Nov 24, 2014 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…
Sep 02, 2014 The large ALMA radio telescope in Chile has discovered that “billowing columns” of “gas” are “fleeing” from gravitational forces that would snare them into new stars. The size of the Sculptor Galaxy depends on the outcome. Unless, of course, star formation is not so much a matter…
Aug 27, 2014 No one buys a jigsaw puzzle that’s pre-assembled. The point of interest in buying the puzzle lies in the process of assembly more than the finally-assembled picture. And the motivation for buying is the promise of a challenging process. So it is with science: You buy…
Aug 07, 2014 Modern astronomy has a planetary nebula (PN) problem: Gravity can’t do what PNs do. Astronomers invent a kind of pseudo-magnetism to fill the explanatory holes. This pseudo-magnetism is a reified presumption that’s unplugged from the electric currents that generate real magnetic forces. Consensus theory has PNs being…
Jul 31, 2014 A gravity-only Universe cannot explain certain discrepancies. Ilya Prigogine, from a young age, was concerned that accepted physical theory had a couple of glaring discrepancies from observation: determinism and time symmetry. Most observations are of contingency and irreversibility. No one has yet seen an egg “un-fry”…
Jul 29, 2014 Rediscovering F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order has been exciting. Hayek began his inquiry into the foundations of theoretical psychology in 1919 before specializing in economics (and winning a Nobel Prize in that latter field in 1974). He didn’t publish The Sensory Order until 1952, when he…
Jun 19, 2014 A second generation of stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 stopped evolving. Perhaps they’re waiting for a better theory. The idea that stars evolve is one of those unjustifiable preconceptions with which observations are interpreted and understood. With that idea for ink, astronomers can draw explanatory…
Mar 17, 2014 Astronomers have found a lot of misbehaving gas around an elliptical galaxy in a galaxy cluster: It’s too hot to form stars. The elliptical galaxy must be big because it’s far away—because: high redshift! The gas around it must be comparably voluminous, too. Theorists expect that…
Feb 27, 2014 The large ALMA radio telescope in Chile has discovered that “billowing columns” of “gas” are “fleeing” from gravitational forces that would snare them into new stars. The size of the Sculptor Galaxy depends on the outcome. Unless, of course, star formation is not so much a…
Feb 25, 2014 Popular accounts of nebulas usually omit mention of their “hairy” structure. Because gravity can’t produce long, evenly spaced filaments of matter, astronomers don’t talk about them. Perhaps they don’t even see them. This double nebula is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small, irregular galaxy that’s considered to…
