Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Bad arguments, tenuous theories, BAD SCIENCE

That was the title of an Amazon reader's review of "Dark Mission" submitted by K. Zoerb on Oct 24th. The following day, Mike Bara refused to accept this post on the dark mission blog:

Have you seen yesterday's review of your book by K.Zoerb in Amazon Customer Reviews?

The review includes some very specific examples of scientific error which you might consider responding to. If you don't, I'll consider the points conceded.

Cheers.

Here's K. Zoerb's main point:

Here is one big inaccuracy that highlights the either misleading or just incompetent nature of Hoagland's arguments: Figure 4-45 on page 198 (also repeated as color Figure 6). The actual graph shows the ABSORBANCE vs. the wavelength of light for a gold film, yet Hoagland just renames the graph as the "Gold Film Spectral TRANSMISSION Curve". Absorbance and transmission are two opposite phenomena (i.e. the higher the absorbance of a material (A), the lower its transmission (T), specifically A = log(1/T) ). Hoagland states that NASA "claims" that a gold coating is used on the astronauts' glass visor on their helmets to protect astronauts from UV light. Well, this is exactly what the gold coating does as it has high absorbance in the UV range (i.e. low transmission of UV light). But because Hoagland incorrectly interpreted the graph as "Transmission", he argues that the gold coating actually "enhances" UV light to allow the astronauts to better see the UV scattered light off of the Moon's "glass ruins". Hoagland can't even get basic scientific terminology right; or he is being deliberately misleading. However, I believe he just doesn't understand, because if he was trying to be misleading he wouldn't be too smart for leaving the absorbance axis labeled that way in the published figure.

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