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Old 09-November-2004, 07:46 PM
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JayUtah JayUtah is offline
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Rusty, you're making a couple of very key errors.

First, you're adopting the method that Bennett and Percy have used for years now in order to try to defuse attempts to prove their theories wrong. You have raised the issue of infidelity in the demonstration as an excuse for why the demonstration doesn't contradict the conspiracy theory. Unless you can describe specifically what effect the point of infidelity has on the conspiracy theory and the test at hand, you're doing nothing more than handwaving -- scramlbing to find any reason to discount the test, whether relevant or not.

The ability of us and others to separate the various conspiracist claims into individually testable units, and to test them under more controlled circumstances, is exactly what makes our approach scientific and theirs not. It demonstrates that we understand the underlying physical principles whereas the conspiracists can only see the combined effects and speculate as to specific cause. Our understanding is analytical while theirs is merly comparative.

For example, to test the interreflection principle, all that is required is a solitary, directional light source. It doesn't matter whether the source is local or infinitely distant, or whether it's natural or artificial. It only matters that all other light sources are eliminated. A spotlight 150 feet away will produce interreflection results that are qualitatively equivalent to the sun in space. The shape of the shadow of our test object (in our case, a small rock) may be ever so slightly different because the light source is local, but in that case the error falls below the jitter introduced by the texture of the ground.

The blind handwaving to the locality of the light source as somehow invalidating that part of the experiment is unsatisfactory. A specific objection is required, involving acceptable principles of photometry to illustrate why, specifically, the demonstration fails.

Here's a simple scenario to illustrate your error. Let's say your foot hurts and so you go to the doctor. You don't understand everything he does in his examination, but you know some things generally because you've been to the doctor before. He gives you a thorough examination but is unable to diagnose your foot pain. He suggests you come back in a week for more testing. Later, upon discussing the matter with a friend who is a nurse, you discover that the doctor performed your ear examination incorrectly. Since you don't really know anything about medicine, you suspect that maybe if the ear examination had been done correctly, the diagnosis would have been possible. But that's really very unlikely. Your foot hurts likely because of something wrong with your foot, not your ear. So whether the ear was examined correctly or not really doesn't matter.

In order to argue that the botched ear examination affected the foot diagnosis, you require a specific testable theory of how they are connected. Such as, "Examining the ear reveals irregularities in blood flow in small capillaries; this indicates poor circulation, such as in diabetes, and that is often a cause of pain in the extremities. Had the ear examination been done correctly, it may have led the doctor to suspect poor circulation."

This is how you (and Percy and Bennett) approach the problem of contradictory evidence. If the experiment wasn't done perfectly, according to every aspect you (and they) think "must" be important, then the entire experiment is simply discounted as invalid without any further analysis. First you have to explain why your idea of what constitutes a correct experiment is actually meaningful. Then you have to show why an infidelity of the experiment, as measured by your criteria, is meaningful.

Second, you approach the question with the (wrong) presumption that I must prove, or am trying to prove, that faking the photography in a studio is impossible. That is not at all what I'm trying to show. I don't have to show it was impossible to argue that it just wasn't done that way.

The "rules" that Percy and others have put forward (e.g., shadows cast by the sun must be parallel, sunlight is always even across a flat surface) are attempts to devise tests by which photographs taken in natural sunlight can be distinguished from photographs taken in the studio. Then they try to apply these tests to Apollo photographs. The photographs "fail" the "test" and therefore are discounted as not possible in natural sunlight.

Unfortunately nowhere do the authors test the tests. We are left with their word that light and shadow behave the way they say they do in natural lighting as well as differently, as claimed, in the studio.

Our goal here is simply to show that the tests these authors propose, really don't do a very good job of distinguishing natural light from artificial light. In many cases we can go out into natural light and take pictures that "break" their rules for natural light. This shows that their test doesn't work. We can also put up artificial lights as they suggest and show that their statements about artificial light are wrong too.

The reasoning goes like this. If the photograph doesn't obey the rules for natural light, then there is no other possibility than that the photo was taken with artificial light. Notice how there is no proof for artificial light; just the suggestion that it "must" be artificial because the only other possibility has been eliminated.

Now to be fair, after the author has drawn the conclusion he sometimes goes back and, with diagrams and handwaving, tries to show that the behavior of light seen in the photos is somehow indicative or characteristic of artificial lighting. But half the time he gets those characteristics wrong, and the other half he doesn't tell you whether natural light would behave that same way.

It matters not one single bit that we can sometimes convincingly recreate natural lighting in artificial surroundings. I can make "sunlight" very convincingly on a stage with my trusty globe grid and some shower curtains. In fact, it works to our advantage because it gives pretty convincing evidence that you can't tell natural light from artificial light in a photograph just by looking at the photograph. And that's what the conspiracists want you to believe: that they can pick up any random photograph and, by application of their "rules", tell you whether that photo's lighting environment is natural or artificial.

We've proven they can't. Therefore the arguments they base on those "rules" are hogwash.
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