[heads]

Are there any examples of this kind of assertion turning out to be incorrect? I’m happy to be told this kind of libation analysis is (ahem) rock solid but it’s not easy to tell from the article.

My understanding of the article and the plot is that the authors modelled how the moon ought to wobble if it has an ocean versus it does not have an ocean, and if it did then how does it wobble with either a thick crust or thin crust on top. The actual, observed wobbling is in the “has an ocean” part of the plot therefore, assuming the model is correct and there isn’t some other cause of wobble, it probably has an ocean. This is the only evidence so far though — other than this data there is “no hint of an ocean underneath”.

It would also wobble if it had a moon-mouse dance party at each pole. Modelling for different sized discos and different tempo dance music, we see that the observed wobbling is consistent with 4 billion mouse / 185bpm portion of the plot.

I could also plot the hypothesised size of the kraken mouth which swallows ships as they vanish over the Earth’s horizon. The plot shows the rates at which the ship sinks from view based on kraken mouth size. The observed sink rate is consistent with a 12m wide kraken mouth which is a cool result except that ships sink over the horizon because the Earth is round. There are no krakens!

[card_zero]

OK, but there are oceans, on moons. Therefore, ocean.

[andrewflnr]

Yeah, the closer analogy would be if multi-kilometer krakens were already a documented phenomenon.

[jl6]

> Are there any examples of this kind of assertion turning out to be incorrect?

Yes - for example, Ptolemaic epicycles. A model that explained the observed motion, but turned out not to be reality based.

[lloeki]

Were they incorrect? Seems like they were rather needlessly complex because of the earth-bound parameters.

IOW if you take the simpler heliocentric motion equations and want to make your life miserable by changing the reference frame to be geocentric you'd land up on epicyclic equations.

So even though the math is borne out of a misguided anthropocentric cosmology it does matches reality to a crude but reasonable approximation, unlike a edge-of-disc kraken.

[jl6]

Depends what you mean by incorrect. If the goal is to predict planetary movement, then epicycles might be a useful tool, just like an ocean-bearing moon model might be useful for predicting the wobble of Mimas. But as an explanation of what’s really happening, centering the universe on Earth is not a lot better than positing that kraken.

[lloeki]

Incorrect as in the kraken doesn't exist. The celestial objects do, the equations are valid not just superficially from observation, but deeper as they do encode gravitational laws, if only in a very obscure way due to the reference frame.

A better kraken would be aether theories, whether luminiferous or mechanical gravitational, which survived all the way to the 19th century and mystified Lorentz and Maxwell (esp. the Mickelson experiment results), and even in the 20th initially by Einstein until he gave up on the idea in 1905.