Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerry
[snip]
Why such a stunning error? Why did it take eight years to fix it? The Hipparcos team had a great deal of confidence in their methodology - They used the tried-and-true 'great circle' as a reference, with multidimensional spline fits to patch together incontinuities. The method should have worked if all of the physical parameters used to define local space are correct. It is possible Hipparcos ran into the same kind of Doppler surges Anderson found, or the path through space varied, or some combination of both?
The new Hipparcos data relys upon what all science must do when the underlying physics are not understood or too complex: Principle components, a variation upon finite element code, and statistics. We can do better.
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Ah the joys and delights that come from random surfing, without being required to show understanding!
If you'd like to ask these questions in the Q&A section, I'm sure you'll get thoughtful answers ... it's fascinating, how the two teams analysed the raw data independently, many years ago, and discovered some shortcomings; how they recognised the limitations of their analyses, and how more were subsequently discovered; how, much later, a complete, more comprehensive re-analysis become possible; ... and what that thorough re-analysis produced ...
But then the mystery - at least
the possibility of a giant warp in "local space"* - would disappear, and we'd be left with boring old ordinary science, wouldn't we? Ah well, there are hundreds of other published papers to skim (and misunderstand) ...
*
see how easy it is to grossly distort the original words? ("The method should have worked if all of the physical parameters used to define local space are correct. It is possible Hipparcos ran into the same kind of Doppler surges Anderson found, or the path through space varied, or some combination of both?")