If anything illustrates the piss-poor state of modern science, it's the attempts to debunk the findings or suppositions of Avi Loeb, who is searching for interstellar objects.
He keeps an open mind, saying that the current mania around UAP (The UFOs of old) needs to be backed up by scientific investigation. He wants to set up a world-wide network surveying the skies to look out for unexplained aerial phenomena with decent, modern and clear sensors, so the sightings can be properly investigated, rather than the always out-of-focus, blurry, overly grainy and unclear optics of the rarely-released videos we get online.
Professor Loeb's last investigation was to look for parts of a meteorite that airbursted over the ocean. It was confirmed by Norad to be faster than any normal meteorite. Faster than the escape velocity of the Sun, which defines it as an object not in orbit around the Sun, but an interstellar object from another solar system.
Not only was it one of the fastest objects to interact with the Earth, it was also one of the longest lasting, indicating it was made not of the normal rock, or iron, instead it was made of some denser material, able to handle the stresses of entry into our atmosphere at higher than normal meteoritic speeds for longer.
He went to the ocean and dragged a magnetic sled behind a ship. That bore fruit: tiny (in the millimetre range) spherical objects attracted to the magnets of the sled in the area of the meteor's track. Indicating they could be molten parts of the meteorite falling to the Ocean as the object melts in the severe heat.
So far so good. Hopefully the spherules will prove to be extra-solar in origin. Time will tell.
But I'm interested in the number of other scientists that instead of openly supporting this scientific exploration, actively attempt to debunk Professor Loeb's investigations and suppositions.
The spherules recovered from the track of the meteorite have so far proved to have unusual compositions. For a meteorite that is. Instead of the normal Iron and Nickel of the majority of objects that fall to Earth, the spherules recovered contain some unusual metals like Beryllium, Uranium and Lanthanum.
Just those results would or should pique the interests of any scientist. But instead the science community seems intent on attributing more mundane origins for the spherules.
Professor Loeb is doing further isotopic analysis on the pinhead sized objects he recovered in order to once and for all confirm if they were formed in our solar system or beyond. If it's from another solar system, that opens more opportunity to go back and recover bigger chunks of the object.
The presence of Uranium opens up the possibility of a nuclear power source. Or it could just be a chunk of rock from a planet outside our solar system. But either way it still pushes science forward with more information than it had before Professor Loeb went trawling.
But it really intrigues me why the scientific community won't stay quiet and let him just get on with confirming his suppositions or coming out and saying the material recovered isn't interstellar.
Why is there always this clamouring to disprove research that is against the current narrative? That's against the scientific method, surely? Isn't an open mind the best to have, to openly investigate and move science along?
Why instead do we have this closed shop in everything scientific, especially climate and medicine? Is it the financial interests behind the various wings of science vying for funds? Is it professional jealousy?
Somebody please explain!
Posts
