[Physics] Physics Digest, Vol 9, Issue 6

[cj at mb-soft.com]

I apologize to all of you for sidetracking your group, but another common example of what I recently tried to describe is prominent now.  Alll sorts of "scientists" claim that countless meterorites they find, especially in 
Antarctica, came from Mars.  No one seems to have done ANY of the math necessary to make such a  statement.  First, they must not realize the enormous and powerful rockets we must use in gettingn to Mars.  Most of the "speculators" claim that asteroids crash into Mars, and such impacts cause incredibly ferocious volcanoes, which then launch chunks of Mars out innto space.  Have they not calculated the "escape velocity"  of Mars?  You can't assume that you can simply throw a rock up and expect it to escape Mars gravitation.  Fairly simple math shows how hard that is to do.  Worse, thhey add in that other complication, of blaming inbound asteroids of causing such hypersonic shock waves to pass through Mars to initiate a volcanic eruption that would be momentous.  Doing the math regarding such things, incluuding the rarity of huge asteroids crashing into the tiny planet Mars, is sort of hilarious.  All that math is fairly simple, so why haven't they done it before making declarative statements?  They don't even say "I think" but simply ASSUME that they are correct about everything.

Next, say that  somehow, Mars actually lauhches some rock at enormous velocity upward.  Do they not realizee what a terrribly tiny dot in the sky the Earth is?  Sure, if Mars is "spraying out billions of objects every day", an occasional one may crash into Antarctica.  But clearly they have not donen the mamth which is necessary to MAKE such a declarative stastement.  

Third, they FIND their objects near the surface of  Antarctic.  Do they not realize that such a meteorite had just gone through our atmosphere and gotten white hot with friction, and it is coming down at 20,000 mph or faster.  In a continent which is covered with thousands of feet thick ice, I would tend to wonder whether it might get entirely through the thick ice in a twenty-thousandth of a second to hit bedrock.  But they wander around Antarctica looking for objects at or near the surface.  

How can such people call themselves "scientists" when they do such sloppy thinking.  Yes, I realize that people without education are excited about "pieces of Mars" available to us.  So such ideas get world news headlines, even without any merit.

NONE of such people ever explin WHY they believe what they do.  Simply calculating the "space angle" that Antarctica represents in the Martian sky, can show the actual chance that ANYTHING from Mars might hit here.  I did that math as a teenager long ago. You should innstead plan on winning thousands of Lotteries, as the odds are far better there.  Yes, when a significant meteorite hits Earth, like Tunguska in 1908, some materials ARE launched upward a few thousand feet, per Newton.  And Earth Volcanoes DO launch small rocks a few miles upward, like Krakatoa.  But "escape velocity" is so much faster, no.  It might have happened ONCE in the Earth's four billion year life.  Mars is even recognized as being a COLD planet, so maybe even less likely there.

Again, if you preface a comment with "I think", then you have the responsibility of explaining WHY in the next paragraph, so a reader might see if there is any merit in your logic. And, in science, vietually all that WHY is centered in math. 

Carl Johnson
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