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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.
...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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
IIRC, petroleum derived from cambrian era plants, while the dinosaurs were mesozoic.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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.
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
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.
Just a little follow-up. I think your point was my point. You just said it more succinctly. One point in my orignal post that I really wish to stress is that I consider scientific orthdoxy to be much less of a concern than over-specialization and compartmentalization. I think one of the most common occasions for scientists (and understand, I am not a practicing scientist. My reading extends only as far as Scientific American, which is hardly an academic journal) to be dismissed is when they write on subjects outside their well-known field. Science itself, however, the so-called scientific method developed out of an interdisciplinary set of skills; yes, a "liberal arts" education. Science was, when it first began to be formalized, called "nature philosophy." It was thought of as one philosophical method out of many. It still is. But the whole of the academy has become so self-contained and insular (for good reasons -- there is so much knowledge to be learned that it takes a lifetime to be an expert in these small, narrow fields), that I fear we miss out on whole avenues of thought. To trot out another cliche, I think they (scientists) sometimes cannot see the forest for the trees.
That's what excited me about Gold. That's what I think Feynman gets at in his autobiographical books -- anyone can do science, in any field. Just don't be disappointed when your brilliant discover turns out to have been made 138 years ago by someone else, and proven wrong 57 years ago by yet another someone.
So, yes, I value the men and women with wide and shallow knowledge, just as I value those with knowledge narrow and deep.
I just want us to keep in mind that even when a kook is right, he's still a kook (I use the word "kook" in its technical psychological sense, of course!)
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 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).
I don't think Gold is challenging stellar evolution here. The article isn't exactly written
to the scientific community; I interpreted the sentence about oil and gas being formed "in the Big Bang" as "The gasses and oils were formed primarily during the formation of the planets, not later (as a result of decomposition of plants)."
You can regard the phrase "The Big Bang" as an instant, or a process for stellar formation, right?
I'm a software geek, not a cosmologist or geologist, so I won't comment too much on the theory, but that's the meaning I got from the article. Oil carrying biological remnants upwards seems plausible enough, and makes me think of that Stephenson story "Big Jelly" =)
"Was ist schoner als ein schones madchen?" -Alberto Vargas
I guess you could say *EVERYTHING* was created in the Big Bang, since it's still happening.
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?
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."
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
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
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Check out my blackbox styles
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
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.