Some of the Papers

Here is a selection of my published work, with comments (and links to the ADS abstact and/or eprint). The book has its own page.

1. Whiting, Alan B. Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, June 2023 Visual Photometry: Testing Hypotheses concerning Bias and Precision. I investigate the by-eye estimates of the brightness of a sample of ten variable stars. I find the data have a scatter of 0.14 to 0.34 magnitude around the fitted curves, smaller than most previous estimates. It varies from star to star for unknown reasons. Several factors that should plausibly affect the scatter do not: range or type of variablility, or even color. An observer's precision is not constant, but varies from star to star. There are more puzzles than conclusions.
2. Whiting, Alan B. The Observatory, February 2023 Ordering the universe with naked-eye observations. Could an ancient astronomer have determined the order of the planets (that is, which was closer and which was farther from Earth) by seeing one pass in front of another? Naively, one would think so; but actually such events would be remarkably uninformative to the naked eye.
3. Whiting, Alan B. 2014 Applying Popper's Probability Tracking down a sneaking suspicion that Karl Popper (see further entries) might actually have done some worthwhile mathematics, I find instead that his axiomatic formulation of probability doesn't solve any problems he identified nor those found by his contemporary supporters.
4. Whiting, Alan B. 2014 Astrophysical Journal, 793, 63 The kinematical center and mass profile of the Local Group. Abandoning any hint of the assumption that light traces mass, using only the plausible assumption of infall into the Local Group, one can go quite a long way. I confirm that essentially all the mass in the Group is concentrated in the two big galaxies (there is no overall halo or population of `orphan' dark haloes). Along the way I find that some statistical techniques of moderate sophistication can be fooled.
5. Whiting, Alan B. Quanta, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 13-18, 2012 Problems in the Science and Mathematics of `The Logic of Scientific Discovery' . This is a somewhat rewritten version of my evaluation of Popper (eprint below), here published in a new online journal. I find that Popper's mathematics, seriously flawed, is still held in high esteem by some philosophers of science; this is a problem for that field.
6. Whiting, Alan B. The Observatory, June 2012 Visual Photometry: Colour and Brightness Spacing of Comparison stars. A great deal of data on variable stars, especially historical data, was derived from visual estimates (people recording how bright a star looked to them, using methods of varying sophistication). Looking carefully at a set of data I found that in several ways human eyes just don't behave like electronic detectors, or like people have assumed them to behave.
7. Whiting, Alan B. 2012 Problems with Popper. This appeared originally only as an eprint, because it requires a background in mathematics and deals with the philosophy of science, severely limiting its readership. I found that one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, Sir Karl Popper, not only lacked some very basic things in his understanding of math and science, he completely misunderstood others. I'm still puzzled why no one seems to have noticed this before; The Logic of Scientific Discovery was written in the 1930s, and translated into English almost seventy years ago.
8. Whiting, Alan B. 2011, Astronomische Nachrichten 332, 208 Power calculation for gravitational radiation: oversimplification and the importance of time scale (no eprint version for copyright reasons). This paper really should not have needed to be written. My attention was drawn to an earlier paper in Astron. Nachr. that was confused, oversimplified and simply wrong about some aspects of gravitational radiation; I tried to correct the errors as simply and clearly (and in as few pages) as I could. One useful result was that, when considering whether you can use a non-relativistic formula, you not only need to keep in mind speeds and the strength of gravity but also time: over periods so short that objects are not in causal contact, you really do need a relativistic treatment.
9. Whiting, Alan B. Sir John Herschel and the Stability of Saturn's Ring. This is a fully mathematical treatment of an episode that appears in my book. There are lessons for scientists in the interpretation of results from the latest and most powerful instruments, and an example of reinforcing errors.
10. Whiting, Alan B.; Hau, George K. T.; Irwin, Mike; and Verdugo, Miguel 2007, AJ 133, 715 An Observational Limit on the Dwarf Galaxy Population of the Local Group; here is an eprint version. This is the summary of our years-long search for faint nearby galaxies, which sets useful limits on how many and how bright they can be. It also contains a lot of incidental information about many faint objects in the sky, and shows just what a miscellaneous collection you get when you use observational criteria alone to choose things. It took a long time to referee, in part because visual searches have different characteristics from automatic ones, and nowadays one has to explain that in some detail.
11. Whiting, Alan B. 2007, Observatory, 127, 13 Sir James Jeans and the Stability of Gaseous Stars; eprint. This is a bit of the history of mathematical astronomy. In 1925 Sir James Jeans, one of the important names in astronomy, calculated that gaseous stars powered by fusion would be unstable. Nowadays we use a very well-developed, detailed theory of just that sort of star. The flaw in Jeans' calculation turned out never to have been properly found, and is very subtle. The episode illuminates several issues about stars, the use of mathematical models and how one theory is chosen over another.
12. Whiting, Alan B. 2006, AJ, 131, 1996, You Can't Get There from Here: Hubble Relaxation in the Local Volume (also available on-line as an eprint ). I found that the current peculiar velocities in the Local Volume are far too small to have formed the visible structures from a smooth beginning in the age of the universe. No known dynamical effects can slow things down enough to solve the problem, and in fact most act in the wrong direction. The simplest explanation is that significant amounts of baryonic dark matter are hiding somewhere within the Volume. (There are other possible explanations.)
13. Whiting, Alan B. 2005, ApJ, 622, 217 , Light and Motion in the Local Volume (Also available on-line as an astro-ph eprint). With much better data and more sophisticated analysis than in the 2003 paper I can be more definite: there is no correlation between luminosity and peculiar radial velocity in the Local Volume. Perhaps more importantly, the data are accurate and complete enough that there should be. One interpretation is that light does not trace mass (always with the caveat that the results strictly apply only to this particular volume, on scales of 1-10 Mpc).
14. Whiting, Alan B. 2004, Observatory, 124, 174, The expansion of space: free-particle motion and the cosmological redshift.
    (Also available on-line as an astro-ph eprint.) This came about because I found a question answered wrongly in an eprint, but realized I didn't know the right answer; and so set out to find it. Since the abstract doesn't show up in the ADS entry, here it is:

    The meaning of the expansion of the Universe, or the `Expansion of Space', is explored using two phenomena: the motion of a test particle against a homogeneous background and the cosmological redshift. Contrary to some expectations, a particle removed from the Hubble flow never returns to it. The cosmological redshift is not an `expansion effect'; in special cases it can be separated into a kinematic (special relativistic) part and a static (gravitational redshift) part, but in general it must be thought of as the effect on light rays of their propagation through curved space-time. Space as such does not affect matter by `expanding', but only through its curvature.

    I found it remarkable how mistaken ideas can propagate in the literature. At this, almost metaphysical, level they may not do much damage; but they have resulted in papers which are just wrong. I don't, however, intend to make the righting of wrong ideas a personal crusade.

15. Whiting, Alan B. 2003, ApJ 587, 186, The Kinematic State of the Local Volume
    This has my first puzzling results about 10 Mpc galaxy motions. Most of it shows how several plausible assumptions don't work.
16. Whiting, Alan B.; Hau, George K. T.; Irwin, Mike 2002, ApJ Sup. 141, 123 The Southern Dwarf Hunt: Local Group Dwarf Candidates in the Southern Sky
    A review of our look at candidates in half the sky. Most are not Local Group dwarfs, of course; and we can estimate our completeness, which shows that there aren't a lot of those just waiting to be found.
17. Whiting, Alan B. 2000, ApJ, 533, 50 The Least-Action Principle: Theory of Cosmological Solutions and the Radial Velocity Action
    A very mathematical paper. The least-action technique is a very promising way of reconstructing galaxy motions, not subject to a number of problems of, say, n-body techniques. I sought the answer to a mathematician's question (though of interest to people who actually perform the calculations): how many solutions are there in a given situation? It was something of an exercise in combining different bits of mathematical theory to give a useful answer. (Which is: one, or not very many, probably.)
18. Whiting, Alan B.; Hau, George K. T.; Irwin, Mike 1999, AJ, 118, 2767 A New Local Group Galaxy in Cetus
    The second of the new Local Group galaxies we found in the southern sky.
19. Whiting, Alan B., 1999, AJ, 117, 202 Angular Momentum in the Sculptor Group
    A fairly straightforward exercise with vectors shows that the spins of six galaxies in (and near) the Sculptor Group could have come from tidal torquing among themselves.
20. Whiting, Alan B.; Irwin, M. J.; Hau, George K. T. 1997, AJ, 114, 996 A new galaxy in the Local Group: the Antlia dwarf galaxy
The first result of our Local Group Dwarf hunt.