ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: AstroBrant on January 12, 2017, 01:55:41 AM
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I've been shown an article by a Julius A. Birch, PhD, on Aulis, where he goes to great pains to show that the observed trajectory of the Apollo 17 lunar ascent is incorrect and therefore faked. He concludes that the ascent module went up on tracks like a roller coaster. Despite his long and scholarly-looking pdf article, he overlooked the fact that even if it did go up on tracks and NASA somehow managed to edit them out, we would have had to be seeing the ascent module through the tracks after pitchover.
I would love to see a review of this by a qualified person. Is anybody aware of anyone who has done that? Would anyone here be willing to do it? If not, I would appreciate some refutation of any specific arguments he made.
Here's the Aulis article:
http://aulis.com/apollo17_ascent.htm
Here's his complete analysis:
http://aulis.com/pdf%20folder/apollo17-ascent_trajectory.pdf
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I skimmed it. First, I can assure you there's no "Julius A Birch PhD" that we need to take seriously. As is typical for Aulis, they have presented the work of yet another unverified academic expert, giving us just enough back story to make it seem credible without following the scholarly convention of providing a method to contact the author. The bibliography is a dead giveway, quoting YouTube and Wikipedia. Clearly something meant to seem scholarly to the layman, but not actually the least scholarly.
From my skim, it looks like another case of homegrown photogrammetry. The author invents an unvetted process he assures us will recover the exact trajectory from the video record and the purports that errors between the results of his method and the one he deduces from the published ideal must be due to fakery -- not errors in his method or ordinary errors in flight control.
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Bob B. has very concise and accurate simulation.
http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/LM-ascent.htm
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I wonder how he squares his analysis with the 16mm footage that reveals details of the lunar surface not previously known but subsequently confirmed, or the live TV broadcast of the LM approach and docking with the CSM?
Let me take a guess: he doesn't.
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I've been shown an article by a Julius A. Birch, PhD, on Aulis, where he goes to great pains to show that the observed trajectory of the Apollo 17 lunar ascent is incorrect and therefore faked. He concludes that the ascent module went up on tracks like a roller coaster. Despite his long and scholarly-looking pdf article, he overlooked the fact that even if it did go up on tracks and NASA somehow managed to edit them out, we would have had to be seeing the ascent module through the tracks after pitchover.
I would love to see a review of this by a qualified person. Is anybody aware of anyone who has done that? Would anyone here be willing to do it? If not, I would appreciate some refutation of any specific arguments he made.
Here's the Aulis article:
http://aulis.com/apollo17_ascent.htm
Here's his complete analysis:
http://aulis.com/pdf%20folder/apollo17-ascent_trajectory.pdf
Aulis? I don't even bother with them anymore. They have a track record of inventing PhD's out of whole cloth.
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Well, obviously they DID go to the moon, but they did it on a giant invisible roller-coaster track. It was all secretly backed by Disney with the goal of eventually constructing the ultimate theme-park ride.
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Bob B. has very concise and accurate simulation.
http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/LM-ascent.htm
Hmmm, I hadn't seen that before. Thanks for the link -- can't wait to dive into it. (Added to my list of Braeunig articles.)
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I skimmed it. First, I can assure you there's no "Julius A Birch PhD" that we need to take seriously. As is typical for Aulis, they have presented the work of yet another unverified academic expert, giving us just enough back story to make it seem credible without following the scholarly convention of providing a method to contact the author. The bibliography is a dead giveway, quoting YouTube and Wikipedia. Clearly something meant to seem scholarly to the layman, but not actually the least scholarly.
From my skim, it looks like another case of homegrown photogrammetry. The author invents an unvetted process he assures us will recover the exact trajectory from the video record and the purports that errors between the results of his method and the one he deduces from the published ideal must be due to fakery -- not errors in his method or ordinary errors in flight control.
Thanks for the skim, Jay. And as always, an excellent response from you. It looked like the guy might have had legitimate credentials, but I didn't look very deep. Yes, I have run into Percy's tactic of using "unverified academic experts" before. It would also be nice if his article had been published in any respected, peer-reviewed journal, which never seems to be the case with Percy's "experts".
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Well, obviously they DID go to the moon, but they did it on a giant invisible roller-coaster track. It was all secretly backed by Disney with the goal of eventually constructing the ultimate theme-park ride.
I can't wait for the invisible water-slide!
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Well, obviously they DID go to the moon, but they did it on a giant invisible roller-coaster track. It was all secretly backed by Disney with the goal of eventually constructing the ultimate theme-park ride.
Luna Park? I thought that was Monsanto.
Who was that other guy who baked some film in an oven? He claimed to be a PhD too. Was that ever verified?
Even I know never to reference Wikipedia and I'm only a MSc (as of a month ago). We would be subject to corporeal punishment if we did that. They don't call my alma mater brutalist just because of the architecture.
But the thing about Wikipedia is that any credible article will itself be referenced. So you look up what they're referencing and then reference that. Wikipedia is a useful place to start sometimes, but even when it is, it is only the start.
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I skimmed it. First, I can assure you there's no "Julius A Birch PhD" that we need to take seriously. As is typical for Aulis, they have presented the work of yet another unverified academic expert, giving us just enough back story to make it seem credible without following the scholarly convention of providing a method to contact the author. The bibliography is a dead giveway, quoting YouTube and Wikipedia. Clearly something meant to seem scholarly to the layman, but not actually the least scholarly.
From my skim, it looks like another case of homegrown photogrammetry. The author invents an unvetted process he assures us will recover the exact trajectory from the video record and the purports that errors between the results of his method and the one he deduces from the published ideal must be due to fakery -- not errors in his method or ordinary errors in flight control.
Thanks for the skim, Jay. And as always, an excellent response from you. It looked like the guy might have had legitimate credentials, but I didn't look very deep. Yes, I have run into Percy's tactic of using "unverified academic experts" before. It would also be nice if his article had been published in any respected, peer-reviewed journal, which never seems to be the case with Percy's "experts".
I also searched for him yesterday, 12 Jan. 2017, and found the Aulis links at the top and nothing much further on, except a discussion forum where another "Phd" Richard X agrees with Birch's observations and calculations. S(he) might be a sock.
http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/5-goofy-moonlanding-hoax-theories.html
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Thanks for the skim, Jay. And as always, an excellent response from you. It looked like the guy might have had legitimate credentials, but I didn't look very deep. Yes, I have run into Percy's tactic of using "unverified academic experts" before. It would also be nice if his article had been published in any respected, peer-reviewed journal, which never seems to be the case with Percy's "experts".
It's important to understand why we look at credentials and qualifications. In this case we look at them because they're offered, and they're postured as part of what is meant to convey the air of correctness. It's a fair bet most of the intended audience won't understand the computations and the methodology. Or rather, why the methodology fails. Hence the article meant to pass cursory examination and then be taken on faith: the author has a PhD, so it "must" be correct. Aulis has a habit of casting their fake faculty with people whose credentials are nigh unto impossible to verify. And our latest adjunct works at an anonymous company doing Very Important Work. All that is meant to sound like the typical colophon of authority in academia without actually providing the sort of verification and accountability you expect from it. The reason people say where they got their degrees, where they work, and how to get hold of them is precisely so that the willingness of the author to be challenged stands as the actual certificate of authority. Aulis goes through the motions without satisfying the substance. In this case we don't say the author's claims must fail because he lacks the claimed qualification. We say -- and this is an important distinction -- that the author's claim to authority on the basis of qualification fails. In circumstances where we would have to rely on that authority, it falls short. Such circumstances would include the proposition that the author has the requisite understanding, that he has done the appropriate research, and other things that are normally attributed as rote to people with advanced academic credentials.
It's important that we distinguish rejecting a claim to authority from rejecting the claim on its merits. The argument may still have merit regardless of whether the author lied about his identity and qualifications.
Conspicuously absent from the paper is a validation of method. What separates real science from pseudo-science of this sort is the reliance on methods that have been proven to work. If you propose to use a method to test some observation, you typically use methods developed by others. For example, in the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, the researcher needed subjects that were homogeneous as far as various predispositions were concerned. He used methods developed by others to measure those predispositions. The validity of the method is guaranteed by the work those others did to demonstrate its effectiveness. But if no such method exists, then you have to invent it, as our author here has done. But having invented your own method, you bear the burden to prove it will produce the results you purport it will. That requires a lengthy process of validation, which often requires its own paper. Here the author just assumes his method will work. That's not science. Further, as we delve into it, we find problems with it which the author does not examine. For example, his method for photogrammetric rectification across zooms assumes a spherical lens. He doesn't use the lens model for the actual lens.
On the other side of the coin, the expected flight path of the lunar module is derived from theory and from published expectations. There is no error analysis to show how far the actual results can be legitimately expected to vary.
The end result, predictably, is that the untested model fails to match the uncontrolled observation. And the failure is simply attributed speculatively to an affirmative claim of fakery, for which no evidence is provided. The way science works is that you have to conduct those validation and error analysis investigations to eliminate other potential sources of variance. You can't confidently attribute it to the proffered cause without showing your means of eliminating possible confounding causes. And that's one thing we expect PhDs to be able to do in their sleep. The paper fails at a fundamental level of scientific inquiry, just as all the other "academic" papers at Aulis. While they may be written by scientists (we can't ever know for sure), they aren't science.
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I skimmed it. First, I can assure you there's no "Julius A Birch PhD" that we need to take seriously. As is typical for Aulis, they have presented the work of yet another unverified academic expert, giving us just enough back story to make it seem credible without following the scholarly convention of providing a method to contact the author. The bibliography is a dead giveway, quoting YouTube and Wikipedia. Clearly something meant to seem scholarly to the layman, but not actually the least scholarly.
From my skim, it looks like another case of homegrown photogrammetry. The author invents an unvetted process he assures us will recover the exact trajectory from the video record and the purports that errors between the results of his method and the one he deduces from the published ideal must be due to fakery -- not errors in his method or ordinary errors in flight control.
Thanks for the skim, Jay. And as always, an excellent response from you. It looked like the guy might have had legitimate credentials, but I didn't look very deep. Yes, I have run into Percy's tactic of using "unverified academic experts" before. It would also be nice if his article had been published in any respected, peer-reviewed journal, which never seems to be the case with Percy's "experts".
I also searched for him yesterday, 12 Jan. 2017, and found the Aulis links at the top and nothing much further on, except a discussion forum where another "Phd" Richard X agrees with Birch's observations and calculations. S(he) might be a sock.
http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/5-goofy-moonlanding-hoax-theories.html
The link he supplies on that post is here
http://www.vixra.org/pdf/1510.0323v4.pdf
he references posts on this site. amongst other things.
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How do you reference Apollohoax.net using Harvard referencing system?
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And the failure is simply attributed speculatively to an affirmative claim of fakery, for which no evidence is provided. The way science works is that you have to conduct those validation and error analysis investigations to eliminate other potential sources of variance. You can't confidently attribute it to the proffered cause without showing your means of eliminating possible confounding causes. And that's one thing we expect PhDs to be able to do in their sleep. The paper fails at a fundamental level of scientific inquiry, just as all the other "academic" papers at Aulis. While they may be written by scientists (we can't ever know for sure), they aren't science.
This sounds a lot like "traceability". One of the places I worked when I was in the RNZAF was EECC (nicknamed Eeky Squeaky), the Electronic Equipment Calibration Centre. Our job was to calibrate the RNZAF's electronic test equipment. eg. everything from AVO meters, through Tektronix 465 Oscilloscopes to HP8566 Spectrum Analysers.
In every case when, when we calibrated (and certified) a piece of electronic test equipment, it was against a standard which we knew was accurate because it had itself been calibrated and certified against an even higher standard held by the US National Bureau of Standards (now known as NIST).
When a technician in the RNZAF was using a digital voltmeter to make a critical voltage measurement, he could be confident that his meter was reading accurately, because the calibration documentation certified that it had been checked against standards that were traceable back to the highest possible standard, a group of Standard Cells that were part of the Volt Transfer Program at the NBS Standards Centre in Gaithersburg MD.
A person inventing their own untried and untested method is somewhat analogous to a technician making his own voltmeter from scratch, using it without checking its accuracy, and then claiming the measurements to be valid and meaningful!
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...All that is meant to sound like the typical colophon of authority in academia...
Thank you, Jay, for making me dive for the dictionary again. I only knew of Colophon as an Ionian Greek town from the time of the Peloponnesian War.
*sigh* The things you learn from being interested in Apollo...
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Bob B. has very concise and accurate simulation.
http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/LM-ascent.htm
Would you believe it if I said that the author actually references Bob's article?
I skimmed the article, and while I could possibly work my way through the maths there doesn't seem to be much point attempting to verify it. First, that's better left to people who use that maths all the time, and second, even if it's right there are plenty of other places where the article falls down that don't require knowledge of the maths.
1. On page 28, Birch says that he was able to make a best-fit "roller-coaster" trajectory fit his calculations of the A17 ascent, then concludes that "... the agreement between the roller coaster and the broadcast trajectory is excellent..." Well, gee, Sherlock what a surprise! If you paint a white line next to a skid mark on the road of course you can say that the skid mark and the white line match very closely.
2. On page 26, Birch says the model of the LM on the roller-coaster was probably scaled down by a factor of 10, and quotes the NASA Apollo 5 Mission Report as evidence. The problem is that he doesn't reference a page or even a section, so we're left to trawl through a 381 page document to find this alleged reference.
3. Throughout the article there are mistaken acronyms, which suggests sloppy oversight (or none). So, for example, the RCS is described as the Reactive [sic] Control System, and the first mention of the Lunar Roving Vehicle gives its acronym as the LVR. Petty? Sure, and pedantic too. But anyone who knows much about Apollo is going to notice things like that and wonder what other mistakes there are.
4. On page 21 Birch speculates that Ed Fendell (who steered the LRV's camera) was caught by surprise by the movements of the LM, which is why he lost track of it. But Fendell had had plenty of opportunity to practice with a reliable simulator, so he would have known what a nominal ascent would have looked like. This then raises the question of how could NASA have messed up the parameters of the roller-coaster Birch speculates about such that it failed to match the LM's nominal ascent? Wouldn't they have tested and measured to make sure the model matched the reality it was intended to mimic?
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I've been shown an article by a Julius A. Birch, PhD, on Aulis, where he goes to great pains to show that the observed trajectory of the Apollo 17 lunar ascent is incorrect and therefore faked.
I have a PhD but I would not profess to be an expert in the dynamics of space vehicles. Just as much as I would not profess to be an expert in Medieval Art on the Aegean Peninsula. Credentials mean jack unless you've worked professionally in the field and have proven application in that field.
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Not to mention that your PhD is in a relevant field. I wouldn't expect a PhD in psychiatry to be useful in analyzing the trajectories of spacecraft--or, come to that, Medieval Art on the Aegean Peninsula. It sometimes occurs to be that conspiracists don't realize exactly how many fields you can get a PhD in.
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Bob B. has very concise and accurate simulation.
http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/LM-ascent.htm
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4. On page 21 Birch speculates that Ed Fendell (who steered the LRV's camera) was caught by surprise by the movements of the LM, which is why he lost track of it. But Fendell had had plenty of opportunity to practice with a reliable simulator, so he would have known what a nominal ascent would have looked like. This then raises the question of how could NASA have messed up the parameters of the roller-coaster Birch speculates about such that it failed to match the LM's nominal ascent? Wouldn't they have tested and measured to make sure the model matched the reality it was intended to mimic?
IIRC the vehicle was "lost" when it flew beyond visual acuity of the camera. The last visible aspect that I remember was the exhaust plume with the camera looking almost directly at it. That doesn't seem like NASA (Ed Fendell) was caught by surprise to me.
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Last year I ought a postal cover signed by Ed Fendell. I posted on a facebook group how pleased I was with it, despite having no provenance as to its authenticity.
Ed Fendell recently liked the post.
Apart from being absolutely thrilled that he did that, my point is that Ed Fendell is around and can be contacted if anyone was really interested in finding out something about his experiences (as are many other people directly involved in Project Apollo. 'Dr' Birch didn't do this. Wonder why...
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This then raises the question of how could NASA have messed up the parameters of the roller-coaster Birch speculates about such that it failed to match the LM's nominal ascent? Wouldn't they have tested and measured to make sure the model matched the reality it was intended to mimic?
Of course not, these guys weren't rocket scientists...