If you pay attention to science news, you may have noticed this sort of headline: “Scientists Shocked” or “Scientists Baffled.” The teaser headline leads you to a heroic story of hero scientists heroically unjamming the gears of science.
What you may not have noticed is the pattern. Six or seven times out of ten, the scientist is an astronomer or cosmologist. And if you read even more closely, you’ll find that the same sort of shocking results crop up at regular intervals. For example, every time a probe gets near a comet, we see a rash of reports of baffled scientists running around with their heads cut off, shocked at the results reported back by our robotic emissaries. Often, in the second paragraph, or perhaps the last, you’ll see a comment along the lines of “It’s back to the drawing board.”
But two years later when the next probe arrives, the same confusion reigns.
Clearly, someone did not go back to the drawing board, and paradigms were not altered.
Aside from comets, one of the most common sources of bafflement is electromagnetism in space. Keep this in the back of you mind next time you scan the science news. Remember that hot gas is plasma. Plasma is electromagnetic. The easiest way on earth to generate high energy radiation – gamma, x-ray – is with plasma devices, entirely without the need for rapidly spinning gravitational sources. Finally, there’s no such thing as magnetic field line reconnection – field lines are as real (though fully as useful) as lines of longitude or latitude. They can’t reconnect.
Now read an article like this one. It’s typical.
Here’s a fun one about ball lightning, with a space connection.
In other science news, climate models are awesome. Borepatch weighed in on that one, too. And sunspots may have had something to do with the little ice age.