Hands off

When I was about thirty years old, I stumbled upon a copy of American anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum's 1969 memoir Keep the River on Your Right.

It's gripping reading.  It recounts when Schneebaum, himself around thirty at the time, made his way down to Peru on a Fulbright Scholarship, looking for uncontacted tribes to study.  He was staying in a village in southern Peru when he spoke to one of the village leaders about his quest.  The leader basically told Schneebaum, "Yeah, you go into the jungle, they're there."

Schneebaum asked, so how could he find these people?

The elder replied, "Go into the jungle, keep walking, keep the river on your right.  They'll find you."

So Schneebaum did.

He was gone, and completely incommunicado, for almost two years; his family and friends presumed his death.  But then he showed back up, stark naked, wearing body paint.  He'd essentially gone native.  Keep the River on Your Right describes his time amongst the Harakmbut people, who speak a linguistic isolate -- a language that seems to be unrelated to any other known language -- and with whom he'd been accepted, even participating in their sexual ceremonies and ritual cannibalism.

Schneebaum received some criticism for what amounts to a major violation of the Prime Directive.  Although his memoir is fascinating, it brings up an interesting question.  Sure, people have rights (or should -- actions being taken by the United States government lately are making it terrifyingly clear that not everyone believes this).  But do cultures have rights?  Schneebaum didn't give the Harakmbut people a choice, he sort of just showed up one day.  The cultural knowledge certainly flowed both directions.  Did he violate the culture's rights by contaminating it with our own?

Of course, if the answer is yes, it brings up the followup question of how you determine what cultural contact is allowable.  Even having the Harakmbut see him changed them; they now know there are other people out there, who don't look, speak, or behave like they do.  It reminds me of the poignant and thought-provoking episode of Star Trek:The Next Generation called "Who Watches the Watchers?", where the crew of the Enterprise is forced to intervene when a hidden anthropological outpost on Mintaka III is accidentally discovered by the planet's natives -- who then decide Picard and his crew must be gods.

There are still a number of more-or-less uncontacted groups right here on Earth.  The most famous are the Sentinelese, who live on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Island chain, nominally under the jurisdiction of India.  But the Indian government has made it illegal to contact the Sentinelese, or even to land on their island.  Not that prosecution is likely -- the last one who tried, 26-year-old American missionary John Allen Chau, landed on North Sentinel Island in 2018 with the intent of converting the Sentinelese to Christianity, and was promptly handed over to God himself by the expedient of an arrow through the chest.

North Sentinel Island from the air [Image is in the Public Domain]

We don't know much about the Sentinelese.  There are thought to be somewhere between thirty and five hundred of them, but the thick jungle of their home island makes any kind of estimate from the air difficult at best.  The scanty contact they've had with inhabitants of the other Andaman Islands has shown that the languages of the two nearest islands in the chain, Jarawa and Önge, are mutually unintelligible.  It's presumed that Sentinelese must be related to the other languages in the island chain -- and so belong to the Ongan language family, itself an isolate group -- but without any real data to go by, this is just a guess.

So we're left with a mystery.  Just horning in and hoping for the best, like Schneebaum did with the Harakmbut, is seriously not recommended for the Sentinelese.  And as I asked before, would it be ethical to do so even if it wasn't likely to lead to you getting turned into a pincushion?  History is replete with examples of contact between two cultures of unequal power that have ended up going very badly for all concerned.  Colonialism rightly occupies a horrible spot in the chronicles of humanity.  The Indian government -- wisely, in my opinion -- decided that the Sentinelese's right to self-determination superseded any considerations of curiosity, scientific study, missionary zeal, or even a desire to help.

And that's where we have to leave it.  There are people whose existence as a living culture would be threatened by our attempts to come in and "improve" things.  We here in the technological, industrialized West have done immeasurable damage by our arrogant assumption that the way we do things is the best, and of course everyone would be better off if they just acquiesced and did it our way, too.

Sometimes the best you can do is to keep your mouth shut and your hands off.

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Building the Rockies

I recently re-read John McPhee's wonderful quartet of books on geology, Basin and Range, Rising from the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  His lucid prose and capacity for focusing on the human stories connected with the subject while teaching us some fascinating science brought me back to these books, which I first read perhaps twenty-five years ago.

The first two, in particular, describe something that is quite surprising -- or at least was to me when I first learned about it.  The biggest mountain range in the United States, the Rockies, is actually quite poorly understood, and contains some features that are still yet to be satisfactorily explained.  A good part of the Rocky Mountain range is non-volcanic, and although there are some areas that have igneous rocks the vast majority is made up of sedimentary and metamorphosed sedimentary rock -- sandstone, limestone, shale, slate, quartzite, and marble.  Even some of the igneous rocks only show at the surface because the overlayment of sedimentary rock that once was present has eroded away.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Self, Rocky Mountain National Park, CC BY-SA 2.5]

As McPhee describes it, the current thought is that most of what is west of Colorado and Wyoming is probably the result of accretion -- the huge North American Plate overriding smaller plates to the west and gathering up microcontinents and island arcs they carried, cementing them onto the coastline.  It's certain that this is how California formed -- the boundaries between the different "suspect terranes" (the alternate spelling is used when referring to these chunks of land that end up in a very different place from where they were formed) are pretty well established.  Also, the subduction process that brought them to North America is still ongoing, as the small Explorer, Juan de Fuca, and Gorda Plates (in order from north to south) are pulled underneath -- giving rise to the Cascade Volcanoes such as Mount Lassen, Mount Hood, Mount Rainier, and Mount Saint Helens.

We got another piece added to the puzzle with a paper in Nature, out of the University of Alberta, by Yunfeng Chen, Yu Jeffrey Gu, Claire A. Currie, Stephen T. Johnston, Shu-Huei Hung, Andrew J. Schaeffer, and Pascal Audet.  Entitled, "Seismic Evidence for a Mantle Suture and Implications for the Origin of the Canadian Cordillera," the paper describes research that found a sharp boundary in the mantle of the Earth between the "craton" -- the central, oldest piece of the North American continent, encompassing what is now the Midwest -- and a long, narrow microcontinent that slammed into the North American Plate as a primordial sea closed -- moving the coastline hundreds of miles further west.

"This research provides new evidence that the Canadian section of this mountain range was formed by two continents colliding," said Jeffrey Gu, professor in the Department of Physics and co-author on the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "The proposed mechanism for mountain building may not apply to other parts of the Rocky Mountains due to highly variable boundary geometries and characteristics from north to south."

The cool part is that the research was done by looking deep into the Earth's mantle -- not just by studying the surface features.  And this collision, which is estimated to have occurred a hundred million years ago, has left a scar that is still detectable.  "This study highlights how deep Earth images from geophysical methods can help us to understand the evolution of mountains, one of the most magnificent processes of plate tectonics observed at the Earth's surface," said study co-author Yunfeng Chen.

And this technique could be applied elsewhere, as the Rockies are far from the only mountain range in the world that were created by accretion rather than volcanism.  (The obvious examples are the Alps and the Himalayas -- the latter of which are still rising as the Indian Plate continues to plow into the Eurasian Plate.)  "There are other mountain belts around the world where a similar model may apply," said Claire Currie, associate professor of physics and co-author on the study.  "Our data could be important for understanding mountain belts elsewhere, as well as building our understanding of the evolution of western North America."

So we're piecing together the picture of how the Rockies formed -- ironic, as they seem to have been assembled from pieces themselves.  In the process, we're learning more about the processes that move the tectonic plates, and create the landscape we see around us.  It reminds me of the haunting lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which seem like a fitting way to end:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars has been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands,
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves, and go.

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Down in flames

The more exoplanets we find, the more they challenge our notion of how planets should be.

For the many of us who grew up watching Star Trek and Lost in Space and Doctor Who, it's understandable that we picture planets around other stars as being pretty much like the ones we have here in our own Solar System -- either small and rocky like the Earth, or gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.

The truth is, there is a far greater variety of exoplanets than we ever could have dreamed of, and every new one we find holds some sort of surprise.  Some of the odder ones are:

• 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.
• 55 Cancri e, nicknamed the "diamond planet."  Another "hot super-Earth," this one is thought to be carbon rich, and that because of the heat and pressure, much of the carbon could be in the form of diamonds.  (Don't tell Dr. Smith.)
• PSR J1719−1438, a planet orbiting a pulsar (the collapsed, rapidly rotating core of a giant star).  It has one of the fastest rates of revolution of any orbiting object known, circling its host star 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.

We now have a new one to add to the list -- 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 BD+05 4868 Ab is literally evaporating, and leaving a long, comet-like tail in its wake.

The estimate is that each time it orbits, it loses a Mount Everest's worth of rock from its surface.  It's not a large world already, and the researchers say it is on track to disintegrate completely in under two million years.

"The extent of the tail is gargantuan, stretching up to nine million kilometers long, or roughly half of the planet's entire orbit," said Marc Hon of MIT, who co-authored a paper on the planet, which appeared this week in Astrophysical Journal Letters.  "The shape of the transit is typical of a comet with a long tail,.  Except that it's unlikely that this tail contains volatile gases and ice as expected from a real comet -- these would not survive long at such close proximity to the host star.  Mineral grains evaporated from the planetary surface, however, can linger long enough to present such a distinctive tail."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Marc Hon et al. 2025, submitted to AAS Journals, BD+05 4868Ab simulation dust cloud (Figure 12), CC BY 4.0]

So we have a new one to add to the weird exoplanet list -- a comet-like planet in the process of going down in flames.  Not a place you'd want to beam your away team to, but fascinating anyhow.

Makes me wonder what the next bizarre find is going to be.  The universe is like that, isn't it?  We think we have it figured out, then it turns around and astonishes us.

I, for one, think that is fantastic.

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The origins of Carthage

You probably know the story of Carthage, the city in ancient Tunisia that gave its name to a sprawling empire that at its height ran along the Mediterranean coast from southern Spain to northern Egypt.  Carthage's power and influence brought it into conflict over territory and resources with the Roman Republic, resulting in the three Punic Wars, fought between 264 and 146 B.C.E.  At the beginning of the Third Punic War, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder spoke the famous phrase Carthago delenda est on the floor of the Senate, and the Roman military obliged.  Carthage was obliterated, although the whole "plowed under with salt" is a nineteenth-century invention.

The Romans were hardly stupid enough to ruin arable land when they could just kill or enslave the inhabitants and take the place over for their own.

In an amusing "better late than never" postscript, the mayors of Rome and Tunis (Ugo Vetere and Chedli Klibi, respectively) signed a formal peace treaty ending the Punic Wars on February 5, 1985, 2,131 years after the final battle was fought.

The Carthaginian culture, language, and religion were all Phoenician in origin; the Phoenicians were a seagoing people who originated in what is now Lebanon and Syria.  Even the name Carthage is an anglicization of the Phoenician qrt-ḥdšt, "new city."  The most renowned Carthaginian, the general Hannibal -- the guy who famously invaded Italy and brought along some elephants -- was named Ḥanībaʿl in his language, meaning "by the grace of Ba'al."  (Yes, Ba'al -- the Canaanite god mentioned in the Bible as a Very Bad Dude, and whose name is a cognate to the first half of the name of the demon Beelzebub.)

A marble bust of Hannibal [Image is in the Public Domain]

So the Carthaginians were culturally Phoenician.  But what's curious is that a study published this week in the journal Nature describes research showing that the Carthaginian people weren't related to the Phoenicians at all -- they are much more closely related to Sicilians, Greeks, and the people of the Balearic Islands.

A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, led by population geneticist Harald Ringbauer, analyzed the remains of two hundred people recovered from archaeological sites scattered around the Carthaginian world, and found that the only ones who were related to the Semitic Phoenicians and Canaanites were the ones who were actually in the Middle East.  DNA from people in North Africa, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and Spain, while buried according to Carthaginian customs (and often with artifacts featuring the Punic script) was much more similar to the other, presumably non-Carthaginian inhabitants of ancient Greece, Italy, and Spain than it was to that of the Middle Easterners whose culture and language they shared.

The Phoenicians, apparently, were a culture of integration and assimilation, not replacement.  But the degree to which the Carthaginian and Phoenician DNA differed was a surprise even to the researchers.  “How can there be such a disconnect?” Ringbauer said.  “Does this mean Phoenician culture was like a franchise that others could adopt?  That’s one for the archaeologists.”

Of course, that tactic was familiar to their bitter enemies the Romans.  Look at how Rome handled France.  The Celtic Gauls who were in control of most of what is now France were conquered by the superior Roman military might, and after the fighting was over, those Gaulish groups who were content to let the Romans run things (and, of course, pay tribute) were largely allowed to continue to manage their own affairs.  (The ones who objected, of course, were dealt with just as harshly as were the Carthaginians.)  This is why the French people today are genetically largely Celtic and Germanic, but speak a language descended from Latin.  (My own ancestry -- on my father's side from the French Alps, and on my mother's from a swath of western France from Bordeaux up into Brittany -- is, according to a DNA test, largely Gaulish in origin.  Must be why I've always loved Asterix.)

All this is why you have to be careful not to conflate culture with ethnic origin.  It's also why the concept of race is not nearly as cut-and-dried as most people think it is.  Not only are just about all of us ethnic mixtures, our own cultures are amalgams.  Not only can genetically unrelated groups share a culture, but most of the traits we think of as markers for race (such as skin and eye color, hair texture, and so on) are due to a handful of genes that happen to characterize particular groups, and overlook the fact that even very different-looking human groups share well over 99% of their DNA.

Like it or not, we're all cousins.  Me, I love that.  Anything that allows me to give an enthusiastic middle finger to the racists is okay by me.

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The bone wars

Non-scientists often have a mental image of scientists, and the scientific process, as being dispassionate and emotionless.  Think about how scientists are often depicted in movies -- cool, methodical, and impassive, sometimes to the point of seeming inhuman.  (Other than those characters who are mad scientists, of course, but I wouldn't argue that those characterizations are any more accurate.)

In reality, scientists are human, and therefore subject to the same range of emotions we all are.  It's to be hoped that their rational faculties are better developed than the rest of us; certainly, their specialist knowledge had better be.  But otherwise, the personalities of scientists run the same gamut as any random sample of humanity -- to take an example from the field of genetics, compare the humble, self-effacing, genial Svante Pääbo to the bombastic wild child Kary Mullis.

The result is that inevitably, scientists' personalities come through in their work -- and, sometimes, get in the way, especially when you have two incompatible types working on the same goal.  And the best example of this I can think of is the long-running feud between nineteenth-century paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.

Marsh and Cope were working in a fruitful time and place for fossil hunters; the late 1800s in the North American Midwest, particularly Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming, which have rich sedimentary deposits from the Jurassic, Cretaceous Periods, and early Paleogene Periods.  They started out -- well, if not friends, at least on reasonably amicable terms, but they were set up to fall out.  Marsh was from a working-class family in Lockport, New York, not far from where I live now.  Cope, on the other hand, was solidly upper crust, from a family that had been in Philadelphia for two hundred years.  "The patrician Edward considered Marsh not quite a gentleman," observed a mutual friend.  "The academic Othniel regarded Cope as not quite a professional."

They did share one set of characteristics, though, and that was being pugnacious, quarrelsome, and distrustful.

Othniel Charles Marsh (left) and Edward Drinker Cope (right), ca. 1880 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The first salvo in what were to become known as the Bone Wars happened before they left the east.  Cope had been working a marl deposit (a calcareous clay often associated with freshwater deposition), and Marsh found out that he'd discovered some decent fossils -- so Marsh went to the pit excavators and bribed them to send any future finds to him rather than to Cope.  Cope retaliated with a similar incursion into sites Marsh had laid claim to.  But things really went downhill when Marsh published a sarcasm-laden response to a paper Cope had written on the recently-discovered plesiosaur Elasmosaurus, in which he'd reconstructed the skeleton with the head on the wrong end.  

Cope tried to buy up every copy of the journal that had the error he could find, as well as the one with the rebuttal.  You can guess how well that worked.  Marsh responded by laughingly doing everything he could do to publicize it further.  Cope had blundered, there was no doubt about it, but Marsh's sneering riposte effectively detonated any remaining friendship the two had.

Things got worse in 1872 when both men went to Wyoming to prospect in some Eocene-age fossil beds that proved to have a variety of then-unknown species of mammals, including Uintatherium, Loxolophodon, Eobasileus, Dinoceras, and Tinoceras.  Not only did they each trick the other into hiring workers who were loyal to the rival, they engaged in the biggest slap in the face you can give a taxonomist; renaming a species that had already been found and described by someone else.  Marsh accused Cope of deliberately and knowingly misidentifying fossils as being new discoveries when they weren't, but backdating their discovery dates to make it look like he had precedence.

In the naming issue, at least, it seems like Marsh had a point.  Once the dust settled, a lot of Marsh's identifications have stuck, and only a few of Cope's have.  For example, Marsh gave names to four of the most iconic dinosaur species known -- Triceratops, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus.

Things really went downhill when Marsh started paying locals to prospect for him -- by 1877 he had not only hired dozens of people, but was paying them to keep their finds (and the locales) secret so Cope's spies wouldn't get wind of them.  Cope retaliated with similar tactics, which led to a number of attempts by workmen to feed partial or inaccurate information to their bosses because the other team had bribed them to hamper efforts in any way they could.

In one case, this devolved into an actual fight, with the rival teams throwing rocks at each other.

Ultimately, though, this kind of behavior is never sustainable.  Other scientists, such as Alexander Emmanuel Agassiz, decided that someone had to be the adult in the room, and got their own teams together to go investigate the fossil sites on their own.  The Bone Wars had produced a huge amount of fossil material, much of which is still in museums today; but in the process it destroyed both men's reputations, and financially ruined them.  Cope and Marsh died virtually penniless in 1897 and 1899, respectively, and hated each other right to the bitter end.

What strikes me about all this is that what you had was two men who were both motivated by a fascination for, and a love of, paleontology, but they let their rivalry rob thirty years of work of every last scrap of joy.  It may seem like a quaint story, a century and a half later, but really, it's more a tragedy than a comedy.  Scientists are frequently competitive; in fact, in today's publish-or-perish environment, it's nearly a necessity.  But Marsh and Cope turned a competition into an all-out war, and in the end, both of them lost.

So scientists are capable of the same range of behaviors we all are -- from nobility all the way down to toddlerish pettiness.  They don't leave their personalities behind when they go into research.  Sometimes this can be a good thing; the puckish senses of humor found in brilliant researchers like Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are legendary.

But in the case of the Bone Wars, it resulted in three decades of misery that could so easily have been avoided had they just been able to set aside their desperation to be in first place every single time.

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Thus sayeth the prophecy

I've wondered for years why people fall for conspiracy theories.

My surmise -- and admittedly, that's all it is -- is that when bad things happen, any explanation is better than there being no explanation other than the universe being a chaotic and capricious place.  Blaming the latest tornado outbreak on weather manipulation by the Bad Guys at least means there's a reason why communities were destroyed and lives were lost; otherwise it just appears that shit happens because shit happens, and nice people sometimes die and the world can be dangerous and unfair.

Which brings us to the death of Pope Francis, who died three days ago at the age of 88.

Even for many non-Catholics, Pope Francis seemed like a pretty cool guy.  He embodied tolerance, gentleness, humility, and a deep concern for our environment.  I didn't agree with his theology (obviously) but I did have a lot of respect for him as a person and a spiritual leader.

Now, it's not like his death was unexpected.  He'd been ailing and in a slow decline for months, and recently came out of a long hospital stay for double pneumonia.  Even so, the world's Catholics are in mourning -- and understandably anxious, in our current volatile world situation, about who will be chosen next to lead the world's 1.4 billion Roman Catholics.

And... also not unexpected... almost as soon as he died, the conspiracy theories started.

The first was that his death had something to do with a visit from Vice President J. D. Vance, who is nominally Catholic himself but embodies the exact opposite list of characteristics from those I listed for Pope Francis: intolerance, viciousness, arrogance, and a complete disregard for the environment.  I've seen a number of claims -- some tongue-in-cheek, others apparently quite serious -- that Vance did something to hasten the Pope's death because of Francis's condemnation of many of the Trump administration's policies.

I'm a little dubious, but I think we should deport Vance to El Salvador just in case.  He recently said he's fine with the "inevitable errors" that will come with eliminating due process, so he should have no problem with it, right?

Even more out there are the people who are now leaping about making excited little squeaking noises about the Prophecy of St. Malachi.  This curious document is a series of 112 phrases in Latin, each of which is supposed to refer to one of the Popes, in order, starting with Celestine II (who led the church from 1143 to 1144).  It was published in 1595 by Flemish Benedictine monk Arnold Wion, but Wion said it was actually from Malachi of Armagh, a twelfth-century Irish saint.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Andreas F. Borchert, Malaquías de Armagh (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0]

Most modern scholars, however, think the whole thing was made up, if not by Wion, by someone in the late sixteenth century.  So any accurate passages that apply to the Popes from prior to 1595 or so shouldn't be looked upon as anything even close to miraculous.  It is, after all, easy to prophesy something after it's already happened.

Aficionados of the prophecy, though, have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to make the lines referring to events after 1595 fit to the Popes they allegedly are about.  #83, for example, which would correspond with Pope Alexander VII, translates to "Guardian of the Mountains," and Alexander's papal arms had a design of six hills.  Pope Clement X, whose line is "From a Great River," was allegedly born during a flood of the Tiber.  

When you get into the eighteenth century, however, things become dicier, because by that time the Prophecy of St. Malachi had become widely popular, so some of the Popes apparently did stuff to fit the prophecy rather than the other way around.  Pope Clement XI, for example, corresponds to the line "Surrounded by Flowers," and Clement had a medal created with the line "Flores circumdati," which is a pretty blatant attempt to make sure the Prophecy applies to him.

The reason the conspiracy theorists are getting all excited is that there are a total of 112 passages in the Prophecy, and -- you guessed it -- Pope Francis is the 112th Pope since Celestine II.  So, without further ado, here's the passage that's supposed to apply to Pope Francis:

Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the City of Seven Hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people.  The End.

It's hard even for the most devoted conspiracy theorist to see how Pope Francis could be "Peter the Roman."  He's not Roman, he's Argentine; neither his chosen papal name nor his birth name (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) contains any form of the name Peter.  The best they've been able to do is to say that his chosen name (Francis) is after St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Francis's father was named Pietro, but even for a lot of woo-woos this is stretching credulity to the breaking point.

Be that as it may, there are still a lot of people who think the Prophecy is serious business, and they are especially focusing on "the City of Seven Hills will be destroyed" part.  Because now that Pope Francis is dead, that means the rest of the prediction is imminent, so Rome is about to be hit by a massive earthquake or something.

I'm thinking it's probably not worth worrying about.  I mean, for cryin' in the sink, this is worse than Nostradamus.  Plus, it's not like we don't have enough real stuff to lose sleep over.  I'm not going to fret over a prophecy that couldn't even get the name and origin of the Pope right.

But for some reason, this kind of stuff thrills a lot of people, and I really don't see the appeal.  I guess it gives some mystical gloss to day-to-day events, rather than things happening because the world is just kind of weird and random.  In any case, to any of my Catholic readers, my condolences for the loss of your spiritual leader.  He did seem like a pretty cool guy, and I hope they can find a suitable replacement to step into his shoes.

But for those of you who live in Rome, no worries about the city burning down or anything. 

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The cracked mirror

Why is there something rather than nothing?

It's the Mother of All Existential Questions, and has been batted around for as long as there've been philosophers there to ask it.  Some attribute the universe's something-ness to God, or some other uncreated Creator; predictably, this doesn't satisfy everyone, and others have looked for a more scientific explanation of why a universe filled with stuff somehow took precedence over one that was completely empty.

Probably the most thought-provoking scientific answer to the "something versus nothing" debate I came across in Jim Holt's intriguing book Why Does the World Exist?, in which he interviews dozens of scientists, philosophers, and deep thinkers about how they explain the plenitude of our own universe.  You've probably run across the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- the bizarre, but extensively tested, rule that in the quantum realm there are pairs of measurable quantities called canonically conjugate variables that cannot be measured to a high degree of precision at the same time.  The best-known pair of canonically conjugate variables is position and momentum; the more accurately you know a particle's position, the less you can even theoretically know about its momentum, and vice-versa.  And this is not just a problem with our measuring devices -- that balance between exactitude and fuzziness is built into the fabric of the universe.

A less widely-known pair that exists in the same relationship is energy and time duration.  If you know the energy content of a region of space to an extremely high degree of accuracy, the time during which that energy measurement can apply is correspondingly extremely short.

The question Holt asks is: what would happen if you had a universe with nothing in it -- no matter, no energy, no fields, nothing?

Well, that would mean that you know its energy content exactly (zero), and the time duration over which that zero-energy state applies (infinitely long).  And according to Heisenberg, those two things can't be true at the same time.

The upshot: nothingness is unstable.  It's like a ball balanced at the top of a steep hill; a tiny nudge is all it takes to change its state.  If there had been a moment when the universe was completely Without Form And Void (to borrow a phrase), the Uncertainty Principle predicts that the emptiness would very quickly decay into a more stable state -- i.e., one filled with stuff.

There's another layer to this question, however, which has to do not with why there's something rather than nothing, but why the "something" includes matter at all.  I'm sure you know that for every subatomic particle, there is an antimatter version; one whose properties such as charge and spin are equal and opposite.  And every Star Trek fan knows that if matter and antimatter come into contact with each other, they mutually annihilate, with all of that mass turned into energy according to Einstein's famous mass/energy equation.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dirk Hünniger, Joel Holdsworth, ElectronPositronAnnihilation, CC BY-SA 3.0]

[Nota bene: don't be thrown off by the fact that the arrows on the electrons and positrons appear to indicate one is moving toward, and the other away from, their collision point.  On a Feynman diagram -- of which the above is an example -- the horizontal axis is time, not position.  Matter and antimatter have all of their properties reversed, including motion through time; an electron moving forward through time is equivalent to a positron moving backward through time.  Thus the seemingly odd orientation of the arrows.]

More relevant to our discussion, note in the above diagram, the photon produced by the electron/positron pair annihilation (the wavy line labeled γ) is also capable of producing another electron/positron pair; the reaction works both ways.  Matter and antimatter can collide and produce energy; the photons' energy can be converted back to matter and antimatter.

But here's where it gets interesting.  Because of charge and spin conservation, the matter and antimatter should always be produced in exactly equal amounts.  So if the universe did begin with an unstable state of nothingness decaying into a rapidly-expanding cloud of matter, antimatter, and energy, why hasn't all of the matter and antimatter mutually annihilated by now?

Why isn't the universe -- if not nothing, simply space filled only with photons?

One possible answer was that perhaps some of what we see when we look out into space is antimatter; that there are antimatter worlds and galaxies.  Since antimatter's chemical properties are identical to matter's, we wouldn't be able to tell if a star was made of antimatter by its spectroscopic signature.  The only way to tell would be to go there, at which point you and your spaceship (and a corresponding chunk of the antimatter planet) would explode in a burst of gamma rays, which would be a hell of a way to confirm a discovery.

But there's a pretty good argument that everything we see is matter, not antimatter.  Suppose some galaxy was made entirely of antimatter.  Well, between that galaxy and the next (matter) galaxy would be a region where the antimatter and matter blown away from their respective sources would come into contact.  We'd see what amounts to a glowing wall between the two, where the mutual annihilation of the material would release gamma rays and x rays.  This has never been observed; the inference is that all of the astronomical objects we're seeing are made of ordinary matter.

I'm pretty sure the two would not connected by a weird, foggy celestial bridge, either.

So at the creation of the universe, there must have been a slight excess of matter particles produced, so when all the mutual annihilation was done, some matter was left over.  That leftover matter is everything we see around us.  But why?  None of the current models suggest a reason why there should have been an imbalance, even a small one.

Well -- just possibly -- until now.  A press release from CERN a couple of weeks ago found that there is an asymmetry between matter and antimatter, something called a charge-parity violation, that indicates our previous understanding that matter and antimatter are perfect reversals might have to be revised.  And it's possible this slight crack in the mirror might explain why just after the Big Bang, matter prevailed over antimatter.

“The more systems in which we observe CP violations and the more precise the measurements are, the more opportunities we have to test the Standard Model and to look for physics beyond it,” said Vincenzo Vagnoni, spokesperson for the Large Hadron Collider.  “The first ever observation of CP violation in a baryon decay paves the way for further theoretical and experimental investigations of the nature of CP violation, potentially offering new constraints for physics beyond the Standard Model.”

So that's our mind-blowing excursion into the quantum realm for today. A slight asymmetry in the world of the extremely small that may have far-reaching consequences for everything there is.  And -- perhaps -- explain the deepest question of them all; why the universe as we see it exists.

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