© MODIS - NASA Terra satelliteMillions of people were left without power as a snowstorm dropped as much as 32 inches (81 centimeters) on some parts of the northeastern United States in late October 2011.
We started this series with a pretty 'out-there' topic: prophecy. But the Cassiopaean Experiment, while pretty 'out-there' to begin with (at least from the mainstream perspective), also deals with more 'down-to-earth' subject matter. Issues relating to more conventionally understood and practiced science (albeit with often unconventional interpretations) make up a large portion of the received data.
It's been my experience that people tend to forget that scientists are 'human' too, or more precisely, scientists can be just as willfully blind, self-serving, conformist, fearful and mendacious as anyone else. Some of them are even unabashed con men who falsify their data, or intellectual prostitutes who will produce the results they are paid to, whether they believe them or not. Just because it's been peer-reviewed, or written by a person with a string of letters after their name, doesn't mean it's true, or even remotely so. And if history tells us anything, it's that the history of science is a long history of wrong or incomplete ideas. So it's best to be skeptical whenever scientists speak in terms of absolutes with certainty, whenever they put the lid on testing alternate hypotheses. Chances are, they're simply deceiving themselves, and
you.
Science is a work in progress. The theories that are taken for granted as being true may very well turn out to be completely bogus following the intervention of new discoveries and innovations. Sadly, space and weather science are two areas where innovation not only rarely occurs, it is actively hindered by scientists and politicians with vested interests in keeping old, inadequate theories at the forefront of popular and academic belief systems. Like many of the examples that will follow in subsequent installments of this series, the ones below are just a sample of ideas that at first glance may look just plain wrong. But new discoveries have been proving many outdated preconceptions to be just that.