I&#x27;m old enough to remember Pons-Fleischmann. But not so old as to forget the more recent faster than light neutrinos social media storm. I&#x27;ve been thinking about the nature of scientific claims for more than twenty years. Few people are intentionally wrong: that doesn&#x27;t mean astronomers as men of science didn&#x27;t sware by the Ptolemaic cosmology.<p>To be clear, I am not denying the possibility of the earth expanding in and contracting in what passes for space time. I am skeptical of the proposition that the instruments are measuring the collisions of black holes is methodologically sound.<p>The careful preparation and engineering that occurred before LIGO was constructed resulted in an instrument that ran from 2002 to 2010 without detecting gravitational waves. The consequence of this $400 million experiment was not reexamining the theory, but sinking another $200 million into an instrument that created good tweetable data. That&#x27;s the way careers and politics and human nature works.<p>There are three components to the theory. Spatial change, gravitational waves, and colliding massive bodies. The reason I am skeptical is that the scientists are inferring two of them: gravitational waves and colliding black holes from the component most likely to have other causes. If I had the mountaintop shells and the flood, god would be more plausible. If I have the shells and god, the flood is. Two outta three is <i>my</i> threshold for reasonable scientific inference in this case.