Actually, I've played on that stage. For the 100th anniversary of the Hall, they did a series of youth orchestra concerts--I don't know if they still do--and my community orchestra played. I was terrified. And I am assuredly not good enough for a solo recital, even if they ever had solo viola recitals. (I'm certainly not good enough on French horn, as I took one semester of it in high school from a teacher who didn't really know how to play it himself--followed up by a semester of bassoon, which he didn't know how to play at all!)

However, I seem to recall asking a direct question of Jerry that hasn't been answered yet.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

What is the source of the attached images?

If discussion of the matter would have been limited to thirty days, and then the thread closed, Blood flow would still be ATM.

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jwj

The Reluctant Cosmologist

Okay, number one, that's not actually an answer. I'll accept it as one, but it isn't.

Number two . . . William Harvey did the work. He didn't just expect people to overthrow thousands of years' worth of belief. He provided evidence. Further, he didn't expect time on a message board to change science. He didn't think that blathering on, and on, and on in one place was actually going to accomplish something. They didn't have peer review per se in the 17th Century, but he went through the closest process they had.

Number three, you're missing my point. Yeah. Discussion here is limited to 30 days, and thank Gods for that. However, science as a whole eventually accepted his ideas, and within his own lifetime. So much for "science never accepts new ideas." If it doesn't accept yours, the more likely options are that you haven't provided enough evidence, you haven't done enough work, or you're wrong.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Bear in mind to that we are not living in the ancient days.

Much of what was once unknown is no longer unknown. We have a clearer basis upon which to stand.
Claiming that such and such wasn't accepted a thousand years ago but was ultimately right means nothing by today's standards.

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"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." -- Vaclav Havel

Quote:

We just don't know much.

Yet if not for those words, what would science be for? - KaiYeves

I propose an ATM corollary to Godwin's law: an ATM'er will inevitably compare himself to Copernicus (Or Galileo), when the going gets tough. - CodeSlinger

Cool. I found music too difficult, so I switched to physics and chemistry.

Breakthrough science is rare. All scientists dream of it; few get to bath in it. There was a fairly major (but largely unpublished) breakthrough in energetic chemistry when western scientist got their hands on what had been happening in the USSR. One of the direct results is much safer airbags.

Revolutionary changes are even more rare; but if you are looking for a comparison to musicianship, there really is none: Both Stravinski and Lennon were breakthrough musicians, but there is no 'more correct' musical score. Sometimes all that matters is that you can dance to it and it has a good beat.

Something is wrong with our physical understanding of the universe. What we are looking at here, is more like a very complex puzzle, and like all puzzles, you start with borders, work on the lines and note discontinuties. The model of the universe has a lot of pieces that don't fit - but is it because of the level of complexity, or is some of the framework assembled wrong?

I spent an evening plowing through Hipparcos papers, and this is the kind of observations that perk my interest:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/astro-p.../0412093v2.pdf

Two years later, the ESA scientist who reduced the Hipparcos data acknowledged substantial errors, and published corrected tables of Hipparcos positions and distances.

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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jwj

The Reluctant Cosmologist

Nereid
originally the wmap site...but i have stretched the original (oval shaped) "mollweide"? projection horizontally at top and bottom to produce a psuedo "plate caree" projection.

in other words, the unavoidable distortions of projecting a spherical image onto a flat surface are now pushed to the top and bottom horizons of the image.

so when you look at the image it is now distortion free from the left to the right edges.

i have also converted it to grey scale, tonally adjusted it and then converted to red scale.

Madman's features really are outstanding in the new WMAP image:

http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/index.html

Is it just me, or is the 5 year map rather less homogenious than the 1 and 3 year abstractions?

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jwj

The Reluctant Cosmologist

"homogenious"? Another Jerry test, to see if anyone is reading the posts?

And may one have the temerity to ask how you concluded, albeit somewhat tentatively, it's "rather less homogenious"?

Was it, perchance, by application of a standard statistical test?

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?")

All good points.

The best approach to solving a problem changes with time. William Harvey probably never looked anything up in Wikipedia or sold anything on Ebay.

About a year before Anderson published the gravitational assist anomally paper, I engaged in a series of Emails with one of his collaborators. Did this help persuade them to publish? Anderson pointed out he had access to unpublished data; he is also retired so he can question the mainstream all he wants - it might hurt his scientific credibility, but not his livelyhood. I don't have that luxury - in fact being labeled a radical has hurt my career.

I don't have the skills necessary to do the multivariant analysis of the Hipparcos data to test the hypothesis that the errors may have been the results of unexpected orbital paths divergence, or distortions in space: But someone who reads this may have that charter.

Newton was scoffed when he first introduced his laws - he didn't publish for what? Two decades, during which he worked out many of the details and gave us both the theory and the wonderful mathematical tools.

I don't have decades, and decades of time.

Do you?

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jwj

The Reluctant Cosmologist

What about GRACE data? LAGEOS? lunar ranging data? (and so on).
OK, so but for the decades, you and Newton are the same ... or did I misunderstand?

Yes. But the best approach to getting people to accept your solution does not.

Yeah, that Nobel Prize would sure be a pain.

Maybe. But if you don't have the skills necessary, what makes you think you're right about it?

That had nothing to do with scoffing; Newton was actually accepted pretty quickly upon publication. That had more to do with Newton's perfectionism and the fact that his primary interest was the alchemy, not the physics.

I will, however, grant you that Newton himself was a prime example of scientists hampering the research and publication of that with which they didn't agree. Ditto Lord Kelvin. I can, however, name you dozens of scientists who embraced the new with open arms. And if you're going to mention the persecution of Copernicus and Galileo, I will tell you that their persecution (expected persecution, in Copernicus's case; he actually did publish on his deathbed) was from the Church, and that other scientists largely accepted them unless their religious beliefs prevented them from doing so. Ditto Darwin.

Depends on how you define "decades, [sic] and decades of time." Certainly if I live to the average lifespan for a woman in the United States, I've got about 35 years. I can't know that I'll live that long, though I do come from a long-lived family; not one of my grandparents died before their 80s. However, science is not particularly my field of interest. Currently, film is. Not creating, though I've done some of that in my day--studying. So I'm watching some 400 movies a year and reading just about everything my library system has on the subject. I'm putting myself through independent film school, is how I'm currently thinking about it. I'm not expecting other people to teach me about, say, The Conversation, the one I'm currently watching. I've read some about it, but in the end, the only way to know the film is to watch it. Similarly, the only way to know the science is to do it yourself.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Isaac Newton was ATM for two decades?!! How cool is that!

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Credibility is simply incredible... sometimes even to me.
disclaimer

Not a giant warp, a minor one, if you read the Anderson papers (on Pioneer, lunar ranging, and gravitational assist anomalies), you would know there are wider margins of error than the known systemics can account for. Three years ago, your peers were scoffing at these suggestions and using Hipparcos as the defining standard. (How could we possibly determine such astrometric limits...). I think you will find that even with the known errors in the Hipparcos measurements, the solar "warp" is more constrained by Hipparcos than Grace or LAGEOS. Also, the Cassini paper, which tightened constraints upon the WEP, was withdrawn without explanation.

I don't find very obvious discrepancy until you leave the Lunar-Earth environment. We need to perform fundamental tests the equivalance principles somewhere besides the Earth.

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jwj

The Reluctant Cosmologist

It is a good point, but I never said science does not accept new ideas - I pointed out progress in energetics as an example.

What I am saying is that astro-scientist have used unusual and unscientific reasoning to perpetuate bad scientific arguments; while at the same time expecting those with alternative solutions to find exact solutions, in Sagan's words: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is NO evidence of the imaginary 'tholins' on the surface of Titan, and Sagan's attempt to bale out Newton must be rejected as nullified.

Extraordinary evidence does exist that Newtonian physics do not correctly predict what we observe: Galactic rotations, cluster rotations, gravitational accelerations, even the calibration of the GPS system produced results that differ from Newton's predictions. It is impossible to resolve all of these oddball observations without changes that also predict higher percentages of heavy atoms in the outer solar systems, because that is what we are observing all of the time.

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jwj

The Reluctant Cosmologist

It is hard to be credited with a discovery if the work is destroyed or the establishment condones burning at the stake or you are from the wrong background. From Wikipedia the page on William Harvey.
Ibn al-Nafis was hundreds of years ahead of his time and accredited.