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Damned / Rejected Science (Miscellaneous)

Well, to be fair, that diatribe by Patrick Huyghe is quite far from the true situation.
For a start many planetary scientists are prepared to accept that there is a respectable amount of influx of water from small comet-like objects into the Earth's atmosphere; recent radar searches have shown that the number of incoming objects is far higher than previously expected.
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I’ve a feeling that this has come up before in the past and was ignored just the same, but I can’t remember what or when. Also, I seem to have read an article recently on ice meteorites, where the astronomy representative denied that it was possible for these things to have come from space. I’ll post the ref’s if I come across them again.
 
http://www.weatherquestions.com/What-causes-megacryometeors.htm
The claim that such ice falls occurred before aircraft were invented, and that they were not associated in any way with thunderstorm activity, would have to be exceedingly well documented to be taken at face value. Anecdotal evidence is interesting, but in situations where the claim is contrary to our understanding of basic physical principles, it can not be considered proof.

I reiterate: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. While Prof. Martínez-Frías might one day be proved correct, the evidence at hand remains unconvincing. Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.
The University of Alabama in Huntsville
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Have we heard this somewhere before? ;) ;) ;)
 
Just out of interest, do pilots dump wastewater ice on people on a regular basis?

A sort of more advanced, mile high version of taking your slops out from under the bed and chucking it out of the window?

:shock:
 
The skies are raining big chunks of ice, and experts ranging from scientists to federal investigators are scrambling to learn what's going on.
For the second time in a week, California was the victim of an aerial, icy assault, the latest being early Thursday when a chunk of ice the size of a microwave oven plunged out of a cloudless sky into the San Bernardino County town of Loma Linda. The ice punched through the metal roof of a recreation center, leaving a hole up to 2 1/2 feet wide, then fragmented into opaque, brilliant white chunks, one as big as a bowling ball. No one was hurt.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... I9OUE1.DTL

1500-Pound ice chunk falls from sky

June 26, 1985. Hartford, Connecticut.
"Scientists yesterday tried to determine the origin of a 1500-pound sheet of ice that mysteriously dropped from the sky and smashed into a backyard fence. David H. Menke, directory of the Copernican Observatory and Planetarium, said the ice was probably 6 feet long, 8 inches thick and moving at about 200 mph. 'It's unusual in the fact that it fell from the sky,' said Craig Robinson, curator at the planetarium. 'That does not happen often.' A 13year-old boy was in his backyard Monday with a friend when the ice came 'whirling' from the sky and smashed into the fence about 10 feet away from them."
http://www.ijsklompen.net/divers.htm

Huge Block Of Ice Falls From Sky In Oakland
http://www.ktvu.com/news/8575846/detail.html

Giant ice block falls in china
April 11, 1983. Wuxi, China. In full view of passers-by, a 50-kilogram block of ice hurtled from the sky and splintered on the pavement. The ice was milky white (some say greyish), and apparently of roundish shape before breaking up. Chinese scientists hurried to the scene and were able to preserve specimens. Their study of the meteorological conditions and specimens led them to conclude that the ice was truly meteoric; that is, extraterrestrial.
(Wei, Chen; "Giant Ice-Block Falls in East China City," Journal of Meteorology, U.K., 8:188, 1983.)
Comment. In the West, such ice falls are automatically attributed to chunks falling from aircraft overhead.
From Science Frontiers #30, NOV-DEC 1983. © 1983-2000 William R. Corliss
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf030/sf030p13.htm

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ ... i_12508311
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Nice one almond13 I hadn't realised that some of the ice blocks were getting so big, I had read that their chemical composition ruled out plane toilets in some instances.
 
The main objection to an extraterrestrial origin of blocks of ice which reach the ground, is that ice would be expected to vaporise in the upper atmosphere; that is, there are icy meteors, but most of the objects would not reach the ground. Objects that come from the outer solar system are expected to be mostly water ice.

However if a meteor does reach the ground and can be gathered quickly, it can be very cold; a falling meteor causes a plasma shockwave in the atmosphere, like a re-entering spacecraft, but most of the energy is dissipated behind the object so doesn't heat it.

By the way, Professor Martinez-Frias is arguing for a mundane, that is Earthly origin for the ice falls that are reported all over the world;
link
He has tested the composition of some such objects, and they seem to be consistent with earth water.

Icefalls are among the quintessential Fortean subjects, having been investigated by Charles Fort himself.
 
coldelephant said:
Yes - perfectly possible that these simian experts may be so enthusiastic about their work that they jump to conclusions
Then, like a child with poo in its hand, says to the scientific community "Look what I made!"
I find it unlikely however...
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I'm going from memory here, but in Stephen Pinker's book The Language Instinct, he describes the reaction of some deaf users of Ameslan (American Sign Language) when they tried to decipher the sign language of chimp and gorilla test subjects in the US a decade or two ago.
The sign language users observed the experimenters as they attempted to communicate with the apes in sign language (which of course they were very familiar with), and said that the apes were inconsistent and unclear in their signing, and more often than not were led by the experimenters to copy the signs the humans were making rather than express themselves.
 
eburacum said:
coldelephant said:
Yes - perfectly possible that these simian experts may be so enthusiastic about their work that they jump to conclusions
Then, like a child with poo in its hand, says to the scientific community "Look what I made!"
I find it unlikely however...
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I'm going from memory here, but in Stephen Pinker's book The Language Instinct, he describes the reaction of some deaf users of Ameslan (American Sign Language) when they tried to decipher the sign language of chimp and gorilla test subjects in the US a decade or two ago.
The sign language users observed the experimenters as they attempted to communicate with the apes in sign language (which of course they were very familiar with), and said that the apes were inconsistent and unclear in their signing, and more often than not were led by the experimenters to copy the signs the humans were making rather than express themselves.
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That proves nothing - the fact that the animals could sign and not just bark or mewl or shriek is clearly something interesting.

Don't see why they should have to learn our language though, why not we learn how they communicate with various shrieks and barks and body language?

That way lies the understanding of the culture of the simian or any other animal, not trying to make them human.

Why should they be human?

The arrogance of the talking monkey that drops out of the tree and makes a digital watch!
 
The arrogance of the talking monkey that drops out of the tree and makes a digital watch!
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I may be wrong, but I don’t think there’s any evidence of arrogance in the animal kingdom – a purely human trait?
 
coldelephant said:
That proves nothing - the fact that the animals could sign and not just bark or mewl or shriek is clearly something interesting.
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It indicates that the experiment may not have been as objective as the experimenters believed it was.

Don't see why they should have to learn our language though, why not we learn how they communicate with various shrieks and barks and body language?
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Good point. Current thinking is that the chimps have a vocabulary of their own with dozens, perhaps hundreds of elements.
I believe they are certainly intelligent; and they are more competent in the task of subsisting in the deep forest than we are. Maybe one day we will learn their language; but their communities are under a lot of stress from human pressure, and we may never get the chance.
 
almond13 said:
The arrogance of the talking monkey that drops out of the tree and makes a digital watch!
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I may be wrong, but I don’t think there’s any evidence of arrogance in the animal kingdom – a purely human trait?
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I was talking about us - humans!

We are those monkeys ;)
 
eburacum said:
I believe they are certainly intelligent; and they are more competent in the task of subsisting in the deep forest than we are.
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I suspect their human neighbours would contest that rather strongly.

In any case, lots of beetles are very good at subsisting in deep jungle, and that does not (IMO) make them intelligent.
 
Their human neighbours have a different strategy; they manage the forest, slashing, burning, planting; the chimps do very little management of their environment. If a band of humans attempt to copy the behaviour of a chimp band they would not succeed; humans are not physically strong enough to leap from tree to tree in pursuit of a colobus, for instance.

Recent studies suggest that the orangutan is the best at problem solving among the non-human primates; but as orangs are solitary creatures their societies are non-existent, and they have almost no need for language (however rudmentary).
 
Found this in ForteanTimes Breaking News;

Octopus Genius of the Deep

http://news.independent.co.uk/environme ... 956568.ece


The link is broken now though - but the gist of it was that the Octopus has shown that it can feel pain, and that it can use tools.

This apparently means that it has intelligence, and that it should not be vivisected whilst alive or cooked whilst alive, and that the government should give it the same protection as cats and dogs.

Apparently the government does not care however, and has not made any moves to protect the creature at all.
 
Apparently the government does not care however, and has not made any moves to protect the creature at all.
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:mrgreen: I’ve gone right off my paella.
 
An Historic Report On Life In Space: [Transcript]

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/upd ... -008.shtml

During the years 1899-1924 three experimental scientists, Nikola
Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi, and David Todd (working independently
of each other) observed laboratory data and related phenomenon
which suggested the possibility that they were monitoring
interplanetary communications. During the same period
(199-1924) the Russian theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky deduced a
model of an intelligence existing independently of terrestrial
influence.

Tesla, Marconi, and Todd did not know that they were working
with identical data, nor did they know that these data
corroborated, in a quantitative manner, the theoretical model
built by Tsiolkovsky.

This paper presents the investigations and experimental data of
Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi and David Todd. The data are
first brought together in a historical model (1899-1924) and
then are shown to be the natural complement of a current
theoretical model (1959-1962). These data are then recommended
for assembly into a quantitative five model according to the
theoretical outline described by Tsiolkovsky…
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It seems that SETI have been looking in the wrong place and that there are no ET’s drinking at the ‘Water Hole’, they are waiting on the long wave. As all of this was well known to Drake and one wonders why there has been no follow up in all these years?
 
So they found something, and there was no follow up?

Did anybody actually find out what they had been listening to?

Quite interesting if all three of them found the same thing independently of each other and without knowing what each other was doing.
 
As I understand it they had detected the natural radio emissions from the planet Jupiter. Jupiter is very energetic, due to gravitational contraction, and gives of radio waves in a fairly wide spectrum. Tesla in particular seems to have detected these waves, but failed to make the connection with the king of the planets.
See this .pdf by Corum and Corum
http://www.teslasociety.com/mars.pdf
Tesla was a lot of things, but he wasn't a radio astronomer. Rather he was far ahead of his time, but didn't have the tools to locate sources of emission accurately at that time.
 
Yes, such things need to be put into historical context and not back-engineered to 'prove' a modern take on things.
 
Thanks for the link eburacum

I can clearly remember reading about the detection of radio signals from Jupiter in Practical Radio Mag’ in the fifties. BTW this was one of Velikovsky’s predictions. It would be good to look at the planetary positions for the date of Tessa’s’ signals. Any offers?
 
Mr. Green I’ve gone right off my paella.
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Don't ever watch Oldboy then, if you haven't seen it already :shock: It has a rather famous scene involving a live octopus being eaten!
 
Quite interesting if all three of them found the same thing independently of each other and without knowing what each other was doing.
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I made a slight mistake in the last post in that Practical Radio should read Practical Wireless.

It is interesting when you consider that radio frequency transmitters were so rare at the time. The thing that I personally find interesting is the lack of interest in long wave radio astronomy until quite recently. I did have some files on a guy in Australia who was doing just this on an independent basis, can’t remember his name though and the files are gone. http://www.nrl.navy.mil/pressRelease.php?Y=2005&R=2-05r

It seems that someone else has tried to get to the bottom of the Tesla Marconi thing -
http://www.nidsci.org/articles/dialog_jh.php

A number of researchers have received anomalous voice transmissions by various means not excluding radio and this has already been covered by FT.
http://www.terra.es/personal2/986313268/report.htm

Anomalistics At The Aaas Meeting
"'They are uncomfortable,' he said. 'Your friends may doubt your judgment. You may lose the respect of some of your colleagues. You will get no funding. You will have difficulty publishing your work. Your boss may think you are wasting your time.'
"And, he added, 'If you don't have tenure, don't even consider it.'
"But the reasons why there should be serious consideration of at least some anomalous phenomena, Dr. Sturrock said, include the fact that 'the gray area of science is the crucial area... You may -- perhaps without knowing it -- start a scientific revolution.'
"Also, he added, 'You may be honored -- posthumously.'" http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf058/sf058g18.htm
:D
 
almond13 said:
It seems that someone else has tried to get to the bottom of the Tesla Marconi thing -
http://www.nidsci.org/articles/dialog_jh.php
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Since that's 8 years ago, it doesn't look like much happened. IMO it's still likely that Tesla and Marconi accidently discovered radio astronomy without realising exactly what they'd found.

Isn't NIDs defunct? The site doesn't seem to have been updated for about two years, and I think Bigelow cut off its funding.

BTW the AAAS quote's a bit long in the tooth isn't it?
 
Since that's 8 years ago
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You seem to be becoming more cynical with time Timble?
Does it really matter how old these things are?
How about a fresh one?
"Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life." Marcus Aurelius.

I don’t think that radio astronomy was discovered with the reception of coherent signals or SETI wouldn’t exist. I think that Tesla would have known the difference even though this and the Pierce Arrow were two of the things used to declare him mad. No madness for Marconi though?

The changes I noted were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis, and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes. The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was sometime afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. A purpose was behind these electrical signals...."
Decades later on his birthday in 1937, he announced: "I have devoted much of my time during the year past to the perfecting of a new small and compact apparatus by which energy in considerable amounts can now be flashed through interstellar space to any distance without the slightest dispersion." (New York Times, Sunday, 11 July 1937.) http://www.borderlands.com/archives/arch/marscom.htm
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:D :D :D :D :D
 
From your link to http://www.terra.es/personal2/986313268/report.htm

In his ITC experiments Marcello Bacci uses the Direct Radio Voice Method (DRV), i.e. the method that seeks to obtain anomalous communications directly through the loudspeakers of radios, and such voices frequently refer to listeners by name, respond to questions put to them, and sometimes provide relevant and lengthy items of information. For this purpose he favours a valve radio, tuned to white noise in the short-wave band, rather than solid-state technology. The experiment detailed in this Report was a sequel to a number of earlier successful investigations carried out into the voices received by him using this Direct Radio Voice Method. Two of these earlier carefully controlled investigations are of particular relevance to the present experiment. In the first of them, conducted in the presence of Dr. Eng. Carlo Trajna, a second radio was set up beside that used by Bacci, connected to the same power lead, with independent aerial, and tuned to the same short-wave frequency. While Bacci’s radio was heard to receive the anomalous voice communications, the second radio was found to be receiving only normal white noise (e.g. Trajna 1985). This experiment strongly discounts the possibility that the anomalous voices were fraudulently produced. In the second and equally ground-breaking investigation, Professor Mario Salvatore Festa, professor of Physics and Physical Radio Protection at Naples University, and Radio Technician Franco Santi removed the two valves ECC85 (the FM valve) and ECH81 (the AM/SW converter valve) from Bacci’s radio during the receipt of anomalous voices, and established that even without these valves (in the absence of which no normal broadcasts can be received in the short wave band), the voices continued unabated. During this experiment Professor Festa also measured the intensities respectively of the electric field and of the magnetic field adjacent to the radio with the radio switched off, and both during normal radio transmission and during the period when the voice phenomenon occurred, and found that these fields did not show any variation when the voices phenomenon started and also that the values measured after the valves were removed but the voices continued were practically identical to the values measured when the radio was turned off (see Festa 2002 for full details). The demonstration that the voices continued even in the absence of the valves and that there was no variation in electric or magnetic fields during their reception provides further convincing evidence that such voices cannot be accounted for by fraudulent transmissions.
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What's being described here, both in method and content, is EVP/Electronic Voice Phenomena, we have a thread on it here.

Some people get results with quite complex equipment, others simply with an old radio or white noise source, and some with only an old cassette recorder...

...without wanting to get into a discussion about precisely what they're recieving, or whether they're recieving anything at all (which is best kept to the EVP thread), i think that the relevance of short wave radio to the above is limited, as the same results can be achieved without radio iinvolvement...
 
almond13 said:
I don’t think that radio astronomy was discovered with the reception of coherent signals or SETI wouldn’t exist. I think that Tesla would have known the difference.....
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How could Tesla (or Marconi), have known whether the radio signals from space were of natural or artificial origin?

Schiaparelli (among others) had described the canali on Mars about 30 years earlier, Lowell was observing Mars around the same time and was a proponent of the dying civilization idea. War of the Worlds was published in 1898. A proposal that radio waves from space were communications from other civilizations was very much in the spirit of the times.

It was suggested quite seriously that pulsars might be artificial when they were first discovered.
 
A proposal that radio waves from space were communications from other civilizations was very much in the spirit of the times.

It was suggested quite seriously that pulsars might be artificial when they were first discovered.
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Yes, your right that Mars was in vogue at the time and it’s possible that Wells got his ideas for War of the Worlds from Tesla as the two were acquainted. However, Tesla was an acute observer and hardly likely to be scared by the background hissing of the cosmos. He says that the signals were regular and as you can see from my post he knew about the radio Sun, its no great stretch of the imagination to suppose that all stars were emitting noise. Most of Tesla’s notes are missing – if he ever did them?
He was an insatiable reader of all things scientific and would have known about Lowell’s claims; was he persuaded? I don’t know.

I find the consensus story about pulsars suspect however and their use as proofs of relativity makes me doubly uncertain. I have William Corliss’ book “Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos” which gives examples of non-conformist pulsars that appear to be quite common. IOW’s they may still turn out to be artificial or even something more exotic.
:idea: :arrow:
 
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