Exposing PseudoAstronomy

The issue of funding in science is near and dear to my heart ... or, perhaps to my grocery, rent, and utility bills. Most people who are not in science do not know - and have many misconceptions about - how research scientists get funding and what they do with it. In this episode, I interview and discuss with Dr. Pamela Gay this significant issue and why it is a larger issue than many realize.

Black holes seem like a given in popular culture: They exist, they have to, right? Well, some people claim they don't. In this episode, we go through the theoretical underpinnings for black holes, some of the observational evidence for their existence, and examine some of the claims made by credentialed and practicing physicists who state that black holes cannot exist.

Measuring distance in every-day life requires some basic tools like a ruler. But who holds the other end when we want to measure the distance to the next galaxy? In response to young-Earth creationist claims, this episode delves into some of the science of how we measure distances across the cosmos and how all those different measurements fit together in what we call the Astronomical Distance Ladder.

Lingust, Dr. Karen Stollznow, discusses some of the communication problems on our own planet and how that translates to the huge potential problems of communicating with any type of intelligent creature who originated off our planet. We used this information to discuss some claimed contactees and how linguists have debunked their claimed communication with aliens.

The Rosetta mission with a destination of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has faced numerous conspiracies circulating throughout the internet (and even more mispronunciations of its target). In this episode, I talk about a few of them.

I've listened to Coast to Coast AM for many years, and one of the repeating guests I have not yet talked about on this show is James McCanney. His ideas can broadly be classified as falling into the Electric Universe model, and he is best known for his ideas about comets. While Part 1 dealt with those cometary ideas exclusively, this Part 2 deals with his ideas regarding Venus, the Big Bang, the Apollo moon landings, Planet X, weather, and conspiracies in general.

I have listened to Coast to Coast AM for many years, and one of the repeating guests I have not yet talked about on this show is James McCanney. His ideas can broadly be classified as falling into the Electric Universe model, and he is best known for his ideas about comets. It is these cometary ideas that are the focus of this Part 1 episode.

On December 9, 2009, a strange spiral anomaly appeared in the skies over Trondelag, Norway, and Northern Norway, a day before President Barack Obama arrived to accept his Nobel Peace Prize. As with other weird, unexplained events, this gigantic blue- and yellow/or/white-glowing spiral has become a pet example of many different fill-in-the-blank paranormal phenomena.

"Come one, come all! See the never-before-seen and never-to-be-seen again phenomenon of two moons in the sky, when Mars appears as large as the moon! This August 27 ... don't miss it!" So the paraphrased claim goes. And goes around every August. I don't seem to recall seeing Mars as big as the Moon in the sky, so in this episode I explore the origins of the claim and why it can never be true.

The majority of UFO = aliens reports today - if not in quality then at least in quantity - come from simple eyewitness testimony. People often point to "trained observers" as being key witnesses, such as police officers or pilots. But, skeptics tend to dismiss these reports, and in this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus shares her research into the fallibility and manipulability of human memory, with implications for why this kind of testimony is not considered good evidence.

Continuing from Part 1 which was a broad introduction to the Electric Universe concept, in this episode we delve into four different Electric Universe models for the Sun and explore whether the direct predictions made based upon those models bear out in observations.

When originally formulated, the Electric Universe umbrella of ideas was a serious area of investigation. And Dr. Tom Bridgman describes many of the early tests that were done ... and why they failed. In this Part 1, we discuss a lot of these early ideas, tests, and a general overview of the Electric Universe.

This episode was spurred by the #FacebookExperiment where researchers tried to influence moods of about 700,000 people, without their explicit knowledge or consent. Using that as a starting point, I interview my father (Dr. Jeffrey Robbins) about ethics in science and especially in human research. I then talk about my take on the subject and bring it back to ethics in general, and contrast that with pseudoscientists.

The True Color of Mars conspiracy was dispelled in Episode 74, but a niggling part remained: What about the haze of blue around the limb of Mars seen in many photos of it from Earth orbit, especially from the Hubble Space Telescope? This part of the conspiracy has a surprising result -- it's true!

In 2008, and ever since, young-Earth creationists have claimed that MESSENGER spacecraft results from the planet Mercury indicate that Mercury's magnetic field has been decreasing, in-line with creationist Russell Humphreys' prediction back in 1984. Find out if the data support this, and if there are other explanations. Or, if we need to throw out an old Mercury for a recently created one.