Yes - how the ear determines pitch and the true nature of pulsars are just
two of them:
----- 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 -----
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.