Alexander Abian
Erland Gadde
program about the Moon, its origin and its significance for life on
earth. In the a program a scientist Alexander Abian was briefly
mentioned, I don't remember exactly why. Abian was said to be recently
deceased.
Is this the same Alexander Abian who were posting regularly to sci.math
and other groups? These posts seemed to me to be rather egocentric,
since the headers often mentioned his name: "Abian's formula for..." and
similar.
Robin Chapman
Erland Gadde <ga...@sm.luth.se> wrote:
> Yesterday, there was in Swedish TV an American (or British?) science
> program about the Moon, its origin and its significance for life on
> earth. In the a program a scientist Alexander Abian was briefly
> mentioned, I don't remember exactly why. Abian was said to be recently
> deceased.
> Is this the same Alexander Abian who were posting regularly to
sci.math
> and other groups?
I expect so. "Our" Alexander Abian died about a year ago, and he did
have some curious ideas about the moon.
--
Robin Chapman, http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~rjc/rjc.html
"`The twenty-first century didn't begin until a minute
past midnight January first 2001.'"
John Brunner, _Stand on Zanzibar_ (1968)
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
G. A. Edgar
> Yesterday, there was in Swedish TV an American (or British?) science
> program about the Moon, its origin and its significance for life on
> earth. In the a program a scientist Alexander Abian was briefly
> mentioned, I don't remember exactly why.
Perhaps because he proposed blowing up the moon?
> Abian was said to be recently deceased.
> Is this the same Alexander Abian who were posting regularly to sci.math
> and other groups? These posts seemed to me to be rather egocentric,
> since the headers often mentioned his name: "Abian's formula for..." and
> similar.
It's the same one.
--
Gerald A. Edgar ed...@math.ohio-state.edu
Bart Goddard
> Is this the same Alexander Abian who were posting regularly to
> sci.math and other groups?
I know someone who knew Abian. He said that in his time,
he was a respected in his field. Our experience with him
on this group was attributed to later senility. I'm
thinking he was in his 80's a few years ago.
Bart
Kevin Buhr
>
> Perhaps because he proposed blowing up the moon?
He also wanted to bring Venus into an Earth-like orbit to create a
born-again Earth, didn't he? The motivation there was clear, but I
can't remember why he wanted to blow up the moon. Did it have
something to do with improving Earth's climate?
> > Abian was said to be recently deceased.
Well, I can say one thing about him. His ideas had a lot of inertia.
Kevin <bu...@stat.wisc.edu>
John Prussing
>In article <39C7212F...@sm.luth.se>, Erland Gadde
><ga...@sm.luth.se> wrote:
>> Yesterday, there was in Swedish TV an American (or British?) science
>> program about the Moon, its origin and its significance for life on
>> earth. In the a program a scientist Alexander Abian was briefly
>> mentioned, I don't remember exactly why.
>Perhaps because he proposed blowing up the moon?
Yes, that was what he was most famous (notorious) for. The goal was to
make the spin axis of the earth orthogonal to its orbital plane,
and thus eliminate those *inconvenient* seasons of the year.
But his plan for blowing up the moon to accomplish this made no
physical sense.
>> Abian was said to be recently deceased.
>> Is this the same Alexander Abian who were posting regularly to sci.math
>> and other groups? These posts seemed to me to be rather egocentric,
>> since the headers often mentioned his name: "Abian's formula for..." and
>> similar.
>It's the same one.
I met a colleague of his in the mathematics dept at Iowa State. He said
Abian had done some good work earlier, in fixed point theorems,
as I recall. And that he was extremely good at explaining things. I have
somewhere some examples of his explaining the axiom of choice.
But his later rantings were embarrassing and widely distributed
on the net (by him) and in the tabloid press.
>--
>Gerald A. Edgar ed...@math.ohio-state.edu
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
John E. Prussing
Dept. of Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://www.uiuc.edu/~prussing
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Ron Hardin
> I met a colleague of his in the mathematics dept at Iowa State. He said
> Abian had done some good work earlier, in fixed point theorems,
> as I recall. And that he was extremely good at explaining things. I have
> somewhere some examples of his explaining the axiom of choice.
>
> But his later rantings were embarrassing and widely distributed
> on the net (by him) and in the tabloid press.
He played the piano, liked Edna St. Vincent Milay.
Explaining his theories in person, he is said to have sounded more like
a gentle poet than a madman.
--
Ron Hardin
rhha...@mindspring.com
On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.
Gerry Myerson
=> Is this the same Alexander Abian who were posting regularly to
=> sci.math and other groups? These posts seemed to me to be rather
=> egocentric, since the headers often mentioned his name: "Abian's
=> formula for..." and similar.
I was under the impression that he put his name in the subject header
as a courtesy to those who wanted to avoid reading anything he wrote
and anything anyone wrote in reply.
GM
Marvin the Robot
fiery apotheosis of Valery Fabrikant. Also
it is McElwaine, not Abian, who patented
capitalization in service of alternative physics.
Kevin Buhr wrote:
> > Perhaps because he proposed blowing up the moon?
>
> He also wanted to bring Venus into an Earth-like orbit to create a
> born-again Earth, didn't he? The motivation there was clear, but I
> can't remember why he wanted to blow up the moon. Did it have
> something to do with improving Earth's climate?
The slogans were something like:
" BLOW UP THE MOON TO STOP EPIDEMICS
OF CHOLERA AIDS ETC "
" BRING VENUS INTO A NEAR EARTH-LIKE ORBIT
TO CREATE A BORN-AGAIN EARTH"
" TIME HAS INERTIA T = 1/log(M) (Ab)"
Abian also proposed that all bodies in the universe
move to INFLATE THEIR EGO and FEEL SECURE.
Is there an archive somewhere?
John R Ramsden
>
> G. A. Edgar <ed...@math.ohio-state.edu.nospam> writes:
> >
> >
> > Perhaps because he [Abian] proposed blowing up the moon?
>
> Yes, that was what he was most famous (notorious) for. The goal was to
> make the spin axis of the earth orthogonal to its orbital plane,
> and thus eliminate those *inconvenient* seasons of the year.
>
> But his plan for blowing up the moon to accomplish this made no
> physical sense.
If the debris settled into a Saturn-like ring or dispersed away from
the Earth then the only effect would be to eliminate the precession
of the equinoxes. (I guess the role played in this by the Sun's
gravity must be fairly miniscule.)
Also, if the Moon vanished then the tides would continue to swill
round and round for several tens of thousands of years (according
to Isaac Isimov I think).
Cheers
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
John R Ramsden (j...@redmink.demon.co.uk)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The new is in the old concealed, the old is in the new revealed.
St Augustine.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave L. Renfro
[sci.math Tue, 19 Sep 2000 10:17:52 +0200]
<http://forum.swarthmore.edu/epigone/sci.math/kimplorje>
wrote
> Yesterday, there was in Swedish TV an American (or British?)
> science program about the Moon, its origin and its significance
> for life on earth. In the a program a scientist Alexander Abian
> was briefly mentioned, I don't remember exactly why. Abian was
> said to be recently deceased.
> Is this the same Alexander Abian who were posting regularly to
> sci.math and other groups? These posts seemed to me to be rather
> egocentric, since the headers often mentioned his name:
> "Abian's formula for..." and similar.
Others have already answered "yes", but perhaps sci.math
readers would be interested in some additional information
about Abian.
BORN: Jan. 1, 1923 DIED: July 25, 1999
Ph.D. at University of Cincinnati in 1956 under Isaac Barnett
Dissertation: "Invariants and Covariants of Systems of Linear
Differential and Integro-Differential Equations"
Alexander Abian had 9 Ph.D. students
<http://hcoonce.math.mankato.msus.edu/html/id.phtml?id=237>
Alexander Abian's homepage (still up as of Sept. 20, 2000)
<http://www.math.iastate.edu/abian/>
Publication list of 254 papers
<http://www.math.iastate.edu/abian/list.html>
Three books by Alexander Abian
<http://www.math.iastate.edu/abian/books.html>
An obituary by Rebecca Anderson of the Ames Tribune
<http://www.tanelorn.demon.co.uk/Physics/abian.html>
Abian has a fairly strong presence on the web --->>>
At <http://www.google.com/> I got
44 hits for a search with the words: Alexander Abian crackpot
110 hits for a search with the words: Alexander Abian moon
261 hits for a PHRASE search using: "Alexander Abian"
Abian's strongest web presence is in his numerous posts to
mathematics discussion groups, primarily sci.math. Many of
these posts (and all of his sci.math posts beginning with
June 1996) can be found using the Math Forum Discussion
Groups' search:
Enter -- Alexander Abian -- and select "that exact phrase?" option
<http://forum.swarthmore.edu/discussions/epi-search/all.html>
Although the number of matches is not given, a "print preview"
of the output I got resulted in 38 pages of thread titles.
I noticed that a lot of posts and web pages seemed to involve
both Alexander Abian and Archimedes Plutonium. In fact, at
least one person thought they were the same person:
<http://forum.swarthmore.edu/epigone/sci.math/deltacloi/347368db...@news.oanet.com>
Abian's papers tend to be short, not very deep, often appear
in fairly obscure journals, are quite weak in informing
the reader of related work, and tend to be overly pedantic.
Nonetheless, many of them in my opinion would serve quite well
as advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate student
seminar topics. I have copies of over a dozen of his papers,
and would probably have 3 to 4 times this many if it were not
for the obscurity of the journals that many of his papers appear
in. One of Abian's Ph.D. students once told me that Abian
tended not to be all that observant of the published literature,
but instead he would work out a number of variations of a
well-known topic and then try to publish those that he felt were
the most interesting (without trying very hard to see whether
anyone else had already done the same thing before). Even a
short glance at Abian's publications shows him to be someone
who was interested in many things and who enjoyed--perhaps
even felt compelled to--share this interest with others.
------------------------------
*******************************************************************
3'rd paragraph of John Baez's "This Week's Finds in
Mathematical Physics (Week 32)" at
<http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week32.html>
One problem with preprint mailing lists, though, is that the
preprints have not gone through the scutiny of the referee
process. This is, frankly, much less of a problem for the
*readers* than is commonly imagined, because this scrutiny is
less intense than people who have never refereed papers think!
Many refereed papers have errors, and I would personally feel
very uncomfortable using a result unless I either understood
the proof or knew that most experts believed it. The real need
for refereed journals, in my slightly cynical opinion, is that
academics need *refereed publications* to advance in their
jobs: the people who give tenure, promotions etc. cannot be
expected to read and understand ones papers. This is, of course,
also the reason for other strange phenomena, such as the idea
of *counting* somebody's publications to see how good they are.
We need only count Alexander Abian's publications to see the
limitations of this approach.
*******************************************************************
------------------------------
*******************************************************************
PEOPLE magazine (June 24, 1991; page 84)
A brief lesson in etymology: luna, which is what Romans
called the moon prior to Dean Martin, forms the root
of lunar, lunette and lunatic. Some might apply that last
word to Iowa State math professor Alexander Abian, 68,
after seeing his proposal--published initially in a campus
newspaper--to becalm the world's weather. Just imagine
the end of cyclones in Bangladesh, droughts in Ethiopia,
sweltering days in Manhattan--a planet where the forecast
is always California balmy! The solution to climatic
catastrophes is simple, Abian asserts: "Nuke the moon.
You make a big hole by deep drilling, and you put there
atomic explosive," Abian (who is of Armenian descent) says
in English unpolished by 41 years in America. "And you
detonate it--by remote control from Earth.
The professor claims that blasting the moon would release the
gravitational tug that causes our planet to tilt and thus
stabilize the earth's temperature and wind patterns. Other
professors say poppycock--or worse. David Taylor, assistant
chairman of the physics and astronomy department at
Northwestern University, asks, "How does he propose to change
the earth's angle of rotation without creating massive
earthquakes? He would destroy civilization, but we'd have
great weather."
There are a few nettlesome questions--like what would happen
to the tides, for instance, and whether Abian is actually
serious in his proposal or just dabbling in a bit of
academic humor--but for the time being he insists that
his theory is sound. "I am raising the petulant finger of
defiance to the solar organization for the first time in
5 billion years," the professor declares. "Those critics
who say `Dismiss Abian's ideas' are very close to those
who dismissed Galileo."
*******************************************************************
------------------------------
*******************************************************************
From a Sept. 1994 Newspaper article (Monroe, LA I think)
TABLOID STORY OF THE WEEK:
"NASA to blow up the moon within months!"
"On the advice of Iowa State University Professor Alexander
Abian, they are preparing to launch three rockets tipped with
hydrogen warheads to blast the smithereens out of our satellite
planet. If all goes well, the debris from the moon will
plunge into the Pacific Ocean, causing a shift in the Earth's
axis and triggering improvements in the planet's weather,"
the Weekly World News reports.
*******************************************************************
Dave L. Renfro
Erland Gadde
I wrote:
> Yesterday, there was in Swedish TV an American (or British?) science
> program about the Moon, its origin and its significance for life on
> earth. In the a program a scientist Alexander Abian was briefly
> mentioned, I don't remember exactly why. Abian was said to be recently
> deceased.
I saw a rerun of the program last night. It was English.
The problem was that the moon is moving away from Earth, which ultimately
will get the Earth axis to oscillate uncontrollably. Abian's solution of
that problem was that we should "hijack" the Jupiter moon Europa and put it
in an orbit around Earth.
A comment: If we ever will get the technology to move Europa from Jupiter
to Earth, wouldn't it then be much simpler to just move the moon a bit
closer to Earth?
Regards,
Erland Gadde
Ronald Bruck
<ga...@sm.luth.se> wrote:
:Thank you all for replies!
.se, that's Sweden, right? I would have thought Sweden was enough like
the U.S. for you to understand:
That's not the way contractors work. They'll bid on the Europa->Earth
job, but just wiggle the moon? Not worth their time ;-)
--Ron Bruck
--
Due to University fiscal constraints, .sigs may not be exceed one
line.
Axel Harvey
> Also, if the Moon vanished then the tides would continue to swill
> round and round for several tens of thousands of years (according
> to Isaac Isimov I think).
^^^^^^
That would turn them into "isotides", then?
John Prussing
>Thank you all for replies!
>I wrote:
>> Yesterday, there was in Swedish TV an American (or British?) science
>> program about the Moon, its origin and its significance for life on
>> earth. In the a program a scientist Alexander Abian was briefly
>> mentioned, I don't remember exactly why. Abian was said to be recently
>> deceased.
>I saw a rerun of the program last night. It was English.
>The problem was that the moon is moving away from Earth, which ultimately
>will get the Earth axis to oscillate uncontrollably. Abian's solution of
>that problem was that we should "hijack" the Jupiter moon Europa and put it
>in an orbit around Earth.
We all know people who remodel their house, right? This is the same
thing on a somewhat larger scale.
>Regards,
>Erland Gadde