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Adrian Morgan Says: [Word Press -comments on the article linked to above.]
June 26th, 2009 at 6:20 pm

I’m confused. Surely “passing through galactic plane” and “passing between spiral arms” are completely different things, yet this article seems to refer to them interchangeably.

Now I’m not terribly sure of this myself, but my thinking here is that passing through the Galactic plane means rising above and below from the “Galactic equator” which is in a direct line from the “equator” of the Galactic bulge – (Hmm.. Not sure if that makes it clearer …?)

Anyway, I think the spiral arms are also in the midplane of the galaxy but at intervals ie. you have the Galactic plane which is :

Spiral arm-> inter-spiral medium (where the Sun is now) ->Spiral arm -> another interspiral medium -> spiral arm -> etc ..

Given that the number of spiral arms is cited as relevant, it appears to me that this article is really about the cycle of “passing between spiral arms”, and that the conflation between that and “passing through the plane” is an error. (Also note that according to Phil Plait in DFTS page 240, the “passing through galactic plane” cycle is 64 million years.)Could someone clarify these points, please?

Maybe. There does seem to be some ambiguity or potential confusion here.

Anyone else care to clarify this? I’m not sure I quite understand it myself.

….

Okay .. Just been there looking and can’t find it – yet – what’s the (sub)forum, username tag, & title please?

@ Coolstar 20 – yes that’s a great hard SF novel too.

In response to Cindy, it was definitely in the mid nineties. I don’t remember the exact year, but I distinctly remember reading about it and realising that some of my childhood astronomy books were out of date. I read about it in one of World Book Encyclopedia’s annual science supplements, which we received from 1994 through 1997.

“Crucially, [the tapes] could once and for all dispel 40 years of wild conspiracy theories.”

I don’t like the implication “wild conspiracy theories” . Why wild?? prove it. … I feel on each and every issue, a huge argument like above should occur before someone says it’s a “wild” theory. That is just a ploy to label people as kooky and violates every rule of logic in the book.

Okay first – wrong thread for this comment maybe?

Second – “wild ” to me just implies unlikely, far out , extraordinary, strange, improbable, etc .. & quite often gets applied to serious mainstream SF theories too.

For instance, Einstein’s Relativity and ?Somebody’s?* Quantum mechanics genuinely scientific theories could be (and have both been) described as wild and we don’t call Einstein and ?Whoever?* kooks because of the (accurate) strangeness / bizarreness or wildness.

Thirdly -and lastly, “wild” is an apt and accurate description for almost all coinspiracy “theories”.

Eg. To say the idea that the Earth is hollow, that Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a giant comet & played comic pinball withErath & Mars over recent millennia, that Zeta Reticulan lizard men are really the secret rulers of Earth, etc .. is just “wild” not to mention rather ludicrous and clearly wrong.

No offence intended but if something is wild why should it be called wild?

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* Insert the name of the Quantum Mechanics founding scientist here. I forget who it was – Bohr maybe? Or Dirac? Or Schrodinger… ?