On Saturday, November 8, 2014 2:40:39 AM UTC-5, Craig Markwardt wrote:

You're right, that's a really nice result. It's also a quite sound
rejection of certain mass quantization theories recently discussed on
this newsgroup, namely mass quantized in units of 0.145 Msun.

For the pulsar in question, J1906+0746, the estimated total binary
mass is 2.6134 +/- 0.0003, which disagrees with 0.145 Msun mass
quantization at 11.3 sigma significance. The pulsar mass and companion
mass disagree at 70 and 57 sigma respectively. All of these results
soundly reject such mass quantization with essentially 100%
confidence.


Here is how I compare the predicted and observed total masses.

2.6134 - 2.61 divided by 2.61 times 100 = 0.34 relative error.

100 - 0.34 = 99.66% relative agreement.

Note: 2.61 = 18 times 0.145 solar masses.

Given the realistic and unavoidable uncertainties involved here, I
think the results and their implications are indeed very nice.

[Mod. note: Craig's analysis uses the actual quantified error. Yours
waves hands about the 'realistic uncertainties'. Guess which one
statistically literate scientists will believe -- mjh]