On silly creationists
As I'm sure all three of you recall, I mentioned in the early days of this blog that much of the crank mail that comes to the department makes its way to my mailbox.
I got another good one the other day. Unfortunately, this one was written by a young Earth creationist (who also believes the geocentric model of the universe!), so I'm not going to go quite so easy on him as I did the person who felt the Earth had slipped by ~12 degrees overnight.
So, here is the thrust of the letter:
1) Scientists claim that Mars is X number of miles away, and on a particular date, this means its angular size was ~20 arcseconds.
2) Big fat optics textbook claims that the angular resolution of the human eye is 24", but in practice most people can't do better than one arcminute.
Conclusion -- anything under ~30" must be invisible, but since we can see Mars, that means that scientists are wrong! It can't be that far away! It must be closer!
My first reaction (and also, when I showed the letter to Richard, his first reaction) was "I guess we've just been lucky then landing all of those satellites on its surface."
My second reaction was that this would make a good homework question -- what does it mean that the angular resolution of the human eye is ~30"? Does that mean that every source of light that subtends an angle smaller than that should be invisible? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader, but I'll give you a hint.
If you ask, I'll point you to the link of this anti-science nut, but let me just say that his friendly letter took an obnoxious turn on the second page. There it said (paraphrasing), "now that I have proven that astronomers get simple things like the distance to Mars wrong, why should we believe the universe is old or that the Big Bang happened, etc. etc.".
I wonder if the guy knows that his website is being made available for the world to read using a system invented by a physicist from CERN?
I got another good one the other day. Unfortunately, this one was written by a young Earth creationist (who also believes the geocentric model of the universe!), so I'm not going to go quite so easy on him as I did the person who felt the Earth had slipped by ~12 degrees overnight.
So, here is the thrust of the letter:
1) Scientists claim that Mars is X number of miles away, and on a particular date, this means its angular size was ~20 arcseconds.
2) Big fat optics textbook claims that the angular resolution of the human eye is 24", but in practice most people can't do better than one arcminute.
Conclusion -- anything under ~30" must be invisible, but since we can see Mars, that means that scientists are wrong! It can't be that far away! It must be closer!
My first reaction (and also, when I showed the letter to Richard, his first reaction) was "I guess we've just been lucky then landing all of those satellites on its surface."
My second reaction was that this would make a good homework question -- what does it mean that the angular resolution of the human eye is ~30"? Does that mean that every source of light that subtends an angle smaller than that should be invisible? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader, but I'll give you a hint.
If you ask, I'll point you to the link of this anti-science nut, but let me just say that his friendly letter took an obnoxious turn on the second page. There it said (paraphrasing), "now that I have proven that astronomers get simple things like the distance to Mars wrong, why should we believe the universe is old or that the Big Bang happened, etc. etc.".
I wonder if the guy knows that his website is being made available for the world to read using a system invented by a physicist from CERN?
posted by Chris at 11:37 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home