Universal Ice

Examines how the ludicrously erroneous theories of Hanns Horbiger (1860-1931) concerning cosmology and Earth sciences were incorporated into Nazi ideology - a telling example of how pseudo-science can be twisted to serve political ends and corrupt or hinder genuine "value-free" research.

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The work of the obscure Austrian engineer and self-taught cosmographer Hanns Horbiger (1860-1931) is today largely forgotten and even in his lifetime his elaborate and iconoclastic attempts to overturn conventional approaches to Earth science and astronomy by promulgating his "World Ice Theory" were rejected by most anglophone scientists as unworthy of consideration. Yet, although his preposterous ideas that, amongst other things, the Earth has a frozen core, the planets had frozen surfaces and that ice was a universal phenomenon are ludicrously erroneous, they were appropriated by the Nazi state as examples of Aryan and anti-Jewish science; thus they became the accepted wisdom for politically-correct Earth scientists and educationalists in the Hitler state. Robert Bowen, a distinguished geochemist, recounts the incredible tale of how a set of crackpot and ridiculous ideas became scientific orthodoxy out of political expediency and the ideological pressure of fascism, and draws some parallels with how contemporary pseudo-science might have similar consequences today.