While researching the Earth’s inner and outer core I realized that scientists are doing what they sometimes do and that is provide information that if you dig deep enough (no pun intended), you realize it is a bit unscientific. Many of the reports I read regarding the Earth’s core are filled with words like: believed, deduced, hypothesized, etc. From what I’ve seen, a lot of their descriptions of the core are based on speculation even though they treat it as fact not theory.
The Earth’s core is 4,000 miles from the Earth’s surface and it’s around 9,800 degrees. I can certainly see where scientists could calculate the distance to the center of the Earth but knowing the actual size of the core, what it’s made of, and how hot it is down there, when the deepest hole ever drilled in the Earth has only been eight miles down, makes it a little difficult to grasp.
Thermal imaging is limited in distance and it certainly isn’t going to send electronic sound waves 4,000 miles and back. They also say there’s an iron–nickel alloy ball at the Earth’s core; how could they know this without taking samples? The bottom line is there aren’t scientific tools necessary to confirm anything yet students everywhere are learning about the Earth’s core without knowing its mostly speculation at this point.
This isn’t unlike how some scientists treat the Big Bang as fact when it’s actually a theory. It could be correct but good luck figuring out how they measured an event from 40 billion years ago. As with the Earth’s core, they could be correct but at least admit it doesn’t meet scientific standards for fact-based conclusions. If scientists can’t agree on what the status of our solar system was 20,000 years ago how could they predict an event that occurred 40 billion light years away?
My purpose for this article is that we should all be careful about taking information from the scientific community and assuming it’s factual just because they’re smart people. If we don’t perform due diligence in these situations and ask ourselves regarding their claims: “How do they know that?” then we’ll be like sheep naively following the herd; a Knowledge Seeker definitely isn’t a sheep.
The Earth’s core is 4,000 miles from the Earth’s surface and it’s around 9,800 degrees. I can certainly see where scientists could calculate the distance to the center of the Earth but knowing the actual size of the core, what it’s made of, and how hot it is down there, when the deepest hole ever drilled in the Earth has only been eight miles down, makes it a little difficult to grasp.
Thermal imaging is limited in distance and it certainly isn’t going to send electronic sound waves 4,000 miles and back. They also say there’s an iron–nickel alloy ball at the Earth’s core; how could they know this without taking samples? The bottom line is there aren’t scientific tools necessary to confirm anything yet students everywhere are learning about the Earth’s core without knowing its mostly speculation at this point.
This isn’t unlike how some scientists treat the Big Bang as fact when it’s actually a theory. It could be correct but good luck figuring out how they measured an event from 40 billion years ago. As with the Earth’s core, they could be correct but at least admit it doesn’t meet scientific standards for fact-based conclusions. If scientists can’t agree on what the status of our solar system was 20,000 years ago how could they predict an event that occurred 40 billion light years away?
My purpose for this article is that we should all be careful about taking information from the scientific community and assuming it’s factual just because they’re smart people. If we don’t perform due diligence in these situations and ask ourselves regarding their claims: “How do they know that?” then we’ll be like sheep naively following the herd; a Knowledge Seeker definitely isn’t a sheep.
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