Cosmic Soil in Human History I: Germanic hoard storms 2011 Lunar and Planetary Conference

This should sound somewhat familiar:

In the now published article the exposure is most widely described and interpreted from a geomorphological and soil science perspective while the unambiguous impact features implying the typical heavy rock deformations and shock metamorphism (shock effects) are completely ignored. Nevertheless, the authors conclude that there are not any indications of an impact event.

The very least the critics can do is to point at the very evidence upon which the impact thinking is based and to argue WHY that evidence is not valid. Dodging the basis – just HOW is that a rebuttal in ANY honest discussion?

Instead, they cherry pick their way around that evidence and then declare, “Nothing to see hear, folks. Move along now…”

Such disingenuousness does not become people who claim to be honest scientists.

Impact claims DO point to specific evidence and say, “What do you think of this?” For the opponents of such claims to pretend that the evidence simply doesn’t exist is the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand. But we do know that they didn’t NOT see those pieces of evidence, not when they reference and comment all around it, judiciously avoiding the very evidence the claim is based upon.

Having seen it and still pretending it doesn’t exist is mendacious and has no place in science. It fits in a court of law, where an advocate/lawyer is paid to present evidence favorable to his client and to ignore what isn’t (and to hope that the other attorney isn’t so dumb as to not to make the jury aware of it).

But, seriously, when the jury is in actuality not humans but natural reality, the truth will out some day. Do they honestly think it won’t?

Down the list of articles on one of those links is a commentary article about the YDB, which ends with:

…We remember moreover the severe scientific controversies und [sic] feuds related with the mass extinction (including the dinosaurs) at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary and the new idea of Alvarez and co-workers postulating a cosmic catastrophe as a trigger factor (the Chicxulub impact). Also then, many groups were arguing against the new hypothesis (now commonly accepted) using MISSING evidence in the layers they had been studying, and particularly many paleontologists needed again and again to be reminded by Prof. Alvarez that, e.g., missing fossils are NOT a criterion for dating purposes and are barely suited for any argumentation.

That’s the way things are in science that missing evidence basically is of poor conviction. Convincing evidence is given by positive results provided they are consistent with the current state of scientific knowledge.

Not to forget the Chiemgau impact completely: We experienced the fugacity of claims in science exemplarily in connection with a TV documentary film on the “Chiemgau comet” broadcasted in 2006 by the German ZDF in its Terra X series. After the broadcast the Institute of Planetology of the University of Münster (Prof. Jessberger) vociferously and analogously let out: “As for comets we know everything”, with that said trying to slaughter the Chiemgau impact hypothesis. Only a few (!) months later, when samples of the Stardust mission had been returned, NASA experts stated: We are at the beginning of a change of paradigm in the science of comets; we must give it a serious new consideration where the comets are coming from and of what they are composed.

I can vouch for such comments as that last. I’ve seen many of them in quite a few fields over the years, when those who “know it all” end up having to publicly admit that a new development blows all their certainty out of the water.

The worst part about that is that they immediately begin to posture again, saying with a straight face that they knew that new thing all along – returning unbelievably to the “We know it all” position again.

Scientific knowledge is an oxymoron in a sense. Science is a combination of knowledge – measured and quantified data – combined with a patina of interpretations of how that data fits into a manufactured overall understanding of a subject. At best, when the manufactured understanding is honestly created, the level of study is only a point on a continuum. At worst, facts are not accepted as facts, academic politics intrudes, egos get involved, and science is the worst for it – and it holds back scientific inquiry and understanding for decades or centuries.

One example of the continuum is the understanding 150 years that the ether existed. Even Maxwell’s famous paper – upon which electromagnetic science and much of physics is based on now – is rife with massive doses of fitting his new “laws” – understandings – in with the ether. That part of his paper is no ignored, while the rest of it is worshiped.

It is anybody’s guess what scientific knowledge 150 years from now will NOT include of what we now are certain is true. If as much fails in those 150 years as in the last 150 years, there is no telling what children of 2163 will be taught in school. Which of today’s certainties will survive? I would suggest that those in ALL disciplines will claim that their certainties will survive. (They wouldn’t be “certainties” if they didn’t think that, would they?)