Exposing Pseudoastronomy

After being gone for a bit of time, I return to discuss where I have been, what to expect for the future (when more episodes will air), and if you need your fix of Dr. Stu, there is a new podcast that I have released with two of the co-hosts of The Reality Check podcast, entitled: 5 Minutes with an Astronomer. In this episode, I play four of the twenty-eight shows we have released so far.

In the final regular episode in the three-part Solar Eclipse of August 2017 series, several of the claims made by Richard Hoagland are addressed. Three types of claims are examined: Whether shadow bands indicate there are glass structures on the Moon, whether the Accutron watch readings indicate there is a hyperdimensional physics, and alleged disinformation.

An exploration into four groups of fine-tuning arguments used by some to say that we are special: Solar outbursts, habitable zone, lunar origin and effects, and giant planets and impacts on Earth.

The August 2017 total solar eclipse was seen by hundreds of millions of people, and yet some of them have tried to use it to promulgate pseudoscience. In this Part 2 episode, I discuss ideas about the eclipse promoted by proponents of the idea that Earth is flat.

The half-truth and misconception addressed in this episode is whether the age of a star with error bars that overlap with the age of the universe means all of science is wrong and the universe was created 6000 years ago.

Three separate topics all tied together by a commonality: A little bit of something that you tend to only experience in space. First up is microgravity, then near-vacuum, and then what it means to have a temperature in space.

The world did not end, again, on September 23, 2017. However, the story behind this latest doomsday prognostication may surprise you -- it did me as I investigated it.

This past eclipse on August 21, 2017, was perhaps one of the most-hyped and most-viewed solar eclipses in human history. As with any such mass-sighted event, pseudoscience is bound to rear its ugly head. In this episode, I address doom and gloom, earthquake predictions, astrologic predictions, Planet X predictions, and other topics related to the eclipse.

Young-Earth creationists who are not geocentrists - those who accept the Copernican Revolution so far as Earth's place in the universe - have a vested interest in combatting some forms of pseudoscience, including geocentrism. In this episode, I lay out some of their more convincing arguments against geocentrism and point out that their methods of argument are very similar to scientists, which leads one to wonder about hoe much cognitive dissonance one mind can hold.

Inspired by one of the longest-running primetime television shows in history, and frustration with late-night radio hosts pretending they can Science, this episode addresses two common misconceptions about the forces from and on water on our planet and their effects on human scales. I first discuss whether Coriols makes toilet bowls swirl in opposite directions in opposite hemispheres, and then whether the moon's tides are strong enough to affect the water in your body.

A return to a tried-and-true subject of skepticism: the Apollo Moon Hoax. In this shorter episode, I discuss two of the most common claims that you may hear: Why does the US flag appear to be waving in photographs, and if we went to the moon, why haven't we been back?

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union sparked an uproar and furious debate among scientists and non-scientists alike when they voted for a definition of the word, planet. Numerous proposals since that time have been made for the definition of that term. Eleven years later, a new proposal has gotten a lot of media attention and in this episode, we discuss that new proposed definition. This is closer to a friendly debate style because the host of this podcast and the guest have different points of view on this issue.

In past episodes, I have talked about how you can't get any more information out of an image than what is in a single pixel. Dr. Tod Lauer is an astronomer who has worked on all kinds of telscopes and instrument data and has developed numerous image processing techniques over his career. In this episode, we discuss some of those and how to correctly - versus incorrectly - apply them to image data to get to the best representation of the original object, or what the image was trying to capture.

In a special cross-over episode, the cast of The Reality Check (Cheque?) podcast come over and we all did short-ish segments on astronomy-related topics: Do we live in a black hole, the Drake equation, are aliens likely to be hostile, did Earth's magnetic field recently collapse, and lunacy. I also did a quiz and learned how difficult it is to make quiz questions that work over a podcast.

The scientific method is the process through which most modern science is done. Whether done explicitly in its formalized steps or not, it underlies the very basics of how we know what we know, why science is inherently a self-correcting process, and why when there exists a long-standing scientific consensus with broad support, it should not be taken as a political whim by a few motivated people.

Magic mirror on the wall, when will reality shifts affect us all? A phenomenon known as the Mandela Effect has been making the rounds of paranormal shows for the last year or so, and it seems silly until they start to use real science to back it up. Then, I get mad, and you don't want to see me get mad. In this episode, we learn about our changing knowledge about the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Impact craters form the basis of, or fit into the claimed evidence for, several different kinds of pseudoscientific claims. In this episode, I review two of them and also discuss some sensational headlines and why those headlines were wrong.

Radiation is a mechanism for a large array of pseudosciences out there today, almost on par with quantum mechanics. The purpose of this episode is to provide a primer of radiation - what it is, what it isn't, why some is scary, and why some isn't. In going through this discussion, I also address numerous pseudosciences, including claims by proponents that the Apollo missions were hoaxed, that granite countertops are deadly, that microwave ovens are irradiating your food, and that cell phone and wifi signals are harming you in some way.

This podcast show most often focuses on refuting pseudoscience with real science, but it rarely sets out to make a positive case for real science. This episode is one of those rarer ones where I have used an unlikely source - youn-Earth creationists - to explain the case for why Earth is round and not flat.

Planet X is one of those topics that keeps coming up in pseudoscientific circles, in part because people who have been claiming it will come by and cause destruction continue to do so, making up new excuses as to why their last prediction failed. In this episode, I delve into the latest claims by Nancy Leider, one of the originators of the Planet X causes doom mythology, and I discuss some of the supposed discoveries and announcements in 2016 in the scientific community about a real extra, as-yet-unseen planet in our solar system.