Who is David Esker?
In the spring of 1974, I was a teenager listening to St. Louis’s favorite real rock radio station, KSHE 95, when the commercials were suddenly interrupted by a special announcement. The station was going to sponsor a Rock and Roll / Kite Flying event! They would award prizes for the largest kite, the kite with the longest tail, and so on. And since it was a rock and roll station, there would also be live bands — including a new upstart group called Kiss. So I started building a large kite, three times bigger than the standard diamond-shaped kind, complete with a two-hundred-foot tail.
Spoiler: my kite didn’t win any prizes — and Kiss, love them or hate them, went on to become one of the most influential rock bands of their time.
Anyway, the day of the big event brought only a light breeze, which made flying difficult — especially for my oversized diamond-shaped kite. A little thought explains why.
The standard diamond or cross-bow kite is about four feet tall with a 3’4” cross spar, but mine was three times larger. Its vertical spar was twelve feet long, its cross spar ten feet, and the thickness of both spars was also three times greater. Doing the math, the area of my larger kite was 3 × 3 = nine times that of a standard kite, while the volume — and therefore the weight — was 3 × 3 × 3 = twenty-seven times greater. Dividing 27 by 9 shows that my kite’s weight-to-area ratio was three times higher than that of a standard kite.
That meant every square foot of my kite’s surface had to lift three times the weight required of a standard kite. Only by running with it could I get it high enough to reach stronger winds — and only then would it fly.
So there you have it — the essence of the Square Cube Law. Even though scaled-up objects look the same, certain properties inevitably change, and those changes can affect performance. Size matters.
At science conferences I have given dozens of presentations explaining many of the fundamental scientific concepts covered in DinosaurTheory: Galileo’s Square Cube Law, Why Size Matters, The Derivation of the Science of Flight Equations, The Theory of Biological Evolution, and The Evolution of Earth and Our Solar System.
The fact that size matters — and that the Square Cube Law explains how it matters — is a fundamental scientific concept relevant to nearly every discipline. Yet, while grade-school teachers may casually mention that size is important, few (if any) explain Galileo’s Square Cube Law in a way that helps students truly understand it. Why? Because if teachers made it clear that most objects cannot be any arbitrary size, many of their brighter students would immediately recognize a problem: how could paleontologists claim that there is nothing wrong with dinosaurs and pterosaurs being so large if size matters? This would leave teachers with two uncomfortable choices — either admit that the paleontologists are wrong or leave their students thinking that science itself doesn’t make sense. As a result, even teachers who know about the Square Cube Law usually avoid explaining it fully. The consequence is that most people — including future educators, scientists, and engineers — grow into adults without ever developing a clear understanding of whether and how size matters.
Think about that! All over the world, scientists, engineers, and others make costly mistakes — sometimes amounting to millions or even billions of dollars, and in some cases costing lives. And all of this traces back to the failure of paleontologists to resolve the paradox of how dinosaurs and pterosaurs grew so large. Paleontologists are spreading the disinformation that size is unimportant — interfering with science education and holding back progress — all to avoid owning up to their failure.
Well anyway, continuing on with my bio.
From this experience, having discovered the Square Cube Law on my own, and later recognizing that paleontologists were misleading the public about the large dinosaurs’ paradox, made me realize that leading scientists do not have all the answers and are not always as truthful as they should be. From then on, instead of blindly accepting what I was told, I became curious — and that curiosity drove me to question not science itself, but the scientists who failed to provide solid evidence for their beliefs.
Throughout my life I have questioned scientific ideas. Of course, most scientific ideas are correct, but that doesn’t mean all of them are. This questioning sometimes led to interesting exchanges. For example, when I pointed out to my physics professor that certain statements about special relativity were logically inconsistent, he didn’t attempt to resolve the problem. Instead, he rattled off the impressive list of institutions where he had earned his degrees. But no matter how impressive the list, he still had not answered my question.
This willingness to challenge dogmatic answers is a key difference between me and many people holding science degrees: their thinking is weighed down by beliefs accepted on authority, while mine remains clear because I refuse to accept any belief unless it is supported by evidence and makes sense.
Author is taking a break during a field trip.
Photoshop is much easier than time travel.
I eventually earned my physics degrees and found myself teaching full-time at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado. It was a fun job, and I typically had great students who really cared about learning. After a couple of years of settling into my work, I returned to my interest in solving the large dinosaurs’ paradox.
I think it was the summer of 2004 when I finally felt ready to tackle the problem. My first thought was that maybe Earth had once rotated faster, but I quickly found evidence-backed reasons for rejected that idea. Then I considered buoyancy — the possibility that the atmosphere had been thicker. But when the calculations showed the atmosphere would have to be hundreds of times thicker than it is today, my reaction was, “Whoa, that can’t be right.” At that point, I assumed I would soon find a reason to dismiss the hypothesis and move on. But that didn’t happen. Instead of finding evidence against a thick atmosphere, I discovered that several other scientific paradoxes were also solved if Earth once had an extremely dense atmosphere. Remarkably, instead of solving just one paradox, I had uncovered the solution to several.
I never set out to make earth-shaking discoveries; for me, solving these scientific problems was just a fun, intriguing hobby. Yet, like it or not, I had just cracked major scientific puzzles that had baffled scientists for over a century, and so I felt that I had to publish my work.
This was unfamiliar territory for a community college instructor. Unlike university professors, who are pressured to publish, community college instructors have little support or motivation to do so; their focus is on providing high-quality education. Publishing original scientific research from a community college is extraordinarily rare — most articles are about teaching, not groundbreaking science.
At the time, I was so humble that my thought was simply: “OK, I just solved the paradox of how the dinosaurs grew so large. Perhaps this is worthy of publication.” It took a long while before I realized that what I had accomplished was far from ordinary.
The science community does not work the same way as other areas of life. When engineers figured out how to put a man on the Moon, the astronauts got a ticker-tape parade. When a city’s team wins the Super Bowl, some drunken blue-collar fans get to turn over a few cars. When a surgeon saves a child’s life, the family has that to be grateful for, even as they are later bankrupted by the medical bills. In a normal world, if something truly good happens, people celebrate. But in the scientific world, doing something really good usually just attracts the hatred of those who envy your success. For this reason, it’s often “safer” to make small, unthreatening contributions to science. The last thing most scientists want to do is achieve something so significant that it challenges the status quo. That was my mistake.
Established scientists and conservative religious groups have always rallied against revolutionary ideas. The pope, theologians, and many academic scientists threatened—or even burned at the stake — freethinking scientists such as Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, and many others who promoted the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Geologists mocked Alfred Wegener for suggesting that continents were drifting apart. Charles Darwin almost didn’t publish On the Origin of Species for fear of religious backlash and peer ridicule. Physicians mocked and ostracized Ignaz Semmelweis for advocating hand washing to prevent disease in hospitals. Michael Servetus, after discovering the pulmonary circulation of blood, was burned at the stake by angry Catholics and Protestants alike. So should anyone be surprised that paleontologists are coming after me now that I’ve proposed a revolutionary solution to how dinosaurs and pterosaurs grew so large?
Sorry girls, I am already taken.
Fortunately for me, burning at the stake is no longer fashionable as a means of suppressing freethinking. Moving to the next option, my critics tried mockery — but that didn’t work out for them either. It turns out the idea that Earth once had a much thicker atmosphere is actually scientifically sound, while many of their own ideas for explaining large dinosaurs and similar phenomena are weak if not outright ridiculous. Yet the science-establishment loyalists still have tools such as censorship and ostracism, and because they control much of the media, they have no problem using them against me. In modern times, destroying a person’s livelihood — or even threatening to — is an effective way for authoritarians to silence opposition.
Nearly two decades ago, when I first started publishing DinosaurTheory, it may have been fair to refer to the Thick Atmosphere Solution as merely a hypothesis or to claim it was controversial, but that time has come and gone. Now that I have posted so much evidence supporting this new science, there are no grounds for dismissing the significance of my ideas. The authoritarians trying to fight change know their best chance of holding on to their positions is to spread disinformation and censor my work. These cowards will never agree to public debate because they know they will lose. I have no respect for these people, and neither should you. They are self serving impostor scientists holding back the advancement of science.
The Thick Atmosphere Solution has resolved numerous paradoxes of the Mesozoic era. Together with the derivation of the Science of Flight Equations and the Theory of Planetary Evolution, these represent groundbreaking advancements in our understanding of reality. Along with Galileo’s Square Cube Law, they should become standard lessons in science classrooms worldwide.
It is unfortunate that within the scientific community there are almost always obstructionists who slow the acceptance of positive change. Because of them, progress often takes not just years but decades — and sometimes even centuries. Yet those of us who truly love science fight on, hoping to create a more rational and better world. Will you join me?
Please feel free to contact me if you have a question or comment.
Sincerely,David Esker
M.S. Physics
College Physics Instructor
Resolution of the Large Dinosaur Paradox
Science of Flight Equations
Theory of Planetary Evolution
Author of DinosaurTheory
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