Dillinger
Guerrilla Ontologist
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2000
- Posts
- 26,152
http://www.badastronomy.com
Here is an article from the June 2002 issue of Discover magazine that I found quite interesting...
The web site (above) is also worth checking out.
When Astronomy Goes Bad:
Why are media science stories still crazy after all these years?
By Bob Berman
Even as researchers report one amazing discovery after another, media depictions of astronomy seem stuck in a state of arrested development. Many scientists look at the endless misconceptions that fill the airwaves and sigh, but Philip Plait, a NASA consultant and astronomer at Sonoma State University in California, decided to do something about it. After watching a local newscaster state that it is possible to balance an egg on its end only during an equinox, he wrote a rebuttal and posted it in what was then, in 1994, a novel place?the World Wide Web. Four years later he launched badastronomy.com, a site compiling responses to celestial misinformation. Now he has published a companion book, Bad Astronomy, that uses scientific goofs to teach people how the world really works.
The media's astronomy errors fall into three broad categories: silly, sloppy, and malicious. Egg balancing clearly falls in the first group. It takes only a moment's thinking to realize gravity is no different during the equinoxes than at any other time. The myth that flushing toilets and draining sinks swirl the opposite way in the Southern Hemisphere is another example of silly science. Pseudo-experts claim Earth's rotation causes this phenomenon, but the effect is tiny: You would have to let a sink sit for three weeks before the water would be still enough to reveal any influence of our planet's spin. And toilets flush in a consistent direction merely because they are designed to swish the water in one direction.
Sloppy mistakes result from unfamiliarity with the basic workings of science. Plait has complained about reporters who refer to the giant "lens" of the Hubble Space Telescope. Like all large telescopes, Hubble collects light with a mirror. Sure enough, during the recent NASA mission to upgrade the Space Telescope, a network news anchor promised that the upgrade would "make the Hubble's lens 10 times more powerful." Likewise, reporters often claim that people on the International Space Station have escaped Earth's gravity. In fact, the astronauts experience a full 89 percent as much gravitational pull in orbit as they do on terra firma. The sensation of weightlessness arises because the station is constantly falling along its curved orbit, like a roller coaster taking a steep plunge, which makes everyone on board feel weightless.
The worst offenses, which could be called maliciously bad science, seem to be deliberate deceptions intended to boost ratings. Last year, scientists and astronauts expressed disgust when a Fox network program claimed the Apollo missions to the moon might have been hoaxes. Plait quickly debunked the alleged evidence point by point, and traffic on his Web site soared to 4.5 million page views. But the most powerful rebuttal comes from science itself. Astronomer Tom Murphy of the University of Washington is preparing to bounce a laser off a set of reflectors on the moon to measure the lunar distance to within one-twentieth of an inch. How did the reflectors get there? Apollo astronauts installed them for just such experiments.
Sometimes bad astronomy is all in the name of fun. But Plait, a self-proclaimed science fiction nut, cannot resist deconstructing Hollywood's space fantasies and showing what they would be like if they obeyed the laws of physics. Spaceship engines would not whoosh, stars would not streak by, and even the most skillful pilot could not dodge enemy laser beams. Nothing travels faster than light, so there would be no way to know that a beam was headed your way until it arrived.
Plait isn't out to lecture. His goal is to demonstrate that reality is actually more interesting than make-believe. To understand why you can balance an egg at all, you need to know how a hen's body makes an eggshell?and that's a much better story than the scrambled science any newscaster might create.
http://www.badastronomy.com/pix/starwars2_ngc4565.jpg
Here is an article from the June 2002 issue of Discover magazine that I found quite interesting...
The web site (above) is also worth checking out.
When Astronomy Goes Bad:
Why are media science stories still crazy after all these years?
By Bob Berman
Even as researchers report one amazing discovery after another, media depictions of astronomy seem stuck in a state of arrested development. Many scientists look at the endless misconceptions that fill the airwaves and sigh, but Philip Plait, a NASA consultant and astronomer at Sonoma State University in California, decided to do something about it. After watching a local newscaster state that it is possible to balance an egg on its end only during an equinox, he wrote a rebuttal and posted it in what was then, in 1994, a novel place?the World Wide Web. Four years later he launched badastronomy.com, a site compiling responses to celestial misinformation. Now he has published a companion book, Bad Astronomy, that uses scientific goofs to teach people how the world really works.
The media's astronomy errors fall into three broad categories: silly, sloppy, and malicious. Egg balancing clearly falls in the first group. It takes only a moment's thinking to realize gravity is no different during the equinoxes than at any other time. The myth that flushing toilets and draining sinks swirl the opposite way in the Southern Hemisphere is another example of silly science. Pseudo-experts claim Earth's rotation causes this phenomenon, but the effect is tiny: You would have to let a sink sit for three weeks before the water would be still enough to reveal any influence of our planet's spin. And toilets flush in a consistent direction merely because they are designed to swish the water in one direction.
Sloppy mistakes result from unfamiliarity with the basic workings of science. Plait has complained about reporters who refer to the giant "lens" of the Hubble Space Telescope. Like all large telescopes, Hubble collects light with a mirror. Sure enough, during the recent NASA mission to upgrade the Space Telescope, a network news anchor promised that the upgrade would "make the Hubble's lens 10 times more powerful." Likewise, reporters often claim that people on the International Space Station have escaped Earth's gravity. In fact, the astronauts experience a full 89 percent as much gravitational pull in orbit as they do on terra firma. The sensation of weightlessness arises because the station is constantly falling along its curved orbit, like a roller coaster taking a steep plunge, which makes everyone on board feel weightless.
The worst offenses, which could be called maliciously bad science, seem to be deliberate deceptions intended to boost ratings. Last year, scientists and astronauts expressed disgust when a Fox network program claimed the Apollo missions to the moon might have been hoaxes. Plait quickly debunked the alleged evidence point by point, and traffic on his Web site soared to 4.5 million page views. But the most powerful rebuttal comes from science itself. Astronomer Tom Murphy of the University of Washington is preparing to bounce a laser off a set of reflectors on the moon to measure the lunar distance to within one-twentieth of an inch. How did the reflectors get there? Apollo astronauts installed them for just such experiments.
Sometimes bad astronomy is all in the name of fun. But Plait, a self-proclaimed science fiction nut, cannot resist deconstructing Hollywood's space fantasies and showing what they would be like if they obeyed the laws of physics. Spaceship engines would not whoosh, stars would not streak by, and even the most skillful pilot could not dodge enemy laser beams. Nothing travels faster than light, so there would be no way to know that a beam was headed your way until it arrived.
Plait isn't out to lecture. His goal is to demonstrate that reality is actually more interesting than make-believe. To understand why you can balance an egg at all, you need to know how a hen's body makes an eggshell?and that's a much better story than the scrambled science any newscaster might create.
http://www.badastronomy.com/pix/starwars2_ngc4565.jpg
