Manhin Look-Yat

Manhin Look-Yat
Born	(1925-08-06)August 6, 1925 Trinidad and Tobago
Died	July 1, 1996(1996-07-01) (aged 70)
Residence	Beltsville, Maryland, United States
Nationality	Trinidadian
Known for	Astrophysics, Astronomy, "True Planetary Motions and Rhythmic Climatic Changes"

Manhin Look-Yat (August 6, 1925 – July 1, 1996) was a Trinidadian-born amateur astronomer and independent researcher who developed an unconventional theory of planetary motion which he called "True Planetary Motions and Rhythmic Climatic Changes." Working largely outside mainstream academia, he argued that the Sun moves in an orbit of its own around the hub of the galaxy and that projecting planetary orbits from a moving Sun, rather than a stationary one, reveals predictable long-term cycles of climatic change. His manuscript was left unpublished at his death and was completed and published posthumously in 2010 by his daughter, Helen Look-Yat Taylor.

Biography

Look-Yat was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1925, the son of a Trinidadian mother and an immigrant Scottish merchant father. As a child he took a wide-ranging interest in the natural world, from geology, anthropology and physics to astronomy and cosmology. Rather than pursuing a traditional university education, he was largely self-taught, and by his mid-twenties he had begun compiling a series of journals on the sciences, taking a particular interest in theories of planetary motion. Accounts of his life compare his self-directed scholarship to that of the nineteenth-century self-taught Scottish scientist James Croll.

Look-Yat later settled in the United States, residing in Beltsville, Maryland. From the mid-1970s until his death he worked to document his theory, typing his manuscript himself even as the progressive effects of Parkinson's disease increasingly limited him. According to his family, he died in July 1996, before completing the publication of his work.

Work

Look-Yat's central claim was that earlier astronomers, including Galileo and Kepler, had modeled planetary orbits with reference to a stationary Sun, and that this assumption produced what he regarded as deficiencies in describing planetary motion. In his framework, the Sun itself follows a cyclical orbit around the inner hub of the galaxy, and planetary orbits should be projected from the center of the ellipse of this moving Sun.

He held that these "true planetary motions" corresponded to regular, predictable cycles of climatic change, which he described in periods on the order of 6,000, 12,000 and 25,000 years. On this basis he asserted that long-term climate shifts, including ice ages, could be forecast far into the future. These ideas are not accepted within mainstream astronomy or climate science and stand outside the established models of celestial mechanics and orbital forcing.

Look-Yat left volumes of notes, drawings and audio recordings of his projections. After his death these materials passed to his daughter, Helen Look-Yat Taylor, who transcribed the manuscript and audio tapes and, beginning in 2009, prepared the work for publication. The completed book, True Planetary Motions and Rhythmic Climatic Changes, credited to both Manhin Look-Yat and Helen Look-Yat Taylor, was published by Xlibris in 2010.

Abstracts

• 2010 - "True Planetary Motions and Rhythmic Climatic Changes" (Read in full)

Books

• 2010 - "True Planetary Motions and Rhythmic Climatic Changes" (Read in full)

External links

• True Planetary Motions and Rhythmic Climatic Changes on Amazon
• True Planetary Motions and Rhythmic Climatic Changes at Google Books
• "Discovery of the Century: True Planetary Motions and Rhythmic Climatic Changes" (PR Newswire, 2010)