Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Is This The Clearest Picture Of Space Ever Taken?

Of all the things they have to argue about, I would think this would be the last of it.

Nature has a rather amusing (at least, it is for me, but probably not for the participants) of the minor controversy surrounding what has been claimed to be the clearest pictures taken of objects in space (link may be open for free only for a limited time). A group at CalTech and Cambridge claims to have taken the clearest picture ever using a ground-based observation and 50,000 cheaper than the Hubble telescope. Of course, the Hubble people aren't taking this lying down and have fired back!

I think that whenever something like this occurs, people tend to forget the REASON for doing these things. Rather, they are arguing the means, rather than figuring out how the get to the ends. Can any of these pictures actually give us the information we need? Getting a good resolution and better pictures are only the means to being able to give us information to better our understanding. Can any of these pictures do that, and do that better than the other? That is what should have been pointed out and discussed, not who has the "clearest" picture.

Zz.

1 comment:

Vyaas said...

Clear media hype....
Competition in science without acknowledging the other party's work can lead to snubs like this....