[meteorite-list] Sceptical Inquirer article

From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon May 9 04:11:37 2005
Message-ID: <427F1B14.7B762D6_at_bhil.com>

Hi, Darren, List

    But Morrison is playing a game of his own, the game of the politics of consensus truth. The media
is not obligated to present only views which represent a consensus. Yes, they are guilty of hyperbole
and outright blather, and yes, British newspapers are sensational trash, but when was that not true?
    Would there have been no reporting of Alvarez, the iridium, the KT boundary until there was
consensus? Until we found Chicxulub? Until we agreed it was the cause of dino demise? Until now?
Let's not rush into this; it's only been 25 years...

    Or, take this: "In 2003, the old idea that both the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and another
conflagration more than a hundred miles north in Wisconsin were started by hot stones falling from the
sky was revived. In the cases where we have been able to estimate the surface temperature of just-fallen
meteorites (such as where they land on snow or ice), the data indicate that they are cool. I follow the
rule of thumb that if a meteor or meteorite is reported to have started a fire, the claim is probably
mistaken."
    Having posted on this complicated case myself in some (probably boring) detail, I'm annoyed at the
idea that the way to evaluate a phenomenon is to apply a "rule of thumb" without examining any evidence,
just as the French Academy knew that "stones do not fall from the sky."
    While there are a few goony web sites that make the "hot rock" mistake, what we are talking about
here is air-bursts. If you seriously think a thermal air-burst can't start fires, you should talk to
the folks who used to live in the Tunguska Terrace subdivision or go stand under an A Bomb test.
    In fact, the testimony of the (few) survivors of the Peshtigo Fire give some of the best
descriptions of air-burst events that I've ever seen, if you allow for the fact that they being given by
people who had no idea of what it was that they were experiencing.
    It was 1871, and the fact that they attributed what are their clear descriptions of air-bursts to
vague XIXth century explanatory notions is irrelevant. They accurately reported what they saw and felt
and suffered the consequences of; it's just that we know what those events were and they didn't.
    In the thousands of pages of witness statements about the Chicago, Peshtigo, or the many other
simultaneous fires that night, there is not one account nor even one word about "hot rocks" falling from
the sky or starting fires. Not one.

    As if designed to make me happy, this is immediately followed by: "A common assertion in the tabloid
press and on some Web sites is that we are at great risk from impacts, because impacts happen much more
frequently than the scientists claim."
    Again, we've had this topic on the List about fall rate many times, and the "official" (if there is
such a thing) fall rate of 25,000 meteorites per year for the Earth is clearly too darn low! (I had to
go back and change that word to "darn" -- I don't really talk that way.) It's off by a considerable
multiple.
    If the fall rate for small objects is too low by a factor of five or six or more, then by the magic
of the power law of mass distribution, the fall rate for everything bigger is in error by the same
factor. Now, maybe you think that the idea that a Tunguska sized impact event, big enough to kill
everybody in small country the size of Belgium is actually six times more likely to happen than we
thought it was is not a "great risk," but I don't.

    Then, he chews on some recently reported possible impact sites. They are dismissed for lack of
evidence, but since none of them have been investigated to any great extent yet, that's just a straw
dog.

    Then, he attacks the "dark comet" hypothesis. Remember, this is a hypothesis, not a theory (as he
calls it), and a reasonable one. We have had plentiful evidence that Kuiper Belt objects, like the
recently discovered Sedna, have very very dark surfaces, whether the result of "space weathering" or a
chemical surface peculiarity, and we know that "old" comets become darker as volatiles are boiled off by
successive passes through the warmer inner System, and that a few dark asteroids have turned out to be
"dead" comets. It is reasonable to suggest that there might be a population of "dark" comets, and it
would be reasonable to look and see if there are. Pooh-pooh, don't bother, he says. Ah, Science At
Work...

    Looking around for any other old dogs to kick, he does a long bit on Louis Frank. I note that he
uses all the approved techniques of the scientific method in this part of the piece. He calls his
subject by a nick-name, "Lou," like he was some figure of fun or a drunk at the corner tavern. He
repeats somebody else making fun of the subject ("LAFO's"). He phrases things in a misleading way, that
Frank was "attempting to interpret very small, transient dark patches in NASA spacecraft images of
Earth's atmosphere," like Louis Frank just happened to look at some hand-out photos from the NASA press
office.
    Frank was the Principal Investigator of the Ultraviolet Explorer, the designer and builder of the
instruments and those cameras that took those pictures. It was his job to interpret the results of his
experiment. He knew more about it than anyone else. What is he supposed to do when others disagree
with his conclusions about his observations? He defended and defends his results.
    You'll note that nowhere is it mentioned that Frank still gets contracts to build substantial
satellite instrumentation because he's one of the best experimental physicists around. He does great
work. So nobody agrees with him on this. So what? Frank is criticized for defending his own
considered opinion by a fellow "scientist," who calls his inability to ignore his own analysis of his
own experiment "an obsession --- he even wrote a book..."
    Omigod! He wrote a book! Criminal, just criminal. What is this world coming to?

    Note on the "small comets" controversy. Frank's only mistake (but it's a doosie) is to hypothesize
that the small comets spiral all the way in from the outer solar system in continuous grand procession
by the trillions, which makes the flux needed to explain their existence HUGE, millions of times too
great to be believed. That's the chief reason no one can go along with him on what is otherwise a fair
"starter" case for their existence.
    It has apparently never occurred to Frank or to his many critics either that these tiny, almost
undetectable objects could merely be a small local stream of dust-free all-ice cometary debris roughly
co-orbital with the Earth, probably slightly interior to us, a temporary remnant of a cometary breakup
in the past 10,000 or 50,000 years. That would cut the required flux down by a factor of millions to a
perfectly reasonable figure. It would fit all the data to a tee.
    If you're not insulted by the idea that someone would dare to write a book, read Frank's, not only
for the scientific issue, but for the story of how things work out in the "real" world. Fascinating.

    Morrison is pandering to his audience's prejudices, almost like those scummy journalists he so
despises. As for what gets published, he says, "This is best done by the scientists..." Now, that's
Skepticism! It certainly makes me skeptical...

    Yes, if your mind is too open, your brain will fall out, but remember, if your mind is too closed,
nothing will ever get in.


Sterling K. Webb
----------------------------------------------
Darren Garrison wrote:

> http://www.csicop.org/si/2005-03/asteroids.html
>
> Hyperbole in Media Reports on Asteroids and Impacts
>
Received on Mon 09 May 2005 04:11:00 AM PDT