The Silver City Astronomical Society will offer a program for November to be held at the Red Barn, Saturday, November 12, 1:00 o'clock pm. Board member Alex Woronow will lead the discussion, as follows:
The Dooms-Day Asteroid: Insights from a Dirty Gym Sock (Alex Woronow, Author/Speaker
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Carl Sagan
Recently, numerous professional astronomers have claimed discovery of a new asteroid with a high probability of impacting the earth, with dire consequences.
In every case, the impact probabilities, starting as high as 1 in 3, undergo multiple downward revisions toward a reasonable and clearly benign value. Obviously, their initial extraordinary claims rested on weak, not extraordinary, evidence. With a simple dirty gym sock we learn how to appraise correctly this less than extraordinary evidence and immediately reach reasonable impact probabilities within an intuitive, yet rigorous, scientific framework it isn't rocket science!
