Comment by GarnetFloride
6 months ago
Pilot had been reporting things like that for years but nobody would believe them because they weren't "trained observers", until a pilot caught it on film in the 80's.
Same with sailors, who've been repairing rogue waves for centuries, but it wasn't until it was recorded scientifically on an oil rig that scientists took it seriously.
Still an awesome picture.
In 1995 or 1997, can't remember which, I flew from Belo Horizonte to Miami (if the former) or NYC (latter). When we were flying over what I think is the Caribbean, I recall seeing "upward lightnings". They were absolutely majestic. I was absolutely awaken. I don't remember much else as I was a kid but seeing this text made me come back to this beautiful memory.
Upward lightnings happen frequently enough, there is a guy called Tom Warner that has done pretty extensive research into this including high speed photography.
Here is his website[0] very cool stuff indeed.
0. https://ztresearch.blog/2014/07/03/unique-image-showing-ligh...
I was shooting time lapse during a thunder storm and caught a ground to sky lightning bolt. I assumed that if I had an image of one that it must be a fairly common kind of thing, because I know I don't have that kind of luck. Then again, I also had a time lapse of the Milky Way that someone point out something I had caught being a meteor coming straight at camera recognizable by the ionized trail it left behind which took minutes to dissipate. It definitely helps to have a shutter open. You'll miss 100% of the shots you don't take (to borrow a sports phrase).
My favorite variant of that kind of story: https://blog.nature.org/2018/01/12/australian-firehawk-rapto...
As Adam Savage famously said (though I'm sure he was far from the first):
The quote is a bit of an oversimplification, i.e. "writing it down" isn't all there is to the scientific method, but the core idea something wasn't science until the scientific method was applied is both a tautology and a good thing.
I saw something weird on a red-eye recently that maybe someone can explain:
We were going over a pretty rural area. I saw what looked like the fan of headlights but in these large marbleized shapes like large lightning-crackles. They just sort of moved across the ground and then fizzled out. The movement patterns would be kind of like clouds dissipating but it definitely looked like lights? Very weird.
Something like ball lightning? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
You have a small typo: repairing instead of reporting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper-atmospheric_lightning
> In ensuing decades, high altitude electrical discharges were reported by aircraft pilots and discounted by meteorologists until the first direct visual evidence was documented in 1989.
From your link.
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I feel you are undermining the Science!
Just because some common folks think they seen something, it does not mean it exists! It was probanly gas leak explosion, or something!
Classism in higher education, science, etc is sadly all too common. Even those in the 'correct' class have uphill battles as science very much is vulnerable to ego, politics, etc and reform can be difficult, or in some cases impossible, regardless of merit.
It makes you wonder what obvious thing is being ignored right now due to these politics. I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things. There's just way too many stories and experiences to entirely write it off, but who knows. I feel like hand wavey excuses like third-man, carbon monoxide suddenly everywhere, thought experiments about brains releasing chemicals, calling everything a hallucination, intuition impossible to know conventionally just called luck, etc is the system trying hard to deny this.
> It makes you wonder what obvious thing is being ignored right now
Not really, 40% of the US believes they were created (or are descendant of) by a divine being (creationism), in spite of all evidence, so pass that hurdle first
> I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things.
Like 20%-66% of the US believes this today? No one is experiencing the reality you are, ever, something to keep in mind, IMO.
To be exact a little under 40% believe in special creation - the mainstream Christian position (and more common even in the US) is that evolution is part of God's creation.
The US is very odd, not only in having large numbers of members of creationist churches, but also in tat a lot of members of churches that oppose creationism and Biblical literalism are quite often creationist.
The good news is that there is a downward trend in creationism.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-...
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Lack of evidence is not the same as contradictory evidence.
Could you point to any literature on evidence that refutes creationism? I'm not saying there isn't any. I'm just admitting my ignorance of it. Please enlighten me.
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> No one is experiencing the reality you are.
This is a common sentiment, but it is also a declaration of epistemic bankruptcy, thus incompatible with the scientific method.
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Not to mention flat-earthers, climate change deniers, 5G-causes-vaccines activists burning down 4G towers as they have no idea what 5G even is, etc., etc.
It's all too easy for the less skeptical to be misguided. :/
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Reminds me. On a Greyhound cross country trip, I got seated next to this pretty, well dressed, middle aged lady, that poor college student me, hardly ever saw on such trips. We start chatting and she tells me she is a Ghost Hunter. I took her at face value due previous experiences with real freaky characters on Greyhound, and was thinking oh great here we go again, thank you Greyhound, going to be stuck for hours next to another very strange kook. That kind of put me off further conversation. Then she starts taking out her papers to read, and says - want to see something weird? Shows me all sorts of stuff about different haunted houses. And I was just blown away by how well organized and detailed everything was. Later on she told me she was a PI doing investigations for real estate companies. But for a while it felt like I was sitting next to Scully reading X-Files.
You're saying real estate companies actually pay people to investigate "haunted" houses?
That's crazy
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> I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things.
Even if the experiences becomes accepted (although i think it unlikely) but not necessarily as really being what people who believe in ghosts think them to be.
it is quite common for things to turn out to be real observations but not to be what the observers thought they were (e.g. flying saucers).
If militaries around the world are not using it, it is probably not real. See also telekinesis or ESP experiments the US Army performed [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_un...
"Science advances one funeral at a time.”
Max Planck
Which is ironic since Max Planck experienced a staggering amount of change in science that did not require anyone dying, took place over just a few decades here and there, and was extremely fruitful.
Born 1858, died 1947, pretty much everything known about anything changed somewhat in that time period, and he was literally part of a lot of it, and helped convince people and change their minds without them dying.
Almost like the quote is utter bullshit.
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If people in the "correct" class are having trouble, that means it's not entirely classism. Only the additional trouble the people in the "wrong" class have is because of classism.
Dunno if it's classism so much that if you look at reports of odd waves or lights it's going to be really hard to filter the signal from the noise of people saying odd stuff. Photos are much better.
The problem is they never even tried to look before. Just hand waved that it was impossible and they knew better. Like bees can't fly.