This yarn is without a doubt the most ridiculous piece of fiction I have seen in a long time.
Item: What is the source? The author clearly intends to remain anonymous--and with good cause.
Item: The report is said to be from the Jayton Chronicle, but the anonymous writer doesn't say if this is Jayton, Texas, which is the only Jayton shown in world atlases, or some other unlisted Jayton (assuming even that Jayton, Texas, does have a newspaper name the Chronicle). The story is said to have been reported in "other newspapers," but they are carefully not identified.
Item: No such incident ever happened in Greenbelt, Maryland. The author of the story obviously knows nothing about how computers work or what astronometrics is all about. NASA has a real computer center there, and one of their tasks is to calculate a table that is know as an ephemeris (plural, ephemerides). These tables give us the positions of astronomical bodies (sun, moon, stars, satellites) with respect to a given point of observation. The point can be anywhere in space, even on the planet Pluto if necessary; it can go back (or ahead) to any point in time.
The problem is that the calculations are based on the observed orbits of these bodies, and accurate observations are not more than 300 years old. Observations accurate enough for long term projections didn't even begin until fifty years ago. Based on these observations, the computer can hustle back to Joshua's time and tell in which direction Joshua would have had to look to see, say, the planet Venus, and how far above the horizon he would have had to raise his eyes.
Item: Are those calculations correct, in the sense that an actual Joshua living over 3000 years ago, would have actually found Venus at the predicted point? Not necessarily--both Earth and Venus may have changed their orbital characteristics since that time. The only way to check their correctness would be for NASA to send somebody back to Joshua's time and actually measure! So far this is beyond the capability of rocket science. So when the story-teller says that the Greenbelt people were "checking" their calculations, we have to ask, "Against what?"
Item: The problem of the computer stopping because it found a "missing year" is hilarious. A computer knows nothing about "years" until the programmer tells it. What the computer does is continuously repeat a particular calculation, each time with a different set of numbers plugged into the calculation to get a result. The computer stops only when the programmer tells it to; this can be done by telling the computer to do just so many repetitions or by telling the computer to keep track of each result as it is calculated and then stop when a certain result is achieved. The computer is totally insensitive to the facts underlying the numbers it is crunching.
Item: Somehow the passage in Joshua, chapter 10, became converted from "about a day" to the precise "23 hours and 40 minutes." If the computer couldn't tell Greenbelt that a day was missing, how did it calculate the exact time of 23 hours and 40 minutes?
Item: The author relied on the KJV translation in 2 Kings, but he assumed a lot from a questionable translation. The word translated here as "degrees" is a word that is elsewhere translated as "steps" or "stairs" and is rendered "degrees" only in the story about the extension of Hezekiah's life. Other translations besides the KJV and NKJV use "steps" instead of "degrees" even in the tale about Hezekiah. Actually, then, Isaiah was asking Hezekiah if he wanted the sun to go ahead 10 "steps" or back 10 "steps." Hezekiah made the interesting observation: "No, anyone can make the shadow move ahead--instead let it move backwards ten steps." We can't really know what "ten steps" meant in terms of measuring time in Hezekiah's era or for that matter what kind of measuring device they were using. If they used sundials like the modern type, it would have been easy to make the shadow move in any direction without ever involving the sun at all, by just giving the gnomon a little shove with an elbow.
Of course, the measurement of angles in degrees, minutes, and seconds, as well as the measurement of time in hours, minutes, and seconds is a relatively late invention. How the author of this tract converted the angle measurement of "ten steps" into precisely 40 minutes remains a mystery.
We haven't even addressed the physical consequences of stopping the earth's rotation for even a few seconds, much less a 24-hour period. The energy requirements are so huge that it would take the impact of a major celestial body, striking at just the right angle and the right spot on the earth's surface, with exactly the correct velocity. Since the earth acts like an enormous gyroscope, stopping the rotation would immediately make it tumble at right angles to its path in orbit, so Joshua might have gotten a few seconds of darkness before the sun began to come up in the north and set in the south! Dissipating all that rotational energy would have raised the temperature substantially and perhaps fractured the mantle down to the iron core. All life would probably have been exterminated within a few seconds, and poor ol' Josh would never have gotten to savor his victory.
If this story is the sort of childish nonsense that appeals to Bible-believers, they are certainly welcome to it. I do hope, for their sake, that they don't try to apply their insights to actual projects!
(Charles N. Brennecke, 7992 Goodrich Avenue, St. Paul, MN
55105-3343)
