Slashdot Mirror
No Black Hole Or Magnetic Monopole: Tunguska Really Was a Meteor
davide-nature writes "The mysterious blast that flattened 2,000 square km of a remote Siberian forest in 1908 has been blamed on the most bizarre causes, such as an exotic elementary particle left over from the Big Bang, a black hole or, of course, aliens, including in the double-episode 'Tunguska' of The X-Files. But a new analysis of tiny rock samples suggests that a more mundane explanation — a meteor exploding in the atmosphere — may be the right one. The blast is estimated to have packed between 3 and 5 megatons, 10 times the energy of the meteor that exploded over Russia earlier this year."
It's amazing that so many people preferred/prefer to believe that black holes or UFO's were the cause of the Tunguska event. Why is it so hard, for some people, to believe the most probable cause, a meteor, was the cause? Just looking at the moon shows that meteor impacts are not uncommon.
The serious answer to the joking rhetorical question is that tile layers who like to play geometric patterns stumbled upon the properties of the 3-4-5 triangle. That 3*3 + 4*4 = 5*5 is completely obvious when the tile pattern is laying down right in front of you. It is trivial to demonstrate a triangle is right (or at least that is so extremely close to be a right triangle that no one cares about its variance) by physical inspection, applying a folding/flipping operation. The nature of such triangle became common enough knowledge, even if the proof did not come into existence for a long time later. The hard part is figuring out what to try and prove.