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.
