De Zondvloed
One of the first scientific attemps to explain cosmology was due to William Whiston (1667-1752) in his 1696 book A New History of the Earth. Perhaps motivated by Edmond Halley's 1694 suggestion that the Biblical deluge may have been due to an Earth-comet encounter, Whiston's book was an impressive manipulation of Biblical chronology and Newtonian mechanics. To Whiston, the six days of creation actually meant six years because, at the time, the Earth's day was equal to one year. That is, the periods of the Earth's rotation about its axis and the revolution about the Sun were both equal to one year. According to Whiston, on Friday, November 28, 2349 B.C., a comet passed very close to the Earth. The near collsion caused a tidal breakup of the Earth's crust. The subsequent release of subterranean waters, together with precipitation from the comet's atmosphere and tail, caused the Biblical deluge by rasing a tide several miles high.
The notion of cometary collisions causing major geological and biological effects on the Earth dates back to at least 1688, when Edmond Halley suggested that the deluge causing the Biblical flood might have been due to a casual shock of a comet. In an address to the Royal Society of London on December 12, 1694, Halley pointed out that a cometary collision might well cause a major extinction of species, but the fine debris would then settle onto the Earth's surface and render the soil more suitable for vegetable production and animal life.
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