Re: moon dust info - please help
Joel Duff (crinoid@midwest.net)
Tue, 3 Nov 1998 21:56:22 -0500
>At 08:42 AM 11/4/98 +1100, Jonathan wrote:
>>You seem to imply that the thick dust layer was the only risk to be
>considered.
>
>Well, that is the subject of this thread! And you failed again to
>acknowledge that the issue was scientific in its inception. ICR people and
>others are not making up the arguments that were advanced for a thick layer
>of dust on the moon. The perception of the public was firmly grounded in
>science. You have clearly established that it was the physical evidence
>and not the theory that modified our perception of what was expected (i.e
>they found there was little dust). Until the physical evidence that there
>was very little dust on the moon was in hand, it was still the expected
>outcome that there would be a lot of dust on the moon if there was a lot of
>time. I present this as a neutral party. I have never used this argument,
>and see no need to now. But to say that YEC's were out of their tree
>because they advanced this argument as evidence for a young (moon?)
>something is just wrong. It was good science in its day. Today it is not
>because we know there is very little dust on the moon, so naturalists no
>longer predict there would be a lot of dust on the moon, and have found
>adequate scientific grounds for their conclusions.
>Art
Art,
I am finding this discussion most intersting. I must admit I am still
trying to work out the details as to who knew what and when. You may be
right about the initial argument but I am not sure yet. Now I would like
to see what people were saying in the 1950s. Was the argument that if the
moon had been around for 2 billion years it must have thick dust on it
mainstream scientific thought or was it a minority idea among scientists
but a common idea among popularizers of science. I do think that Jonathan
has a point that although the thread is about moon dust I find that ICR
people have polarized the issue by emphasizing the dust as necessarily
being the result of uniformitarian assumptions when there were other
concerns and possible causes of moon dust that would not fit within a
uniformitarian construct. Let's look back in time and see exactly who and
how the original argument that dust on the moon might be a significant
concern. Again, this has been a most interesting thread. I thought the
moon dust argument was old stuff but there are some interesting nuances to
all of this.
Regards,
joel duff