Coppedge vs. JPL – discussion thread

Remember the case with that Texas teacher in the Texas Dept. of Education who was basically fired for saying that evolution was good science? (Because apparently only the geniuses who were elected to the Texas State Board of Education were allowed to have opinions on scientific issues, or something.) After that, I’ve realized how hard it can be to win such a case, if the employer has even vaguely plausible reasons for dismissing someone. Probably it’s even more difficult to win against a private employer like Caltech. If Caltech didn’t settle, they probably think they’ve got a strong case, and this is probably the opinion of lawyers who have absolutely no interest in evolution vs. creationism/ID. It will basically come down to whether or not Caltech followed the appropriate policies and procedures.

On the other hand, we know that the other side is close-to-crazy – reading Coppedge’s thousands and thousands of straight-up, hard-shell Young-Earth Creationist posts (the news stories only mention ID, which just indicates the journalists haven’t done any research at all) at his Creation-Evolution Headlines website is enough to determine that.

And Coppedge wasn’t just an ID creationist, although that’s bad enough, especially to well-informed scientists who care about good science and public education. Coppedge’s main activity was posting YEC stuff to Creation-Evolution Headlines for years and years. Amongst his posts, he regularly trashed JPL/Cassini-produced science – e.g. anytime some finding could be twisted into some argument that Saturn’s moons, or rings, or whatever were young, Coppedge would turn this into a diatribe about the dogmatism and materialism of scientists who accept that the Universe and planets are old.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it – how many posts did Coppedge produce at Creation-Evolution Headlines? It may be tens of thousands for all I know. I only discovered his RSS feed in 2006 or so, and every time I was subscribed, I would soon unsubscribe, because the sheer volume of posts was difficult to keep up with. I wonder if the lawyers will ask if any of this activity happened on JPL work time? That could certainly be a relevant issue. Even if Caltech/JPL academics are given latitude about blogging on work time, that might not apply to a sysadmin, and even if all employees are given some latitude about blogging (which I think employers should), it is highly debatable whether pushing pseudoscience on a massive scale, including pseudoscience specifically contradicting the published research produced by the JPL/Cassini mission, would pass muster.

E.g.:

More Youth on Titan 04/09/2011 April 09, 2011 — Hopes that Saturn’s giant moon Titan might have volcanoes just dropped. A new paper in Icarus1 concludes Titan gets its geology from the outside, not the inside. If confirmed, it implies all the surface features were created by wind, impacts and weather – not by active geology. The hopeful cryovolcano announced last year (Sotra Facula, see 12/24/2010, bullet 12) was disputed by Moore and Pappalardo, authors of the new paper. Titan may be a geologically dead world.

Titan’s atmosphere, however, remains a subject of intense interest. Scientists were eager to visit Titan via Cassini because of its thick atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. Because precipitation of methane and its byproducts was considered inevitable, astrobiologists were eager to find liquid as possible abodes for life. Some proposed a global ocean several kilometers deep. When the Huygens Probe landed in January 2005 with a thud on a moist but mostly dry lake bed, those hopes evaporated.

Planetary scientists have also had an age conundrum with Titan. They know that the methane in the atmosphere is destroyed and converted to other compounds in a one-way process. This puts strong upper limits on the age of the atmosphere – far less than the 4.5-billion-year age assumed for the solar system. They had hoped that a reservoir of methane under the surface would be found to erupt in cryovolcanos to replenish the atmosphere. The new paper casts doubt on that solution; see the Cassini press release for a summary of the findings, and also PhysOrg, Science Daily.

Instead of volcanoes, another possible large crater has been found. The “ghost crater” reported by New Scientist is disputed by others. The surprising dearth of volcanoes leads many planetary scientists to say they are quickly erased by erosion. If it weren’t for the atmosphere, scientists expect Titan would look like Callisto, a dead moon orbiting Jupiter.

Another paper in press in Icarus analyzed Titan’s equatorial sand dunes.2 The longitudinal dunes, covering about 12.5% of the surface, were a surprise when discovered, because scientists were expecting large lakes or even a global ocean. They had also doubted that the winds were strong enough at the surface to move particles around. Dunes also exist on Mars, Venus, and of course, Earth, but on Titan, the average 300-foot-high dunes are nearly 3 km apart, getting farther apart at higher latitudes. Unlike the silica sands on Earth, the particles in Titan’s dunes are thought to be composed of hydrocarbon dust and ice precipitated out of the atmosphere. All together, they constitute the largest known reservoir of organics on Titan, because the combined area of dunes is about as large as the United States (Titan’s diameter is also about that size).

The dunes also impinge on theories of Titan’s age. For one, they are among Titan’s most youthful features; for another, they indicate a lack of persistent liquid on Titan’s equator, even though liquid ethane should have been raining onto the surface throughout Titan’s history. The presence of dunes implies that much of Titan is arid. If spread out evenly over the globe, the particles in this largest reservoir of organics (larger than all the observed lakes combined) would doubtless fail to cover Titan with the predicted accumulation of hydrocarbons that must have been produced in the assumed 4.5-billion-year age of the moon. “The dune distribution places constraints on Titan’s meteorology and geology,” the authors said.

1. Jeffrey M. Moore and Robert T. Pappalardo, “Titan: An Exogenic World?”, Icarus April 2011, doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2011.01.019.

2. LeGall, Janssen et al., “Cassini SAR, radiometry, scatterometry and altimetry observations of Titan’s dune fields,” Icarus (article in press), doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2011.03.026.

[Coppedge then comments on his own description above. He always does this in green for some reason, which I cannot reproduce.]

We are still discovering facts about Titan, so definitive conclusions are premature; however, enough is known to falsify many assumptions and predictions made by those who refuse to budge from their A.S.S. (age of the solar system, 4.5 billion years; see 02/19/2011). They were wrong about a global ocean; they were wrong about huge lakes of liquid ethane; they were dumbfounded to find sand dunes; and now it appears they were wrong about active geology.

The upper limits on age appear to be growing stronger with time. The puzzlement on their faces, and the silence about defending the consensus age, are tell-tale signs that their fascination with discovery is tempered by panic over looming destruction of favored beliefs about the age of the solar system (02/15/2008). Titan may be the old-agers’ Titanic.

Next headline on: Solar System • Geology • Dating Methods

What if JPL hired someone who turned out to be a Flat-Earther? Would it be discrimination to disfavor that employee when half the employees are being cut (for instance)? It’s precisely the same situation, once you know anything about the actual science of how we know the solar system is ~4.5 billion years old…

Wow. Until this trial happened, I had no idea Coppedge was employed by the Cassini mission. A lot of his old posts take on a new aspect once this is realized. E.g.

The study of Titan is a work in progress, so any conclusions drawn at this time are subject to revision as more data come in. We can, however, step back and consider what planetary scientists expected to find and what they have found so far. In the decades after the Voyager visits (1981), when scientists realized an irreversible erosion of atmospheric methane was precipitating hydrocarbons onto the surface (especially ethane, which has no way to get back into the atmosphere), scientists expected to find, over the course of 4.5 billion years, an accumulation of half a kilometer or more of liquid ethane in a global ocean. That was a clear prediction that has been spectacularly falsified by Cassini observations (see list of previous articles). In fact, the Huygens probe was designed to float on that ocean that failed to materialize.

Instead, we found Titan to have paltry accumulations of liquid in scattered lakes near the poles, while the equatorial regions are largely covered in icy sand dunes. Now we are learning that the polar lakes are probably shallow, could have impermeable bottoms, and move around so rapidly that they don’t deposit sediment on the lake floors (or else they deposit bright sediments). But if the sediments are bright, which would be surprising in itself, is there enough sediment to account for 4.5 billion years of deposition? In addition, Titan, the largest moon with the greatest gravitational attraction, has few craters (three to five) after all that time.

You have to ask yourself whether it is credible these processes have been going on for billions of years. Did 4.5 billion years ever exist? Is it a fiction? In order to save the blessed timescale so precious to planetary scientists (because Darwin depends on it), all kinds of evidence-free theory-rescue devices are being rigged: maybe the ethane seeped into the interior where no one can find it; maybe the interior has a methane reservoir that erupts through cryovolcanoes, replenishing the atmosphere; maybe this, maybe that. If scientists stuck to the observations and drew reasonable conclusions from data alone, they would have to conclude that there are severe upper limits on how long Titan has been acting this way. Let facts be submitted to a candid world.

http://creationsafaris.com/crev2011[…]tm#20110219a

This isn’t just mildly bringing up some vague form of ID on biology issues far removed from space science, this is trashing the research on which JPL scientists are experts and Coppedge is not.

I wonder if peoples’ initially problems with Coppedge really were only related to ID, or if someone noticed this stuff and got annoyed.

The BYU thing sounds like the student’s hadn’t gotten their degree yet, and the University revoked their student-in-good-standing status before they did. Which is silly but probably legal.

If they did it after the degree was awarded, I imagine you could sue…honorary degrees are different though, those are revoked all the time when people become dictators, commit genocide, etc.