| Subject: Re: News reports of "ET" signal off-base, say scientists |
| From: brmoret@tin.it (SETI ITALIA Bruno IK2WQA) |
| Date: 03/09/2004, 21:10 |
| Newsgroups: alt.astronomy,alt.sci.amateur,alt.sci.seti,japan.sci.misc,japan.sci.space |
from Dan Werthimer in Arecibo
Da: "Dr. H. Paul Shuch"
Inviato: Venerdì 03/09/2004 00:41:07 -0400
Oggetto: SETI public: False SETI@home alarm, courtesy of the press
SETIzens,
Today, I've received nearly a hundred emails about a three-time
SETI@home hit, reported in today's New Scientist. Sorry to throw a wet
blanket on this otherwise exciting announcement, but I have to tell you
the press attaches more significance to this observation than do the
astronomers themselves.
Here is the text of an email received today
from SETI@home director Dan Werthimer of U.C. Berkeley
(and now in Arecibo):
it's a zero on the rio scale.
none of our candidates are very interesting - they are all
consisitent with noise. we will continue to observe many
of the candidates over the next few years, but there's
nothing on the candidate lists we are particularly excited about.
a reporter from new scientist read the seti@home web pages:
in particular there's a section on "candidate signals" where
we discuss how we score signals and we show the data from
the 220 candidates we re-observed at arecibo 1.5 years ago.
these web pages are old, but the reporter made an exciting
story about them, by exagerating their content and mis-quoting
us and quoting us out of context, and making a press release
about one of the candidates that has a bit higher score than
the others.
i talked to a couple of reporters today, explaining we've seen
stuff like this for the last 30 years, and it's always turned
out to be rfi or noise, and that there's nothing to get excited
about, and that when you look at 50 trillion bytes of data,
occasionally you'll find patterns that look unusual just from
noise...
i wish we had something in our data to get excited about.
tomorrow we'll start using the multibeam receiver you guys made
to map HI in the galaxy. the HI survey will take about five years.
we begin in 12 hours.
best wishes from arecibo,
dan
The Rio Scale to which Dan refers is a one-to-ten tool SETI scientists
use for quantifying the importance of a candidate detection. For
details, see
http://www.setileague.org/iaaseti/rioscale.htm
Sorry this one wasn't The Signal, but as you can see from Dan's last
comment, that won't stop us from continuing the search!
Yours for SETI success,
Paul