Below is the latest lunar example of inkblot sensationalism. Someone has found what looks like a man and his shadow on the moon. That seems pretty exciting, until you realize that it really looks more like a shadow and its shadow, not a man and his shadow.
Image Credit: Google Earth/Youtube.com
Another example of inkblot sensationalism is when a paranormal investigator posts a photo with a little white smudge or white blur, implying that is possible evidence of a ghost. Having just read the sensational story of the ghosts of flight 401, I would not at all exclude the possibility that a ghost might be photographed. But if you are going to claim to have evidence of a ghost, it had better be something more than just a blurry white smudge on your photo, as such smudges can be produced by fingerprints on a lens, insects flying near a lens, or a speck of dust floating in the air.
Laura
Mersini-Houghton. Studying the cosmic background radiation (believed
to be the faint afterglow of the Big Bang), Mersini-Houghton claimed
to find 9 possible signs of evidence for another universe. At least
one of these claimed “signs” was ridiculous: the non-observation
of supersymmetry (as if a non-detection of anything could be evidence
for another universe). Other items on Mersini-Houghton's list seemed to be
just flimsy cases of looking for some unexplained anomaly, and
claiming that as evidence for another universe. But some of the
things mentioned by Mersini-Houghton were anomalies that had been
named or suggested by other cosmologists: a large-scale “Dark
Flow,” a “cold dark spot” in the cosmic background radiation,
and a claimed linear feature of the cosmic background radiation called
“the Axis of Evil.”
The
idea of trying to find evidence for other universes by looking at
features of the cosmic background radiation in our universe seems
like a quixotic quest (I will avoid the less polite term “fool's
errand.”) Even if we were to find a particularly striking feature
in that radiation, it would merely tell us something about our
universe or its history, rather than being an indication of some
other universe. It should also be noted that the cosmic background
radiation is essentially featureless, because it is uniform to 1 part in
100,000. The visual below illustrates the point.
Recent findings have not been kind to Mersini-Houghton's thesis. Using the latest and greatest observations from the Planck satellite, no less than 175 scientists co-wrote a paper last year concluding that there is no evidence for Dark Flow. They said flatly, “There is no detection of bulk flow.” You can read here a New Scientist story reporting on this paper. The story says, “The sharpest map yet made of light from the infant universe shows no evidence of 'dark flow.'"
Now
there is a new scientific paper that casts doubt on other items on
Mersini-Houghton's list. The
paper is entitled “Planck CMB anomalies: astrophysical and
cosmological secondary effects and the curse of masking.” The
paper refers to a process called masking, whereby scientists subtract
foreground signals to try to get at an underlying background signal.
Imagine if you have planted a tape recorder in the home of a mobster
who is unaware of eavesdropping devices in his house. Perhaps the
mobster always turned on the radio while he was talking, so that no
one could detect his words. You might then create some technique for
subtracting the sound of the radio, to get at the background signals
of the mobster's voice. That would be an example of masking.
Scientists use similar techniques to “mask out” foreground
signals to get at background signals such as the primordial cosmic
background radiation, believed to come from the very early universe.
No comments:
Post a Comment