I was offered this book by someone who was breathless in her excitement for it. She is also a psychic who claims to "never be wrong" (yet in her psychic physiological assessment of my wellbeing entirely missed my chronic lower-back issues...despite my limping in and out of the session).
I bought it, read the introduction, then read 80 pages of it before placing it carefully in my bedroom garbage can.
In the introduction he put us on notice that, while he certainly WOULD have submitted his work to the established peer-reviewed journals, he felt his work was too important to be slowed down by their sluggish processes. Why, he even knows of someone whose work took eight years to get past peer-review! He derides this issue of "delay" as a critique of the peer-review process, rather than exactly it's added value. Peer-review without "delay" (i.e., sober, thoughtful analysis of claims, evidence, argument and conclusions) is called "rubber stamping." So he says - still in the Introduction - that he's opted here to bypass peer review for this middle-road: that is, his book is a popular version of what surely WOULD have passed muster had it been peer-reviewed. It brings us peer-reviewed quality without the exasperating hassle of being peer-reviewed.
With this assertion, he leaves his scientific credibility wounded, unconscious and face-down in the bathtub. It's not dead yet, but we better see some heroic measures in the next few pages.
I think it was on page 11 that he makes a mathematical so simple, so easily spotted and corrected, that it grinds against my bones. He miscalculates how many miles are in a light year. It's middle-school math. It goes like this. Light travels 186,292 miles per second. So in 60 seconds, it goes (186,292 x 60) miles or 11,177,520 miles. From there, we just keep on multiplying our way up...
186,292 miles per second
x 60 seconds per minute
x 60 minutes per hour
x 24 hours per day
x 365 days per year
--------------------------
5,874,904,512,000 miles in a light year.
But he gets it wrong, by about 20%. I believe this was on the top left side of page 11, but as I threw my copy out I can't promise that. This is a big number, sure, but the math is simple -- surely within the grasp of our author, an accomplished engineer. Given that it appears so early in the book, one could think it would have been corrected after, say, *15 minutes* of peer review -- even if the specter of eight years was too much to bear.
Also within the first 20 pages of the book he asserts that Pluto is "11 light-hours" away -- which is true. No argument from me. But then he explains that a light-hour is the distance light travels in a year. No. A light-YEAR is the distance light travels in year. A light-hour is the distance light travels in an HOUR. The naming system is really quite clear. But our author's error on that simple point has also survived multiple printings as well, unencumbered as it's been throughout it's history by any exasperating peer-review delays.
The heart of his thesis is embarrassing. He leaps from the four amino acids in DNA to the key four chemical elements that make them up (and they are not the ONLY elements, just the most common) to the four "classic elements" of fire, earth, water and air, and from there to the Hebrew letters, and from there to...some astonishing conclusions that must have unfurled without me after page 80 in my garbage can.
Each of these leaps from one domain to the next is entirely intuitive. He connects each to the next in casual concurrences and interesting similarities and whatever else occurs to him. He does not present a series of ways to show their connection (or even why we should presume to undertake the effort), and then argue for the way he's chosen to show why it's the empirical "best fit" -- he just waves his hands and says "Hydrogen = fire!, etc."
Now, his overall thesis is that DNA has baked into it a message from God. It happens to be the Hebrew god, which is of course, unsurprising from an American (presumably Christian?) author. (I admit I enjoy imagining his expression should his careful research have spelled out the word "Mithra" or "Cthulhu" or "No One Here But Us Chickens.") The core concept is that this message was spelled out in a fashion that anyone on earth would have found it. God doesn't play favorites with us; he wanted us ALL to see this message. Kind of like in Sagan's "Contact" where the message is written out in the digits of pi, here it's written out for us in our DNA. *Any culture* would eventually encounter this message when they reached the necessary sophistication to crack the DNA code, as we have done.
Except then...why would God hide this message in such a way that we require both the exacting sophistication of DNA research (e.g., biology, chemistry, x-ray crystallography, molecular structures, etc.)...with the notion of the four classical elements? The whole "earth/water/fire/air" cosmology is defunct. It's antiquated, primitive, little more than quaint. It's like if God hid a message in our DNA that required us to believe in mermaids, or in blood-letting, or a flat earth.
And the whole "four classical elements" concept was NOT universal. It's very European in it's origins - which seems like God was really stacking the deck to have us (or our American author) find the magic message. The Tibetans and Japanese would have garbled that message horribly, trying to map it to their five elements of fire, earth, air, water and space (or void, for the Japanese). The Chinese would have wandered right into the wilderness with their fire, earth, water, metal and wood. Buddhists would have had a tough time with cohesion, solidity or inertia, expansion or vibration, and heat. (Okay, so Wikipedia grants that these map to the four European classical elements...but given all the other intuitive jumps our author makes, would the Buddhists have successfully leaped from these more ethereal concepts to the correct Hebrew letters?)
And why the *Hebrew* alphabet? Hardly universal.
Anyway, then I got to page 80 and got on with my life.
