Someone asked about whether the “photon belt” is real or not. Supposedly this is something the earth is about to pass through that will kill everyone. Cecil’s answer to this one is right on, but misses what I feel is a critical piece of information.
This whole photon belt thing sounds a whole lot like a story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle call “The Poison Belt”, which you can read here:
In this story, the earth passes through a belt of poisonous “ether” that appears to kill everyone on earth. The author and a few of his scientist friends “ride it out” in a home that is sealed against the poisonous whatever. They come out after the belt has passed and drive around looking at all the dead bodies. Interestingly enough it never occurred to them to save at least one woman, but I digress.
In actuality, everyone was just anesthetized and woke up after a day or so. Yay, the world didn’t end after all!
Not only does the title sound suspiciously similar to “The Poison Belt”, but the action of the belt sounds identical to the story as well, with two exceptions being that everyone would really be dead, and that there would not be any way for a few smart alecks to save themselves (short of hitching a ride on the U.S.S Enterprise on one of its jaunts into earth’s past).
I strongly suspect that someone either conciously or unconciously adapted this story to the new-age notion of a deadly “photon belt”, and obviously it caught on. After all, Doyle’s stories (Sherlock Holmes series, et. al.) always did have a way of lodging in the psyche and not letting go.
Can’t find Cecils original answer, but what’s the deal with a BELT? I guess it’s simply the solar wind we are talking about. It’s out there all the time but deflected by the earth magnetic field (most of the time and places).
Well, I was going to wait until I could get the link to the article for you, but the search engine on the StraightDope page hasn’t worked all day, so it will have to wait until it’s fixed. It’s easy to get just by searching the archives for “photon”.
I don’t think the new-agers are talking about the solar wind. I wouldn’t try to apply too much logic to their beliefs; folks who buy into most of this stuff obviously flunked high school physics.
I don’t know why Doyle chose the word “belt” as part of the title of his short story, but I suspect his choice was influenced by the use of the word belt in legitimate astronomical phenomena such as the asteroid belt and the Ort belt that is believed to lie somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto. The constellation Orion also has a “belt” of a different sort. Ring shaped (and therefore “belt” shaped) phenomena are very common in supernova nebula as well as in the rings of Saturn, so it’s not too shocking that Doyle would pick the word ring or belt as part of the name of his fictional astronomical feature.
If I recall correctly, the idea is that this is a belt of ether (or some such unidentified substance) that orbits the Milky Way galaxy’s core at a distance roughly coincident with our sun’s orbit about the same galactic core, so this belt is something our solar system (earth included) could traverse, perhaps as the distance between our solar system and the galactic core oscillated (keep in mind we’re talking about a combo of pseudo science and 19th century ignorance as the basis of this story).
As I said before, I think the new agers just got a distorted version of this very same story somehow, where “poison” was morphed into “photon”. They just kept the “belt” part from the original story title.
Sorry, if I had read that, I wouldn’t have written a word.
…folks with CIA or NSA credentials likely will show up and say it would be in the best interest of your family if you gave up the quest…
Good grief! But as you said, the search tool was down.
Your idea about the parallels to the poison belt sounds good, though.
What’s really amazing is that there are people that believe this stuff! Being a student of the memetic theory of human cognition, I find this kind of thing facinating.