Re: Sky and Telescope magazine

[Ron Ebert <ebert@CITRUS.UCR.EDU>]

At 12:28 PM 12/1/2000 -0800, Leigh Palmer wrote:
> >Leigh's post reminds me of a great resource I forgot to mention - Sky &
> >Telescope magazine and website.  http://www.skypub.com/
> >
> >--
> >Arlyn DeBruyckere
>
> Any high school astronomy teacher should subscribe to this magazine.
> In the mid eighties, when Kelly Beatty added the excellent News
> sections to it, this has been a very valuable publication even for
> those of us who read the primary literature in astronomy and
> astrophysics. Sky & Telescope has many interesting articles suitable
> for the high school student and is, in my opinion, much better than
> its imitators (though I quit looking at them long ago, so others may
> enlighten us).

A word of caution is in order here. Sky and Telescope is not a
peer-reviewed journal and from time to time they have articles that dress
up pseudoscience as science. For example, in the February 1992 issue they
had an article by Peratt and Lerner promoting Plasma Cosmology. The authors
presented bogus arguments such as the Wolf effect, where the phase of two
sources is supposed to combine in such a way that the observer sees a
redshift even though the sources are not in motion with respect to the
observer.

The critical alignment needed to see a Wolf redshift is implied in a
diagram in the article. What should be obvious with a little critical
thinking but is not mentioned at all in the article is that a different
alignment will give you a blue shift instead. So if redshifts are caused by
the Wolf effect in a non-expanding universe, as the authors contend, we
should see by chance half redshifts and half blueshifts.

Sky and Telescope permitted no criticism of plasma cosmology to be
published in subsequent issues. I wrote a letter that was vetted by Rick
Fienberg, who has just now taken over as editor in chief. He tried to argue
my points with me privately, but did not publish my letter. More telling
about the magazine's attitude was that no one else got a letter critical of
plasma cosmology published either.

Popular science magazines like Astronomy and Discover have also let
iconoclasts have their say. But unlike Sky and Telescope, these other
magazines present two sides of the story.


Ron Ebert
ron.ebert@ucr.edu
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Believers tend to insist on openmindedness except when it applies to
themselves.  It is not some noble notion of intellectual fairness which
these people promote.  The openmindedness argument is simply an appeal to
sympathy made by those who have no good evidence in their support and no
good response to criticism.  It's whining...nothing more.

--  Brant Watson