Unexpected patters in historical astronomical observations

[pood]

Pood

An astrophysicist says ... argument from authority. It is how you tend to make your arguments.

No, Steve, that is incredibly stupid and incorrect. I make no such fucking arguments, The astrophysicist did not say that that these papers PROVED these things were alien craft, and I never said that he did. Even if he had said that, I would not agree with him.

I have never, ever made an argument from authority about anything.

Also, I know far more about science than you do. And of course you remain wholly ignorant about the philosophy of science,

In this thread you have conflated peer-reviewed papers in reputable science journals with anecdotal bullshit like people confusing Venus with alien crafts.

Thus parading yet again your ignorance.

Did you read the linked papers, Steve? Of course you didn’t.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Not sure why the roll eyes from Elixir and the snark from others. I am not making any claims of anything, and nor are the authors. I do put some weight when an astrophysicist finds this paper highly intriguing.

Adam Frank, the astrophysicist you are linking to, doesn't actually comment on the papers themselves. He's just pointing out that he's interested in the idea that there's an astronomer publishing in a reputable journal about the possibility of detecting "non-terrestrial artifacts" (the term Villarroel uses in her paper). Adam also says "Getting your paper published in a peer-reviewed quality journal does not make it right."

Indeed, I did already note this. All this is understood

Sorry. I guess I misunderstood when you said he found the paper highly intriguing that he was commenting on the content of the paper and not its mere existence.

I guess it’s both the content and the existence of the paper. The fact that the papers passed peer review and got into reputable journals because the content is intriguing and not just bullshit Coast to Coast stuff.

As I understand the journal “scientific reports”, which I hadn’t heard of before (as opposed to the PASP) and is an “open source” journal, the fact it was published has nothing to do with the “intriguing” nature of the content but the validity of the scientific analysis. I believe that’s the basis on which a referee is supposed to assess.

 

[steve_bank]

I was driving out in the countryside when I saw these lights, my car was engulfed with a bright lighht ...

When I was iivng north of Seattle before devilment and light pollution looking south towards Seatac you could imagine pasterns in the moving lights, jets. Sometimes it would look like a large moving object.

When I was taking flying lessons in the 80s when I did my first solo night flight it was spooky. A clear moonless night over dark rural New Hiroshima. Imagination kicks in.

That’s nice. This thread has nothing to do with any of that.

Human imagination is near limitless. One can look at photographic plates and see patterns where there are none. Invoking data science means nothing.

 

[Jarhyn]

I was driving out in the countryside when I saw these lights, my car was engulfed with a bright lighht ...

When I was iivng north of Seattle before devilment and light pollution looking south towards Seatac you could imagine pasterns in the moving lights, jets. Sometimes it would look like a large moving object.

When I was taking flying lessons in the 80s when I did my first solo night flight it was spooky. A clear moonless night over dark rural New Hiroshima. Imagination kicks in.

That’s nice. This thread has nothing to do with any of that.

Human imagination is near limitless. One can look at photographic plates and see patterns where there are none. Invoking data science means nothing.

The patterns are there. Whether they are a statistical accident is one thing, but if they aren't, I would absolutely insist that we seriously consider that it's debris sent by the blast that happened shortly before we see such things.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Human imagination is near limitless. One can look at photographic plates and see patterns where there are none. Invoking data science means nothing.

That’s a very strong Statement and strikes at the core of many astronomical survey programs, including SDSS and the nascent Vera Rubin observatory. The astronomical community (of which I assume you are not a part) would highly disagree with this statement.

 

[pood]

Steve can’t follow a simple chain of reasoning.

This is a discussion board. I noted, for discussion, an astrophysicist who at his blog declared himself intrigued by two peer-reviewed papers in reputable science journals providing defeasible evidence that there may have been non-terrestrial artifacts (NTAs) orbiting the earth before Sputnik — they would have had to have been NTAs if they were up there before Sputnik.

I subsequently linked the two papers as soon as I was able to find them.

And immediately Steve goes all ad hom on me and charges me with nonsense like an appeal to authority. He has nothing of substance to say and I’m sure he did not read the papers.

Eff off.

 

[pood]

Not sure why the roll eyes from Elixir and the snark from others. I am not making any claims of anything, and nor are the authors. I do put some weight when an astrophysicist finds this paper highly intriguing.

Adam Frank, the astrophysicist you are linking to, doesn't actually comment on the papers themselves. He's just pointing out that he's interested in the idea that there's an astronomer publishing in a reputable journal about the possibility of detecting "non-terrestrial artifacts" (the term Villarroel uses in her paper). Adam also says "Getting your paper published in a peer-reviewed quality journal does not make it right."

Indeed, I did already note this. All this is understood

Sorry. I guess I misunderstood when you said he found the paper highly intriguing that he was commenting on the content of the paper and not its mere existence.

I guess it’s both the content and the existence of the paper. The fact that the papers passed peer review and got into reputable journals because the content is intriguing and not just bullshit Coast to Coast stuff.

As I understand the journal “scientific reports”, which I hadn’t heard of before (as opposed to the PASP) and is an “open source” journal, the fact it was published has nothing to do with the “intriguing” nature of the content but the validity of the scientific analysis. I believe that’s the basis on which a referee is supposed to assess.

I fully agree. I probably did not express it well. What I meant was that the astrophysicist I linked found the material intriguing. I agree that the content passed peer review because of the validity of the scientific analysis. Something Steve does not appear to get.

 

[pood]

I have some things to say about this now but it may take a day or two before I have the time to properly write it up here with citations etc. because I can’t do that easily on my phone.

Adam Frank is also working through the papers so maybe you two could compare notes and share them here.

 

[pood]

Scientific American discusses the data.

 

[pood]

Phys.org weighs in.

 

[pood]

A pretty in-depth back and forth discussion here. The subhead is terrible and almost dissuaded me from reading, but it’s a good article that explores this issue from a number of angles.

“Bombshell new research” in the subhead is not my thing.

 

[pood]

From the above link:

“It’s not aliens,” said Michael Brown, Associate Professor in Astronomy at Monash University.

“It is flaws in photographic plates taken over half a century ago. I’m extremely sceptical [of the findings]. These old photographic plates have a lot of flaws in the old emulsions, and yes those flaws can sometimes look like objects.”

Prof Brown noted that Dr Nigel Hambly, Senior Researcher at The University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy, had recently examined similar claims by the group about the apparent flashes of light and found “the vast majority were almost certainly not real”.

Dr Hambly’s analysis of the same data set, published in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments last February, found the “putative transients are likely to be spurious artefacts of the photographic emulsion”.

 

[steve_bank]

Are we playing ping pong or badminton?

Volley for serve?

 

[pood]

But then again!

Dr Villarroel, speaking to The Sol Foundation YouTube channel last week, said the correlations identified in the papers — to UAP sightings, nuclear bomb tests and the earth’s shadow — defied the “plate defect hypothesis”.

“Our best cases happened to be during the Washington 1952 flap,” she said. “If you have a temporal correlation it’s not going to agree with the notion that the entire sample are plate defects.”

 

[pood]

Are we playing ping pong or badminton?

Volley for serve?

This is a discussion about science, Steve. I thought you were a big science guy?

Evidently not.

 

[pood]

To recap: Neither the authors of these studies nor the astrophysicist I quoted claimed these data show aliens.

Nor did I.

I made no appeal to authority — the notion is daft.

We have interesting data that suggest the POSSIBLE presence of artificial artifacts in space before Sputnik.

The papers passed peer review and were published in reputable journals.

The papers do not make any definitive conclusions.

This is science.

Someone claims to be devoted to science.

Guess not.

 

[pood]

As an aside, let’s look at this appeal to authority stuff.

Such an appeal is when you say, ‘x is an authority in his field, so what he says must be right,”

This is obviously wrong, because arguments stand or fall on their own weight and not because someone, no matter how authoritative they are, says they are wrong or right.

However, it is perfectly legitimate to say, “x is an authority in his field, he’s got street cred, so maybe we should listen to what he has to say.”

Which is what I did.

 

[pood]

I should mention that in this article, the subhead:

A stunning ‘smoking gun’ discovery in this photo could reveal an ‘alien artefact’ in orbit, bombshell new research claims.

Is really repulsive in its entirety. No, it is not a “smoking gun” nor a “bombshell.”

This is clickbait. It very nearly put me off from reading the article, but I did anyway, and it’s probably the most comprehensive article I’ve read on this stuff so far apart from the original papers, both of which I have read.

It should be noted that writers of articles online or in newspapers almost never write the headlines. The article being as good as it was, I suspect the writer was embarrassed by the subhead, if not the headline, which is not too bad except for the “alien artifacts” part, but that is probably OK since it was put in quote marks.

 

[Shadowy Man]

I will still respond with more later but it seems the heart of the discussion is that since there’s no way to prove that every transient is a plate defect then some of them could be non-terrestrial artifacts. There’s a lot of wishful thinking here it seems. Looking for correlations with the earth shadow is a good idea but I have read some criticisms of their statistical analysis on that specific paper over in a long thread on Metabunk.

 

[pood]

I will still respond with more later but it seems the heart of the discussion is that since there’s no way to prove that every transient is a plate defect then some of them could be non-terrestrial artifacts. There’s a lot of wishful thinking here it seems. Looking for correlations with the earth shadow is a good idea but I have read some criticisms of their statistical analysis on that specific paper over in a long thread on Metabunk.

OK. Look forward to your analysis. However I don’t think the authors are engaging in wishful thinking but rather offering the idea that NTAs are consistent with the data while other explanations have serious flaws. So it’s an open question,