Forensic Ballistics: How Apollo 12 Helped Solve the Skydiver Meteorite Mystery

The article's discussion of golf balls reads completely opposite to standard well-accepted theory. The author writes:

> [The "drag catastrophe"] is when an object is falling so fast that the boundary layer of gas separates off the object and the drag force suddenly drops by a factor of almost 10. The reason why golf balls have dimples is to cause this drag catastrophe to happen at slightly slower speeds, so the ball will travel a lot farther.

This is very confused. Golf balls have dimples to prevent flow separation. The dimples are turbulators meant to induce turbulent flow around the golf ball before the laminar flow would otherwise give way to flow separation. Far from decreasing the drag force, flow separation increases it substantially.

[Also, the term "drag catastrophe" appears to have no relevant hits on Google other than this one article.]

[Edit 1]: The author is well qualified and unlikely to be confused himself; so I don't doubt his conclusion. Reading charitably, turbulent flow might be called a form of separated flow, and this must be what the author means. His coefficient of drag graph supports this interpretation as his "drag catastrophe" would be happening when you would expect a transition flow (from separated laminar to turbulent). Pedagogically he should have more clearly distinguished it from the typical laminar separated flow.

Does confusion impact the conclusion at all?

It was all going so well...

“It can’t be anything else. The shape is typical of meteorites – a fresh fracture surface on one side, while the other side is rounded,” said geologist Hans Amundsen.

Every hoax just needs one credible expert to put their name to it. This story may not have been a deliberate hoax but it ultimately was a hoax. It is good to see something debunked with some good, old-fashioned science!

I came here to post that it was a great article - except for the needless invocation and anthropomorphization of Occam's Razor.

I. It is not clear that a rock falling out is _simpler_ than a meteorite falling out. How exactly is a meteor less simple? Sure, it's rarer and less likely, but it is not simpler.

II. A simple explanation of a how an iPhone works is "magic." But we know that's not the case. Our invocation of Occam is tautological - we only call on it when we think it's right, not when we're making a decision. We note that the article did not begin with: "there must be a simple explanation, because Occam's Razor always works." Instead, it invoked Occam after the fact.

Conclusion: Occam's Razor is a fetishized social construction and carries no magical properties and is of no use in predicted phenomena using a scientific model. It is simply a feel-good mantra like prayer and rosary beads.

"Magic" itself isn't an explanation, it's an excuse for not seeking an explanation. It can also be a category of explanation (that is you could develop an explanation which involves magic), but any explanation in that category is unlikely to actually be particularly simple in the sense of Occam's razor, in that it will involve invoking new entities that are not already needed to explain other phenomena. Occam's razor is simply a test of parsimonious when considering expansion of an effect in the context of all other effects.