Is there a way to prove that men have gone to the moon

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Tio Barnabe
It's frustrating to see plenty of videos on YouTube and websites across the internet claiming that men has never walked on the moon or that the Apollo mission was a fraud. I do believe that the land on the moon happened.

On the other hand, it's on the heart of science to consider all claims which are physically possible and testing their validity, so we should not simply believe in NASA (or in what most people believe) --every claim has to be proven to be accepted.

So is there ways of actually proving that the Apollo mission really was what is informed?
 
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Tio Barnabe said:
So is there ways of actually proving that the Apollo mission really was what is informed?
There is a very simple proof:
The ongoing Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment measures the distance between Earth and the Moon using laser ranging. Lasers on Earth are aimed at retroreflectorsplanted on the Moon during the Apollo program (11, 14, and 15) and the two Lunokhod missions. The time for the reflected light to return is measured.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment)

See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Point_Observatory_Lunar_Laser-ranging_Operation
https://ilrs.cddis.eosdis.nasa.gov/science/scienceContributions/lunar.html
 
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The impressive thing is that we could show that to the supporters of the conspiration theory and they will continue under their belief.
 
Tio Barnabe said:
The impressive thing is that we could show that to the supporters of the conspiration theory and they will continue under their belief.
There's a saying: "men convinced against their will, are of the same opinion still". On a related note, ice walls forever!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_flat_Earth_societies

j/k
 
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Tio Barnabe said:
The impressive thing is that we could show that to the supporters of the conspiration theory and they will continue under their belief.
Yes, because conspiracy theories are not, at their heart, about facts and logic.
 
fresh_42 said:
There is a very simple proof:

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment)
This is evidence that spacecraft , equipped with laser reflectors landed on the moon. It is not proof that the Apollo landings were manned.

(Note: I have no doubt the Apollo landings were "as advertised", but that does not justify applying loose standards of evidence and proof.)
 
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fresh_42 said:
I wonder which equipment would be necessary to see the cars.

Unfortunately, the Hubble Space Telescope's resolution is not quite good enough to see them, and it's probably the best chance we have. (The Palomar telescope has a bigger mirror, but it's ground-based so atmospheric interference probably makes it worse at resolving objects on the Moon.)
 
PeterDonis said:
Unfortunately, the Hubble Space Telescope's resolution is not quite good enough to see them, and it's probably the best chance we have. (The Palomar telescope has a bigger mirror, but it's ground-based so atmospheric interference probably makes it worse at resolving objects on the Moon.)
Yes, I've done a little research meanwhile and it seems that Hubble can resolve something about 500 yards. Don't the modern telescope systems calculate the atmospheric disturbances out of their images? But they probably don't work in the visible range of light.
 
Steve Dutch has a good article on this:

https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/ConspiracyTheoryDidWeGototheMoon.htm

Note in particular the "Telemetry" and "Rocks" sections.
 
Yes, the rocks and the missing Soviet propaganda are quite convincing. I've seen Russian scientists in a TV documentation, who worked on their space program and who told, that they had been equally (as us) excited and happy to watch the Apollo landings at the time. That made perfectly sense to me, as scientists don't care a lot about who made which discovery as long as it's scientifically valid.
 
fresh_42 said:
Don't the modern telescope systems calculate the atmospheric disturbances out of their images? But they probably don't work in the visible range of light.
They do (you can't do that in software, you have to deform a mirror while taking data), but that is still not sufficient for Earth-based observations. ELT will be nearly diffraction limited in the visible light with its 39 meter mirror - but that still means the resolution is just about 10 meters. And where is the point in a few blurry pixels if people dismiss the videos filmed there as staged? It would be much easier to change the color of a few pixels in a picture taken from Earth.
 
Tio Barnabe said:
So is there ways of actually proving that the Apollo mission really was what is informed?
My general response to crackpottey of any kind is to ask that very question as a rebuttal, inserting any random theory, discovery or accomplishment into it. Because the reality is that very few people who aren't specialists in a particular field are actually capable of proving a modern theory or experimental result for themselves. For all the rest of us it comes down to trust that the evidence we see second-hand is real.

But honestly, considering it was broadcast live on TV at a time when CGI didn't exist, it doesn't take a whole lot of trust to believe it was real.
 
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It wasn't just the actual moon landings . The whole process of technical development from the earliest test flights to the final landings was conducted openly .
 
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I'm surprised - and more than a little irked - that the Mentors are not just keeping, but actively participating in, a topic that is explicitly on the banned list.

That said, how is it that 850 pounds of moon rocks are unconvincing?
 
Vanadium 50 said:
I'm surprised - and more than a little irked - that the Mentors are not just keeping, but actively participating in, a topic that is explicitly on the banned list.
I have a broader interpretation of the rules in that I think there is a difference between proving the science and disproving the crackpottery. Along the same lines, I judge "how do I test conservation of energy?" differently from "can you debunk my perpetual motion machine?"

And also, as you like to say, there is a difference between learning physics and learning about physics.
 
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Indeed, someone should have probably pointed out by now that science is not a device for "proving" anyway, that's mathematics. It's also not a device for convincing people, that's rhetoric. Science is a device for making testable predictions that work out better than any other system so far devised. So we should not make it the goal of science to prove that we have walked on the Moon, nor to convince people that we have walked on the Moon, but simply to make predictions (like, the evidence we didn't will be easy to debunk, the people who present that evidence will advertise essentially phony credentials, and hoax supporters will cherry pick expert comments way out of context, etc.) that test out well. The mathematicians will not see a proof there, and people who want to believe something different will not see something convincing there, but neither was ever really the goal of science.
 
russ_watters said:
My general response to crackpottey of any kind is to ask that very question as a rebuttal, inserting any random theory, discovery or accomplishment into it. ...

Exactly. "Prove you aren't really a sleeping butterfly, dreaming that you're human..."
 
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O.k. now it looks as we've arrived at the point where the second stage has been ignited: What is a proof? Since the third stage will likely be the actual conspiracy front, it's time to close the thread. Despite it's problematic title, it has provided some scientific insights about the distinction of lunar and terrestrial rocks, a paper which actually debunks the conspiracy and a few insights about the resolution and behavior of modern telescopes. But now it's time to close it, before it goes too far off topic.
 
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