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Oil Isn't from Dinosaurs & Other Iconoclasms
jkeene writes "The Washington Post has an article on Thomas Gold, a scientist who thinks oil doesn't come from dinosaurs, amongst other interesting theories. Some of Gold's other strange ideas turned out to be true, like pulsars. It's in the Style section, not exactly a peer-reviewed journal, but it has names and references. " I always like reading about iconoclasts, because at least I know there are people out there questioning even our basic assumptions.
Series=Serious.
It's true, the worst English speakers are those from there.
Mo.
Yes, except this article said NOTHING whatsoever about creationism. Read the article first please
Amozon carries some reviews on The Deep Hot Biosphere, the book that dwells on the theory mentioned in this article.
I some times do wonder, why is it that we spend so much time, cash and equipments on search for ET when our own good old earth is still a vast mystery to us !
The theory does have some loop holes but on the whole it does sound very impressive.
One question that really haunts me is that if this theory is right, why is it that we don't see so much barrels of oil and petroleum being pupmped out during an volcano eruption. A volcano is the closest natural link with the simmering inside of earth.
I really wonder what the poor OPEC guys will think about this theory. How they must be praying that it truns out to be case of the "infinte monkey on infinite typewriter.. " as some one earlier pointed out. !
Manifest
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
second first post!?!?!
I enjoy reading about Creationists, et al, if only because they make me feel so much better about myself. "As bad as my life is, at least I'm not completely brainwashed like these bozos." And hey, we all enjoy a good ego boost now and then. - rev
Think about this, though: in fact, an infinite number of monkeys would create "every work ever written, that ever will be written, and ever possible to be written" an infinite number of times. Well, at least a countably infinite number of times, as opposed to uncountably infinite.
Furthermore, given enough time, the monkeys would mail the best paper to your professor (probably an infinite number of times as well), and you would get an A.
So here's my proposal: forget Seti@home, forget DES, and RC5, and all those silly distributed products. Install my infinite monkeys client to write pieces for /., and then when we reach enough processing power that it is close enough to infinite to start behaving like those monkeys, we'll axe Rob Malda and have /. articles with no misspellings.
The idea that the blobs in the Martian rock were life has been discredited, principally because they are too small. Although they look like bacteria, they are many thousands of times too small to be lifeforms.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Oil and gas are formed when carbon and hydrogen are combined in a reducing environment. It's a chemical process, that does not concern itself with the source of the carbon and hydrogen. It could be from organic material, or from inorganic material alike.
I used to work for his daughter. Every once in a while he would come up with some crackpot theory that we could use as an analogy to explain why her latest idea wouldn't work.
My favourite was the "wrinkled apple" theory of mountain range formation, that assumed that the Earth was cooling, and therefore shrinking, causing the crust to buckle without any of those messy plate tectonics.
Just like Gold, and Fred Hoyle, Bondi worked on the theory that if you throw enough ideas out there, some of them will stick.
--
E_NOSIG
If he had he would know he could publish anything he wanted without the requirment of his peer's passing on his ideas. -just a thought
...is that it is used. If it was the same stuff that came out of the ground, you wouldn't need to replace it.
Used motor oil is full of metal particles and other various crud. It's pretty nasty toxic waste, as well as a lousy lubricant.
I'm not sure the value of recycled oil is as high as the cost of processing it.
This is certainly useful information, but all you've shown is that no hydrocarbons were created in the first 10 seconds after the big bang. If, say, they were created starting at t+1 hour, I think that would still count as being "at" the Big Bang (at least for the purposes of a newspaper article).
So, at what time did hydrogen atoms begin to form? I'm not a scientist, but my guess would be around t+1 minute or so. Thus, it seems to me, the question here is whether heavier atoms such as oxygen and carbon were present in any significant quantity prior to the first supernova (at t+10^9 years or so).
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Dunno. Some of the most recent heavy elements are really weighing quite mightily as of late. For instance, my Pentiumium is rather light compared to its oft paired sister element of Windowsium, but seems to do quite fine with Beosmium, and even Linuxium. It may be a Ramium issue in relation to Windowsium, since Windowsium, even with it's fairly diminuitive atomic weight of 98, seems quite a bit heavier - perhaps closer to 2000. Feh! It is highly probable that Pentiumium just does not react well when paired with the highly unstable Windowsium, whatever the atomic weight may be. But, I won't know until I test the newest element, Athlonium. Of course, this has nothing to do with the source of fossil fuels, the Earth's crust, Hillary Clinton's remote chance of getting elected to the Senate (do these people ever stop?), or even Don Imus's remarkable ability to market quality, American made outerwear. I could be wrong.
I think it's pretty easy to say that the article was incorrect in saying that the hydrocarbons were made in the big bang and such. Rather than concentrating on one errant statement, look at the important stuff. The theory hypothesizes that the hydrocarbons were part of the matter that originally formed the earth. (But don't those seem to be rather complicated molecules for that point in the development of the universe?).
Now, I venture into the land of conjecture and speculation. Perhaps the microbes formed as a result of the extreme conditions under the earth's surface at the time, similar to the "primordial soup" that has been hypothesized for decades. Since the best source of energy underground was these hydrocarbons (probably not oil and gas yet) the microbes digested these and created other forms of hydrocarbons (waste products - this is where petroleum comes in). I'm confusing myself even more with this speculation... Because in this situation, the hydrocarbons of the initial form (whatever it may have been) would eventually be depleted by the microbes. It wouldn't make sense for a microbe to excrete the same type of molecule as a waste product that it uses as fuel, so there must be some type of change going on there...
I guess this is what separates people like Gold from me. I really have a hard time thinking outside the box of logic, and pulling data together that seems on the outside to contradict into a coherent theory.
The anvil always catches up to the coyote in the cartoons.....
Kepler was not a monk. Christian, yes.
Newton's last words on his deathbed were about his pride in dying a virgin.
Little interesting tidbit there...
-Vel
The threads in the discussion clearly demonstrate why a conservative scientific mainstream is needed. Look at how many of these discussions turn into a sort of scientific wish fulfillment where things that people want to believe are put forth and backed up with evidence that the scientific orthodoxy was wrong in the past.
;-)
I think problems lies in distriguishing what is possible from what is true. That's the difference between hypothesis and theory. Experiment is the path from hypothesis to theory. Theory is as strong a statement as you can (or should) expect science to make, because you never know when an observation is going to blow it all out of the water.
Of course there is stodgy resistance to new ideas. That's because scientists are people. Show me an organization without orthodoxy and I'll show the absence of an organization
For every example of the orthodoxy resisting an idea that later turned out to be accepted theory, I can show you tens of thousands of crackpots who, in their ignorance of much of the body of scientific knowledge and method, advance theories that were demonstrated false by sound experiment decades ago.
I'm not saying "forward the stodgy orthodoxy" here, I'm just saying, to trot out a cliche, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I see three dangers in the scientific orthodoxy that should be examined regularly:
1) Human desire. This is the natural reluctance we all have to abandon a belief, particularly one to which we have dedicated our lives and whose overthrow amounts to a repudiation of our lives' work. This is what made Wegener (sp?), proponent of Continental Drift, into a pariah.
2) Financial interest. This is closely related to human desire, because greed is a human desire, but here I'm talking about something even more basic. If your livelihood, which is necessity (as opposed to your future wealth, which is greed), depends on funding from organizations who would withdraw funding if their agenda were undermined by your findings, you would be sorely tempted to withhold findings; not to say falsify findings.
3) Specialization. This is part, I think, of Gold's heresy. The "scientifc community" tends to separate in disciplines and those disciplines tend to become insular. How many geologists know much, if anything, about astronomer's findings of hydrocarbons on other worlds? How could they come up with a radical new idea on the formation of oil if they are ignorant of a significant source of information. Likewise, one of the reasons Wegener (yes, him again) was dismissed was that he was a meteorologist. What did he know about geology? This last problem is perhaps the most serious.
So, yes, problems exist. Even so, most radical ideas are, I suspect, quite spectacularly wrong. There are limited time, money, and tools for scientific research. Some effort must be made to concentrate our efforts on research likely to bear fruit (not just economic, but also purely intellectual fruit).
I think most people seriously underestimate how much we know about the physical world, and how abstruse, sensetive, and detailed are experiments that move science incrementally forward. This fact is what makes "problem area 3" such a, well, problem. This kind of science is based on inference; on steady observation, and drawing reasonable conclusions and extrapolations from those observations.
But don't despair. Science's famous heroes are those who leap beyond the current framework. Those people frequently labor in the world of inference, but at the same time are accumulating a wider model; an idea, like Einstein's photons or his relativity; like Gold's geophysical oil production; like Wegener's drifting continents. At some point the idea "solidifies," and they outline a radical hypothesis. This is an act of imagination, and quite different from inference. Inference is a process (as is "science"), but imagination is a human creative act, as difficult to quantify as "insight" or "brilliance."
The trouble is, in music or poetry or painting, you have the "insight" and you are done. You have created. In science, however, your insight must be tested against the physical world. Many a beautiful theory has been destroyed by an ugly fact (I wish I could say I had invented that turn of phrase; can someone remind me who said that first? I have forgotten, but I love the phrase).
This is, I think, the source of the "Nobel whacko." Many scientists are, I think, freed by their Nobel prize; by the concrete assurance of their status that the prize represents. They are freed to articulate their personal untested pet hypothesis.
I have to wrap up this ramble. I'd just like to say that I think people are far too sanguine. People are far too ready to believe an idea that matches their "feeling" about how things should work. Even Einstien said "God does not play dice." Don't let's throw away the orthodoxy. As with so much of life, good science is the challenge of finding balance.
Why yes I do. Thank you so very much for asking.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
Science has the sciebntific method and Christianity has faith. In my experience the scientific method is more likely to get you the truth. I really don't understand why faith is held in such high regard. One person can have faith in one book another person can faith in another book. These books say the complete opposite things. I could have faith in either one, which should I choose? Both persons would say I need faith in their book. But I agree not all scientists have been interested in the truth. That is a failing of the people not the scientific method.
Err, I don't suppose you've had any history outside of European history? The Islamic world was busily recovering from the Mongol invasion, entering a second 'golden age'. The Chinese were busily improving on their technology at the time as well. Any advances in Europe, at that time, would have been scorned at by the rest of the world. During the Middle Ages (and even the Renaissance), Europe was merely a backwater in the civilized world.
BTW, no need to post potentially inflammatory religous statements unless it has something to do with the article. The resulting flamewars decrease the S/N ration. (and since I use 'nested' comments, the page is longer than necessary)
Do you mean 'said the Earth is round'?
Well, as an example of bad teaching in the schools, few people in Europe actually believed that the Earth was flat. Most people just thought you'd die on the ocean before reaching land. Columbus made a mistake calculating the circumfrence of the Earth, and thought that the resulting distance between Japan and Europe would be short enough to sail. He was, of course, wrong. The Americas were in the way.
"Mommy, mommy, is that a curmudgeon?"
"Yes dear, the mordant bastard".
"Why does he have to focus on the grammer rather than the thought?"
"Because he's a myopic AC who would rather criticize than contribute".
"What a poo-poo-head".
People are dumb...not religions. Lets get that straight.
Dark Ages only occur in europe. during this time, other civilization is more advance than europe. don't think that europe is the center of advancement.
Nothing can't become something, without there being something in the nothing
In another words, which one came out first...the egg or the chicken. I do not know. do you?
--
You're a cartoon of rebel! You're all like exaggerated version of yourself! - Gerard Jones
Well this inspired me to do a websearch. http://www.aip.org/enews/ physnews/1995/split/pnu244-3.htm http://www.sciam.com/ askexpert/geology/geology9/geology9.html The second references the first.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
1) Mix a bunch of hydrogen and carbon with traces of other elements. Heat and squeeze for a few million years. Let H2 escape your squeezer more easily than other stuff.
2) Scatter a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, and traces of other elements in interstellar clouds and hard vacuum. Irradiate for a few million years, while letting them be pushed together and ionized by radiation pressure, mutual gravitation, and subtle orbital effects. Let hydrogen be blown away from the mass more easily than other elements and non-trivial molecules (due to relative lightness and selective scattering of hydrogen-line light).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But I wonder how many of his 280 articles turned out to be all hot air? Even supposed psychics are right some of the time.
Don't get me wrong though, I love people who shake things up. When you talk about things on the level of millions of years, there are simply too many things we don't know, yet throughout human history there has always been some sort of "accepted truth" of "the way things are". Currently as far as the origin of life we have a form of darwinism. A hundred years from now (maybe more) it will most likely have changed to something different. There is also a theory about oil as well, mentioned by the article. It takes an overwhelming amount of evidence to challenge the status quo however, and that is something Gold doesn't have much of right now.
And on a somewhat unrelated note:
For those of you who like to bash christianity because of it's lack of science, keep in mind that accepted "scientists" have been lying, covering things up, and brushing off evidence ever since the concept of "science" was conceived. It's a human problem, not simply a religious one. I appreciate guys like Gold who challenge "the way things are."
http://www.people.cornell.edu/ pages/tg21/recharging/
This page describes his theory and offers insight into it. Impressive read.
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Most people still do.
I'm always a little leery of theories that tell us what we want to believe. And you have to admit that the idea that the oil supply is endless is mighty attractive in many circles.
The cake is a pie
Nope. The days of exponentially increasing oil usage are long over. These days, we're promoting alternative fuels, but not because we're afraid we're going to run out, rather because we don't like the environmental damage. If current trends continue regarding the decline in how quickly our oil usages increases, it will peak, fall, and reach near zero before we exhaust what oil resources we have already discovered. Finding out oil is more abundant or replaceable than we thought is not going to change that. Back in the 70's, we thought we'd need to pull in the reins because we'd run out soon. We know better now, but we're pulling in the reins anyways. Look forward to a future of electric cars and whatnot, not because we're afraid of running out of fuel but because we just don't want to put up with the pollution anymore...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I wholeheartedly agree with Gold on the issue that peer review is a stifling factor in modern scientific research, one that I have often thought to put economic viability before scientific worth.
After all, what better way to get an edge on your competitor than to pre-qualify their products before they are released for general acceptance in the scientific 'marketplace'.
Imagine this same system being used by such scientific innovators as Microsoft and Sun, and you see why this is really not the best way for scientific validity to be obtained.
The fact is, such things as 'competitive interest' and 'peer acceptance' have no place in scientific research - they are simply forms of maintaining status quo amongst the players involved (i.e. what everyone thinks and accepts, as opposed to what 'individuals discover'), rather than means by which scientific progress can flourish and prosper.
I think we find a lot of this anti-establishment view in the Slashdot/open source community as well - certainly its evident in the OS arena. If we all agreed to only use that which had been peer approved, we'd be subject to the rules of marketing and economics, and thus we wouldn't be using such alternative OS's as BeOS/FreeBSD/Linux, etc. By this stance, Microsoft NT would be the only valid operating system - and in fact, in some realms of the computer industry, this is the case.
Now, I don't think 'peer review' of code is the same thing here, though... in an open source environment, we're more prone to a 'peer cooperative' effort than 'peer review' - i.e. if you find bugs in someone elses software, fix it and let 'em have the fix - thus progress is made.
I for one look forward to reading his memoirs when they are published - and I monitor with continued interest the Slashdot view on 'scientific methods'.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Ok. A little clarification is in order.
The Big Bang, which is still a much debated THEORY, happened..a long time ago. At the "time" of the Big Bang (since we have no idea what the concept of time would have meant back then) the universe ITSELF exploded. There wasn't a tiny piece of matter that contained everything..the universe itself exploded and sent into motion _everything_. This explains microwave background radiation - we detect it everywhere, from every direction, equally. This radiation was released in the Big Bang, so it literally fills the universe.
To go on...matter essentially didn't exist at this time. Some fundamental particles were in existence, but nothing that exists now in our percieved nature. Most of what "inhabited" the universe was radiation. Until approximately 10^-43 seconds, no one has any idea. Between 10^-43 s and 10^-35 s, what existed is called the GUT era - Grand Unified Theory era. At this point, everything was uniform - quarks and leptons were the same thing, in other words. From 10^-35 to 10^-4 s is called the Hadron era. This refers to the "soup" that was the universe...extremely dense radiation and quarks and such. Physics, matter, and energy were beginning to form [remember, they didn't exist before..physics came about during the Big Bang].
From 10^-4 to 10 seconds was the Lepton era. Lighter particles - electrons, neutrinos, etc - were dominant, along with lots of heat and radiation. The next 5*10^7 years were dominated by radiation, then from then to now became matter dominated as radiation formed matter and solar systems and such began to form.
Throughout this time, the average temperature of the universe has steadily declined, from around 10^32 K to its present state of about 3 K.
If you're still awake, it's obvious that no hydrocarbons were formed at the Big Bang. Chances are that Gold knows this very well, but the reporter screwed it up pretty royally.
There's your lesson on cosmology for the day..
Cheers
In that context, referring to "Christian Science" as an "oxymoron", as another who replied to this article did, is inappropriate, unless one wishes to offend others out of ignorance regarding their religion.
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
I'd rather have a truckload of people like him, even if he is right 1/100 times, than the bee colony of walking zombies that fill the ranks of today's "science". We are, supposedly, living in a time of GREAT scientific progress, yet there has been has been hardly a new idea in the last two decades. Progress? O yeah, a LOT of it, but just of the more-of-the-same kind. Computers, for instance, are stagnant. Yes, faster & more powerful, but basically the same. Take Linux for instance. Most of it IS 30+ years old. Now now, before you start flaming me no end: I love Linux, I think that it is the best since sliced bread, and it is what is *finally* moving us ahead. But that Linux can be ADVANCED with 30 years old technology only makes more clear how stagnat we are (the Great Micro$oft Technogical Winter? ;) I paraphrase Nietzsche: "Linux is something to be superated". I am a biologist, and mainstream biology has YET (nov 1999!) to incorporate the cybernetic advances of the 40's and 50's (actually, cybernetics was originally created for biology, did anyone know? :). But I find that even all the 'new' theories I read every other day propose 0th order regulation (neodarwininsm, for example, among many many). I am fed up of zombies, that are never right because they aren't even WRONG. Give more nuts and crackpots, anyday!!! :)
consider, if you will, the Great Flood. all you that don't believe the Bible can stop reading this right now; you won't get it, and you will only try to ridicule what you don't understand.
i heard some compelling things about this; that the people and animals that didn't make it onto the ark with Noah ended up becoming what we know as oil deposits. think about it. there's this huge amount of water (no reference of rain in the Bible until the Flood with Noah!), and the dead got buried in the silt and whatever else was settling as the waters receded... another poster here mentioned fossils found in the coal or shale. if you consider this theory, then it would make sense, eh?
just something to get you thinking.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
But they often do! Heavier things are often denser things, hence they achieve a higher terminal velocity. In the very special case of a perfect vacuum, all things fall at the same speed.
Good points about Kuhn... I was wondering how many slashdotters had read the "the structure of scientific revolutions".
Normal science is pretty good, but what do we have to compare it to? Since the enlightenment, all we've had to compare normal science to has been wacko science, and other things that rise out of weird social circumstances.
I think what Gold is talking about is the way in which scientific inquiry tends to lose the positive effects of Occam's razor after a few iterations of any theory. His whole approach has been to zoom out and think critically about the core issues within a discipline.
For most grad students who are trying to publish something, it is almost a rite of passage to cite all of the "elite" in the field, at least when defining the particular subproblem of interest. For many grad students, going after a fringe issue has the effect of
making advisors' knowledge less useful, and
Showing irreverance to the ideas put forth by one's advisor and other members of the already-established academic community.
Anyway, let's hear it for Kuhn... and let's hear it for an educational system that doesn't force scientists to so myopically focus on thier own little subfield.
Actually that's not true - according to the 9th law of Cartoon Physics, "Everything falls faster than an anvil."
I didn't think heavier elements even appeared until later in stellar evolution. It seems he's challenging more then just all of geology...
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
I think you're right that peer review serves a useful academic purpose. It's like inertia for the system that prevents us from wandering all over the map with new discoveries like "cold fusion."
However, correct me if I'm wrong, but really radical new ideas will take 10-20 years or more to displace an established view. Perhaps it's a little slow, and could be made better by a little tuning. To bend the control system analogy, we want the response critically damped -- fastest convergence to truth without oscillations.
In the open source world, the peer review is made close to instantaneous thanks to the internet. The same phenomenon is going on in academia thru the online papers you speak of. However, there it's a side path, "real science" is still widely viewed as the output of the reviewed journals.
I think science simply needs to admit that different data has different certainties. What's called scientific law is very properly left to the output of the respected journals. But a lot can be gained by exposing everyone to radical new perspectives, even if they aren't widely accepted. So maybe science just needs a variable moderation system like Slashdot -- where interesting and insightful count, and trustworthiness is a scale, not a binary decision.
Just because the technology is available doesn't mean people will use it. Gas-guzzling, smog-spewing SUV's are the fastest growing market segment these days.
BTW, I'm looking forward to getting an aircar.
I always thought it was from plants .. there was a lot more vegetative matter than dinosaurs ... I thought this was widely known ...
I generally don't post twice on the same story, and I generally don't pay any attention to "party line" regurgitations like this, but I gotta respond. Hopefully those 3 remaining folks who browse at 0 still will read both our comments and judge them almost completely unrelated to the story.
Global climate change is real, it's been happening since there was a globe, and humans' fossil fuel use has had little or no real impact on it. Any changes attributable to humans are dwarfed by those caused by other causes. See this page for a more lucid explaination (with citations) than I can make here after being up so long today.
"...agreements commiting to a policy of reduced fossil fuel use. ...all just talk to appease a few iconoclastic environmentalists." They're not appeased, to judge by the demonstrations still being staged at the ongoing negotiations. It's been and will be more talk, but the goal isn't "saving the planet". I quote one of the very few non-sympathetic persons allowed to observe the proceedings: "The Kyoto Protocol is a prime piece of the embodiment of a massive, grand, global scheme for redistribution of the world's wealth from "abilities" to "needs" -- a scheme which has flamed in the hearts of egalitarians of all stripes and "-isms" for ten thousand years of known human history."
For some reason, I suspect your not-quite on-topic post was motivated by the fact that there's a UN climate change negotiation session happening this week. My response certainly is: I'm involved with an effort to report on those meetings (Daily updates here). Our reports are nearly unique in that we're concerned about not over-reacting to the "urgent problem of global warming". Not a popular attitude... Rather iconclastic by today's standards.
WOW! Great link!!
Original Source Material!
(What a concept!)
It appears Thomas Gold has anticipated most of the comments and criticisms that have been posted here on Slashdot.
I have this knawing suspicion I am going to accomplish very little today.
Nick.
Can't deny the fossils found in coal. So at least there is at least a fossil fuel.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
The problem that must be overcome is that there is a stigma attached to scientists who voice nonrigorous ideas. But this is just plain silly, since the nature of the forum should make it pretty clear which articles are rigorous and peer reviewed, and which are more speculative.
IIRC, petroleum derived from cambrian era plants, while the dinosaurs were mesozoic.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Next thing you'll be telling me is that the Earth is one big giant computer trying to figure out the question to . . . no, wait . . . Hmm.
Most of the Earth's carbon has been locked up in the mantle by the Carbon Cycle. That's a good thing, since there it has no opportunity to recombine and eliminate the atmospheric oxygen.
Dont mistake what I'm saying I dont buy in to the earth is only 10,000 year old BS but the Christian Science has been saying this one for a long time. Its been shown that Volcanic activitis relase a large amount of Hydrocarbons.
I do tend to agree Oil could probly be formed this way or possabliy both. Seeing as how we dont have anyway of going back to really look its going to be hard to prove for a while.
my 2 pence
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
I note that any post expressing a Christian theme is rapidly down-checked. Do I see a pattern here?
-- Slashdot sucks.
Of course the email spam harvesters attempt to filter out nospam and SPAM and ...
I bet that some of the slashdot readers are also spam kings and queens... and anyone who can work with REGEXPs can come up with some nice rules to unmask email addresses on online posts.
so, how do you discourage spam and encourage human to human contact? Well, I suggest something unconventional that is not likely to be part of a spammers email address unmasking algorithms.
Actually, though scientists had hoped to find background radiation uniform across the backdrop of space, they found embarassing clumps instead. There is speculation that the instruments just aren't subtle enough to do a good enough monitoring job yet. I don't remember the specifics, but check out Scientific America, they often have good articles on this kind of thing.
Read his short story "The fires within" (reproduced in
"Reach for tomorrow". That story actually suggests
intelligent life in our planet's hot interior.
Whether Gold is completely off his rocker or not (hey, I'm conservative and skeptical here, too), I'm also glad to see that some of the interview subjects praised him for stepping out with these new theories.
If there is such a thing as an Iconoclast Award -- OTHER than being immortalized in a "think different" Macintosh commercial -- Gold definitely deserves it.
(Me, I'm a big fan of the Darwi Odrade character, and some of the things she says in _Chapterhouse: Dune_ point to people like Gold as being absolutely necessary for culture survival. I won't quote anything here, since I've gone on long enough.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Traffic is a problem no matter how transportation is fueled. Have you ever seen a bycycle traffic jam? It's just as bad, only instead of someone honking or flipping you the bird, they can spit, kick, whatever.
As for smog and such, take a look at modern gas and deisel engines. You can find cars with emissions that are cleaner than the air they are using to burn the gas. Deisels that are as powerful as larger gas engines but burn _much_ less fuel, and within 1 to 2 research-years of being legal in California (which says a lot about the cleanliness of the emissions)
itachi, also a car geek
If nothing else, he has given us some definite food for thought. Perhaps he'll even be right. I must say, I find it interesting that the article mentioned I think only one case where he was wrong. Too much of the "he got this right" for me.. I prefer a bit of a balance.
-- Sapere aude.
I'm impressed.
This sentence caught my eye too... impressive, but not unheard of.
In fact, several excellent teachers I've had told me similar stories. IIRC even such luminaries as Richard Feynman had to do this sort of thing on occasion... the combination of extreme time pressure and the memories of very recent learning can help to produce a very successful teaching experience. Can lead to ulcers, though...
You know, the point of view of the scientist we're all commenting on?
He didn't say God created the oil, just that the hydrocarbons weren't the result of prehistoric life.
That still leaves the same processes that formed the hydrocarbons in the comets and such. Which is probably what he's referring to.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Adding this to my list of oxymorons:
Military Intelligence,
Jumbo Shimp
...
Grunt. Oink, oink.
If the American Public wasn't persauded by
the media to beleive that hemp is bad, we could
use hemp oil which burns much cleaner and more
efficent then Fossil Fuels. Not to mention that
hemp is much eaiser to renew then oil.
Thats just my opinon anyway. Any one care to agree
or disagree?
A tree does die from old age. If it didn't, there'd be a lot more 'immortal' trees out there... I believe the oldest are California Redwoods or something like that, and they're only a few hundred (maybe thousand?) years old.
Agreed. This a very important concern. However it doesn't negate the usefulness struggling against orthodoxy. The two themes are mutually interdependent on each other. Iconoclasts need something strong, slow and stable to rebel against. The status quo needs heretics and crackpots dangerously running about in order to justify the walls. The walls are important, they hold everything inside. Or outside, depending on where you sit.
What's arguably the one of the most important characteristics about the style of development found in free software/open source world?
Seperate, and yet joined, Stable and Unstable source code trees, which are recognized as equally important and valuable.
Academia could learn from programming. I think the real issue is that we do not seem to have formally identified the absolute necessity of keeping both modes prevalent and balanced. We want one or the other to reign supreme.
..but not a whole lot. It's true. I claimed this about a year ago and went into a huge row with my lecturer, but then I proved it to him, and he had to give in (victory!).. It's quite simple, actually, and anyone who's been studying physics should know. The gravity force on the surface of a heavy meteorite is larger than on the surface of a light one. That's why astronauts can jump higher on the moon than on Earth. The heavy object pulls on other objects more than the light object. Same thing applies when two different-sized rocks are released 1 yard over the ground. The Earth will pull HARD, but both rocks will also pull the Earth a little. The large rock will pull harder than the small rock, thus approaching the surface quicker. Heavy objects DO fall faster than light ones! -- Jens Roland, 17-year-old physics geek from Denmark P.S. If you are interested, I will email you the proof.
Install my infinite monkeys client to write pieces for /., and then when we reach enough processing power that it is close enough to infinite to start behaving like those monkeys, we'll axe Rob Malda and have /. articles with no misspellings.
But what will be do with all those articles that have one letter infinitely mispelled?
"To be or not to ble, ohh! Stupid Monkeys" -Krusty the Klown
+&x
I mock the climatologists! Doomsayers and Cassandras!
Look at the data, read about the consensus among scientists, and keep these handy phrases in mind:
"260 million people can't be wrong"
"the earth is flat"
"lining the aqueducts with lead? Genius!"
"ice ages occur every 50,000 years or so"
"your baseline is the most important piece of data. Without a baseline, your data is meaningless. So what value do you choose for your baseline?"
The article was IMHO overly kind to Mr. Gold regarding his track record. Yes, he predicted there would be dust on the surface of the moon, but he predicted there would be so much of it that the Apollo lander would sink into it and be swallowed up. His steady state model of the universe is one of the most famous disproven theories in modern astronomy; the cosmic microwave background is direct evidence against it. He came up with the theory in the first place because he didn't like General Relativity, a theory which has withstood every test put to it to date. The fact that he has clung to this theory despite the evidence has contributed to the majority view in astronomical circles that he's a bit of a crackpot. The only astronomical theory of his that's mentioned in the article and which turned out to be right was his prediction of the existence of pulsars in 1967, a prediction which was an incremental extension of theoretical work done in 1934 by Zwicky and Baade.
His image amongst astronomers as a bit of a nut comes from a long history of proposing fringe theories that, while they may have a germ of a good idea in them, turn out to be largely wrong.
-Josh
Just let them read Borges. That should cure them of such simplistic analogies.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
His history of shaking up stagnant fields and forcing them to rethink some of their assumptions is his greatest value. And no, we don't have an infinite supply of hydrocarbons, just a renewable one. This means that if we can find more efficient ways to use our natural resources, we can balance production and consumption. Our current efforts have been to phase out the use entirely, under the assumption that there was a limited supply. With a limited production rate, we can set our goals differently.
So what process should there be to separate the shit from the gems other than peer review?
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
There's plenty of outlets for "crackpots". Just watch a TV news magazine some night. It's just that most establishment scientists have their threshold set too high to notice. I think this is appropriate. While science is the eternal search for the truth, or, to look at it in another way, the study of disprovable ideas. It is also an iterative attempt at categorizing and managing the enormous complexity of knowledge in order to understand and predict.
Such a process is necessarily conservative for the simple reason that it is expensive to shift a consensus for any reason, particularily one that has had operational success.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
We had Freeman Dyson, the physicist at Princeton, down here on the U. Penn campus the other day, and one of the many things he said that surprised me was that he knew Gold, and had complete confidence in him as a scientist. Dyson's own credibility in science is without question, so I found that pretty impressive.
I don't have the impression that Gold is against peer review, or anything; I just think he feels that it's gotten a bit too conservative, which is certainly possible. Speculation is a valid part of science; it needs to be identified for what it is, but it also needs to be heard.
In fact, it sounds like he is claiming that there are more than enough hydrocarbons to use up all the oxygen on the surface when burned. If a volcanic eruption (or humans) caused that to be released, the end result would be something like Venus: an atmosphere very high in carbon dioxide and with extremely high temperatures. Who knows, maybe that's just what happened to Venus.
an iconoclast. Put your car in museum and walk. Work where you live. Live where you work.
The majority of people are unwilling to believe that driving their car to work everyday will cause problems for other's. The status quo is not about taking action on things like global warming.
Libertarians like h2odragon are unwilling to think that satisfying their every whim might affect others in a negative way. The idea that all human actions are inherently benign is nonsense. Human nature includes co-operating with your fellow humans.
It's the difference between countable (cardinality of the integers) and uncountable (cardinality of real numbers). Consult any undergraduate real analysis textbook for elucidation. You should find it interesting.
But I believe that Midnight Coder is wrong, if we assume that the original premise, that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters can, indeed, produce the complete works of Shakespeare, is true.
The reason is that monkeys do not have the manual dexterity to change typewriter ribbons or reload paper. You cannot write the complete works of Shakespeare without changing the ribbon at least once, and defintely cannot write them on one sheet of paper. Therefore, the complete works of Shakespeare must be an aggregate work of over 1000 monkeys, each of whom has written one page.
Since the monkeys are not ordered, we can presume that the original author of the quotation wished to allow us to use any permutation of monkey pages to compile the tome.
There may be only a countably infinite number of monkeys, but the number of monkey page permutations is uncountable, and can map, I believe, to the set of all works that can ever be written.
Sorry, but there is some hyperbole at work here.
Microbes deep inside the earth were first hypothesized by Edson S. Bastin in the 1920's.
Furthermore, I recall another article in Scientific American from the late 1970s or early 1980s which discussed geological sources of hydrocarbons, primarily methane, that could form the feedstock for virtually unlimited petroleum formation, even without microbes.
That was a lot more than "eight years ago".
There are all sorts of "scientists" around -- and if one wants to be the Jesus Christ of scientists, one can always find persecutors.
Seastead this.
Yes, I do. The egg. All mutations accure at the time of meiosis (sperm+egg come together time), and at no other time. So it would have to be the egg that came first, although barely distinguishable from any previous eggs, but different.
http://gabrielcain.com/
Just think of all the trouble we'd have to go to with cloning dinosaurs and burying them so future generations can have the god given right to drive fuel guzzling 4 wheel drives.
'He landed in Harvard in 1955, "either the youngest or the second youngest full professor on the faculty. I forget which." But he refused to live in Boston and detested commuting from the suburbs, so within four years he had migrated to a "much more livable" environment at Cornell.'
... Where else can you swim in a waterfall, or go walking in the gorge right after classes? The much vaunted Californian weather (sunny and temperate day after day, bah..), the accessibility (highways everywhere...) don't hold a candle...
I was formerly from Cornell and currently at Stanford, and I share Thomas Gold's sentiment entirely. Despite (or perhaps because of) the freezing Ithacan winters and the numbing isolation, the place is incredibly beautiful and peaceful
... I posted my views earlier, I guess we have a case of article collision.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
At least not without dooming your children to a world of one massive natural disastor to another. Global climate change is real, it's already happening, and we need to faze out "fossil fuels" now.
CDN government .. impacts
Floods, droughts, massive crop failures.... the list even includes the possibility of another ice age within a few decades. It's not worth the risk.
CDN government.. understanding
This is recognized by most scientists, who have even managed to convince a lot of national governments to sign agreements commiting to a policy of reduced fossil fuel use. Unfortunatly, none of them are doing anything to follow through, so it was all just talk to appease a few iconoclastic environmentalists.
A couple more links:
West Coast Environmental Law
International Red Cross
David Suzuki Foundation
I am glad to see that you welcome Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler as Christian Scientists, hundreds of years after their deaths. Their contributions to mankinds knowledge should make all Christians proud, (including you and me). I can't help but find it ironic, however, that they were all branded heretics by the Church while they were alive; Galileo was even faced with the option of burning at the stake or renouncing his ideas. Would you have supported him then? Heh.
Charles Darwin lived to see himself hated by religious extremists, to the point that they tried to outlaw the very consideration of his theories. For the simple crime of describing the world as God created it, instead of as people in Kansas wish it were, he watched his name become synonymous with evil. He lived to see himself become a fundamental barrier between Christianity and reality, between people who think and people who blindly follow the men in black cloth. Yet you seem proud to have him as a Christian. Strange.
Read about the 'Pascal's wager' argument to find out why he was a christian. You might be surprised...
IMHO Christians are their own worst enemies when confronting issues of science. How better to lose credibility in the face of the not-yet-converted or the converted-but-questioning but to deny the existence of something that obviously happens? The Church did this when they branded Galileo a heretic in 1633; they did it with Darwin and again now with the recent Kansan stance on evolution. The people who do this are either fools, or charlatans intent on destroying the church proper.
A small note to any men of the church who are listening: Religion must be flexible enough to account for revolutions in thought, or else it will lose ground amongst the intelligentsia. Once this happens, there are only 2 means of recourse: violently hiding the truth, as with Galileo et al., or fading into obscurity/being absorbed into cults that are flexible, as happened with most pre-christian pagan cults. Science is your friend, because Science is man's best estimate of The Truth, and religion seeks to provide Truth for the people. Denying one piece of Truth makes even the most fundamental canonical propositions suspect.
Final cheap shot(that exemplifies my point completely): "To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin"
-Cardinal Belleramine
Now one of 3 things happened here, based on this quote and the fact that the Cardinal can be assumed to be stating the official position of the Church (and therefore God). Either 1) Jesus as we think of him is a fraud (unlikely imho), 2) God changed his mind based on reading Galileo's paper (even less likely), 3) Some poor shephard fucked up when he wrote down the original text in the bible. (Pretty likely) Unfortunately, certain members of the church were too stupid to consider this an option, and caused a good man to be incarcerated for life. And caused an unfathomable amount of damage to their own cause, by sickening hundreds and thousands of people for all eternity.
Oh, and look up what 'oxymoron' actually means, please.
Nehemiah Scudder
First Prophet
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
I know why he was a Christian -- and I was already familiar with his wager. As for heretics: I am not aware that Copernicus, Pascal, or Newton were judged heretical. In fact I'm quite certain that Copernicus and Pascal were not.
What was done to Darwin was a horrible crime, which I have preached against on more than one occasion. The way the churched showed its ass during the monkey trials is a large part of why we are in so much trouble to day. We focused on doctrine to the exclusion of everything else: caring for the poor, loving our neighbours, our relationship with God. We elevated the Bible to an almost idolatrous position. We because defensive and deluded ourselves into thinking that America was
But why do you assume that Christianity is synonymous with "the church"? I would say that Christianity is something that happens
Also, you should probably look up the arguments that were used to assume that the earth revolved the sun. They were based on bad interpretation of scripture: nowhere does the Bible say that the Sun circles the earth. IIRC, the verse in question says that the sun rises and sets over the earth. I think that is legitimately a figure of speech, not a statement of scientific fact, and not a "shepherd making a typo".
Most modern Christians would agree with me that the best criteria for understanding the Bible is to try to understand what the author
I could go on for hours about principals of hermaneutics, but that's the basic idea. The thing is that far too many people, both religious and irreligious check their brains at the door when they read the Bible. They are so busy trying to crack "the bible code" that they neglect the gospel message! Concentrate on the big things scripture says and the small ones will work themselves out.
Also, I know full well what an oxymoron is. Could you look up what "sarcasm" means?
-- Slashdot sucks.
I'm not a biologist, but I'm going to throw out a
counter idea to what you're getting at.
You're saying that coal can't be from fossils because if the fossils decompose, they'd be unnoticeable, so you say that the coal is something else.
Have you every seen a petrified tree? it's really a rock shaped like a tree, if you get close. The tree is gone, but it existed long enough for minerals to seep into the location where the tree once was.
That's what a lot of fossils are. The original parts did decompose, but the stayed around long enough for something to make an impression.
This is an ancient hypothesis. I heard about it in grade school, I'm 28 now. Oil may be a byproduct of planet formation, what a surprise as we all know that METHANE is the RAREST element in the solar system, it being the atmosphere of plenty of planets (sarcasm).
You're right, it's not new; Gold has said it for years. Other people are just now catching on.
... methan was an element. I thought its molecule was made of one atom of carbon and four of hydrogen. But maybe I'm wrong.
The real "problem" with peer review is not the system itself but rather the fact that the system is intsituted by a race of domesticated primates. Which is to say that any system, no matter how pure in intent, will always be clouded by the hierarchies that our societies as shaped by evolution impose on us. This is one of the reasons I find the Apple ads so unutterably sad. Anyone who claims to "think differently" should realise that the act of thinking is a process defined by millions of years of evolution. Any system any human society creates will have the imprint of glands.
.sig
If he isn't right. Stellar idea, Gumby.
This theory is an excellent alternate explanation for the existance of hydrocarbons such as oil. A few questions/comments/criticisms though:
1. How exactly would this oil be formed in the Big Bang? Current elements and compounds were formed by thermonuclear reactions of stars and, in the case of the Big Bang, one massive superhot and superdense explosion. How would this produce the right environment for creating hydrocarbon compounds?
2. If oil and helium were trapped in the materials that created the earth and various other planets, isn't there still a limited amount of them? And what about Europa and its surface sea of liquid hydrocarbons? How would a small celestial body like that create enough heat to boil up that amount of hydrocarbon compounds?
All in all it is a very interesting theory, and one I would like to see verified. It would definitely be an ecouragement to those wanting to put forth other radical ideas, as well as give us a more stable fuel source, at least for a while..
There are fossils in coal. Plant leaves, animal shells. Yet you claim that the very same plant leaves and animal bits decomposed to form that coal in the first place. So - why is that leaf imprint preserved at all? Imagine a primeval bog, lots of rotting leaves, another leaf falls on it, then other stuff falls on that - it all turns to coal and the one leaf is preserved? How plausible is that?
Let me give you an alternative theory: this stuff is oozed up in layers, from some completely different source. then one leaf (shell, whatever) falls, then another layer oozes up - the one leaf is fossilized between layers of ooze. Doesn't that seem more plausible? Does it? :-)
Now, I'm not saying I believe or disbelieve the conventional wisdom, but some things are not quite as simple as they might appear...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
"I always like reading about iconoclasts, because at least I know there are people out there questioning even our basic assumptions."
So you enjoy reading about the Flat Earth Society, Creationists and Immanuel Velikovsky?
Questioning assumptions is easy -- any crackpot can do that. (Being correct, now there's where the meat is).
The hydrocarbon mass of methane hydrates is greater than that of all the Earth's oil, coal and gas deposits combined. See one of the latest issues of Scientific American SciAm.
BTW - the sum of the brain power of an infinite number of monkeys is infinite. So then, it is possible to have an infinite number of monkeys filtering noise and an infinite number generating content so that all that is produced is signal (infinity + infinity = infinity). Just an idea
The problem there is that you're assuming the filtering is parallizable, which is not necessarily the case.
"I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change."
"We're going to have the best-educated American people in the world."
"Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."
Quayle foot-in-mouths never cease to amuse...
Not to mention Drow elves and Kuo-Toa!
this guy is obviously pretty smart, and i think his efforts are very noble, moreso than his actual work.
i really agree with him when he says we need to challenge our thoughts about how the world works. i mean sure, there are things that are probably true and that we've tested thoroughly, but there's probably lots of stuff that we can't really test (ancient history, origins of our species, etc) -- this is what needs to be thought about very critically.
for that i applaud gold.
Everyone has a say on the Internet.
Well Duh! Right now almost no one grows hemp. So
if you knew anything about econimics you would
know it's way more expensive. Because the market
demand right now is so low, business do not find
any motive in R&D. So much time has been spent
making oil refiners, drills, pumps and technology to find oil. No one grows hemp, so it is more
expensive.
Its like switching over to the Metric system. No
one wants to do it because of the capital required
up front. Although in the long run using the metric system would be alot cheaper.
Another example of this is using Silver wiring. Silver is more expensive up front but in the long run i.e. 50 years it will save money.
Get the picture?
peer review prevents in a larg part crackpot ideas like "The world hatched from a larg egg", "The world is flat" and "The moon is a dary product".
But he's right about holding us back. Iconoclasts and ecentrics break the mold they leap ahead.
What I dislike about the whole notion of track records for iconoclasts and ecentrics is they are wrong more often than not. They are mearly smart about how the approch a new idea. Instead of disguarding a new notion as a status que type might they are careful not to burry themselfs within the idea. If you build a world around an idea and the single idea falls your toast.
He is pointing out that oil may be renuable. But toss that out the window for a moment becouse the next comment in support of creative thinking accually is based on oil not being renuable.
We think so much "in the box" that when gass started becomming to expensive instead of using that to move us away from oil into other fule sorces and into more expensive electric cars we saw only the economic side and setforth to preserve our ability to continue to depeate this resorce.
While preserving all current notions suggested an unothedox action we chouse to react inside a narrow set of rules and fix a problem that leaving it to fix itself would solve many other problems along the way. Instead the one problem is fixed and the more sereous issues stay in place.
Iconoclasts and ecentrics have a place in our hyper cultre [ohh a new treandy catch phrase.. everyone say "Hyper culture"] but it's a pocket and not mainstream. They exist to dusript mainstream and keep us from becoming lemmings ready to jump off the cliff.
They are often wrong occasionally right, and represent our modern day harratics.
Having said that I need to point out that I have been described as an ecentric so my defence of ecentrics is like a programmer on a Windows develupmean team defending Windows.
And as allwase I could be wrong but thats something all those who think "outside the box" must live with. Thinking "in the box" has the vertue of allways being right.. or at least beleving you are...
I don't actually exist.
Just dig a hole in the ground and pour it in! I mean, it originally came out of the ground right? Now if recyclers PAID people to recycle it, then people would recycle. But recyclers want it for free or worse, have the gall to charge people to accept their recyclables... which they turn around and sell for a profit to the reprocessing facilities.
this theory has been around a long time in the oil industry. basically it amounts to the fact that you can find oil anywhere on the face of the earth, you just have to drill deep enough. the popular theory is that the earths mantle is not lava, but oil. I forget what the explanation for lava was (read the report years ago). The scientist that wrote the report was tested on his theory by being told to drill in a few random spots where oil was thought not to be found. in the process new drilling equip. had to be engineered to go as deep as he did, but eventually he did strike oil. If anyone is interested in the report, I'll ask my dad for it (he's been in the oil industry his whole life).
I have always wondered how the biology was initiated so the evolution could start, what made those first molecules to interact and create "life". Perhaps the theory in the article is correct that life is just a consequence of thermodynamics.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Too often in academic circles, certain views can be taken as correct, without being proven.
Here are a few examples of things that "everybody knows" with the responses from heretics in the field.
(btw, I don't necessarily agree with these views, but can you imagine what would happen if just one of them were true?)
1. A virus called HIV causes AIDS. AIDS is certain death.
Yup. that's right. There are quite a few respected scientists and even nobel prize winners who think this is either an oversimplification or even a complete myth.
Unlike most hypotheses, the AIDS-HIV hypothesis wasn't published first in a scientific magazine. It was announced on a press conference, in a rush, before someone on the other side of the atlantic had the chance to do it first. It became "instant truth" and trying to claim otherwise was a good recipe to get ridiculed by your peers an even ruin a career.
Some of the AIDS heretic's claims:
* HIV isn't a sufficient condition for AIDS.
Some people have been living with HIV for over 10 years with no treatment and apparent symptoms. The response of AIDS mainstream research has been to update the AIDS incubation period several times, from a few months to 3 years, 5 years and even more.
* HIV isn't even a NECESSARY condition for AIDS.
People have been diagnozed with AIDS without testing as HIV antidote positive.
* AZT and other drugs used in AIDS treatment attack the immune system, creating the exact same symptoms that HIV is alleged to cause. The justification for giving such highly toxic drugs to AIDS patients is that AIDS is invariably fatal.
The radicals like Peter Duesberg claim that AIDS is caused solely by behavioural and environmental factors and that HIV is harmless. The more moderate claim that it might be a contributing factor, but has not been proven to the the only cause.
2. CFCs deplete ozone. Less ozone=more UV. More UV=more skin cancer.
Some of the heretic's claims:
*Volcanos and other natural sources release several orders of magnitude more ozone-killing chlorine and bromides into the atmosphere that all of man-made CFCs.
*The correlation between ozone and UV levels is in fact POSITIVE, not negative as might be expected. People often forget that ozone not only blocks UV, it is GENERATED by UV.
*The antrarctic ozone hole is a periodic phenomenon which has been observed at similar levels back in the 50s.
*The patents on the original CFCs alleged to destroy the ozone have expired. The same companies now own the patents on the ozone friendly replacements.
*Changes in UV levels due to altitude and latitude are much larger than those predicted by worst-case ozone scenarios and yet skin cancer levels closer to the equator aren't noticably higher.
3. Cold fusion was either a hoax or gross measurement error.
*Many scientists around the world, including researches in US government national labs have been generating significant amounts of unexplained excess heat, are they all charlatans or totally incompetent in operating a calorimeter?
They claim to get much more consistent results than the original Fleischman and Pons experiment.
*Helium and other fusion byproducts have been measured and are accumulating over time.
4. No amount of radiation is safe. It is a purely accumulated risk.
* Some evidence shows that low levels of radiation (still significantly higher than ambient) are actually good for your health
* It's a well known response of the immune system where small amounts of something are actually beneficial in preventing the symptoms caused by large amounts of the same thing. (This is called hormesis)
* Statistics of cancer in nuclear industry workers are actually much lower than average, especially after subtracting those which can be traced to high exposures in accidents.
* Cancer in US states with higher levels of average background radiation due to altitude or radioactive materials in the grounds is noticably lower.
In all of these cases it's easy to see the role of the media, popular hysteria, politics or political correctness in determining what is considered an inappropriate viewpoint. It's much easier to believe in something which won't get you in trouble.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Why is everyone so convinced that oil and gas are from a biological source?
Hydrocarbons are found in comets, outer solar system planet, some theories say that in Titan it might be raining petrol - but here on Earth? oh, no, the old textbooks can't be wrong. It must be biological in source.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Lulling our anxiety over the extinction of fossil fuels is a dangerous effect of somthing that may be nothing more than just such gibberish.
So if a hypothesis is dangerous in your opinion it doesn't deserve the same treatment as any other?
Since when do the social effects of a theory have any relationship to it being either true or untrue?
This is first step on the same road that leads to political correctness hell.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
There is growing acceptance of organisms living in the earths crust. I know that life has been found as deep as something like 5 miles, from a mine in South Africa, which is the deepest down we've ever been.
Also, a link to Thomas Gold's site at Cornell, which contains links to the theories mentioned
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/
I've seen several people talk about peer review. I think most, if not all, need to actually look into what IS peer review, and what actually is taking place during that process.
"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." -Flaubert
If oil comes from the fozzilized remains of plants and animals that once lived on the surface of the earth, then why isn't oil found everywhere? Clearly plant life and animal life have evolved over the entire planet, as evidenced by fossils, but certain areas of the earth have little to no oil resevoirs at all.
The geology dictates it.
To clarify, you have to have the right sort of rocks on top of the organic stuff so that a. the organic stuff turns into Exxon's finest and b. Exxon's finest doesn't dissipate into thin air before Exxon gets to it.
And yes (as has been mentioned by others), my guess is the reporter (not Gold) messed up with the "hydrocarbons forming in the Big Bang" line -- it doesn't even really make sense to talk about this, since the "Big Bang" phraseology typically only refers to the idea of an initial formation followed by eras of matter/radiation coupling, etc. (That is, by the time the Universe had cooled down to the point where hydrocarbon formation was possible, it was beyond the point typically dealt with in "Big Bang" theories.)
Finally, a couple words on the peer review process. No, it's not perfect -- people can, and probably occasionally do, use the system to further their own careers (by, for instance, delaying or rejecting a competitor's work). But the scientific community isn't blind to these problems, and hasn't been for a long, long time -- in part because of this, I'd go out on a limb and say that most of the time, it works pretty well. Don't screw over other people, lest ye be screwed. Probably the biggest problem I see with the system is one that's inherent to any system designed to check over articles before their publication -- it takes an awful lot of time to go over a paper with a fine-toothed comb, looking for errors or misconceptions and the like, and it's awfully easy to shirk a little on the quality of the review. (And remember, the way peer review works is something like this: you get a letter in the mail from, say, the Astrophysical Journal, saying "Dear So-and-so, as an expert in the field would you please take the time to comment on the enclosed paper and issue a recommendation for or against publication? And, by the way, please do this in the next week.") This is, perhaps, not conducive to either high-quality reviews or cheery reviewers. But it's probably not avoidable.
Have fun.
Maybe all the world's oil is from dead geeks?
That is the beauty of the internet. All ideas, whether horrificly crackpot, such as 'all children need to be vulgarly raped by age 3', or good ideas like 'lets torch microsoft' are available. As the human population continues to grow, these monkeys will rapidly approach infinity. We will then see an incredible increase in the number of horrendous ideas, and zero increase in good ideas. We can see this happening even today. I firmly believe that the number of good ideas at a given time is a constant. The only question is, how many of these will be recognized and put to use. That is why we must have systems like slashdot whereby excellent ideas can be seperated from the vast sea of gibberish ideas, via appropriate moderation systems. Everybody writes ideas, all of these ideas get read. That way all the good ideas get identified, and scientific progress goes up and up. Of course, the idea that subterraneon microscopic oil generating hamsters do indeed exist may or may not be true, but surely the we will know by looking at how the moderators rate the posts in support of his theory, and how the moderators react by screaming and shouting and moderating down.
If only we could eliminate the need for secrecy induced by competition, intellectual property, and so forth, could this 'good-idea-mining' be implemented in the world at large.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
So what you're saying is that it's wrong to come up with ideas if you don't know they are right before-hand? He's not saying these ideas are facts, just ideas - and these ideas have led to break-throughs in the past. He us not saying we don't have to worry about lack of fossil fuels - rather, we *might* not have to. To say otherwise is dogmatic.
BTW - the sum of the brain power of an infinite number of monkeys is infinite. So then, it is possible to have an infinite number of monkeys filtering noise and an infinite number generating content so that all that is produced is signal (infinity + infinity = infinity). Just an idea
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
Sure, just because he's been right before he doesn't have to be right now. But the "infinite monkey" argument is way overkill. It is in fact only one "monkey" and one typewriter, and he has produced so good results that he deserves to be heard.
hypothesis's
I believe the word you were looking for is hypotheses.
And this bozo's comment got marked up as interesting. Sheesh. The wonders of moderation never cease to amaze me.
It's comparable to our knowledge of stellar evolution coming from many "snapshot" examples of an (even slower) process at different stages.
That would, of course, only prove that coal/oil/gas *can* come from sedimentary burying of old forests - not that it can't *also* come from Gold's mechanism.
But again, off the top of my head, it seems to me that despite the anomalous discovery in granite in Sweden, the *vast majority* of existing discoveries are in sedimentary layers with lots of fossils from the right period nearby.
Crack into higher hydrocarbons? Does that make sense? Isn't is something like recombination or something?
Where do you think life came from?
Do you think the first organisms created what they needed to exist out of thin air? Bootstrapped themselves into existence?
The question is not whether hydrocarbons can only be created by life, but whether oilbeds were laid down by life. So far (although it may be the lack of detail in the report) he's far from convincing.
I suppose the real test of his theory will be if oil supplies regenerate. Still, I thought the interior of the earth was fairly well understood. Iron core generating a magnetic field and all that.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
The article gives examples of about 7 or so hypothesis's of his that were proven correct 4 years to 30 years later as if thats proof. The article doesn't tell us how many countless ideas of his have been blown out of the water. It goes into that amazingly hackneyed theory that an infininte number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters given an infinite amount of time will reproduce the entire works of shakspeare, but in the meantime they'd also put out a bunch of gibberish. Lulling our anxiety over the extinction of fossil fuels is a dangerous effect of somthing that may be nothing more than just such gibberish. Perhaps he is correct in his theory and if so kudos, but if he is as much of a crackpot as he is sometimes made out to be... that could have disasterous consequences.
On a lighter note... <g>
--Ks9
The idea that oil and natural gas are derived from natural hydrocarbons in the earth's core is not new. In fact it has been around for a long time and the theory is bolstered by the fact that volcano eruptions contain huge amounts of hydrocarbons and by the natural hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of Titan (amoung other places).
But that doesn't mean the resource is endless. What it means is that it is renewable at a somewhat higher rate than it would be were it purely squeezed out of fossilized swamps. The point is that our consumption can still outstrip the natural production of oil. Not a pardon, only a reprieve.
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
I hope he's not correct about this one. If he is, then we can look forward to eternal smog, oil spills, traffic, etc, etc.
Slashdot moderation says "this is worth reading" or "this is not worth reading."
Actually, scientific peer review is closer to Slashdot peer review than you think. Reviewers are asked to judge whether the paper they are reviewing is a new, interesting, or non-trivial contribution to the subject (i.e., is it "worth reading". True, reviewers will also reject papers if there are flaws, but a reviewer cannot decide by him/herself whether the paper is "right" or "wrong"; only more research can decide that.
And of course, there are usually outlets for the "crackpots": there are many (too many?) journals, and a lesser one may accept what a major one rejects. And now there are online preprint archives as well.
...disciplining the ronkeys since 3/2000...
Didn't it ever occur to anyone that hydrocarbons could be made by both biological and interstellar processes? This would certainly explain the finding of hydrocarbons throughout the universe, as well as beneath the Earth's surface. Furthermore, the presence of biological matter in oil should not be taken as proof that such created oil; one could argue that at one time oil oozed to the surface, killed the life there, and carried the dead matter back underground during subsequent seismological disturbances.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
But: on average, it works.
True, it is biased towards incremental progress rather than revolutions, but that is the way science works most of the time. Most of us do not recreate whole systems of thought like Feynman (another iconoclast idol) - the times that require that are few and far between. (Though for physics, the current impasse with GUTs might be one of them.)
The reason we have to submit to the tyranny of peer review is simple: no one is an expert on everything. With our increasingly narrow specialisations, I know next to nothing about topic A at wavelength B, though I'm the world's expert on topic C. So if someone says A affects C in some way, I have much less chance of judging his claim correctly than another expert in A. But I should hear about, not have that view supressed by others, right?
So now we have preprint servers. One little 386 (yes!) at LANL archives all the submitted preprints in astronomy and physics on a daily basis - some people submit them after peer review and acceptance at a major journal (to prevent embarrassing retractions), some people submit them as soon as they send in a paper (to establish priority) and some people just publish papers on the preprint servers (and we know them well, as kooks of various kinds).
In this day, when results are shared at conferences and off webservers, journals are having an increasingly hard time justifying subscriptions. (I read preprint abstracts daily, and never use dead tree journals...) So they are evolving into keepers of standards - if its published in the Fancy Journal of UnGnomon News, it must be good stuff on Gnus!
That's quite enough raving - but as for this comment in the article: 'He [..] migrated to a "much more livable" environment at Cornell' - let me just add: "yeah, right!"
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Whoa.... science is part of humanity's extended phenotype? Hmm....
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The newspaper article was a bit lacking on references. Here is his web page which has other links. http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/
i think that one of the ideas of the article that is being missed is that Gold is comes up with new theories. he has been wrong before (read: static universe theory), but his theories have raised hell -- they've caused us to think about how we see the universe and our place in it.
does it really matter if he is right or wrong, so long as his ideas cause us to think about how the world works and, in proving or disproving his theories, we learn some truth about the universe in which we live? (i apologize for the hideous run-on)
Rhapsody in Numbers
Come on! I know thousands of you slashdotters
are X-Files followers! It's obviously the black
oil, churning and bubbling beneath the surface
of the earth, waiting to be tapped for colonization!
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
It comes from Dan Kaminsky's forehead
I have direct experience of the peer review
process, having participated in it, both as
submitter and referee, on many occasions.
Peer review is good for building on an existing
theoretical foundation. It ensures that everyone
cites the existing litterature properly etc.
However, when a revolutionary challenge to
existing theory comes along, the peer review
process is a serious impediment to the advance
of science. Remember, reviewers are academics
who have spent their entire working lives
building on the current theoretical foundation.
Any significantly new theory makes their whole
life's work look, at best, misguided, at worst,
foolish and irrelevant. They have a strong
incentive to shoot down any revolutionary idea.
How may readers realize that Einstein's original
publication on Special Relativity cited *no
published works at all?* Such an article could
never be published in a modern peer reviewed
physics journal.
Academics have become narrowly focused
specialists. Revolutionary theories are extremely
unlikely to come from within an academic
discipline, because virtually no one has the
necessary breadth of understanding, and those
that do, meet with the formidable road block
of the rigid peer review system.
(These are not verbatim quotes, just the best of my recollection...)
'Spacecraft landing on the Moon will sink into the dust until they are buried.'(Delayed the Apollo program by about a year. I think this was the primary science mission of one of the early (Ranger???) landers: to demonstrate that the craft would not sink.)
'Manned spaceflight is pointless.' (at a press conference hours after the Challenger disaster; while I ultimately came around to believe that his point is defensible, I thought it was the height of bad taste at the time...)
'The igneous rocks were too fractured to hold the hydrocarbons.' (12 tons of 'crude oil' in the Swedish well may sound like a lot, but it's about 50 barrels of oil. A good production well does that in a day. IIRC, the well was extensively logged for lithology; does anyone know if there were any traces of sedimentary rocks? I'd be willing to bet that the well intersected some sedimentary 'country rock' or that there's some other conventional explanation which can't be ruled out. Anyone with actual data??? Incidently, there are literally thousands of mines in igneous and/or metamorphic rocks in the world; none of them show 'crude oil'. None. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Why this one well?)
I'll listen to Tommy Gold respectfully, but then I reserve the right to think for myself. You should too. It's called 'falsifying hypotheses' in the scientific method.
Actually with an infinite number of monkeys at infinite type writers, they'd write every work ever written, that ever will be written, and ever possible to be written. :) Infinite time just lets them take the time to write out even the LONGEST of long papers. (Of couse it wouldn't matter how long, cause infinite monkeys would still type every single possible variation at the same time)
This is incorrect.
There should be a FAQ about this. Anyone know of a FAQ to show people that make this statement?
I enlightened my quota of would be mathematicians for one life time and I can't be bothered explaining it again.
I agree that Gold is a good thing to the scientific community of late. Rather than taking every theory that has been examined and used so many times that it is practically accepted as fact, he takes a fresh look at the data present.
However, I see some problems here. Firstly, I need to qualify my statements. I am not even a college graduate; I am technically in no position to argue against Dr. Gold. However, I begin to wonder whether even an accomplished man such as he has not begun to overstep his bounds? If nothing else, I would say he needs to be careful lest he should adopt a cavalier attitude towards "shaking up" the scientific community. I certainly don't think he's to this point yet, but (I hope I'm not overstepping MY bounds by saying this...) it would be quite harmful to the scientific community if such a well-known man's pursuits became self-gratifying rather than for the pursuit of knowledge.
Anyway, on to his actual theories...
The Washington Post seems to have given more evidence proving him right than wrong; I wish that it went into greater depth describing and criticizing the deep, underground, high pressure microbial biosphere that he theorises. For example, how does he explain the transition of the dominant forms of life on earth from underground to the surface? Why does it seem that evolution has not taken place underground? And does he also intend to "dis" the more or less generally accepted idea that most, nearly all of the energy that supports life comes from the sun? I'm confused, how the petroleum hydrocarbons can become fuel for life, and where exactly they came from. If these petroleum hydrocarbons are from the decaying remains of these microbes, but the microbes depend on the hydrocarbons for energy (which is what I got out of the article), you end up in a "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation.
I am certainly not trying to debunk Dr. Gold's theories with a simple article on slashdot, much less insult his character as a scientist. I ask rather for clarification. Anybody who hass discussed this before or read his book... any input?
Slashpothesis
Oil deposits come from the layers of frozen Methane hydrates that exist at the bottom of most oceans. Hydrates are notoriously unstable and decompose if the ambient temperature rises above about 3C or if they are exposed to lower pressures than the 300 atmospheres at 3km ocean depth. However, hydrates which get trapped by overlying sediments and adiabatically compressed as sediment accumulates, do not escape or decompose into their main constituent, Methane gas. As plate tectonic motion moves these deposits deep into the earth, geothermal heat cracks the methane into higher hydrocarbons -- "oil".
Signed, b8e68717731bb141d4f5f9a16e3d0974
Large shifts in theory or belief like this are scary. It's no surprise that Gold's peers are reluctant to publish his work.
However, it hardly seems appropriate to lobby to ban the man's work. Surely it isn't in the interests of science to disallow the discussion of his ideas, reagardless of what one thinks of them personally?
People were looked at the same way when they said the Earth is flat, or that the Earth is NOT the center of the Universe. Or at least that's what we're taught. It makes me wonder how much of what schools teach us is actually true, and how much "Common Sense" we should believe. After all, people used to think that heavier objects fall faster than light objects.
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
I've paid attention to this fellow for almost a decade now, and he never fails to evoke criticism in whatever field he delves into.
Unfortunatly for his critics, he usually falls closer to the truth than existing theory.
Gold seems to like to poke his nose into whatever the accepted theory is and find the most off-the-wall answer that fits the circumstances, boldly ignoring 'known fact'.
He is a combination of the hardest skeptic and Sherlock Holmes, and whatever scientific endevor he pokes his nose into is far better for his presence.
.sig: Now legally binding!
A deeply religious person could have the tendancy to beleive God created oil for some purpose.
A deeply scientific person could say that extinct wildlife broke down into oil and other stuff.
Other people just might say "Hey, I don't care."
I say, "Listen to all three sides. It is best to get as many perspectives as possible on a topic."
-PovRayMan
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
I don't know what the textbooks in america say, but in the rest of the world it has been common knowledge that petroleum can have a mineral origin for decades. They are formed when carbon and hydrogen are combined in a reducing environment. This could be organic material, or inorganic material, it doesn't matter.
Just ignore idiots who claim such a thing. Just like you should ignore idiots who claim oil is made from dinosaurs. The formation of hydrocarbons from carbon and hydrogen is a purely chemical process. It occurs wherever carbon and hydrogen are combined in a reducing environment. Whether this occurs on earth, or on a jupiter moon makes no difference.
I really liked this article. I hope that what he had to say was true. But this is what bugs me about it: It was very very short on scientific proofs. While it was nice to hear how many theories of his were eventually proven correct, I wondered how many of his were proven wrong.
Furthermore, I would like to have seen some type of mathematical proof showing that the earth could be "sweating out" petroleum. Is something like this available anywhere?
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
It's too bad they butchered Gold's story. When you see his work in more academic terms it's got some good stuff. His remarks in the article were heavily fluffed for the mass market.
Gold has a sharp mind, and understands scientific method. His biggest problem is that he tends to be a bit extreme. When he comes up with a viable alternative to existing theories he almost invariably presents his as the one and only answer. None of this multiple-processes-at-work hooey for him. It's Gold's way or the highway.
BTW the '12 tons of oil' in Sweden sounds like a bunch, but they used several times that much diesel just drilling the well.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Yes! There should be a FAQ! If only to let us know what this person is talking about.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Peer review is the same thing as moderating a news group or forum. It is there to cut the noise level. A printed journal can't afford to have the high level of noise that on-line publications have. If Gold doesn't like peer review, why doesn't he come up with something better? Do you think if he started a journal without peer review, the journal would be taken seriously?
iirc most of the world's oil is Mesozioc, just as the dinosaurs are. Certainly oil cannot come from Cambrian strata, since after that amount of time it is usually either "over-cooked" or has leached away. Oh, and Cambrian sediments are not exactly common.
Plenty of people have pointed out that oil does not come from dinosaurs, firstly there were not that many of them and secondly, they would tend to produce gas not oil. (Also iirc).
TJ
Owl tried to think of something wise to say, but couldn't.
FIRST POSTxyz11!!!
It is interesting to see people ripping apart the peer-review system on a moderated and meta-moderated message board, which is the virtual equivalent.
Not that I'm defending the flaws in the peer review system of course. However, like slashdot moderation (of which you have been a beneficiary), neither am I overlooking the advantages.
They wuz called the Rockettes...
Scientific peer review says "this is right" or "this is wrong."
/. moderation, but if a paper doesn't pass peer review it doesn't even get published. There is no section in the back of scientific journals for "crackpots" (unlike the bottom of the /. page).
Slashdot moderation says "this is worth reading" or "this is not worth reading."
You can ignore
"I told them I would like to teach advanced physics," Gold remembers. "They said that was fine. But since I had never studied any physics, I had to learn it myself night by night, before each lecture."
I'm impressed.
Pulled a website that seems to have more information http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
For what it's worth, the particular theories I could feasibly subscribe to goes something like this:
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
We perceive time according to the cycles of the Sun. As we are finite beings, we only see time, creation and life as being linear. It is certainly true/probable that Dinosaurs et al existed and died and became oil many, many years ago. However, what if our perception of "time" is wrong, indeed what if there is no "time". Just as we live a finite existence, what about beings who don't? We possibly can't percieve them, them us. A tree (asfaik) doesn't die unless something causes it too. The point I'm making is that maybe there was no initial "push", whether Godly, or Atomically. There maybe don't have to be reasons for being here. Have people considered what was "there" before the Big Bang? Nothing can't become something, without there being something in the nothing. Comprende?
The other option could be that we WERE created by some superior force. The old idea of "alien" intervention makes a LOT of sense, in the late 20th (C), we are capable of dramatically altering life via "tampering" with DNA. In a hundred years, maybe we will be able to create it... Thanks to the Dark Ages, humanity is probably about 200 years behind schedule, that is; no inovation or exploration really occured then - it was a complete standstill. Maybe if we had used those 200 years, we'd be in the position to create life already. Now note that many, many planets are many, many years/decades/millenia... older than our own. Go figure.
Thirdly, maybe it's all dream, or maybe we're a really advanced computer program - Sim City 9000?
Hard to say.
The only thing I will say, is that most of the worlds religions are dumb. People blindly following a creed usually passed to them from their family/school. Many religions died out at the hands of others. Just becuase Christianity is probably the most "dominant", it maybe isn't right. Religions tend to have grown from tribal stories and folk lore. Maybe in 2000 years, there'll be a Saint Jean Luc Picard, or a Prophet Yoda. After all, some guy turned water into wine, and another guy instructs a giant beetle to push the sun into the sky.
Hmm, I'd best get some series cermaic plating... I feel a well directed thunderbolt, coming right this way...
Mo.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
There was one line in particular which I totally agree with in this article - about how Gold "always shakes things up in a useful way"
No matter how correct people may think his theories are, the effect these theories have upon researchers etc. in the particular field is what is important. If Gold manages to inspire someone to prove him WRONG, by working at the problem from a different angle, then everyone wins.
Too often in academic circles, certain views can be taken as correct, without being proven. This is counter-productive; it is important that researchers disagree and argue - this is how important theories can arise, and how discoveries
can be made.
Whether it's stable-state Universe versus big-bang, or the exact value of Hubbles's constant, or whatever, these arguments can drive great discoveries.
"The problem is this system of peer review" wherein established scholars in a field pass judgment on new papers before publication, he says. "That rewards small steps but discourages bold ideas and the very sort of cross-discipline thinking that can provide the greatest breakthroughs. I don't think there's any question that we produced more great ideas in the first half of the 20th century than we have in the second"--when peer review has ruled.
The floor is open. What does Slashdot think? (please don't just limit this to a discussion of open source software)