Originally posted by RJHinds
I noticed this reference:
Wakefield, J. Richard , 1988, Geology of Gentry's "Tiny Mystery", Journal of Geological Education, May, 1988.
The video mentoned that some were calling it a "tiny mystery" or "a riddle" to be solved. But have they really solved it with solid proof or is this just more conjecture based on assumption that may or may not be true. ...[text shortened]... Can you stir me to a video that shows the refutation in a clear and understandable way?
Not trying, already tried and done.
One of the things I know from personal experience about Phd's:
I have a son in law who has the same Phd as that scientist in Jerusalem, which is described as a 'bio physicist'. The real name for that branch of science is Statistical Physics.
Not that that name change means anything but I thought I would point that out.
I work with two Phd's directly in my job and unlike a guy with only an MS, they leave no stone unturned in the quest for knowledge.
Let me tell one incident that happened just a couple of days ago:
We use plasma sputtering machines, targets of a substance, which can by just about any solid, like aluminum or silicon carbide (we use both of those in our systems). Anyway, we had just installed an aluminum target, which is a solid block of extremely pure aluminum about 1/4 inch thick, 14 inches long, 5 inches wide, where a plasma of an ionized argon beam which has been excited by an RF field of several hundred watts so this ionized beam attacks the surface of the aluminum and creates a cloud of aluminum atoms which fly about inside the vacuum system, the idea being a nearby platen with some kind of wafer, alumina or silicon, whatever, will be coated with a very thin layer of whatever the target is made of, in this case aluminum.
So when we got the aluminum target installed, and pumped down and started the process of coating said aluminum on an alumina substrate, it is supposed to come out as reflective as a mirror.
In this case it did not. The coating was cloudy, not a good thing.
Keith (one of our resident Phd's) made this hypothesis: the clouding came from contamination of the vacuum system with a water leak.
We proceeded to actually find evidence of water in the vacuum system using a residual gas analyzer, a variation of a spectrum analyzer which samples the gas of the vacuum and separates out the various components.
So we find water in the spectrum.
Ergo sum, problem solved.
I wasn't convinced. I told him I observed a pattern in the cloudy nature of the aluminum coating, a kind of shadowy half circle that was different from the rest of the coating.
He had trouble seeing that pattern and for a couple of days was convinced the problem came from the water leak which we both agreed was there.
But subsequent pumping of the system made the water leak get better, less water in the vacuum. Then the pattern I originally noticed was more pronounced, obvious and a lot smaller.
He then noticed that he had been including a measurement monitor with the alumina substrate being coated and saw now that the pattern of cloudiness was confined to the space directly around the monitor.
He then realized the cloudiness came from the fact he was using Kapton tape on the monitor wafer which was situated very close to the alumina substrate.
It turned out the reason for the cloudiness was not so much due to the water leak inside the vacuum chamber but instead was due to the fact that Kapton tape (a tape like scotch tape but made for use inside a vacuum chamber) can outgas if heated up inside a vacuum.
Our process which I previously described, does in fact heat up the substrate, whatever is put in proximity to the ionized argon and target interacting with the RF energy, anything in there will in fact heat up several hundred degrees.
So what he figured out was the Kapton tape was outgassing and spreading that crap onto the alumina substrate, causing both the pattern I saw in the cloudiness and the cloudiness itself.
The gist of this little story is in this case, he ran with a hypothesis that water was the cause, something I doubted when I saw the hard to see pattern of the cloudiness, but later when the pattern got clearer, he did not stick with the water hypothesis, but modified it to account for the new data.
A guy with just an MS does not have that kind of vigorous training to look for alternative causes for whatever data he is trying to interpret. The point being here, the Phd did not have an agenda and readily admitted his error with further data.
Your MS Gentry came into it with a basic agenda, to try to prove his idea that the Earth was created only a few thousand years ago.
Then bend the data to fit his hypothesis.
That is the difference between a real scientist and a charlatan.