One of the most important results of science is the negative result. If something doesn’t work or a hypothesis is disproven, often it’s not widely reported or disseminated. That is a shame. However, science is getting better at incorporating negative results into its reporting system, which has resulted in publications like the Journal of Negative Results, which covers biomedicine.
Unfortunately there isn’t a similar journal for Astronomy. At least not yet. But the field could really use one. There are plenty of disproven hypotheses that don’t see the light of day in academically peer reviewed publications. When it comes to topics like SETI, sometimes those negative results are extremely important, as it lends credence to one of the most important hypotheses out there – that we are alone in the universe. Papers that cover negative SETI results can be accepted into journals that otherwise might not accept a paper centered around not finding anything. That’s what happened recently when a team of astronomers from Australia and elsewhere used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) to search a patch of sky that included 10 million stars. The negative results was that they did not see a single sign of intelligent life anywhere in those 10 million stars.
Continue reading “Australian Telescope Just Scanned 10 million Stars For Any Sign of Extraterrestrial Signals. No sign.”