Jun 17, 2015 “I’ll believe it when I see it” could be the motto of the empiricist. His not unreasonable belief is that reasonable belief in an idea should be governed by tests that give results which can be sensed. His concern is that beliefs not anchored to what…
Jun 11, 2015 The Wishing Well Cluster in the southern sky is twice the size of the full Moon. The conjectures about how it works are as varied as the colors of its stars. The consensus conjecture of stellar evolution has been developed in detail over several generations. A cloud…
Jun 09, 2015 European astronomers have discovered that some quasar spin axes are aligned with the Large Scale Structure (LSS) in which they’re embedded. The Electric Universe (EU) also expects quasars to be aligned with the larger Birkeland currents that power them. But the LSSs of the Big Bang…
Jun 04, 2015 ESO (European Southern Observatory) has announced the discovery of a “huge” star-forming region obscured by dust in the Spiderweb Galaxy protocluster. Alternatively, it may be a tiny spatter of dusty plasma ejected from a nearby galaxy. The Spiderweb Galaxy is a radio galaxy with a redshift of…
May 26, 2015 Some thoughts upon re-reading Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 essay, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His thesis was an instance of itself. The prevalent opinion was that scientific knowledge accumulates incrementally toward ever more accurate approximations of “the truth”, embodied in facts that are “out there”. Kuhn’s study of the history of science-plus…
May 25, 2015 Kuhn’s 1962 essay (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) exploring the nature of changes in scientific theories, and a plethora of commentaries since, have made it out to be a Big Deal and to be also somewhat mysterious: “revolution”, “incommensurability of paradigms”, “new world”, etc. It seems…
May 11, 2015 Ignorance is not bliss. In discussing the question of progress in scientific revolutions, Kuhn noted: “There are losses as well as gains [in a paradigm shift]…, and scientists tend to be peculiarly blind to the former.” In a footnote, he elaborates: “Because science students ‘know the…
May 6, 2015 The house of cards which is modern astronomy contains two jokers. Both lie in the foundation; both are being played; and the house is doomed to collapse. The first joker is the assumption that redshift is entirely a doppler effect. Upon this card is founded the…
Mar 16, 2015 Recent images of the star CH Cygni reveal the electrical circuitry that drives it. Radiation in radio (blue), optical (green), and X-ray (red) highlight the several inner components of the plasma discharge. The outer red circle (large optical image) is composed of radial filaments. This is a…
Mar 11, 2015 Imagine a rock. Now, imagine breaking it into pieces. Break the pieces into smaller pieces. Continue breaking until your eyes can no longer resolve the pieces. Get a microscope. Now you can distinguish the pieces. Break them until the microscope can no longer resolve the parts….
