h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thinking about this stuff can drive you nuts.

Trust me. I know.

Mathematical proof *is* of a different nature to scientific proof.

Unfortunately, as soon as we move from numbers to the real world, and try and do something practical with the maths, we're back to science and engineering. It may not be perfection, but it's the best we're going to get.

Proff, if there are no witnesses, there is no noise! It will produce all the pressure variations characteristic of a noise, but a noise can be best described as "that which is heard", and with no ears (or microphones) around, there is no "noise"...

(Semantics, dontya love 'em! )

Mathematical proofs require a faith in the existence of numbers just as religious proofs require a faith in the existence of a god or gods.
Neither is necessarily true, so the absoluteness of a proof derived from either method cannot be 100% guaranteed - just a probability.

I would guess that the most probable cause here was a comet impact, followed by human caused explosion, folowed by alien intervention and least likely being that the trees were all tired and fell down at the one time.

Assuming a set statistical chance of a given tree falling down at a particular moment, might the product of these chances for all the trees involved not possibly be of the same order of magnitude as the chjance of an alien space-ship finding an inhabited planet in a universe this vast, then exploding as soon as it arrived...?

True - I meant to add the unquantifiable "wrath of God against uninhabited forests" factor as well.

Look, a large lump of dirt hits the atmosphere at great speed.
The kinetic energy is equivalent to several Kilo/Megatons of TNT.
At some point something says "Enough" and the culmination of the forces and stresses involved a s**t load of energy is released, simple physics.
No Philosophising, no Ju Ju Flop, no wishful thinking.
Reality can be as much fun as dreaming.

Ice, perhaps, but it was unlikely to be dirt, unless you believe in the likelihood of a meteorite with the same chemical makeup as the local native soil... (No localised anomalous readings were found)

From what I remember Mathematical proofs involve very few
numbers. Numbers are a byproduct of Maths.
I think the proofs require a faith in logic.

I'm disappointed that nobody could be bothered to read and comment on the Tesla article I linked to earlier

Tesla was a genius, misguded, mad, but nevertheless, a bloody genius.
We have built several of his machines. The results are capital and amazing. But still within the realms of science, realty, and reason.
His experiments are only too well documented and filed on the web, in books and other literature. If he was such an innonvator, then governments both friendly and other, would have used his discoveries to their chosen ends. That has not happened.
So go on, build and replicate the stuff, you too could form 17 foot lightining tendrils in a wet car park.
But Tunguska? Nah! Bollocks! Otherwise loons like Duffy Duck of Libya, or whatever would be doing it.....
Grab the the 21st century, but not by Ju Ju Flop, or the Apron strings, inventing pseudo sciencfe is not going to solve anything.

PS. You should see the 6ft Tesla discharge in the livibg room!!!
And that can be worked out on a calcualtor!

When referring to "ju ju flop", are you saying you've read the article, or are you just assuming the content from my previous synopsis taken from a hazy memory of a different source?

I am a great beleiver in aliens visiting our planet, but am still inclined to beleive that it was a meteorite/asteroid that flattened Tunguska. Forget angles of tragectory, looking for fragments etc, large natural objects entering our thick atmosphere at many miles per second, will vaporise in an explosion above the earth, but still have atom bomb-like qualities - wiping out all below, in a circular spread.

Yup, but as mentioned above, any extraterrestrial object blowing up in such a fashion will leave a "layer" of its dust in the soil below. No anomolies have been detected in the Tunguska soil, despite many investigations, and the chances of a piece of rock (or ice - the ice found in comets isn't pure water, but rather an aggregation of water with all the dust and micro-meteorites it has hit on the way) from space having exactly the same chemical makeup as the soil at the point it exploded above are so small as to be on a par with the likelyhood of some intelligent being flying billions of miles without incident to crash just above a forest in the middle of nowhere.

Yes but the amounts of such dust will be very low density - too low to detect. I mean, a decent size comet wouldn't have more than say 1 ton of mud in the snowball which when it exploded in the atmosphere would have been very very diluted by our own atmosphere and spread over a large area.
Just because you can't detect the anomaly using current technology doesn't mean it isn't there...

But there is an anomaly at the K/T (cretatious/tertiary) boundry, where iridium is found in a thinlayer around the world. This is a very rare element on the earth and the concentration is big enough to be detected.

The K/T boundry anomaly is thought to come from a cometary impact off the Yucatan peninsular of Mexico. It's also thought that this is a reason for the dinosaur extinction (one of several competeing theories).

If the likeliest natural explanation is a comet, I guess whether people believe that explanation is possible depends what the composition of cometary material is.
I don't know enough to comment on what should/might be found in the case of a cometary impact, what has already been found, or how the various researcher's preconceptions may have affected their observations - see

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Cockpit/3240/conf98.htm

It seems people can cite evidence to support many theories, including several claims of unusual elemental traces, and glassy beads, in peat from the time of the explosion. Other abstracts claim that nothing of the sort has ever been found. I guess someone isn't being entirely honest.

How to separate the wheat from the chaff, I'm not sure (though I guess ignoring anything with reference to crop circles would be a good place to start)

Crop circles, Oh Dear, I was wondering when that one would Crop Up.....
Strange that to the best of my knowledge we do0 not get Rice Circles,
Rape Seed Circles, Sun Flower Circles, other plantation circles, just specific grain crop, right! More Ju Ju Flop!

Potholer, nice to hear from a rational being with a sense of humour, you are not alone!

Peet, I have been building and researching Tesla stuff since pre 1968.
I have produced some weird effects, fun effects, and some downright dangerous with some surprises. everything could always be explained rationaly, if not by myself then those who ether taught me or were just better at calculus, rationality or uderstanding of Physics and Teslas writings. But by George, I scared the sh.. out of myself many times!

I agree that the "pretty" circles are the result of human intervention, but I have also seen a pretty good explaination for "plain" circles of up to 15 feet diameter which appear spontaneously with no tracks leading in or out...

They are apparently caused by a mycelial growth similar to the well known "fairy ring" phenomenon - the growth radiates outwards from a central point in a 10-20 hour period, promoting rotting at the base of the corn stems. The corn is so densely packed that it remains standing for some time afterwards, until a swirl of wind causes it to collapse, much like a circle of dominoes. This can lead to a perfectly formed circle appearing in front of witnesses, with no visible cause.

Just because some more publicised occurences of a phenomena are manifest rubbish doesn't mean that there is no underlying phenomenon to be investigated...