Shifted Science Revisited: Percolation Delays and the Persistence of Wrongful Convictions Based on Outdated Science

We previously wrote about the phenomenon of convictions based on science that is credible at the time of trial, but later comes to be repudiated. Such post-conviction shifts in science were most obvious and reprehensible in the very old cases, the example being a 1986 arson prosecution, whose scientific underpinnings are exposed in a post-conviction motion filed in 2011. Immediately upon completing that article, we came to realize that it told only half the story. We seek in this Article to build on that foundational idea of shifted science by discussing at length a harder question: the perception, percolation, and continued evolution of shifts in science. We address here cases that arise on the cusp of a shift, identify the process of the shift in various forensic science disciplines, and analyze how difficult it can be to perceive and address a shift in science, even when it occurs concurrently with, or even some time prior to, trial. Taking a step-by-step route through the process of significant shifts in several different forensic disciplines, we hope to clarify the many stages involved in these shifts and the important consequences of misperceiving shifts in science as they occur. Finally, we also lay a foundation for a later piece addressing the difficult question of legal avenues for relief in shifted science cases that arise on the cusp of a revolution, such as those we address here

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7