Joseph Smith and Symmes's Hole

Today, Slate.com's history blog calls attention to the attempt in 1818 by John Cleves Symmes, Jr to assemble an expedition to the North Pole. (If you click over you can see a copy of the circular he distributed.) Symmes had come to the conclusion that Earth is hollow inside and perfectly habitable. He traveled Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New England promoting his theory, gaining a small following in Cincinnati. Rejecting Newton's theories of gravity, his ideas mostly brought ridicule. Nevertheless, Symmes was an entertaining and convincing presenter; apparently he even convinced a group of Harvard students who had to be disabused of the nonsense by their professors. He died in 1829, apparently from stomach problems.

Over the course of Church history a variety of ideas have circulated as to the location of the lost Ten Tribes. It's more of a fringe thing now, but you can still find people who think that the Ten Tribes live inside a hole at the North Pole. Typically D&C 133 is cited as evidence along with an alleged corroborating statement by Joseph Smith, who is reported to have compared Earth to the shape of a kettle, with the Ten Tribes living inside. Is this the legacy of "Symmes's hole?"

Symmes was not the only person to have postulated a hollow Earth, but he promoted it heavily. I don't know whether he passed through Joseph's neighborhood, but I can envision Joseph and friends attending one of his lectures and coming away impressed. Even more plausible, given Symmes's following in Ohio, is that early converts in Kirtland brought the idea to Joseph's attention. The first volume of the LDS newspaper, Evening and Morning Star, published June 1832 in Independence, Missouri, contained a reference to "the theory of Capt. Symmes" in connection to a report of some kind of sink hole. However, the story appears to have been reprinted from a New York publication, so whether the LDS readership would have understood this reference is a matter of speculation, as far as I can tell.

I don't know whether Joseph actually espoused the hollow Earth theory, but a part of me likes to think that he did. He had a creative and hungry mind; I'm willing to grant him some space to speculate and think out loud, without feeling like I have to conform my every opinion to his.

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Pitch Illustrates Geological Time in a Lifetime

Perhaps my favorite feature of Provo Canyon (right) is the bent rock layer toward the southern end of the canyon. How can solid rock bend like that? How, indeed. Young-earth creationists point to these kinds of geological features as evidence that the strata were laid down during Noah's flood, adding that no human alive was there to observe the process. It's easy to imagine wet earth bending and then solidifying into rock, which is perhaps one reason why this view of geology is common in the U.S. But things aren't always as they seem.

In 1927 a professor in Australia heated pitch--basically asphalt--and put it into a funnel. Pitch shatters if struck with a hammer, yet it also flows as a liquid...very slowly. In the intervening time, drops of pitch fell from the funnel about once per decade. Predicting when exactly that drop would fall was difficult, and until a couple of weeks ago the actual drop had never been witnessed. (It had been missed by as little as 15 minutes.) However, this time was successful; the drop was observed by both human and electronic eyes. Go read this Atlantic article for a more complete and interesting tale.

Seeing the pitch drop helps make the folding of rock layers in Provo canyon and elsewhere easier to imagine. When exposed to heat and pressure, they become more malleable than we would otherwise think, and over millions of years the rock can be bent and folded. Of course imagination does not constitute evidence, but a little real-life demonstration can help make abstract concepts, developed based on multiple lines of evidence, more concrete (ha!).

So the next time someone expresses incredulity at the proposition of rock layers bending and folding, point them to the pitch drop experiment. And as a bonus, when they say that you weren't there millions of years ago to observe geological processes, you can point out that for almost 70 years nobody was there to see the pitch drop either.

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