Krakatoa (Earth & Sky) (Astrophysics)

[Ishmael]

Here is an example of what passes for "science" in our modern age.

Earth Wreathed by Invisible 'Dark Matter'

[Boreades]

[Tilo Rebar]

[Mick Harper]

It arises out of the following melancholy application of the human condition:

1. People can't stand not knowing and/or not being able to control things.
2. Many things are either random or chaotic or just plain beyond our ken.
3. One way of taming (2) is to declare they are cyclical.
4. This is often possible because the 'things' are often so variable in themselves (like say sunspots) that it is always possible to define when they are happening and when they are not to suit the cycle.
5. But also by definition they will be only recently discovered eg El Nino so there will be very few 'cycles' on record.
6. Also (eg lemming surges) it is always possible to argue that our knowledge is getting better and better so past 'misses' were down to our own ignorance.
7. And of course (eg global warmings) there are always opportunities to slip in cycles-within-cycles.

So what's the problem? Well, in order to establish your cycle to everybody's satisfaction, you actually have to come up with a number. And while that number can be satisfactorily wished into existence to explain the past, now everybody is waiting for the next event to appear on cue. Which it can't because the whole thing was a mare's nest in the first place.

[Ishmael]

Yes! And that's where a new scientific quest is born: The effort to explain why this time the cycle was missed. Lots of funding to be had there.

[Mick Harper]

Or, in the case of the most famous of all non-existent cycles, the boom-and-bust of the trade cycle, how we didn't solve it last time so we'll just have to do even more next time.

[Hatty]

In a programme last night about the history of weather forecasting, we were told weather forecasters used a ninety year-old forecast to give their audience an accurate prediction. That was before computer technology took over and forecasters became meteorologists. It remains to be seen whether the weather is affected by a ninety year planetary cycle which is, perhaps conveniently, not quite verifiable within a person's lifetime.

[Boreades]

[Boreades]

Talking of lunar cycles, that reminds me of something that ought to give fresh hope to the Flat Earth Society.

The astrophysicists at the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey have (we're told) created the first accurate map of the universe (within 1% of something)

"the findings strongly indicate that the universe is extraordinarily flat....

So they say it's very flat, but not why or how.
Why does it appear to be in a flat two-dimensional plain?

[Tilo Rebar]

[Grant]

[aurelius]

Just by way of a side issue, Krakatoa was not the largest recorded eruption in human history. Tambora, for example (1815) exceeded it, as did Santorini though you may argue about whether that was 'recorded' as such.

Krakatoa is arguably the most famous after Vesuvius, though.