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Domain: scientificexploration.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to scientificexploration.org.

Comments · 12

  1. Re:An epic failure in science journalism by paradigmsareconstruc · · Score: 2 · on Can Electricity Travel Through Space on Astrophysical Jets? (mdpi.com)

    You're adopting a very limited view of the word "methods" that is not in line with what these two sociologists are referring to. The point of the text is to describe the social and evidential processes of science by looking at what they call disputed science.

    A review of even just the Amazon reviews would have clarified this. For example:

    "The cases laid out by the authors demonstrate how much science and scientific results can be hidden under personal interests, believes (superstition is a better word), wishes and inaccuracy. One example is the "proof" of Einstein's gravitaion theory by Sir Arthur Eddington by systematically dismissing data in conflict with the theory."

    Re: "You're doing exactly what you're quoting as the wrong thing to do, and you claim that the right thing to do - based on your quotes - is "studying one side"."

    I absolutely do NOT recommend shutting out arguments from any side. What I am proposing is the construction of a social network where information about scientific controversies can over time be aggregated with crowdsourcing. I've recently described the details of this social network I'm advocating for in an article titled Tracking Scientific Controversies.

    Constructing such a social network is not in the least equivalent to arguing that one side should be ignored. As the situation stands, academia implies that certain questions should no longer be asked because they are considered "settled science". What I'm arguing is that the public can participate in scientific discourse as a check upon scientific authority by double-checking that their "settled" science is indeed settled. The way we do this is to check for vindications over time of these supposedly settled science claims -- a process which benefits from a diverse crowd (which means that the public can be better at this than the scientific community).

    What I am reporting to you right now is that I have been practicing this method for a full decade now for this Electric Universe debate, and what I have found is that you are not being properly informed by science journalists. There have been many vindications and completely legitimate explanations which have not been reported to the public. If you had been tracking the EU with me, you'd know of them. I'm trying to report them to you, and doing so does not in any way suggest that you should only pay attention to one side of the debate.

    To the extent that a person only pays attention to one side of a debate, they become subject to it. Once we make a conscious decision to track controversies over time -- which is of course easier if we have help from a community -- then this helps us to treat each side of the debate as an object. The premise of my social network design is that we can actually make people smarter by helping them to make this subject-object transition. If you go to any International Baccalaureate-level high school literature class, that is exactly what you will find the teachers instructing the students how to do: They are inviting the students to interpret the text from competing worldviews. But, notice the problem: Science instruction completely lacks a similar tradition -- and so what we end up with, whenever somebody criticizes modern science in some manner, is an angry mob which defends the claims of science for the very reason that these students have not been trained to transition from subject to object.

    The mistake you are making here is to interpret the presentation of critique and competing claims as inherently one-sided. But, the whole point of critique is to make us smarter and wiser about our current worldview, and to provide the possibility for change. It's to replace one single thought with two or more. When we learn about critique and competing ideas, we think at a higher level for the very reason that we stop being subject to the information we've b

  2. Re:An epic failure in science journalism by paradigmsareconstruc · · Score: 1 · on Can Electricity Travel Through Space on Astrophysical Jets? (mdpi.com)

    Re: "But the way those guys presented their theories, usually heavily leaning towards the 'buy my book' path before all else, as well as their intense paranoia towards anybody with a legit background in astrophysics always left them looking just a wee bit off."

    I hear what you're saying: You have expectations for what a competing theory and presentation should look like, and this doesn't look like your expectations.

    What I am arguing for is that, in terms of process, we can more meaningfully judge controversial scientific claims by systematically tracking scientific controversies. By that, I mean (1) learning the arguments of the debate; and then (2) watching for any vindications which might occur for the against-the-mainstream idea; and (3) preferably, doing this in a group of people, so that the work is distributed. I've proposed a new social network to crowdsource this information in an EdgeScience article which details the origin of the idea.

    The problem with your existing process is that we do not actually know what state the correct answer currently is in. When popularity does not align with validity -- i.e., when there are observable biases on a topic -- then the state of a valid line of investigation can be immature. Some people -- and this includes actual scientists -- will try to cast that as reason to believe that the idea is not correct, but then they use that judgment as a reason to stop paying attention. What I'm suggesting is that this is not a rigorous approach for identifying what is and isn't true. There is a way to deal with these situations which is much less prone to error: tracking controversies.

  3. Re:Fermi Paradox: SOLVED - They Are Here Now! by lennier · · Score: 1 · on SETI Is 50 Years Old; No Sign of ET

    Anyone who's paid attention to the UFO phenomenon can tell you that the existence of 'something' out there has been well known by the US military since the 1940s. The problem is nobody really seems to understand the first thing about just what 'they' are, so it's embarassing to talk about and best brushed under the table. Whatever 'they' are they're NOT classical little green men with antennae... and I highly doubt that any 'crash debris' was ever retrieved.. all the best incidents indicate something much weirder, transient, and more in control of the parameters of the encounters than we are.

    There's a few good reviews of the classic UFO material online: Michael Swords is good, as is the Daily Kos blogger Two Roads. I also recommend the Society for Scientific Exploration. The rest of the stuff is out there for anyone with Google.

    The apparent failure of radio SETI is a very interesting data point to put against the apparent reality (yet weirdness) of the UFO phenomenon. But then, we've moved so far beyond analog broadcast radio in the last 50 years, why wouldn't ET civilisations' communications move equally fast? What if there were some way of, eg, modulating gravity or quantum entanglement? Should we expect to still be detecting legacy technologies just because that's the detectors we happen to have right now?

  4. Evidence is here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on SETI Is 50 Years Old; No Sign of ET

    The evidence for a foreign intelligence is here on earth. This evidence is overwhelming. Yes, there is no "hard evidence", but still: Everyone who has done deep *scientific* investigation of the UFO phenomenon won't deny the fact that there is a foreign intelligence on earth.

    Documents

    If you haven't read those papers, please don't assert to know that UFOs (as in "foreign intelligence") don't exist.

  5. Evidence is here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on SETI Is 50 Years Old; No Sign of ET

    The evidence for a foreign intelligence is here on earth. This evidence is overwhelming. Yes, there is no "hard evidence", but still: Everyone who has done deep *scientific* investigation of the UFO phenomenon won't deny the fact that there is a foreign intelligence on earth.

    Documents

    If you haven't read those papers, please don't assert to know that UFOs (as in "foreign intelligence") don't exist.

  6. Evidence is here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on SETI Is 50 Years Old; No Sign of ET

    There is already enough evidence for a foreign intelligence, here on earth. Yes, it is no so-called "hard evidence", but in its entirety the evidences are just overwhelming.

    You want to see it? There you go:

    But before you say that all UFOs can or could be explained as natural phenomenons or secret aircrafts or any other explanation besides a foreign intelligence, you really should read these documents. I don't know anybody who has read them and still says "UFOs (as in "foreign intelligence") are not real". Every person who did deep scientific investigation into the UFO phenomenon comes to the conclusion that there must be a foreign intelligence behind some of the mass of UFO cases.

    Documents:

    Archives and data bases

  7. Evidence is here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on SETI Is 50 Years Old; No Sign of ET

    There is already enough evidence for a foreign intelligence, here on earth. Yes, it is no so-called "hard evidence", but in its entirety the evidences are just overwhelming.

    You want to see it? There you go:

    But before you say that all UFOs can or could be explained as natural phenomenons or secret aircrafts or any other explanation besides a foreign intelligence, you really should read these documents. I don't know anybody who has read them and still says "UFOs (as in "foreign intelligence") are not real". Every person who did deep scientific investigation into the UFO phenomenon comes to the conclusion that there must be a foreign intelligence behind some of the mass of UFO cases.

    Documents:

    Archives and data bases

  8. Re:God Bless Him by lennier · · Score: 1 · on Ray Bradbury Loves Libraries, Hates the Internet

    Exactly. Also, if you're interested in somewhat off-the-beaten-tracks topics, like say ufology, you're much more likely to find interesting resources on the Internet than at your library. For example, the Journal of Scientific Exploration isn't likely to be carried at your local.

    I was a library rat since I was a preteen, but my knowledge base only really started to expand once the Web - and then Wikipedia - came online. Most of the topics I wanted to know about were very, very esoteric and specialised and most of the published books I could find were at the popular digest level, third- or fourth-hand summaries.

    And far worse, most of the teen science fiction books I grew up with and loved got purged mercilessly in the 1990s. Great young adult writers like Nicholas Fisk and John Christopher and Douglas Hill have been erased from the stacks, just because... I don't understand why, really, just they weren't considered sufficiently 'relevant' I suppose. So libraries don't always keep the important works around.

    Having said that, I do love libraries, the feel and the smell of them, although I switched to bookshops in my thirties and started specifically ordering books I'd find online. I can walk into any given library and instantly get sucked into a book; it's a bit of a hazard. I think the best way is a symbiosis between the Internet for cataloguing and exotic/up-to-date material, and well-managed libraries for finding the rest.

  9. There have been some successful dowsing studies. by Bananatree3 · · Score: 1 · on 10 Great Snake-Oil Gadgets
    Below I list some studies which DID find some success in dowsing, The site references this one study:

    Mogila (1986) reported a field study at the Monastery of the Caves, Kiev, where conventional sub-surface radar had failed to locate secret passageways. Of 130 sites indicated by dowsers, 73 (56%) corresponded with existing passages, previously known to the curators but not to the dowsers. At a further 29 dowsed sites (22%), previously unknown to the curators, test drillings revealed cavities. This gave a total success rate of 78%.

    Mogila, I. 1986. Dowsing in the Soviet Union. Soviet dowsers reveal long sought for legendary and hidden underground passageways at Russia's famous Monastery of the Caves near Kiev. Psi Research, 5 (1 2) March/June 1986, 34 38 Another site discusses a study done at Lund University in Sweden which showed some statistical significance in dowsing.

    so not ALL studies have been found against the technique, but it is definitely not proven for sure.

  10. Re:Common sense by Savantissimo · · Score: 1 · on Sunscreen Not So Good for You?

    The parent post to which I was responding referred to UV as ionizing radiation. There is no scientific difference between extreme UV and soft X-rays. Some UV is ionizing radiation - it can break the bonds in most biological molecules and thus cause cellular damage. It does not matter whether the damage was caused by gamma rays, UV, or massive particles - only the extent of damage itself matters. UV is more strongly absorbed by the body than x-rays and this offsets its lower energy for those reactions where the UV has enough energy to break the bonds in question at all, which it usually does in the case in biological materials. BTW IR is the standard abbriviation for infrared, not for ionizing radiation, particularly in contexts where ultraviolet is abbriviated as "UV".

    Ionizing radiation only causes cancer above a threshold dose which can be raised by prior exposure - previous low doses can immunize against the effects of later high doses. The repeatedly demonstrated dose curves show a "J" shape - the risks of cancer go down with increasing radiation until they reach a minimum well below the mortality rate for low-background radiation subjects. After that the mortality graph goes upward until the risk matches that of the low-background subjects, and keeps going up at even higher doses. For radon the optimum dose to prevent lung cancer is at about 3.5 times the total background radiation from other sources (background is 5-10K nuclear disintegrations per second, mostly from the potassium-40 in the body). For other radioactivity where the emitters are not ingested the optimum dose is around 10 REM per year - 50 times the background level. The residents of some villages in Iran get 70 REM/yr. yet suffer no increase in mortality.

    "I can quote 10^2 papers that do link IR [sic]with cancer." Sure - at higher dosages.

    "Also, we have actually seen DNA damage in human cells after IR [sic] exposure." Yes, and we have actually seen muscle fiber damage after exercise. The body's repair systems then make the muscle stronger than it was in the first place. An analogous process happens with cellular radiation damage.

    "Irradiated cells initiate protective responses within a few hours, including radical detoxification, DNA repair, cell removal by stimulated immune response, and apoptosis. These responses are also used to repair endogenous DNA and other metabolic damage as well (Feinendegen & Pollycove, 2001; Luckey, 1991, p. 5). Radiation damage caused by a low initial dose induces a DNA repair mechanism that allows efficient repair of a large number of breaks from a high later dose. This has been investigated by biochemical experimenters in great detail (Wolff, 1992). Radiation hormesis, therefore, is a moderate overcompensation to a disruption in homeostasis caused by the radiation; it is a stimulus to the repair mechanisms that cope with nonradiation damage as well, so that the overall effect is a health benefit (Cuttler,2002)."
    http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/ pdf/17.3_kauffman.pdf[a good review of the literature for and against radiation hormesis]

  11. Re:Dirac's equation of 1/2 spin: by Abcd1234 · · Score: 1 · on Greatest Equations Ever

    Umm, by the very definition of that presentation, I am not, by any means, a "pathological disbeliever". If this individual was, say, qualified in the field, I might pay a little more attention to his claims. If he was able to successfully test his theories with experiments, I would most certainly be willing to hear him out. However, until he's either 1) achieved a doctorate in Physics, thus proving that he's competant enough to question fundamental building blocks of theoretical physics, or 2) proved his theories with valid, repeatable experiments, I will continue to be highly skeptical, as you should you.

    Frankly, it sounds to me like you should try to be a little *more* skeptical. After all, you're putting an awful lot of stock into the claims of someone who can't even earn a degree in the area (or even a related area... AFAICT, he doesn't have a degree of *any kind*!) he's claiming to study.

    Oh, and BTW, you might want to look at some of Hotson's other claims. He's done a talk on Dirac's Equation And A Possible Physical Basis For Some of Astrology (astrology!), and apparently he has some interesting beliefs regarding ball lightening, "time storms", and other phenomena. So, why was it that I should bother paying any attention to this guy? He's looking more and more like a total crackpot the more I dig...

  12. Re:Failure to Publish Negative Results by GeoGreg · · Score: 1 · on Danger Of Strong Electromagnetic Fields

    This is known as publication bias or the "file drawer problem". For one view of this issue, see this link.