Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Rushing toward a paradigm shift

I have a sneaking suspicion that the physicists are on the threshold of a paradigm-breaking discovery.

The weird data have been building up for some time now, observations and measurements that are at odds with our current models of how the universe works.  I say "models (plural)" because one of the most persistent roadblocks in physics is the seeming incompatibility of quantum mechanics and general relativity -- in other words, coming up with a Grand Unified Theory that pulls a consistent explanation of gravity into our conceptual framework for the other three fundamental forces (electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces).  All attempts to come up with an amalgam have either "led to infinities" (had places in the relevant equations that generate infinite answers, usually an indicator that something is seriously wrong with your model) or have become so impossibly convoluted that even the experts can't agree on the details (such as string theory with its eleven spatial dimensions, something that's always reminded me of Ptolemy's flailing about to save the geocentric model by adding more loops and twists and epicycles so the data would fit).

And still the anomalous data keep rolling in.  Three weeks ago I wrote about a troubling discrepancy that's been discovered in the value of the Hubble Constant, which describes the rate of expansion of the universe -- there are two ways to measure it, which presumably should give the same answer, but don't.

Then last week, physicists at a lab in Hungary announced that they'd found new evidence of "X17," a mysterious particle that could be a carrier for a fifth fundamental force.  The argument is a bit like the observation that led to the discovery of the neutrino back in 1959 -- during beta radioactive decay, the particles emitted seemed to break the laws of conservation of energy and momentum, until that time strictly enforced in all jurisdictions.  Wolfgang Pauli said, basically, "Well, that can't be right," and postulated that an undetected particle was carrying off the "lost" momentum and energy.  It took twenty-eight years to prove, but he was right.

Here, it's the behavior another radioactive substance, beryllium-8, which emits light at the "wrong" angle to account for all of the energy involved (again, breaking the law of conservation of energy).  Conservation could be re-established if there was an undetected particle being emitted with a mass of 17 MeV (about 33 times the rest mass of an electron).  Even considering the neutrino, this seemed a little bit ad hoc -- "we need a particle, so we'll invent one to make our data fit" -- until measurements from an excited helium nucleus generated anomalous results that could be explained by a fifth force carried by a particle with exactly the same mass.

Hmm.  Curiouser and curiouser.

If that's not enough, just this week a paper appeared in Nature Astronomy about that elusive and mysterious substance "dark matter" that, despite defying every effort to detect it, outweighs the ordinary matter you and I are made of by a factor of five.  Its gravitational signature is everywhere, and appears to be most of what's responsible for holding galaxies together -- without it, the Milky Way and other rotating galaxies would fly apart.

But what is it?  No one knows.  There are guesses, but once again, those guesses have come up empty-handed with respect to any kind of experimental verification.  (And that's not even considering the even-weirder dark energy, which outweighs dark matter by a factor of two, and is thus the most common stuff in the universe, comprising 68% of what's out there -- even though we have not the slightest clue what it might be.)

The paper, by a team led by astrophysicist Qi Guo of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is called, "Further Evidence for a Population of Dark-Matter-Deficient Dwarf Galaxies," and describes no less than nineteen different galaxies that have significantly less dark matter than conventional explanations (such as they are) would need to explain (1) how they formed, and (2) what's holding them together.  Lead author Guo, for her part, is baffled, and although the data seem solid, she admits to being at a bit of a loss.  "We are not sure why and how these galaxies form," she said, in a press release in Science News.

Elliptical galaxy Abell S740 [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

So the anomalous observations keep piling up, and thus far, no one has been able to explain them, much less reconcile them with all the others.  I'm reminded of what Thomas Kuhn wrote, in his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: "Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense... that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way."

It must be both nerve-wracking and exhilarating to be a physicist right now.  Nerve-wracking because suddenly finding out that your previous model, the one you were taught to understand and cherish during your training, is inadequate -- well, the response is frequently to do what Irish science historian, writer, and filmmaker James Burke calls "scrambling about to stop the rug from being pulled out from under years of happy status-quo."  On the one hand, you can understand that, apart from any emotional attachment one might have to an accepted model; it is an accepted model because it worked perfectly well for a while, accounting for all the evidence we had.  And there are countless examples when a model was challenged by what appeared to be contradictory data, and it turned out the data were mismeasurements, misinterpretations, or outright fabrications.

Which is why Pauli was so sure that the neutrino existed -- the law of conservation of energy, he reasoned, was so well-supported that it just couldn't be wrong.

But now -- well, as I said, that data keep piling up.  Whatever's going on here, they aren't all mismeasurements.  It remains to be seen what revision of our understanding will sweep away all the oddities and internal contradictions and make sense of what the physicists are seeing, but I have no doubt we'll find it at some point.

And there's the exhilarating part of it.  What a time to be in research physics -- when the race is on to pull together and explain an increasingly huge body of anomalous stuff, and revise our understanding of the universe in a fundamental way.  It's the kind of climate in which Nobel Prizes are won.

Being an observer is exciting enough; I can't imagine what it might be like to be inside it all.

*******************************

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]






Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Produced by design

In the brilliant and disturbing 1997 movie Gattaca, set in the "not very distant future," it has become possible to genetically screen for... just about everything.  So most couples conceive using in vitro fertilization followed by pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), to screen out susceptibilities to common diseases and to screen in high IQ, a tendency to physical strength, good looks, and emotional stability.

The movie is about a young man, Vincent (played movingly by Ethan Hawke) whose dream of becoming an astronaut is thwarted by the fact that he is an "in-valid" -- conceived the old-fashioned way, and thus a mix of varying traits from his parents, both good and bad.  While there is an official policy of non-discrimination on the basis of genes, the hiring requirement of a urine test for drug screening allows potential employers to find out what you're made of -- and to find a pretext not to hire you if it turns out that you have a potential toward early heart disease or higher aggression.  When everything about you -- your fitness, intellect, personality, even your suitability as a mate -- can be discerned from a fingerprick, a cheek swab, or a stray hair, there is no longer such a thing as "private information."


I won't tell you further about it because it's well worth watching, and Vincent's struggle against being held back by the genetic cards he was dealt is deeply inspiring.  But it's interesting to look at whether the "not very distant future" has panned out in the twenty-two years since the movie was made.

Like much of the cutting edge of science, pre-implantation screening hasn't progressed quite as fast as people expected.  The conditions we can reliably screen out are fairly few in number, and the idea of screening in highly complex traits such as IQ or personality or appearance has turned out to be elusive at best.  Our potential to use genetic information even to predict something a good bit simpler -- adult height -- was dealt a significant blow by a paper that came out in Cell last week, called, "Screening Human Embryos for Polygenic Traits Has Limited Utility," by a team led by Ehud Karavani of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

What they did is pretty impressive.  Using aggregate data from no less than 700,000 people, they came up with a protocol for generating a genetic "score" that seemed to correlate with adult height, and then tried to see if applying the score to individuals from 28 different families who were not part of the original study worked the other way -- if the score reliably predicted adult height.

To say that the results were disappointing is a bit of an understatement.  It predicted the tallest person in the family in only seven of the families -- a hit-rate of 25%.  Worse still, five of the people it identified as tallest turned out to be shorter than average for the family.  The method would almost certainly be even less accurate if you tried to apply it to a trait that shows greater variability and (likely) less overall dependence on genetics -- such as IQ.

"There’s still a great deal of variability that’s not accounted for by the genes they were analyzing or simulating in their polygenic score," said Susanna Haga, geneticist at Duke University, who was not part of Karavani's team.  "Therefore, you’re still going to see a wide distribution of height or IQ points."

While I'm fascinated with genetics and all for learning more about how our DNA works, I'm not entirely sure this is a bad thing.  Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to allow a couple who are carriers of (say) cystic fibrosis to conceive a healthy child is one thing; screening an embryo to try to boost its eventual intelligence crosses a line.  It's edging way too close to eugenics for my comfort, and in any case, we haven't even been able to come up with a consistent definition for what we mean by intelligence, so the idea that we'd screen embryos on that basis is dodgy right from the start.

So while the results of the Karavani study are a setback to our understanding of how DNA affects our development, in one way it's actually kind of a relief.  We humans don't exactly have a stellar track record for applying scientific discoveries in a positive or humane fashion, and the number of ways this kind of information could be misused is astronomical.  I know of people who are passionately interested in genealogy but have refused to sign up for Ancestry or 23 & Me genetic testing because they're afraid of what might be done with the data, and while I can understand the concern, it's nice to know that the ability to surreptitiously abstract from our DNA information about our appearance, personality, intelligence, and aptitudes is not possible...

... yet.

*******************************

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]






Monday, November 25, 2019

Anatomy of a personal u-turn

Two years ago, a paper appeared in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology called, "How Personal Transformation Occurs Following a Single Peak Experience in Nature: A Phenomenological Account."  The authors, Lia Naor and Ofra Mayseless of the University of Haifa, describe the experiences of fifteen individuals who reported a sudden positive transformation in their lives -- a personal quantum leap, as it were -- that resulted in long-lasting changes to their outlook, self-awareness, mood, and well-being.

It's been known for years that a single traumatic negative experience can cause devastating damage to a person's psyche, the authors said; why, then, has so little attention been given to the potential for equivalent positive changes from single peak experiences?  The entire article is well worth reading, but one paragraph stood out to me:
The results of this study shed light on the nature of profound meaning and real knowledge, in which unconscious or contradictory aspects of self (regarding inner strength and personal potential) were discovered.  The actual moment of insight was cognitive, perceptual, and emotional, and although not lengthy, substantial knowledge became conscious that involved embracing and repossessing those aspects of the self through which new self and world perceptions were created...  [T]he concrete and personal experience seemed to validate those aspects hence perceived as authentic inner truth, enabling the participant to internalize them as integral and empowering aspects of self.  From this perspective, the experience is a step in the process of personal growth and when perceived and treated as such, may contribute significant personal knowledge to the process.
Had I read this two weeks ago, I would have been largely disinclined to believe it.  Unquantifiable, unmeasurable phenomena like "personal potential" and "inner truth" have always seemed so subjective to me as to be nearly meaningless.

Also, I've blogged before about my struggles with anxiety and depression, troubles that have been with me as long as I can recall and which probably owe their origin equally to genetics and to a home environment when I was a child that was, even putting the best face on it I can, not easy.  The idea that all that could turn around in a veritable instant would have seemed ridiculous.

But it's not.  Because it happened to me.

Ilya Repin, What Freedom! (1903) [Image is in the Public Domain]

A week ago I attended a men's retreat called "Break Your Chains" at a local retreat center.  The weekend was led by John Aigner, a German life coach and mentor, and the informational website described it as a way of shucking old, self-destructive patterns and learning strategies for revitalizing your life.  All of this sounded good to me.  Just what I needed, actually.  I'd come across the upcoming retreat more or less by accident, and before I could decide otherwise I signed up.

However, the closer it got, the more dubious I became.  I'd been sliding into a full-blown depressive episode for some weeks, and in the week before the retreat, I came damn close to talking myself out of attending.  It was just going to be more happy-talk about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, I was sure of it, and besides, one of my issues is calling attention to myself.  It sounded like the activities during the retreat were going to be largely participatory -- little to no sitting and listening passively -- and the thought that I'd be baring my soul to a bunch of strangers, all of whom were looking at me, was somewhere between distasteful and terrifying.

But Friday came, and I couldn't think of a good excuse.  Oh, well, it was just forty-eight hours.  I'd survive.

So I got in my car and drove to the retreat center.

Out of respect for the privacy of the fourteen other men who participated, and also because John requested that we not reveal the exact activities during the retreat -- not out of any Secrecy from Non-Intitiates, but because future participants shouldn't be cheated of the surprise and delight of where the process takes them -- I'm not going to give a lot of details.  Suffice it to say it was largely about reconnecting body to mind, something I've struggled with forever; the way I've put it is that I feel like I have two brains, a cognitive one and an emotional one, and they are not on speaking terms.  The other part was about creating connections to other people, which is something else I've never found easy.

It became apparent within the first hour that if I didn't throw myself into the process, I was going to gain nothing from it.  So Friday evening, I sort of said, "Fuck it, what do I have to lose?" and pitched myself in headfirst.

And it feels like the person who walked into the retreat center on Friday afternoon is not the same person who walked out Sunday evening.

I'm not foolish enough to think that this one event solved all my problems, nor that my difficulties with depression and anxiety are vanquished.  John warned us about how easy it is to sink back into your previous patterns as soon as you're back in the old context of work, family demands, and the various distractions and difficulties that the world inevitably brings.  But something fundamental in me got knocked loose during that weekend, something that's been stuck for a very long time.  And I think -- I hope -- I'll never be quite the same again.

I'm still processing a lot of what I learned and experienced during that forty-eight hours.  I know that continuing to integrate that into my life -- not to slip backward to where I was -- will take effort.  But one of the deepest realizations I had was that whatever headway I made, I was not going to get dragged back without putting up a hell of a fight.  The constant fear and anxiety, the habit of caution and guardedness toward everything and everyone, was nowhere I'd choose to be, and if there was a way out, I'd take it even if it required a lot of work.

I'd made a u-turn, and I couldn't afford to waste the opportunity it afforded me.

I'll end with a quote from another piece of research, this one by CaSondra Devine and William Sparks of Queens University.  In their 2014 paper "Defining Moments: Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Personal Transformation," from the Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, they write, regarding patients who described positive transformative experiences:
The quick fixes to mask reality did not work anymore.  A way out did not seem possible, and then realization set in.  A choice had to be made between living or dying.  To choose life meant to pick up the pieces and access resources that could assist.  To choose death was to allow thoughts, guilt, shame, remorse, anger, rage, hurt, and past to consume their identity...  [The] participants... chose to live.  When [they] were asked where they would be had they chosen a different direction, they unanimously had responses that limited their quality of life.  It is my belief that the very instant that the individuals chose to live was their defining moment towards personal transformation.
*******************************

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]






Saturday, November 23, 2019

The language of music

Music is, in a lot of ways, the universal human language.  If there is a culture that does not have some form of music, I've never heard of it.  It speaks to us on a deep, primal level, which is why dance is as ubiquitous as music.

We hear the beat, we want to move our bodies, and for a lot of us, that experience is transformative, almost transcendent.

It's also undeniable that musical traditions differ.  I've been a musician since I was a teen, primarily on flute and piano (although I also play bagpipes, something I think accords me some bragging rights, although others may differ, such as my wife and my two dogs).  I've played primarily in three different musical traditions -- western European classical music, traditional Celtic music, and Balkan music.  It hardly bears mention that these idioms differ, as do (honestly) just about any two musical traditions you want to pick.  From the formal, cerebral intricacy of J. S. Bach, to the wild abandon of an Irish reel, to the insane asymmetrical time signatures of a Bulgarian kopanica, there's no doubt that there are tremendous differences in style, rhythm, melody, and structure.

Me and the amazing fiddler Deborah Rifkin performing some loony Macedonian tune in 11/16 at Folk College a few years ago

An interesting question, considering how universal music appears to be, is if there really is an underlying similarity between all of these traditions.  The differences are obvious; consider the different scales used in a lot of Jewish folk music that gives its distinctive sound, and even odder (to my ear) are the quarter-tone intervals used in Middle Eastern music from such ethnically distinct traditions as the music of the Arabs, Turks, and Persians.

To answer this question, a team led by Samuel Mehr of Harvard University did a structural analysis of 5,000 songs from 60 different cultures, and found that despite the differences there are fundamental similarities between music no matter where it's from or what purpose it serves.  The authors write:
Music is in fact universal: It exists in every society (both with and without words), varies more within than between societies, regularly supports certain types of behavior, and has acoustic features that are systematically related to the goals and responses of singers and listeners.  But music is not a fixed biological response with a single prototypical adaptive function: It is produced worldwide in diverse behavioral contexts that vary in formality, arousal, and religiosity.  Music does appear to be tied to specific perceptual, cognitive, and affective faculties, including language (all societies put words to their songs), motor control (people in all societies dance), auditory analysis (all musical systems have signatures of tonality), and aesthetics (their melodies and rhythms are balanced between monotony and chaos).
It's a fascinating result, and makes me wonder if we have some fundamental brain structure that is responsible for not only our universal response to music, but the commonalities that exist between songs from different cultures.   "In the way that all languages in the world have a set of phonemes – all words in the world are made up of small sets of speech sounds – so it is with melodies," said W. Tecumseh Fitch, of the University of Vienna, who co-authored the study.  "All melodies can be built up from a small set of notes.  This suggests there is a biological basis that is constant across all humans, but interpreted differently in different human cultures."

Which I think is amazingly cool.  We've already seen here at Skeptophilia that musical training enhances brain plasticity, and seen music's role in emotional catharsis, so it should come as no real surprise that there could be an underlying neurological reason why it affects us on so many different levels.

One limitation of the study that came to my mind, however, is that all they looked at were songs.  As versatile as the human voice is, this restricts the range (literally) of melodies they could consider.  Additionally, there are musical traditions that have traveled very far from the tonal centering the researchers found to be ubiquitous -- consider the twelve-tone system of the brilliant Arnold Schönberg, and the startlingly experimental music of people like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, just as three examples.  There's no denying that there are people who find their pieces emotionally moving, but they're about as far from a simple folk melody as you can get.

You have to wonder what Mehr et al.'s algorithm would do with them.

But enough of this.  I've been listening to some piano music by Claude Debussy while I'm writing this, and one of my favorite pieces -- La cathédral engloutie (The Drowned Cathedral) just came on.  I think I'm ready just to close my eyes and sink into it.

***************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Friday, November 22, 2019

An unusual outburst

There's something about the very large and the very small that never fails to be awe-inspiring.

I remember when my eighth grade science teacher was trying to impress upon us how tiny atoms were.  She asked us to think about how many atoms were in a typical raindrop.  Then she asked, "If you had the same number of grains of sand as there are atoms in a raindrop, how much sand would you have?"

The guesses were all over the place.  A bucket full.  A dump truck full.  A whole beach full.

But no, she said.  If you had as many grains of sand as there are atoms in a raindrop, you'd have enough to fill a trench a kilometer deep, three kilometers across...

... stretching all the way around the world at the equator.

I've since tried to do some ballpark estimation to see if this is right, and it appears to be pretty damn close.  If anything, it's an underestimate.

Then there's the world of the very large.  Voyager 1, one of the fastest spacecraft ever launched (hit speeds of 17 kilometers per second).  At those speeds, how long would it take to reach the nearest star other than the Sun -- Alpha Centauri?

Turns out it's 70,000 years.  The nearest star.  If it were heading that direction, which it's not.

Yeah, the universe we live in is a place of extremes.  But since we live in that middle zone in between, our brains aren't all that well-equipped to comprehend those extremes.  It doesn't take much before we simply boggle.  "Okay, that's small," or "okay, that's big," and we can't really get past that.  This, I think, is why the average U. S. citizen isn't all that concerned when (s)he hears that the federal deficit is now nudging close to one trillion dollars.

A trillion?  It's big.  That's a lot of money.  But so is a billion, and so is a million.

"Meh."  *shrugs shoulders*

I have to watch that tendency myself, and I consider myself at least above average at mathematics.  Which is why I had to do a little mental arithmetic when I read a paper published this week in Nature about one of the biggest, most powerful phenomena known -- a gamma-ray burster.

Artist's depiction of a gamma-ray burster [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Gamma-ray bursters are basically the death screams of enormous supergiant stars.  When one of those becomes a supernova, on its way to its final destination as a black hole, the shock waves from the explosion smash into the clouds of gas and debris moving outward from the star's surface, but traveling more slowly than the shock waves are.  This pumps energy into the gas clouds and triggers them to emit light.  Then the electrons freed by the collision slingshot even more energy into the light in a process called inverse Compton scattering.

The result is a jet of electromagnetic radiation like nothing else in the universe.  As spectacular as it is, it would be no fun to witness up close.  Any planet anywhere near -- and by near, keep in mind that I mean hundreds of light years -- would be flash-fried within milliseconds.

Here's something to wrap your head around.  One of the more familiar units of energy to science types is the electron volt.  What exactly it means, and why it's named that, isn't really critical here, but to give you a feel for it, your average photon of visible light carries with it an energy on the order of between one and three electron volts.

This week's paper describes the capture, by the two MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov) Telescopes on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, of photons from a gamma-ray burster that carried one trillion electron volts of energy.  (There's no reason for concern, however.  The explosion in question took place 4.5 billion light years away, so by the time it got here, the energetic remnants were barely more than a blip.)

Here's another comparison, if that one wasn't enough for you.  Gamma-ray bursts of this type generally last between a few seconds and two minutes.  And in that time, more energy is released than the Sun will release in its entire lifetime.

At that point, my brain kind of goes into vapor lock and freezes up.  All I'm left with is the feeling of being very, very small.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing.  We humans tend to get a bit cocky at times, and it's good that sometimes we're reminded we're little fish in an extremely big pond.  The problems and day-to-day struggles we face down here are, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant.

On the other hand, I'm still pretty freakin' worried about the federal deficit.

***************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Thursday, November 21, 2019

Unbearable

I remembering going to visit my parents during the Christmas season in the mid-1980s, and there was this new thing on the market for kids called "Teddy Ruxpin."  Teddy Ruxpin was a talking teddy bear that would move his eyes and mouth while "saying" pre-recorded lines, first on a cassette tape, and (in later models) on a digital device.

Teddy Ruxpin was a massive hit, largely due to an equally massive advertising campaign.  They flew off the shelves.  Toy stores couldn't keep them in stock.  Desperate parents of spoiled children paid huge amounts for black market Teddies Ruxpin.

I recall this primarily, though, for a different reason than crass commercialism, a phenomenon so deeply entrenched in American culture that it's hardly worth commenting on.  What I mostly remember about Teddy Ruxpin was that during the height of the craze, a batch of the toys went out that had defective playback devices.  They played the recordings slowly, with a lower pitch, with the result that Teddy Ruxpin's voice sounded like a cross between Morgan Freeman and Satan.

I still recall the news broadcast where a reporter, trying heroically to keep a straight face, talked about the recall, and activated one of the defective bears.  "I WANT TO PLAY WITH YOU," Teddy said in a sepulchral voice, all the while smiling cheerfully.  "HA HA HA HA HA HA."  Apparently the voice was scary enough that several children had already been traumatized when they activated their bear, expecting a cheerful cartoon-character voice, and instead got something that sounded like the soundtrack from The Exorcist.

My dad and I took about 45 minutes to stop laughing.  Over dinner, one of us would say, "PASS THE KETCHUP," in a Darth Vader voice, adding, "HA HA HA HA HA."  And then we'd both crack up again, much to the chagrin of my poor, long-suffering mother, who had many fine qualities but was born without a sense of humor.

This all comes up because of a new talking teddy bear, also designed for children, but with a special twist.

This teddy bear is supposed to be appealing to dead children.


I wish I was kidding about this, but I'm not.  I heard about it on Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, and she has an excellent reputation for veracity.  Apparently the idea is that the bear, who is named (I kid you not) "BooBuddy," says things that might be attractive or interesting to the spirits of dead children, who then will approach the bear and activate an EMF detector, making LEDs on his paws light up.

Here's the sales pitch, from Ghost Stop, the site that is selling Boo Buddy:
Not your average bear! BooBuddy is cute as a button and so much more.  This ghost hunting trigger object responds to environmental changes and even asks EVP questions to initiate interaction and potential evidence. 
BooBuddy is not a toy - he's an investigator! 
Within the ghost hunting and paranormal investigations field, some theories suggest that using an object familiar and attractive to an entity may entice them to interact.  This is called a 'trigger object'.  BooBuddy is just that and more allowing us the ability to 'see' changes in the environment and initiate communication on it's [sic] own. 
Set BooBuddy and turn it on to detect environment changes and start asking questions.  Make sure to set a recorder or camcorder near the doll to document any potential responses.  That, and BooBuddy loves being on camera!
Sure he does.

I'm not at all sure what I could say about this, other than that I would buy one for the novelty value alone, if they weren't $99.95.  I guess if you believe all of this stuff about trigger objects and EMF fluctuations and so on, BooBuddy is as sensible as anything else out there.  And if anyone does conduct any... um, empirical research using the teddy bear, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know the results.

Unless it says something like "HEY CHILDREN... DO YOU WANT TO PLAY WITH ME?  HA HA HA HA HA HA."  And then winks at you.  Because that would be scary as hell.

***************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Wednesday, November 20, 2019

The biochemical zoo

The human/alien hybrid is a common trope in science fiction.  From the angst-ridden half-Vulcan Mr. Spock, to the ultra-competent and powerful half-Klingon B'Elanna Torres, to the half-Betazoid empath Deanna Troi, the idea of having two intelligent humanoid species produce children together is responsible for dozens of plot twists in Star Trek alone.

Much as I love the idea (and the show), the likelihood of a human being able to engage in any hot bow-chicka-bow-wow with an alien, and have that union produce an offspring, is damn near zero.  Even if the two in question had all the various protrusions and indentations more or less lined up, the main issue is the compatibility of the genetic material.  I mean, consider it; it's usually impossible for two ordinary terrestrial species to hybridize -- even related ones (say, a Red-tailed Hawk and a Peregrine Falcon) are far enough apart genetically that any chance mating would produce an unviable embryo.

Now consider how likely it is to have genetic compatibility between a terrestrial species and one from the fourth planet orbiting Alpha Centauri.

Any hope you might have had for a steamy tryst with an alien just got smashed even further by a study that came out of a study from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Emory University, and the German Aerospace Center a few days ago.  Entitled, "One Among Millions: The Chemical Space of Nucleic Acid-Like Molecules," by Henderson James Cleaves II, Christopher Butch, Pieter Buys Burger, Jay Goodwin, and Markus Meringer, the study shows that the DNA and RNA that underlies the genetics of all life on Earth is only one of millions of possible information-encoding molecules that could be out there in the universe.

It was amazing how diverse these molecules were, even given some pretty rigid parameters.  Restricting the selection to linear polymers (so the building blocks have to have attachment points that allow for the formation of chains), and three constituent atoms -- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, like our own carbohydrates -- the researchers found 706,568 possible combinations (counting configurations and their mirror images, pairs of molecules that are called stereoisomers).  Adding nitrogen (so, hooking in chemicals like proteins and the DNA and RNA nitrogenous bases, the letters of the DNA and RNA alphabets) complicated matters some -- but they still got 454,442 possible configurations.

The results were a surprise even to the researchers.  "There are two kinds of nucleic acids in biology, and maybe twenty or thirty effective nucleic acid-binding nucleic acid analogs," said Henderson James Cleaves, who led the study, in an interview in SciTechDaily "We wanted to know if there is one more to be found...  The answer is, there seem to be many, many more than was expected."

Co-author Pieter Burger of Emory University is excited about the possible medical applications of this study.  "It is absolutely fascinating to think that by using modern computational techniques we might stumble upon new drugs when searching for alternative molecules to DNA and RNA that can store hereditary information," Burger said.  "It is cross-disciplinary studies such as this that make science challenging and fun yet impactful."

While I certainly can appreciate the implications of this research from an Earth-based standpoint, I was immediately struck by its application to the search for extraterrestrial life.  As I mentioned earlier, it was already nearly impossible that humans and aliens would have cross-compatible DNA, but now it appears that alien life might well not be constrained to a DNA-based genetic code at all.  I always thought that DNA, or something very close to it, would be found in any life form we run across, whether on this planet or another; but the Cleaves et al. study suggests that there are a million or more other ways that organisms might spell out their genetic code.

So this drastically increases the likelihood of life on other planets.  The tighter the parameters for life, the less likely it is -- so the discovery of a vast diversity of biochemistry opens up the field in a manner that is breathtaking.


... but the chance that the aliens will look like this is, sadly, pretty low.

This raises the problem of whether we'll recognize alien life when we see it.  The typical things you look for if you're trying to figure out if something's alive -- such as a metabolism involving the familiar organic compounds all our cells contain -- might cause us to overlook something that is alive but is being carried along by a completely different chemistry.

And what an organism with that completely different chemistry might look like -- how it would move, eat, sense its environment, reproduce, and think -- well, there'd be an embarrassment of riches.  The possibilities are far beyond even the Star Trek universe, with their fanciful aliens that look basically human but with odd facial structures and funny accents.

The whole thing boggles the mind.  And it further reinforces a conclusion I've held for a very long time; I suspect that we'll find life out there pretty much everywhere we look, and even on some planets we'd have thought completely inhospitable.  The "Goldilocks Zone" -- the region surrounding a star where orbiting planets would have conditions that are "just right" for life to form -- is looking like it might be a vaster territory than we'd ever dreamed.

***************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Jurassic bird

Regular readers of Skeptophilia know that I have scant patience for creationists, but what really grinds my gears about them is that so often their questions and objections to evolutionary theory are an indication that they haven't even bothered to find out what the scientists are actually saying.

A few examples, that I am still seeing and hearing, even though a three-minute Google search would answer them in a way even a third-graders would understand:

1.  If humans came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
If God created humans from dust, why is there still dust?
2.  Evolution is ridiculous.  They're expecting you to believe that a fish gave birth to a bird.
No, actually, no one is trying to get you to believe that, and your apparent failure to understand what the theory says is not evidence that it's wrong.
3.  Scientists have disproven/discredited (choose as many as you want from the following): radioisotope dating, Darwin's theory of natural selection, the existence of beneficial mutations, the antiquity of the Earth.  They are abandoning evolution as a failed theory in droves.
No, they haven't, and no they aren't.  Next question.
4.  If evolution is true, there's no reason to be moral, and there should be no problem if we run around murdering and pillaging and raping all the time.
All you have to do is look at the degree of cooperation and social bonding in a wolf pack to recognize why that's wrong.  Oh, and if all that's keeping you from murdering and pillaging and raping is your religion, then I think you're the one with the questionable moral standards, not me.
5.  There are no transitional fossils.  There's no hard evidence of "missing links" between different groups of organisms.
There are actually thousands of fossils of transitional species.  The problem is, if you tell a creationist, "Look, here's a species B that's a transition between A and C!" he'll say, "Yeah, well now you have two gaps -- between A and B, and between B and C!"
It's the transitional fossil question that brings up this topic today, because of an awesome discovery in Japan that was the subject of a paper in Communications Biology last week.  In "An Unusual Bird (Theropoda, Avialae) from the Early Cretaceous of Japan Suggests Complex Evolutionary History of Basal Birds," Takuya Imai, Yoichi Azuma, Soichiro Kawabe, Masateru Shibata, and Kazunori Miyata (of Fukui Prefectural University), and Min Wang and Zhonghe Zhou (of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) describe a fascinating new species, christened Fukuipteryx prima, that is adding to what we know about the evolutionary history of birds, and their relationship to theropod dinosaurs.

Grumpy bird is sick of those creationists' shit.  [Restoration of Fukuipteryx prima by Masanori Yoshida]

The authors write:
Except for the Late Jurassic Archaeopteryx, non-ornithothoracine birds had previously been known only from the Jehol Biota [China] and contemporary deposits in northern Korean Peninsula.  The discovery of F. prima further increases the geological distribution of non-ornithothoracine birds.  It appears that non-ornithothoracine avialans are not restricted to a relatively cold, highland lacustrine environment in the Early Cretaceous of north-eastern China, but inhabited more temperate, lowland regions such as the one represented by the Kitadani Formation, most likely with other ornithothoracines widespread around the globe.  Further exploration of the Early Cretaceous fossil birds outside East Asia are greatly needed to clarify the palaeogeographical distribution of these basal birds.  Very recently, several new genera and species of non-ornithothoracine avialans have been described from north-eastern China.  These discoveries and this study suggest non-ornithothoracine avialans may represent a diverse group within the Avialae.
So Fukuipteryx (and Archaeopteryx as well) are basically cousins to modern birds (the "Ornithothoracines," a term that means "bird thorax" and signifies an internal chest structure similar to modern birds).  But it clearly shows the transition of an animal that was more dinosaur-like into something more bird-like, adding one more link in the chain between the two groups and further strengthening the assertion that, basically, modern birds are dinosaurs.

I'm sure it won't take the creationists long to start disputing all this, however.  As I've remarked before, if you disbelieve in the methods of science, you're kind of unreachable.  (I've heard it put, you can't logic your way out of a belief you didn't logic your way into.)  But for the rest of us, this is just one more fascinating piece of the puzzle -- another one of Darwin's "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" that evolution has generated on our planet.

***************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Monday, November 18, 2019

Religious expression in science class

Did you hear about Ohio House Bill 164?

It's been called the "Student Religious Liberties Act."  It contains four provisions:
  • It requires public schools to give students the same access to facilities if they want to meet for religious expression as they’d give secular groups.
  • It removes a provision that allows school districts to limit religious expression to lunch periods or other non-instructional times.
  • It allows students to engage in religious expression before, during and after school hours to the same extent as a student in secular activities or expression.
  • It prohibits schools from restricting a student from engaging in religious expression in completion of homework, artwork and other assignments.
It's the last one that made me sit up and take notice.

Despite being an atheist, I have no problem with public schools allowing religious groups to meet on their property, as long as there's no statement (overt or implied) that students are required be there.  I don't really have a problem with provision #2 except that it's ambiguous -- who is leading the religious expression?  If students want to say a prayer before an exam, no big deal.

If the teacher leads the class in a prayer before an exam, big deal.

Eastman Johnson, A Child at Prayer (1873) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Likewise, #3 is no real issue as long as there's no coercion.  But #4?

Just hang on a moment.

So what you're telling me is that my biology students could "engage in religious expression" in their homework, to the extent of saying the Earth is 6,000 years old and life was whooshed into existence by a Big Dude in the Sky?  That they could claim radioisotope dating doesn't work?  That they could state that the Grand Canyon was formed in a big, worldwide flood, and the only survivors were a 700-year-old man and his family who rescued two of each of the nine-million-odd species on Earth, conveniently dropping them off in their ancestral homelands afterward?  And all the water just sort of "went away?"

If an administrator told me I had to do that, my response would include the word "No," but the rest of it would be barely printable without a "strong language" warning.

Teachers are under no obligation to coddle students' erroneous beliefs, whether or not they come under the heading of "religion."  If a kid comes in and tries to convince me homeopathy works or that vaccines cause autism or that there's a secret code in our DNA implanted there by Ancient Aliens, I am abrogating my duty as a science teacher if I don't (gently and kindly) show them why they're wrong.  That's what science is about -- using the tools of inference, logic, and evidence to figure out how things work.

If your wild imaginings, fears, or wishful thinking lead you to an answer that is demonstrably wrong, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to pretend you're right just out of some misguided sympathy.   And I don't care particularly where the aforementioned wrong stuff came from.  It could come from Monster Quest or from Chariots of the Gods... or the Bible.  The source is completely irrelevant.

What matters is that science is about figuring out the truth, not about making us comfortable.

There are folks who might think my fury about this is an overreaction, that provision #4 just guarantees that students can put religious imagery or references into art, personal essays, and so on.  This is nonsense; students have always been able to do that.  (There was a claim zooming around the internet a while back about a kid who had turned in a paper saying her biggest inspiration was Jesus, but the Evil Secular Teacher wrote in red ink "Remove Jesus Please!" and gave her an F.  The illustration was obviously photoshopped, and the whole story made up, but that didn't stop a lot of extremely religious people from posting indignant screeds about how the United States was going to hell.)

No, provision #4 is yet another attack on science teachers, an attempt to shoehorn Genesis and the Great Flood into the classroom.  It's a sneaky way to protect kids who claim there's doubt about evolution (there isn't), that there's no evidence of the Big Bang (there is, plenty of it), and that plate tectonics is false (it's not), allowing them to write down blatant falsehoods in a discipline that is supposed to value the truth, and still not be penalized for it.

It is, simply put, another attempt to destroy the separation of church and state.

Oh, and I didn't tell you the worst news: Ohio House Bill 164 passed.

By a margin of 61 to 3.

I can only hope that the fight's not over, that this legislation will generate lawsuits about constitutionality, but it does demonstrate the fact that the people who would love to see the United States become a fundamentalist theocracy aren't giving up.

***************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]