europa  

Re: Thomas Gold on alien life deep under the surface

LARRY KLAES
Wed, 27 Oct 2004 04:59:43 -0700

Darnit, Michael - I have hardly any heroes left!
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 12:49 AM
Subject: Re: Thomas Gold on alien life deep under the surface

Thomas Gold did not show how the ear determines pitch.  That required a discovery few predicted: that the inner air is equipped with mechanical feedback mechanism like cochlear cilia.  Purely acoustic models don't work.  Neither do purely neuronal models.  You need coupling between the two.  Gold understood this, but never himself characterized the precise mechanism and proved its existence.  Freeman Dyson documents it all nicely here:
 
 
Gold objected to the prevailing theories of the time, which proved wrong in the end.  He hypothesized feedback in the ear, and proved its existence.  And it went no further, because it wasn't funded.  As a former denizen of a phonology laboratory, I can tell that that phonology and audiology don't attract many good physicists for the simple reason that linguistics doesn't get much money, period.  (Tragically, in my view.)  Smashing atoms was where it was all at, back then.
 
As for discovering the true nature of pulsars, Gold had a good hypothesis, but he was hardly a lone wolf, battling scientific orthodoxy, in his view.  As Freeman Dyson says, "One of his important right ideas was the theory that pulsars, the regularly pulsing celestial radio-sources discovered by radio-astronomers in 1967, are rotating neutron stars. Unlike most of his right ideas, his theory of pulsars was accepted almost immediately by the experts."  I find unsupported references to Gold having not been allowed to present this theory at a conference, but when you're a renegade, sometimes you don't bother your head with bureacratic trivia like getting the paper in by the submission deadline; as a renegade, you might be likely to make a fuss about that as well.  I don't know the real story.
 
The only Gold theory that seems to match the picture of the brilliant scientist contending against other real scientists and being proved right in the end, at long last, seems to be his theory of a polar flip.  In audiology/phonology, I wouldn't say he was going up against real scientists - or rather, he was going up against scientists who didn't realize they'd have to learn a lot more about other sciences than they already knew.  With pulsars, the claims that he was a lone defender seem to be overblown.  Abiogenic hydrocarbons?  Deep Hot Biosphere?  Even Freeman Dyson, who clearly held great affection for Gold, doesn't go so far as to say those theories are anything but controversies at this point.
 
Thomas Gold was one of those rare birds willing to charge into almost any field to upset accepted views.  He was an even rarer bird: occasionally, he was proven right.  However, I wouldn't hold him up as a model for budding scientists, because if all scientists (including the mostly-less-brilliant) were to do this all the time, science would be in considerable disarray, would be considerably less productive, and would finally be even more underfunded than it is.
 
-michael turner
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 3:14 AM
Subject: Re: Thomas Gold on alien life deep under the surface

Yes - how the ear determines pitch and the true nature of pulsars are just two of them:
 
 
Almost as an aside, Hefner asked if perhaps the recent concept of infinite universes being created by an infinite number of Big Bangs is just a variation on the Steady State theory.
Larry
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 11:10 AM
Subject: Re: Thomas Gold on alien life deep under the surface

Thomas Gold comes up with fascinating theories.  But has he ever nailed any of them to the wall?
 
 
Panspermia is a cool idea.  It it doesn't exist, we should invent it.
 
However, inventing theories for panspermia before panspermia itself has run the Occam's Razor gauntlet makes only for fascinating speculation.  I love speculating myself, but I don't claim to be a scientist.  Fred Hoyle was good (and also loudly bad) at this kind of thing, but I think Hoyle had a few solidly established theories to his credit.
 
Thomas Gold thought the Siljan Ring would bear out his theories after a year of drilling.  After six years of drilling, and long wrangling over the results, the theory that fossil fuels are truly fossil-based is still bouncing bullets off its hairy chest.
 
It's time for this:
 
 
The Seven Warning Signs of Voodoo Science, in Digest Form:
 
1) A discovery is pitched directly to the media
2) A powerful "establishment" is said to be suppressing the discovery
3) An effect is always at the very limit of detection
4) Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal
5) A belief is said to be credible because it has endured for centuries
6) An important discovery is made in isolation
7) New laws of nature are proposed to explain an incredible observation
 
Thomas Gold isn't claiming a discovery, and what he says about interstellar planets doesn't directly match any of the criteria above.  However, we haven't detected any interstellar planets, they may not be at all abundant, and ... how would we know?  You're stuck in (3) "An effect is always at the very limit of detection".  In this case, interstellar planets are probably well beyond limits of detection we currently have, barring some very lucky observation for which a repeat would be unlikely.
 
A close reading of Gold's interstellar-planet panspermia theory reveals a stealthy affection for his Deep, Hot Biosphere hypothesis - which was "pitched directly to the media" in a book that's been glowingly reviewed.  It takes quite some Google searching to discover that Gold's theory is still on wobbly legs.  It's so cute that a lot of people have been sold already.
 
"Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal" - well, in the first link above, you hear petrochemical scientists complaining that the Russian cohort selling abiogenic origins for fossil fuels still hasn't come up with compelling evidence.  Abiogenic origins still can't explain more than a tiny fraction of what's found.  Gold complains that people aren't looking hard enough.  Well, but even he ended up looking much harder than he predicted, without coming up with conclusive evidence.
 
"Endured for centuries" - ah, not in the details, perhaps, but I wonder if some digging wouldn't turn up a manuscript proposing panspermia by Giordano Bruno, who UNSCIENTIFICALLY insisted that God had created a universe full of life, who tried to make it dogma, not a scientific hypothesis.  The idea of a non-terrestrial origin for terrestrial life might be a century old, and it might be much older - there are some interesting hints in ancient literature that people were thinking all kinds of thoughts that we associated more with post-Enlightenment science.
 
I score Gold maybe 1.9 out of 7.  A good scientist sticks as close to zero as possible, though I like Jeff Bell's idea that every accomplished scientist is entitled to one pet wacko theory.
 
-michael turner
 
----- Original Message -----
To: europa
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 11:03 PM
Subject: Thomas Gold on alien life deep under the surface

Galactic Panspermia?

Are there bodies of planetary sizes that exist in abundance in the spaces between the stars? We would not have discovered them even if they were so numerous that their combined masses were an appreciable fraction of the total masses of all the stars. Molecular clouds may well be forming such objects constantly , and only a fraction would come to be associated with a star. Perhaps the frequent motion of such objects through the outer reaches of our solar system are the causes of the large perturbations that comets seem to suffer, and that bring them occasionally into the inner part of the solar system where they become evident to us. Such objects could contain and maintain for billions of years an active internal microbial life, just as seems to be the case on the Earth. Panspermia across galactic distances would then be a possibility, through impacts spalling off pieces like our Martian meteorite, when such an object had come, perchance, into the vicinity of a planetary system. In this case there would be no dependence on dormant life for long periods, nor on any long term resistance to the damage of cosmic rays, two problems that have made other galactic scale panspermia proposals seem improbable.