okay, you sound a bit rattled perhaps?
What do I have to be rattled about? I'm not an astronomy or astrophysicist, so I have no personal investment in the mainstream models of planets and stars and even if I did I'd accept I'm wrong if people can provide evidence. But you haven't and neither has the author of the NS article. NS mostly talks about mainstream stuff but has had cover stories on things which the mainstream utterly disagrees with, like Heim theory,
The only thing which 'rattles' me if your unwavering gullibility and irrationality.
Mmmm... gummi bears!
I'm quietly confident that the Hayabusa samples will be at least approximately 34% gummi bear. I'm currently seeking investors to establish a gummi-bear farm and processing plant on Itokawa.
The gummi bears live in The Land of Chocolate, where the rivers are flowing caramel, so having a line of chocolate coated gummi bears would be easy to do. I suggest you include that in your business plans.
Billy T; Gerard Caudal is a top class reference and much better informed than either yourself or AN, or are you disputing this fact?
But simply because he's an academic doesn't mean he's right. Writing an article for a pop science magazine who have a financial incentive to post as sensational or over the top work as possible is not the same as publishing a paper in a peer reviewed journal. The former doesn't need evidence or even to pass review, the latter requires people to justify their claims. Plenty of people who have been amazing physicists in one area have been wrong or non-mainstream in other areas or. Einstein disliked quantum mechanics. Newton liked alchemy. Feynman disliked string theory. Dirac liked the aether. Josephson (who got a Nobel prize for his PhD) is banned from posting on ArXiv.org because his work now entirely involves trying to link conciousness and quantum mechanics and he just makes crap up without justification or reason.
There's a very good explanation of why you shouldn't listen to people because they have letters before or after their name in
this Youtube video. There are PhDs who think 9/11 was an inside job and the towers fell due to planted explosives. They write websites but not papers they submit to journals. If they can't pass peer review then they aren't worth listening to because it means they can't reach basic standards of the scientific methodology like justifying their claims and providing clear explanations. Until they can justify their arguments in a way which meets basic standards they are 'just some guy' (as said in the video). The fact they are 'just some guy' with letters after his name is irrelevant.
Besides, if you want to go down the road of "I'll listen to Person X because he has more education and experience than Person Y" then you should listen to me a lot more when you just make up ideas. I have more experience, knowledge and ability than you when it comes to physics, the entire mainstream community does, yet you don't listen to the mainstream most of the time. Either you accept argument from authority (ie accept the views of the most educated/experienced) as you're trying to do here or you never accept argument from authority and you go entirely by how much evidence and reason supports a point of view. By jumping from one to the other and back you're being a hypocrite and inconsistent and just picking whichever one is in line with your preconceived notions. But then all cranks do that.
Argument from authority is flawed methodology, you should work by evidence and reason. The NS article has no evidence and even has to assume several pretty big things which have never been observed.
