Software Development

It must be possible to show that the hypothesis is false. This doesn't mean that it is false. But that if evidence is gathered, it should be possible for that data to show the hypothesis false. Some theories are not falsifiable and enter the realm of dubious logic. We won't mention those here and stick with the scientific method as it should be used.

Step 2 is testing the hypothesis by doing experimentation. You do not always need to have a way to prove the hypothesis as true. Often, simply having a method to demonstrate how the hypothesis is false is good enough. Over time, if no one is able to show it false, then it lends more and more credibility to the hypothesis assuming that experimentation is possible.

Step 3 is simply looking at the data to come at a conclusion which is the last step.

One thing to note is that the scientific method does not involve itself with the WHY of the hypothesis. At no point do we need to EXPLAIN WHY the hypothesis is true or not. The scientific method only concerns itself with BEING true or false rather than the WHY of that result. In fact, science rarely explain why things happen. Only that they do. Given enough information, inferences can be made as to gain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms, but that is another process all together.

As I said before, I will use a theory (not known whether it is true or false) to demonstrate how the scientific method should work. To make the point even clearer, I will take a theory that a great many people dismiss out of hand. It's the Growing Earth theory being pushed by Neal Adams, a comic book artist. If you click on the Growing Earth theory link, you will find plenty of videos made by Neal that more than explains what it entails.

I like this theory a lot, not because I necessarily believe it, but because it requires one to open their mind. For anyone thinking that this is preposterous, you are not alone. But what you may not know is that this was once the leading theory. Plate tectonics only came later and those ideas were in fact taken from what was called the Expanding Earth theory at the time. That's part of history and all we need concern ourselves is that the Expanding Earth theory gave way to plate tectonics because there was no adequate mechanism to explain how the Earth grew.

We'll come back to that last point in a moment. First, we'll go through how the scientific method should have been applied. The hypothesis that proponents of the Growing Earth theory put forth is that the current land mass all fit together, not just in the Atlantic, but also in the Pacific IF the Earth was smaller.

Is it possible to prove false? Sure, just put the land mass on a smaller globe and see for yourself. It does in fact match up, but there are areas that I personally have problems with. Neal is opposed to these objections, so I set about to program something that would retrace the Earth back in time according to the age of the seafloor. No seafloor is more than 180 million years old. In fact, about half the seafloor was created in the last 60 million years.

And this brings us to the programming and observation part. I wanted to get a better grasp as to what kind of changes were happening. I wanted to use ONLY facts that were accepted by both sides. I started off by making a new map that would show the seafloor age in 10 million year increments. Here is a map produced by the NOAA. There are larger versions here. These are made with the 2008 data. A few years ago when I was working on this, I only had the 1998 images and they were hideous. Even the new ones don't give you much info. You cannot tell where or how much of the seafloor crust has been created when. So I created a better map with Neal Adams' assistance.

I needed to get my hands on the raw data. One would think that the NOAA would have it, but it's actually the University of Sydney (Australia) that has it. Their data was a mess in parts. Some info was complete garbage. They have 0 degrees longitude as well as 360 degrees. It'd be fine if the data matched, but it did not. This garbage appears quite clearly on the map I produced as I put 0 degrees right in the middle of the map so that Canada was on the left and Europe and Asia on the right. (These problems have been fixed with the 2008 dataset.)

Here is the map I produced (from the raw data) that I sent to Neal on June 28, 2007.

(Click on image for 2MB version)



This is based on the 1998 data. As a curiosity, the reader may look at these two PDF files (PDF1 and PDF2). If the map on the top right of the first PDF looks familiar, that's no coincidence (look closely at the prime meridian). I only found out about it today but I made those maps for Neal and he's free to use them as he wants. The PDF's are from an article in the Japan Times November 22, 2009.

Here are two more graphs that I sent Neal when I wanted to better chart the rate of growth of the seafloor.

The first one is for each million years. And the second one is for every 10 million years. The numbers at the bottom are off by 1. So 0 on the first chart is actually 1 million years ago. And 0 on the second chart is actually 10 million years ago.

The percentages are in terms of the current size of the Earth.

(Click on images for larger versions)





The spike at 130 million years is when the arctic broke apart. It likely was breaking apart much sooner, but the data from that region is not clear.

What we can see is that the seafloor is being produced at an exponential rate except for the last 30 million years where it has flattened off.

As an indication of just how much seafloor crust is being produced, here is one interesting bit of trivia.

Africa: 30,221,532 km² or 11,668,545 mi².

Seafloor production:


Age......Perc..km².........mi²
00-10MY: 5.52% 28160719.65 10872914.69
10-20MY: 5.62% 28661612.19 11066310.38
20-30MY: 5.79% 29522190.99 11398581.71

Seafloor production is 2 million km² short of being equal to all of Africa and came close to matching it 20-30 million years ago. So in 10 million years, the Earth has produced enough seafloor crust to almost match the area of Africa. And it did this not once, but three times for the last 30 million years. A total of 17% of the Earth's surface (albeit underwater) was not there 30 million years ago. That's nearly three Africa's created in that time.

The next stage that I wanted to accomplish was going 3D and remove layer by layer the seafloor crust according to its age and make the Earth smaller going backwards in time. This never happened. While I could manually fit the continents together quite nicely for the most part, some areas were troublesome. Besides, I wanted the software to do it for me so as to remove any bias. The biggest problem was re-adjusting the data to fit on a smaller globe. I know what parts are to be removed and hence the new size of the Earth. But I could not find an adequate algorithm to put the different sections of the Earth back together again.

I did find one algorithm that showed some promise, but I lost my hard drive soon after. I never went back. The only thing I really want back is a new map I made with the new 2008 data. The rest isn't necessary anymore since none of it worked. As for the code to produce the map, I can always code it up again. I may be able to retrieve some of it if I cared to do so.

If I had been successful in creating this program, not only would it have looked awesome, but it would show what a smaller globe would have looked like and we would be able to see instantly if the continents and land masses would have been distorted beyond recognition or if they actually fit nicely together. Two parts I really want to look at is Australia and Madagascar. From the maps I've produced, it appears they would go in different locations than what Neal has suggested. Let's just say that Neal was not open to this idea.

I will likely try again if I get some new ideas. The shearing is what I was tackling and I may have an answer to be tried at a future date. For now, I find it interesting that the decision to accept or reject a theory is not based on the scientific method, but rather as to the mechanism behind it.

As history has recorded, the Expanding Earth theory could not adequately explain why or how the Earth would grow. Since this was the reason that the Expanding Earth theory was left behind, a mechanism had to be found for the Plate Tectonics theory. This has changed so many times that it's difficult to keep up. I believe the most recent incarnation is the conveyor belt analogy through convection. So much was the importance drawn onto the mechanism that Neal Adams likewise created his own explanation for how the Earth grows. I personally think this was a mistake as this gives people an angle of attack that is not really part of the scientific method. In fact, the mechanism is actually the ONLY angle of attack on the Growing Earth theory since it actually explains for more details than plate tectonics could ever hope. I want to mention that I haven't made up my mind. While I'm not leaning toward Growing Earth, I am moving away from plate tectonics.

Neal has suffered a great deal of ridicule and criticism for his ideas. All because the very idea is ridiculous and the mechanism can't be adequately explained for the scientists to be comfortable with it. Creation of matter would be a difficult pill to swallow indeed. But matter was created at one point (no pun intended). We're all here as proof of that. Do we dismiss the idea that matter could still be created right now?

As to the conclusion of the hypothesis, what would it mean if the continental crust fits together on all sides on a smaller globe? Does it mean that the Earth is growing? Is there another explanation? Is it coincidence?

I'm not a geologist or any of that. I just like programming. And this idea was so different that I was drawn to it immediately. Different is where you find great ideas, usually from places you would not expect. I learned a great deal during the process too. I learned about great circle calculations. I learned about seafloor data. I learned techniques on how to process massive amounts of information with relatively little RAM. And I learned that speaking about this at all will get you called names. I'm talking about it now, two years later, partly because there are more people looking into it and partly because I was hoping to have completed a working version of my program by now.

For the curious, the reasons I'm moving away from plate tectonics isn't because subduction has never been proven (a little known fact) or that Pangea ping ponging back and forth takes a lot of faith or anything like that. For me, it was purely mathematics. Well, one is geometry and the other is a progression.

The first problem is Antarctica. We know with 100% certainty that there is no subduction at all at Antarctica. If this continues, the Earth will be all sea except for Antarctica and whatever rest of the current land mass is left at the North Pole. Unless of course if the mid-ocean ridge surrounding Antarctica suddenly ceases to produce new seafloor. This could happen and other ridges have gone "dead". But even the future of the Earth in such a scenario is not my problem. No, what bothers me is that there needs to be subduction going on around the bottom tip of Africa and on the bottom of Australia and possibly also at the bottom of South America to swallow up the seafloor created by the rift surrounding Antarctica. This is NOT happening at all. We can see that the age of the seafloor extends out for the same duration on both sides of the ridge. This means no subduction under Africa and no subduction under Australia.

So why is all this important? Because this is dealing with North/South expansion. If there's no subduction at the South of the planet, then it must happen elsewhere. But it isn't. The North pole is actually spreading apart as well.

While the claim can theoretically be made that subduction exists East/West in the Pacific and in the Atlantic, this claim cannot be made North/South because of Antarctica. You cannot subduct a disc toward a central point without upheaval. And because the other side of the ridge is just as old, we know no subduction has ever happened in this area in either North or South direction.

The other problem has to do with the exponential rate at which the seafloor is being produced. If we posit that the Earth has always been about the same size, then one could say the expansion is somewhat linear. Either way, the seafloor production rate is increasing. In the context of plate tectonics, this makes no sense. But it does fit perfectly with a Growing Earth. Not that I'm convinced, but plate tectonics does nothing to predict this feature. As said earlier, the Earth is now producing the equivalent area of Africa every 10 million years. That's a lot of seafloor to be subducting.

What I like is consistency. If it's happened before, it should be happing now. Plate tectonics does not fit that criteria because at different points in Earth's history, something radical had to have happened for it to produce the Earth we have to day. What's more, we get quotes like this one from Wikipedia.

This contradicts the scientific consensus plate tectonics theory by stating that significant destructive plate boundaries do not exist.

If we go to the scientific consensus page, we get this golden quote.

Scientific consensus is the collective judgement, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity. Scientific consensus is not by itself a scientific argument, and it is not part of the scientific method. Nevertheless, consensus may be based on both scientific arguments and the scientific method.

I like how it says it's not part of the scientific method, but can be based on it. How does that work exactly? Realistically, scientific consensus is science via the American Idol method where each scientist gets a vote and whichever sides comes out on top wins. Over time, the winner can and does change.

If one will note, the real important point is that "destructive plate boundaries" (otherwise known as subduction) has achieved scientific consensus. In English, that says it has not proven.

I want to end this by saying that the fact that an idea is different should not be qualification for dismissal even in the face of scientific consensus. It should especially not be enough to sidestep proper methods used to determine if something is true or not. In fact, personal opinions of scientific aesthetics should not be brought up at all. The thought of using the mechanism as a point of attack is strange when there is so much we don't know. We don't know why or how gravity works, yet there it is. Don't play American Idol with your conclusions lest one becomes a scientist with Dade Murphy mentality. Today, there seems to be more and more science that operates with his point of view exemplified by a quotation of his.

Mess with the best, die like the rest.

Update:

I coded up another program to create maps. Here is the new map with the 2008 data.

Click on the image to get larger version (2MB 3600x1800).