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.

Monday, October 26, 2020

Five dozen trips

Dear Skeptos...

After today I'm taking a quick break -- this will be my only post this week.  I'll be back on Monday, November 2.  Until then, please keep topic suggestions coming!

cheers,

Gordon

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

Today is my sixtieth birthday.

I'm not a big believer in the significance of milestones, but this one seems to be pretty major.  Partly, it's my incredulity over turning sixty when I don't feel sixty.  Well, in some ways I do; I've got more aches and pains and minor physical issues than I used to.  Fortunately, at this point, nothing at all serious.  I've got some gray, especially in my facial hair, so I keep it trimmed really short to minimize the impact.  I have a few more wrinkles and laugh lines.  I need reading glasses (either that, or my conjecture that everyone is printing in smaller and smaller fonts is correct).  My stamina for running is less than it used to be.

Overall, though, I can't complain.  I've made it here relatively unscathed.

What sixty looks like

Part of that is good luck, and part is good genes.  I come from a family of long-lived people.  My parents both made it to 83, and my dad especially looked a consistent ten years younger than he actually was, pretty much his whole life.  His mom, my beloved Grandma Bertha, lived to 93, and her eccentric Aunt Clara died at 101.  (Great Aunt Clara was almost completely blind during the last ten years of her life, but still walked daily around her home town of Wind Ridge, Pennsylvania with her red-tipped cane.  The story is that she made a point of whapping people she didn't like with her cane as she passed them.  "Accidentally."  Just showing that irascibility runs in my father's family as well as longevity.)

So as far as genetics goes, I got dealt a pretty good hand.

I also attribute some of it, though, to the fact that I still have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old.  Nothing keeps you young like retaining your ability to laugh at fart jokes.

Looking back, it's been a wild ride.  I've come a long way in sixty years, both literally and figuratively.  I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel to exotic places like Ecuador and Trinidad and Malaysia.  I live in upstate New York, which I would put in contention for the most beautiful place in the world.  I have two sons I'm proud of.  Despite off-the-scale shyness and social anxiety I'm happily married to the love of my life.  I'm a published author with fifteen books to my name.  I just retired a couple of years ago after a 32-year career teaching science to teenagers, a vocation that was some combination of challenging, fun, frustrating, and exhilarating -- truly a job where you never know what's going to happen next.  With the support of family and friends, two years ago I finally came out publicly as bisexual, shedding decades of shame and fear and finally stepping into the light and saying, "This is who I am."  I've learned a lot about myself and others, especially the deep, aching truth of what a family friend told me when I was six: "Always be kinder than you think you need to be, because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."  Through it all, I've come out mostly happy, mostly healthy, and entirely glad to be where I am.

I am an incredibly lucky man.

Still, it's a little mind-boggling that I've made five dozen trips around the Sun.  It's hard to fathom that it's been that long.  When someone says "twenty years ago," I immediately think, "1980?"  No, that's forty years ago.  Twenty years ago is 2000.  Today's twenty-year-olds were infants when 9/11 happened.  So many of the things I think of as high-magnitude historical events -- the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the start of the Gulf War, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the development of the World Wide Web and email, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the siege of Sarajevo, the Oklahoma City bombing, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that officially ended the Irish "Troubles" -- all happened before today's twenty-year-olds were born.

I can't fool myself.  I haven't been young for quite some time.  It brings back memories of my grandma, then about eighty, dropping into her favorite rocking chair with a groan, then cocking an eyebrow at me and saying, "You know, Gordon, I'm no spring chicken any more."  I'd usually grin and say, "Grandma, when were you a spring chicken?"  To which she'd retort something like, "Last Thursday, you little pipsqueak.  Now fix me a martini."  And we'd both crack up.

Then I'd fix her a martini.

That's the kind of eighty-year-old I want to be.

I guess there's no avoiding aging, although I do think a lot of it boils down to attitude.  You can't escape the physical stuff completely, although you can ameliorate it by staying active; I'm glad I'm still a runner, and I suspect that I'd be in way worse shape than I am if I'd become sedentary.  But I'm damned if I'll let it get me down.  I remember a friend of mine turning sixty, and he went into a serious depression -- it was so much harder than fifty, he said, "because there's no doubt you're past halfway.  Some people make it to a hundred, but almost no one makes it to a hundred and twenty."

Which might be true, but it's not going to stop me from trying.

So anyhow: happy birthday to me.  Despite my friend's hang-dog attitude, here's to the next five dozen trips.  Maybe my attitude is a little like the guy who fell off the roof of a skyscraper, and as he passes the twentieth floor, someone yells out of a window at him to ask how he's doing, and he shrugs and says, "So far, so good."

But it's better than the alternative.  Much better to relax, enjoy the view, and have a martini.

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

Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

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



Saturday, October 24, 2020

What doesn't kill you

In evolutionary biology, it's always a little risky to attribute a feature to a specific selective pressure.

Why, for example, do humans have upright posture, unique amongst primates?  Three suggestions are:

  • a more upright posture allowed for longer sight distance, both for seeing predators and potential prey
  • standing upright freed our hands to manipulate tools
  • our ancestors mostly lived by the shores of lakes, and an ability to wade while walking upright gave us access to the food-rich shallows along the edge

So which is it?  Possibly all three, and other reasons as well.  Evolution rarely is pushed in a particular pressure by just one factor.  What's interesting in this case is that upright posture is a classic example of an evolutionary trade-off; whatever advantage it gave us, it also destabilized our lumbar spines, giving humans the most lower back problems of any mammal (with the possible exceptions of dachshunds and basset hounds, who hardly got their low-slung stature through natural selection).

Sometimes, though, there's a confluence of seeming cause and effect that is so suggestive it's hard to pass up as an explanation.  Consider, for example, the rationale outlined in the paper that appeared this week in Science Advances, called "Increased Ecological Resource Variability During a Critical Transition in Hominin Evolution," by a team led by Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian Institution.

What the paper looks at is an oddly abrupt leap in the technology used by our distant ancestors that occurred about four hundred thousand years ago.  Using artifacts collected at the famous archaeological site Olorgesailie (in Kenya), the researchers saw that after a stable period lasting seven hundred thousand years, during which the main weapons tech -- stone hand axes -- barely changed at all, our African forebears suddenly jumped ahead to smaller, more sophisticated weapons and tools.  Additionally, they began to engage in trade with groups in other areas, and the evidence is that this travel, interaction, and trade enriched the culture of hominin groups all over East Africa.  (If you have twenty minutes, check out the wonderful TED Talk by Matt Ridley called "When Ideas Have Sex" -- it's about the cross-fertilizing effects of trade on cultures, and is absolutely brilliant.)

Olorgesailie, Kenya, where our distant ancestors lived [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rossignol Benoît, OlorgesailieLandscape1993, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So what caused this prehistoric Great Leap Forward?  The Potts et al. team found that it coincides exactly with a period of natural destabilization in the area -- a change in climate that caused what was a wet, fertile, humid subtropical forest to change into savanna, a rapid overturning of the mammalian megafauna in the region (undoubtedly because of the climate change), and a sudden increase in tectonic activity along the East African Rift Zone, a divergent fault underneath the eastern part of Africa that ultimately is going to rip the continent in two.

The result was a drastic decrease in resources such as food and fresh water, and a landscape where survival was a great deal more uncertain than it had been.  The researchers suggest -- and the evidence seems strong -- that the ecological shifts led directly to our ancestors' innovations and behavioral changes.  Put simply, to survive, we had to get more clever about it.

The authors write:

Although climate change is considered to have been a large-scale driver of African human evolution, landscape-scale shifts in ecological resources that may have shaped novel hominin adaptations are rarely investigated.  We use well-dated, high-resolution, drill-core datasets to understand ecological dynamics associated with a major adaptive transition in the archeological record ~24 km from the coring site.  Outcrops preserve evidence of the replacement of Acheulean by Middle Stone Age (MSA) technological, cognitive, and social innovations between 500 and 300 thousand years (ka) ago, contemporaneous with large-scale taxonomic and adaptive turnover in mammal herbivores.  Beginning ~400 ka ago, tectonic, hydrological, and ecological changes combined to disrupt a relatively stable resource base, prompting fluctuations of increasing magnitude in freshwater availability, grassland communities, and woody plant cover.  Interaction of these factors offers a resource-oriented hypothesis for the evolutionary success of MSA adaptations, which likely contributed to the ecological flexibility typical of Homo sapiens foragers.

So what didn't kill us did indeed make us stronger.  Or at least smarter.

Like I said, it's always thin ice to attribute an adaptation to a specific cause, but here, the climatic and tectonic shifts occurring at almost exactly the same time as the cultural ones seems far much to attribute to coincidence. 

And of course, what it makes me wonder is how the drastic climatic shifts we're forcing today by our own reckless behavior are going to reshape our species.  Because we're not somehow immune to evolutionary pressure; yes, we've eliminated a lot of the diseases and malnutrition that acted as selectors on our population in pre-technological times, but if we mess up the climate enough, we'll very quickly find ourselves staring down the barrel of natural selection once again.

Which won't be pleasant.  I'm pretty certain that whatever happens, we're not going extinct any time soon, but the ecological catastrophe we're increasingly seeming to be facing won't leave us unscathed.  I wonder what innovations and adaptations we'll end up with to help us cope?

My guess is whatever they are, they'll be even more drastic than the ones that occurred to our kin four hundred thousand years ago.

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

Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

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



Friday, October 23, 2020

The astronomical pogo stick

It's all too easy lately to find reasons to criticize humans.  I'm guilty of contributing to it myself, by my focus on pseudoscientific nonsense; you can jump from "some humans do stupid stuff" to the cynical "all humans are irreparably stupid" without even realizing it.

It's worthwhile focusing instead on our accomplishments, some of which are downright amazing.  This year, I think we all need something to cheer us up and make us feel a little more optimistic about our potential as a species.  So today we're going to look at: the mind-blowing reconnaissance mission NASA has undertaken to collect, and bring back to Earth, material from the asteroid Bennu.

Bennu is interesting from a number of standpoints.  It's a carbonaceous asteroid, meaning it is high in the carbon-containing compounds that were probably abundant in the early Earth's atmosphere -- carbon dioxide and monoxide, methane, and hydrogen cyanide.  Because these were the raw materials from which the first biochemicals were synthesized, it's of serious interest to people like me who are obsessed with the possibilities of extraterrestrial life.  Astronomers tend to be more curious about Bennu because its composition is thought to be very similar to the material from which the Solar System originally coalesced, so learning about it might give us a lens into our region of the galaxy's very distant past.

And if you needed another reason, Bennu is one of the asteroids which periodically crosses the Earth's orbit, making it high on the list of eventual Earth strikes.  (Not to worry: it's not going to hit the Earth, or anything else, for at least another two hundred years, and the current surmise is that it's much more likely to hit Jupiter than it is to hit Earth.)

So in 2016, NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx mission, which first did a near pass and mapped out its surface to look for good spots for rock collecting, and then on the second encounter -- which happened three days ago -- dropped onto the asteroid with a maneuver that looked like someone bouncing on a pogo stick.  The six-second contact stirred up material from the surface, which was sucked into a collector.  OSIRIS-REx then zoomed back off into space for its return voyage to Earth, carrying what scientists hope is a sixty-gram sample of the surface of the asteroid.

Okay, that's already impressive, right?  If you want your mind boggled further, consider this:

OSIRIS-REx's trip (one way) from Earth to Bennu covered about 820 million kilometers.  The asteroid's diameter is about 530 meters; the spacecraft's is a little under seven meters.  I did a bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation, and discovered that our ability to hit Bennu from this distance is equivalent to hitting a target the size of a bacterium with a bullet the size of a virus -- from a kilometer away.

Oh, and it's hardly standing still.  Bennu is a fast-moving target, zooming along at 28 kilometers per second.

If that doesn't impress you, I can't imagine what would.

OSIRIS-REx's sampling arm, seconds before impact on asteroid Bennu on October 20, 2020 [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

"The spacecraft did everything it was supposed to do," said mission principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona.  "I can’t believe we actually pulled this off."

His elation and incredulity are understandable considering all of the things that could have gone wrong, and how slight the error would have to be to result in the spacecraft either plunging into a destructive crash or else missing the asteroid entirely.  And at that point, OSIRIS-REx had to function perfectly on its own -- at that distance, radio signals traveling at the speed of light take over eighteen minutes to reach Earth, and (even assuming an instantaneous response by NASA scientists) another eighteen to send back a command like "NO NO NO DON'T DO THAT!"

By that time, the spacecraft would either be rubble or else zooming away into space, and away from the target.

So the mission went off without a hitch.  Well, the first half of it -- they still have to get OSIRIS-REx back to Earth safely.  But I'd say given how flawless the first bit was, there's a good chance they'll accomplish the whole shebang, and we'll have some really interesting stuff to study.

When you consider things like this, it's reassuring -- the capacity for human accomplishment is limitless.  Yes, I know there's still idiotic stuff going on down here.  But I'm not ready to give up on humanity yet.  I find the OSIRIS-REx mission incredibly inspirational.

Gives me hope that there may be a bright future for our species yet.

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

Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

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



Thursday, October 22, 2020

Lines of sight

What amazes me about so many crazy claims is that you get the impression that the people making them didn't even try to find a natural explanation.

It's one thing to speculate wildly about a phenomenon for which science is still searching for explanations.   Déjà vu, for example, is one experience that virtually everyone shares, and for which no convincing explanation has yet been found.  It's no wonder that it's fertile ground for people who prefer to ascribe such occurrences to the paranormal.

But in other cases, there is such a simple, convincing natural explanation that you have to wonder why the claimant isn't going there.   Such, for example, is the suggestion over at the phenomenally bizarre quasi-religious site The Watchman's Cry that geographical locations on the Earth that have been the sites of disasters (natural or manmade) fall along connecting lines, making some sort of mystical, meaningful pattern.

The article starts out with a bang, with the phrase, "Several months ago, I had four prophetic dreams which took place on the same night."  Four precognitive dreams is pretty impressive, I have to say, especially since most skeptics don't think precognition occurs at all.  Be that as it may, these dreams involved train wrecks, which is ironic, because that is what the rest of the site turns out to be.

Both literally and figuratively.

The site goes into great detail about various train derailments, and how if you connect them by lines (great circles, to be more precise), those lines then go around the Earth and connect to other sites that have had bad things happen.  These then intersect other such great circles, which go other interesting places, and so on.



[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's just ley lines all over again, isn't it?  If your search parameters are wide enough -- basically, "anywhere that anything bad has happened in the past two centuries" -- you can find great circles that link them up.  Which is entirely unsurprising.  I could draw a great circle anywhere on Earth and pretty much guarantee that I'll find three or more sites near it that had some kind of natural or manmade calamity in the past two centuries.  The Earth is a big place, and there are lots of calamities to choose from.

But what gets me most about this guy is that he doesn't even seem to understand that given the fact that the Earth is a sphere (an oblate spheroid, to be precise, but let's not get technical), a given point on Earth has an infinite number of great circles passing through it.  Just as two points on a plane define a line, two points on a sphere define a great circle.  And his lack of grasp of simple geometry becomes apparent when he tells us that it's amazing that two intersecting great circles (ones connecting Houston, Texas to train derailment sites in Rosedale, Maryland and Bear Creek, Alabama, respectively) were "only 900 feet apart."

How can you say that two intersecting lines are any specific distance apart?  If they intersect, they are (at that point) zero feet apart.  Farther from the intersection, they are farther apart.  Because that's how intersection works.

But the author of this site trumpets this statement as if it were some kind of epiphany.  It's like being excited because you found a triangle that had three sides.

I'll leave you to explore the site on your own, if you're curious to see more of this false-pattern malarkey, but suffice it to say that there's nothing at all mystical going on here.  He's adding geometry to coincidence and finding meaning, and it's no great surprise that it turns out to be the meaning he already believed going into it.

So like the ley lines people, this guy doesn't seem to be trying very hard to see if there's a natural explanation that sufficiently accounts for all of the facts, a tendency I have a hard time comprehending.  Why are people attracted to this kind of hokum?  Science itself is a grand, soaring vision, telling us that we are capable of understanding how the universe works, from the realm of the enormous to the realm of the unimaginably small.  With a little work, you can find out the rules that govern everything from galaxies to quarks.

But that, apparently, isn't enough for some people.

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

Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

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



Wednesday, October 21, 2020

The gospel according to Tolkien

Markus Davidsen, a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, thought he'd write his dissertation about people who believe that the Jedi religion, made famous by Star Wars, is real.  But after he began his research, he seems to have decided that that was just too silly a topic to research, so he changed his mind.

And decided to research people who believe that the religious schema from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is real, instead.

Yes, we're talking Elves, and the whole Valar and Maiar thing from The Silmarillion.  And that there have been a series of massive cataclysms, including the one caused by Fëanor forging the Silmarils (a battle which "reshaped Middle-Earth"), and one that sank the continent of Númenor, not to mention the more famous Battle of Five Armies (from The Hobbit) and Battle of the Pelennor Fields (from The Return of the King).  All of which, mysteriously, have left no archaeological traces whatsoever.

But that's not all.  Many of these people think that they are Elves.  Or descended from the Valar.  And there are enough such folks that Davidsen was inundated with requests to participate in his research.  When asked how he found Latter-Day Elves, Davidsen responded, "Actually, they found me.  My graduation thesis on Jedis won a prize and that generated lots of publicity in Mare [the official newspaper of Leiden University] too.  As a result, those people got in touch with me: one group of Tolkien followers would put me in touch with another and it snowballed from there. The groups turned out to be quite diverse too, so I could compare them to each other."

[Image licensed through the Creative Commons Giorgio Minguzzi from Italy, Elf, Tolkien (5503256855), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Allow me to emphasize; these were not some folks playing role-playing games, a sort of Middle-Earth version of the Society for Creative Anachronism.  These people are serious.

And of course, what would a religion be without schisms and squabbling?  "There are those who swear that they themselves are descended from Elves and accordingly have Elvish genes," Davidsen says.  "That’s some claim, and taking it too far for the people who only claim to have Elvish souls and who dissociate themselves from that group."

Others, Davidsen says, go right to the top, worship-wise.  "Yet another group say they not remotely related to Elves, but that there is another world in which the Valar exist," he said.  "They use rituals to try and contact the Valar.  Some draw a circle on the ground, spiritually cleanse it and then evoke the Valar while others go on a kind of shamanic journey with their spirits travelling to another world."

Right.  Okay.  Because it's not like Tolkien made the whole thing up, or anything.

Davidsen, fortunately, agrees.  On the other hand, he says, "This kind of religion isn’t any dafter than other faiths, we’re just used to that particular madness.  We think it’s normal for Catholics to consume the flesh and blood of their God, but when the modern vampire movement says they draw powers from blood, we think they’re loonies.  It’s not really fair.  Buddhism dictates that some people have a Buddha nature, which is not essentially different from the Tolkien-esque idea of having an Elvish nature."

Which is spot-on, even if predictably I think it's all a lot of lunacy.  I tend to agree with Stephen F. Roberts, who said the following to a devout Christian: "I contend we are both atheists.  I just believe in one fewer god than you do.  When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

Now, understand, as religions go, Tolkienism (or whatever it's called) at least has one selling point; it's got a beautiful narrative.  If I was forced to choose a fictional world to live in, Middle-Earth would come near the top.  It's got a grandeur, a breadth of scope, like no other fantasy world I've ever read about, and (best of all) the good guys win.

Which is more than you can say for the world of, say, the Lovecraftian mythos.  There, you do everything you can to worship Yog-Sothoth, or whoever, and for your devotion you get your arms ripped off and your face melted.  That's one fictional religion I'm glad isn't real.

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

Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

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



Tuesday, October 20, 2020

The swing of a pendulum

 Physicists have a serious problem.

Back in the mid-1970s, astrophysicist Vera Rubin made an interesting discovery.  She had initially been interested in quasars, but moved away from that because the subject was "too controversial" -- and landed herself in the midst of one of the biggest scientific controversies to hit the field since the discovery of the quantum nature of reality back in the 1920s and 1930s.

She was looking at the rotation rates of galaxies, and found something curious; based on what was known about gravitational interactions between massive objects, the outer fringes of every galaxy she studied were moving at the "wrong" velocity.  The outermost stars were moving far faster than the model predicted, suggesting there was some unseen mass increasing the gravitational field and whirling the edges of the galaxy around faster than the visible matter could have.

And it wasn't by a small margin, either.  Rubin's calculations suggested that there was five times the unseen stuff as there was all of the visible matter in the galaxy put together.  This was way too much to be accounted for by something like diffuse dust clouds or other agglomerations of non-luminous, but completely ordinary, matter.  Rubin nicknamed the invisible stuff dark matter, more or less as a placeholder name until the physicists could figure out what the stuff was, something most researchers figured would be accomplished in short order.

Almost fifty years later, we still are hardly any further along.  Better measurements have confirmed that there is way more dark matter than ordinary matter; Rubin's estimate was spot-on, and current data indicates that 27% of the universe's total mass is dark matter, as compared to only 5% ordinary matter.  (The other 68% is an even more mysterious thing called dark energy, about which the astrophysicists are even more completely, um, in the dark.)

Every attempt to figure out the nature of dark matter -- or even to detect it by anything else but its gravitational effects on the galactic scale -- has resulted in failure.  The leading candidate, called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), has been the subject of repeated detection attempts, and every single one of them has generated "null results."

Which is science-speak for "bupkis."

At some point, you have to wonder if the scientists are going to give the whole thing up as a bad job.  The problem is, if that happens you have 95% of the universe made of stuff we can't account for, which isn't a state of affairs anyone is happy with.

So a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology is giving dark matter one more chance to show itself, using the only way in which we're certain it interacts with ordinary matter -- gravity.

The trouble is, gravity is a really weak force.  It's only a big player in our lives because we live on a massive chunk of rock, big enough to have a significant gravitational field.  Of the four fundamental forces -- gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces -- gravity is weaker than the next in line (electromagnetism) by a factor of 10 to the 36th power.

So gravity is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times weaker than the electromagnetic force that holds molecules together, generates static electricity, and toasts your bread in the morning.

How on earth could you detect something that small, when even a trace of a stray electrical field could overwhelm it by many orders of magnitude?  The NIST scientists think they have the answer: an array of over a billion tiny, incredibly sensitive pendulums, each only a millimeter long, shielded and then cooled to near absolute zero to minimize interference from other forces.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ben Ostrowsky, Foucault's Pendulum, CC BY 2.0]

There are four possibilities of what could happen to the array:

  • Nothing.  Then we're back to the drawing board.
  • Motion of one or two pendulums only.  This is probably due to interaction with an ordinary matter particle, which would hit a pendulum and stick, causing it to swing but leaving the ones around it unaffected.
  • Chaotic or random movement in a number of the pendulums.  This "noise" would most likely be caused by a fluctuation in an electric field -- i.e. the array wasn't well enough shielded.
  • A coordinated "ripple" passing through the detector, setting more or less a straight line of the pendulums swinging.  This, the researchers say, would be the signal of a dark matter particle zooming through the array, and its gravitational ripple streaking across in a specific direction.

Of course, even if the best possible outcome -- option #4 -- occurs, it still doesn't tell us what dark matter is.  After all, Vera Rubin's research in the 1970s showed that it interacts gravitationally with ordinary matter (i.e., we already knew that).  But at least we'll have a demonstration that it exists, that we're not looking at something like the nineteenth century's luminiferous aether, the mysterious substance that supposedly was the medium through which light waves propagated, and was shown not to exist by the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment (and the nature of light propagation ultimately explained by Einstein and others, decades later).

So I'll be eagerly awaiting the outcome.  Right now, the array is still in development, so it will be a while before we can expect results.  But if it generates positive results, it'll be the first conclusive demonstration that we're talking about something detectable right here on Earth, not just by its effects on distant galaxies.

Of course, that still leaves us with the other 68% unknown stuff to explain.

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

Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

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



Monday, October 19, 2020

Knots, twists, and meaning

One of the most curious relics of the past, and one which is a persistent mystery, is the quipu (also spelled khipu) of Andean South America.

A quipu is a linked series of knotted, dyed cotton strings, and were apparently some kind of meaningful device -- but what their meaning was is uncertain, thanks to the thoroughness and determination of Spanish priests in the sixteenth century to destroy whatever they could of the "pagan" Inca culture.  The result is, there are only 751 of them left, which is a pretty small sample if you're interested in decipherment.

An Incan quipu in the Larco Museum, Lima, Peru [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Claus Ableiter nur hochgeladen aus enWiki, Inca Quipu, CC BY-SA 3.0]

A number of attempts have been made to understand what the patterns of knots meant, but none of them have really panned out.  Some of the possibilities are that they were devices for enumeration, perhaps something like an abacus; a literary device for recording history, stories, or genealogies; or census data.

In fact, the jury's still out on whether they encode linguistic information at all.  An anthropologist named Sabine Hyland has suggested that they do; the color, position of knots, and even the ply of the string combine in 95 different ways to represent a syllabic writing system, she says, and claims that they were intricate family records.  If she's right, the burning of the Incan quipus represents a horrific eradication of the entire cultural history of a people -- something the invading Europeans were pretty good at.

The reason the topic comes up is because of a paper that came out last week in Nature Communications that has a striking parallel to the quipu.  The paper, titled "Optical Framed Knots as Information Carriers," by Hugo Larocque, Alessio d'Errico, Manuel Ferrer-Garcia, and Ebrahim Karimi (of the University of Ottawa), Avishy Carmi (of Ben-Gurion University), and Eliahu Cohen (of Bar Ilan University), describes a way of creating knots in laser light that could be used to encode information.  The authors write:

Modern beam shaping techniques have enabled the generation of optical fields displaying a wealth of structural features, which include three-dimensional topologies such as Möbius, ribbon strips and knots.  However, unlike simpler types of structured light, the topological properties of these optical fields have hitherto remained more of a fundamental curiosity as opposed to a feature that can be applied in modern technologies.  Due to their robustness against external perturbations, topological invariants in physical systems are increasingly being considered as a means to encode information.  Hence, structured light with topological properties could potentially be used for such purposes.  Here, we introduce the experimental realization of structures known as framed knots within optical polarization fields.  We further develop a protocol in which the topological properties of framed knots are used in conjunction with prime factorization to encode information.
"The structural features of these objects can be used to specify quantum information processing programs," said study lead author Hugo Larocque, in an interview in Science Daily.  "In a situation where this program would want to be kept secret while disseminating it between various parties, one would need a means of encrypting this 'braid' and later deciphering it.  Our work addresses this issue by proposing to use our optical framed knot as an encryption object for these programs which can later be recovered by the braid extraction method that we also introduced.  For the first time, these complicated 3D structures have been exploited to develop new methods for the distribution of secret cryptographic keys.  Moreover, there is a wide and strong interest in exploiting topological concepts in quantum computation, communication and dissipation-free electronics.  Knots are described by specific topological properties too, which were not considered so far for cryptographic protocols."

A few of the research team's knotted beams of light

I have to admit that even given my B.S. in physics, most of the technical details in this paper went over my head so fast they didn't even ruffle my hair.  And I know that any similarity between optical framed knots and the knots on quipus is superficial at best, but even so, the parallel jumped out at me immediately.  Just as the Incas (probably) used color, knot position and shape, and ply of the string to encode information, these scientists have figured out how to encode information using intensity, phase, wavelength, polarization, and topological form to do the same thing.

Which is pretty amazing.  I know the phrase "reinventing the wheel" is supposed to be a bad thing, but here we have two groups independently (at least, as far as I know) coming up with analogous solutions for the same problem -- how to render information without recourse to ordinary symbology and typography.

Leaving me awestruck, as always, by the inventiveness and creativity of the human mind.

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

Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

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



Saturday, October 17, 2020

After the collapse

When you start looking into black holes, there's a lot to be fascinated by.

As you probably know, a black hole is one type of collapsed star.  The ultimate fate of a star depends on its initial mass.  When the collapse begins at the end of a star's life, it continues until it meets a force strong enough to counteract the gravitational pull of its mass.  In low-mass stars like the Sun, that oppositional force is the mutual repulsion of the negatively-charged electrons in its constituent atoms.  This leaves a dense, white-hot blob called a white dwarf, slowly radiating its heat away and cooling.  More massive stars -- between ten and twenty-five solar masses -- have such a high gravitational pull that once they start collapsing the electrostatic repulsion is insufficient to stop it.  The electrons are forced into the nuclei, resulting in a neutron star, a stellar core so dense that a matchbox-sized chunk of its matter would weigh three billion tons.

Above twenty-five solar masses, however, even the neutron degeneracy pressure isn't enough to halt the collapse.  Supergiant stars continue to collapse, warping space into a closed form that even light can't escape.

This is the origin of a black hole.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Black holes are seriously odd beasts.  Let's start with what we can infer from the upshot of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, that gravitational fields and accelerated frames of reference are indistinguishable.  (To clarify with an easy example; if you were in a box with no windows, and were being accelerated at a rate of 9.8 m/s^2, you would have no way of knowing you weren't simply in Earth's gravitational field.)  So as weird as it sounds, the same relativistic weirdness would occur in a powerful gravitational field as occurs when you move at a high velocity; time would slow down, mass increase, and so on.  You might recall this from the movie Interstellar.  The crew of a spaceship stranded on a planet orbiting a black hole experiences time dilation -- while a year passes for them, a hundred years passes for people out in the more ordinary reaches of the universe.

This is only the start of the weirdness, though.  You may have heard about spaghettification -- yes, that's really what it's called -- when an object falls into a black hole.  Usually the example given is an astronaut, but that kind of seems cruel; spaghettification would be as unpleasant as it sounds.  What happens is that the falling object would be ripped apart by tidal forces.  A tidal force occurs when one part of an object experiences a different gravitational pull than another part of the same object, and the result is that the object is stretched.

There actually is a tidal force on your own body right now; assuming you're not doing a headstand, your feet are closer to the Earth's center of mass, so they're being pulled a little harder than your head is.  The difference is so small that we're unaware of it.  But with an object near a black hole, the gradient of gravitational pull is so large that when the object gets close -- how close depends on the black hole's mass -- the tidal forces rip it apart, stretching it in a thin filament of matter (thus the "spaghetti" in "spaghettification").

The reason all this comes up is a paper published this week in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that contains observational data of a star getting sucked into a black hole and spaghettified.  "When an unlucky star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy, the extreme gravitational pull of the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material," said study co-author Thomas Wevers, a European Southern Observatory Fellow in Santiago, Chile, in an interview with Science Daily.  "As some of the thin strands of stellar material fall into the black hole during this spaghettification process, a bright flare of energy is released, which we can detect."

That's not the only reason that black holes were in the news last week.  In a paper in Nature Communications Physics, scientists describe their observations of a rare event -- the merger of two black holes.  When this happens, the coalescence causes such a powerful shift in the warped gravitational field surrounding it that it sends ripples out through the fabric of space.  These gravitational waves travel outward from their source at the speed of light, and the ones from something as cataclysmic as a black hole merger are so powerful they can be detected here on Earth, thousands of light years away.

"The pitch and amplitude of the signal increases as the two black holes orbit around their mutual center of mass, faster and faster as they approach each other," said Juan Calderón Bustillo, of the University of Hong Kong.  "After the collision, the final remnant black hole emits a signal with a constant pitch and decaying amplitude -- like the sound of a bell being struck."

So that's our excursion into the bizarre and counterintuitive world of collapsed stars.  The whole thing makes me realize what a violent and hostile place much of the universe is, and glad we're relatively safe down here on our comfortable little planet orbiting an ordinary star in the outer spiral arms of an ordinary galaxy.

Boring as it can seem sometimes, it beats being spaghettified by a significant margin.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

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



Friday, October 16, 2020

A linguistic labyrinth

It's funny the rabbit holes fiction writers get dragged down sometimes.

This latest one occurred because of two things that happened kind of at the same time.  First, in my work-in-progress, a fall-of-civilization novel called In the Midst of Lions that in the current national and global situation is seeming to cut a little close to the bone, one of the characters is a linguist who saw what was coming and wrote a conlang -- a constructed (invented) language -- so he could communicate with people he trusted without it being decipherable by enemies.

So of course, to make it authentic, I've had to write the language, following in the footsteps of the Star Trek folks with Klingon and J. R. R. Tolkien with Quenya and Sindarin (two of the languages of the Elves).  My MA is in linguistics (yes, I know, I spent my career teaching biology; it's a long story) so I know a good bit about language structure, and I wanted to make the language different enough from the familiar Indo-European languages to seem (1) an authentic language, not just a word-for-word substitution, and (2) something a smart linguist would think up.  Unfortunately, my specialty is Indo-European languages, specifically Scandinavian languages.  (My wife gives me grief about having studied Old Norse.  My response is that if the Vikings ever take over the shipping industry, I'm gonna have the last laugh.)

A sample of Quenya script, with the English transliteration.  It translates to, "Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!"  [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I started out with a pair of blinders on.  There are a lot of rules specific to Indo-European languages that we tend to take for granted, which was exactly what I didn't want to do with my conlang.  But in order to identify those, you have to somehow lift yourself out of your own linguistic box -- which is awfully hard to do.

The second thing, though, was a nice kick in the rear that came from a question on Quora that asked, "What is the hardest language to learn to speak fluently?"  By "hardest" most people assumed "for speakers of English," which went right to what I was interested in -- finding out what would seem odd/counterintuitive (and therefore difficult) for English speakers.

Well, this is what led me directly into the research labyrinth, literally for hours.

One respondent answered that the hardest ones would be the Northwest Caucasian languages of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia -- a group made up of Abaza, Abkhaz, Adyghe, Kabardian, and Ubykh -- the last-mentioned of which became extinct in 1992 when the last native speaker died of old age.  These languages form an isolate family, related to each other but of uncertain (but undoubtedly distant) relationship to other languages.

So naturally, I had to find out what's weird about them.  Here's what I learned.

Let's start out with the fact that they only have two vowels, but as many as 84 consonants depending on exactly how finely you want to break them up based on the articulation.  They use SOV (subject-object-verb) word order, plopping the verb at the end of the sentence, but that's hardly unique; Latin does that, giving rise to the old quip that by the time a Roman got to the verb in his sentence, his listeners had forgotten who all he was talking about.

But in the parlance of the infomercial, "Wait, there's more!"  The Northwest Caucasian languages use agglutination -- gluing together various bits and pieces to make a more specific word -- but only for verbs.  In these languages, a verb is actually a cluster of parts called morphemes that tell you not only what the core verb is, but the place, time, manner of action, whether it's positive or negative, and even the subject's and object's person.

Then, there's the fact that they're ergative-absolutive languages.  When I hit this, I thought, "Okay, I used to know what this meant," and had to look it up.  It has to do with how the subject and object of a sentence are used.  In English (a nominative-accusative language), the subject has the same form regardless of what kind of verb follows it; likewise, the object always is the same.  So the subject of an intransitive verb like "to walk" is the same as the subject for a transitive verb like "to watch."  (We'd say, "she walked" and "she watched [someone or something];" in both cases, you use the form "she.")  The object form of "he" is always "him," regardless of any other considerations in the sentence.

Not so in the Northwest Caucasian languages, and other ergative-absolutive languages, such as Tibetan, Basque, and Mayan.  In these languages, the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive one have the same form; the subject of a transitive verb is the one with the different form.  (If English was an ergative-absolutive language, we might say "He watched her," but then it'd be "her walked.")

So there are lots of things that seem normal, obvious even, which in fact are simply arbitrary rules that we've learned are universal to English, but which are hardly universal to other languages.  It always puts me in mind of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is that the language you speak shapes your cognitive processes.  In other words, that speakers of languages differently structured from English literally perceive the world a different way because the form of the languages force different conceptualizations of what they see.

I've gone on long enough about all this, and I haven't even scratched the surface.  There are tonal languages like Thai, where the pitch and pitch change of a syllable alter its meaning.  There are languages like Finnish and Japanese where vowel length -- literally, how long you say the vowel for -- changes the meaning of the word it's in.  There are inflected languages like Greek, where the ending of a word tells you how it's being used in the sentence (e.g., in the phrases "the cat walked," "she pet the cat," "it's the cat's bowl," "give the food to the cat," and "the dog is with the cat," the word "cat" would in each case have a different suffix).

So I have some work to do to make my conlang something that would be believable to a linguist.  Or, in the context of the story, something an actual linguist would invent.  Of course, being that it's only one small piece of the story, in the end I'll probably use something like a dozen phrases total from the language, so it'll be a lot of work with very little useful result.

But hey, if J. R. R. Tolkien did it, who am I to criticize?

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

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



Thursday, October 15, 2020

Life at the center

Appeal to Authority is simultaneously one of the simplest, and one of the trickiest, of the fallacies.

The simple part is that one shouldn't rely on someone else's word for a claim, without some demonstration of evidence in support.  Just saying "Neil de Grasse Tyson said so" isn't sufficient proof for a conjecture.

On the other hand, there are times when relying on authority makes sense.  If I claimed that Neil de Grasse Tyson was wrong in the realm of astronomy, the likelihood of my being wrong myself is nearly 100%.   Expertise is worth something, and Tyson's Ph.D. in astrophysics certainly gives his statements in that field considerable gravitas.

The problem is that when confronted with a confident-sounding authority, people turn their own brains off.   And the situation becomes even murkier when experts in one field start making pronouncements in a different one.

Take, for example, Robert Lanza, a medical researcher whose work in stem cells and regenerative medicine has led to groundbreaking advances in the treatment of hitherto incurable diseases.  His contributions to medical science are undeniably profound, and I would consider his opinion in the field of stem cell research about as close to unimpeachable as you could get.  But Lanza hasn't been content to stay within his area of specialization, and has ventured forth into the fringe areas of metaphysics -- joining people like Fritjof Capra in their quest to show that quantum physics has something to say about consciousness, souls, and life after death.

Let's start with Lanza's idea of a "biocentric universe," which is defined thusly:
Biocentrism states that life and biology are central to being, reality, and the cosmos— life creates the universe rather than the other way around.  It asserts that current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness.  While physics is considered fundamental to the study of the universe, and chemistry fundamental to the study of life, biocentrism claims that scientists will need to place biology before the other sciences to produce a theory of everything.
Which puts me in mind of Wolfgang Pauli's famous quote, "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."  Biocentrism isn't really a scientific theory, in that it makes no predictions, and therefore de facto isn't falsifiable.  And Lanza's reception on this topic has been chilly at best.  Physicist Lawrence Krauss said, "It may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn't look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science."  Physicist and science writer David Lindley agrees, calling biocentrism "a vague, inarticulate metaphor."

And if you needed further evidence of its lack of scientific rigor, I must also point out that Deepak Chopra loves biocentrism.  "(Lanza's) theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient wisdom traditions of the world which says that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world," Chopra writes.  "It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence."

As a scientist, you know you're in trouble if you get support from Deepak Chopra.

And there's a further problem with venturing outside of your field of expertise.  If you make unsupported claims, then others will take your claims (with your name appended to them, of course) and send them even further out into the ether.  Which is what happened recently over at the site Learning Mind, where Lanza's ideas were said to prove that the soul exists, and death is an illusion:
(Lanza's) theory implies that death simply does not exist.  It is an illusion which arises in the minds of people. It exists because people identify themselves with their body.  They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too. 
In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space.  It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it.  That fits well with the basic postulates of quantum mechanics science, according to which a certain particle can be present anywhere and an event can happen according to several, sometimes countless, ways.  
Lanza believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously.  These universes contain multiple ways for possible scenarios to occur.  In one universe, the body can be dead.  And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe.  This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive.  And so on, infinitely.
Which amounts to taking an untestable claim, whose merits are best left to the philosophers to discuss, and running right off a cliff with it.

As I've said more than once: quantum mechanics isn't some kind of fluffy, hand-waving speculation.  It is hard, evidence-based science.  The mathematical model that is the underpinning of this description of the universe is complex and difficult for the layperson to understand, but it is highly specific.  It describes the behavior of particles and waves, on the submicroscopic scale, making predictions that have been experimentally supported time after time.


[Image is in the Public Domain]

And that's all it does.   Quantum effects such as superposition, indeterminacy, and entanglement have extremely limited effects on the macroscopic world.  Particle physics has nothing to say about the existence of the soul, the afterlife, or any other religious or philosophical claim.  And even the "Many Worlds" hypothesis, which was seriously put forth as a way to explain the collapse of the wave function, has largely been shelved by everyone but the science fiction writers because its claims are completely untestable.

To return to my original point, Appeal to Authority is one of those fallacies that seem simpler than they actually turn out to be.  I have no doubt that Robert Lanza is a genius in the field of regenerative medicine, and I wouldn't hesitate to trust what he says in that realm.  But his pronouncements in the field of physics appear to me to be unfalsifiable speculation -- i.e., not scientific statements.  As such, biocentrism is no better than "intelligent design."  What Adam Lee, of Daylight Atheism, said about intelligent design could be applied equally well to biocentrism:
(A) hypothesis must make predictions that can be compared to the real world and determined to be either true or false, and there must be some imaginable evidence that could disprove it.  If an idea makes no predictions, makes predictions that cannot be unambiguously interpreted as either success or failure, or makes predictions that cannot be checked out even in principle, then it is not science.
But as such, I'm sure biocentrism is going to be as popular amongst the woo-woos as ID is amongst the fervently religious.  For them, "unfalsifiable" means "you can't prove we're wrong."

"Therefore we're right. q.e.d. and ha ha ha."
***************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

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



Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Out in the ozone

If you were going to try to pick out the all-time stupidest practice from the alt-med crowd, you'd have a lot of contenders for the top prize.  You have your homeopathic water.  You have your "quantum downloadable medicines."  You have your health benefits of breathing air that bees have flown around in.  You  have your recommendations to take all your clothes off and expose your butthole to direct sunlight.

None of which, for the record, did I make up.

But I think I've found the odds-on favorite, thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who alerted me to the practice.  Today we look at:

Treating COVID-19 infections using "rectal insufflation of ozone."

If you're sitting there thinking, as I was, "Okay, that can't possibly mean what it sounds like," then yes -- it means exactly what it sounds like.  (Actually, what I said was, "You have got to be fucking kidding me.")  Doctors (I'm using the term loosely here) are trying to treat COVID and other illnesses by sticking a plastic tube up your ass and pumping your rectum full of ozone.

I read this entire article with an expression like this on my face:

Okay, brief pause to (1) give you time to stop laughing and/or retching, and (2) review a little bit of high school chemistry.

Ozone is O3 (ordinary oxygen is O2).  Elemental oxygen is, unsurprisingly, a strong oxidizer, meaning it is really good at pulling electrons away from other molecules.  In the case of organic molecules, this usually makes them fall apart.  Fire, after all, is just the energy released by rapid oxidation.

Put simply, oxygen is toxic.  We depend on it to "burn" the glucose molecules from which we get our energy, but there's good evidence that the evolution of aerobic respiration started as a detoxification pathway.  When the first photosynthetic organisms evolved (probably cyanobacteria), the oxygen they gave off as a waste product resulted in the oxidation (i.e. death) of most of the living things on Earth, at that point all single-celled microorganisms.  The ones that survived did so because they either were able to (1) avoid the oxygen altogether (these evolved into today's anaerobic bacteria), or (2) detoxify the oxygen by handing it the electrons it wanted, in most circumstances inducing it to bind to hydrogen ions and stabilize as water molecules.  This latter pathway releases a lot of energy, and the ancestors of aerobes -- in other words, most life forms on Earth -- survived because they evolved a way to hook this energy release to powering their own metabolic processes.

So oxygen is dangerous stuff, and we've just learned to live with it.  But where all this is leading is: ozone is a stronger oxidizer than elemental oxygen.  In fact, five times stronger.  It's twice as strong an oxidizer as chlorine gas, which is dissolved into pool water because it's so good at killing pathogenic microorganisms.

This is the stuff they're recommending blowing up your ass.

The "research" that the article linked above cites has the following to say, apropos of using this technique to treat COVID:

The coronavirus envelope is rich in cysteine, and viral activity depends on the conservation of these residues.  Cysteine contains a thiol or sulfhydryl group (–SH); many viruses, including coronaviruses, require these reduced sulfhydryl groups for cell entry and fusion.  Sulfhydryl groups are susceptible to oxidation, and therefore to the oxidizing effect of ozone. Peroxides created by ozone administration oxidize cysteines and show long-term antiviral effects that can further reduce viral load.  Once their capsid is removed, virions cannot survive or replicate, and the creation of dysfunctional viruses due to the action of ozone offers unique therapeutic possibilities.

Well, you could oxidize the virus's capsid by setting it on fire, too, but doing that to the viruses in someone's lungs could present a bit of an issue.

Of course, this was the thing about Donald Trump's much-quoted comments about using ultraviolet light exposure or intravenous bleach to kill coronavirus.  Sure, bleach and ultraviolet light can both destroy the virus, but something that kills the pathogens and simultaneously kills you is a little counterproductive, don't you think?

It's always the problem with showing that anything -- be it an antiviral or any other medication -- that works just fine in vitro will have the same effect, and no deleterious side effects, in vivo.  You not only have to demonstrate that the drug accomplishes what you want it to do, but (1) can efficiently get to the part of the body where it's needed, and (2) doesn't destroy healthy tissue along the way.

Rectal insufflation of ozone kind of fails on both counts, doesn't it?  Okay, it probably kills coronavirus, but they're mostly in your lungs, not your rectum, and it's highly damaging to the rest of you.

Having oxidation damage to the delicate lining of your lower gastrointestinal tract would not be fun.  Having that on top of a COVID-19 infection would be a level of misery I can only imagine.

So there we are.  What is probably the stupidest alt-med therapy I've ever heard of.  Of course, I hesitate even to say that, because the alt-med folks seem to look upon this as some sort of challenge.  Every time I think, "Okay, this is it, it can't get any more idiotic than this," they up and exceed their previous record.

As the quote attributed to Einstein so aptly put it: "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

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