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Science

Oil Isn't from Dinosaurs & Other Iconoclasms 242

Posted by Hemos from the gold-is-a-breaker-of-images dept.
jkeene writes "The Washington Post has an article on Thomas Gold, a scientist who thinks oil doesn't come from dinosaurs, amongst other interesting theories. Some of Gold's other strange ideas turned out to be true, like pulsars. It's in the Style section, not exactly a peer-reviewed journal, but it has names and references. " I always like reading about iconoclasts, because at least I know there are people out there questioning even our basic assumptions.
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Oil Isn't from Dinosaurs & Other Iconoclasms

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  • Yes, except this article said NOTHING whatsoever about creationism. Read the article first please
  • Amozon carries some reviews [amazon.com] on The Deep Hot Biosphere, the book that dwells on the theory mentioned in this article.

    I some times do wonder, why is it that we spend so much time, cash and equipments on search for ET when our own good old earth is still a vast mystery to us !

    The theory does have some loop holes but on the whole it does sound very impressive.
    One question that really haunts me is that if this theory is right, why is it that we don't see so much barrels of oil and petroleum being pupmped out during an volcano eruption. A volcano is the closest natural link with the simmering inside of earth.

    I really wonder what the poor OPEC guys will think about this theory. How they must be praying that it truns out to be case of the "infinte monkey on infinite typewriter.. " as some one earlier pointed out. !

    Manifest
  • I enjoy reading about Creationists, et al, if only because they make me feel so much better about myself. "As bad as my life is, at least I'm not completely brainwashed like these bozos." And hey, we all enjoy a good ego boost now and then. - rev
  • Ooooohhhh...

    Think about this, though: in fact, an infinite number of monkeys would create "every work ever written, that ever will be written, and ever possible to be written" an infinite number of times. Well, at least a countably infinite number of times, as opposed to uncountably infinite.

    Furthermore, given enough time, the monkeys would mail the best paper to your professor (probably an infinite number of times as well), and you would get an A.

    So here's my proposal: forget Seti@home, forget DES, and RC5, and all those silly distributed products. Install my infinite monkeys client to write pieces for /., and then when we reach enough processing power that it is close enough to infinite to start behaving like those monkeys, we'll axe Rob Malda and have /. articles with no misspellings.

  • The idea that the blobs in the Martian rock were life has been discredited, principally because they are too small. Although they look like bacteria, they are many thousands of times too small to be lifeforms.
  • I used to work for his daughter. Every once in a while he would come up with some crackpot theory that we could use as an analogy to explain why her latest idea wouldn't work.

    My favourite was the "wrinkled apple" theory of mountain range formation, that assumed that the Earth was cooling, and therefore shrinking, causing the crust to buckle without any of those messy plate tectonics.

    Just like Gold, and Fred Hoyle, Bondi worked on the theory that if you throw enough ideas out there, some of them will stick.
  • ...is that it is used. If it was the same stuff that came out of the ground, you wouldn't need to replace it.

    Used motor oil is full of metal particles and other various crud. It's pretty nasty toxic waste, as well as a lousy lubricant.

    I'm not sure the value of recycled oil is as high as the cost of processing it.

  • This is certainly useful information, but all you've shown is that no hydrocarbons were created in the first 10 seconds after the big bang. If, say, they were created starting at t+1 hour, I think that would still count as being "at" the Big Bang (at least for the purposes of a newspaper article).

    So, at what time did hydrogen atoms begin to form? I'm not a scientist, but my guess would be around t+1 minute or so. Thus, it seems to me, the question here is whether heavier atoms such as oxygen and carbon were present in any significant quantity prior to the first supernova (at t+10^9 years or so).

  • I think it's pretty easy to say that the article was incorrect in saying that the hydrocarbons were made in the big bang and such. Rather than concentrating on one errant statement, look at the important stuff. The theory hypothesizes that the hydrocarbons were part of the matter that originally formed the earth. (But don't those seem to be rather complicated molecules for that point in the development of the universe?).

    Now, I venture into the land of conjecture and speculation. Perhaps the microbes formed as a result of the extreme conditions under the earth's surface at the time, similar to the "primordial soup" that has been hypothesized for decades. Since the best source of energy underground was these hydrocarbons (probably not oil and gas yet) the microbes digested these and created other forms of hydrocarbons (waste products - this is where petroleum comes in). I'm confusing myself even more with this speculation... Because in this situation, the hydrocarbons of the initial form (whatever it may have been) would eventually be depleted by the microbes. It wouldn't make sense for a microbe to excrete the same type of molecule as a waste product that it uses as fuel, so there must be some type of change going on there...

    I guess this is what separates people like Gold from me. I really have a hard time thinking outside the box of logic, and pulling data together that seems on the outside to contradict into a coherent theory.
  • Kepler was not a monk. Christian, yes.

    Newton's last words on his deathbed were about his pride in dying a virgin.

    Little interesting tidbit there...

    -Vel
  • The threads in the discussion clearly demonstrate why a conservative scientific mainstream is needed. Look at how many of these discussions turn into a sort of scientific wish fulfillment where things that people want to believe are put forth and backed up with evidence that the scientific orthodoxy was wrong in the past.

    I think problems lies in distriguishing what is possible from what is true. That's the difference between hypothesis and theory. Experiment is the path from hypothesis to theory. Theory is as strong a statement as you can (or should) expect science to make, because you never know when an observation is going to blow it all out of the water.

    Of course there is stodgy resistance to new ideas. That's because scientists are people. Show me an organization without orthodoxy and I'll show the absence of an organization ;-)

    For every example of the orthodoxy resisting an idea that later turned out to be accepted theory, I can show you tens of thousands of crackpots who, in their ignorance of much of the body of scientific knowledge and method, advance theories that were demonstrated false by sound experiment decades ago.

    I'm not saying "forward the stodgy orthodoxy" here, I'm just saying, to trot out a cliche, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I see three dangers in the scientific orthodoxy that should be examined regularly:

    1) Human desire. This is the natural reluctance we all have to abandon a belief, particularly one to which we have dedicated our lives and whose overthrow amounts to a repudiation of our lives' work. This is what made Wegener (sp?), proponent of Continental Drift, into a pariah.

    2) Financial interest. This is closely related to human desire, because greed is a human desire, but here I'm talking about something even more basic. If your livelihood, which is necessity (as opposed to your future wealth, which is greed), depends on funding from organizations who would withdraw funding if their agenda were undermined by your findings, you would be sorely tempted to withhold findings; not to say falsify findings.

    3) Specialization. This is part, I think, of Gold's heresy. The "scientifc community" tends to separate in disciplines and those disciplines tend to become insular. How many geologists know much, if anything, about astronomer's findings of hydrocarbons on other worlds? How could they come up with a radical new idea on the formation of oil if they are ignorant of a significant source of information. Likewise, one of the reasons Wegener (yes, him again) was dismissed was that he was a meteorologist. What did he know about geology? This last problem is perhaps the most serious.

    So, yes, problems exist. Even so, most radical ideas are, I suspect, quite spectacularly wrong. There are limited time, money, and tools for scientific research. Some effort must be made to concentrate our efforts on research likely to bear fruit (not just economic, but also purely intellectual fruit).

    I think most people seriously underestimate how much we know about the physical world, and how abstruse, sensetive, and detailed are experiments that move science incrementally forward. This fact is what makes "problem area 3" such a, well, problem. This kind of science is based on inference; on steady observation, and drawing reasonable conclusions and extrapolations from those observations.

    But don't despair. Science's famous heroes are those who leap beyond the current framework. Those people frequently labor in the world of inference, but at the same time are accumulating a wider model; an idea, like Einstein's photons or his relativity; like Gold's geophysical oil production; like Wegener's drifting continents. At some point the idea "solidifies," and they outline a radical hypothesis. This is an act of imagination, and quite different from inference. Inference is a process (as is "science"), but imagination is a human creative act, as difficult to quantify as "insight" or "brilliance."

    The trouble is, in music or poetry or painting, you have the "insight" and you are done. You have created. In science, however, your insight must be tested against the physical world. Many a beautiful theory has been destroyed by an ugly fact (I wish I could say I had invented that turn of phrase; can someone remind me who said that first? I have forgotten, but I love the phrase).

    This is, I think, the source of the "Nobel whacko." Many scientists are, I think, freed by their Nobel prize; by the concrete assurance of their status that the prize represents. They are freed to articulate their personal untested pet hypothesis.

    I have to wrap up this ramble. I'd just like to say that I think people are far too sanguine. People are far too ready to believe an idea that matches their "feeling" about how things should work. Even Einstien said "God does not play dice." Don't let's throw away the orthodoxy. As with so much of life, good science is the challenge of finding balance.
  • Why yes I do. Thank you so very much for asking.
  • Err, I don't suppose you've had any history outside of European history? The Islamic world was busily recovering from the Mongol invasion, entering a second 'golden age'. The Chinese were busily improving on their technology at the time as well. Any advances in Europe, at that time, would have been scorned at by the rest of the world. During the Middle Ages (and even the Renaissance), Europe was merely a backwater in the civilized world.

    BTW, no need to post potentially inflammatory religous statements unless it has something to do with the article. The resulting flamewars decrease the S/N ration. (and since I use 'nested' comments, the page is longer than necessary)
  • Do you mean 'said the Earth is round'?

    Well, as an example of bad teaching in the schools, few people in Europe actually believed that the Earth was flat. Most people just thought you'd die on the ocean before reaching land. Columbus made a mistake calculating the circumfrence of the Earth, and thought that the resulting distance between Japan and Europe would be short enough to sail. He was, of course, wrong. The Americas were in the way.

  • People are dumb...not religions. Lets get that straight.

    Dark Ages only occur in europe. during this time, other civilization is more advance than europe. don't think that europe is the center of advancement.

    Nothing can't become something, without there being something in the nothing
    In another words, which one came out first...the egg or the chicken. I do not know. do you?


    --

  • Well this inspired me to do a websearch. http://www.aip.org/enews/ physnews/1995/split/pnu244-3.htm [aip.org] http://www.sciam.com/ askexpert/geology/geology9/geology9.html [sciam.com] The second references the first.
  • 1) Mix a bunch of hydrogen and carbon with traces of other elements. Heat and squeeze for a few million years. Let H2 escape your squeezer more easily than other stuff.

    2) Scatter a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, and traces of other elements in interstellar clouds and hard vacuum. Irradiate for a few million years, while letting them be pushed together and ionized by radiation pressure, mutual gravitation, and subtle orbital effects. Let hydrogen be blown away from the mass more easily than other elements and non-trivial molecules (due to relative lightness and selective scattering of hydrogen-line light).
  • Further information

    http://www.people.cornell.edu/ pages/tg21/recharging/ [cornell.edu]

    This page describes his theory and offers insight into it. Impressive read.

    Lando

  • I'm always a little leery of theories that tell us what we want to believe. And you have to admit that the idea that the oil supply is endless is mighty attractive in many circles.
  • I hope he's not correct about this one. If he is, then we can look forward to eternal smog, oil spills, traffic, etc, etc.

    Nope. The days of exponentially increasing oil usage are long over. These days, we're promoting alternative fuels, but not because we're afraid we're going to run out, rather because we don't like the environmental damage. If current trends continue regarding the decline in how quickly our oil usages increases, it will peak, fall, and reach near zero before we exhaust what oil resources we have already discovered. Finding out oil is more abundant or replaceable than we thought is not going to change that. Back in the 70's, we thought we'd need to pull in the reins because we'd run out soon. We know better now, but we're pulling in the reins anyways. Look forward to a future of electric cars and whatnot, not because we're afraid of running out of fuel but because we just don't want to put up with the pollution anymore...

    --

  • I wholeheartedly agree with Gold on the issue that peer review is a stifling factor in modern scientific research, one that I have often thought to put economic viability before scientific worth.

    After all, what better way to get an edge on your competitor than to pre-qualify their products before they are released for general acceptance in the scientific 'marketplace'.

    Imagine this same system being used by such scientific innovators as Microsoft and Sun, and you see why this is really not the best way for scientific validity to be obtained.

    The fact is, such things as 'competitive interest' and 'peer acceptance' have no place in scientific research - they are simply forms of maintaining status quo amongst the players involved (i.e. what everyone thinks and accepts, as opposed to what 'individuals discover'), rather than means by which scientific progress can flourish and prosper.

    I think we find a lot of this anti-establishment view in the Slashdot/open source community as well - certainly its evident in the OS arena. If we all agreed to only use that which had been peer approved, we'd be subject to the rules of marketing and economics, and thus we wouldn't be using such alternative OS's as BeOS/FreeBSD/Linux, etc. By this stance, Microsoft NT would be the only valid operating system - and in fact, in some realms of the computer industry, this is the case.

    Now, I don't think 'peer review' of code is the same thing here, though... in an open source environment, we're more prone to a 'peer cooperative' effort than 'peer review' - i.e. if you find bugs in someone elses software, fix it and let 'em have the fix - thus progress is made.

    I for one look forward to reading his memoirs when they are published - and I monitor with continued interest the Slashdot view on 'scientific methods'.


  • Re:Oil created in the big bang? (Score:4)

    by jonnythan ( 79727 ) on Monday November 01, 1999 @03:25PM (#1571228)
    Ok. A little clarification is in order.

    The Big Bang, which is still a much debated THEORY, happened..a long time ago. At the "time" of the Big Bang (since we have no idea what the concept of time would have meant back then) the universe ITSELF exploded. There wasn't a tiny piece of matter that contained everything..the universe itself exploded and sent into motion _everything_. This explains microwave background radiation - we detect it everywhere, from every direction, equally. This radiation was released in the Big Bang, so it literally fills the universe.

    To go on...matter essentially didn't exist at this time. Some fundamental particles were in existence, but nothing that exists now in our percieved nature. Most of what "inhabited" the universe was radiation. Until approximately 10^-43 seconds, no one has any idea. Between 10^-43 s and 10^-35 s, what existed is called the GUT era - Grand Unified Theory era. At this point, everything was uniform - quarks and leptons were the same thing, in other words. From 10^-35 to 10^-4 s is called the Hadron era. This refers to the "soup" that was the universe...extremely dense radiation and quarks and such. Physics, matter, and energy were beginning to form [remember, they didn't exist before..physics came about during the Big Bang].

    From 10^-4 to 10 seconds was the Lepton era. Lighter particles - electrons, neutrinos, etc - were dominant, along with lots of heat and radiation. The next 5*10^7 years were dominated by radiation, then from then to now became matter dominated as radiation formed matter and solar systems and such began to form.

    Throughout this time, the average temperature of the universe has steadily declined, from around 10^32 K to its present state of about 3 K.

    If you're still awake, it's obvious that no hydrocarbons were formed at the Big Bang. Chances are that Gold knows this very well, but the reporter screwed it up pretty royally.

    There's your lesson on cosmology for the day..
    Cheers

  • Oil is generally believed to be from microscopic plants and animals that lived in the ocean many millions of years ago. Coal is from land plants, dinosaurs, the flintstones, etc. The formation of coal is a well known process that you can see occuring today in peat bogs. For centuries people have used Peat for fuel, and you can find fossilized remains of trees et al in coal, so there is no dispute about where it came from. The formation of oil on the other hand is more of a dispute, Oil is believed to be formed when microscopic platds and animals precipitate out of seawater and form sediment. As the sediment gets compressed over millions of years, the microbes are turned into oil in a similar fashion to coal. Coal = land plants Oil = Ocean microbes but really, any kind of microbe will do, as long as its organic. Gold's article makes a lot of sense, although it wouldnt explain why most oil occurs in sandy areas ( i.e places where oceans used to be) Whereas the formation of oil doesnt explain the helium ( any helium would simply float to the surface and out of the atmosphere) Either way, its an intriguing theory

  • There might well be Christians who organize as such to do scientific research (e.g. based on Biblical and other religious texts), but don't confuse these with "Christian Science", which is a religion that is not about researching material evidence for, say, oil or dinosaurs. The Christian Science Church, among other things, publishes the Christian Science Monitor [csmonitor.com], and has a more-religious web site maintained by its Mother Church [tfccs.com].

    In that context, referring to "Christian Science" as an "oxymoron", as another who replied to this article did, is inappropriate, unless one wishes to offend others out of ignorance regarding their religion.

  • consider, if you will, the Great Flood. all you that don't believe the Bible can stop reading this right now; you won't get it, and you will only try to ridicule what you don't understand.

    i heard some compelling things about this; that the people and animals that didn't make it onto the ark with Noah ended up becoming what we know as oil deposits. think about it. there's this huge amount of water (no reference of rain in the Bible until the Flood with Noah!), and the dead got buried in the silt and whatever else was settling as the waters receded... another poster here mentioned fossils found in the coal or shale. if you consider this theory, then it would make sense, eh?

    just something to get you thinking.

  • After all, people used to think that heavier objects fall faster than light objects.

    But they often do! Heavier things are often denser things, hence they achieve a higher terminal velocity. In the very special case of a perfect vacuum, all things fall at the same speed.

  • Actually that's not true - according to the 9th law of Cartoon Physics [xs4all.nl], "Everything falls faster than an anvil."
  • I didn't think heavier elements even appeared until later in stellar evolution. It seems he's challenging more then just all of geology...
  • I think you're right that peer review serves a useful academic purpose. It's like inertia for the system that prevents us from wandering all over the map with new discoveries like "cold fusion."

    However, correct me if I'm wrong, but really radical new ideas will take 10-20 years or more to displace an established view. Perhaps it's a little slow, and could be made better by a little tuning. To bend the control system analogy, we want the response critically damped -- fastest convergence to truth without oscillations.

    In the open source world, the peer review is made close to instantaneous thanks to the internet. The same phenomenon is going on in academia thru the online papers you speak of. However, there it's a side path, "real science" is still widely viewed as the output of the reviewed journals.

    I think science simply needs to admit that different data has different certainties. What's called scientific law is very properly left to the output of the respected journals. But a lot can be gained by exposing everyone to radical new perspectives, even if they aren't widely accepted. So maybe science just needs a variable moderation system like Slashdot -- where interesting and insightful count, and trustworthiness is a scale, not a binary decision.
  • Just because the technology is available doesn't mean people will use it. Gas-guzzling, smog-spewing SUV's are the fastest growing market segment these days.

    BTW, I'm looking forward to getting an aircar.
  • I always thought it was from plants .. there was a lot more vegetative matter than dinosaurs ... I thought this was widely known ...

  • I generally don't post twice on the same story, and I generally don't pay any attention to "party line" regurgitations like this, but I gotta respond. Hopefully those 3 remaining folks who browse at 0 still will read both our comments and judge them almost completely unrelated to the story.

    Global climate change is real, it's been happening since there was a globe, and humans' fossil fuel use has had little or no real impact on it. Any changes attributable to humans are dwarfed by those caused by other causes. See this page [freedom.org] for a more lucid explaination (with citations) than I can make here after being up so long today.

    "...agreements commiting to a policy of reduced fossil fuel use. ...all just talk to appease a few iconoclastic environmentalists." They're not appeased, to judge by the demonstrations still being staged at the ongoing negotiations. It's been and will be more talk, but the goal isn't "saving the planet". I quote one of the very few non-sympathetic persons allowed to observe the proceedings: "The Kyoto Protocol is a prime piece of the embodiment of a massive, grand, global scheme for redistribution of the world's wealth from "abilities" to "needs" -- a scheme which has flamed in the hearts of egalitarians of all stripes and "-isms" for ten thousand years of known human history."

    For some reason, I suspect your not-quite on-topic post was motivated by the fact that there's a UN climate change negotiation session happening this week. My response certainly is: I'm involved with an effort to report on those meetings (Daily updates here [freedom.org]). Our reports are nearly unique in that we're concerned about not over-reacting to the "urgent problem of global warming". Not a popular attitude... Rather iconclastic by today's standards.

  • WOW! Great link!!
    Original Source Material!
    (What a concept!)

    It appears Thomas Gold has anticipated most of the comments and criticisms that have been posted here on Slashdot.

    I have this knawing suspicion I am going to accomplish very little today.

    Nick.
  • Can't deny the fossils found in coal. So at least there is at least a fossil fuel.
  • ...but it should not be the whole story. Scientific thought encompasses ideas with a tremendous range of rigor, and nothing in the physical sciences can ever be completely proved anyway. A forum for loosely formed, but interesting, ideas is just as important as peer reviewed journals since it can be thought provoking and send people in directions they previously wouldn't have considered. And with the internet, such forums are easy to create.

    The problem that must be overcome is that there is a stigma attached to scientists who voice nonrigorous ideas. But this is just plain silly, since the nature of the forum should make it pretty clear which articles are rigorous and peer reviewed, and which are more speculative.

  • IIRC, petroleum derived from cambrian era plants, while the dinosaurs were mesozoic.
  • Next thing you'll be telling me is that the Earth is one big giant computer trying to figure out the question to . . . no, wait . . . Hmm.

  • The plate tectonics-driven Carbon Cycle [columbia.edu] is sufficient to explain the hydrocarbons percolating through the mantle and of the persistence of oxygen in the atmosphere. For those who may find the above lecture note too long, the carbon cycle starts with the absorption of carbon-laden sediments into the mantle at subduction zones, followed by a multimillion year period where the carbon compounds circulate in the mantle, before resurfacing, mostly as gasses from volcanos, and perhaps enhancing existing petroleum deposits.

    Most of the Earth's carbon has been locked up in the mantle by the Carbon Cycle. That's a good thing, since there it has no opportunity to recombine and eliminate the atmospheric oxygen.

  • Dont mistake what I'm saying I dont buy in to the earth is only 10,000 year old BS but the Christian Science has been saying this one for a long time. Its been shown that Volcanic activitis relase a large amount of Hydrocarbons.
    I do tend to agree Oil could probly be formed this way or possabliy both. Seeing as how we dont have anyway of going back to really look its going to be hard to prove for a while.

    my 2 pence
  • One of the holes scientists seem to fall into is to forget that exceptions to rules might be indicators that the theory is flawed and not that the theory just has some exceptions. If a theory comes out that wraps up both the already accounted for behaviour of a system and the bits that aren't accounted for then it surely deserves to be considered, even if it does fly in the face of convention.
  • I note that any post expressing a Christian theme is rapidly down-checked. Do I see a pattern here?
  • Actually, though scientists had hoped to find background radiation uniform across the backdrop of space, they found embarassing clumps instead. There is speculation that the instruments just aren't subtle enough to do a good enough monitoring job yet. I don't remember the specifics, but check out Scientific America, they often have good articles on this kind of thing.
  • Read his short story "The fires within" (reproduced in
    "Reach for tomorrow". That story actually suggests
    intelligent life in our planet's hot interior.
  • Whether Gold is completely off his rocker or not (hey, I'm conservative and skeptical here, too), I'm also glad to see that some of the interview subjects praised him for stepping out with these new theories.

    If there is such a thing as an Iconoclast Award -- OTHER than being immortalized in a "think different" Macintosh commercial -- Gold definitely deserves it.

    (Me, I'm a big fan of the Darwi Odrade character, and some of the things she says in _Chapterhouse: Dune_ point to people like Gold as being absolutely necessary for culture survival. I won't quote anything here, since I've gone on long enough.)

  • Traffic is a problem no matter how transportation is fueled. Have you ever seen a bycycle traffic jam? It's just as bad, only instead of someone honking or flipping you the bird, they can spit, kick, whatever.
    As for smog and such, take a look at modern gas and deisel engines. You can find cars with emissions that are cleaner than the air they are using to burn the gas. Deisels that are as powerful as larger gas engines but burn _much_ less fuel, and within 1 to 2 research-years of being legal in California (which says a lot about the cleanliness of the emissions)

    itachi, also a car geek
  • While I am not sure if I agree entirely with Mr. Gold, I'll admit that he has certainly set me thinking. If indeed, hydrocarbons are found on other planets where we can see no trace of organic life (granted, what we can see isn't always what is/was there) then the theory that we need organic matter to create hydrocarbons is a load of bunk.

    If nothing else, he has given us some definite food for thought. Perhaps he'll even be right. I must say, I find it interesting that the article mentioned I think only one case where he was wrong. Too much of the "he got this right" for me.. I prefer a bit of a balance.

  • People need to very very careful when critising the "peer review" system of scientific reporting.It has led to the most successful method of human development. Although I agree that "peer acceptance" is generally stifling this is really a distorted view of how the scientific process works. "Peer acceptance" is not desireable because it assumes those reviewing already have made up their minds. "Peer review" on the other hand is there as part of the scientific method to ensure that certain minimum criteria has been provided. This must include data and facts. It should also include full descriptions of how the data was gethered so others can repeat the observations so cheating is minimised. There should be references to any other relevant data. What is proposed should be logical and not require to inviolate existing well backed up research unless the author has the evidence to back it up. And the matter should be considered in an objective light, not one tainted by personal opinions, politics and how people would like the world to operate. Without these checks and balances you'll end up with new age loonies waving crystals *over* your computer to increase it's speed, and no-one will be the wiser.
  • The trouble is not to make it so unconventional that it's undecipherable to the average human.
  • "I told them I would like to teach advanced physics," Gold remembers. "They said that was fine. But since I had never studied any physics, I had to learn it myself night by night, before each lecture."
    I'm impressed.

    This sentence caught my eye too... impressive, but not unheard of.

    In fact, several excellent teachers I've had told me similar stories. IIRC even such luminaries as Richard Feynman had to do this sort of thing on occasion... the combination of extreme time pressure and the memories of very recent learning can help to produce a very successful teaching experience. Can lead to ulcers, though...

  • You know, the point of view of the scientist we're all commenting on?

    He didn't say God created the oil, just that the hydrocarbons weren't the result of prehistoric life.

    That still leaves the same processes that formed the hydrocarbons in the comets and such. Which is probably what he's referring to.
  • There are a bunch of micro-organisms that have shown a remarkable amount (and I mean -remarkable-) of resistance to such things as heat and pressure. The only thing stopping us from finding similar, even more resistant ones is probably the fact that our equipment isn't as tough as they are (as well as the fact that they're several miles in the Earth's sublayers). We'd probably find more, if we could build the tools to look.
  • But hydrocarbons only require hydrogen and carbon - that's elements 1 and 6. They might also incorporate oxygen (8) and whatever other elements are handy. Remember that quartz figures heavily in our earth's crust's composition - and quartz is silicon dioxide, and silicon is atomic number 14 (!).

    So all the elements needed to make hydrocarbons are handily available. What is tricky is producing the actual hydrocarbons themselves. Off hand, I don't see any reason why there couldn't be a flourishing biosphere in the deeper layers of the earth's crust.

    What we need to do is study the dead microbes we're finding in the oil. If we could somehow demonstrate that those microbes died recently, rather than billions of years ago - and that's tricky, because carbon dating won't work for them (carbon dating requires the organism to have been interacting with the atmosphere) - that'd be strong evidence for Gold's theory. At worst, someday we'll be able to sequence the genomes of these bugs, reconstruct their biology, and show that they're evolved for an environment that could only be found in deep layers.

    Frankly, this could overturn not only geology, but evolutionary biology as well. Could it be as Gold thinks, that abiogenesis originated deep in the Earth's surface, and that modern life as we know it didn't evolve until some of those deep bugs broke through to a radically different environment? Darned interesting.

  • Adding this to my list of oxymorons:
    Military Intelligence,
    Jumbo Shimp
    ...
  • If the American Public wasn't persauded by
    the media to beleive that hemp is bad, we could
    use hemp oil which burns much cleaner and more
    efficent then Fossil Fuels. Not to mention that
    hemp is much eaiser to renew then oil.

    Thats just my opinon anyway. Any one care to agree
    or disagree?
  • A tree does die from old age. If it didn't, there'd be a lot more 'immortal' trees out there... I believe the oldest are California Redwoods or something like that, and they're only a few hundred (maybe thousand?) years old.

  • The threads in the discussion clearly demonstrate why a conservative scientific mainstream is needed. Look at how many of these discussions turn into a sort of scientific wish fulfillment where things that people want to believe are put forth and backed up with evidence that the scientific orthodoxy was wrong in the past.

    Agreed. This a very important concern. However it doesn't negate the usefulness struggling against orthodoxy. The two themes are mutually interdependent on each other. Iconoclasts need something strong, slow and stable to rebel against. The status quo needs heretics and crackpots dangerously running about in order to justify the walls. The walls are important, they hold everything inside. Or outside, depending on where you sit.

    What's arguably the one of the most important characteristics about the style of development found in free software/open source world?

    Seperate, and yet joined, Stable and Unstable source code trees, which are recognized as equally important and valuable.

    Academia could learn from programming. I think the real issue is that we do not seem to have formally identified the absolute necessity of keeping both modes prevalent and balanced. We want one or the other to reign supreme.
  • Install my infinite monkeys client to write pieces for /., and then when we reach enough processing power that it is close enough to infinite to start behaving like those monkeys, we'll axe Rob Malda and have /. articles with no misspellings.

    But what will be do with all those articles that have one letter infinitely mispelled?

    "To be or not to ble, ohh! Stupid Monkeys" -Krusty the Klown
  • Thanks for the pointer. It's a good thing I'm not famous or creationists would be misquoting that comment for the next 100 years. ;)

    What I should've said was that it could overturn current abiogenesis research, by providing an alternative pathway for natural abiogenesis. Evolutionary biology, far from being overturned, would be resoundingly vindicated.

  • Just let them read Borges. That should cure them of such simplistic analogies.
    --
  • Obviously a lot of people here are either failing to read the article or having reading comprehension. He's not just saying "Hey, we've got an infinite supply of oil!". He's actually got a theory that explains a lot of things that we've discovered recently. He also has a history of being right. And far from a crackpot who just comes up with things, he spends a lot of time studying the experiments already done in the field. The second value of his theory is that if he forces someone to prove him wrong, they have to do it using new experiments and a new way of thinking, since he already accounts for all or most of the experiments that have been done.

    His history of shaking up stagnant fields and forcing them to rethink some of their assumptions is his greatest value. And no, we don't have an infinite supply of hydrocarbons, just a renewable one. This means that if we can find more efficient ways to use our natural resources, we can balance production and consumption. Our current efforts have been to phase out the use entirely, under the assumption that there was a limited supply. With a limited production rate, we can set our goals differently.

  • So what process should there be to separate the shit from the gems other than peer review?
    --
  • There's plenty of outlets for "crackpots". Just watch a TV news magazine some night. It's just that most establishment scientists have their threshold set too high to notice. I think this is appropriate. While science is the eternal search for the truth, or, to look at it in another way, the study of disprovable ideas. It is also an iterative attempt at categorizing and managing the enormous complexity of knowledge in order to understand and predict.

    Such a process is necessarily conservative for the simple reason that it is expensive to shift a consensus for any reason, particularily one that has had operational success.
    --

  • We had Freeman Dyson, the physicist at Princeton, down here on the U. Penn campus the other day, and one of the many things he said that surprised me was that he knew Gold, and had complete confidence in him as a scientist. Dyson's own credibility in science is without question, so I found that pretty impressive.

    I don't have the impression that Gold is against peer review, or anything; I just think he feels that it's gotten a bit too conservative, which is certainly possible. Speculation is a valid part of science; it needs to be identified for what it is, but it also needs to be heard.

  • Far from solving the energy crisis, if the earth contains vast amounts of hydrocarbons, that would be scary indeed. There is only a very limited amount of hydrocarbons that can be burned or released into the air without causing a runaway greenhouse effect that would kill most surface life very quickly.

    In fact, it sounds like he is claiming that there are more than enough hydrocarbons to use up all the oxygen on the surface when burned. If a volcanic eruption (or humans) caused that to be released, the end result would be something like Venus: an atmosphere very high in carbon dioxide and with extremely high temperatures. Who knows, maybe that's just what happened to Venus.

  • It's the difference between countable (cardinality of the integers) and uncountable (cardinality of real numbers). Consult any undergraduate real analysis textbook for elucidation. You should find it interesting.

    But I believe that Midnight Coder is wrong, if we assume that the original premise, that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters can, indeed, produce the complete works of Shakespeare, is true.

    The reason is that monkeys do not have the manual dexterity to change typewriter ribbons or reload paper. You cannot write the complete works of Shakespeare without changing the ribbon at least once, and defintely cannot write them on one sheet of paper. Therefore, the complete works of Shakespeare must be an aggregate work of over 1000 monkeys, each of whom has written one page.

    Since the monkeys are not ordered, we can presume that the original author of the quotation wished to allow us to use any permutation of monkey pages to compile the tome.

    There may be only a countably infinite number of monkeys, but the number of monkey page permutations is uncountable, and can map, I believe, to the set of all works that can ever be written.
  • What the Big Bang theory doesn't explain is the overall uniformity of the cosmic background radiation [nasa.gov] nor it's minute fluctuations. To explain this, the inflation theory [nasa.gov] was developed.
    --
  • Eight years ago, when Gold was still developing his theory, some geologists were so incensed by it they petitioned to have the government remove all mention of it from the nation's libraries.

    Sorry, but there is some hyperbole at work here.

    Microbes deep inside the earth were first hypothesized by Edson S. Bastin in the 1920's. [srv.net]

    Furthermore, I recall another article in Scientific American from the late 1970s or early 1980s which discussed geological sources of hydrocarbons, primarily methane, that could form the feedstock for virtually unlimited petroleum formation, even without microbes.

    That was a lot more than "eight years ago".

    There are all sorts of "scientists" around -- and if one wants to be the Jesus Christ of scientists, one can always find persecutors.

  • In another words, which one came out first...the egg or the chicken. I do not know. do you?

    Yes, I do. The egg. All mutations accure at the time of meiosis (sperm+egg come together time), and at no other time. So it would have to be the egg that came first, although barely distinguishable from any previous eggs, but different.

  • Just think of all the trouble we'd have to go to with cloning dinosaurs and burying them so future generations can have the god given right to drive fuel guzzling 4 wheel drives.
  • I some times do wonder, why is it that we spend so much time, cash and equipments on search for ET when our own good old earth is still a vast mystery to us ! Here's how he establised his theory on the Earth: he looked at the universe and wondered what didn't click.
  • RC, petroleum derived from cambrian era plants, while the dinosaurs were mesozoic.

    Frankly, I was puzzled by this reference to petroleum-generating dinosaurs, all previous literature on the subject - at least what I've read - emphasized plant mass as the presumed source for petroleum.

    A little thinking, also, will show that the total biomass for dinosaurs, or any animals even, (not considering the "era") must have been insignificant compared to that of plants or even microorganisms or insects, as is still the case today.

    IMHO Gold may well be right in principles, although wrong in some particulars. The original "cambrian biomass" theory for oil/petroleum is quite dated and has suffered little revision... hydrocarbons are known to occur in great quantities elsewhere in the universe, and a layer of hydrocarbons in the Earth would certainly be hospitable to life. Life can potentially be found at any energy gradient, as the example of deep-sea hot spots shows.

  • If it were from decayed life forms, it would have to be mostly plants. There is much more plant matter rotting...as you'd know if you ever lived near a swamp or watched excavation in one.

    So some of that stuff may become coal, oil shale, or a form of oil. But what about the much larger amount of carbon which got sucked under the crust? Both plant-derived and hydrate carbons end up in the crust.

    Gold's theory takes it a step further and says that there's even more carbon than this still migrating in the deep crust. The oil we know of is only a trickle. This also helps explain why hydrates are all over the deep ocean...

    Gold's own web pages [cornell.edu] summarize several items very well. The book must be quite an impressive collection of items.

  • ... I posted my views earlier, I guess we have a case of article collision.
  • This is the accepted theory, although Gold seems to indicate that this does not wholly encompass all the intricacies involved in petroleum's presence in various places, like space dust, nor the abundance of helium in underground material.

    More than anything, I think he helps us look outside the prescribed antidotes to unanswered questions, by providing possible truths, rather than refined ones.

    Is there any chance we can send questions off to this guy? :)

  • Just a little follow-up. I think your point was my point. You just said it more succinctly. One point in my orignal post that I really wish to stress is that I consider scientific orthdoxy to be much less of a concern than over-specialization and compartmentalization. I think one of the most common occasions for scientists (and understand, I am not a practicing scientist. My reading extends only as far as Scientific American, which is hardly an academic journal) to be dismissed is when they write on subjects outside their well-known field. Science itself, however, the so-called scientific method developed out of an interdisciplinary set of skills; yes, a "liberal arts" education. Science was, when it first began to be formalized, called "nature philosophy." It was thought of as one philosophical method out of many. It still is. But the whole of the academy has become so self-contained and insular (for good reasons -- there is so much knowledge to be learned that it takes a lifetime to be an expert in these small, narrow fields), that I fear we miss out on whole avenues of thought. To trot out another cliche, I think they (scientists) sometimes cannot see the forest for the trees.

    That's what excited me about Gold. That's what I think Feynman gets at in his autobiographical books -- anyone can do science, in any field. Just don't be disappointed when your brilliant discover turns out to have been made 138 years ago by someone else, and proven wrong 57 years ago by yet another someone.

    So, yes, I value the men and women with wide and shallow knowledge, just as I value those with knowledge narrow and deep.

    I just want us to keep in mind that even when a kook is right, he's still a kook (I use the word "kook" in its technical psychological sense, of course!)
  • I wasn't really intending to be critical or sounding like I thought you were 'wrong'. It was more a case of a nicely wrapped concept popping into mind and I just had to spit it out. Your first paragraph was a good launch pad. :-)

    And like you, I'm an amateur (for the love of it) science (to know) follower.

    Cheers,

    -matt
  • The obvious corollory to this is wondering if God knew which side the burger was going to land on once it fell.

    "Butter-side" down. This follows because the supreme force of the Universe - All Things' Inherent Awfulness, last seen in the avatar Sgt. Murphy - says so. The force is so strong that The Ten Commandments originally started like this:

    1. You shall put no gods before me. I might stumble.
    2. You shall make no image of what's in the Heavens, on the Earth, in the waters or between them. You'll only get the colors all wrong, or it won't be in focus, or somebody will sue you for royalties because they happen to be in it.
    3. You shall... beep... please insert another quarter to continue.

    Remember the five physical states of matter: Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, and broken.

    Oh, and remember to check out rec.humor.oracle once in a while. :-)

  • I am glad to see that you welcome Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler as Christian Scientists, hundreds of years after their deaths. Their contributions to mankinds knowledge should make all Christians proud, (including you and me). I can't help but find it ironic, however, that they were all branded heretics by the Church while they were alive; Galileo was even faced with the option of burning at the stake or renouncing his ideas. Would you have supported him then? Heh.

    Charles Darwin lived to see himself hated by religious extremists, to the point that they tried to outlaw the very consideration of his theories. For the simple crime of describing the world as God created it, instead of as people in Kansas wish it were, he watched his name become synonymous with evil. He lived to see himself become a fundamental barrier between Christianity and reality, between people who think and people who blindly follow the men in black cloth. Yet you seem proud to have him as a Christian. Strange.

    Read about the 'Pascal's wager' [colorado.edu] argument to find out why he was a christian. You might be surprised...

    IMHO Christians are their own worst enemies when confronting issues of science. How better to lose credibility in the face of the not-yet-converted or the converted-but-questioning but to deny the existence of something that obviously happens? The Church did this when they branded Galileo a heretic in 1633; they did it with Darwin and again now with the recent Kansan stance on evolution. The people who do this are either fools, or charlatans intent on destroying the church proper.

    A small note to any men of the church who are listening: Religion must be flexible enough to account for revolutions in thought, or else it will lose ground amongst the intelligentsia. Once this happens, there are only 2 means of recourse: violently hiding the truth, as with Galileo et al., or fading into obscurity/being absorbed into cults that are flexible, as happened with most pre-christian pagan cults. Science is your friend, because Science is man's best estimate of The Truth, and religion seeks to provide Truth for the people. Denying one piece of Truth makes even the most fundamental canonical propositions suspect.

    Final cheap shot(that exemplifies my point completely): "To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin"
    -Cardinal Belleramine

    Now one of 3 things happened here, based on this quote and the fact that the Cardinal can be assumed to be stating the official position of the Church (and therefore God). Either 1) Jesus as we think of him is a fraud (unlikely imho), 2) God changed his mind based on reading Galileo's paper (even less likely), 3) Some poor shephard fucked up when he wrote down the original text in the bible. (Pretty likely) Unfortunately, certain members of the church were too stupid to consider this an option, and caused a good man to be incarcerated for life. And caused an unfathomable amount of damage to their own cause, by sickening hundreds and thousands of people for all eternity.

    Oh, and look up what 'oxymoron' actually means, please.

    Nehemiah Scudder
    First Prophet


  • Read about the 'Pascal's wager' argument to find out why he was a christian. You might be surprised...

    I know why he was a Christian -- and I was already familiar with his wager. As for heretics: I am not aware that Copernicus, Pascal, or Newton were judged heretical. In fact I'm quite certain that Copernicus and Pascal were not.

    What was done to Darwin was a horrible crime, which I have preached against on more than one occasion. The way the churched showed its ass during the monkey trials is a large part of why we are in so much trouble to day. We focused on doctrine to the exclusion of everything else: caring for the poor, loving our neighbours, our relationship with God. We elevated the Bible to an almost idolatrous position. We because defensive and deluded ourselves into thinking that America was /ever/ a Christian nation. These were all horrible mistakes, but more and more churches are correcting them now. Not in the sense of acknowledging Godless random chance as the source of all life (we don't) but recognizing that evolution, as separate from natural selection, is not necessarily untennable, and most of all b y concentrating on more important matters.

    But why do you assume that Christianity is synonymous with "the church"? I would say that Christianity is something that happens /despite/ the church, not because of it. The church can be good and useful, but it is not the head of Christianity: God/Christ is.

    Also, you should probably look up the arguments that were used to assume that the earth revolved the sun. They were based on bad interpretation of scripture: nowhere does the Bible say that the Sun circles the earth. IIRC, the verse in question says that the sun rises and sets over the earth. I think that is legitimately a figure of speech, not a statement of scientific fact, and not a "shepherd making a typo".

    Most modern Christians would agree with me that the best criteria for understanding the Bible is to try to understand what the author /meant/ to say. For example, in Job the author writes about the "four corners of the earth". I don't think he meant that the earth was square: it's poetry people!

    I could go on for hours about principals of hermaneutics, but that's the basic idea. The thing is that far too many people, both religious and irreligious check their brains at the door when they read the Bible. They are so busy trying to crack "the bible code" that they neglect the gospel message! Concentrate on the big things scripture says and the small ones will work themselves out.

    Also, I know full well what an oxymoron is. Could you look up what "sarcasm" means?
  • I'm not a biologist, but I'm going to throw out a
    counter idea to what you're getting at.

    You're saying that coal can't be from fossils because if the fossils decompose, they'd be unnoticeable, so you say that the coal is something else.

    Have you every seen a petrified tree? it's really a rock shaped like a tree, if you get close. The tree is gone, but it existed long enough for minerals to seep into the location where the tree once was.

    That's what a lot of fossils are. The original parts did decompose, but the stayed around long enough for something to make an impression.
  • Who wants an email from the average human?
    --
  • > Its been shown that Volcanic activitis relase a large amount of Hydrocarbons.

    I would like to know where this volcano is. If it was lava from say Iceland or Hawaii, I might find some credence in this hypothesis of non-biological petroleum because this lava is more or less from the mantle and would have no organic matter.
    However if this lava was from say the Western US or Japan I would be sort of suspect, this lava almost certainly had a former life at the bottom of an oceanic trench with plenty of decayed orgainc matter. This rock was then subducted down under the continental plate and the top layers of the ocean crust melted to send magma to the continent. Whatever hydrocarbons you find now are probably from organic matter.

    Now this kind of lava generally becomes granite, probably much like the oil producing granite in Sweden. Hmm, now ordinarly the temperature and pressures associated with melting of the crust should cause whatever oil in the rocks to turn into methane and disappear. However any oil you find in granite could come from underlying sedimentary rocks with oil. The oil could have risen and been trapped by a very impermeable layer of granite. Presto, oil in granite.
  • If hemp were legal ... like ... no one would need to drive man, 'cause they'd be happy where they were.

    But seriously. The one thing I hate worse than a large conservative theory which has flaws is a panacea. Repeat after me, hemp will not save the world. Neither will organic foods, bio-intensive argriculture, genetic engineering, representative democracies, free markets, space weapons, marxist communes, or a draconian drug policy. It is amazing to me that seemingly reasonable people will see immediately that some of the things I mentioned have flaws, but will staunchly defend others. Hardly any two people will choose the same set of dogmatic principles to defend.

    Humans are simple minded creatures. Complex phenomena are difficult to explain, so we choose simple explanations. Simple explanations are invariably wrong but they allow movement (not necessarily progress). One thing that is clear from an engineering perspective, is that even with perfect information and a simple system, optimal solutions are either impossible, or so hard to find as to be worthless. So a simple, flawed explanation may be our best bet for stumbling closer to the elusive truth.

    What is amazing, as any mathematician will tell you, is that science is able to do so well. QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) is able to make predictions of physical phenomena to amazing precision (11 or more significant digits IIRC) based on mathematical equations that are part logic, part art, and a lot of magic. But ask WHY things happen on the quantum scale and you will discover that those willing to speculate are drawing as much from philosophy as they are science. After all, that was the essential Bohr/Einstein debate, not the mathematics, but the philosophy.

    I apologize, I got a bit far afield of the hemp issue... my mind must have wandered.
    --
  • You're right, it's not new; Gold has said it for years. Other people are just now catching on.
  • ... methan was an element. I thought its molecule was made of one atom of carbon and four of hydrogen. But maybe I'm wrong.
  • I know that we cannot isolate ourself from the cosmos. To be frank Ill rather spend my time reading Stephen Hawkins rather than Gold, but what I mean is the diparity in resources used.

    Manifest
  • "I always like reading about iconoclasts, because at least I know there are people out there questioning even our basic assumptions."

    So you enjoy reading about the Flat Earth Society, Creationists and Immanuel Velikovsky?

    Questioning assumptions is easy -- any crackpot can do that. (Being correct, now there's where the meat is).
  • I don't think Gold is challenging stellar evolution here. The article isn't exactly written
    to the scientific community; I interpreted the sentence about oil and gas being formed "in the Big Bang" as "The gasses and oils were formed primarily during the formation of the planets, not later (as a result of decomposition of plants)."
    You can regard the phrase "The Big Bang" as an instant, or a process for stellar formation, right?

    I'm a software geek, not a cosmologist or geologist, so I won't comment too much on the theory, but that's the meaning I got from the article. Oil carrying biological remnants upwards seems plausible enough, and makes me think of that Stephenson story "Big Jelly" =)
  • I guess you could say *EVERYTHING* was created in the Big Bang, since it's still happening.
  • The article gives examples of about 7 or so hypothesis's of his that were proven correct 4 years to 30 years later as if thats proof. The article doesn't tell us how many countless ideas of his have been blown out of the water. It goes into that amazingly hackneyed theory that an infininte number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters given an infinite amount of time will reproduce the entire works of shakspeare, but in the meantime they'd also put out a bunch of gibberish. Lulling our anxiety over the extinction of fossil fuels is a dangerous effect of somthing that may be nothing more than just such gibberish. Perhaps he is correct in his theory and if so kudos, but if he is as much of a crackpot as he is sometimes made out to be... that could have disasterous consequences.

    On a lighter note... <g>

  • The idea that oil and natural gas are derived from natural hydrocarbons in the earth's core is not new. In fact it has been around for a long time and the theory is bolstered by the fact that volcano eruptions contain huge amounts of hydrocarbons and by the natural hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of Titan (amoung other places).

    But that doesn't mean the resource is endless. What it means is that it is renewable at a somewhat higher rate than it would be were it purely squeezed out of fossilized swamps. The point is that our consumption can still outstrip the natural production of oil. Not a pardon, only a reprieve.

    Jack

  • Actually with an infinite number of monkeys at infinite type writers, they'd write every work ever written, that ever will be written, and ever possible to be written. :) Infinite time just lets them take the time to write out even the LONGEST of long papers. (Of couse it wouldn't matter how long, cause infinite monkeys would still type every single possible variation at the same time)

    Hehe.
    FunOne
  • I am not sure I agree. Even in his beloved
    first half of the century, peer review ruled.
    That's why anyone who was someone would come
    to Gottingen. It is also why Einstein's
    critique of quantum mechanics did not sway
    scientists. It is also why Einstein was
    considered crazy for a long time for suggesting
    the notion of a photon. Radical ideas were
    always subject to peer review, and only by
    surviving such a brutal test do they earn
    trust. It's tough on scientists but good for
    science, at least in the infinite amount of
    time approximation.

  • Peer review in the Internet era (Score:3)

    by pq ( 42856 ) <rfc2324&yahoo,com> on Monday November 01, 1999 @04:35PM (#1571385) Homepage
    As a grad student - in Tommy Gold's department, no less (-: - I have to say that I'm a firm believer in peer review. Like all systems, it has its failings: I could tell you about the referees who lost papers, the ones who sat on papers until their versions of the same theory were published, the ones who are ignorant, biased, narrow minded or just plain stupid...

    But: on average, it works.

    True, it is biased towards incremental progress rather than revolutions, but that is the way science works most of the time. Most of us do not recreate whole systems of thought like Feynman (another iconoclast idol) - the times that require that are few and far between. (Though for physics, the current impasse with GUTs might be one of them.)

    The reason we have to submit to the tyranny of peer review is simple: no one is an expert on everything. With our increasingly narrow specialisations, I know next to nothing about topic A at wavelength B, though I'm the world's expert on topic C. So if someone says A affects C in some way, I have much less chance of judging his claim correctly than another expert in A. But I should hear about, not have that view supressed by others, right?

    So now we have preprint servers. One little 386 (yes!) at LANL archives all the submitted preprints in astronomy and physics on a daily basis - some people submit them after peer review and acceptance at a major journal (to prevent embarrassing retractions), some people submit them as soon as they send in a paper (to establish priority) and some people just publish papers on the preprint servers (and we know them well, as kooks of various kinds).

    In this day, when results are shared at conferences and off webservers, journals are having an increasingly hard time justifying subscriptions. (I read preprint abstracts daily, and never use dead tree journals...) So they are evolving into keepers of standards - if its published in the Fancy Journal of UnGnomon News, it must be good stuff on Gnus!

    That's quite enough raving - but as for this comment in the article: 'He [..] migrated to a "much more livable" environment at Cornell' - let me just add: "yeah, right!"

  • Come on! I know thousands of you slashdotters
    are X-Files [thex-files.com] followers! It's obviously the black
    oil, churning and bubbling beneath the surface
    of the earth, waiting to be tapped for colonization!

  • I've paid attention to this fellow for almost a decade now, and he never fails to evoke criticism in whatever field he delves into.
    Unfortunatly for his critics, he usually falls closer to the truth than existing theory.
    Gold seems to like to poke his nose into whatever the accepted theory is and find the most off-the-wall answer that fits the circumstances, boldly ignoring 'known fact'.
    He is a combination of the hardest skeptic and Sherlock Holmes, and whatever scientific endevor he pokes his nose into is far better for his presence.
  • A deeply religious person could have the tendancy to beleive God created oil for some purpose.

    A deeply scientific person could say that extinct wildlife broke down into oil and other stuff.

    Other people just might say "Hey, I don't care."

    I say, "Listen to all three sides. It is best to get as many perspectives as possible on a topic."

    -PovRayMan
  • Wasn't oil supposed to have been produced by the long-term decomposition of diatoms? (as opposed to coal, which came from multicellular plant matter)
  • Scientific peer review says "this is right" or "this is wrong."

    Slashdot moderation says "this is worth reading" or "this is not worth reading."

    You can ignore /. moderation, but if a paper doesn't pass peer review it doesn't even get published. There is no section in the back of scientific journals for "crackpots" (unlike the bottom of the /. page).

  • Academic Inspiration (Score:3)

    by SuperG ( 83071 ) <garth_e AT hotmail DOT com> on Monday November 01, 1999 @03:16PM (#1571435)
    There was one line in particular which I totally agree with in this article - about how Gold "always shakes things up in a useful way"

    No matter how correct people may think his theories are, the effect these theories have upon researchers etc. in the particular field is what is important. If Gold manages to inspire someone to prove him WRONG, by working at the problem from a different angle, then everyone wins.

    Too often in academic circles, certain views can be taken as correct, without being proven. This is counter-productive; it is important that researchers disagree and argue - this is how important theories can arise, and how discoveries
    can be made.

    Whether it's stable-state Universe versus big-bang, or the exact value of Hubbles's constant, or whatever, these arguments can drive great discoveries.

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