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To: Bernard Marx; Physicist
care to try a rebuttal of this piece?

I can and will. However, I need to get home from the lab first.

Will later this evening.

Physicist, will you give it a go as well please?

25 posted on 12/13/2004 4:20:32 PM PST by RadioAstronomer
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To: RadioAstronomer
Physicist, will you give it a go as well please?

To be quite honest, I lost patience with it halfway through. The game wasn't worth the candle. I did, however, identify where he went grossly stupid:

The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science.

I had to laugh out loud at this one. Similarly, Franklin's definition of the proton's charge as positive and the electron's as negative is not testable, therefore electromagnetism is not science.

More importantly, Crichton doesn't seem to realize that the Drake equation is a heuristic device, rather than a theory. It doesn't make predictions, so what is there to test? It's just a way of defining terms, of giving names to the quantities we don't know. I wonder: does Crichton actually doubt that these quantities have values, or that when multiplied together their product equals the number of civilizations?

I also got a chuckle out of how Crichton heaped contumely on the TTAPS study on grounds that it was not testable, and then went on to say that the final refutation of the study was that it failed to predict the climatological effects of the Kuwaiti oil fires.

46 posted on 12/13/2004 8:03:26 PM PST by Physicist
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