Original Post June 10, 2012 Is hot gas sloshing in a gravitational wine glass—or is astrophysicists’ reasoning going in a circle? A recent press release explains: “Like wine in a glass, vast clouds of hot gas are sloshing back and forth….” The blue image is assembled electronically from x-ray data and…
Original Post May 21, 2012 Without a theory of electricity in space, astronomers must explain cosmic lightning with theories of falling gas. To get x-rays from falling gas, the gas must be attracted to a source of gravity with orders-of-magnitude more force than any known density of matter. Nevertheless,…
Original Post May 11, 2012 Spherical stars in spherical arrangements From the ESO: “A new image of Messier 55 from ESO’s VISTA infrared survey telescope shows tens of thousands of stars crowded together like a swarm of bees…. One hundred thousand stars are packed within a sphere with a diameter…
Third episode in a seven-arc series on the art of creative thinking. Over one-hundred years ago, after Einstein’s “rubber space-time” model replaced Newton’s dynamic model, gravity as a force was abandoned in favor of gravity as a warped coordinate system—although some people still think of gravity as a force….
Second episode in a seven-arc series on the art of creative thinking. Knowledge tends to progress incrementally for long periods as popular theories are developed and adjusted to fit discrepant evidence. Eventually, entirely fresh foundational ideas become necessary. To explain new evidence, the gravity-and-gas theories are patched with hypothetical,…
First episode in a seven-arc series on the art of creative thinking. Science is in the midst of an accelerated changing of paradigms—a set of metaphysical assumptions or a worldview by which all subsequent observations and reasonings are interpreted. Physics is what we think about—metaphysics is how we think…
Original Post February 3, 2012 Fourteen years ago, Halton Arp published Seeing Red. Chapter 6, “Clusters of Galaxies,” presented his finding that the clusters were low-luminosity high-redshift—and nearby—“star piles.” There was not then and there has not been since any discussion of the difficulties for consensus theories that Arp’s observations…
Original Post January 3, 2012 Mergers are out. Vanity is in: active galaxies are self-absorbed. For many years, the only acceptable explanation of high galactic x-ray output accompanied by high redshift was mergers of galaxies. The universe became a bumper-car arena where every presumed high-energy event was proof of a…
December 18, 2020 It’s common to hear people refer to “what science says.” The usual assumption is that “what science says” is said indefeasibly. But the term ‘science’ has two conflicting senses: science as currently-accepted theory (CAT) and science as method. To conclude that method inevitably leads to CAT and,…
September 21, 2020 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 to…
