Stellar slingshot

Sometimes there's a scientific discovery that's just such an "oh, wow!" that I have to tell you about it.

Like the research that I ran into in the Astrophysical Journal recently.  "Origin of a Massive Hyper-runaway Subgiant Star LAMOST-HVS1: Implication from Gaia and Follow-up Spectroscopy," by Kohei Hattori, Monica Valluri, Norberto Castro, Ian U. Roederer, Guillaume Mahler, and Gourav Khullar, of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, describes a star that was ejected from our galaxy at a speed that boggles the imagination.

This star -- the euphoniously-named LAMOST-HVS1 -- is traveling at about 570 kilometers per second, on a trajectory almost perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy.  (If it helps, that's over a million miles an hour.)  It was initially thought that the star might have been evicted from the center of the galaxy, where there is an enormous black hole -- only something that massive, scientists thought, could impart enough energy to a star to get it traveling that fast. But tracking its path backward showed that it didn't come from the center, but from a region called the Norma Spiral Arm.

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

What this seems to indicate is that there are massive black holes scattered throughout the galaxy, not concentrated at the center.  Which is vaguely terrifying.  The scenario is apparently that a binary star was drawn in toward the black hole, and as it fell toward the event horizon, one of the two gained enough energy to be flung free -- what's called the "gravitational slingshot effect."  This phenomenon has been used to get countless television and movie spacefarers out of sticky situations, most notably in the 1998 film Lost in Space, wherein we learn that something being a truly awful television show is not sufficient to stop producers from turning it into an even worse movie.  I say "worse," even though the 1960s Lost in Space television show was uncategorically abysmal, because the movie took itself so damn seriously.  When the television show brought out space vikings or space cowboys or space hippies or a space motorcycle gang -- none of which, by the way, I'm making up -- at least they knew they were being campy.

But here, we're actually supposed to believe the intrepid crew of the Jupiter 2, having just escaped from Gary Oldman as a Dr. Smith who has turned into a giant humanoid spider (for the record, I'm not making that up, either), realizes that they don't have enough oomph to escape from the planet that's disintegrating around them, so Matt LeBlanc as Major Don West decides to use the "gravity well" of the planet to fling them free.  So he puts the Jupiter 2 into a power dive, and somehow they go all they way through the planet, miraculously dodging all of the rocks and debris, not to mention an entire mantle and core's worth of molten lava, and get squirted out of the other side like someone spitting out a grapefruit pit.

But I digress.

In any case, the writers of the script actually were referencing a real phenomenon, but one which would be unlikely to save you if you are ever in the situation of having your spaceship run out of gas while trying to escape from an exploding planet.  "This discovery dramatically changes our view on the origin of fast-moving stars," said study co-author Monica Valluri, in a press release.  "The fact that the trajectory of this massive fast-moving star originates in the disk rather that at the Galactic center indicates that the very extreme environments needed to eject fast-moving stars can arise in places other than around supermassive black holes."  (The press release also has a nice gif showing the star's path, which you should all check out.)

All of which is pretty cool, especially since there have only been around thirty of these "hyper-runaway" stars ever observed.  Given its current position, it's interesting to think about what the sky would look like to a denizen of one of its planets (yes, I know, any denizens it may have had surely wouldn't have survived a close encounter with a black hole, but just bear with me here).  I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's comment about a star in that position experiencing not a sunrise but a galaxy-rise -- from where it is, the disc and arms of the Milky Way would fill the entire night sky.

So there's some awe-inspiring research from the astronomers.  I don't see how anyone would not find this astonishing.  Maybe if you were like the Robinson family, meeting hordes of aliens every week, you'd get inured, but I can't help but think I'd still be pretty blown away even so.

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Islands of the imagination

There's a long list of what have been nicknamed "phantom islands" -- islands that have been recorded on maps, sometimes for centuries, but then when people follow the map and go out where the island supposedly is, there's nothing there.

Well, there's something there, namely a shit tonne of salt water.  In one way, it's unsurprising that misidentifications like this can happen; icebergs, pumice rafts from volcanic eruptions, and even low cloud banks in the distance can look like land, and when you couple that with the desperation to reach terra firma a lot of mariners felt after weeks at sea, it's understandable that this sometimes occurred.  What's more curious is how persistent some of these phantom islands were -- there are ones that were only conclusively proven not to exist in the last two decades.

A big part of the problem is that in the days before satellites and GPS, when you were out at sea, it was awfully hard to be certain of exactly where you were.  Latitude, as it turns out, is fairly easy; in the Northern Hemisphere, the altitude of Polaris above the horizon (which you can measure with a sextant) is equal to the latitude.  (It's a little trickier in the Southern Hemisphere -- there is no "South Star" -- but with a little adjustment, the same principle can still be used.)

Longitude, on the other hand, is a whole other can of worms.

You can figure out your longitude using the rising times of various stars, but the hitch is that requires you have an accurate timepiece that isn't thrown off by the incessant jostling and jolting on board ship.  It wasn't until the eighteenth century that such a clock was invented, and it only went into widespread use in the nineteenth -- how this happened is the topic of Dava Sobel's wonderful book Longitude -- but even with more accurate timekeeping, figuring out exactly where in the trackless oceans you were was no easy task.  This is probably what happened with the nonexistent Saxemberg Island, first sighted in 1670, which appeared on maps for almost two hundred years (and was "viewed extensively from a distance" in 1804 and again in 1816).  It's now surmised that they were actually seeing the remote Tristan da Cunha Island, and had simply miscalculated where they were.

One that is likely to have been a combination of inaccurate longitude calculation and seeing something that looked like an island but wasn't is "New South Greenland," which was "discovered" by the curious figure of Captain Benjamin Morrell, originally of New York.  To say that Morrell had a checkered career is a bit of an understatement.  He ran away to become a sailor at age seventeen, served during the War of 1812 (and was captured twice by the British), but eventually rose through the ranks to captain the Wasp, which he took down into Antarctic waters in 1823.  He had a penchant for exaggeration and occasional outright lying, but in this particular case he seems to have simply been mistaken.  He reported an extensive land which he initially thought was part of the Antarctic Peninsula, and sailed along it for five hundred kilometers -- but subsequently he found his position to be ten degrees of longitude (at that latitude, about two hundred kilometers) east of where he thought he was, in a part of the ocean that has no land masses whatsoever and by later sounding was found to be 1,500 meters deep.  So what he saw clearly wasn't part of Antarctica.  What it actually was remains a mystery -- the best guess is a long connected chunk of icebergs.

For what it's worth, Morrell's career didn't improve much thereafter.  He was involved in piracy in China and Madagascar and was lucky to escape with his life, launched a fruitless search for gold in New Guinea, and supposedly died "of a fever" in Mozambique in 1838 -- although a letter with his signature showed up in New York in 1843, leading some people to believe he faked his own death to get away from all the people he'd defrauded or otherwise pissed off.

Sometimes imaginary islands get wrapped up in mythology, and that makes it even harder to tease out what's real and what isn't.  Penglai, "thirty thousand leagues off the east coast of Shandong, China," described as one of the homes of the "Great Immortals," is pretty certainly a tall tale -- although interestingly, there's a legend both in Vietnam and Japan pinpointing an island in more or less the same place (where it's called Bồng Lai and Hōrai, respectively).  Saint Brendan's Isle, supposedly first seen in 512 C.E. by the Irish monk/explorer Saint Brendan of Clonfert, is another one around which wild tales have arisen, but it was reported so persistently that its existence was considered a fact for hundreds of years.  (Its reputation for being the home of devils and demons led a priest in the Canary Islands to perform an exorcism directed toward the entire island in 1723.)  The last alleged sighting of Saint Brendan's Isle was in 1772, but it still appeared on maps -- somewhere off the west coast of Africa -- well into the nineteenth century.

Bedarra Island, off the coast of Australia, which is actually real [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Banfield1 at English Wikipedia, Bedarra Island aerial, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Sometimes islands do exist -- temporarily.  This seems to be the case with Bermeja, discovered by Spanish explorers off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in 1539, and extensively described (along with its precise location) by other mariners in the sixteenth century.  Expeditions to find it later proved unsuccessful, although close to the reported location there is a significant seamount.  It's likely that Bermeja was the victim of a combination of erosion and tectonic shifting, and what was once dry land now isn't.

A lot of them, though, have eluded explanation except as mirages.  This is almost certainly the case with the aptly-if-unfortunately-named Fata Morgana Island (a fata morgana is a common type of mirage experienced at sea, especially in polar regions).  The explorers Johan Peter Koch and Aage Bertelsen reported it -- once again, along with an exact location, off the northeast coast of Greenland -- in 1907, and its existence was confirmed from the air by Koch's son Lauge in 1933.  Unfortunately for all three of them, there's no land there, just lots of extremely cold salt water.  The sightings were undoubtedly a combination of mirages and wishful thinking.

In any case, our precision GPS systems, satellite photography, and (I hope) less tendency to fall for fanciful tall tales has improved our ability to discern between what's real and what's not.  Although I have to say I'm kind of disappointed that Antillia isn't real.  A favorite claim amongst the Spanish and the Portuguese until the sixteenth century, at which point their own explorers came back and reported that there wasn't anything where it allegedly was but a big blob of the Atlantic Ocean, Antillia supposedly had seven cities run like some utopian paradise, where everyone lived in harmony and there was no crime or violence, and its leaders were wise, kind, and benevolent.  I don't know about you, but if that one is ever rediscovered, I'm buying a plane ticket.

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The return of Fido

Recently we've dealt with such deep topics as quantum mechanics, the origins of the universe, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, not to mention controversial (and worrying) stuff like climate change and the current political situation.  So I'm sure what you're all thinking is: "yes, Gordon, but what about pet reincarnation?"

I know the subject is on at least one person's mind, because a couple of days ago a friend and former student sent me a Facebook reel showing an advertisement from "Master Reincarnationist" E. David Scott containing a 1-900 number you can call, where for the low-low-low price of $1.95 per minute you can "answer a few simple questions" and he will tell you who your pet used to be in a previous life.  The two dogs in the advertisement apparently were once George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte, and the cat was Annie Oakley.

Which is wicked cool.  But it does leave me with a few questions:

1. What the actual fuck?
2. How do you become a "Master Reincarnationist?"  Do you have to get a Bachelors Degree in Reincarnation first, then go to graduate school?
3. He can do all of this over the phone?  I mean, he doesn't actually have to be near the pet, and sense the mystical quantum field frequency vibrations of their aura, or something?  It's pretty impressive if he can do all that remotely.
4. It's likely that the call would take at least ten minutes, so that'd cost me about twenty bucks.  I have better uses for twenty bucks, and that includes using it to start a fire in my wood stove.  (Okay, that one wasn't a question.)
5. Don't you think it's statistically unlikely that your pet was once a famous person?  Just by the law of averages, it's much more likely they were once Chinese peasants.
6. Speaking of statistics, why do you think your pet was once a person at all?  Given that they're now a pet, the contention is that it's possible to have a human reincarnate as an non-human animal, so other transmutations are probably allowed as well.  Since insects outnumber all other animals put together, wouldn't it be much more likely that Fido and Mr. Fluffums, not to mention you and I, were once bugs?  Odd that you often hear the past-life crowd saying things like, "I was once Cleopatra" and you rarely ever hear them say, "Life really was boring, when I was a bug."
7. At the risk of repeating myself, what the actual fuck?

I have to admit to wondering, however, what E. David Scott would tell me about our three dogs.  We have Guinness, who is headstrong, smart, temperamental, and a really natty dresser:

He might have been Oscar Wilde.

Then there's Rosie, who has the demeanor of an upper-crust lady and the judge-y attitude to match.  She even has her own throne:

I think Rosie was clearly Queen Victoria, who was also Not Amused.

Last, we have Jethro:

God alone knows who or what Jethro was.  In this incarnation he's basically an animated plush toy, and is very sweet but has the IQ of a peach pit.  Maybe he's a reincarnated Tribble, I dunno.

Anyhow, after watching the reel, I decided to look into the topic further, and almost immediately regretted that decision.  Pet reincarnation is a huge deal.  Apparently a lot of people, like the owner of this site, think that pets reincarnate so they can become your subsequent pets, which just considering the numbers involved seems even less likely than their having been bugs, or even people.  This individual tells us she "receives telepathic information directly from pets," and says you can ask your pet while they're still alive to be reincarnated as another of your pets in the future if you want.

Of course, she warns, the pet could say no.  Think about that the next time you sneakily buy the cheaper brand of cat food or say to your dog, "I've already given you three biscuits, you can't have any more."  Your pet might be keeping tally on all that, and when it comes time to decide where they want to reincarnate next time, they'll choose a better venue.

Then there's this site, which contradicts the first two -- it says that pets don't reincarnate as humans (or vice versa).  Once a dog, always a dog, apparently.  "We're on our own unique soul journey," she tells us.  In her opinion, going from dog or cat to human would be "taking a step backward in their soul's evolution."  Which, if I compare how my dogs act to how a great many people act, I have to admit actually makes a lot of sense.

Oh, and for only $447, you can take her "Soul Level Animal Communication" online course, and learn how to telepathically communicate with animals, too.  Tempting offer, but I'm declining that one as well, since my dogs' thoughts are easy enough to discern.  Respectively:

1. Play with me!  Play with me!  Now!
2. I disapprove of your refusal to serve me a second dinner.  And also the fact that you are sitting in my chair.
3. *gentle static noise*

So there you have it.  Maybe your pet, too, can be Born Again.  Anyhow, I have to wrap this up, because Oscar, Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, and Fluffy McTribble want their breakfast.  Can't keep them waiting, or once they've gone on to the Great Beyond they may say bad things to the other Spirit Animals and my next dog will be the reincarnation of Attila the Hun or something.

  

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Thawing the snowball

One of the frightening things about a system in equilibrium is what happens when you perturb it.

Within limits, most systems can recover from perturbation through some combination of negative feedbacks.  An example is your body temperature.  If something makes it goes up -- exercise, for example, or being outside on a hot, humid day -- you sweat, bringing your temperature back down.  If your body temperature goes down too much, you increase your rate of burning calories, and also have responses like shivering -- which brings it back up.  Those combine to keep your temperature in a narrow range (what the biologists call homeostasis).

Push it too much, though, and the whole thing falls apart.  If your temperature rises beyond about 105 F, you can experience seizures, convulsions, brain damage -- or death.  Your feedback mechanisms are simply not able to cope.

This, in a nutshell, is why climate scientists are so concerned about the effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide.  Within limits -- as with your body temperature -- an increase in carbon dioxide results in an increase in processes that remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the whole system stays in equilibrium.  There is a tipping point, however.

The problem is that no one knows where it is -- and whether we may have already passed it.

A piece of research from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, however, has suggested that this flip from stability to instability may be fast and unpredictable.  A paper authored by a team led by paleobiologist Shuhai Xiao, that was published in the journal Geology, looks at one of the main destabilization events that the Earth has ever experienced -- when the "Snowball Earth" thawed out in the late Precambrian Period, 635 million years ago.

Artist's conception of the Precambrian Snowball Earth [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Xiao and his team studied rocks from Yunnan and Guizhou, China, that are called cap carbonates.  They are made of limestone and dolomite and are deposited quickly in marine environments when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere spikes, leading to a dramatic temperature increase and a subsequent increase in absorption of carbonates into seawater (and ultimately deposition of those carbonates on the seafloor).  The cap carbonates Xiao et al. studied were dated to between 634.6 and 635.2 million years old, which means that the entire jump in both temperature and carbon dioxide content took less than 800,000 years.

So in less than a million years, the Earth went from being completely covered in ice to being subtropical.  The jump in global average temperature is estimated at 7 C -- conditions that then persisted for the next hundred million years.

Xiao et al. describe this as "the most severe paleoclimatic [event] in Earth history," and that the resulting deglaciations worldwide were "globally synchronous, rapid, and catastrophic."

Carol Dehler, a geologist at Utah State University, is unequivocal about the implications.  "I think one of the biggest messages that Snowball Earth can send humanity is that it shows the Earth’s capabilities to change in extreme ways on short and longer time scales."

What frustrates me most about today's climate change deniers is that they are entirely unwilling to admit that the changes we are seeing are happening at an unprecedented rate.  "It's all natural," they say.  "There have been climatic ups and downs throughout history."  Which is true -- as far as it goes.  But the speed with which the Earth is currently warming is faster than what the planet experienced when it flipped between an ice-covered frozen wasteland and a subtropical jungle.  It took 800,000 years to see an increase of the Earth's average temperature by 7 degrees C.

The best climate models predict that's what we'll see in two hundred years.

And that is why we're alarmed.

It's unknown what kind of effect that climate change in the Precambrian had on the existing life forms.  The fossil record just isn't that complete.  But whatever effect it had, the living creatures that were around when it happened had 800,000 years to adapt to the changing conditions.  What's certain is that an equivalent change in two centuries will cause massive extinctions.  Evolution simply doesn't happen that quickly.  Organisms that can't tolerate the temperature fluctuation will die.

We can only speculate on the effects this would have on humanity.

This is clearly the biggest threat we face, and yet the politicians still sit on their hands, claim it's not happening, that remediation would be too costly, that we can't prevent it, that short-term profits are more important than the long-term habitability of the Earth.  (Not to mention firing the people and closing the agencies that are currently trying to do something about it.)  Our descendants five hundred years from now will look upon the leaders from this century as having completely abdicated their responsibility of care for the people they represent.

Presuming we still have descendants at that point.

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Locks and guards

H. P. Lovecraft's novel The Lurker at the Threshold is, like much of his work, uneven.  At its best, it's atmospheric as hell, and has some scenes that will haunt your nightmares long after you turn the last page.  (I swear, I'll never look at a stained-glass window the same way after reading that book.)  It's the story of a man named Ambrose Dewart, who returns to rural Massachusetts after inheriting some property that had passed down in his family from a mysterious great-grandfather "whom no one in the family talked about."  Upon arrival, he reads a set of instructions that had come along with the deed, and finds a baffling warning that he should not damage a stone tower located nearby "lest he abandon his locks and guards."

It's a phrase that's peculiar and evocative, and it's stuck with me since I first read the tale when I was a teenager.  Especially since Ambrose proceeds to ignore the instructions entirely, knocks a hole in the tower so he can get inside, and unleashes chaos.

While overall it's a decent story, Dewart's actions always struck me as completely idiotic.  If you're in an unfamiliar situation, and you receive a set of ominous directives, why would you blunder in and do the exact opposite?  Especially when the implication is by doing so, you're getting rid of something that might be vital for protecting you?

I must say, though, that my sense that "no one would do something that stupid" may have to be revised, now that I've watched the last four weeks of actions by our so-called government here in the United States.

Just in the first month of Trump 2.0, he, Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the various other lunatics in charge have:

• withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization
• stripped funding from the Center for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, including ending research into cancer prevention and treatment
• proposed revoking the Affordable Care Act and making drastic cuts to Medicaid
• ended the CDC-led "Wild to Mild" flu vaccination campaign, just as flu-related hospitalizations reached a fifteen-year high of fifty thousand per week
• suggested that anyone on psychiatric medications, especially antidepressants and anxiolytics, should be taken off their medications and forced to go to mandatory "wellness camps"
• fired staff and cut funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, and National Hurricane Center
• withdrawn the United States from the Paris Accords
• fired staff and cut funding to the National Parks Service
• fired senior staff in the military, replacing them with Trump loyalists
• fired all the Department of Energy staff who oversee nuclear weapons safety

When this last one got out, there was so much public outcry that the administration reversed course and tried to rehire the fired staff, with only partial success.  It turned out that the person responsible for the cuts was Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old SpaceX intern -- one of the techbro hackers Musk now has infiltrating the Department of Justice, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS.

And not one Republican congressperson has stood up and said no to any of it.  Sure, there are some who are probably loving every minute of this, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and the spectacularly stupid Nancy Mace.  The scuttlebutt is that a lot of them are horrified, but are "scared shitless" to say anything because they're afraid of reprisals by Trump and his goons. 

The media, too, has been largely complicit, for which you can thank people like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong.  It's being played as "eliminating governmental waste and fraud," but make no mistake about it.  These cuts are not because they're examples of fraudulent spending.  You bring in auditors to find fraud, not hackers.  These decisions are being made purely for ideological reasons (when they're not just idiotic mistakes, like the firing of the nuclear weapons staff).  Epidemics and pandemics sound bad, and things like mandatory vaccinations and mask mandates don't sell well with the MAGA "don't step on muh freedoms" crowd, so no more funding the NIH and CDC.  Can't admit that anthropogenic climate change is happening, because it'll piss off Trump's BFFs in the fossil fuel industry, so destroy NOAA, the NWS, and the NHC.  The National Parks Service stands in the way of opening up the parks to mining, logging, and drilling for oil and natural gas, so they've gotta go.

And we have to make sure the military is led by Trump's christofascist cronies.  The firings went all the way up to the Chiefs of Staff, where Hegseth axed two -- Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and Joint Chairman Air Force General C. Q. Brown, Jr.  Hmm... the only woman on the Chiefs of Staff, and the only Black guy.

Wonder what the motivation was there.

See why I thought about Lovecraft's book?  Trump has had over two centuries worth of precedent basically saying, "Here's how to keep our nation and its citizens as safe as possible," and his response was, "Okay, I'm going to do exactly the opposite of all that."

Not that this was probably his conscious thought.  There's a lot of speculation about his being a Russian agent, and working to destroy the United States deliberately, and I find that dubious.  Thing is, he isn't that smart.  His thinking never goes beyond (1) this will get people to praise me, (2) this make me richer, and (3) this will keep me out of jail.  It's more a case of running roughshod through the government to pad his own bank account and keep one step ahead of the people who might try to stop him.

Yeah, if it causes chaos in the United States, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will be thrilled, but that's not why it started.  Trump is more a sticky-handed toddler loose in a museum.  He's likely to damage priceless stuff, but it's because he has the attention span of a gnat and zero impulse control, and throws hellacious tantrums when he doesn't get his way immediately.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ritchie333, Trump Baby Balloon at protest in Parliament Square, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As far as the other people in charge -- well, Musk is in it for the money, although you have to wonder why four hundred billion dollars isn't enough for anyone.  Hegseth, Vance, and Noem are loony ideologues; of all of them, they're the ones most likely to be true believers.  As far as RFK, who the hell knows?  You look into that guy's dead eyes, and it's anyone's guess what's going on behind them.

Look, I understand that government isn't perfect.  Not ours, not any country's in the history of humanity.  There are porkbarrel projects and waste and cronyism, and probably at least some outright fraud.  But you don't fix it by running around with a chainsaw (which, I shit you not, Elon Musk literally did at CPAC last week).  What this represents is a coup by a coalition of fascists and burn-it-all-to-the-ground opportunists, who are using as their public face a man who has never had any thought beyond personal self-aggrandizement.

And in four weeks, we've abandoned -- no, destroyed -- our locks and guards.  Maybe it's not too late to put the pieces back together and keep the monsters from getting loose.  I don't know.  But the Republicans now in charge of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court had damn well better figure out where their spines are and stop this.

Or in another four weeks we may not have a nation left to defend.

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Quantum pigeons

It will come as no particular shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I have a fascination for quantum physics.  Not that I can say I understand it that well; but no less than Nobel laureate and generally brilliant guy Richard Feynman said (in his lecture "The Character of Physical Law"), "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."  I have a decent, if superficial, grasp of such loopy ideas as quantum indeterminacy, superposition, entanglement, and so on.  Which is why I find the following joke absolutely hilarious:

Heisenberg and Schrödinger were out for a drive one day, and they got pulled over by a cop. The cop says to Heisenberg, who was driving, "Hey, buddy, do you know how fast you were going?"

 
Heisenberg says, "No, but I know exactly where I am."

 
The cop says, "You were doing 85 miles per hour!"

 
Heisenberg throws his hands in the air and responds, "Great!  Now I'm lost."

 
The cop scowls at him.  "All right, pal, if you're going to be a smartass, I'm going to search your car."  So he opens the trunk, and there's a dead cat inside it.  He says, in some alarm, "There's a dead cat in your trunk."

 
Schrödinger says, "Well, there is now."

Thanks, you're a great audience. I 'll be here all week.

In any case, there's a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called, "Experimental Demonstration of the Quantum Pigeonhole Paradox," by a team of physicists at China's University of Science and Technology, which was enough to make my brain explode.  Here's the gist of it, although be forewarned that if you ask me for further explanation, you're very likely to get very little besides an expression of puzzled bewilderment, similar to the one my puppy gives me when I tell him something that is beyond his capacity to understand, such as why he should stop eating the sofa.

There's something called the pigeonhole principle in number theory, that seems kind of self-evident to me but apparently is highly profound to number theorists and other people who delve into things like sets, one-to-one correspondences, and mapping.  It goes like this: if you try to put three pigeons into two pigeonholes, one of the pigeonholes must be shared by two pigeons.

See, I told you it was self-evident.  Maybe you have to be a number theorist before you find these kind of things remarkable.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Razvan Socol, Rock Pigeon (Columba livia) in Iași, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In any case, what the recent paper showed is that on the quantum level, the pigeonhole principle doesn't hold true.  In the experiment, photons take the place of pigeons, and polarization states (either horizontal or vertical) take the place of the pigeonholes.  And when you do this, you find...

... that when you compare the polarization states of the three photons, no two of them are alike.

Hey, don't yell at me.  I didn't discover this stuff, I'm just telling you about it.

"The quantum pigeonhole effect challenges our basic understanding…  So a clear experimental verification is highly needed," study co-authors Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan wrote in an e-mail.  "The quantum pigeonhole may have potential applications to find more complex and fundamental quantum effects."

It's not that I distrust them or am questioning their results (I'm hardly qualified to do so), but I feel like what they're saying makes about as much sense as saying that 2 + 2 = 5 for large values of 2.  Every time I'm within hailing distance of getting it, my brain goes, "Nope.  If the first two photons are, respectively, horizontally polarized and vertically polarized, the third has to be either horizontal or vertical."

But apparently that's not true. Emily Conover, writing for Science News,writes:

The mind-bending behavior is the result of a combination of already strange quantum effects.  The photons begin the experiment in an odd kind of limbo called a superposition, meaning they are polarized both horizontally and vertically at the same time.  When two photons’ polarizations are compared, the measurement induces ethereal links between the particles, known as quantum entanglement.  These counterintuitive properties allow the particles to do unthinkable things.

Which helps.  I guess.  Me, I'm still kind of baffled, which is okay.  I love it that science is capable of showing us wonders, things that stretch our minds, cause us to question our understanding of the universe.  How boring it would be if every new scientific discovery led us to say, "Meh.  Confirms what I already thought."

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Pacific spike alert

One thing that drives me crazy is the tendency of the woo-woos to take a perfectly legitimate, valid piece of science, and then woo all over it.

The latest example of this is one you might have heard about.  Scientists doing isotopic analysis of cored sediments from the Pacific seabed found an unusual spike of an isotope called beryllium-10.  Beryllium-10 is mainly produced by cosmic rays colliding with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere; the beryllium atoms then gradually settle, creating what should be a uniform deposition in terrestrial and marine sediment layers.  Beryllium-10 is also radioactive, decaying into boron-10, so the relative concentrations of these two atoms, along with beryllium-10's known 1.4 million year half-life, allows for a convenient way to date sediment layers.

That, of course, presupposes that the formation and deposition rate of beryllium-10 is uniform, and cores from the Pacific seafloor from around ten million years ago show that, for a short time at least, this wasn't true.  These strata, from the mid-Miocene Epoch, showed up with an anomalous spike of beryllium-10.  What caused this isn't certain; two possibilities the researchers suggested were a shift in oceanic currents near Antarctica, causing an alteration in sediment distribution rate, or a nearby supernova producing a higher-than-normal influx of cosmic rays for a time.  In any case, the spike eventually leveled off, and the rest of the core sample was unremarkable, at least in that regard.

Well, "radioactive sediments" and "cosmic rays" and "anomaly" were apparently all it took.  In the past two weeks, since the paper was published, I've seen the following:

• the beryllium-10 spike is the debris from the reactor core of an exploded alien spacecraft, so add this to the list of "evidence for Ancient Astronauts."
• time-traveling government operatives went back to the Miocene to conduct illegal tests of nuclear superweapons so they could get away with it without anyone finding out, except apparently for this wingnut.
• the Sun had a "flare-up" ten million years ago that caused this.  This same phenomenon also caused all of the Earth's major mass extinctions.  It will happen again, and why is NASA covering this up?
• it's all a smokescreen to hide radioactive contamination that's actually from the Fukushima Reactor disaster.
• something something something HAARP something weather modification wake up sheeple something something.

Okay, will all of you lunatics just hang on a moment?

First of all, let's look at the actual spike the paper discusses.

[Image from Koll et al., Nature Communications, 10 February 2025]

See that wee bump at about ten million years?  That's the anomaly.  It's peculiar, sure, and cool that the scientists are trying to find out what caused it.  But it's a slightly higher-than-expected amount of a single isotope, and that's all.  They have even proposed some nifty uses for the discovery -- detecting the spike in sediment layers elsewhere could help to pinpoint how old they are -- but it's not, honestly, all that dramatic otherwise.  It doesn't correlate with a mass extinction (so cross out the Sun-induced extinction events), there are no other anomalous isotopes that show up at the same time (eliminating the superweapons and the ancient spacecraft, unless the aliens constructed their entire ship from beryllium-10), and it dates to ten million years ago (so it has nothing to do with Fukushima).

And HAARP was decommissioned in 2014, so all y'all conspiracy theorists can just shut the hell up about it, already.

I mean, really.  Isn't the actual science cool enough for them?  Why does everything have to fold into these people's favorite weird idea?

I suppose, as I saw a friend post a while ago, "Everything's a conspiracy if you don't understand how anything works."  But in these times when everyone's got a website, and "I read it on the internet" is considered by a lot of people to be the modern equivalent of "I have a Ph.D. from Cambridge in the subject," it's maddening how quickly these ideas spread -- and how little it takes for the wacko interpretations to eclipse the actual science.

So that's our dive into the deep end for today.  Beryllium spikes and ancient astronauts.  Me, I'm gonna stick with the scientific explanations.  Better than worrying about NASA covering up that we're all about to get fried by a "solar flare-up."

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Order out of chaos

When I was an undergraduate, I sang in the University of Louisiana Choir in a production of Franz Josef Haydn's spectacular choral work The Creation.

The opening is a quiet, eerie orchestral passage called "The Representation of Chaos" -- meant to evoke the unformed "void" that made up the universe prior to the moment of creation.  Then the Archangel Raphael sings, "In the beginning, God made Heaven and Earth; and the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep."  The chorus joins in -- everything still in a ghostly pianissimo -- "In the spirit, God moved upon the face of the waters; and God said, "Let there be light.  And... there... was...

...LIGHT!"

The last word is sung in a resounding, major-chord fortissimo, with the entire orchestra joining in -- trumpets blaring, tympanis booming, the works.  

Even if you don't buy the theology, it's a moment that sends chills up the spine.  (You can hear it yourself here.)

Of course, the conventional wisdom amongst the cosmologists has been that the universe didn't begin in some kind of chaotic, dark void; quite the opposite.  The Big Bang -- or at least, the moment after it -- is usually visualized as a searingly hot, dense fireball, which expanded and cooled, leading to a steady entropy increase.  So by our current models, we're heading toward chaos, not away from it.

Well, maybe.

A recent paper by the pioneering Portuguese physicist and cosmologist João Magueijo has proposed a new model for the origins of the universe that overturns that entire scenario -- and far from being ridiculed off the stage, he's captured the attention even of hard-nosed skeptics like Sabine Hossenfelder, who did a video on her YouTube channel about his paper a few days ago that is well worth watching in its entirety.  But the gist, as far as a layperson like myself can understand it, goes like this.

It's long been a mystery why the fundamental constants of physics have the values they do, and why they actually are constant.  A handful of numbers -- the speed of light, the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, the strength of the gravitational force, the fine-structure constant, and a few others -- govern the behavior of, well, pretty much everything.  None seem to be derivable from more fundamental principles; i.e., they appear to be arbitrary.  None have ever been observed to shift, regardless how far out in space (and therefore how far back in time) you look.  And what's curious is that most of them have values that are tightly constrained, at least from our perspective.  Even a percent or two change in either direction, and you'd have situations like stars burning out way too fast to host stable planetary systems, atoms themselves falling apart, or matter not generating sufficient gravity to clump together.

So to many, the universe has appeared "fine-tuned," as if some omnipotent deity had set the dials just right at the moment of creation of the universe to favor everything we see around us (including life).  This is called the anthropic principle -- the strong version implying a master fine-tuner, the weak version being the more-or-less tautological statement that if those numbers had been any different, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.

But that doesn't get us any closer to figuring out why the fundamental constants are what they are.  Never one to shy away from the Big Questions, that's exactly what Magueijo has undertaken -- and what he's come up with is, to put it mildly, intriguing.

What he did was to start from the assumption that the fundamental constants aren't... constant.  That In The Beginning (to stick with our original Book of Genesis metaphor), the universe was indeed chaos -- the constants could have had more or less any values.  The thing is, the constants aren't all independent of each other.  Just as numbers in our mundane life can push and pull on each other -- to give a simple example, if you alter housing prices in a town, other numbers such as average salaries, rates of people moving in and moving out, tax rates, and funding for schools will shift in response -- the fundamental constants of physics affect each other.  What Magueijo did was to set some constraints on how those constants can evolve, then let the model run to see what kind of universe eventually came out.

And what he found was that after jittering around for a bit, the constants eventually found stable values and settled into an equilibrium.  In Hossenfelder's video, she uses the analogy of sand grains on a vibration plate being jostled into spots that have the highest stability (the most resistance to motion).  At that point, the pattern that emerges doesn't change again no matter how long you vibrate the plate.  What Magueijo suggests is that the current configuration of fundamental constants may not be the only stable one, but the range of what the constants could be might be far narrower than we'd thought -- and it also explains why we don't see the constants changing any more.

Why they are, in fact, constant.

Stable pattern of grains on a vibrating pentagonal Chladni plate [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matemateca (IME USP), Chladni plate 16, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Magueijo's work might be the first step toward solving one of the most vexing questions of physics -- why the universe exists with these particular laws and constants, despite there not seeming to be any underlying reason for it.  Perhaps we've been looking at the whole thing the wrong way.  The early universe really may have been without substance and void -- but instead of a voice crying "let there be light!", things simply evolved until they reached a stable configuration that then generated everything around us.

It might not be as audibly dramatic as Haydn's vision of The Creation, but it's just as much of an eye-opener.

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Kings of the jungle

When I visit New York City, one of my favorite places is, unsurprisingly, the American Museum of Natural History.  

And my favorite spot in that museum is the Hall of Mammals in the paleontology section.  I've always had a fascination for prehistoric mammals, especially those lineages that are extinct -- strange animals like the gargantuan brontotheres, the oddly rodent-like multituberculates, and the diverse South American hoofed litopterns.

Seeing all the dioramas of what these creatures may have looked like always highlights two things, which I was chatting about with a paleontologically-inclined friend a couple of days ago.  The first is that even though we know a great deal about Earth's biological history, there's a ton that we don't know and will probably never know.  Fossilization requires a very specific (and rare) set of conditions -- most organisms that die are never fossilized in the first place.  Then, those few fossils that form have to survive all of the geological processes that happen afterward, and not get eroded, melted, or crushed.  And last, a paleontologist (or interested amateur) has to find it.  So chances are, for every one species we know about, there are likely to be hundreds of others that we don't -- because the remains from those species haven't been found, or perhaps never were preserved in the first place.

Second, the natural world has often been a very, very dangerous place, with large quantities of animals with Big Nasty Pointy Teeth roaming around.  My friend and I both agreed that as fascinating as they are, neither of us would be keen on hopping into a time machine and visiting the Cretaceous-age Western Interior Seaway or the shallow sea that led to the Kem Kem Formation in what is now Morocco.  Both were chock-full of enormous BNPT-owners who would have been thrilled to turn any human-sized animal into a light snack.

Well, a recent discovery has added another place and time to the "Fascinating Spot, But Let's Not Visit, Mmmkay?" list: Oligocene-age Egypt.  It was the home of an extinct lineage of carnivorous mammals called hyaenodonts -- named after, but only distantly related to, modern hyenas -- in particular one spectacularly scary beast called Bastetodon, a complete skull of which was the subject of a paper last week in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.  

Study lead author Shorouq Al-Ashqar of Mansoura University, along with the Bastetodon skull (and a statue of the Egyptian goddess Bastet, after which the species was named) [Image credit photographer Hesham Sallam]

The skull was found in a fossil-rich stratum in the Faiyum Depression, a green oasis in central Egypt surrounded by trackless desert.  During the Oligocene, Faiyum (and the rest of northern Africa) was a lush jungle, and Bastetodon and the other hyaenodonts were apex predators, preying not only on the hippos and elephants of the time, but on primates like Aegyptopithecus -- a close cousin of our own ancestors, who evolved farther south in what is now Kenya and Tanzania.

Bastetodon was brilliantly equipped to fill its niche.  "I think of them as like really beefy wolverines or basically like pitbulls," said Matthew Borths, of Duke University, who co-authored the paper.  "They have really big heads that were just covered in muscle."

That, combined with an impressive set of BNPTs, made it a fearsome animal, but it bears mention that it wasn't the largest of the hyaenodonts.  That honor goes to Megistotherium osteothlastes -- the name is Greek for "giant bone-crushing beast" -- which is estimated to have weighed five hundred kilograms, with a sixty-centimeter-long skull.

Yeah, fascinated as I am with prehistoric mammals, I think Oligocene-age north Africa is a place I'd just as soon not visit.

Interestingly, though, not long after Bastetodon and Megistotherium reached their apogee, the entire group went into steep decline.  No one is quite sure why, but it's probably that climate change had a lot to do with it.  The region was getting hotter and drier, reducing the amount of vegetation and ultimately producing the desert we have now.  These sorts of changes percolate their way up the food chain, ultimately hitting carnivores the hardest; the last of the hyaenodonts went extinct during the Miocene Epoch.  (Even bigger changes were on the way, however -- during the Pliocene Epoch, the Straits of Gibraltar closed for a time, the Mediterranean Sea dried up almost completely, and the entire region became so hot it was uninhabitable -- then when the Straits reopened, it created a flood the likes of which is nearly impossible to imagine.)  

But for a while, when northern Africa was lush jungle, the hyaenodonts were on the top of the heap.  There was nothing that could come close to matching their strength and fierceness, until the climate and the passage of time ended their hegemony.  Just showing that no species is immortal -- and that today's powerful are tomorrow's (pre)historical footnote.

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Misremembering the truth

There are two distinct, but similar-sounding, cognitive biases that I've written about many times here at Skeptophilia because they are such tenacious barriers to rational thinking.

The first, confirmation bias, is our tendency to uncritically accept claims when they fit with our preconceived notions.  It's why a lot of conservative viewers of Fox News and liberal viewers of MSNBC sit there watching and nodding enthusiastically without ever stopping and saying, "... wait a moment."

The other, dart-thrower's bias, is more built-in.  It's our tendency to notice outliers (because of their obvious evolutionary significance as danger signals) and ignore, or at least underestimate, the ordinary as background noise.  The name comes from the thought experiment of being in a bar while there's a darts game going on across the room.  You'll tend to notice the game only when there's an unusual throw -- a bullseye, or perhaps impaling the bartender in the forehead -- and not even be aware of it otherwise.

Well, we thought dart-thrower's bias was more built into our cognitive processing system and confirmation bias more "on the surface" -- and the latter therefore more culpable, conscious, and/or controllable.  Now, it appears that confirmation bias might be just as hard-wired into our brains as dart-thrower's bias is.

I recently read a paper that shed some light on this rather troubling finding in Human Communication Research, describing a study conducted by a team led by Jason Coronel of Ohio State University.  In "Investigating the Generation and Spread of Numerical Misinformation: A Combined Eye Movement Monitoring and Social Transmission Approach," Coronel, along with Shannon Poulsen and Matthew D. Sweitzer, did a fascinating series of experiments that showed we not only tend to accept information that agrees with our previous beliefs without question, we honestly misremember information that disagrees -- and we misremember it in such a way that in our memories, it further confirms our beliefs!

The location of memories (from Memory and Intellectual Improvement Applied to Self-Education and Juvenile Instruction, by Orson Squire Fowler, 1850) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What Coronel and his team did was to present 110 volunteers with passages containing true numerical information on social issues (such as support for same-sex marriage and rates of illegal immigration).  In some cases, the passages agreed with what (according to polls) most people believe to be true, such as that the majority of Americans support same-sex marriage.  In other cases, the passages contained information that (while true) is widely thought to be untrue -- such as the fact that illegal immigration across the Mexican border has been dropping for years and in the last five years has been at its lowest rates since the mid-1990s.

Across the board, people tended to recall the information that aligned with the conventional wisdom correctly, and the information that didn't incorrectly.  Further -- and what makes this experiment even more fascinating -- is that when people read the unexpected information, data that contradicted the general opinion, eye-tracking monitors recorded that they hesitated while reading, as if they recognized that something was strange.  In the immigration passage, for example, they read that the rate of immigration had decreased from 12.8 million in 2007 to 11.7 million in 2014, and the readers' eyes bounced back and forth between the two numbers as if their brains were saying, "Wait, am I reading that right?"

So they spent longer on the passage that conflicted with what most people think -- and still tended to remember it incorrectly.  In fact, the majority of people who did remember wrong got the numbers right -- 12.8 million and 11.7 million -- showing that they'd paid attention and didn't just scoff and gloss over it when they hit something they thought was incorrect.  But when questioned afterward, they remembered the numbers backwards, as if the passage had actually supported what they'd believed prior to the experiment!

If that's not bad enough, Coronel's team then ran a second experiment, where the test subjects read the passage, then had to repeat the gist to another person, who then passed it to another, and so on.  (Remember the elementary school game of "Telephone?")  Not only did the data get flipped -- usually in the first transfer -- subsequently, the difference between the two numbers got greater and greater (thus bolstering the false, but popular, opinion even more strongly).  In the case of the immigration statistics, the gap between 2007 and 2014 not only changed direction, but by the end of the game it had widened from 1.1 million to 4.7 million.

This gives you an idea what we're up against in trying to counter disinformation campaigns.  And it also illustrates that I was wrong in one of my preconceived notions; that people falling for confirmation bias are somehow guilty of locking themselves deliberately into an echo chamber.  Apparently, both dart-thrower's bias and confirmation bias are somehow built into the way we process information.  We become so certain we're right that our brain subconsciously rejects any evidence to the contrary.

Why our brains are built this way is a matter of conjecture.  I wonder if perhaps it might be our tribal heritage at work; that conforming to the norm, and therefore remaining a member of the tribe, has a greater survival value than being the maverick who sticks to his/her guns about a true but unpopular belief.  That's pure speculation, of course.  But what it illustrates is that once again, our very brains are working against us in fighting Fake News -- which these days is positively frightening, given how many powerful individuals and groups are, in a cold and calculated fashion, disseminating false information in an attempt to mislead us, frighten us, or anger us, and so maintain their positions of power.

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