Helen wrote:
The computer put out the results.
You still don't get it, Helen. The results were in accorance with its program, no? In any case, the authors failed to check the plausibility of those computer-generated results. They failed to check for the most basic errors. Any reasonable human looking at the scattered speed-of-light data and then seeing a claimed .99999999+ correlation coefficient would have immediately known that something was wrong, and would have NEVER published such a silly result. Setterfield failed to do so.
There was an apology issued later by Trevor Norman for the faulty programming that led to this.
That was a reasonable thing for Norman to do, but it doesn't get Setterfield off the hook. Just because a result is computer-generated is no reason that it must be believed. If it is entirely implausible, as was the Setterfield/Norman .99999999+ correlation coefficient, then a human author must see a red flag when presented with such a result. Setterfield's failure to realize that the .9999999+ correlation coefficient was garbage, an artifact of likely faulty progbramming, was inexcusable.
I put that apology somewhere on this creation/evolution forum for you at an earlier date.
I don't remember it, but it doesn't matter. It is true that Norman, as an experienced programmer, should have caught that error in output. (There couldn't have been that much output.)
Regardless of what Norman did, however, Setterfield read the .99999999+ correlation coefficient and failed to see immediately its implausibility. He published it, perhaps under pressure, but nevertheless he published a result that he reasonably should have seen to be patently flawed. That's bad enough, but now he, through you, still 20 years later blames the computer for his own mistake.
But that is long, long gone.
No, Setterfield through his wife still blames that old computer (which probably is long, long gone) for the blunder of Setterfield (who is stil, stil here, but hasn't yet acknowledged that it was he who blundered so long, long ago, and not the long, long gone computer.)
Now either Setterfield is or is not acting in good faith. If he is not acting in good faith in blaming the computer, obviously this says much about his present character. If he is acting in good faith in blaming the computer for his own mistake, then Setterfield is showing us that he has not, over these long, long years, learned from his mistake of long, long ago. Either way this issue is current in assessing Setterfield's current capability or competence.
Of course the issue could, and probably would go away if Setterfield would acknowledge his own old blunder and demonstrate that he has learned thatit was an old blunder of his. But for him to continue to deny what was patently his own blunder is to deny that he has advanced past that blunder.
Keep in mind, however, that in the early 80's, computers were mostly in the hands of the universities and big businesses and there were a number of mistakes that were made!
And everybody who worked with computers knew that mistakes were made, just as anyone who currently (or at any time) does mathematical calculations knows that mistakes can be made. So what does one do? One thing that we are all taught from earliest undergraduate years is to check the limits. In this case those limits might be perfectly-correlated data or completely uncorrelated data. The correlation coefficients would be, respectively, +/-1 and 0. Any data between those extremes would have a correlation coefficient between those extremes. Anyone sophisticated enough to use a correlation coefficient whould and should have known that. So when Setterfield obtained a correlation for patently scattered light-speed data essentially equal to 1 he should have immediately known that something was wrong with that result. He might not have known what was wrong, but he should have known that something was wrong. He failed to detect the problem. And that is his blunder. Yes, anyone could have misprogrammed the computer and gotten out that garbage .99999999+ correlation coefficient, but no computer user could have failed to spot that problem. And if he had, he wouldn't go 20 years and still blame the computer for his own mistake.
And, when you get tired of chewing your bone, feel free to examine his work from 1987 on, the way I think the serious physics community and others are doing.
Well, I can't speak for Paul, but when I've looked at his work from 1987 and beyond and pointed out a very few of the reasons why it fails to meet the standards generally accepted by the physics community I am rebuffed as above and whined to and told (sans evidence)that I wouldn't find anything from a creationist to meet my standards.
