Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I am getting email about a video that purports to be between a scientist and a Muslim fundamentalist^* debating whether the Earth is flat or not. It has English subtitles, and if they are accurate, well then, you can guess what the fundamentalist says.

Watching it means, of course, that hilarity ensues. Tear half your brain out and enjoy:

The man who quotes the Koran about paradise then uses it as a basis for saying things that are so obviously contrary to reality — and on occasion appear to be made of random words he has strung together — that I would question his mental health. The scientist makes a game try at it, but sometimes debating people like this just proves Heinlein right: "Don’t wrestle with a pig: you get dirty and the pig enjoys it".

It’s painful to watch the fundamentalist make his claims. The Sun, he says, is 2.4 million km across, and the Moon is half that. How can anyone say anything that ridiculous?

Oh right: he "categorically rejects" science. He says that "Anything that has no indication in the Koran is false."

I’d hate to point out to him that he’s saying all this while wearing glasses and a wristwatch. I don’t remember reading anything about them in the Koran, or optics, or gears, or batteries, or, for that matter, the television he uses to spread his dumbosity.

ObMistake: At 3:19 in, the scientist says that the mass of the Moon is one-sixth the Earth’s, which is why it has one-sixth the gravity. That’s wrong; the Moon has roughly 1/80th the mass of the Earth and 1/4 the radius; together they give it 1/6th the gravity. I have to admit he makes his points poorly, but then they didn’t ask me to be on the interview. When faced with such an avalanche of ridiculousness, it can be difficult to function coherently. I have personal experience here!

In the end, I’m not terribly sad that such people as the flat Earther exist; I am far more saddened that he would be given even one moment of air time. And before you mock that television station for putting him on, remember that at least he doesn’t have his own talk show.

^* Yes, I know that the word "fundamentalist" technically refers to Christian fundamentalism, but I think in modern culture it’s taking on a broader context of any religion that adheres to strict literal scripture. If you know of a better name or category for this sort of religious person — a serious one, please — then by all means let me know.

While I was at the January 2008 meeting of the AAS, I stopped by the SETI booth and chatted with Dr. Jill Tarter. SETI received a very healthy dose of money from Paul Allen to build 350 radio dishes so they can monitor the sky for alien signals. She talks a bit about the array in the interview:

As I note in the video notes, I wanted to edit out her slip of the tongue about Mike Griffin, but I couldn’t because there was no place to splice the footage. Oh well, it’ll be here for all eternity, I suppose.

The Bollingbrook Babbler, that same journalistic tower of Swiftian impeccableness that had me talking to aliens, has once again scooped out a steaming pile of Pulitzer material: Fermilab creates new universe!

I visited Fermilab a couple of years ago for a project I was on, and I was suspicious about the number of colloquia advertised with titles like "How best to fleece the microcosm’s flock" and "Creating your own universe at home: potential patent and publishing pitfalls". I should have known.

No.

Oh, you want details? OK then.

If you read any antiscience screeds, at some point or another most will claim that science is based on faith just as much as religion is. For example, the horrific Answers in Genesis website has this to say about science:

Much of the problem stems from the different starting points of our divergence with Darwinists. Everyone, scientist or not, must start their quests for knowledge with some unprovable axiom—some a priori belief on which they sort through experience and deduce other truths. This starting point, whatever it is, can only be accepted by faith; eventually, in each belief system, there must be some unprovable, presupposed foundation for reasoning (since an infinite regression is impossible).

This is completely wrong. It shows (unsurprisingly) an utter misunderstanding of how science works. Science is not faith-based, and here’s why.

The scientific method makes one assumption, and one assumption only: the Universe obeys a set of rules. That’s it. There is one corollary, and that is that if the Universe follows these rules, then those rules can be deduced by observing the way Universe behaves. This follows naturally; if it obeys the rules, then the rules must be revealed by that behavior.

A simple example: we see objects going around the Sun. The motion appears to follow some rules: the orbits are conic sections (ellipses, circles, parabolas, hyperbolas), the objects move faster when they are closer to the Sun, if they move too quickly they can escape forever, and so on.

From these observations we can apply mathematical equations to describe those motions, and then use that math to predict where a given object will be at some future date. Guess what? It works. It works so well that we can shoot probes at objects billions of kilometers away and still nail the target to phenomenal accuracy. This supports our conclusion that the math is correct. This in turn strongly implies that the Universe is following its own rules, and that we can figure them out.

Now, of course that is a very simple example, and is not meant to be complete, but it gives you an idea of how this works. Now think on this: the computer you are reading this on is entirely due to science. The circuits are the end result of decades, centuries of exploration in how electricity works and how quantum particles behave. The monitor is a triumph of scientific engineering, whether it’s a CRT or an LCD flat panel. The mouse might use an LED, or a simple ball-and-wheel. The keyboard uses springs, the wireless uses radio technology, the speakers use electromagnetism.^*

Look around. Cars, airplanes, buildings. iPods, books, clothing. Agriculture, plumbing, waste disposal. Light bulbs, vacuum cleaners, ovens. These are all the products of scientific research. If your TV breaks, you can pray that it’ll spontaneously start working again, but my money would be on someone who has learned how to actually fix it based on scientific and engineering principles.

All the knowledge we have accumulated over the millennia comes together in a harmonious symphony of science. We’re not guessing here: this stuff was designed using previous knowledge developed in a scientific manner over centuries. And it works. All of this goes to support our underlying assumption that the Universe obeys rules that we can deduce.

Are there holes in this knowledge? Of course. Science doesn’t have all the answers. But science has a tool, a power that its detractors never seem to understand.

Science is not simply a database of knowledge. It’s a method, a way of finding this knowledge. Observe, hypothesize, predict, observe, revise. Science is provisional; it’s always open to improvement. Science is even subject to itself. If the method itself didn’t work, we’d see it. Our computers wouldn’t work (OK, bad example), our space probes wouldn’t get off the ground, our electronics wouldn’t work, our medicine wouldn’t work. Yet, all these things do in fact function, spectacularly well. Science is a check on itself, which is why it is such an astonishingly powerful way of understanding reality.

And that right there is where science and religion part ways. Science is not based on faith. Science is based on evidence. We have evidence it works, vast amounts of it, billions of individual pieces that fit together into a tapestry of reality. That is the critical difference. Faith, as it is interpreted by most religions, is not evidence-based, and is generally held tightly even despite evidence against it. In many cases, faith is even reinforced when evidence is found contrary to it.

To say that we have to take science on faith is such a gross misunderstanding of how science works that it can only be uttered by someone who is wholly ignorant of how reality works.

The next time someone tries to tell you that science is just as faith-based as religion, or that evolution is a religion, point them here. Perhaps the evidence of science may sway them. Perhaps not; it’s difficult to reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. But the next time they get on a computer, maybe they’ll take a slightly more critical look at it, and wonder if its workings are a miracle, or the results of brilliant minds over many generations toiling away at the scientific method.

^*The irony of Answers in Genesis denigrating science on a website is not lost on me.

One of the biggest questions in astronomy today is, are there any other Earths out there, and if so, how many?

We know that there are over 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and that a lot of them have planets. But we’re still groping round trying to nail down the frequency of planets, and how many are rocky bodies like Earth (as opposed to gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter).

A new study using the Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that planets like Earth may be common! The procedure was actually rather simple. They looked at over 300 sun-like stars, and grouped them by ages (very young, young, middle aged, etc). They then used Spitzer to look for the presence of dust around the stars; dust glows in the infrared when warm, and the temperature (and thus the distance of the dust from the star) can be found.

What they found was striking: young stars had lots of dust that was at about the same distance from the star as the Earth is from the Sun, but as stars get older, the amount of dust drops. The timescale for the dust to disappear — a few hundred million years — is roughly the same timescale it takes planets to form. The obvious conclusion is that as time goes on, planets are forming around those stars, and they hoover up the dust. This process would make rocky planets, much like the Earth!

In other words, this study did not directly detect planets, but it found that planet-making material disappears with age. That’s incredibly provocative.

They found that 10-20% of young stars had these disks of dusty debris around them. As it happens, about 10% of the stars in the Milky Way can be categorized as sun-like, which is about 10 billion stars. If 10% of them have rocky planets, as this study indicates, then there may be a billion Earths orbiting stars in our galaxy alone! And that’s only for stars like the Sun; lower mass stars also can form planetary systems, and there are far more of them then stars like the Sun. It is entirely possible that there are many billions of terrestrial planets in the galaxy… and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe.

The Universe may be buzzing with life. We still don’t know, but this is another big step forward.