doing so does a disservice to the community and to the author involved. That certainly appears to be the case for Indivisible Earth: Consequences of Earth’s Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant. Timmer’s review might lead a casual reader to the conclusion that the author is attempting an end-run around peer review. That is simply not the case. In Indivisible Earth , my purpose was not to present new unpublished work, but to make understandable to the public some of the scientific work I have published in world-class, peer reviewed journals over a period of some 3½ decades; 13 of those articles I cite in that eBook. Timmer’s review unwittingly brings up the important question of science ethics. Does one make irresponsibly pejorative assertions, or go the scientific literature and refute work which might at first seem outrageous? To date, no one has refuted my work in the scientific literature. I have explained quite precisely the scientific considerations involved. In fact, the final sentence of the the eBook summary states: “Clearly, critical observational, experimental, and theoretical evaluation is warranted.” An objective reader should be able to follow the logic presented in Indivisible Earth, go to the cited scientific literature, and then decide for themselves whether the misleading, pejorative assertions made in Timmon’s review are warranted. – J. Marvin Herndon
Mherndon says:
Download The Universe can make a valuable contribution. There is some craziness out there that a critical reviewer, such as John Timmer, might highlight. But the credibility of Download The Universe comes into question when he mistakenly paints an individual’s work with the wrong brush and in doing so does a disservice to the community and to the author involved. That certainly appears to be the case for Indivisible Earth: Consequences of Earth’s Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant. Timmer’s review might lead a casual reader to the conclusion that the author is attempting an end-run around peer review. That is simply not the case. In Indivisible Earth , my purpose was not to present new unpublished work, but to make understandable to the public some of the scientific work I have published in world-class, peer reviewed journals over a period of some 3½ decades; 13 of those articles I cite in that eBook. Timmer’s review unwittingly brings up the important question of science ethics. Does one make irresponsibly pejorative assertions, or go the scientific literature and refute work which might at first seem outrageous? To date, no one has refuted my work in the scientific literature. I have explained quite precisely the scientific considerations involved. In fact, the final sentence of the the eBook summary states: “Clearly, critical observational, experimental, and theoretical evaluation is warranted.” An objective reader should be able to follow the logic presented in Indivisible Earth, go to the cited scientific literature, and then decide for themselves whether the misleading, pejorative assertions made in Timmon’s review are warranted. –J. Marvin Herndon
Karl Bunker says:
Dr. Herndon, “misleading” and “irresponsible” assertions are by definition not warranted. The question is whether any of Mr. Timmon’s assertions actually fit those words. The comments section of this blog is not an adequate place to fully discuss that question, but I’d like to make one small point, based only on the information presented on this page:
The theories you present in your book would, if accepted, represent a revolution in geology, planetary science, and probably other fields. You would be refuting huge swaths of accepted science — science that has been supported by probably tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of published articles. Against this, you offer up your 13 cited papers.
Does this help you to see why some people might have a problem with taking your book seriously?
Mherndon says:
Hi Karl Bunker,
I very much appreciate your response. Debate and discussion is what science should be all about. You are of course correct in what you say about “misleading” and “irresponsible” assertions and it is indeed regrettable that such words are in the present instance warranted. Science is all about telling the truth, the full truth. Review of science writing should hold to a similar standard. Regrettably, John Timmer’s review has more the tenor of a political hack-piece, fraught with misleading associations and incorrect pejorative assertions, for example: “run-around peer review”; “can make psedoscience seem very polished”; “He has some ideas that, to put it mildly, are pretty fanciful. But, thanks to eBooks, he’s now able to let those ideas float free of the burden of peer review.”; “It’s just that the scientific reasoning has gaps you could drive an aircraft carrier through”. Timmer goes on to wrongly assert: “Earth somehow selectively aggregated from rare meteorites.” What I said is that the interior of Earth resembles an enstatite chondrite and I explained about Earth’s interior raining-out from within a giant gaseous protoplanet. The job of a reviewer is to set forth the facts and the debate, not to try to refute the work; that should be done in the scientific literature. But Timmer summons-forth astrophysical models that purport to show that gas giants require about 20 Earth-masses of rocky material. I am not a big fan of astrophysical models. Before the discovery of close-to-star exoplanets, the astrophysicist-modelers thought that gas giants could only form at Jupiter like distances from their star. So, when close-to-star gas giants were discovered, the modelers invented planet migration models, where gas giants would form at Jupiter-like locations and then migrate inward. Now, NASA’s website lists one of the “Big Questions” as to why Jupiter never migrated. I could go on and on, for example, pointing out that I have described quite precisely in Appendix I the reason mantle convection is physically impossible. Instead though, I will point out why Indivisible Earth potentially changes much of geological thinking. For half a century, geology has been dominated by the idea that planets formed by the planetesimal hypothesis beginning with dust condensing from an atmosphere of solar composition at about one ten-thousandth of an atmosphere. What I have set forth is profoundly different, namely, that the central regions of planets literally rained-out at high pressures, 1-100 atmospheres. Whenever new ideas emerge, new possibilities open for further new ideas and discoveries.
Karl Bunker says:
“John Timmer’s review has more the tenor of a political hack-piece…”
I’m sorry Dr. Herndon, but I see no reason to accept that evaluation. The evidence I see overwhelmingly indicates that Mr. Timmer responded to your book appropriately: as a piece of pseudo-scientific crackpottery. He may have gotten some minor details wrong, but the central flaw in your position remains: You’re arguing against vast swaths of well-supported science despite having virtually nothing to support your competing “theories.”
But as I said, this is not a place where that issue can be properly debated, nor am I an appropriate person to debate it with you, nor are you a person who is likely ever to see your own crackpot theories in a realistic light.
I thank you for your response, but considering those points, I don’t plan on commenting here again.
Mherndon says:
It almost seems that we live in parallel universes. Let me explain. (1) To brand a scientist’s work “pseudo-scientific crackpottery” without ever taking the time or expending the effort to understand the scope and depth of the published work is, in my universe, irresponsible and mean-spiritedly unkind. Is that something you just do on the web or do you behave similarly to the professionals you encounter in your day-to-day activities? (2) Like John Timmer, you seem to be swayed by the vast extent of scientific literature that I contradict. What you should be aware of is this: Science is a logical process, not a democratic process. A new scientific concept begins with a single individual and spreads, sometimes quickly (DNA alpha-helix) sometimes against great opposition (continental drift). Galileo addressed the subject more eloquently than I might: “THAT MAN WILL BE VERY FORTUNATE WHO, LED BY SOME UNUSUAL INNER LIGHT, SHALL BE ABLE TO TURN from the dark and confused labyrinths within which he might have gone forever wandering with the crowd and becoming ever more entangled. Therefore, in the matter of philosophy, I consider it not very sound to judge a man’s opinion by the number of his followers.”- Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (1623)
Torbjörn Larsson says:
Reply to Mherndon:
First rule of holes is to stop digging.
The outsider’s test of an area is to see how useful it is, hence its consensuality comes into play. Likewise you would judge specific works against the amount of work they would have to replace. The discussed book and its references fails to come to grips with a large amount of accepted science.
And the Galileo Gambit? Please, that is high points on Baez’s scale of crackpotism: more digging.
Conversely, as an astrobiology student I have had the pleasure to study some of the accepted science of planetary formation, core/mantle formation and plate tectonics. It would be very difficult to replace all that with an equally predictive theory.
Which gets me to my last gripe with what has gone wrong here. Science isn’t about seeking philosophical truth or religious full Truth, but an empirical search for facts. There is very little common sense “logic” in the market process of competing ideas or their scientific content (say, general relativity).
Plate tectonics was not accepted for a very long time because it isn’t common sense that the ground moves. But today we can measure plate movements with GPS, working by way of general relativity, which I guess makes common sense after all. http://www.iris.edu/hq/files/programs/education_and_outreach/aotm/14/1.GPS_Background.pdf
Esmeralda says:
Your science is bad and you should feel bad!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG2KMkQLZmI
Dinoxdotcom says:
Hi Matthew,
Thanks for the link-through from Matthew R. Francis’s article. It’s interesting what you say about peer review. I’m thinking of writing up something from the opposite point of view – that it prevents scientific progress rather that helps it – so I’ll have to remember to link to your article as well to give both sides of the argument. I’ll send you a link if I ever do.
I’ve not read J. Marvin Herndon’s book myself because the formation of the Earth in such a way would imply that gravity was about 8 times present 200 Ma and the structural dynamics of life at that time disproves that. I suppose that is my own internal “peer review” system operating.
All the best.
Stephen