Born just outside Vienna, Austria in November 1860, Hanns Hörbiger was an engineer by trade. He invented a steel valve for a blast furnace blowing engine which changed the game for efficient steel production. He also played a key role in the design and construction of the Budapest subway, the third in the world at the time. He was obviously a clever man. A real thinker. And some might say, a complete nut job.
A keen astronomer, one evening Hörbiger pointed his telescope at the moon and suddenly realised, it was all made of ice. It was so shiny! How could it not be ice? He looked at Mars. He looked at Neptune. He looked at the Milky Way…Everything in the cosmos was ice. And not only was it made of ice, but ice was the driving force of the entire universe.
Not long after his telescope revelation, Hörbiger had a prophetic dream. He saw the earth swinging like a giant pendulum. It swung to Jupiter, to Saturn and Neptune. Then, after swinging three times past Neptune, the pendulum string broke. Hörbiger had found the limit of the solar system, where gravity ends. He knew that Newton was wrong!
Eager to share his revelations with the world, Hörbiger teamed up with school teacher and fellow amateur astronomer, Philipp Fauth, to solve the riddles of the universe and birth a new theory on the formation of our solar system. A theory based completely on ice.
According to Hörbiger, millions of years ago, in the constellation Columba, a supergiant sun and a dead, waterlogged star had a cataclysmic encounter. The soggy star got absorbed into the bigger sun and after millions of years, the soggy star, now superheated steam, exploded. This explosion sent ice blocks hurtling through space, forming planets and celestial bodies made of—you guessed it—ice.
Hörbiger and Fauth published an 800 page book, Welteislehre or Glacial Cosmogony, where they explained (with elaborate lines of reasoning) their World Ice Theory. They also detailed how the cosmic rays of the moon were going to cause man to reawaken to his place in the living universe. Mutations would transform his existence and demigods and giants would again arise in our midst. Supermen would once more walk the earth's surface and before them, the slave men would tremble and obey. Starting to sound more and more culty by the minute.
Strangely, the German scientific community at the time thought Hörbiger was bonkers and didn’t pay attention to anything he said. World War I was happening so, you know, people had other things to think about.
But Hörbiger was not dissuaded. He became a total zealot and decided that all he needed to do was convince the masses of his ideas. Then the academic scientists would be pressured to agree.
He appeared on the scene like a political party, creating a whole new movement promoting the Ice World vision to amateur scientists and bourgeois intellectuals. He gave public lectures, made cosmic ice movies and radio programs, and released a monthly magazine called “The Key to World Events”.
Well, his plan worked. Germany totally lapped it up and created a virtual cult around Hörbiger and his teachings. So we’ve got (what he ominously called) ‘a non-Jewish explanation’ for how the universe works, a whole bunch of magic, and manipulation to get people to believe it. Do you know who loved that shit? The Nazis. In fact, the World Ice Theory was the one that Hitler embraced the most.
Hörbiger died in 1931 but by then, he had millions of devout followers. They would interrupt educational meetings and physics lectures and yell “Out with astronomical orthodoxy, give us Hörbiger!” They also openly wrote threatening letters to astronomists and physicists. Hörbiger himself once wrote, “Either you believe me and learn, or you must be treated as the enemy.”
Oh, and let’s not forget the weather forecasts! Yes, Hörbiger’s devotees even claimed to predict the weather based on cosmic ice principles.
So World Ice Theory was nothing short of culty… but maybe it wasn’t all such a bad thing. See, some people believe Hörbiger’s ice theory actually contributed to the undoing of Hitler and his evil Nazi schemes. How so? Because the idiots used this pseudoscience to actually make decisions.
The Nazi military used pendulums to try and detect British ships and believed they could see enemy reflections in the stars. And of course, they relied on the Cosmic Ice global weather report - but it turns out invading Russia from the East was not such a great idea.
Thankfully, and not surprisingly, the Cosmic Ice Theory didn't survive past August 1945. But it remains a sobering reminder that the line between legitimate science and utter nonsense can sometimes be icy thin.
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[00:00:00] Will: The Student Union had organized something like 34 events across the whole country. There was live music, singing, fire oaths speeches by Fire oaths.
[00:00:12] Rod: Fire oaths. I swear by the burns I'm about to give myself, I will do my homework?
[00:00:18] Will: Something like that, yeah, it must be.
[00:00:20] Rod: I've heard of a lot of things. Yeah. Okay.
[00:00:22] Will: Speeches by big dignitaries incantations as well. Yeah, and they got a whole lot of radio and newspaper coverage. The newspapers described them as great joyous ceremonies but we know now, of course, and shit, you didn't have to be very aware at the time to know then that the German Students Union was scum And the events they'd organised weren't joyous ceremonies, but disgusting precursors of what was to come.
[00:00:51] Rod: Satanism and Nazis.
[00:00:54] Will: So they started in early May 1933, plundering libraries throughout university towns.
[00:00:59] Rod: The timing gives it away, doesn't it? Yeah.
[00:01:01] Will: They came first for the truly heroic sexologist. Truly heroic sexologist and advocate for gay and transgender rights. Dr. Magnus Hirschfield.
[00:01:12] Rod: Holy shit. In the thirties.
[00:01:14] Will: Yeah. I'm not going to tell you his story now, but one day I will. Oh, what a trailblazer. Total trailblazer. Like in the thirties, he was just for many people. Yeah. Big hero. Dr. Magnus Hirschfield and dragged, there was like 20, 000 books and journals and things like that in his Institute's library, dragged them out onto the street and burnt them.
[00:01:32] Rod: God, it still hurts.
[00:01:33] Will: Oh I was reading this bit and I was just like, I was so freaking angry. And then the list expanded of course. So Gerbils joined in he's like, no to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality and family and state. So what was on the list? They burned books of what they called traitors, immigrants and authors from foreign countries. So if people had left Germany and writing a bad bad book, they burned them who believed or attack denigrating the new Germany. They burned anything that smelled of Marxism, communism, or pacifism. They burned liberal literature. They burned books on modern art. They really didn't like modern art.
[00:02:08] Rod: Oh wow.
[00:02:09] Will: I know
[00:02:09] Rod: that pacifism too. What? You don't want arguments and violence? No, get out,
[00:02:15] Will: Yeah, totally. And they burned books of so called Jewish science.
[00:02:20] Rod: No, that's just science.
[00:02:22] Will: They definitely had a term for that.
[00:02:23] Rod: Pretty bad that I brought munich beer now, is that a mistake?
[00:02:27] Will: No, it's not. In particular, the works of Albert Einstein. But while they were burning, the Students Union and a variety of other organisations ran a parallel project seeking to stock the library shelves with the books that they did consider decent and moral. And what they replaced Einstein with? Well, that's the story I'm going to tell you today.
[00:02:50] Welcome to the wholesome show. Science stories for people who sit up the back of the classroom.
[00:02:58] Rod: It doesn't rhyme.
[00:03:00] Will: There's no song in there. I hadn't thought that through. Listen, I hadn't thought that through. Well, anyway, the wholesome show is me. Will Grant.
[00:03:09] Rod: And me, Dr. Roderick Griffin. I love Jewish science.
[00:03:12] Will: Me too. Hanns Hörbiger was born just outside of Vienna. 29th of November, 1860. In fact, his Austrian ness was a little bit part of the story later on. An engineer by training.
[00:03:25] Rod: The Germanic engineer.
[00:03:26] Will: So just for the record engineers, great love engineers, you know, Einstein did some training in physics. And if you're replacing Einstein's theory, maybe physics might be good training. I don't know.
[00:03:36] Rod: Engineers do physics though, you can't, you can't engineer without it.
[00:03:40] Will: Well, he was an inventor. So when he was 34, he came up with a new design for a blast furnace blowing engine. Basically, they used to have leather flaps on them and he replaced it with a steel flapI or a valve. I think being fairness to him, it was a steel valve.
[00:03:56] Rod: This is going to get hot. Let's put a little more product there. I'm thinking something organic, definitely organic.
[00:04:02] Will: Yeah. Yeah. This leather flap only lasts one use. Why don't we get something that might, I like to,
[00:04:07] Rod: what we do is we just keep pouring water on it.
[00:04:10] Will: Look apparently he did very well out of this and It's smoothed the way for efficient steel production and greater productivity in mining and apparently high pressure chemistry in the global network of gas exchange, none of these would be possible without the Horbiger valve.
[00:04:23] Rod: So I reckon that's fair. I took leather away from fire and put steel in its place. That's going to change a few things.
[00:04:31] Will: Well, he did. He did do it. He also played a key role in the design and construction of the Budapest subway which was the third in the world.
[00:04:40] Rod: Third. Third. Slack. Bronze medal.
[00:04:41] Will: How many subways have you built?
[00:04:43] Rod: I haven't built any, you know what? Already been done. Yeah. I'm a trailblazer, not a trail follower. That's not true.
[00:04:49] Will: But it was his hobby. It was his hobby that was his pathway to fame and glory and greatness. His hobby, you see, he was keen amateur astronomer. So definitely photos of him in with his glorious beard.
[00:05:02] Rod: And moustache. Like that is, that was at a time when you'd call it moustaches.
[00:05:06] Will: Yes, definitely. And he has them. He has them. He has moustaches. Listener, I'll chuck this up on the Twitter account later. He has an amazing beard. He would go world beard competition. He would get the bronze. So he's keen astronomer. And there's photos of him with nice little sort of kid sized telescopes, like home telescopes, home telescope being the way that you defeat Einstein.
[00:05:24] Rod: A toilet roll and the bottom of two broken glasses.
[00:05:26] Will: Okay. Now, once upon a time, and I can't tell you if this was when he was a kid or when he was 50 years old, the stories are not precise on this point. He pointed his telescope at the moon and suddenly realized, it's all made of ice. Ice. Everything is ice. Cold ice. The whole moon is made of ice.
[00:05:45] Rod: I did not know that.
[00:05:46] Will: And Venus, too. Venus, look how shiny it is. It's made of ice.
[00:05:51] Rod: The sun's even shinier. That must be ice, too.
[00:05:53] Will: Everywhere he looked away from earth was ice.
[00:05:56] Rod: So this is the first guy to be diagnosed with cataracts.
[00:05:58] Will: It's all so shiny. It must be ice. So he looked at the moon. He looked at Mars. He looked at Neptune. He looked at the Milky way and he's like, Oh my God, it's all ice. Everything in the universe is ice. Big ice blocks. Everywhere is ice and not only was it made of ice, he said, ice is the driving force of the universe.
[00:06:20] Rod: when you want a cocktail. when you really want ice, it becomes a driving force, but otherwise I'm a little skeptical
[00:06:25] Will: not long later, he had a prophetic dream. He saw the earth, a giant pendulum swinging on a pendulum string. And another side note here, pendulum science frigging huge at the time in Germany. Everyone was into pendulums.
[00:06:39] Rod: Yeah, just a bunch of swingers.
[00:06:40] Will: Everyone was in. It's pendulum. Pendulum, pendulum. So anyway, he saw the earth suspended on luminous thread and he saw it swing longer and longer swings. It swung to Jupiter. And to Saturn. And beyond. And it swung past Neptune. It swung three times past Neptune. And then it broke. And he's like, Oh, that's it. That's the limit.
[00:06:59] That's the limit of the solar system. That's where gravity stops. That's the end. So the whole universe.
[00:07:04] Rod: That's where gravity stops.
[00:07:05] Will: Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's it. The sun's gravity doesn't get any more. The whole universe is basically that. I knew that Newton had been wrong and that the sun's gravitational pull ceases to exist at three times the distance of Neptune.
[00:07:18] Rod: Cool. Cause I dreamt it.
[00:07:20] Will: Yeah. And of course the world needed to know. He teamed up with another local amateur astronomer, a school teacher named Philip Fauth, Who had already done a bunch of astronomy things. He created a large map of the moon, the ice moon that he now knew was an ice moon.
[00:07:33] And the two collaborated to explain Hobieger's theory, solving, as they claimed, the riddles of the universe, especially the formation of the planets, geological history, and meteorology with engineering principles.
[00:07:44] Rod: Holy snapping duck shit. That's a big call. Everything's made of ice. I think I know about the rest. Oh, and the dream. Let's not discount that. It all makes sense now. What a fun time though. Like you make shit up like that now no, but if you back then.
[00:07:57] Will: That's the thing that they published an 800 page book. Like it's the size of like an encyclopedia Britannica.
[00:08:03] Rod: 300 pages is the title, right?
[00:08:06] Will: No, it's not. It's a short title. It's Glacial Cosmogony, but it's a big book. And so they 1912 and it's a huge book where they're describing all of this stuff. So that's their original name for the theory. Glacial Cosmogony, but it's in, in Latin. So they Germanicized it later to make it more authentic. Welteislehre. World ice doctrine or theory.
[00:08:26] Rod: Yeah, leire is like teach.
[00:08:27] Will: Sometimes called cosmic ice theory. Cosmic ice is my favorite version of it, I think. So what is in the cosmic ice theory?
[00:08:34] Rod: Well, everything clearly.
[00:08:37] Will: a lot more than should be.
[00:08:40] Rod: Starting with its existence, diving in from there.
[00:08:43] Will: Now I'm going to, I'm going to read a bunch from the awesome Willie Lay's article. Willie Lay is awesome. His article is awesome. His article is pseudoscience in Nazi land and I just tiny aside on Willie Lay. He was lived in Germany at the time. And he later emigrated, he emigrated. He didn't like Nazis emigrated to America, but he ran a amateur rocket club in Germany in the 1930s that was so good at its amateur rocketry that the Gestapo came in and confiscated everything. This's too good. You can't have this anymore.
[00:09:11] Rod: You must go professional. It's one or the other.
[00:09:13] Will: And also when he was in America, he became basically a rocket theorist scientist and science writer. He was also one of the first to successfully deliver the mail by rocket.
[00:09:24] Rod: And I'm one of the last as well.
[00:09:27] Will: There was actually a large movement from like literally as far back as 1800. There were people that were saying, you know, we'll get, that's how the mail is going to be delivered by rockets.
[00:09:36] Rod: It sounded like the windows rattled down the street is this thing like sound barriers through your, Oh, that.
[00:09:42] Will: So it really took off in like 1930s, I think 1920s, 1930s. People are like, okay, now's the time. We will do mail by rocket. I think the first thing they tried was mail by artillery. They would pack all of the letters
[00:09:58] Rod: into your mail catching gloves. Remember to pull your goggles down. Here it comes. Count to 10. Don't let it land on your head.
[00:10:07] Will: Weirdly, I think the first place might've been was it Tonga or something like that? But anyway, this is in America. Yeah. It was very weird.
[00:10:14] Rod: Delivering mail by artillery in Tonga. You'd shoot it to fricking Samoa.
[00:10:20] Will: Maybe I'll do that whole story one day.
[00:10:21] Rod: Please. I can wait, just finish this.
[00:10:25] Will: But there was there was definitely a chunk of people, like mail people, like the people who ran, who said, look, this is inevitable. It is inevitable that the world is going to deliver mail by rocket.
[00:10:36] Rod: Why? Why? Don't deliver male via artillery. That's better than rockets. It's just so ridiculous. Shut this letter in here, it cost 90 times more than a normal letter to deliver, but fuck it gets there at high velocity.
[00:10:51] Will: So I got some new heroes out of this and Willy Lay.
[00:10:53] Rod: How much mail survives? I've sent you a thousand letters, no I haven't seen one of them. I saw something whiz by on fire.
[00:11:02] Will: It's fast. It's fast.
[00:11:04] Rod: Yeah, the shit you never get really doesn't get to you quickly.
[00:11:07] Will: Oh my god. Alright okay, back to Hobinger. Here's his story about the origin of the solar system. Millions of years ago, there existed in the constellation Columba, a super giant sun, like really giant, like big, as big as our solar system. Millions of times as large and as heavy as our sun. Now near that sun was another star, not as big, but still pretty big, many times bigger than Jupiter.
[00:11:31] But the problem was this smaller star was dead and totally waterlogged. Like it was really soggy. It was a really soggy star. It's covered by layers of ice, hundreds of miles thick and waterlogged all the way through, soggy soggy. And one day, one day the soggy star fell into the big working star and it settled at a depth, and this is where he went really engineer for a second, corresponding to its specific gravity.
[00:11:57] Rod: Or turn into steam.
[00:11:59] Will: No, not yet. Not yet. Because once when Horbiger was a young engineer. He saw molten iron from a furnace, probably from his blast furnace, yeah run over waterlogged earth with patches of snow on it and observed the wet lumps of soil exploded with a delay and great violence.
[00:12:17] So it took a while and then, so I don't know. So he says, so the waterlogged star fell into the big star. And it took quite a while. The sogginess dried out and changed into superheated steam, but nothing happened for millions of years. And then suddenly, the equilibrium was disturbed for some reason.
[00:12:35] We don't know. Stuff. We don't know. And the superheated steam exploded. And it blew the little star and layers of sun material into space as a whirling mass, and all of it froze into giant ice blocks.
[00:12:47] Rod: AKA planets?
[00:12:48] Will: Yes. So, there's a ring of ice blocks on the outside of the solar system. That's the Milky Way. Lots of ice blocks.
[00:12:54] Rod: Is it now?
[00:12:55] Will: Yes. The Milky Way is only just outside the solar system so that's the edge.
[00:12:59] Rod: I did not know that.
[00:12:59] Will: And then heaps and heaps of planets. He said there's like 34 planets. I don't know why he said this.
[00:13:05] Rod: In the galaxy or in our solar system.
[00:13:07] Will: He doesn't have galaxies. There are galaxies. Anyway, so that's the birth of our solar system. Now in there, there are two types of planets. There's the neptodes or outer planets, which have swallowed lots of ice blocks and the heliodes the inner planets haven't swallowed many ice blocks and they're made of metal. So they're they're like Venus and Earth and stuff like that, so lots of iceblocks, not very many iceblocks.
[00:13:28] Rod: The thinking like, 'cause I know we think we know a lot more than he did. The elaborate lines of reasoning and then to assert them with such confidence Never fails to blow my mind
[00:13:40] Will: and to get 800 pages out like it's a lot of typing. That's a lot of work
[00:13:44] Rod: I just I'm amazed by the raw fucking brass of it all you just like I thought it through. Oh, okay So this could mean, because there's pixies and something to do with my neighbor who came along because their car backfired. And you're like, what are you talking about? It's just fricking red twine and a cork board. Very wild.
[00:14:00] Will: So he said the cool thing was that, okay, so ice is the driving force of the universe. But we can also use it to predict the weather. See interplanetary space is filled with traces of hydrogen gas, which cause the planets to slowly spiral inwards.
[00:14:13] So everything is falling inwards towards either the earth or towards the sun. All of the ice blocks are coming down. And so ice blocks you can see on the move, that's meteors. Okay. If you see a meteor, that's an ice block on the move. Obviously. And if an ice block on its way to the sun happens to hit the earth, That's when you get a hailstorm. Proved by the fact that hailstorms move in straight lines.
[00:14:31] Rod: And are made of ice.
[00:14:32] Will: And are made of ice. Yeah, exactly.
[00:14:34] Rod: So it must come from space.
[00:14:35] Will: Comes from space. It's up. It's up. But if an ice block falls all the way into the sun, it doesn't stay there. It evaporates and is blown out through a funnel of the sunspot as a jet of hot water vapor, which freezes in space and forms fine ice and fine ice like, like mercury and Venus totally covered in fine ice. Like it's all that they're completely covered.
[00:14:55] Rod: Venus is renowned for being very cold.
[00:14:58] Will: Yeah, that's it. That's it. But he says earth is in the sweet spot, the Goldilocks zone. So he was right on one thing, the Goldilocks zone where too close and you're covered in fine ice too far away, not enough fine ice? I don't know. Mars is covered in thick ice.
[00:15:13] Rod: Closer to the Sun you are. Ice.
[00:15:16] Will: Yeah. Oh, and so fine ice when it hits Earth, that's that's the clouds.
[00:15:20] Rod: He's an engineer though. Doesn't he recognize that when you put ice near a heat source, it gets less iced? I mean, you know, call me picky, and I've really not done a degree in engineering. Or physics. I'm curious about that leap. Underpinning most of it.
[00:15:35] Will: I don't know. Hobiga himself, he doesn't seem to be a super bad guy. He gets a little bit cranky later on. He seems a crackpot. And that's one of the key things the key thing here is, it's not just about the crackpot. It's about how his idea was taken up.
[00:15:49] Rod: Of course it's never, it's not a lone act. It is a community act at some level.
[00:15:53] Will: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So earth is lucky. Too much fine ice that way, too much thick ice that way, but we're in the sweet spot. Yeah. Now our moon, of course, ice and weirdly, this is our fourth moon. Three other moons have crashed into Earth many times over because everything's basically crashing into each other slowly. And when this moon crashes into the Earth, that's the end. That's the end of all life.
[00:16:12] Rod: I think he's not wrong there. I think it'll be great.
[00:16:14] Will: Yeah, he said the other moons that have fallen in fortunately they were too small to kill all life. Their masses formed what we now call geological deposits.
[00:16:21] And in fact, he reckons that the most recent moon crash was witnessed by primitive man. The Norse legends about the Götterdammerung and the apocalyptic visions, that's all about, that's all about former moon crashes.
[00:16:32] Rod: So, okay. There's an apocalyptic thing. Old therefore must've been that the whole thing that ice becomes rocks confuses me, but anyway, carry on.
[00:16:40] Will: I don't know. Ice is just water rock.
[00:16:42] Rod: Yeah, but rocks aren't. The ice that came in geological formation is like.
[00:16:47] Will: Oh, when the last moon came down, that, that's what killed Atlantis. A bunch of this so Christina Wesley has done a bunch of work on Hobigus stuff. And so, some of her articles are really interesting here.
[00:16:56] She said that his Hobigus world ice doctrine, not only said it will explain astronomical, geological, and meteorological phenomena, it even offered a cosmic cultural history a scientific and philosophical, poetic, artistic, total view of the world. So he's explaining everything. He's got everything.
[00:17:13] Rod: Please tell me he ends up running a cult because it really, it would be good.
[00:17:16] Will: Basically, basically. In fact, yeah, you could say it's one of the most, you know, dangerous cults.
[00:17:23] Rod: That's a big call.
[00:17:23] Will: Ah no. No, it's pretty easily the, about the most dangerous cult that there has been. Not him. He doesn't run it.
[00:17:29] Rod: It may have been related to his ideas.
[00:17:30] Will: It may have been related to his ideas. Another theory that he had was that the cosmic rays of the moon, which is spiraling closer to us, are going to cause man to reawaken to his place in the living universe. Mutations will transform his existence and demigods and giants will again arise in our midst.
[00:17:47] Rod: So that'd be cool. Do you get to turn into one though or do you have to be born one?
[00:17:51] Will: I think certain type of people might turn into them.
[00:17:55] Rod: That's us. Come on, we could be huge.
[00:17:57] Will: An uprush of fire was imminent. That great initiates would cooperate once more with the cosmos and its struggle between ice and fire.
[00:18:06] Rod: It's Scientology.
[00:18:07] Will: It totally is. That supermen would once more walk the earth's surface and that before them the slave men would tremble and obey.
[00:18:13] Rod: Great. I love once more too.
[00:18:15] Will: Yeah. Do you feel the cult that might be coming?
[00:18:18] Rod: No idea. It could be anything. Wait, did this happen near germany? Yeah, no, that's it.
[00:18:22] Will: You might be thinking, as I said before, okay, he's got a crackpot idea. Like, why is the world's premier science story podcast talking about this? But Germany's scientists at the time, they didn't care about it. They were like, dude, you're insane.
[00:18:34] Rod: Do you know why they didn't care about it? the word scientist.
[00:18:37] Will: Yeah, I know. I know. I know. I know. That's probably it. So there, there seems to be no reaction at all. Cause they're like, why should we read this stuff? It's garbage. There was one astronomer that I can find Edmund Weiss who said that Hörbiger might as well have claimed that the cosmos was made of olive oil as ice cause the theory is basically the same.
[00:18:56] Rod: That's cool, I use a lot more olive oil than ice.
[00:18:58] Will: But also, 1912, World War I happened, 1914, and it killed any further interest in his book at this time.
[00:19:05] Rod: And a lot of people.
[00:19:06] Will: And yes, a lot of people. So people, you know, they're fighting in the trenches, I don't think very many people were super interested in reading the world ice theory at the time.
[00:19:14] But, Hörbiger was not to be dissuaded. He turned total zealot for his job. After the war, now equipped as Willy Ley describes it, with a long white beard, a persona like a renaissance polymath, and handwriting calculated to impress amateur graphologists, he changed tactics. I don't know why his handwriting matters, but it seems
[00:19:33] Rod: Calculated to impress amateur graphologists. That sentence has never been formed anywhere else in the universe.
[00:19:39] Will: So Hörbiger's theory was If the masses accepted his ideas, that would put sufficient pressure on the academic scientists to agree with it. He wanted to force the cosmic ice theory through
[00:19:50] Rod: That's just good science. You do it by bullying and imposition. That's how it works.
[00:19:54] Will: It's not, but yeah, no.
[00:19:56] Rod: Oh, but you're so traditional.
[00:19:57] Will: Yeah. So he took up all of this, like this persona and he convinced that audience, you know, these sort of you know, smart people in Germany, but not scientists. So, you know, bourgeois intellectuals, that kind of thing.
[00:20:07] Rod: Oh, like us. So he would have convinced us. Well, maybe.
[00:20:09] Will: He convinced them that what he was doing was truly scientific. It was serious scientific work, full of objectivity and rationality. And yeah. Here's how Willy Ley described his tactics.
[00:20:18] He appeared on the scene like a political party. Created a whole new movement, promoting the Ice World vision to amateur scientists and bourgeois intellectuals through Cosmo Technical Societies, an information bureau in Vienna. He gave public lectures to crowds of up to like 1200 people. He made cosmic ice movies and radio programs, released a monthly magazine called the key to world events, which is such a great title.
[00:20:42] Rod: Big call. And I love how ambiguous it is. What is this? It's the key to world events. I'll take a copy.
[00:20:47] Will: Like if you're walking through the newsagent, which, which is the one you want to read?
[00:20:50] Rod: Yeah, it's a horse fetishist, something to do with weddings, a hammer magazine, the key to world. What was it events?
[00:20:57] Will: I'm still stuck on the hammer magazine though.
[00:20:59] Rod: Of course you are, but that's cause you're a specialist.
[00:21:00] Will: MC Hammer or like the tool or both?
[00:21:03] Rod: We're going to have to buy the magazine.
[00:21:04] Will: Front half is MC Hammer.
[00:21:05] Rod: You got to buy it.
[00:21:06] Will: Yeah. And something like 40 novels and popular books.
[00:21:10] Rod: He is our Ron Hubbard.
[00:21:12] Will: Wow. Totally. No, I don't know if he wrote all of those. I think there was a lot of devotees that joined in and like, cool, I'm going to write the novel as well. I couldn't find any of the novels, but I could find this totally wild heavy metal novel that was written like 10 years ago. Karnov, Phantom Clad Rider of the Cosmic Ice. And listener the cover of this book, It's just so heavy metal, wild, like,
[00:21:36] Rod: except there aren't women who basically have a small piece of metal over their vaginas and two small power pasties
[00:21:43] Will: just over the side here just over the side
[00:21:44] Rod: marginalizing the hot women. Typical
[00:21:47] Will: but that's Karnov. Going to be the center of it. He's the writer of the Cosmic Ice.
[00:21:51] Rod: But Karnov should be surrounded by the ladies. That's how it would work in that subcontinent.
[00:21:55] Will: Once he's defeated the baddie. Whoever the baddie is.
[00:21:58] Rod: Skeletor by the looks of it.
[00:22:01] Will: And even better. Here's the thing. New members of the World Ice Movement Cosmic Ice Movement put out weather forecasts. Like they, they put out a monthly weather forecast claimed that its principles permitted reliable general, general, not local, general weather forecast for months and even years in advance.
[00:22:17] Rod: Today on Earth, there's going to be some storms.
[00:22:20] Will: There's ice. Ice, some ice is coming. There'll be hail. I just, I love the chutzpah of going, oh no, we can do this. We've got a totally made up theory and we can predict the weather with it.
[00:22:32] Rod: Careful with the Jewish language there, mate. You'll be found by the ice people.
[00:22:37] Will: Okay. Okay. Germany lapped it up.
[00:22:39] Rod: Did they?
[00:22:40] Will: Yeah they totally did. As Willy Lei says, you know, created a virtual cult around Hobbiger and his teachings. Now Willy Lei starts his essay with this really cool, it's not a quote, it's just his way of thinking. He's German, so he can say this. When things get so tough that there'd be no way out, the Russian embraces the vodka bottle. The Frenchman, a woman, and the American, the Bible. The German tends to resort to magic, to some nonsensical belief which he tries to validate by ways of hysterics and physical force. I think it's interesting. I've never necessarily thought that magic and magical thinking is big in Germany, but there is, oh, and there's a great article and book.
[00:23:19] So Eric Kurlander, historian Hitler's Monsters is the book. And then there's an article I read called Song of Ice and Fire. But talking about how all of this is such an undercurrent in German society that the Nazis drew on.
[00:23:31] Rod: They loved all of it. It was wildly occult. But the whole drawing on that, I say so to more with more Northern Germanic types, like, like, you know, Nordic folk. Not as much with Germany per se, but yeah, I can see it. I can see it.
[00:23:44] Will: Yeah. And I'm sure, I'm sure there's plenty of people that weren't. And I assume that, you know, maybe all those feelings with a bunch of the stuff that happened in the twenties and thirties, they latched together. And it's really interesting.
[00:23:54] Rod: So yeah, that's the most interesting thing about the third, right? Well, they had two, they did two things. Well, Hugo Boss suits. Very cool. Very well tailored. They were very well tailored. They represented monstrosity, but they're very well tailored in doing it.
[00:24:05] And they're weaving in with the occult gave us Indiana Jones and other cool things like that.
[00:24:08] Will: I know, this is, it's such the thinking, and it was fascinating reading this all of this stuff. It's the thinking that you see in the Indiana Jones and I always thought, Oh, that's gotta be a little bit, they totally, not at all. Wildly into it.
[00:24:21] Rod: Hitler was fucking Ouija board casting bones and covered in rune tats.
[00:24:24] Will: And this is the interesting one that world ice theory was the one that Hitler embraced the most. Like heinrich himler, Hitler they are all totally down for world ice theory. This is the one.
[00:24:34] Rod: That's wild. If we're gonna go back to what people do, by the way, I'm gonna be the Frenchman. That sounds like the best approach. Like, magic's great, but
[00:24:41] Will: yeah the vodka bottle that's not solving a lot of your problems.
[00:24:44] Rod: Drunks easy.
[00:24:45] Will: Yeah.
[00:24:46] Rod: What was it? Americans Bible
[00:24:48] Will: I dunno. Magic's fun though.
[00:24:49] Rod: Like magic's fun but women exist.
[00:24:51] Will: Look, I don't want to give the conclusion away, but the end of the war, the Nazis didn't do so well. And there's a bunch of arguments that maybe the magical thinking maybe slowed them down a little bit. I'll tell you, I'll tell you some examples in it.
[00:25:03] Rod: If we believe hard enough, we'll win.
[00:25:05] Will: Obviously all countries are made of a lot of different trajectories, currents, tensions, things like that. No one people believe one thing. But it's interesting how they try to reconcile it and just didn't.
[00:25:15] So there are stories from the time of, this is in the 1930s now. Oh, so Hobiega himself died in 1931. So his followers kept the movement going.
[00:25:24] Rod: That's when my dad was born.
[00:25:26] Will: Oh my god.
[00:25:27] Rod: Could have been reincarnation therefore.
[00:25:28] Will: He is. You are.
[00:25:30] Rod: I am.
[00:25:32] Will: There are stories from the time of world ice devotees. Leigh reckons there were literally millions of followers. I know Germany is a big country. Millions is a lot. Anyway, his followers would interrupt educational meetings, physics lectures, and stuff like that. So they go into physics lectures and yell out and they're all chanting
[00:25:49] Rod: ice baby.
[00:25:50] Will: They really should! They really should! Well, more boringly, out with astronomical orthodoxy, give us Hörbiger. So they're all chanting.
[00:26:01] Rod: That is a shit chant. In German it would be longer.
[00:26:03] Will: They also wrote openly threatening letters to a whole bunch of astronomists and physicists. There was a director of a government Institute that was was told once we have one, you and your kind will go begging. So they really got totally bullied. Hörbiger, himself once wrote either you believe me and learn, or you must be treated as the enemy.
[00:26:22] So yeah, I think he, he does. That's the bit I was mentioning before. He doesn't seem to have been perfect. Like, I didn't think he was a bad guy, but he does seem to have been happy to bully people a little bit.
[00:26:32] Rod: It's strong language.
[00:26:33] Will: Yeah. And I think the idea of winning a scientific debate by convincing the wider population first perhaps by a little bit of bullying is not lovely.
[00:26:42] Yeah. If anyone doubted him, he'd shout instead of trusting me, you trust equations? How long will you need to learn that mathematics is valueless and deceptive? The practical engineer, he always called himself
[00:26:53] Rod: That's not the engineer you hire. We're looking for an engineer. I do not believe in maths. Have you got a partner? I think i'm a vision guy. I've a vision guy. I dreamt how this bridge should be built. You're like I'm gonna need a little more
[00:27:07] Will: I don't know how much engineering he was still doing.
[00:27:09] Rod: It sounds like none.
[00:27:09] Will: It sounds like once he'd done his invention and the Budapest subway, it's like, all right, I'm done with all of that.
[00:27:15] Rod: I'm a fan of qualitative methods, but not to build structures.
[00:27:18] Will: No, not at all. No, not at all. It's my feel, I feel the bridge.
[00:27:25] Rod: That looks strong enough to me.
[00:27:27] Will: Okay. Oh, there was another story of like businessmen who would only hire staff if they felt friendly about the world ice theory.
[00:27:34] Rod: Why the fuck did that matter? Like, it's just amazing. Imagine giving such a shit about that. It blows my mind. Like, no, you know, it's really important to me. Do you believe that the cosmos is made of ice and it came from a giant sun and one of it stuck in and the small sun that was made of ice actually fell into that sun?
[00:27:48] It took three and a half million years for that to turn to stem, and then we had moons, there was other moons, do you know ancient people saw that other moon, that blew down?
[00:27:55] Will: I don't want to work here anymore! sir!
[00:27:57] Rod: Anyway, here's your pay. I don't want it!
[00:27:59] Will: I just don't know. So, okay, look at all these ingredients.
[00:28:02] There's a whole bunch of magic. There's a non Jewish explanation for how the universe works. And there's bullying people into taking up a new belief. You know who loved that shit? The Nazis fricking loved it.
[00:28:13] Rod: You're allowed to say Hitler, you can call it. Do you know who else was into that? Hitler.
[00:28:17] Will: Yeah Hitler definitely was. But the famous Heinrich Himmler, as I said but the Marta, Nazi Marta, Horst Wessel. So he was, he, Nazi asshole. He was killed fairly early on. I'm not sure who by, and then he became this martyr to the whole Nazi party.
[00:28:29] Rod: I'd never heard of him. I'd heard a lot, but not that.
[00:28:31] Will: Yeah, I know. He's famous. He's a young ish guy. He's a little bit like, imagine if Carl Rittenhouse. A little bit like that maybe.
[00:28:38] Rod: If you're listening in the future, Kyle Rittenhouse didn't used to be president.
[00:28:41] Will: Yeah. Anyway. They all dived in like balls in. They love that they didn't have to listen to Einstein's understanding of space anymore.
[00:28:49] Rod: Well, he was a little circumcised, wasn't he? So we can't have that.
[00:28:52] Will: There you go. World ice theory was authentically German. Gives you a different way to understand the universe. They also love, cause like, our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow. So, that's obviously, like they're, this is when they're thinking ice is awesome.
[00:29:07] Rod: As opposed to everybody else's ancestors who were puny little lady girls. I mean, what are you talking about?
[00:29:13] Will: Or from warm places where there wasn't ice.
[00:29:15] Rod: Therefore weak.
[00:29:16] Will: Exactly. Like they're really thinking ice is awesome.
[00:29:19] Rod: And heat is no challenge. Or swimming, climbing mountains, dealing with famine, desert. No, no challenge. Only ice.
[00:29:26] Will: They also loved again, that Hobbiger was Austrian. Just as it needed a child of Austrian culture, Hitler, to put the Jewish politicians in their place. So it needed an Austrian to cleanse the world of Jewish science.
[00:29:35] Rod: Good snapping Lord. Do you know what amazes me? Nazi articulations and utterances can still surprise. I know. There's always another one where you go, what?
[00:29:46] Will: Still. You're awful, but wacky and weird.
[00:29:49] Rod: More, how could there be more layers to this ridiculous onion?
[00:29:52] Will: Okay. So, Hitler totally embraced this. And so Eric Kolenda says this was the only border science and border science term that like pseudoscience or fringe scientific movement pretending to be scientific sort of thing, that Hitler embraced wholly and with conviction. So, Hitler quotes it a few times, he's talking about the moon theory and pre moon humanity.
[00:30:11] He read a whole bunch of the books and believed it's predictive qualities when it came to both geological and meteorological phenomena. And also remember Hitler kind of came undone because of a bad winter, amongst many other things. You know, invading Russia from the West is not a good thing to do. But maybe it would have been better if he got better meteorological predictions.
[00:30:28] Rod: Yeah. If you take the the weather forecast for Earth, it may be not quite as locally relevant to you as you'd hoped.
[00:30:36] Will: He wanted to erect a great observatory in his hometown, Hitler's hometown representing the three great cosmological conceptions of history, Ptolemy, Comperticus, and Holbein. Hitler even said, he said, maybe world ice theory could replace Christianity eventually.
[00:30:51] Rod: I don't think they're the same. I don't believe in either, but I don't think they're the same.
[00:30:55] Will: This gives a theory of how the universe sort of started.
[00:30:58] Rod: But that's not, I can't believe I'm going to defend Christianity or any religion, but I feel like it does a bit more.
[00:31:04] Will: Yeah. This doesn't tell you how to live your life. As far as I could see. It just says there's ice.
[00:31:08] Rod: Yeah, it doesn't say that people who are different are wrong. Oh, no, it does.
[00:31:11] Will: They gave an honorary doctorate to Philip Fowth. You remember the guy that he wrote the book with? And they put a meteorologist in charge of the world ice theory in Hitler's super think tank.
[00:31:21] Rod: Can you imagine that? You're a meteorologist, go and run this. I don't know how. This isn't meteorology. That's not fair.
[00:31:26] Will: Now. So at the same time, the Gestapo banned professional debunkers from revealing any of the secrets behind this.
[00:31:33] Rod: Shocked I told you.
[00:31:34] Will: I know, right? Okay, so there were some limits. Like the propaganda ministry said you can be a good Nazi without believing in the world ice theory. So they said you don't have to believe it.
[00:31:44] Rod: And people say they were unyielding.
[00:31:46] Will: And I love this. There were prominent mathematicians and physicists who said, you know, this fricking dumb theory that you've got is going to hurt the war effort.
[00:31:54] So, well, they said, we don't have enough maths and science skills already. So believing in this magic garbage.
[00:32:01] Rod: Thanks for making it worse fellas.
[00:32:02] Will: I know. And so this is a, the Prussian Academy of Science wrote to someone, I can't remember what, Hey, what are you doing here? It's bad enough that kids can't do math anymore. And I love, even back in the thirties, like in Nazi Germany, people are worried about kids that can't do math.
[00:32:16] And they're like, we're trying to rebuild our military and improve our technology. Now you've got too much time with your world ice theory. So they're like, stop it. And this is really problematic. And this is the thing that comes out at the very end. Like there's some people who reckon this dumb magical belief.
[00:32:34] Rod: Save the world?
[00:32:36] Will: A little bit. A little bit. So there's stories. There's stories of the German Navy and this was helped along by Hitler and all of the idiots in the Nazi party using a bunch of this pseudoscience to actually make decisions.
[00:32:49] So there's stories of them They would use the pendulum science to try and detect where British ships were. So they'd have a map and they'd hold the pendulum above the map and if it made a circle or if it made a shape, it would say where the British ships were.
[00:33:03] Rod: Did that go well?
[00:33:04] Will: No, they also used this other theory that supposedly cause the world ice theory, you can look up into space in a certain angle and see where the ships were.
[00:33:13] Rod: The reflections from the space
[00:33:14] Will: there are actually like admirals and people making decisions based on this dumb, dumb idea.
[00:33:20] Rod: Wait a moment, Lieutenant. I'm looking into the stars for a reflection of what's happening.
[00:33:26] Will: And there's the british ship. Something like that. So, so here's the thing. Here's the thing. They started with, you know, obviously a super dumb idea, but they took it up because it suited them and then it made their thinking dumber and dumber.
[00:33:39] And they brought this in, like, obviously there were plenty of people in the German army that were using normal maths and all of that, but there was enough people using the dumb maths of world ice theory, but here's the thing. I think an idiot ideology that tied themselves in such stupid knots that they could never really ever win in the long run.
[00:33:58] Rod: Look at you. You've put a positive spin on fucking morons being in charge. Like there's something to be said for it. If it's, if they're in the charge of the right place and the right activity, let's call it, then great.
[00:34:11] Will: So there you go. So, World Ice Theory didn't last much past August 1945. There you go, listener. That's that is the dumb pseudoscience. So I mentioned a bunch of sources. So Willie Ley's pseudoscience in Nazi land. Christina Vesely's cosmic ice theory. Erik Kurlander's Songs of Ice and Fire and Hitler's Monsters. All awesome. Awesome, fascinating stuff. So.
[00:34:35] Rod: But you won't need those because you've heard this.
[00:34:36] Will: And also maybe Rocket Mail.
[00:34:37] Rod: Oh, artillery. I want the explosions. Because, like a rocket you can control after you've fired it, in theory. Artillery shells? You're on your own, son.
