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.

Saturday, February 29, 2020

The second biggest bang

There are times in science where -- if you're going to describe something accurately -- you rapidly become lost in superlatives.

That was my reaction to a paper this week in Astrophysical Journal titled, "Discovery of a Giant Radio Fossil in the Ophiuchus Galaxy Cluster," by a team led by Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory.  Here's what the researchers had to say about it:
The Ophiuchus galaxy cluster exhibits a curious concave gas density discontinuity at the edge of its cool core...  Using low-frequency (72-240 MHz) radio data from MWA GLEAM and GMRT, we found that the X-ray structure is, in fact, a giant cavity in the X-ray gas filled with diffuse radio emission with an extraordinarily steep radio spectrum.  It thus appears to be a very aged fossil of the most powerful AGN [active galactic nucleus] outburst seen in any galaxy cluster (pV∼5×10^61 erg for this cavity).  There is no apparent diametrically opposite counterpart either in X-ray or in the radio.  It may have aged out of the observable radio band because of the cluster asymmetry.  At present, the central AGN exhibits only a weak radio source, so it should have been much more powerful in the past to have produced such a bubble.  The AGN is currently starved of accreting cool gas because the gas density peak is displaced by core sloshing.  The sloshing itself could have been set off by this extraordinary explosion if it had occurred in an asymmetric gas core.  This dinosaur may be an early example of a new class of sources to be uncovered by low-frequency surveys of galaxy clusters.
To say that this explosion was huge doesn't even begin to describe it.  The energy output of this outburst puts it in second place ever -- the only event we know of that was more energetic than this was the Big Bang itself.

Its size isn't the only odd thing about it.  "We've seen outbursts in the centers of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive," said Melanie Johnston-Hollitt of Curtin University's International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, in an interview at Phys.Org.  "And we don't know why it's so big.  But it happened very slowly—like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years."

However slow it was, the explosion blew a hole in the sphere of superhot plasma surrounding the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.  Study lead author Simona Giacintucci compares it to the pressure from the eruption of Mount Saint Helens blowing off the entire top of the mountain, leaving a crater behind.  "The difference," she said, "is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rogelio Bernal Andreo, Rho Ophiuchus Widefield, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Johnston-Hollitt, who directs the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia, said that despite the enormity of the relic explosion, it was only recently observed because of a drastic improvement in astronomers' ability to observe the skies in the very-low-frequency end of the spectrum.  "It's a bit like archaeology," she said.  "We've been given the tools to dig deeper with low frequency radio telescopes so we should be able to find more outbursts like this now."

So there might be other colossal explosion remnants out there just waiting to be found.

What it brings up for me, non-researcher that I am, is to wonder what on earth could have caused a detonation on this scale.  To my knowledge, the explanation is still uncertain, and in fact can't be accounted for by any known natural process.  The lack of a mechanism and the size of the outburst led scientists at first to doubt the measurements were correct.  "People were skeptical because of the size of outburst," Johnston-Hollitt said.  "But it really is that."

And improvements to the Murchison Widefield Array is improving its sensitivity by a factor of ten, which means we're only seeing the beginning of discoveries like this, and who knows what else.  "The Universe is a weird place," Johnston-Hollitt said.

Indeed it is.  Awe-inspiring to the point of bowling over your brain, at times.  Look around you at your house, town, and region, your friends, family, and pets, even the bigger concerns of politics and global conflict -- and realize that on the grand scheme of things, we are minuscule, hardly even a blip on the surface of cosmic space-time.  Humbling and a little scary, isn't it?

But the human brain isn't built to conceptualize such enormities, and it's best not to dwell on it.  On the whole, it's probably better to have another cup of coffee and think about something else for a while.

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

One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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





Friday, February 28, 2020

Pieces of the mosaic

The diversity you find among birds is really remarkable.

There are differences in bill shape, from the weird angled beaks of flamingos, to the longer-on-the-bottom fish skewers of skimmers, to the absurd (and aptly-named) spoonbills and shoebills, to the pelicans -- about whom my dad taught me a limerick when I was little:
A wonderful bird is the pelican.
His bill can hold more than his bellican.
He can stash in his beak
All his food for the week,
But I really don't see how the hellican.
Yeah, it's kind of obvious where I got my sense of humor from.

Of course, it doesn't end there.  The impossibly long toes of the South American jacanas (called "lilytrotters" because they can walk on the floating leaves of waterlilies).  The phenomenal wingspan of the albatross.  The insane plumage of the birds-of-paradise.

And the colors.  Man, the colors!  Even in my decidedly non-tropical home we have some pretty amazing birds.  The first time I saw an Indigo Bunting, I was certain that one of my sons had put a blue plastic bird on the bird feeder just to rattle my chain.  There couldn't be a real bird that was that fluorescent shade of cobalt.

Then... it moved.

But nothing prepared me for the colors I saw on my visits to Ecuador, especially amongst the birds of the tanager family.  There are hundreds of species of tanagers in that tiny little country, and because they often travel in mixed foraging flocks, you can sometimes see twenty or thirty different species in the same tree.  These include the Green-headed Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lars Falkdalen Lindahl (User:Njaelkies Lea), Green-headed Tanager Ubatuba, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Black-capped Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joseph C Boone, Black-capped Tanager JCB, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And the Flame-faced Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eleanor Briccetti, Flame-faced Tanager (4851596008), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Being a biologist, of course the question of how these birds evolved such extravagant colors is bound to come up, and my assumption was always that it was sexual selection -- the females choosing the most brightly-colored males as mates (in this group, as with many bird species, the males are usually vividly decked out and the females are drab-colored).  If over time, the showiest males are the most likely to get lucky, then you get sexual dimorphism -- the evolution of different outward appearances between males and females.  (This isn't always so, by the way.  Most species of sparrows, for example, have little sexual dimorphism, and even experienced birders can't tell a male from a female sparrow by looking.)

The truth is, however, this is an oversimplified explanation, which I suppose I should expect given how long I've been in science.  Nature is both way more complex and way more interesting than we usually expect.  Just this week a paper was released in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology that looks at another group of birds that look like someone went nuts with a paint-by-number set -- the Australasian lorikeets.

Lorikeets are in the parrot family, and even by comparison to other parrot species they're ridiculously flamboyant.  Take a look, for example, at the aptly-named Rainbow Lorikeet:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dick Daniels (http://carolinabirds.org/), Rainbow Lorikeet RWD, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The researchers, Brian Smith, Glenn Seeholzer, and Jon Merwin of the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Ornithology, were curious about how lorikeets balance being bright enough to attract mates while not being so showy they attract the attention of predators -- the latter being in no short supply in Australia and New Guinea, where the birds are found.  Using spectral analyses of museum specimens encompassing nearly the entire diversity of lorikeets, Smith, Seeholzer, and Merwin found out a few things that were absolutely fascinating:
  • Virtually all the color diversity in lorikeets is on the underside -- breast, abdomen, and front of the face.  The backs of almost all species are plain green -- making them camouflaged from above and less visible to predators like hawks.
  • Some of the range of colors they do have is invisible to the human eye.  A number of species have pigments that reflect strongly in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum, which is visible to birds but not to us -- and presumably, not to many non-avian predators either.  So they can be as flashy as they want in the ultraviolet and still not attract attention from hungry carnivores.
  • Each of the patches is under the control of a different set of genes and thus can be selected independently, meaning different species of lorikeets can diverge in terms of the facial color while remaining similar in the coloration on the back and abdomen -- something called "mosaic evolution."
"The range of colors exhibited by lorikeets adds up to a third of the colors birds can theoretically observe," Merwin said.  "We were able to capture variation in this study that isn't even visible to the human eye.  The idea that you can take color data from museum specimens, infer patterns, and gain a larger understanding of how these birds evolved is really amazing."

Of course, I wondered if the same forces might be involved in the evolution of two groups I've actually seen in the wild, hummingbirds and the aforementioned tanagers.  It certainly seems to fit the same pattern -- a wide range of eye-catching colors on the front of the body, and -- especially in the hummingbirds -- largely green on top.

But that's just a guess.  It certainly opens up an interesting line of inquiry into the evolution of other bird groups.  And -- perhaps -- will end up explaining a great many of the other pieces of the biodiversity mosaic.

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

One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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





Thursday, February 27, 2020

Choosing the right path

We're all so familiar with our own mental internal state that it's interesting to consider (1) that not everyone has the same sort of thing going on in their brains, and (2) what's really going on in there is not at all obvious.

I was just discussing the first bit last night with a friend.  She told me that she has entire, back-and-forth conversations in her mind, pretty much constantly.  Asking herself things, musing over answers, as if she was on both sides of a discussion over what to do and how to do it.  Me?  I have a crazy, trippy, disjointed monologue, jumping from topic to topic, as if my skull was occupied by Daffy Duck on speed.  And generally there's a soundtrack, too, usually of whichever song I heard on the radio over the past 48 hours was the most annoying.

It's no wonder I have such difficulty focusing.

Some people are highly visual, and rather than words, they think in pictures.  No internal chatter at all, which is hard for me to imagine.  And I guess it's no surprise I don't think in images much, especially not images of people; being face-blind, I can't picture anyone's face, including my own.  Nada.  I know I have blond-ish hair and blue eyes and short facial hair and a big nose, but I can't put it all together into a composite image the way some people (apparently) do with ease.

Of course, in most ways I get by just fine.  I was asked one time, "If you can't picture your own face at all, how do you know it's you when you look into the bathroom mirror in the morning?"  I stared at the person for a moment, and said, "Because I know there's no one else in the bathroom but me."

I mean, I may be face-blind, but fer cryin' in the sink, I'm not stupid.

But I digress.

Anyway, there seems to be a huge variety of internal experience, which I suppose is what we should expect given the huge variety of outward expressions of that experience.  But that brings us to the second question: what's happening inside our skulls that creates that internal experience in the first place?

Neuroscientists are just beginning to piece together an answer to that question.  We have a pretty good idea of where in the brain certain activity occurs; higher-order processing in the prefrontal cortex, motor coordination in the motor cortex and cerebellum, spatial navigation in the hippocampus, speech production in the Wernicke's and Broca's areas of the cerebrum, and so on.  Even my own particular difficulty, which goes by the medical name prosopagnosia, has been localized to a place called the fusiform gyrus, which in the face-blind simply doesn't respond when confronted with an image of a face.  So we can see it just fine, but we don't recognize who it is.  (It manifests in me as everyone looking vaguely familiar -- so when someone starts talking to me, I can usually slip right into acting like I know who I'm talking to, when in fact I very rarely do until I recognize the voice or pick up context clues.  But I'm good at faking recognition, at least until I get fed up fishing around and say, "I'm sorry, but I have no idea who you are.")

But other than the general locations in the brain where certain functions occur, we're still largely in the dark.  Think about something really simple that isn't in your mind before the question was asked -- for example, what did you have for dinner last night?

Now, where was that information before I asked the question?  How was it encoded?  How did you retrieve it?  Even weirder are those moments when you know you know a piece of information, and it's in there, but you can't get at it -- the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon.  And why, when you stop worrying at it and start thinking about other things, does the answer spontaneously pop out?  (In the days before Google, when finding out factual information usually required a trip to the library, I was driving myself nuts trying to remember the names of the Three Musketeers.  Athos, Porthos, and...?  It was a full two days later, while I was out for a run and completely thinking about other things, that suddenly my brain went "... Aramis!")

What about when we're trying to make a decision between two alternatives?  For me, I'll bat back and forth between them, then -- quite suddenly -- I settle down into one or the other.  And just last month a paper in Cell has suggested that what's going on in the brain might be exactly what it feels like, only much, much faster.

In "Constant Sub-second Cycling between Representations of Possible Futures in the Hippocampus," a team led by neuroscientist Kenneth Kay of Columbia University found that rats confronted with a choice in maze-running shuttle back and forth quickly (about eight times per second) between patterns of neural firing representing the two choices -- as if they were thinking, "Let's see, I wonder what's down the right-hand path?  Hmm, how about the left-hand path?"

The authors write:
Cognitive faculties such as imagination, planning, and decision-making entail the ability to represent hypothetical experience.  Crucially, animal behavior in natural settings implies that the brain can represent hypothetical future experience not only quickly but also constantly over time, as external events continually unfold.  To determine how this is possible, we recorded neural activity in the hippocampus of rats navigating a maze with multiple spatial paths.  We found neural activity encoding two possible future scenarios (two upcoming maze paths) in constant alternation at 8 Hz: one scenario per ∼125-ms cycle...  Notably, cycling occurred across moving behaviors, including during running.  These findings identify a general dynamic process capable of quickly and continually representing hypothetical experience, including that of multiple possible futures.
There are a couple of interesting things about this.  First, there's the role of the hippocampus; higher-order decision-making is traditionally thought to be the provenance of the prefrontal cortex, although the fact that this decision has to do with spatial navigation is probably why it occurs where it does.  Second, why is the cycling so fast -- each flip lasting, on average, an eighth of a second -- when it feels very much like we're considering each possibility slowly and deliberately?  (Of course, that's assuming that our neurology and experience are both comparable to what's happening in rats, which may be a poor assumption.)

I also wonder what's happening with the consideration of imaginary scenarios.  Being a fiction author, I do that a lot, and I know I spend a great deal of time testing out various ideas and plot twists before settling on the one that I want.  It's quite remarkable when you think about it; we're capable of dreaming up highly detailed and completely counterfactual scenes, and interact with them as if they were real -- deciding which path to take, which of the two magical doors to open.


As author and journalist Kathryn Schulz put it, in her phenomenal TED talk "On Being Wrong," "The most wonderful thing about the human mind is not that we can see the world as it is, but that we can see the world as it isn't."

But this is just the first step of solving that most fundamental of questions in neuroscience, which is how we emulate our experience in our brains.  This is one small piece of the puzzle of human consciousness, the origins of creativity, imagination, and memory, the last-mentioned of which hopefully will solve how I can set a tool down and literally thirty seconds later can't remember where I put it.

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

One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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





Wednesday, February 26, 2020

A prehistoric hoax

One of the hazards of becoming more aware of how biased and (sometimes) duplicitous popular media can be is that you finally, de facto, stop believing everything you read and hear.

It's called, of course, being a "cynic," and it's just as lazy as being gullible.  However, because the credulous are often derided as silly or ignorant, cynics sometimes feel that they must therefore be highly intelligent, and that disbelieving everything means that you're too smart to be "taken in."

In reality, cynicism is an excuse, a justification for having stopped thinking.  "The media always lies" isn't any closer to the truth than "I know it's true because I read about it online;" nor is there anything particularly smart about saying "everything you eat causes cancer" or "all of the science we're being told now could be wrong."  All it does is give you an automatic reason not to read (or not to watch your diet or not to learn science), and in the end, all of those are simply statements of willful ignorance.

Take, for example, the site Clues Forum, which has as its tagline, "Exposing Media Fakery."  In particular, consider the thread that was started quite some time ago, but which continues to circulate, lo up unto this very day... entitled "The (Non-religious) Dinosaur Hoax Question."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rauantiques, Psittacosaurus Dinosaur Fossil Skeleton, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And yes, it means what you think it means.  And yes, the "Question" should simply be answered "No."  But let's look a little more deeply at what they're saying... because I think it reveals something rather insidious.

Take a look at how it starts:
Dinosaurs have, in recent years, become a media subject rivaling the space program in popularity and eliciting similar levels of public adoration towards its researchers and scientists. The science of dinosaurs and other prehistoric life is also directly linked to other controversial scientific topics such as evolution, fuel production, climate and even the space program (i.e., what allegedly killed them).
So right from the outset, we've jumped straight into the Motive Fallacy -- the idea that a particular individual's motive for saying something has any bearing on that statement's truth value.  Those scientists, the author says, have motives for our believing in dinosaurs.  Then we're told, at least in vague, hand-waving terms, what those motives are: supporting controversial ideas so people will look up to them, and getting us worried about the climate and the potential for cataclysmic asteroid strikes so they can get funding.  Therefore: they must be lying.  We're never told, outright, that's there's any real evidence the scientists are lying, but the seed is planted, right there in the first paragraph.

Then more reason for doubt is thrown our way when we're told that (*gasp*) scientists make mistakes.  A dinosaur skeleton found in New Jersey, and now on display at the New Jersey State Museum, was reconstructed with a skull based on an iguana, since the actual skull could not be found.  The article, though, uses the word "fake," as if the museum owners and the scientists were deliberately trying to pull the wool over people's eyes.  The truth is that they were simply interpolating the missing pieces -- something that is routinely done by paleontologists.  But the author claims it was more nefarious than that, and that those wily characters gave away the game by admitting what they were up to, right beneath a photograph of the skeleton:
Above is the full-size Hadrosaurus mount currently on display at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton.  The posture is now recognized as incorrect.  At the same time the skeleton is fitted with the wrong skull of another type of duck-bill dinosaur.  Signs at the exhibit acknowledge that both the mounted skeleton as well as nearby illustrated depictions of what the living animal looked like are both wrong.  Both are slated for correction at some unspecified future date.
So yet another hole punched in our confidence, with the revelation that (*horrors*) there are things scientists don't know.  Instead of looking at that as a future line of inquiry, this article gives you the impression that such holes in our knowledge are an indication that everything is suspect.

Last, we're told that it's likely the paleontologists are creating the fossils themselves, because fossils are just "rock in rock," leaving it a complete guessing game as to where the matrix rock ends and the fossil begins.  So for their own secret, evil reasons, paleontologists spend days and weeks out in the field, living in primitive and inhospitable conditions, grinding rocks into the shape of bones so as to hoodwink us all:
But, in our hoax-filled world of fake science, doesn't this rock-in-rock situation make it rather easy for creative interpretations of what the animal really looked like?  And, once a particular animal is “approved” by the gods of the scientific community, wouldn't all subsequent representations of that same animal have to conform with that standard?
By the time you've read this far, you're so far sunk in the mire of paranoia that you would probably begin to doubt that gravity exists.  Those Evil, Evil Scientists!  They're lying to us about everything!

Of course, what we're seeing here is the phenomenon I started with; substituting lazy gullibility with lazy disbelief.  All the writer would have to do is sign up for a paleontology class, or (better yet) go on a fossil dig, to find out how the science is really done.

But I've found that people like this will seldom take any of those steps.  Once you suspect everyone, there's no one to lean on but yourself -- and (by extension) on your own ignorance.  At that point, you're stuck.  So actually, there is a difference between gullibility and cynicism.

Gullibility is curable.

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

One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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





Tuesday, February 25, 2020

The constancy of constants

One of the most enduring mysteries of physics is why the fundamental constants have the values they do.

I remember first thinking about this when I was a freshman in college, and we were looking at the Special Theory of Relativity in my intro-to-physics class.  The speed of light in a vacuum -- the ultimate speed limit, whatever Star Trek would have you believe -- was 299,792,458 meters per second.

What occurred to me was why it was exactly that number and not something else.  What if the speed of light was, say, twenty miles per hour?  Automobile travel would be a different game, and we'd have serious relativistic effects even riding a bicycle.  (Races would be an interesting affair; faster runners' clocks would move more slowly than slower runners' would, so by the end of the race, it'd be hard to get anyone to agree on what everyone's time was.)

All of which was delightfully silly stuff but didn't really get at the original question, which is why the speed of light has the value it does.  And it's not just the speed of light; in Martin Rees's wonderful book Just Six Numbers, he looks at how a handful of fundamental constants -- the gravitational flatness of the universe, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the ratio between the strength of the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force, the number of spatial dimensions, the ratio between the rest mass energy of matter and the gravitational field energy, and the cosmological constant -- have combined to produce the universe around us.  Alter any of these, even by a little bit, and you have a universe that would be profoundly hostile to life, if not to stable matter in general.

This has led some of the more religious-minded folks to what is called the Strong Anthropic Principle, sometimes called the "fine-tuning argument" -- that the universe has been fine-tuned for life, presumably by a Higher Power tweaking the dials on those constants to make them juuuuuuust right for us.  Which runs into two unfortunate counterarguments: (1) the vast majority of the universe is completely hostile to life, including much of our home planet; and (2) the fact that we live in a universe where the important constants have those particular values is unremarkable, because if they didn't, we wouldn't be around to remark upon it.

The latter is something known as the "Weak Anthropic Principle," a stance that doesn't tell you much except for the fact that the only kind of universe we could live in is one that has the conditions in which we could live.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What I find intriguing is that none of these universal constants is derivable -- none come out of calculations based upon known physical laws... yet.  It might be that some of them are derivable and we just haven't figured out how.  Thus far, though, they seem completely arbitrary (except, as noted, that they have to have the values that they do in order for us to be here to consider the question).

A subtler question, and one that (unlike the fine-tuning argument) is actually testable, is whether those constants are the same everywhere in the universe, and whether they're constant over time.  Because if not -- if they vary either in time or space -- that strongly implies that they're not arbitrary, but derive from some underlying characteristic of matter, energy, and space/time that we have yet to uncover, and therefore in altered conditions could have a different value.  So a lot of time is being spent to determine whether any of these constants might be not so constant after all.

Just last week the results came in for one of them, one that is not on Rees's List of Six but is nonetheless pretty damn important; the fine-structure constant, usually written as the Greek letter alpha.  The fine-structure constant is a measure of the strength of interaction between electrons and photons, and is equal to 1/137 (it's a dimensionless number, so it doesn't matter what units you use).

The fine-structure constant is one of the numbers whose value is instrumental in the formation of atoms, so (like Rees's numbers) if it were much different, the universe would be a very different place.  It's one that can be studied at a distance, because one outcome of the fine-structure constant having the value it does is that it creates the spread between the spectral lines of hydrogen.

So a team of physicists looked at the spectrum of hydrogen emitted in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole -- a place where the fabric of space/time is highly contorted because of the enormous gravitational field.  In a paper in Physical Review Letters, we find out that the fine-structure constant in that extremely different and hostile region of space is...

... 1/137.

The authors write:
Searching for space-time variations of the constants of Nature is a promising way to search for new physics beyond General Relativity and the standard model motivated by unification theories and models of dark matter and dark energy.  We propose a new way to search for a variation of the fine-structure constant using measurements of late-type evolved giant stars from the S-star cluster orbiting the supermassive black hole in our Galactic Center.  A measurement of the difference between distinct absorption lines (with different sensitivity to the fine structure constant) from a star leads to a direct estimate of a variation of the fine structure constant between the star’s location and Earth.  Using spectroscopic measurements of 5 stars, we obtain a constraint on the relative variation of the fine structure constant below 10^−5.
So the variation between the fine-structure constant and the fine-structure constant near a humongous black hole is less than a factor of 0.00001.

Note that this still doesn't tell us anything about why the fundamental constants have the values they do, all it does is suggest pretty strongly that they are constant regardless of the conditions pertaining in the region of space where they're measured.

The universe is a strange and mysterious place, and we're only beginning to figure out how it all works.  I mean, think about it; while I don't want to denigrate the scientific accomplishments of our forebears, we've really only begun to parse how the fundamental laws of nature work in the last 150 years.  It's an exciting time -- even if we don't yet have answers to a lot of the most basic questions in physics, at least we're figuring out which questions to ask.

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One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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





Monday, February 24, 2020

A scientific Johnny One-Note

In science, there's sometimes a fine line between looking for data to support your model, and shoehorning every bit of data you can find into your model whether it belongs there or not.

Someone who has stepped over that line -- hell, he left the line behind decades ago, and probably doesn't even know where it is any more -- is British astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe.  Wickramasinghe is best known for his research into panspermia, the idea that living things, and perhaps the ancestors of all living things on Earth, arrived here on meteorites and in interstellar dust.  He did his Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of Fred Hoyle, whose views were also a little on the unorthodox side.  (Hoyle, for example, rejected the Big Bang in favor of the Steady-State model, which he steadfastly clung to his entire life despite there being zilch in the way of evidence in its favor.)

So Wickramasinghe was kind of set up from the beginning to be a maverick.  He and Hoyle wrote paper after paper on panspermia, ultimately ascribing an extraterrestrial origin for the pathogens responsible for the 1918-1919 "Spanish" flu, mad cow disease, polio, and SARS.  He has been involved in studies of dust collected from the upper stratosphere that tested positive for microorganisms, which he claimed was extraterrestrial in origin (of course) and turned out almost certainly not to be (of course).  A meteorite strike in Sri Lanka in 2012 was analyzed by Wickramasinghe, and he stated that the rock fragments contained "extraterrestrial diatoms" -- which were ultimately shown to be fossils of entirely terrestrial species that were contained in the sedimentary rocks where the meteorite hit.

Oh, and in the 1981 creationism/evolution "debate" in the courts of the state of Arkansas, Wickramasinghe was the only scientist to testify on the behalf of the creationists.  "Once again," he said, "the Universe gives the appearance of being biologically constructed, and on this occasion on a truly vast scale."

And, he added, the famous Archaeopteryx fossil, showing the clear link between birds and dinosaurs, is a fake.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Davidnoy, Chandra-Wickramasinghe, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So here we have a guy who is bound and determined to bang away at the same idea forever, in spite of (or maybe because of) the complete lack of scientifically credible evidence for it.  The more embattled he becomes, the more certain he becomes.

You almost have to admire his determination.

I say "almost," because I have to admit to saying, "are you fucking kidding me?" when I ran into an article over at Mysterious Universe describing a paper Wickramasinghe submitted to the journal The Lancet a couple of weeks ago.  And in it -- which you're probably already anticipating...

... he claims that the Wuhan coronavirus came from outer space.

Wickramasinghe writes:
In the case of the current Coronavirus pandemic in China it is interesting to note that an exceptionally bright fireball event was seen on October 11 2019 over Sonjyan City in the Jilin Province of NE China.  It is tempting to speculate that this event had a crucial role to play in what is now unfolding in throughout China.  If a fragment of a loosely held carbonaceous meteorite carrying a cargo of viruses/bacteria entered the mesosphere and stratosphere at high speed ~30km/s, its inner core which survived incandescence would have got dispersed in the stratosphere and troposphere... 
Following the initial deposition of infective particles in a small localized region (e.g. Wuhan, Hubei province, China) particles that have already become dispersed through over a wider area in the troposphere will fall to ground in a higgledy-piggledy manner, and this process could be extended over a typical timescale of 1-2 years until an initial inoculant of the infective agent would be drained.  This accords well with many new strains of viruses including influenza that have appeared in recent years.
Which, I have to admit, is the first time I've ever seen "higgledy-piggledy" used in a scholarly paper.

Be that as it may, the main problem I see about all this -- besides the fact that (1) meteorites hit the Earth all the time, so finding one in the vicinity of a disease outbreak isn't remarkable, and (2) there is no evidence for what he's saying other than "hey, it could be, y'know?" -- is that all of Wickramasinghe's alleged extraterrestrial microbes are closely related to bacteria and viruses that were already here, and in fact have been here for a long, long time.  Yes, the 1918-1919 flu epidemic was horrifying in its contagion rate and mortality, but the causative virus is not really all that different from other flu viruses seen before and since.  Polio has been around since ancient Egyptian times -- and even if you don't buy that the quick mentions in ancient writings were actually polio, it was unequivocally described in an autobiographical account by Sir Walter Scott of events he endured in 1773.  Mad cow disease, and its human analog Creutzfeld-Jakob Syndrome, are caused by misfolding of a protein called PrP, which (in its properly-folded state) is present the brains of every mammalian species tested, including ones that have never been hit on the head with a meteorite.

And COVID-19, as the epidemiologists have named the Wuhan coronavirus, is one of a large family of viruses that have been troubling humanity for millennia.  In fact, a good many of the cases of the common cold are due to members of the coronavirus family, so it'd be a little odd if there was an epidemic caused by a coronavirus, and that one (and its cousin SARS) turned out to be from outer space while the rest of them were here all along.

Wickramasinghe's response to all this is that since all life on Earth originated in space, it stands to reason that you'll find similarities between the ones that come crashing to Earth and the ones that were already here.  We're all aliens, he says, it's just that some of us are more recent arrivals.

Which to me is stretching credulity to the snapping point.  Ockham's Razor kicks in, here -- in the absence of any positive evidence, the (vastly) simpler theory is that all the life forms on Earth go back to a common (terrestrial) ancestor.  Yes, it's possible that the progenitor of all life forms landed here four-billion-odd years ago from an extraterrestrial source -- but that's all we can say.  It's possible.  There's no independent evidence that this happened, so at the moment, it's just a hand-waving guess, not a valid scientific theory.

But that's not going to stop Wickramasinghe, who is bound and determined to take every new development in microbiology and attribute it to an alien incursion.  I keep hoping the guy will give it a rest eventually, but he's 81 years old and showing no signs of it.  Like I said, have to kind of appreciate his tenacity, but it'd be nice if he'd turn that onto some other lines of scientific inquiry, because it gets a little tiresome to keep listening to the astronomical version of Johnny One-Note.

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

One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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





Saturday, February 22, 2020

The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

One of the more curious ghost stories I've ever heard is the tale of the "Brown Lady," named after her drab clothing, who has been allegedly seen many times in Raynham Hall Manor in Norfolk, England.

I first ran across the story in a collection called 50 Great Ghost Stories by John Canning, which from the inscription inside the front cover -- "October 29, 1977 -- Mon cher ami -- mieux vaut tard que jamais -- Amélie" -- I received three days after my seventeenth birthday from a family friend.

It's a pretty cool book, although (like many of this ilk) it mixes myth and folklore with stories that actually have some historical veracity.  The tale of the Brown Lady is one of the second type, because the people involved are actual historical figures, although the evidence for the haunting itself is still a little on the sketchy side.

The facts of the case are pretty well documented.  Lady Dorothy Walpole (18 September 1686 - 29 March 1726), who was the sister of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of England, was married to Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend.  Townshend had been married before, to one Elizabeth Pelham, by whom he had five children; he and Dorothy Walpole had seven more, the youngest of which was the mother of Charles Cornwallis, who signed the surrender at the Siege of Yorktown and ended the American Revolutionary War.

Dorothy Walpole wasn't happy, however, partly because Charles Townshend was more interested in growing turnips (I kid you not) than in devoting himself to his wife and family, and also because supposedly he had a nasty temper, which I would too if I had to eat turnips.  Be that as it may, Dorothy Walpole Townshend sought solace elsewhere, but unfortunately for her, she chose Thomas Wharton, 1st Marquess of Wharton, as a lover.

Well, the story goes that either Townshend or Wharton's wife (the legend varies) caught Dorothy and Thomas in flagrante delicto, and Townshend decided the only proper response was to lock his wife up in Raynham Hall to prevent her from cheating on him again.  She stayed there for the rest of her life, dying in 1726 at the young age of 40, possibly of smallpox -- although if she was never allowed outside her room, you have to wonder who she caught it from.

Be that as it may, once Dorothy Walpole Townshend's sad and short life had ended, people started to report the presence of a specter haunting Raynham Hall.

The most famous of the encounters was with novelist Frederick Maryatt, who was a friend of Charles Dickens.  Maryatt's daughter, Florence, wrote in 1891 about her father's meeting with the Brown Lady :
…he took possession of the room in which the portrait of the apparition hung, and in which she had been often seen, and slept each night with a loaded revolver under his pillow.  For two days, however, he saw nothing, and the third was to be the limit of his stay.  On the third night, however, two young men (nephews of the baronet), knocked at his door as he was undressing to go to bed, and asked him to step over to their room (which was at the other end of the corridor), and give them his opinion on a new gun just arrived from London.  My father was in his shirt and trousers, but as the hour was late, and everybody had retired to rest except themselves, he prepared to accompany them as he was.  As they were leaving the room, he caught up his revolver, "in case you meet the Brown Lady," he said, laughing.  When the inspection of the gun was over, the young men in the same spirit declared they would accompany my father back again, "in case you meet the Brown Lady," they repeated, laughing also.  The three gentlemen therefore returned in company. 
The corridor was long and dark, for the lights had been extinguished, but as they reached the middle of it, they saw the glimmer of a lamp coming towards them from the other end.  "One of the ladies going to visit the nurseries," whispered the young Townshends to my father.  Now the bedroom doors in that corridor faced each other, and each room had a double door with a space between, as is the case in many old-fashioned houses.  My father, as I have said, was in shirt and trousers only, and his native modesty made him feel uncomfortable, so he slipped within one of the outer doors (his friends following his example), in order to conceal himself until the lady should have passed by. 
I have heard him describe how he watched her approaching nearer and nearer, through the chink of the door, until, as she was close enough for him to distinguish the colors and style of her costume, he recognised the figure as the facsimile of the portrait of "The Brown Lady."  He had his finger on the trigger of his revolver, and was about to demand it to stop and give the reason for its presence there, when the figure halted of its own accord before the door behind which he stood, and holding the lighted lamp she carried to her features, grinned in a malicious and diabolical manner at him.  This act so infuriated my father, who was anything but lamb-like in disposition, that he sprang into the corridor with a bound, and discharged the revolver right in her face.  The figure instantly disappeared - the figure at which for several minutes three men had been looking together – and the bullet passed through the outer door of the room on the opposite side of the corridor, and lodged in the panel of the inner one.  My father never attempted again to interfere with "The Brown Lady of Raynham."
Now, to be fair, Florence Maryatt isn't exactly what you might call an impartial witness.  She was heavily into spiritualism, and was the author of books with titles like There is No Death and The Spirit World.  So I'm inclined to take anything she says with a grain or two of salt.

Which, of course, I would have anyhow.

Maryatt, however, wasn't the only one to claim seeing the Brown Lady in person.  In 1936, a photographer named Hubert Provand, who worked for Country Life magazine, was taking photos of Raynham Hall for a feature article.  They were setting up for a shoot of the wide interior staircase when Provand's assistant, Indre Shira, pointed at "a vapoury form gradually assuming the appearance of a woman moving down the stairs towards us."  Provand took a photo of the apparition, which has since become one of the most famous ghost photographs ever:


The incident was investigated by Harry Price, a noted paranormal researcher whose reputation for accepting questionable evidence led to his leaving the skeptical and science-based Society for Psychical Research, and founding his own rival organization, the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, because the obvious answer to skepticism is to start a group that will see things your way.  (One of the more famous examples of Price's dubious approach to investigation was the debacle of Borley Rectory, the "most haunted house in England," the evidence for which subsequent inquiries found was almost entirely fabrication.)

For what it's worth, which is probably not much, Price declared the Brown Lady photograph authentic, saying "the negative is entirely innocent of any kind of faking."  But like Florence Maryatt, he's not exactly the most reliable source of information.  Further analysis showed that the image is most likely a double exposure (note the pale lines above the stair treads, and the double reflections on the bannisters).  The ghost figure itself shows a lot of similarity to a traditional Madonna statue, down to a foggy impression below the face that appears to be hands folded in prayer.

Even if the photograph is a fake, of course, it doesn't mean that the other accounts aren't true.  But at the moment, the story doesn't have much to recommend it -- other than a second-hand and probably biased account, and a famous photograph that is almost certainly a fake, the Brown Lady doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

It's still kind of a cool story, however, and I'd love to visit Raynham Hall myself.  If I ever get to go, however, allow me to reassure Dorothy Walpole Townshend that I plan on being entirely unarmed, and even if I were to bring a gun for some reason, I'd never think of shooting her in the face with it.  I mean, it's all very well to get scared in those kinds of situations, but that kind of breaches the rules of etiquette even so.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

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