Thursday, January 30, 2020

Why "You Can Get Anything by Magnifying" Fails as a Skeptical Rebuttal

I have recently heard the following objection to photos such as mine: the claim that "you can get anything you want in a photo by magnifying parts of it."  Below are several reasons why this fails as a skeptical rebuttal.

The first reason is that the statement simply isn't true. You might get many different things by magnifying little parts of a photo, but you can't get "anything you want." You could magnify parts of your random photos to your heart's content, and you would almost certainly never get, say, a part that would look like an image of Barack Obama or an image of a pink unicorn.

The second reason this rebuttal fails is that it only mentions a single occurrence of something, not massive repetitions of something. It might be true that if you magnify little parts of random photos, you might once in a blue moon get, say, something that looks like a purple car. But you would absolutely not get very many repetitions of such a thing. So a rebuttal that only explains one occurrence fails to rebut the many cases like I have in this blog of very many repetitions and pattern repetitions, as shown here and here.

The third reason this rebuttal fails is that I did not discover any of the 700+ mysterious striped orbs shown on this blog through any process of zooming in on photos and looking for something. In each case the striped orb was plainly visible in the photo before any zooming or cropping occurred. And I did not use any zoom lense when any of the photos was taken. I never "zoom in" looking for something in photos where I did not clearly see an anomaly in the photo without zooming in. Except when photographing falling water drops, my photographic magnification was always 1.0. In very many photos I have published such as the one below (from this post), it is evident that the orbs were a signficant fraction of the original photo, not just some tiny fraction got by zooming in.

two striped orbs 
 in same photo

The fourth reason this rebuttal fails is that 90% of my photos of mysterious striped orbs occurred when the orb was in front of a featureless plaster wall or a black cloudless sky.  You do not get appreciable details by zooming in on such things,  For example, here is a part of a photo showing a blank plaster wall, which is the most common background when I get a photo of a striped orb.


And here is part of a photo that showed a cloudless sky when I photographed a night orb.


It is not at all true that you can "get anything you want" by zooming in on such featureless areas of a photo. You won't get anything by zooming in on such areas.

The weakness of "you can get anything you want by magnifying" as a rebuttal is indicated by the following hypothetical exchange.

Astronomer: I think we're in for some trouble. On 30 days I have checked a particular spot in the sky with my telescope, and I keep seeing a big asteroid coming closer and closer toward our planet.
Skeptic: Just ignore it, because you can get anything you want by magnifying a view.

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