[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
stokedporcupine8 wrote:
Gregus wrote:
How convenient. We can see distant galaxies far far away and we can’t even try to look at anything as close as the moon. I don’t quite buy it.
As Bill Roberts pointed out, im sure the Hobble could see it, but i don’t think it would take even that.
No offense, but what the fuck do you know about optics and telescopes? This isn’t something that “you just don’t buy”–the math is in front of you. Unless you’re an astrophysicist with lots of knowledge and experience on these things, what you “buy” doesn’t matter. This would be like your average John Doe telling an electrical engineer, “Nope, I just don’t buy it. There’s just no way those electrons can break the conservation of energy like that”.
That is I think unfair to Gregus.
The calculation was NOT (so far as I know) presented to him at the time of his post. Even if it may look that way it may not be the case.
The originally provided post did not provide a calculation for the HST or any claim of a calculation for the HST. It only made an assertion but then went further only for Earth based telescopes.
Extreme resolution for the HST has long been reported. It was reasonable, given that the first link did not go into the issue of the HST at all other than to make an assertion, for Gregus to not consider that a proven matter.
While I haven’t gone back and checked, I didn’t have the impression that the original link was written by a scientist, so your claim that he was arguing against a scientist in his specialty may be quite wrong. (Most science writers for magazines, newspapers, and the like are not scientists and not so expert in what they write.)
As for myself, I was just flat mistaken. But not because I was disagreeing or thought I was disagreeing with a scientist expert in the question, but because it seemed to me that a science writer had made a mere assertion and had only backed up the Earth half of it.[/quote]
My point, which was what does he knows about optics and telescopes, would hold up even if the calculation wasn’t there. Gregus asserted something to the effect of “Well, if we really landed on the moon we should be able to point HST there and look…”. The burden of proof is on him. He needs to back up his uneducated conjecture on just what the HST can and can’t do. Arguing intuitively that “well, since it can see galaxies, it should be able to see stuff on the moon” is silly. There could be dozens of reasons that someone not familiar with optics or astrophysics wouldn’t know that would allow the HST to see the former but not the latter.
The spirit of my post though was really in response to the general anti-science attitude on this forum. It seems that many people here think their soooo smart, and know soooo much about science without ever having seriously studied any science at all. The general idea that one can just apply intuitive common sense arguments and that there is no need to look into the deeper work that scientists have done is a stupid idea.