Connect with us

The Conversation

Hundreds of 19th-century skulls collected in the name of medical science tell a story of who mattered and who didn’t

Published

on

theconversation.com – Pamela L. Geller, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Miami – 2024-11-14 07:23:00

Hundreds of 19th-century skulls collected in the name of medical science tell a story of who mattered and who didn’t

Illustration of just one of almost a thousand skulls Morton and colleagues collected.

Crania Americana by Samuel Morton, CC BY

Pamela L. Geller, University of Miami

When I started my research on the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection, a librarian leaned over my laptop one day to share some lore. “Legend has it,” she said, “John James Audubon really collected the skulls Morton claimed as his own.” Her voice was lowered so as not to disturb the other scholars in the hushed archive.

As my work progressed, I uncovered no evidence to substantiate her whispered claim. Audubon had collected human skulls, several of which he then passed on to Morton. But birds and ornithology remained Audubon’s passion.

Nevertheless, the librarian’s offhanded comment has proven useful – a touchstone of sorts that continues to remind me of the controversy and confusion long surrounding the Morton Collection.

Morton was a physician and naturalist who lived in Philadelphia from 1799 until the end of his life in 1851. A lecture he delivered to aspiring doctors at the Philadelphia Association for Medical Instruction outlined the reasons for his cranial compulsion:

“I commenced the study of Ethnology in 1830; in which year, having occasion to deliver an introductory lecture on Anatomy, it occurred to me to illustrate the difference in the form of the skull as seen in the five great races of men … When I sought the materials for my proposed lecture, I found to my surprise that they could be neither bought nor borrowed.”

He would go on to acquire almost 1,000 human skulls.

Morton used these skulls to advance an understanding of racial differences as natural, easily categorizable and able to be ranked. Big-brained “Caucasians,” he argued in the 1839 publication “Crania Americana,” were far superior to small-skulled American Indians and even smaller-skulled Black Africans. Many subsequent scholars have since thoroughly debunked his ideas.

Certainly, condemnation of Morton as a scientific racist is warranted. But I find this take represents the man as a caricature, his conclusions as foregone. It provides little insight into his life and the complicated, interesting times in which he lived, as I detail in my book “Becoming Object: The Sociopolitics of the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection.”

My research demonstrates that studies of skulls and diseases undertaken by Morton and his medical and scientific colleagues contributed to an understanding of U.S. citizenship that valued whiteness, Christianity and heroic masculinity defined by violence. It is an exclusionary idea of what it means to be American that persists today.

Yet, at the same time, the collection is an unintended testament to the diversity of the U.S. population during a tumultuous moment in the nation’s history.

Pen and ink portrait of a 19th century white man

Samuel Morton wasn’t a lone voice on the fringe of medicine.

‘Memoir of the life and scientific labors of Samuel George Morton’ by Henry S. Patterson, CC BY

Men of science and medicine

As a bioarchaeologist who has studied the Morton Collection for many years, I have sought to better understand the social, political and ideological circumstances that led to its creation. From my work – analyzing archival sources including letters, laws, maps and medical treatises, as well as the skulls themselves – I’ve learned that, over a lifetime, Morton fostered a professional network that had far-reaching tentacles.

He had plenty of help amassing the collection of skulls that bears his name.

The physician connected with medical colleagues – many of whom, like him, received degrees from the University of Pennsylvania – gentleman planters, enslavers, naturalists, amateur paleontologists, foreign diplomats and military officers. Occupational differences aside, they were mostly white, Christian men of some financial means.

Their interactions took place during a pivotal moment in American history, the interlude between the nation’s revolutionary consolidation and its violent civil unraveling.

Throughout this stretch of time, Morton and his colleagues catalyzed biomedical interventions and scientific standards to more effectively treat patients. They set in motion public health initiatives during epidemics. They established hospitals and medical schools. And they did so in the service of the nation.

Not all lives were seen as worthy of these men’s care, however. Men of science and medicine may have fostered life for many, but they also let others die. In “Becoming Object,” I track how they represented certain populations as biologically inferior; diseases were tied to nonwhite people, female anatomy was pathologized, and poverty was presumed inherited.

From person to specimen

Such representations made it easier for Morton and his colleagues to regulate these groups’ bodies, rationalize their deaths and collect their skulls with casual cruelty from almshouse dissecting tables, looted cemeteries and body-strewn battlefields. That is, a sizable portion of the skulls in Morton’s collections were not culled from ancient graves but belonged to those of the recently alive.

It is no coincidence that Morton began his scientific research in earnest the same year Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Men of science and medicine benefited from the expansionist policies, violent martial conflicts and Native displacement that underpinned Manifest Destiny.

line drawing of a skull from three angles, with text beneath about how it was collected from battle

A drawing from Morton’s book of the skull of a Seminole man killed by American troops. A bullet hole is visible on the left side of the man’s head.

‘Crania Americana’ by Samuel George Morton, CC BY

The collection reveals these acts of nation-building as necropolitical strategies – techniques used by sovereign powers to destroy or erase certain, often already vulnerable, populations from the national consciousness. These skulls attest to precarious existences, untimely deaths and trauma experienced from cradle to beyond the grave.

In the specific case of Native Americans, skeletal analysis testifies to the violent effects of U.S. military campaigns and forced removal. Native skulls that Morton labeled “warriors” have evidence of unhealed fractures and gunshot wounds. Children’s skulls bear the marks of compromised health; such pathology and their young ages at death are evidence of long-standing malnutrition, poverty and deprivation or stress.

To effectively transform subjects into objects – human beings into specimens – collected crania were ensconced in the institutional spaces of medical school lecture halls and museum storage cabinets.

There, Morton first numbered them sequentially. These numbers along with information about race, sex, age, “idiocy” or “criminality,” cranial capacity and provenance were inked on skulls and written in catalogs. Very rarely was the person’s name recorded. If used as teaching tools, Morton drilled holes to hang the skulls for display and notated them with the names of skeletal elements and features.

As dehumanizing as this process was, the Morton Collection does contain evidence of resilience and heterogeneous lives. There are traces of people with mixed-race backgrounds such as Black Indians. Several people may have also bent gender to navigate dire conditions or in keeping with social norms, such as native Beloved Women, who were active in warfare and political life.

stone monument in a graveyard

In contrast to those whose skulls ended up in his collection, Samuel Morton’s own grave was memorialized with a monument.

Pamela L. Geller

What these bones mean today

As anthropologists now recognize, it is through the repatriation of the remains of the people in the Morton Collection to their descendants, among other types of reparations, that current practitioners may begin to atone for the sins of intellectual forebears. Indeed, all institutions housing legacy collections must contend with this issue.

There are other, valuable lessons – about diversity and suffering – that the Morton Collection has to impart in today’s interesting times.

The collection demonstrates that the American body politic has always been a diverse one, despite efforts of erasure by men like Morton and his colleagues. Piecing together the stories of past, disenfranchised lives – and acknowledging the silences that have made it difficult to flesh them out – counters past white nationalism and xenophobia and their current resurgence.

The collection, I believe, also urges the repudiation of violence, casual cruelty and opportunism as admirable attributes of masculinity. Valorizing men who embody these qualities has never served America well. Particularly in the mid-1800s, when Morton amassed skulls, it led to a nation divided and hardened to suffering, an unfathomable death count and the increasing fragility of democracy.The Conversation

Pamela L. Geller, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Miami

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More

The post Hundreds of 19th-century skulls collected in the name of medical science tell a story of who mattered and who didn’t appeared first on theconversation.com

The Conversation

Study shows surge of imagery and fakes can precede international and political violence

Published

on

theconversation.com – Tim Weninger, Collegiate Proessor of Engineering, University of Notre Dame – 2025-04-24 07:59:00

AI tools reveal how images have been manipulated.
William Theisen et al.

Tim Weninger, University of Notre Dame and Ernesto Verdeja, University of Notre Dame

Imagine a country with deep political divisions, where different groups don’t trust each other and violence seems likely. Now, imagine a flood of political images, hateful memes and mocking videos from domestic and foreign sources taking over social media. What is likely to happen next?

The widespread use of social media during times of political trouble and violence has made it harder to prevent conflict and build peace. Social media is changing, with new technologies and strategies available to influence what people think during political crises. These include new ways to promote beliefs and goals, gain support, dehumanize opponents, justify violence and create doubt or dismiss inconvenient facts.

At the same time, the technologies themselves are becoming more sophisticated. More and more, social media campaigns use images such as memes, videos and photos – whether edited or not – that have a bigger impact on people than just text.

It’s harder for AI systems to understand images compared with text. For example, it’s easier to track posts that say “Ukrainians are Nazis” than it is to find and understand fake images showing Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols. But these kinds of images are becoming more common. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, a meme is worth a thousand tweets.

Our team of computer and social scientists has tackled the challenge of interpreting image content by combining artificial intelligence methods with human subject matter experts to study how visual social media posts change in high-risk situations. Our research shows that these changes in social media posts, especially those with images, serve as strong indicators of coming mass violence.

Surge of memes

Our recent analysis found that in the two weeks leading up to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine there was a nearly 9,000% increase in the number of posts and a more than 5,000% increase in manipulated images from Russian milbloggers. Milbloggers are bloggers who focus on current military conflicts.

These huge increases show how intense Russia’s online propaganda campaign was and how it used social media to influence people’s opinions and justify the invasion.

This also shows the need to better monitor and analyze visual content on social media. To conduct our analysis, we collected the entire history of posts and images from the accounts of 989 Russian milbloggers on the messaging app Telegram. This includes nearly 6 million posts and over 3 million images. Each post and image was time-stamped and categorized to facilitate detailed analysis.

Media forensics

We had previously developed a suite of AI tools capable of detecting image alterations and manipulations. For instance, one detected image shows a pro-Russian meme mocking anti-Putin journalist and former Russian soldier Arkady Babchenko, whose death was faked by Ukrainian security services to expose an assassination plot against him.

The meme features the language “gamers don’t die, they respawn,” alluding to video game characters who return to life after dying. This makes light of Babchenko’s predicament and illustrates the use of manipulated images to convey political messages and influence public opinion.

This is just one example out of millions of images that were strategically manipulated to promote various narratives. Our statistical analysis revealed a massive increase in both the number of images and the extent of their manipulations prior to the invasion.

Political context is critical

Although these AI systems are very good at finding fakes, they are incapable of understanding the images’ political contexts. It is therefore critical that AI scientists work closely with social scientists in order to properly interpret these findings.

Our AI systems also categorized images by similarity, which then allowed subject experts to further analyze image clusters based on their narrative content and culturally and politically specific meanings. This is impossible to do at a large scale without AI support.

For example, a fake image of French president Emmanuel Macron with Ukrainian governor Vitalii Kim may be meaningless to an AI scientist. But to political scientists the image appears to laud Ukrainians’ outsize courage in contrast to foreign leaders who have appeared to be afraid of Russian nuclear threats. The goal was to reinforce Ukrainian doubts about their European allies.

image of of two men, one seated
This manipulated image combines French president Emmanuel Macron with Ukranian governor Vitalii Kim. It requires the expertise of political scientists to interpret the creator’s pro-Russian meaning.
William Theisen et al.

Meme warfare

The shift to visual media in recent years brings a new type of data that researchers haven’t yet studied much in detail.

Looking at images can help researchers understand how adversaries frame each other and how this can lead to political conflict. By studying visual content, researchers can see how stories and ideas are spread, which helps us understand the psychological and social factors involved.

This is especially important for finding more advanced and subtle ways people are influenced. Projects like this also can contribute to improving early warning efforts and reduce the risks of violence and instability.The Conversation

Tim Weninger, Collegiate Proessor of Engineering, University of Notre Dame and Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More

The post Study shows surge of imagery and fakes can precede international and political violence appeared first on theconversation.com

Continue Reading

The Conversation

Colors are objective, according to two philosophers − even though the blue you see doesn’t match what I see

Published

on

theconversation.com – Elay Shech, Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University – 2025-04-25 07:55:00

What appear to be blue and green spirals are actually the same color.
Akiyoshi Kitaoka

Elay Shech, Auburn University and Michael Watkins, Auburn University

Is your green my green? Probably not. What appears as pure green to me will likely look a bit yellowish or blueish to you. This is because visual systems vary from person to person. Moreover, an object’s color may appear differently against different backgrounds or under different lighting.

These facts might naturally lead you to think that colors are subjective. That, unlike features such as length and temperature, colors are not objective features. Either nothing has a true color, or colors are relative to observers and their viewing conditions.

But perceptual variation has misled you. We are philosophers who study colors, objectivity and science, and we argue in our book “The Metaphysics of Colors” that colors are as objective as length and temperature.

Perceptual variation

There is a surprising amount of variation in how people perceive the world. If you offer a group of people a spectrum of color chips ranging from chartreuse to purple and asked them to pick the unique green chip – the chip with no yellow or blue in it – their choices would vary considerably. Indeed, there wouldn’t be a single chip that most observers would agree is unique green.

Generally, an object’s background can result in dramatic changes in how you perceive its colors. If you place a gray object against a lighter background, it will appear darker than if you place it against a darker background. This variation in perception is perhaps most striking when viewing an object under different lighting, where a red apple could look green or blue.

Of course, that you experience something differently does not prove that what is experienced is not objective. Water that feels cold to one person may not feel cold to another. And although we do not know who is feeling the water “correctly,” or whether that question even makes sense, we can know the temperature of the water and presume that this temperature is independent of your experience.

Similarly, that you can change the appearance of something’s color is not the same as changing its color. You can make an apple look green or blue, but that is not evidence that the apple is not red.

Apple under a gradient of red to blue light
Under different lighting conditions, objects take on different colors.
Gyozo Vaczi/iStock via Getty Images Plus

For comparison, the Moon appears larger when it’s on the horizon than when it appears near its zenith. But the size of the Moon has not changed, only its appearance. Hence, that the appearance of an object’s color or size varies is, by itself, no reason to think that its color and size are not objective features of the object. In other words, the properties of an object are independent of how they appear to you.

That said, given that there is so much variation in how objects appear, how do you determine what color something actually is? Is there a way to determine the color of something despite the many different experiences you might have of it?

Matching colors

Perhaps determining the color of something is to determine whether it is red or blue. But we suggest a different approach. Notice that squares that appear to be the same shade of pink against different backgrounds look different against the same background.

Green, purple and orange squares with smaller squares in shades of pink placed at their centers and at the bottom of the image
The smaller squares may appear to be the same color, but if you compare them with the strip of squares at the bottom, they’re actually different shades.
Shobdohin/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

It’s easy to assume that to prove colors are objective would require knowing which observers, lighting conditions and backgrounds are the best, or “normal.” But determining the right observers and viewing conditions is not required for determining the very specific color of an object, regardless of its name. And it is not required to determine whether two objects have the same color.

To determine whether two objects have the same color, an observer would need to view the objects side by side against the same background and under various lighting conditions. If you painted part of a room and find that you don’t have enough paint, for instance, finding a match might be very tricky. A color match requires that no observer under any lighting condition will see a difference between the new paint and the old.

YouTube video
Is the dress yellow and white or black and blue?

That two people can determine whether two objects have the same color even if they don’t agree on exactly what that color is – just as a pool of water can have a particular temperature without feeling the same to me and you – seems like compelling evidence to us that colors are objective features of our world.

Colors, science and indispensability

Everyday interactions with colors – such as matching paint samples, determining whether your shirt and pants clash, and even your ability to interpret works of art – are hard to explain if colors are not objective features of objects. But if you turn to science and look at the many ways that researchers think about colors, it becomes harder still.

For example, in the field of color science, scientific laws are used to explain how objects and light affect perception and the colors of other objects. Such laws, for instance, predict what happens when you mix colored pigments, when you view contrasting colors simultaneously or successively, and when you look at colored objects in various lighting conditions.

The philosophers Hilary Putnam and Willard van Orman Quine made famous what is known as the indispensability argument. The basic idea is that if something is indispensable to science, then it must be real and objective – otherwise, science wouldn’t work as well as it does.

For example, you may wonder whether unobservable entities such as electrons and electromagnetic fields really exist. But, so the argument goes, the best scientific explanations assume the existence of such entities and so they must exist. Similarly, because mathematics is indispensable to contemporary science, some philosophers argue that this means mathematical objects are objective and exist independently of a person’s mind.

Blue damselfish, seeming iridescent against a black background
The color of an animal can exert evolutionary pressure.
Paul Starosta/Stone via Getty Images

Likewise, we suggest that color plays an indispensable role in evolutionary biology. For example, researchers have argued that aposematism – the use of colors to signal a warning for predators – also benefits an animal’s ability to gather resources. Here, an animal’s coloration works directly to expand its food-gathering niche insofar as it informs potential predators that the animal is poisonous or venomous.

In fact, animals can exploit the fact that the same color pattern can be perceived differently by different perceivers. For instance, some damselfish have ultraviolet face patterns that help them be recognized by other members of their species and communicate with potential mates while remaining largely hidden to predators unable to perceive ultraviolet colors.

In sum, our ability to determine whether objects are colored the same or differently and the indispensable roles they play in science suggest that colors are as real and objective as length and temperature.The Conversation

Elay Shech, Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University and Michael Watkins, Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More

The post Colors are objective, according to two philosophers − even though the blue you see doesn’t match what I see appeared first on theconversation.com

Continue Reading

The Conversation

‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ − an astronomer explains how much evidence scientists need to claim discoveries like extraterrestrial life

Published

on

theconversation.com – Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona – 2025-04-25 07:54:00

The universe is filled with countless galaxies, stars and planets. Astronomers may find life one day, but they will need extraordinary proof.
ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi

Chris Impey, University of Arizona

The detection of life beyond Earth would be one of the most profound discoveries in the history of science. The Milky Way galaxy alone hosts hundreds of millions of potentially habitable planets. Astronomers are using powerful space telescopes to look for molecular indicators of biology in the atmospheres of the most Earth-like of these planets.

But so far, no solid evidence of life has ever been found beyond the Earth. A paper published in April 2025 claimed to detect a signature of life in the atmosphere of the planet K2-18b. And while this discovery is intriguing, most astronomers – including the paper’s authors – aren’t ready to claim that it means extraterrestrial life exists. A detection of life would be a remarkable development.

The astronomer Carl Sagan used the phrase, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” in regard to searching for alien life. It conveys the idea that there should be a high bar for evidence to support a remarkable claim.

I’m an astronomer who has written a book about astrobiology. Over my career, I’ve seen some compelling scientific discoveries. But to reach this threshold of finding life beyond Earth, a result needs to fit several important criteria.

When is a result important and reliable?

There are three criteria for a scientific result to represent a true discovery and not be subject to uncertainty and doubt. How does the claim of life on K2-18b measure up?

First, the experiment needs to measure a meaningful and important quantity. Researchers observed K2-18b’s atmosphere with the James Webb Space Telescope and saw a spectral feature that they identified as dimethyl sulfide.

On Earth, dimethyl sulfide is associated with biology, in particular bacteria and plankton in the oceans. However, it can also arise by other means, so this single molecule is not conclusive proof of life.

Second, the detection needs to be strong. Every detector has some noise from the random motion of electrons. The signal should be strong enough to have a low probability of arising by chance from this noise.

The K2-18b detection has a significance of 3-sigma, which means it has a 0.3% probability of arising by chance.

That sounds low, but most scientists would consider that a weak detection. There are many molecules that could create a feature in the same spectral range.

The “gold standard” for scientific detection is 5-sigma, which means the probability of the finding happening by chance is less than 0.00006%. For example, physicists at CERN gathered data patiently for two years until they had a 5-sigma detection of the Higgs boson particle, leading to a Nobel Prize one year later in 2013.

YouTube video
The announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson took decades from the time Peter Higgs first predicted the existence of the particle. Scientists, such as Joe Incandela shown here, waited until they’d reached that 5-sigma level to say, ‘I think we have it.’

Third, a result needs to be repeatable. Results are considered reliable when they’ve been repeated – ideally corroborated by other investigators or confirmed using a different instrument. For K2-18b, this might mean detecting other molecules that indicate biology, such as oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere. Without more and better data, most researchers are viewing the claim of life on K2-18b with skepticism.

Claims of life on Mars

In the past, some scientists have claimed to have found life much closer to home, on the planet Mars.

Over a century ago, retired Boston merchant turned astronomer Percival Lowell claimed that linear features he saw on the surface of Mars were canals, constructed by a dying civilization to transport water from the poles to the equator. Artificial waterways on Mars would certainly have been a major discovery, but this example failed the other two criteria: strong evidence and repeatability.

Lowell was misled by his visual observations, and he was engaging in wishful thinking. No other astronomers could confirm his findings.

An image of Mars in space
Mars, as taken by the OSIRIS instrument on the ESA Rosetta spacecraft during its February 2007 flyby of the planet and adjusted to show color.
ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA, CC BY-SA

In 1996, NASA held a press conference where a team of scientists presented evidence for biology in the Martian meteorite ALH 84001. Their evidence included an evocative image that seemed to show microfossils in the meteorite.

However, scientists have come up with explanations for the meteorite’s unusual features that do not involve biology. That extraordinary claim has dissipated.

More recently, astronomers detected low levels of methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Like dimethyl sulfide and oxygen, methane on Earth is made primarily – but not exclusively – by life. Different spacecraft and rovers on the Martian surface have returned conflicting results, where a detection with one spacecraft was not confirmed by another.

The low level and variability of methane on Mars is still a mystery. And in the absence of definitive evidence that this very low level of methane has a biological origin, nobody is claiming definitive evidence of life on Mars.

Claims of advanced civilizations

Detecting microbial life on Mars or an exoplanet would be dramatic, but the discovery of extraterrestrial civilizations would be truly spectacular.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, has been underway for 75 years. No messages have ever been received, but in 1977 a radio telescope in Ohio detected a strong signal that lasted only for a minute.

This signal was so unusual that an astronomer working at the telescope wrote “Wow!” on the printout, giving the signal its name. Unfortunately, nothing like it has since been detected from that region of the sky, so the Wow! Signal fails the test of repeatability.

An illustration of a long, thin rock flying through space.
‘Oumuamua is the first object passing through the solar system that astronomers have identified as having interstellar origins.
European Southern Observatory/M. Kornmesser

In 2017, a rocky, cigar-shaped object called ‘Oumuamua was the first known interstellar object to visit the solar system. ‘Oumuamua’s strange shape and trajectory led Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb to argue that it was an alien artifact. However, the object has already left the solar system, so there’s no chance for astronomers to observe it again. And some researchers have gathered evidence suggesting that it’s just a comet.

While many scientists think we aren’t alone, given the enormous amount of habitable real estate beyond Earth, no detection has cleared the threshold enunciated by Carl Sagan.

Claims about the universe

These same criteria apply to research about the entire universe. One particular concern in cosmology is the fact that, unlike the case of planets, there is only one universe to study.

A cautionary tale comes from attempts to show that the universe went through a period of extremely rapid expansion a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Cosmologists call this event inflation, and it is invoked to explain why the universe is now smooth and flat.

In 2014, astronomers claimed to have found evidence for inflation in a subtle signal from microwaves left over after the Big Bang. Within a year, however, the team retracted the result because the signal had a mundane explanation: They had confused dust in our galaxy with a signature of inflation.

On the other hand, the discovery of the universe’s acceleration shows the success of the scientific method. In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble found that the universe was expanding. Then, in 1998, evidence emerged that this cosmic expansion is accelerating. Physicists were startled by this result.

Two research groups used supernovae to separately trace the expansion. In a friendly rivalry, they used different sets of supernovae but got the same result. Independent corroboration increased their confidence that the universe was accelerating. They called the force behind this accelerating expansion dark energy and received a Nobel Prize in 2011 for its discovery.

On scales large and small, astronomers try to set a high bar of evidence before claiming a discovery.The Conversation

Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More

The post ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ − an astronomer explains how much evidence scientists need to claim discoveries like extraterrestrial life appeared first on theconversation.com

Continue Reading

Trending