One common trick that conspiracy theorists (and creationists) use to convince people is deception in the form of what essentially constitutes lying by omission, or implicitly giving a logical-sounding but false impression of something, and then showing that something to be wrong. Sometimes it might be deliberate, sometimes it might be that the conspiracy theorist himself is confused about that thing and doesn't understand it properly.
As a fictitious example (I have never seen this being used, but it could well be), consider this:
The notion that galaxies are receding from us, and that the farther a galaxy is from us, the faster it's receding from us, is based on measuring the red-shift of the light arriving from that galaxy to us: The more red-shifted the galaxy is, the faster it's moving away from us. But this is a completely incorrect assumption! Hotter stars, and thus on average hotter galaxies, emit bluer light, while cooler stars, and thus on average cooler galaxies, emit redder light. Thus a galaxy being redder simply means that its stars are on average cooler.
It's indeed true that cooler stars emit redder light, while hotter stars emit bluer light. Once you confirm this fact, the above argument starts sounding quite convincing, and casts doubt on using red-shirt as a measure of the alleged recession speed of galaxies.
Except that I deceived you. I quite deliberately, albeit implicitly, gave you the picture that red-shift is measured by looking at the color of the light. However, red-shift is not measured like that. It's measured by looking at the spectral lines of the color spectrum of the light. As light passes through matter, the properties of that matter will cause dark spectral lines in the color spectrum of that light (as certain atoms and molecules absorb light of certain frequencies). Most prominently, light passing through hydrogen gas (which is by far the most common element in stars) causes a very distinctive and unambiguous spectral line, which is always at a certain fixed frequency.
Now, if the emitter of that light is moving towards or away from the observer, this will cause the wavelength of the light to become shorter or longer due to the Doppler effect, and the spectral lines will shift by that same amount. This is a very reliable way of measuring how fast the source of the light is moving towards or away from the observer, and it can be measured and corroborated with simple tests. So, it's not the color of the light that matters in this, but the position of the hydrogen spectral line. That's how we know that galaxies are receding from us.
One concrete example of this that I have seen was a Moon landing hoax conspiracy theory page which argued that it's impossible for there to be a mirror on the Moon, brought there by the Apollo 15 mission, which is being used to measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon to an accuracy of a few centimeters.
The page proceeded to argue that in order for a laser sent from Earth to hit a target that small that far away, it would require a targeting precision that's orders of magnitude larger than is physically possible. It also argued that the position of the laser emitter and the laser receiver would have to be impossibly precise in order for the laser to bounce back from the mirror and hit the receiver. The page proceeded to present copious amounts of math proving this fact, and how it would require such precision that it would be physically impossible to make it work. It also showed that even the tiniest shifts in the Moon's position would cause the reflected laser to move significant distances when reaching back Earth (and the face of the Moon indeed does not stay stationary with respect the Earth, as the Moon wobbles around quite significantly over the course of its orbit.)
All that math, and all those arguments, might have been completely correct and precise, and all the calculations might have been completely correct... but, once again, the author is deceiving the reader, implicitly giving a false impression of the situation.
Most prominently, the page didn't actually have any image or photograph of the actual mirror that was placed on the Moon by the Apollo 15 mission. That in itself is a red flag, because the reader is given the impression that it's just a plain old planar mirror, like you have on the wall of your bathroom.
This is deliberate deception. The mirror placed on the Moon is not a regular planar mirror. It looks like this:
For those who aren't familiar with it, it may look really strange. What is it? It's actually an array of corner cube reflectors. They look like this:
Their idea is that they reflect light back in the same direction where it came from, no matter what that direction is (within a certain range of possible directions). The working principle is illustrated in this diagram:
So it doesn't matter where on the surface of Earth you send the laser from, the reflector will always reflect it right back to the emitter.
But what about the precision required to hit such a small target so far away with a laser? Once again the page is deceptive. It implicitly gives the impression that something like a 1-millimeter wide laser (or whatever) is shot at the Moon, and it stays that width for the entire distance, and what hits the surface of the Moon is that same 1-millimeter wide laser.
In reality the laser that's sent to the Moon spreads out, like a spot light. When it hits the surface of the Moon, it's several hundreds of meters wide, which is ample enough to hit the reflector with completely realistic aiming precision required from the laser emitter. The reflected portion of it likewise spreads as it travels back to Earth, but that doesn't matter. The emitted laser is so strong that even after it has spread out by some hundreds of meters on its way there and back, it's still perfectly measurable. The strength of the reflection that arrives to Earth might be just a tiny fraction of what was sent, but it's still more than enough to observe and measure it (in this particular case, what's measured is how long it takes for the reflection to arrive back.)
Every time you read conspiracy theories, you should ask yourself if there's something that the author is not telling you, if he might be deceiving you in some manner by omitting some crucial information, giving you the wrong mental image of the situation.
As a fictitious example (I have never seen this being used, but it could well be), consider this:
The notion that galaxies are receding from us, and that the farther a galaxy is from us, the faster it's receding from us, is based on measuring the red-shift of the light arriving from that galaxy to us: The more red-shifted the galaxy is, the faster it's moving away from us. But this is a completely incorrect assumption! Hotter stars, and thus on average hotter galaxies, emit bluer light, while cooler stars, and thus on average cooler galaxies, emit redder light. Thus a galaxy being redder simply means that its stars are on average cooler.
It's indeed true that cooler stars emit redder light, while hotter stars emit bluer light. Once you confirm this fact, the above argument starts sounding quite convincing, and casts doubt on using red-shirt as a measure of the alleged recession speed of galaxies.
Except that I deceived you. I quite deliberately, albeit implicitly, gave you the picture that red-shift is measured by looking at the color of the light. However, red-shift is not measured like that. It's measured by looking at the spectral lines of the color spectrum of the light. As light passes through matter, the properties of that matter will cause dark spectral lines in the color spectrum of that light (as certain atoms and molecules absorb light of certain frequencies). Most prominently, light passing through hydrogen gas (which is by far the most common element in stars) causes a very distinctive and unambiguous spectral line, which is always at a certain fixed frequency.
Now, if the emitter of that light is moving towards or away from the observer, this will cause the wavelength of the light to become shorter or longer due to the Doppler effect, and the spectral lines will shift by that same amount. This is a very reliable way of measuring how fast the source of the light is moving towards or away from the observer, and it can be measured and corroborated with simple tests. So, it's not the color of the light that matters in this, but the position of the hydrogen spectral line. That's how we know that galaxies are receding from us.
One concrete example of this that I have seen was a Moon landing hoax conspiracy theory page which argued that it's impossible for there to be a mirror on the Moon, brought there by the Apollo 15 mission, which is being used to measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon to an accuracy of a few centimeters.
The page proceeded to argue that in order for a laser sent from Earth to hit a target that small that far away, it would require a targeting precision that's orders of magnitude larger than is physically possible. It also argued that the position of the laser emitter and the laser receiver would have to be impossibly precise in order for the laser to bounce back from the mirror and hit the receiver. The page proceeded to present copious amounts of math proving this fact, and how it would require such precision that it would be physically impossible to make it work. It also showed that even the tiniest shifts in the Moon's position would cause the reflected laser to move significant distances when reaching back Earth (and the face of the Moon indeed does not stay stationary with respect the Earth, as the Moon wobbles around quite significantly over the course of its orbit.)
All that math, and all those arguments, might have been completely correct and precise, and all the calculations might have been completely correct... but, once again, the author is deceiving the reader, implicitly giving a false impression of the situation.
Most prominently, the page didn't actually have any image or photograph of the actual mirror that was placed on the Moon by the Apollo 15 mission. That in itself is a red flag, because the reader is given the impression that it's just a plain old planar mirror, like you have on the wall of your bathroom.
This is deliberate deception. The mirror placed on the Moon is not a regular planar mirror. It looks like this:
For those who aren't familiar with it, it may look really strange. What is it? It's actually an array of corner cube reflectors. They look like this:
Their idea is that they reflect light back in the same direction where it came from, no matter what that direction is (within a certain range of possible directions). The working principle is illustrated in this diagram:
So it doesn't matter where on the surface of Earth you send the laser from, the reflector will always reflect it right back to the emitter.
But what about the precision required to hit such a small target so far away with a laser? Once again the page is deceptive. It implicitly gives the impression that something like a 1-millimeter wide laser (or whatever) is shot at the Moon, and it stays that width for the entire distance, and what hits the surface of the Moon is that same 1-millimeter wide laser.
In reality the laser that's sent to the Moon spreads out, like a spot light. When it hits the surface of the Moon, it's several hundreds of meters wide, which is ample enough to hit the reflector with completely realistic aiming precision required from the laser emitter. The reflected portion of it likewise spreads as it travels back to Earth, but that doesn't matter. The emitted laser is so strong that even after it has spread out by some hundreds of meters on its way there and back, it's still perfectly measurable. The strength of the reflection that arrives to Earth might be just a tiny fraction of what was sent, but it's still more than enough to observe and measure it (in this particular case, what's measured is how long it takes for the reflection to arrive back.)
Every time you read conspiracy theories, you should ask yourself if there's something that the author is not telling you, if he might be deceiving you in some manner by omitting some crucial information, giving you the wrong mental image of the situation.
Comments
Post a Comment