Strange places

In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, a scientist develops a polymorph of ice with a very strange property.

Unlike ordinary ice, that melts at temperatures above 0 C, the new form -- "ice-nine" -- melts at 45.8 C, above the temperature experienced anywhere but the hottest places on Earth's surface.  Even worse, a tiny bit of ice-nine acts as a seed crystal, converting any ordinary water it comes into contact with into more ice-nine.  Not only is it rapidly (nearly instantaneously) fatal if ingested, it is capable of wiping out all life on Earth if any is introduced into bodies of water.

While this is a science fiction scenario, there is some real science behind it.  Materials are stable when they are in a "potential well," a form that is the (locally) lowest energy state.  The situation changes, though, when something alters the energy required to overshoot the next highest "hill" in the thermodynamic landscape and allows whatever-it-is to achieve an even lower-energy, and thus more stable, state.

Something like this is what happens with prions, the misfolded bits of protein that are responsible for mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disorder, and other "spongiform encephalopathies."  The contagion occurs because the misfolded version of a protein called PrP is not only more stable than the one with the correct conformation, it triggers an ice-nine-like reaction when it comes into contact with normal PrP; a pair made up of one normal molecule of PrP and one misfolded one is intrinsically less stable than two abnormal ones, so it gradually converts the PrP in the brain into tangles of misfolded protein.

Not fatal as quickly as ice-nine, but still fatal.

This same idea crops up elsewhere.  You may have heard some talk about the possibility that the universe is in a "metastable state" -- a "false vacuum" that is, like ordinary water in Vonnegut's novel, only stable because it's in a local thermodynamic trough, but (given the right conditions) could be nudged up and over a hill into a much more stable state.  A "true vacuum."  If this happened, it would release so much energy that it would trigger neighboring regions into surmounting the hill and falling into the true vacuum state themselves, and on and on it would go, propagating outward at the speed of light and destroying everything in its wake.  The conversion would happen so quickly that if it swept past you and hit your feet first, the neural signal saying that your feet had been disintegrated wouldn't even have time to reach your brain before the rest of you disintegrated, too.  Which, honestly, wouldn't be a bad way to go.  No warning, not even the briefest moment of panic, just... poof.

There's one other example like this I know of, which comes from the realm of particle physics.  In 1950, a particle called the lambda baryon was discovered by a team at the University of Melbourne, and given its relatively high mass, it was unexpectedly stable -- decaying in one ten-trillionth of a second and not the predicted one hundred-sextillionth.  The team called this property strangeness, but it wasn't explained until 1968, when the quark model finally received experimental confirmation, and the lambda baryon was shown to be made of one up, one down, and one strange quark, an unusually stable configuration.

Its makeup exempts the lambda particle from the baryon version of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which states that two or more particles with half-integer spins can't occupy the same quantum state.  And this is where things get interesting.

Initially, it was thought that all strange particles eventually decay into particles composed only of up and down quarks (the lambda can do this two different ways -- either into a proton and a negative pion, or into a neutron and a neutral pion).  They lose their "strangeness."  But the brilliant physicists Arnold Bodmer and Edward Witten have shown that this isn't always so -- that in larger assemblages of quarks, the most stable state is one with equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks, which (like the lambda) would be immune to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and thus could release energy by collapsing into (much) smaller volumes.

They called these assemblages strangelets.

And much like my previous examples, this release of energy could trigger the conversion of normal matter nearby into more strangelets, and the whole thing would spread.  It's been suggested that this might be the ultimate fate of any neutron star that continued to gain more mass.  The gravitational force would eventually rise to the point that the core would no longer have the capacity to support its own weight, and would release that energy in the most convenient way -- by converting to strange matter.

Like ice-nine, prions, and the true vacuum catastrophe, once that conversion happened, it'd be pretty much stuck that way.  There's no easy way out of the lowest local potential well.  In this case, though, the conversion would be limited to the neutron star; there'd be no mechanism for it to spread through the near-vacuum of space to the rest of the cosmos, which is good news for us.  It also bears mention that the hallmark of such "strange stars" suggested by Bodmer and Witten -- extremely high rotation rate, because of conservation of angular momentum as the strange matter at the core collapsed into a smaller volume -- has not been observed.

So it may well be that the Bodmer/Witten model for strange matter is flawed, and like the lambda baryon, anything containing strange quarks ultimately decays into ordinary matter.  Or conversely, perhaps some of the weird and unexplained behavior of astronomical objects is because they're strange, both in the technical and the vernacular sense of the word.

Either way, it's probably best if we stay right here in our nice, comfortable local well of stability.  None of the other options I've read about sound like all that much fun.

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The big good wolf

I'm currently reading James Burke and Robert Ornstein's book The Axemaker's Gift: Technology's Capture of Our Minds and Culture, about the rise of our technological society from the (on the whole) superstitious and non-scientific cultural milieu of the past, and one thing has struck me over and over.  Prior to the more rational, evidence-based view of the world that came out of the Enlightenment, people must have been continuously terrified.

I mean, think about it.  Epidemics happen, seemingly coming out of nowhere.  The cause is unknown, the treatments ineffective at best.  Some people survive, others die.  There are storms, lightning strikes, earthquakes, blizzards, volcanoes; the latter, such as the 1783 eruption of Laki and the 1815 eruption of Tambora, had global consequences, harming people who had no idea that a volcano erupted hundreds or thousands of miles away.  Here in the modern world, we have scientific explanations for at least the proximal causes of these events, even if (as I discussed in yesterday's post) the ultimate causes still leave people searching for answers.

But prior to modern science, they didn't even have proximal causes.  It's no wonder they fell back on demons and witches and evil spirits.  Put yourself in the place of someone who has no knowledge of microbiology during an outbreak of the bubonic plague.  Unsurprising they tried to find some explanation, even if to our modern sensibilities the explanations they landed on seem crazy.  I may not agree with C. S. Lewis's theology, but I have to admit he had a point in Mere Christianity:

Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death...  But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things.  If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?  There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact.  It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there.  You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

To return to James Burke, in his mind-blowing series The Day the Universe Changed, he makes the point forcefully that we like to congratulate ourselves on how much more advanced our minds are now as compared to our ancestors, when in reality it's our model for understanding the universe that has changed.  Our minds themselves really haven't changed much.  We're still trapped in a conceptual framework, just like the people in the past were; it's just a different one.

Which brings us to the strange case of Theiss of Kaltenbrun.

In 1692, an octogenarian was brought into a court in the town of Jürgensberg, then ruled by Sweden, now Zaube, Latvia.  He was accused of robbing a church, but along the way, it came out that Theiss was "widely known in the area" for being a werewolf.

A German woodcut of a werewolf (1722) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Asked about this, Theiss kind of shrugged and said, "Yeah, I am.  So what?"  Well, "so what" turned out to be the wrong thing to say, because back then, werewolves (along with witches and demons and so on) were considered to be the minions of hell, and as such, merited the death penalty.  Questioned about this, he said that he'd been a werewolf for a while, but had given it up ten years earlier.

I find this kind of odd.  I'd always thought that once a werewolf, always a werewolf, at least until you meet up with a silver bullet.  But apparently Theiss decided to retire, and was getting along fine until the whole church robbery incident brought him back to the center of attention.

The judges were initially inclined to dismiss him as insane, but then it came out that he'd been involved in an altercation with a farmer from Lemburg (now Mālpils, Latvia).  Theiss said the farmer was a Satan-worshiping witch, and one night when the farmer was off doing Bad Stuff, Theiss had (in wolf form) followed the farmer down to hell.  The farmer attacked Theiss with a broomstick (of course), breaking Theiss's nose.

A local verified that Theiss had, indeed, had his nose broken, and that was considered sufficient evidence for believing the rest of his story.

So the judges inquired further, and some of the testimony is downright hilarious.  Theiss and the other members of his pack, Theiss told them, liked to roam around local farms and kill and devour any farm animals they found.  They always roasted it first, though.  When one of the judges asked how a wolf could roast meat, Theiss told them they returned to human form while cooking, and that "they always added salt to their meat, but never had any bread to go with it."

Which, to judge by the scientific documentary An American Werewolf In London, is pretty genteel behavior, as compared to your average werewolf.

Here's where the case took an interesting turn, because Theiss admitted freely he was a werewolf, but said that he and his friends used their powers to fight evil.  There was an entrance to hell in a swamp near Lemburg, he said, and the whole pack would enter hell and do battle with the demons and with any human witches they came across.  They were, Theiss said, "God's Hounds."  They'd more than once found food and livestock that the actual evil witches had carted off to hell in order to cause famine, and they'd brought it back and distributed it to the God-fearing farmers in the area.

And sure enough, the people in the area all corroborated that Theiss was known as a healer and a generous friend.

This put the judges in a serious quandary.  They couldn't exactly condone his behavior; getting naked, turning into a wolf, and eating other people's livestock (roasted, and with salt) weren't exactly on the List of Approved Christian Pastimes as set forth by the church fathers.  But still... could there be a good, God-recommended use for magical powers?

I'm reminded of the scene in Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet where Pastor Mortmain is all set to hang Zylle Llawcae, whom he's declared to be a witch, and the Good Guys recite a spell that causes lightning to strike the gallows.  Zylle's husband, Ritchie, shouts, "Do you think all power is of the devil?  What we have just seen is the wrath of God!"  And amazingly enough, given how these things usually went, everyone realizes that Pastor Mortmain is really the Bad Guy here.

Even more astonishingly, that's kind of how the case of Theiss of Kaltenbrun went.  Well, almost.  The judges were desperate to find something to convict him of, because they were afraid that if they didn't, they'd have everybody and his brother running around being werewolves.  There was the matter of the church robbery, too, but what concerned them even more was the magical stuff.  Ultimately they found a guy who was willing to swear that he'd heard Theiss use a magical charm that went, "Sun and Moon go over the sea, fetch back the soul that the devil had taken to hell and give the cattle back life and health which was taken from them."  And although that was not an evil charm, per se, it didn't mention God, so it wasn't a prayer, and therefore was heretical.  So for that and the robbery, they ruled that Theiss should be flogged and then exiled from the town.

Which, considering what could have happened, was a pretty lenient sentence.

What's interesting about this case is not just that it's based on a belief we now consider silly superstition, but that you can see the judges edging, ever so slowly, toward, "But who is it hurting?"  Ironically, Theiss's trial was the same year as the Salem Witch Trials, which had a far more tragic outcome; but already you can see signs that the dogmatism of that time period was gradually eroding.  These kinds of attitudes are very resistant to change -- today's Christian evangelicals haven't moved all that far from their Puritan predecessors, honestly -- but that the judges in Jürgensberg even hesitated when they heard Theiss say "Sure, I'm a werewolf" is significant.

Social and cultural shifts don't happen overnight, and they always trigger a backlash -- which, sadly, is what we're living through right now.  But progress is real.  We can wish it to move a little faster while still acknowledging that things are better now than they were when I was a kid back in 1970, and far far better than when my grandparents were kids in 1910.  Our understanding of the natural world has helped, and just the fact of approaching the world through the lens of science and evidence means that we no longer have to fear what we don't understand.  There's no need for evil spirits and demons and werewolves anymore; we've outgrown them.

Onward and upward.

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Shutting down Leviathan

Is it just me, or has the quality of the conspiracy theories really been dropping off lately?

I mean, back in the day, you had your Moon-landing-was-a-hoax theory, your 9/11-was-an-inside-job theory, your Flat-Earth theory, your Egyptian-pyramids-were-built-by-aliens theory, and your microchips-in-vaccines theory.  (Not that these have gone away, or anything; but their provenance isn't new.)  Those, at least, had some panache, not to mention a conscious decision to look science and evidence directly in the face and say, "I reject your reality and substitute my own."

The topic comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, which references the enormous winter storm that blasted its way through the eastern half of North America a few days ago.  Here in my home village in upstate New York we got about fifteen centimeters of snow -- less than the predictions had suggested -- so enough to shut things down for a day, and after that leaving most of us saying, "Eh, we've had worse."  The bulk of the snow hit the south-central states, which are ill-equipped to deal with it.  Some people are still without power, and considering the bitter cold that followed in the storm's wake, this is a serious matter.

So: a bad storm, but not that far outside the norm.  It seems to have gone farther south than the typical winter storm track because of the weakening of the polar vortex, which triggered deep meanders in the steering currents -- a predicted outcome of anthropogenic climate change.  Which is why Donald Trump's hardy-har-harring over at Untruth Social about "Where is global warming?" is catastrophically stupid even by his standards.  Someone probably should mention to him that (1) it's winter here in the Northern Hemisphere so it snows sometimes, (2), as any ninth grader taking Earth Science could tell you, weather ≠ climate, and (3) it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and Australia is currently experiencing a devastating and record-setting heat wave.  (Okay, that last one is weather, too, but hell, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as my grandma used to say.)

Not that it would make a difference.  He seems to be strangely fact-proof, at least where the facts are inconvenient to his only concerns, which are making money, taking revenge on people who criticize him, and staying in power.

Anyhow, explaining the storm through natural processes apparently isn't good enough for some people, so they had to come up with a better idea.  And here, by "a better idea" I mean "an explanation that would only sound plausible to someone who had two pounds of LaffyTaffy where most of us have a brain."

You ready?

Off the coast of Virginia, there is a huge sea monster that has begun to awaken.  It may or may not be the dragon-like creature Leviathan mentioned in the Book of Job, chapter 41.  On the other hand, it might be one of the minions of Cthulhu.  Or possibly a sea-going relative of the Loch Ness Monster.

Or all three.

Screenshot of a Facebook post about the "Leviathan theory," which apparently is being taken seriously by people who should not be allowed to go outside unaccompanied

Now, the United States of 'Murika isn't gonna put up with enormous sea monsters threatening its coastline, so the crack Weather Modification Team at (choose one: NASA, the DHS, the National Weather Service, the CIA, or HAARP) got right on the job.  (Yes, I know, HAARP is located in Alaska, and hasn't been under federal control for ten years.  Stop asking questions.)  So the Team manufactured an enormous snowstorm to freeze the creature and prevent it from wreaking havoc.

And it worked!  I mean, have you seen any enormous sea monsters lately?  Q.E.D.

To most of us, this kind of thinking makes zero sense.  But honestly, there's a reason it keeps cropping up.  It seems like when bad things happen, even a far-fetched explanation can be more appealing than just shrugging and saying, "The universe is a chaotic place sometimes."  

In an interview in Vox, social psychologist Jan-Willem van Prooijen, of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, agrees. "[Conspiracy theories are] a tool to explain reality," van Prooijen said.  "We can’t always know or understand everything that happens to us.  When people are uncertain about change — when they lose their jobs, or when a terrorist strike or a natural disaster has occurred — then people have a tendency to want to understand what happened, and also a tendency to assume the worst.  It’s a self-protective mechanism people have.  This combination of trying to make sense and assuming the worst often leads to conspiracy theories."

This means, van Prooijen said, that during unstable times, we should expect conspiracy theories to sprout up like mushrooms after a rainstorm.  "They’re particularly likely to flourish in times of collective uncertainty in society.  Particularly after high-profile incidents that imply a sudden change in society or a sudden change in reality in a threatening way.  Think 9/11, but also think of disease outbreaks [or] long-term threats like an economic crisis or climate change."

And I think -- regardless of which side of the aisle you happen to be on -- you'll agree that we do live in a time of "collective uncertainty."  So while it's easy to make fun of the people who come up with this stuff -- and I've certainly done my share of snort-laughing about how ridiculous it can get -- from the standpoint of human psychology, it's exactly what we should expect.

For me, though, I'd rather actually understand what's going on than make shit up just to have a convenient scapegoat.  I'm no more fond of a chaotic model for the universe than anyone else; like all of us, I struggle with explaining why bad things happen, especially when good people fall victim to them.  But at some point, you just have to accept that you don't understand everything.  For a lot of people, they can find solace in placing their understanding in the care of a deity; if God has a plan, they say, maybe they don't need to comprehend it.

Me, I've never been able to get there.  Shit happens, you know?  And that, more or less, is that.  We have an inborn tendency to cast around for comforting answers whenever we're confronted with something outside our wheelhouse, but having a desire for an answer doesn't imply that one exists.  To me it's more honest to fall back on the trenchant words of astronomer Carl Sagan: "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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Through a glass, darkly

I was chatting with my younger son a couple of days ago.  He's a professional scientific glassblower, so anything having to do with the properties, chemistry, or uses of glass is going to interest him automatically.  And this was how he ran into the name of Walter John Kilner.

My son asked me if I'd ever heard of him, which I hadn't, and he suggested I look into him as a possible topic for Skeptophilia.  What I found out was pretty interesting -- straddling that gap between "fascinating" and "crazy."

Kilner, who lived from 1847 to 1920, studied medicine, physics, and engineering at Cambridge University, eventually earning a master's degree as well as a doctorate in medicine.  He had a private medical practice as well as being a "medical electrician" -- then a brand-new field -- at St. Thomas Hospital in London.

So the man was certainly not lacking in brains.  But he veered off into an area that is fringe-y at best, and to this day we don't know if what he was seeing was real.

The basic idea is familiar to us today as the "aura," but what most people mean by that -- some sort of spiritual halo around humans (and supposedly, all living things) that conveniently can't be measured by any known technique -- is several shades more woo-woo than what Kilner meant.  He seems to have latched onto the idea of there being a kind of electromagnetic radiation given off by the human body that was outside the range of human vision, and which could potentially be used as a diagnostic tool if a device was developed that allowed us to see it.

In fact, there is invisible radiation coming from our bodies; it's infrared light, which is light that has a longer wavelength than red light.  (Nota bene: it took me some pondering to get past the misunderstanding that infrared and thermal radiation aren't the same thing.  Thermal radiation can be in any region of the spectrum -- think of the red light given off by a hot stove burner.  The wavelength of thermal radiation is dependent upon the temperature of the source.  Infrared, which can be emitted thermally, is defined by having wavelengths longer than that of visible light, regardless of how it's generated.)

More germane to Kilner and his goggles, although the human eye can't detect it, mosquitoes' eyes can (one of the ways they find us in the dark), and it can be sensed by the loreal pits of pit vipers that they use for finding prey at night, not to mention the infrared goggles used by the military, which convert long-wavelength infrared light to shorter wavelengths that we can see.

So there was at least some scientific basis for what he proposed, and remember that this would have been in the late nineteenth century, when the properties of electromagnetic radiation were still largely mysterious.  What Kilner proposed was that since light is altered when it passes through filters of any kind, there might be a filter that could take the electromagnetic radiation from the aura and convert it to visible light.

His approach was to take thin layers of alcohol-soluble dyes, most derived from coal tar, sandwiched between two sheets of clear glass.  He claimed he found one that worked -- a blue dye he called dicyanin -- but according to Kilner, it was difficult to produce, so he started fishing around for a substitute.

Along the way, he convinced a lot of people that his dicyanin filter allowed him to see the human aura, and generated a huge amount of enthusiasm.  People suggested other blue dyes -- cobalt-based ones, and other coal tar derivatives like pinacyanol -- but the results he obtained were equivocal at best.  Nobody was able to produce dicyanin again, or even figure out what its chemical composition was, which certainly made any skeptics raise an eyebrow.  But to the end of his life, Kilner swore that his dicyanin filter allowed him to see clearly an aura around his volunteers' naked bodies, despite an analysis by the British Medical Journal stating bluntly, "Dr. Kilner has failed to convince us that his 'aura' is more real than Macbeth's visionary dagger."

So what, if anything, did Kilner see?  The easiest answer is: we don't know.

The whole thing reminds me of Kirlian photography -- those familiar (and striking) photographs that result from placing a photographic plate on top of a high voltage source, then adding a flat object of some kind.  This produces a coronal discharge, a purely physical effect caused by the voltage creating temporary ionization of the air molecules.  Pretty much anything works; I've seen Kirlian photographs of coins.  But this doesn't stop the woo-woos from claiming that Kirlian photographs are capturing the aura, and giving it all sorts of spiritual and/or esoteric overtones.

Kirlian photograph of a dusty miller leaf [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rarobison11, MDR Dusty Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In the case of Kilner, though, the effect was never successfully replicated.  This hasn't stopped people from making "Kilner goggles" that you can still buy online, if you've got no better use for your money.  But as far as Kilner himself, he seems to have been entirely sincere -- i.e., not a charlatan or outright liar.  He pretty clearly believed he'd seen something that deserved an explanation.  Whether it was some kind of optical effect produced by his mysterious dicyanin, or a faint blur in the image that he then gave more significance than it deserved, we honestly don't know.  (This is reminiscent of the "canals of Mars," first described by astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, which were clearly an artifact of poor telescope quality -- when the optical equipment improved, the Martian canals mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again.)

Another possibility, though, was brought up by my wife; a lot of the dyes and solvents that Kilner used are neurotoxic.  It could be that what he was seeing was a visual disturbance caused by inhaling the fumes from nasty compounds like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, common in the coal tar he was using to prepare his dyes.

The interesting thing is that Kilner completely dismissed the esoteric spin that auras were given during the last decade of his life, primarily by the Theosophists and Spiritualists who were skyrocketing in membership during the first decades of the twentieth century.  Kilner remained to the end a staunch believer in the scientific method, and that anything he'd seen had a purely physical origin that was explainable in terms of the properties of light and electromagnetism.

It's an interesting case.  The fact that in the hundred years since he died, no one's ever been able to replicate his findings, strongly supports the fact that he was simply wrong -- he'd seen something, but it had nothing to do with anything that could be called an aura.  Even so, he's an interesting example of someone who was clearly trying to do things the right way, but his own determination to prove his conjecture blinded him to the obvious conclusion.

Further stressing the truth of Leonardo da Vinci's statement that "We must doubt the certainty of everything that passes through our senses."

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The tide is high

The list of confirmed exoplanets now exceeds six thousand.  Considering the fact that the three main ways they're detected -- direct measure of stellar wobbles, transit photometry, and Doppler spectroscopy -- all require either that the host star be close, that the planets be massive, or that the planetary orbit be aligned just right from our perspective, or all three, it's almost certain that there are vast numbers of exoplanets going undetected.

All of which bodes well for those of us who would love for there to be extraterrestrial life out there somewhere.

On the other hand, of the exoplanets we've found, a great many of them are inhospitable to say the least, and some of them are downright bizarre.  Here are a few of the weirder ones:

• TrES-2b, which holds the record as the least-reflective planet yet discovered. It's darker than a charcoal briquet.  This led some people to conclude that it's made of dark matter, something I dealt with here at Skeptophilia a while back.  (tl:dr -- it's not.)
• CoRoT-7b, one of the hottest exoplanets known.  Its composition and size are thought to be fairly Earth-like, but it orbits its star so closely that it has a twenty-day orbital period and surface temperatures around 3000 C.  This means that it is likely to be completely liquid, and experience rain made of molten iron and magnesium.
• PSR J1719−1438, a planet orbiting a pulsar (the collapsed, rapidly rotating core of a giant star), and therefore somehow survived its host star going supernova.  It has one of the fastest rates of revolution of any orbiting object known, circling in only 2.17 hours.
• V1400 Centauri, a planet with rings that are two hundred times wider than the rings of Saturn.  In fact, they dwarf the planet itself -- the whole thing looks a bit like a pea in the middle of a dinner plate.
• BD+05 4868 Ab, in the constellation of Pegasus.  Only 140 light years away, this exoplanet is orbiting so close to its parent star -- twenty times closer than Mercury is to the Sun -- that its year is only 30.5 hours long.  This proximity roasts the surface, melting and then vaporizing the rock it's made of.  That material is then blasted off the surface by the stellar wind, so the planet is literally evaporating, leaving a long, comet-like trail in its wake.

Today, though, we're going to look at some recent research about a planet that should be near the top of the "Weirdest Exoplanets Known" list.  It's 55 Cancri Ae, the innermost of four (possibly six; two additional ones are suspected but unconfirmed) planets around the star 55 Cancri A, a K-type orange star a little over forty light years away.  55 Cancri Ae orbits its host star twice as close as Mercury does the Sun, making a complete ellipse around it in only a bit under three days.  This means that like CoRoT-7b and BD+05 4868 Ab, it's crazy hot.

This is where some new research comes in.  A presentation at an exoplanet conference in Groningen, Netherlands last week considered a puzzling feature of 55 Cancri Ae -- a measure of its heat output shows odd, non-cyclic fluctuations that don't seem to be in sync with its orbital period (or anything else).  The fluctuations aren't small; some of them have approached a 1,000 C difference from peak to trough.  They were first detected ten years ago, and physicists have been at a loss to account for the mechanism responsible.

But now, we might have an explanation -- and it's a doozy.  Models developed by exoplanet astrophysicist Mohammed Farhat of the University of California - Berkeley found that the anomalous temperature surges could be explained as moving hotspots.

Which sounds pretty tame until you read Farhat's description of what this means.  We're talking about a planet close in to a star not much smaller than the Sun, being whirled around at dizzying speeds.  This means it's experiencing enormous tidal forces.  The planet itself is so hot it's probably liquid down to its core.  Result: tidal waves of lava several hundred meters high, moving at the speed of a human sprinter.

The presentation definitely got the attendees' attention.  "This is right in the sweet spot of something that is interesting, novel, and potentially testable," said planetary astronomer Laura Kreidberg, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.  "I had this naïve idea that lava flows were too slow-moving to have an observable impact, but this new work is pointing otherwise."

The whole thing reminds me of the planet Excalbia from Star Trek, from the episode "The Savage Curtain," which was completely covered by churning seas of lava -- except for the spot made hospitable by some superpowerful aliens so Captain Kirk could have a battle involving Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, and various other historical and not-so-historical figures to find out whether good was actually stronger than evil.

Put that way, I know the plot sounds pretty fucking ridiculous, but don't yell at me.  I didn't write the script.

In any case, I doubt even the Excalbians would find 55 Cancri Ae hospitable.  But it is fascinating.  It pushes the definition of what we even consider a planet to be -- a sloshing blob of liquid rock with lava waves taller than a skyscraper.  Makes me thankful for the calm, temperate climes of Earth.

The universe is a scary place, sometimes.

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Dream a little dream of me

One of the more terrifying concepts to arise out of physics is the idea of the Boltzmann brain.

The Boltzmann brain was first postulated by, and is named after, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who also discovered the mathematical laws governing entropy.  He was one of several scientists who contributed to the idea of the "heat death of the universe" -- that because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, eventually the universe will reach a state of zero free energy and maximum entropy.  After that -- quantum fluctuations and random motion aside (more on that in a moment) -- the universe will be a thin, more-or-less uniform, cold fog of particles, in which nothing else will happen.  Forever.

Boltzmann committed suicide at age 62.  I'm almost sure his research had nothing to do with it.

In any case, the Boltzmann brain idea came up when he was pondering the state of the universe following the heat death, which (by current models) isn't going to happen for another 10^100 years, so don't fret if you have unused vacation time.  The question that puzzled Boltzmann most was what got the universe into a low-entropy state to begin with; after all, if you see a ball rolling down a hill, its behavior isn't at all strange, but it leaves unanswered the question of how the ball got to the top of the hill in the first place.  He came to the conclusion that random movement of the particles in the fog could, given long enough, create low entropy regions just by chance.  In fact, given the infinitely long time he postulated the heat death stage would last, any possible configuration of particles would show up eventually.

Interestingly, in the hundred-plus years since Boltzmann came up with all this, scientists are still trying to work out all the implications of this.  A 2004 paper by Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen looked at the question of how long it would take for a random, uniform, maximum-entropy universe to spontaneously generate a second Big Bang -- and thus a new, low-entropy universe -- through quantum fluctuations and quantum tunneling, and came up with a figure of 10^10^10^56 years.

Boltzmann, though, was more interested in smaller stuff.  He asked an unsettling question: was it possible, through random movement of particles, for them to come together in such a way as to form an exact copy of himself, with all of his thoughts and memories and so on?

His conclusion: once again, given enough time, it's not just possible, it's inevitable.  In fact, calculations have shown that we should expect such "Boltzmann brains" to outnumber all other sentient beings by a vast margin.

[Nota bene: keep in mind that Boltzmann died prior to the discovery of quantum physics; as Carroll and Chen discussed, adding in quantum effects actually increases the likelihood of these kinds of weird, accidental rearrangements.]

Now comes the kicker.  Suppose you yourself aren't an "ordinary" observer, but a "Boltzmann brain" -- a disembodied, and presumably temporary, sentient arrangement of particles, that happened to have the correct configuration to contain all the thoughts, perceptions, and memories you currently have.  Would there be any way for you to know?

The answer is almost certainly "no."  "I am confident that I am not a Boltzmann brain," physicist Brian Greene said.  "However, we want our theories to similarly concur that we are not Boltzmann brains, but so far it has proved surprisingly difficult for them to do so."

It bears mention that there could be some caveats here that might save us from this rather terrifying possibility.  Current studies of dark energy and the cosmological constant have a significant bearing on the ultimate fate of the universe.  If, as some recent research suggests, the strength of dark energy is decreasing over time, we might be in a universe destined not for heat death, but for a collapse that could reset the entropy content -- and, possibly, a subsequent rebirth.  But that is still very much uncertain, and the majority of physicists are still of the opinion that the expansion is going to continue indefinitely.

Boltzmann Brain World, here we come.

The topic comes up because scientists are still debating the implications of this -- and many of them trying to rule out the Boltzmann brain concept because it's so damned unsettling.  Just last week, there was a paper in the journal Entropy by David Wolpert, Carlo Rovelli, and Jordan Scharnhorst, called "Disentangling Boltzmann Brains, the Time-Asymmetry of Memory, and the Second Law," which considered the fact that just about all physical laws are time-reversible, yet our memories seem not to be.  This is, however, exactly what we would expect if we were Boltzmann brains, because if that were true, memory itself would just be an illusion, a present-moment effect caused by the random configuration of particles that give the ephemeral sense of a past.  Here's the passage from the paper that rocked me back on my heels:

Reasonable as the arguments just presented might be, in the abstract, how, concretely, can they hold?  How could we have all of our human memories concerning the past be fallacious?  How could entropy increase into our past rather than decrease, as required by the time-symmetric nature of all derivations of the Second Law that are consistent with the microscopic laws of physics?  How could it be that our memories are wrong? 

Such flaws in our memory would require some exquisite fine-tuning, that all the neurons in our brains happen to be in the state corresponding to particular memories, when in fact nothing of the sort is true.  Amazingly though, standard arguments of statistical physics tell us that it is almost infinitely more likely for this to be the case, rather than for entropy to continue to decrease into our past, as demanded by the Second Law.

I read this three times and I shuddered every time.

Thanks bunches, Boltzmann.  I'm sure I'll sleep just fine tonight.  If I actually exist, that is.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

So it can't be rigorously ruled out that we're disembodied brains in an entropic sea, dreaming a little dream of being people.  In this formulation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, in fact, time-reversible; entropy increases both into the past and into the future, even if our illusory memories make it seem like that isn't true.  We arose from random fluctuations, and flutter about for a while thinking we're real, then after a few moments subside back into the fog again.

And on that wonderful note, I'll leave you.  If you need me, I'll be hiding under my blankie, hugging my teddy bear.

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Gravitational blink

To end the week on an appropriately surreal note: no, the Earth will not "lose its gravity" for seven seconds on August 12.

I found out about this rumor, currently making the rounds on social media, from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  The whole thing apparently started with a video posted on Instagram by user @mr_danya_of; the video was subsequently removed, but not before it was reshared thousands of times, downloaded, and posted all over the place.  The claim is that there were gravitational waves emitted from two different black holes equidistant from the Earth, and that they are 180 degrees out of phase with each other, so where they intersect -- here, evidently -- they'll undergo destructive interference.  The result is that it will "cancel Earth's gravity" for the seven seconds it takes them to pass by us, and we all need to, I dunno, make sure everything is tied down securely or something, because otherwise it's going to cause huge amounts of death and destruction.

Whoo.  Okay.  Where do I start?

First of all, the information was alleged to come from NASA (of course), from something called "Project Anchor."  Which doesn't exist.  Of course, over at NASA they would say that, wouldn't they?  So let's move on to a few other, harder-to-argue-with objections.

Second, according to the General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, whereof nothing travels faster, remember?  So if there were gravitational waves headed toward us from a black hole (let alone two of them), we wouldn't have any way of knowing about it ahead of time.  Now, you might be thinking, what about the gravitational waves that have been detected by the interferometer array LIGO?  Well, there, we knew there were two neutron stars that had been orbiting each other and were about to merge, so all we had to do was watch until it happened.  (Okay, I'm making it sound simple; in practice it was a lot more complicated than this, but the point is we did have some advance warning in that case.)  Here, we just supposedly have black holes out there emitting gravitational waves for some undisclosed reason, and we've somehow found out about this eight months ahead of their arrival, which Einstein says is impossible, and on the whole I'm inclined to side with Einstein over "mr_danya_of."

Third, what was immediately obvious is that whoever is taking this seriously has no idea how destructive interference actually works.  Simply put, destructive interference occurs where two waves in the same medium intersect in such a way that the crest of one wave overlaps the trough of the other.  At that point, their amplitudes will cancel.  Here, supposedly these two gravitational waves are exactly 180 degrees out of phase, so they'd cancel completely wherever they intersect.

But if that happened, what we'd see is... nothing.  If the two waves did completely cancel, the result at that point would be an amplitude of zero.  In other words, they'd be undetectable.  This would not somehow "erase Earth's gravity."

Fourth, the Earth's diameter is about 0.04 light seconds, so if a gravitational wave or two passed across us, that's how long the effect would last.  How this person came up with seven seconds as a plausible time duration for something traveling at the speed of light, I have no idea.

Fifth, the gravitational field of the Earth at a given distance is dependent on only one thing: its mass.  As long as the Earth's mass doesn't change, the strength of the field won't, either, regardless how it's jostled by gravitational waves (or anything else).

Sixth, what the actual fuck?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons AllenMcC., GravityPotential, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I mean, it's a good thing the Earth's gravity isn't going to disappear, even for seven seconds.  If you, unlike the people posting this story, passed high school physics, you may recall that the reason we're all happily glued to the Earth's surface is the pull of gravity -- and without it, Newton's First Law (an object experiencing no unbalanced forces continues at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant velocity) takes over.  We're all right now moving at a good clip -- at the Equator, about 1,670 kilometers an hour -- but our tendency to fly off is counterbalanced by the centripetal (center-pointing) pull of gravity.  If gravity suddenly disappeared, we'd continue moving at our original speed, but tangent to the circle we're currently traveling in.  The Earth, presumably unperturbed, would continue to rotate out from underneath us, and when the gravity switched back on seven seconds later, we (and everything else not moored) would come crashing back down.

I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation for my own latitude, just shy of halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, and found that in seven seconds unsecured objects traveling tangent to the Earth's surface would end up about twenty centimeters up in the air.  Falling back to Earth from that height would be a bit of a jolt, and no doubt the sudden change in stress would damage some buildings, but it's far from the carnage mr_danya_of and others are claiming.

But to reassure you that you have no cause for concern, even in that regard... no, NASA isn't "94.7% certain" that the Earth's gravity is going to blink for seven seconds on August 12.  There is no such thing as Project Anchor.  Gravitational waves, and in fact waves in general, do not work this way.  We have far more important things to worry about right now, such as trying to figure out what country FIFA Peace Prize Winner Donald Trump is going to declare war on next.

If you see anyone posting hysterical nonsense about how NASA Admits We're All Gonna Die In August, you should definitely inform them that this is complete horseshit, and suggest that maybe at least reading the Wikipedia pages about the relevant physics concepts might be a good idea before publicly humiliating themselves by pretending they understand science.

So anyway, there you have it.  To the friend who sent me the link, thanks just bunches for further reducing my already-abysmal assessment of humanity's overall intelligence.  Me, I'm going to go back to fretting about real stuff.  Not that this is productive either, mind you.  But at least it's better than making shit up so you have additional imaginary stuff to fret about.

Even I am not that neurotic.

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