Another Journalist Gets Science Wrong.

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Link to Article: Aliens Might Shoot Lasers at Black Holes to Travel the Galaxy

This journalist has made a glaring error in stating a basic scientific principle, to wit:

No, Rafi. Increasing a photon's energy DECREASES its wavelength in accordance with the formula:

Wavelength = (h x c) / E

Where 'h' is Planke's constant, 'c' is the speed of light in a vacuum, and 'E' is the photon's energy.

Photon energy is the energy carried by a single photon. The amount of energy is directly proportional to the photon's electromagnetic frequency and inversely proportional to the wavelength. The higher the photon's frequency, the higher its energy. Equivalently, the longer the photon's wavelength, the lower its energy.

Journalists … please stick to reporting, and leave the science to the scientists!

*Planck's

Planque's

well given journalists are not scientists, I could see them getting science wrong.

Yeah, but since they have somehow acquired the reputation for publishing "fake news", one would think that they would at least try to get their facts straight (and accept correction) even if they don't know what those facts mean.

Journalists job are to report on things they don't know to spread the knowledge to a larger population. It isn't easy and we should be tolerant when journalists make HONEST mistakes.

That said people need to realize that unless they're reporting on journalism, journalists are relying on other people's expertise in the subjects they are reporting.

I can understand a run-of-the-mill politics journalist getting this wrong, but a science journalist must have some formal training in - science. Furthermore, his article must have been at least summarily proofread by someone with more scientific expertise still. A shocking oversight if so.

If wavelength were directly proportional to momentum, we'd have a very, very different world indeed from the one we inhabit. This should be obvious to anybody, really.

These days it seems that a lot of journalists are in a rush to print their stories. I've noted a great many typographical errors in the past few years that would never make it past proofreading.

Journalists even get it wrong when reporting about how other folks get things wrong ( say they get it wrong one way when they actually get it wrong some other way).

Some journalist did a piece about Ken Ham, founder of the Ark Encounter in Kentucky ( a ginormous theme park built to look like Noah's Ark that promote "Creation Science"). And the article said that "Ken Ham believes that the extinction of the dinosaurs happened because they were wiped out in the Biblical Flood".

Ham got angry and protested because he doesn't believe that the Flood wiped out the dinosaurs. The actual doctrine he advocates is that the dinosaurs were among the animals rescued by Noah, and that they survived the Flood (at least for a few thousand years), and lived alongside humans both before, and after the Flood, before becoming...not as common as they used to be today.

So that article really did screw up, and really did distort Ken Ham's chronology.

Though it distorted it in the direction of making more sense, instead of less sense. Thinking that the flood wiped out the dinosaurs strikes me as being slightly less ridiculous than thinking that Noah, and his companions, wrangled pairs of Brontas, and T Rexes, and got them on shipboard. But that later is what Ham, and many YECs, believe because they believe that the dinosaurs surviving the Flood is more in tune with scripture for some reason.