Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

RECOMMENDED READING 261
Mikolaj Sawicki is a physicist at John A. Logan College in Illinois. His
web site on tides (http://www.jal.cc.il.us/~mikolajsawicki/gravity _and_tides _
.html) cleared up some of my own tidal misconceptions. It has a very
clear and interesting explanation of tides, and is one of the very few that
not only is correct but carries out the idea to its logical conclusions.
One of the great aspects of the web is the amazing amount of information
it contains—sometimes it’s even accurate. So many questions come
up so frequently that people often put together Frequently Asked Questions
lists, or FAQs. The Astronomy FAQ (http://sciastro.astronomy .net/)
may, then, answer many of your questions. The Physics and Relativity
FAQs (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/) do the same for their fields
and would please Uncle Albert himself. Each of these FAQs has links to
even more web sites, which keep even a hardened geek like me busy for
hours on end.
If that’s not enough, try astronomer Sten Odenwald’s Ask the Astronomer
web page (http://itss.raytheon.com/cafe/qadir/qanda .html). He has
answered over 3,000 questions, so any you have might already be there.
Once again, if pictures are what you’re after, then try either the Space
Telescope Science Institute’s web site (http://www.stsci.edu) or the amazing
Astronomy Picture of the Day (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov), which,
true to its name, has a new beautiful picture posted each day. These are
two of the most popular sites on the web, in any topic, and it’s not hard
to see why.
While researching the chapter on the Apollo Moon Hoax, and later
when looking for images and information about Apollo, I turned again
and again to the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/
office/pao/History/alsj/. There you will find an astonishing amount of
detail about the most ambitious and successful space adventure in human
history. I fell in love with space travel all over again after going through
the images there.
There are a lot of great web sites promoting skepticism in general. I
highly recommend the Talk Origins Archive (http://www .talkorigins.org),
which is a pro-science web site that is mostly an answer to creationist
arguments. It leans heavily toward evolution, but has great astronomy
pages, too.
There are a number of web sites devoted to Immanual Velikovsky’s
ideas, both pro and con. The biggest one on his side is http://www
.varchive.org, which has many of his writings. A good web site debunking
Velikovsky is the Antidote to Velikovskian Delusions at http://abob
.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html.