In this issue

Å NO, you did not fail to receive the March 15 or June 15 issues of this Bulletin. Neither issue was published. See our lead story about changes in our publication schedule, necessitated by our other activities, primarily the CCC2 conference. This is the first MRB issue of 2008.

Å The cover is a schematic of the fission theory for formation of planets and major moons. The left column is the sequence of events viewed in-plane, and the right column is the same sequence viewed from above.

Å This is your final opportunity to sign-up for our international “Crisis in Cosmology – 2” (CCC2) conference from 2008 September 7-11 in Port Angeles, WA. Both participant and observer spaces remain available as of this writing, but may not remain so for very long. See http://www.cosmology.info/2008conference/.

Å The major article of this issue is a comprehensive development of the fission theory for the origin of all major planets and moons of both our solar system and other stellar systems. An outline of this model was first published in MRB in 1997, and appeared in the second edition of “Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets” in 1999. But this new article fills in the details of the mechanism and compares and contrasts this model with the mainstream model in more detail. The fission model is then applied to explaining the origin of traditional solar system bodies, newly discovered solar system and extra-solar planetary bodies, and now-exploded former planets and moons of the solar system. Between the fission hypothesis for how these major bodies begin, and the exploded planet hypothesis for how they end, Meta Science now provides a fairly complete basis for understanding the evolving nature of our solar system over its 4.6 billion years of existence.

Å Our third article is an updating of an article first published in these pages in 1995. It clarifies a common mis-application of the equivalence principle, and shows why gravitational and inertial masses for a single body are not necessarily equal even approximately, despite alleged verification of their equality to more than a dozen significant figures.

Å There is again much to report in our regular feature, Meta Science in the News. However, we have limited this feature to four items this time in the interest of getting this very late issue out now. (It would otherwise have slipped to October because of the September CCC2 conference.) In this issue, we report about the failure of Gravity Probe B, NASA’s “official” stamp of approval for the discovery of water on Mars, Google’s new Knols project as a viable replacement for the failed Wikipedia model for recording encyclopedia-worthy information, and the latest news in the debate about the origin of the Mars hemispheric dichotomy.