Yazata:
I think. As I see it, if something is 'unknown', then we probably shouldn't be prejudging its nature. To do that, we would have to know things that we just admitted we don't know.
One of the possibilities included in 'unknown' would seem to be "new physics", or as the Preliminary Assessment called it, "breakthrough technology". And given that what we are talking about is "the unknown", it would seem to be very difficult if not impossible to estimate the prior probability of such a thing existing.
Nobody is prejudging its nature. Nobody is eliminating "new physics"
a priori. New physics is a possibility, just like all the other possibilities.
You seem to spend a lot of time trying to guess at "prior probabilities". It might be better just to wait for enough evidence to accumulate, before deciding that you need to investigate "new physics" as an explanation with less-than-negligible probability. Like Dave said, I guess the we can't absolutely rule out magical pixies as a
possible explanation for UFOs; I'm sure you have some ideas about what the prior probability of pixies might be.
I haven't reached that conclusion. I'm arguing against forming premature conclusions, including the a-priori assumption that it's ridiculous, impossible and isn't happening ("nothing to see here").
Nobody here is arguing
for "nothing to see here". As you know.
What I am arguing for is the possibility that something new to science might be happening, not the actuality that it is. (which we just agreed we don't know).
That has never been in dispute.
What justifies entertaining the possibility of what you term "new physics"? The reports that have these things accelerating almost instantaneously, descending and rising to space at what the radar operator termed "ballistic missile" velocities, moving through the atmosphere at mach without observable heating, shockwaves or exhaust plumes. And all with small dimensions very unlike the huge fuel tanks that our own rockets need to do a few of those things.
Okay, but at some stage the rubber has to meet the road. We need to dig into that evidence and ask sensible questions, like:
- how reliable are the "reports"?
- has anybody actually measured the accelerations, or are these simply eyewitness guesses/estimates based on naked eye observations?
- where are the radar records?
- Clearly, one viable explanation for something appearing to move through the atmosphere rapidly, without heating, shockwaves or exhaust plumes would be that the thing - whatever it was - wasn't actually moving rapidly through the atmosphere at all. Does the evidence support this interpretation?
- Do we have any verified measurements of "dimensions" of the objects? Or just eyewitness estimates, based on naked-eye observation and guesswork?
The word "convincingly" seems to be carrying most of the weight there. But 'convincingly' is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?
Fair comment. You should ask yourself: what sort of evidence/analysis
should convince us that "new physics" is present?
Physicists themselves have pretty high standards for claiming "new physics". The Higgs boson discovery wasn't announced until physicists were sure it was there at a "five sigma" confidence level - that is, based on statistical analyses of the data, that the chances of seeing that data from the Large Hadron Collider
without the Higgs existing were far less than 0.0001%. This is standard practice for declaring the existence of any "new" particle, by the way. Other areas of physics research are similarly rigorous and demanding of high standards of proof.
Certainly, nobody should be justified in jumping to a conclusion of "new physics" based on a few eyewitness guesstimates about what the acceleration of an unknown object in the sky might have been.
If everyone agrees that a phenomenon hasn't currently been identified, then we seem to have two alternatives:
1. Weak "unknown" - where we don't know precisely what is happening, but do believe that we already know that it must of some kind of necessity be reducible to science and technology as currently understood. It's the faith that whatever explanatory principles are necessary to explain the unknown are already to be found in our existing stock of scientific/engineering concepts and beliefs.
2. Strong "unknown" - which questions that assumption. It argues that whatever explanatory principles are necessary to explain the unknown might not exist in our stock of scientific/engineering concepts at the present time. It imagines the possibility that we might occasionally find ourselves in the same position as a medieval scholar trying to explain a helicopter with Aristotelian physics or that scholar trying to explain animal physiology by consulting Galen.
We don't start any investigation of an unknown phenomenon in a knowledge vaccuum. We start by looking at what we know. It is only
after we've eliminated the explanations based on already-known things, with a high degree of confidence, that we are compelled to turn towards positing "new science" or something else (the "supernatural"?)
We are a very long way from having eliminated "science as usual" as an explanation of the Fravor tic tac. This isn't a matter of having faith that - whatever it was - it
must have been "mundane". It is just that there's no good reason, so far, to suspect it was anything other than mundane.
One other thing: there's no guarantee that we'll
ever have sufficient "data" on, say, the Fravor UFO case, to actually be able to definitively say "It was a weather balloon" or "It was the aliens", with a high level of confidence. If, after a detailed examination of the data, we find ourselves in the position that we can neither rule out a mundane cause nor confirm a non-mundane cause, then the sensible conclusion we are forced to reach is that the data is insufficient and the case remains unsolved.
It seems to me that the "skeptics" are implicitly arguing that everything that happens be thought of as "weak unknowns".
I'm not. I'm saying we should go with what we know first. If that solves the case, then it's solved. If it doesn't solve the case, then we go through the usual scientific process of running multiple hypotheses, including ones with "new physics" and the like, and see whether we can solve it that way.
Bear in mind, though, that
ad hoc "explanations" are weak, in general. If we invent "new physics" to explain one UFO, it had better explain 1001 other UFOs as well; if it can't/doesn't, then it's just a special pleading and we should be rightly suspicious about it.
Also important: we don't want to introduce unfalsifiable hypotheses. "God did it" is an explanation for the Fravor UFO, but it's a hypothesis that is impossible to disprove, and therefore unscientific. (It also doesn't suggest any future direction for productive research.)
