Quaker Meeting House, 150 Church Road, Watford, WD17 4QB, Hertfordshire, UK (map)
11:00 am – AGM.
Nominated and standing for election:
Treasurer: Phillip Clapham
Auditor: David Roth
Council: Laurence Dixon, Chris Phillips, Ian Tresman, Trevor Palmer, Peter Fairlie–Clarke, David Fairbairn, Alasdair
Beal and Michael Caplan.
Nominations are invited for the position of Secretary; the Secretary is responsible for the organisation of meetings and the handling of membership. We would welcome further members of Council. Nominations for Secretary or Council
Member, proposed by one member and seconded by another, should be lodged with Barry Curnock.
Afternoon Spring Meeting 1:30 – 4:15pm
13:30
Mark Bailey: Giant Comets and their Impact through Time, The Most Recent Giant Comet and Its Impact on Civilisation
Emeritus Director of Armagh Observatory:
It is a puzzle that comets, which appear so infrequently to the extent that most people have never seen one, have played such an important role in human affairs throughout recorded history. This talk introduces the subject of comets and their origin and highlights the impact on our understanding of the relatively recent discovery of rare ‘giant’ comets. These occur both in the long–period and time–variable short–period comet populations in the solar system. An exceptionally large comet could plausibly become the most prominent object in the sky other than the Sun and Moon, and debris from its evolution in the inner solar system could produce a much more ‘active’ sky than that experienced today. Evidence for the arrival in near–Earth space of a giant comet some 10 to 20 thousand years ago provides a possible explanation for igniting mankind’s early interest in the sky and could have been a catalyst for placing gods in the sky and the construction, thousands of years ago, of megalithic monuments with astronomical associations.
Mark eloquently demonstrates the severe constraints that Consensus Science has placed on itself, in regarding gravity as the ONLY motivating force in the Universe. He does try to look back at our heritage, but fails to appreciate the extraordinary events which our ancestors clearly reported witnessing. No practical evidence is offered for the comet paradigm, it is purely mechanical, mathematical and statistical.
15:15
Wiz Tehel: ‘The Story of the Latin Alphabet’. Most of the world uses the Latin Alphabet every day. Its success is due to the simplicity of needing to learn only a relatively small number of symbols and how these symbols correspond to a sound. Wiz will cover how the Latin alphabet ended up with the letters it has and how letters have appeared and
disappeared over the course of time.
Wiz Tehel