Can planets affect each other?

My friend Paul Nachman, a physicist and immigration reform activist who lives in southern California, took issue at my linking a story saying that the planet Uranus is having an effect on the earth.

This is, to put it most economically, crap. The notion that Uranus’s magnetic field has anything to do with anything on earth (other than—perhaps—delicate spectroscopic measurements of the field itself!), as the linked article says, is beyond preposterous.

I replied to Mr. Nachman that I had not agreed with the story, only reported the fact that “some scientists” had said that this was so. Then I continued:

Besides which, the solar system is not just a bunch of very distant rocks or gaseous balls pursuing their respective orbits. The solar system is a SYSTEM, the parts of which affect each others in ways we do not understand. The universe does not consist of just the physical plane, it also has a mental plane. I myself have had too many experiences of things that happened that transcended physical cause and effect not to believe that there is a mental reality beyond the physical. A well known example that I and many people have experienced is when we think of someone we haven’t spoken to in a long time, and then a moment later the phone rings and that person is calling us. The very fact of thought, of consciousness, is not physical and thus proves that the physical is not all there is. Since consciousness is not physical, it does not seem impossible that the thoughts of people who are distant from each other could affect each other in a way not bounded by physical parameters of time and space.

Given these mental realities, it also does not seem impossible to me that planets could exert physical effects on each other as well, though I do not endorse that and I simply pointed people to the story.

I know this is shocking to you and will convince you I’m an idiot, but there it is. :-)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 02, 2005 08:36 AM | Send