Colm Ryan of Cork Skeptics will discuss some of the stranger stories arising from our love affair with the cosmos.
Colm will take a sceptical look at astrology, the UFO phenomenon, and the popular conspiracy theories of our culture. In contrast to these are real, scientific quests to find life on planets and moons beyond the Earth.
Lastly, Colm will introduce a baloney detector kit, which may help distinguish outlandish claims from rational scientific discovery.
This talk is part of the Space On The Road! series of events taking place throughout Cork County Libraries this summer, and is one of many events comprising the Summer of Space at Blackrock Castle Observatory. For more information visit www.bco.ie/events or www.ssp17.ie You can also follow along on social media using #SummerOfSpace #SSP17 #OurSpaceOurTime
This talk takes place in Youghal County Library, Cork at 6:30pm on Thursday 27th July. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.
UFOs. Ghosts. Astrology. Homeopathy. Telepathy. Miracle Cancer Cures. People all around the world fervently believe they exist and yet there isn’t a shred of good evidence that they are real in any sense of the word. On the other hand, there is strong scientific support for evolution, climate change and vaccines, yet millions reject the evidence entirely, preferring long debunked ideas instead.
In a wide-ranging talk, Colm Ryan of Cork Skeptics explores the world of strange beliefs and discusses some ways to distinguish between good and bad ideas. Colm will talk about logical fallacies, brain flaws and other tricks that persuade us of things that aren’t so. He will also examine the crucial role that science plays in distinguishing fact from fiction.
Colm is the co-founder of Cork Skeptics, a group dedicated to the promotion of good science while challenging strange claims. Founded in 2010 in Blackrock Castle, we host regular public talks with topics ranging from ghosts to nuclear power and financial scams.
This event takes place in Blackrock Castle Observatory, Cork City from 6pm on Saturday 14th November. It is free to attend, and all are welcome.
At our November meeting, we were delighted to host a Skype call from Dr. Andrew Sneddon of the University of Ulster. He gave us a fascinating talk on witch-hunting and witch-trials in Ireland. Although witch-hunting was nowhere near as widespread in Ireland as it was in Scotland and parts of central Europe, there were a number of celebrated cases in Ireland during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The best documented case in Ireland was the Islandmagee witch trials in Co. Down in 1711. Eight women were put on trial and subsequently subjected to imprisonment and public pillorying. Andrew discussed the background to the case, and gave us an understanding of the mind-sets and motivations of the accusers.
Because of the legal framework in Ireland and England and a lack of solid evidence, it was never easy to convict people of witchcraft in these countries. By the mid 18th century, trials for witchcraft had effectively died out. Widespread belief in witches persisted well into the 19th century in many parts of Europe and America, however. Dr. Sneddon asserts that the belief in fairies in Ireland took precedence over witchcraft, and as a result it never became quite as ingrained in the public psyche as it did in other regions.
Andrew gave us a fascinating talk. His forthcoming book on Irish witches and witch trials will be published in the summer of 2013.
Man Finds His Doppelgänger In A 16Th Century Italian Painting
Doppelgänger lore holds that an exact simile of an person can exist, and is capable of evil or mischievous deeds, often unbeknownst to the original person.
Max Galluppo got quite a shock when he discovered his “doppelgänger” in a painting while walking through the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“The area that the painting is from in Italy, that area is actually where my grandparents are from. I might check out Ancestry.com to see if there’s a relationship,” Galuppo commented.
Fox News in Denver have serious egg on their face after publishing a news report claiming strange UFO activity in the vicinity of the city. The report claimed that numerous fast moving objects were seen on camera, confounding an aviation expert who could not establish what they were.
Over the past few years, people who investigate the existence of UFOs have become increasingly frustrated by the predominance of false sightings and conspiracy related ideologies in their area of study. Coupled with this is an overall decline in UFO sightings, with the best documented cases having taken place many decades ago. This has lead some prominent researchers to conclude that the field is now in terminal decline and that there is no strong case for the presence of UFOs.
Italian Earthquake Scientists Convicted for Not Communicating Risk
A number of scientists in Italy were found guilty of miscommunication after having made statements to the effect that people should not be too worried about earthquakes in an area that subsequently suffered a large and devastating earthquake in 2009. This ruling has prompted outrage in the scientific community, which sees it as hampering how scientific findings can be communicated to the public. Earthquakes are notoriously unpredictable, and it appears to be a case of an angry populace determined to find someone responsible, no matter what. The judgement is being appealed.
Hot on the heels of a an article that claimed that homeopathy could help to resolve domestic violence comes another article that advises the use of homeopathy to cure Ash Dieback, a disease afflicting trees all over mainland Europe. Instead of diverting money into anti-fungal treatment, they have come up with a novel cure: water. How could our scientific community have not thought of this? The scoundrels.
We have just celebrated our second anniversary as a skeptics club in Cork, with (more or less) regular monthly meetings in Blackrock Castle. Our big thanks to Clair, Dee and all the staff of CIT Blackrock Castle over the past two years. It’s been a lot of fun, not to mention deeply fascinating to hear speakers from everything from body part ownership to ghosts and Scientology. We’ve already got a number of great talks lined up over the coming months. Watch this space!
Halloween is on its way and the usual reports of strange lights in the sky will inevitably start to surface. If you see eerie orange lights above the city on the run up to Monday night, it is likely that you will be seeing Chinese Lanterns.
Here’s a video from Poznán, Poland, showing many hundreds of Chinese Lanterns being launched into the sky.
Just before our last Cork Skeptics meeting, a good friend of mine showed me the following photograph, apparently taken by astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle mission STS-37 in 1991. It purports to show a circular orb near the Earth’s horizon. I thought it might be the Moon, but it looked odd. I didn’t pass much comment on it at the time, but I decided to look into it a bit later, to see what I could find.
Upon beginning my research, I quickly discovered photos of a similar anomaly on a completely different shuttle mission, this time in a picture taken during an STS 51A space walk in 1984. The strange object here is the one at the top right hand of the picture (the large object, with an astronaut hanging off it at the bottom, is a satellite).
So, what was going on?
Discovering a rational explanation for photos such as this can be hard work. No matter what you type into Google – “UFO debunking”, “UFO explained” or “UFO skeptic” – the results invariably return pages upon pages of UFO believer websites.
Eventually, I discovered a discussion about it on a forum at Randi.org. The whole phenomenon quickly fell into place.
First of all, there is a video of the STS-51A mission shown below. If you play the video from the 10 minute 30 second point, you will see it soon afterwards.
Just a water droplet. Interestingly, not even noted by the editors of the video as anything particularly remarkable.
There is also a video of the first encounter from STS-37.
Just before the object arrives around the 25 second mark, there is a distinct camera movement. The phenomenon is clearly associated with something inside the spacecraft, and not outside it.
Again, it’s just a water droplet on the window as the field of view is adjusted. Note that the upside down refractions are entirely consistent with what you would expect from a droplet.
What this little example shows is how true believers and sceptics differ in their approaches. A sceptic, when presented with a “evidence” of an interesting oddity, will first try to identify natural or simple explanations that might account for the anomaly. A true believer wants to immediately accept the anomaly as cast-iron evidence of alien spacecraft and if challenged on it, will attempt to prove why a more obvious explanation won’t work. It can be quite entertaining watching how they do this and what rationalisations are provided. The arguments, inevitably, are not about strange spacecraft and alien intelligences, but about mundane things like the existence or origin of burned grass, raindrops and random specks on film.
I have a dragon in my garage. It’s an amazing fire-breathing, flying, immortal dragon. Amazing—except, of course, I’m the only one who can see it and no experiment that any of my friends devise are capable of detecting the dragon …
In this talk, Dr. Niall Smith will look at the importance of experiments in supporting claims that have been made, and continue to be made, in a wide range of areas, from UFO abductions to the claimed hyper-expansion phase of the early universe. How much should we “believe” claims that appear to defy the laws of the universe as we currently understand them? Are there actually times when the experiments we perform result in outputs that are so bizarre that we’d be right to be skeptical – and yet the experiments are reproducible and apparently true? Niall will demonstrate one such experiment—simple to perform, yet still a mystery after over 150 years of study…
About the speaker: Dr. Niall Smith received his PhD from UCD in the area of astrophysics in 1990. Since then he has maintained an active research group (currently at Blackrock Castle Observatory) that develops new techniques to support research into surveys for extrasolar planets and surveys of quasars (the most powerful continuously-emitting objects in the universe).
Niall is also a founder member of BCO and a passionate believer in the importance of quality science education. He is presently the Head of Research at CIT and chair of the Institute’s Research & Development Committee. Niall has 22 publications in international journals, a book chapter on astrophysical photometry, is a member of the National Committee for Astronomy and Space Science and also the International Astronomical Union.
The talk will begin at 8pm on Friday April 15th, in Blackrock Castle Observatory. Everyone is welcome and the talk is free to attend. Please see our Skeptics In The Castle page for directions to the Castle.
Hot on the heels of a an article that claimed that homeopathy could help to 
Cork Skeptics 