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Old 01-November-2007, 08:41 PM
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Jerry Jerry is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nereid View Post
I'm really quite curious Jerry, how do you decide what's "always problematic", and "speculative"?
Those are expert opinions.

I have a background in chemical analytical method development. Also thermal chemistry, particle size analysis, spectrography, HPLC, GCMS, NMR, X-ray tomography, as well as ultrasonic, thermographic and other non-destructive methods development; automation of data analysis and automated data reliability assessment. So I have used many of the analytical tools available to astrophysicists. I know many limits imposed by the fickle physical house in which we live.

That said, you shouldn't give any more weight to expert opinions than I do

Quote:
What, in the Jerry view, constitutes "modeled and demonstrated in the laboratory of local space"?
There is not an easy answer to this question, especially since I have recently come to doubt many experiments I would have considered concrete just a few years ago. For example, the GPS system has been lauded as proof of GR, because GR corrections are used in establishing GPS positions. What you do not hear, is that the original plan for determining absolute positions had to be restructured, and there were periodic effects noted during calibration that have no known physical explanation. Likewise, the Gravity B relativity probe has much greater error factors than expected. Five years ago, I would have written this off as bad engineering; now I think it is at least as likely that the science is wrong.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Neried
And on "twisting the first spanner you can find": are you saying that the two teams, a decade ago now, did not investigate any possible alternative explanations for their data, at all?
They investigated many possibilities. What is wrong is their joint conclusion that the only possible explanation is 'dark energy'. It is always possible they did not have enough evidence to fully characterize distant supernova. As we know now, more evidence is needed. It is also possible, and always will be, that one or more of the basic scientific facts they assumed are not facts at all.
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