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.
