Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that’s made of Nazi-fighting gravitational moon-ice… ice baby… music joke!

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that Republicans came down harder on Joe Biden for having a minor Major problem than they did for Matt Gaetz for having a major minor problem.

So, you know how everything is actually made of ice because Newton was wrong about gravity and the size of Hitler’s dick?

Yeah, neither do these people but here we go…

Cosmic Ice Ice Baby

It seems that whenever someone decides that the Earth isn't round, or the sky is actually ethereal firmament, or that we did not, in fact, evolve from filthy monkey-men, ice plays a crucial role. It walls us off from the capital "T" truth, it's unknowable, or you know, it was the wrath of god or some nonsense.

Today we're borrowing mostly from column B, but there will be some filthy monkey-men later in the show because most of what we're going to talk about were accepted out of a need to venerate stupid assholes for not being them ivory-tower thinky people. Thinky people who would have argued, wrongly of course, that the universe isn't made of magic, Cosmic, ice.

As Dr. Christina Wessely of the Institute of History at the University of Vienna explains:

"The Cosmic Ice Theory portrayed the world in a simple and vivid manner, in the form of a story. Astronomical and geological processes were paired up with spectacular stories in the vein of fantasy-laden adventure novels. And while this theory was easy to follow, conventional academic sciences seemed only to offer numbers and abstract equations, appearing incomprehensible and out of touch. As a result, the Cosmic Ice Theory seemed less esoteric to the man on the street than the conventional sciences."

A problem that we still face, both in terms of people thinking the sun is made of ice—there are still a few Comic Icers out there—and in nearly every other facet of the sciences that requires more than a third-grade education and a bottle of mountain dew to explain.

So "what is the Cosmic Ice Theory," you ask?

For that, we'll need to travel back to a simpler, stupider, time. Specifically, 1894—which started on Monday for Greg and Saturday for Julian, saw William Kennedy Dickson patent the motion picture, Coca-Cola was first bottled, and... Rudolf Hess was born... frustratingly, we'll come back to him.

In the summer of 1894 Austrian Hanns Hörbiger, we'll say "discovered" the theory of Welteislehre, or Cosmic Ice. Apparently, it was also called Glacial Cosmology or Glazial-Kosmogronie. Hanns was an inventor and engineer who didn't have any time for those "ivy leaguers" with their telescopes or math. No, he had visions to explain the universe. Check-make atheists.

By his own account, Hörbiger was observing the Moon when he suddenly had his first "recognition" upon realizing that it was so bright and rough on its surface that must be made of ice. Because truthiness is all about what you can see and never about what you "prove".

Shortly thereafter he had the second of his recognitions, or visions as they're commonly called. He had a dream-vision in which he flew through space and watched a silvery pendulum swing, getting longer and longer, until it broke. Upon awakening, he "knew that Newton had been wrong and that the sun's gravitational pull ceases to exist at three times the distance of Neptune," because... dreams I guess.

Hörbiger, date unknown

It was following this revelation that he contacted his friend Philipp Faith in 1898. Fauth, a schoolteacher, helped him publish the Glzial-Kosmogonio (Glacial Cosmology) in 1912. The 790-page tome, filled with photographs and diagrams,