The prestigious international journal @Nature has expanded its scope beyond science and is now publishing papers in the field of Biblical archaeology. A paper published today asks the question "Did God smite the sinners of Sodom with an #asteroid?" nature.com/articles/s4159…
I just skimmed through the paper and see that my model of asteroid airbursts is cited as the mechanism by which God smote this evil city. Here's a screenshot of the paper's Figure 53, which shows a cross-section of a fire-and-brimstone event I simulated.
It must sound like I'm making this up, especially if you recall my April Fool's joke claiming that the Alabama legislature proclaimed that the value of pi is exactly 3 (see snopes.com/fact-check/ala…). But this is Biblical archeology, not Biblical math, & so within @Nature's scope.
Lest you think I'm joking again, the next tweets are direct quotes from this peer-reviewed paper in a section entitled, "Potential written record of destruction" (at this juncture I have to admit that I'm puzzled as to why the first citation is not to the book of Genesis).
"There is an ongoing debate as to whether Tall el-Hammam could be the biblical city of Sodom (Silvia2 and references therein), but this issue is beyond the scope of this investigation. Questions about the potential existence, age, and location of Sodom are not directly related.."
"..to the fundamental question addressed in this investigation as to what processes produced high-temperature materials at Tall el-Hammam during the MBA. Nevertheless, we consider whether oral traditions about the destruction of this urban city by a cosmic object.."
"..might be the source of the written version of Sodom in Genesis. We also consider whether the details recounted in Genesis are a reasonable match for the known details of a cosmic impact event."
What, you might ask, is the "Silvia2" citation? It is:
Silvia, P. J. The Middle Bronze Age civilization-ending destruction of the Middle Ghor. Ph.D. thesis, Trinity Southwest University (2015).
UNM's tech library doesn't have it, but it can be purchased from TSU for $59.95.
The author, Philip J. Silvia, is a professor at Trinity Southwest University. Here's a link, in case you want to buy a copy of reference 2 of today's @Nature paper.
Here's a quote from the University's description of ref 2:
"Although it was not the author’s purpose in presenting this data to defend the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain.."
".. the evidence, analyses and conclusions presented in this volume clearly support the claim of Dr. Steven Collins that Tall el-Hammam is Sodom."
Ok but wait. Who is Dr. Steven Collins?
Dr. Collins is another professor at Trinity Southwest University and is heavily cited by this paper (6 out of the first 7 citations are to Collins' papers, the only exception being Silvia2).
Let's take a look at Collins1.
Collins, S., Kobs, C. M. & Luddeni, M. C. The Tall al-Hammam Excavations, Volume 1: An Introduction to Tall al-Hammam: Seven Seasons (2005–2011) of Ceramics and Eight Seasons (2005–2012) of Artifacts from Tall al-Hammam. (Penn State Press, 2015).
I don't think UNM's library carries that one either. Searching online turns it up! It's only $89.50 on Amazon.
Prof. Collins has written some other interesting books.
So has Prof. Silvia.
Not too many people know this, but the Campus of Trinity Southwest University is right here in Albuquerque, only 15 minutes from my house. It's in a strip mall, conveniently located between a Chinese takeout place and a nail salon.
Here's a screenshot of the Trinity Southwest University Campus from Google Maps. I envy the students who are so close to Twisters, a local chain, which has great green chile cheeseburgers (fun fact, one Twisters location was used as Pollos Hermanos in Breaking Bad).
Since the TSU campus is only 15 minutes from my house, I thought maybe I could look at those books in the University's library. Unfortunately the door was locked, even on a weekday afternoon. No students in sight. Maybe a religious holiday or something?
I did get a few photos of the entrance to the university's campus today.
This work appears to be based on research led by Professors Silvia and Collins, who coauthored a very similar abstract 3 years ago. It now has many more authors, but inexplicably Prof. Silvia is last and Prof. Collins isn't a coauthor. researchgate.net/publication/32…
This thread is just for context. I haven't even read the paper yet! I will try to say more tomorrow, after I've read it.
Postscript" @alexwitze tweeted, "The paper is in the journal Scientific Reports, not Nature." I apologize for my mistake & if I could edit tweets I would.
Today I'm going to talk about Example #8 in Allen West's formal "Explanation of Changes in Corrected Paper" (the controversial Bunch et al Sodom & Gomorrah was a comet airburst paper). The beginning of the discussion is here:
Here's the link to West's "Explanation" which invokes the word "cosmetic" 12 times. Perhaps the Comet Research Group needs to change the name of its blog to "Cosmetic Tusk" since it seems to focus on cosmetic appearances at the expense of science.
"For cosmetic reasons in Fig. 15b, we used a cloning tool to remove the partially visible N arrow and replaced it with a NE arrow."
In the published version the NE arrow pointed to the left of north and that would have been obvious if the N arrow hadn't been photoshopped out.
I'm starting a new thread to discuss the Comet Research Group's explanation of their corrections to the Bunch et al (2021) Sodom & Gomorrah airburst paper, which used inappropriately modified (photoshopped) field photos. The first thread starts here:
"Example #3. The annotated Figure 44c of the skeleton (left panel below) was provided by official photographers of the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project (TeHEP). It is listed below as the 'uncropped original,' because an unannotated original is not available."
Why were the authors of Bunch et al (2021) unable to get an original copy of this image, given that one of the coauthors is Director of Scientific Analysis and Field Supervisor at the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project (TeHEP), when I was able to get a copy?
The Comet Research Group has just released, through its Cosmic Tusk blog, an extended explanation for the manipulated images in the Bunch et al (2021) Sodom paper. I would like to give all my science friends a chance to analyze & comment on it here. cosmictusk.com/wp-content/upl…
According to the CRG's blogger & spokesman, "In an opaque request, elements of the mob petitioned Science Reports, claiming the photographs in the publication were fraudulent. The impact scientists immediately responded to the nuisance claim carefully and appropriately."
The request wasn't made by a "mob". It was made by 2021 Maddox Prize winning image forensics expert and scientific integrity advocate Elisabeth Bik, @microbiomdigest, in PubPeer. It was a series of requests, starting in September (the week after the paper was published).
This weekend marks 5 months since publication of a deeply flawed paper claiming that the biblical city of Sodom was destroyed by a Tunguska sized airburst. It's under consideration for retraction due to inappropriate image tampering. Here's a chronology. nature.com/articles/s4159…
Sept. 20, 2021:
Bunch et al (2021) was published by @SciReports. It was immediately met by harsh criticism from archaeologists, airburst experts, radiocarbon dating experts & other scientists.
Sept. 29, 2021:
Image forensics expert & scientific integrity advocate E. Bik (@microbiomdigest) discovered evidence for photoshopping (cloning) of one of the 18 digital photographs of the excavation. She immediately published her finding in PubPeer.
Whenever I look at Bunch et al #Sodom#airburst paper I find more problems. I already documented the authors’ profound misunderstanding of airbursts (see link). Now I see that they get much of their information about #Tunguska from creationist literature.
In their subsection entitled “Comparison to Tunguska cosmic airburst” they make several false assertions. In re-reading it today, another claim jumped out at me: “The airburst generated a pressure wave that toppled or snapped >80 million trees, some up to 1-m in diameter..”
I wasn’t aware that there were any trees a meter in diameter that had been toppled. I didn’t see any meter-wide trees when I visited explored the Siberian taiga in the blast zone 13 years ago. None of the surviving trees we cored were that big.
Here's an aerial photograph of the trees there were blown over by the Tunguska blast. It was taken about 30 years after the 1908 event & was used with other data by Giuseppe Longo to create a map of direction of fallen trees. You can see there is some variation in alignment.
In a strong blast wave, there is turbulence & chaotic flow. Terrain influences the direction & intensity too. Not everything that blows down is parallel. It looks to my eye as if, even in this small area, the tree alignment varies by up to 10°.
Researchers can survey a blast zone like Tunguska to create a map of debris directing to infer wind vectors by statistically averaging local variation. Longo did that for his Tunguska map. But not everything lines up perfectly because the real world is noisy.