Published review from "Morry on the Market"

From "Morry on the Market",50 Broadway, Suite 3700, New York, NY 10004,Market Letter #59, Nov. 30, 1994, by Morris J. Markovitz, quoted in its entirety:

"Recommended reading: If you have any interest in pondering matters scientific, I can't recommend too highly Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets, by Tom Van Flandern ($18.95 from North Atlantic Books, PO Box 12327, Berkeley, CA 94701). This is the most interesting new book on any subject that I've read in years, and the most interesting of its type -- exciting, even -- I've ever read. Yet it's a quite easy read, containing hardly any explicit mathematics. Van Flandern is an astronomer with such impeccably well established credentials that his peers can't completely dismiss his maverick theories. From a simple, sensible starting point he carries the reader, by purely deductive reasoning, to a new view of the basic nature of things: from electrons to galaxies, from the nature of a photon to the cause of gravity to the origin of the solar system. Along the way, several paradoxes of existing, theories (relativity, quantum mechanics, etc.) are explained and then resolved (or their resolutions indicated) in the most simple and easily understandable expositions I've ever seen. Those acquainted in some detail with existing theories will appreciate the creative brilliance of Van Flandern's insights, the kind that seem to turn on a mental switch that blasts away every shadow in your field of vision at once, and the kind with which his book literally teems (the unpretentious simplicity of the author's conversational style may disguise its radical significance from the casual reader). Challenging much of existing scientific orthodoxy, Van Flandern's new theory is able to cover the ground of several current theories at once, but more simply and directly than any, with fewer inconsistencies, and without requiring the abandonment of a common sense view of the world. (Coincidentally, only within the past few days it has been reported that the newly operational Hubble telescope's inability to find so-called dark matter has thrown scientists into turmoil because currently accepted cosmological theory requires that the universe be about 90% filled with it. This is precisely one of Van Flandern's predictions (amongst many more): that no dark matter would be found by the Hubble scope, because there is no dark matter; that there was no need for scientists to infer its existence in the first place; that the phenomena which led them to infer it were already predicted and fully explained by Van Flandern's own simple view of gravitation [and by the way, there are no black holes either, according to Van Flandern]). My guess is that many more of Van Flandern's predictions are destined to be verified, and I believe this book may eventually find a place at the base of future scientific inquiry in many fields, not the least of which may be the philosophy of science (specifically its epistemology). If you are curious about such things as the nature of matter and the origin of the solar system, but feel inadequately equipped to grasp what modern science has to say about such things, read this book. You will not get the all-too-common condescending attempt to water-down the mysteries of modern science into a form intelligible to little-non-scientist you, but rather a straightforward new theory, logically derived in front of your eyes, which challenges the roots of many of today's complex accepted paradigms, yet whose essence is simple enough to be thoroughly communicated to the intelligent layman without losing in the translation ."