Stretching time

You know, I'm beginning to think that every time I want to write a piece about cosmology or physics, I should just write "Einstein wins again" and call it good.

One of my favorite science vloggers, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, gives a wry nod to this every time Einstein's name comes up in her videos -- which is frequently -- giving a little sigh and a shake of the head, and saying "Yeah, that guy again."

Maybe we should just stop arguing with him.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I did a post about a possible paradigm shift in cosmology that could account for the mysterious "dark energy," a property of spacetime that is causing the apparent runaway expansion of the universe.  While acknowledging that finding solid evidence for the contention is currently beyond our technical capabilities, I pointed out that it simultaneously does away with two of the most perplexing and persistent mysteries of physics -- dark energy, and the mismatch between the theoretical and experimentally-determined values of the cosmological constant.  (Calling it a "mismatch" is as ridiculous an understatement as you could get; the difference is about 120 degrees of magnitude, meaning the two values are off by a factor of 1 followed by 120 zeroes).

But this week a new study out of the University of Sydney has shown that another of Einstein's relativistic predictions about an expanding universe has been experimentally verified, so maybe -- to paraphrase Mark Twain -- rumors of the death of dark energy were great exaggerations.  A bizarre feature of the Theory of Relativity is time dilation, the fact that from the perspective of a stationary observer, the clock for a moving individual would appear to run more slowly.  This gives rise to the counterintuitive twin paradox, which I first ran into on Carl Sagan's Cosmos when I was in college.  If one of a pair of twins were to take off on a spaceship and travel for a year near the speed of light, then return to his starting point, he'd find that his twin would have aged greatly, while he only aged by a year.  To the traveler, his clocks seemed to run normally; but his stay-at-home brother would have experienced time running much faster.

As an aside -- this is the idea behind my favorite song by Queen, the poignant and heartbreaking "'39," the lyrics for which were penned by the band's lead guitarist, astrophysicist Brian May.  Give it a listen, and -- if you're like me -- have tissues handy.

In any case, the recent research looks at a weird feature of the effects of relativity on time.  The prediction is that the expansion of the universe should affect all the dimensions of spacetime -- and therefore, in the early universe, time should (from our perspective) seem to have been running more slowly.

And that's exactly what they found.  (Recall that when you're looking outward in space, you're looking backward in time.)  The trick was finding a "standard clock" -- some phenomenon whose rate is steady, predictable, and well-understood.  They used the fluctuations in emissions from quasars -- extremely distant, massive, and luminous proto-galaxies -- and found that, exactly as relativity predicts, the farther away they are (i.e. the further back in time you're looking), the more slowly these "standard clocks" are running.  The most distant ones are experiencing a flow of time that (from our perspective) is five times slower than our clocks run now.

"[E]arlier studies led people to question whether quasars are truly cosmological objects, or even if the idea of expanding space is correct," said study co-author Geraint Lewis.  "With these new data and analysis, however, we’ve been able to find the elusive tick of the quasars and they behave just as Einstein’s relativity predicts."

The bizarre thing, though, is the "from our perspective" part; just like the traveling twin, anyone back then would have thought their clocks were running just fine.  It's only when you compare different reference frames that things start getting odd.  So it's not that "our clocks are right and theirs were slow;" both of us, from our own vantage points, think time is running as usual.  Neither reference frame is right or wrong.  The passage of time is relative to your velocity with respect to another frame.

Apparently it's also relative to what the fabric of spacetime around you is doing.

I'm not well-versed enough in the intricacies of physics to know if this really is a death blow to the paradigm-shifting proposal of a flat, static universe I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, but at least to my layperson's understanding, it sure seems like it would be problematic.  So as far as the nature of dark energy and the problem of the cosmological constant mismatch, it's back to the drawing board.

Einstein wins again.

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

The stubbornly persistent illusion

I was driving through Ithaca, New York a while back, and came to a stoplight, and the car in front of me had a bumper sticker that said, "Time is that without which everything would happen at once."

I laughed, but I kept thinking about it, because in one sentence it highlights one of the most persistent mysteries of physics: why we perceive a flow of time.  The problem is, just about all of the laws of physics, from quantum mechanics to the General Theory of Relativity, are time-reversible; they work equally well in forward as in reverse.  Put another way, most physical processes look the same both ways.  If I were to show you a short video clip of two billiard balls colliding on a pool table, then the same clip backwards, it would be hard to tell which was which.  The Laws of Conservation of Momentum and Conservation of Energy that describe the results of the collision work in either direction.

There are exceptions, though.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the most commonly-cited one: closed systems always increase in entropy.  It's why when I put sugar in my coffee in the morning and stir it, the sugar spreads through the whole cup.  If I were to give it one more stir and all the sugar molecules were to come back together as crystals and settle out on the bottom, I'd be mighty surprised.  I might even wonder if someone had spiked the sugar bowl with something other than sugar.

In fact, that's why I had to specify a "short clip" in the billiard ball example.  There is a time-irreversible aspect of such classical physics; as the balls roll across the table, they lose momentum, because a little of the kinetic energy of their motion leaks away as thermal energy due to friction with the surface.  When they collide, a little more is lost because of the sound of the balls striking each other, the (slight) physical deformation they undergo, and so on.  So if you had a sensitive enough camera, or a long enough clip, you could tell which was the forward and which the reverse clip, because the sum of the kinetic energies of the balls in the forward clip would be (slightly) greater before the collision than after it.

But I am hard-pressed to see why that creates a sense of the flow of time.  It can't be solely from our awareness of a movement toward disorder.  When there's an energy input, you can generate a decrease in entropy; it's what happens when a single-celled zygote develops into a complex embryo, for example.  There's nothing in the Second Law that prevents increasing complexity in an open system.  But we don't see those situations as somehow running in reverse; entropy increase by itself doesn't generate anything more than expected set of behaviors of certain systems.  How that could affect how time is perceived by our brains is beyond me.

The problem of time's arrow is one of long standing.  Einstein himself recognized the seeming paradox; he wrote, "The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."  "Persistent" is an apt word; more than sixty years after the great man's death, there was an entire conference on the nature of time, which resolved very little but giving dozens of physicists the chance to defend their own views, and in the end convinced no one.

It was, you might say, a waste of time.  Whatever that means.

One of the most bizarre ideas about the nature of time is the one that comes out of the Special Theory of Relativity, and was the reason Einstein made the comment he did: the block universe.  I first ran into the block universe model not from Einstein but from physicist Brian Greene's phenomenal four-part documentary The Fabric of the Cosmos, and it goes something like this.  (I will append my usual caveat that despite my bachelor's degree in physics, I really am a layperson, and if any physicists read this and pick up any mistakes, I would very much appreciate it if they'd let me know so I can correct them.)

One of the most mind-bending things about the Special Theory is that it does away with simultaneity being a fixed, absolute, universal phenomenon.  If we observe two events happening at exactly the same time, our automatic assumption is that anyone else, anywhere in the universe, would also observe them as simultaneous.  Why would we not?  But the Special Theory shows conclusively that your perception of the order of events is dependent upon your frame of reference.  If two individuals are in different reference frames (i.e. moving at different velocities), and one sees the two events as simultaneous, the other will see them as sequential.  (The effect is tiny unless the difference in velocities is very large; that's why we don't experience this under ordinary circumstances.)

This means that past, present, and future depend on what frame of reference you're in.  Something that is in the future for me might be in the past for you.  This can be conceptualized by looking at space-time as being shaped like a loaf of bread; the long axis is time, the other two represent space.  (We've lost a dimension, but the analogy still works.)  The angle you are allowed to slice into the loaf is determined by your velocity; if you and two friends are moving at different velocities, your slice and theirs are cut at different angles.  Here's a picture of what happens -- to make it even more visualizable, all three spatial dimensions are reduced to one (the x axis) and the slice of time perceived moves along the other (the y axis).  A, B, and C are three events, and the question is -- what order do they occur in?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons User:Acdx, Relativity of Simultaneity Animation, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As you can see, it depends.  If you are taking your own velocity as zero, all three seem to be simultaneous.  But change the velocity -- the velocities are shown at the bottom of the graph -- and the situation changes.  To an observer moving at a speed of thirty percent of the speed of light relative to you, the order is C -> B -> A.  At a speed of fifty percent of the speed of light in the other direction, the order is A -> B -> C.

So the tempting question -- who is right? what order did the events really occur in? -- is meaningless.

Probably unnecessarily, I'll add that this isn't just wild speculation.  The Special Theory of Relativity has been tested hundreds, probably thousands, of times, and has passed every test to a precision of as many decimal places as you want to calculate.  (A friend of mine says that the papers written about these continuing experiments should contain only one sentence: "Yay!  Einstein wins again!")  Not only has this been confirmed in the lab, the predictions of the Special Theory have a critical real-world application -- without the equations that lead directly to the block universe and the relativity of simultaneity, our GPS systems wouldn't work.  If you want accurate GPS, you have to accept that the universe has some seriously weird features.

So the fact that we remember the past and don't remember the future is still unexplained.  From the standpoint of physics, it seems like past, present, and future are all already there, fixed, trapped in the block like flies in amber.  Our sense of time flowing, however familiar, is the real mystery.

But I'd better wrap this up, because I'm running out of time.

Whatever that means.

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

Tiny timepieces

One of the most mind-blowing revelations from science in the past two hundred years came out of a concept so simple that a sixth-grader could understand it.

You've all observed that the motion of objects is relative.  Picture a train with glass sides (only so you can see into it from outside).  The train is moving forward at 5 kilometers per hour, with an observer standing next to it watching it roll past.  At the same time, a guy is walking toward the back of the train, also at 5 kilometers per hour.

From the point-of-view of anyone on the train, the walking man is moving at 5 kilometers per hour.  But from the point-of-view of the stationary observer outside the train, it appears like the man on the train isn't moving -- he's just walking in place while the train slides out from under him.  This is what is meant by relative motion; the motion of an object is relative to the frame of reference you're in.  We don't observe the motion of the Earth because we're moving with it.  It, and us, appear to be motionless.  In the frame of reference of an astronaut poised above the plane of the Solar System, though, it would seem as if the Earth was a spinning ball soaring in an elliptical path around the Sun, carrying us along with it at breakneck speed.

With me so far?  Because here's the simple-to-state, crazy-hard-to-understand part:

Light doesn't do that.

No matter what reference frame you're in -- whether you're moving in the same direction as a beam of light, in the opposite direction, at whatever rate of speed you choose -- light always travels at the same speed, just shy of 300,000,000 meters per second.  (Nota bene: I'm referring to the speed of light in a vacuum.  Light does slow down when it passes through a transparent substance, and this has its own interesting consequences, but doesn't enter into our discussion here.)

It took the genius of Albert Einstein to figure out what this implied.  His conclusion was that if the speed of light isn't relative to your reference frame, something else must be.  And after cranking through some seriously challenging mathematics, he figured out that it wasn't one "something else," it was three: time, mass, and length.  If you travel near the speed of light, in the frame of reference of a motionless observer your clock would appear to run more slowly, your mass would appear greater, and your length appear shorter.  (Where it starts getting even more bizarre is that if you, the one moving near light speed, were to look at the observer, you'd think it was him whose watch was running slow, who had a greater mass, and who was flattened.  Each of you would observe what seem to be opposite, contradictory measurements... and you'd both be right.)

All of this stuff I've been described is called the Special Theory of Relativity.  But Einstein evidently decided, "Okay, that is just not weird enough," because he did another little thought experiment -- this one having to do with gravity.  Picture two people, both in sealed metal boxes.  One of them is sitting on the surface of the Earth (he, of course, doesn't know that).  The other is out in interstellar space, but is being towed along by a spacecraft at an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second (the acceleration due to gravity we experience here on the Earth's surface).  The two trapped people have a communication device allowing them to talk to each other.  They know that one is sitting on a planet's surface and the other is being pulled along by a spaceship, but neither knows which is which.  Is there anything they could do, any experiment they could perform, anything that would allow them to figure out who was on a planet and who was being accelerated mechanically?

Einstein concluded that the answer was no.  Being in a gravitational field is, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same as experiencing accelerated motion.  So his conclusion was that the relativistic effects I mentioned above -- time dilation, mass increase, and shortening of an object's length -- not only happen when you move fast, but when you're in a strong gravitational field.  If you've seen the movie Interstellar, you know all about this; the characters stuck on the planet near the powerful gravitational field of a black hole were slowed down from the standpoint of the rest of us.  They were there only a year by their own clocks, but to everyone back home on Earth, decades had passed.

Maybe you're thinking, "But isn't the Earth's gravitational field pretty strong?  Shouldn't we be experiencing this?"  The answer is that we do, but the Earth's gravity simply isn't strong enough that we notice.  If you travel fast -- say on a supersonic airline -- your clock does run slow as compared to the ones down here on Earth.  It's just that the difference is so minuscule that most clocks can't measure the difference.  Even if supersonic seems fast to us, it's nearly standing still compared to light; if you're traveling at Mach 1, the speed of sound, you're still moving at only at about one ten-thousandth of a percent of the speed of light.  The same is true for the gravitational effects; time passes more slowly for someone at the bottom of a mountain than it does for someone on top.  So on any ordinary scale, there are relativistic effects, they're just tiny.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mysid, Spacetime lattice analogy, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But that's what brings the whole bizarre topic up today -- because our ability to measure those tiny, but very real, effects just took a quantum leap (*rimshot*) with the development of a technique for measuring the "clocks" experienced by a cluster of atoms only a millimeter long.  A stack of about 100,000 strontium atoms that had been cooled down to near absolute zero were tested to see what frequency of light would make their electrons jump to the next energy level -- something that has been measured to a ridiculous level of accuracy -- and it was found that the ones at the bottom of the stack (i.e. nearer to the Earth's surface) required a different frequency of light to jump than the ones at the top.  The difference was incredibly small -- about a hundredth of a quadrillionth of a percent -- but the kicker is that the discrepancy is exactly what Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicts.

So Einstein wins again.  As always.  And if you're wondering, it means your feet are aging slightly more slowly than your head, assuming you spend as much time right-side-up as you do upside-down.  Oh, and your feet are heavier and flatter than your head is, but not enough to worry about.

All of this because of pondering whether light behaved like someone walking on a train, and if someone being towed by an accelerating spaceship could tell he wasn't just in an ordinary gravitational field.  It brings home the wonderful quote by physicist Albert Szent-Györgyi (himself a Nobel Prize winner) -- "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought."

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

My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

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

Space warp

I honestly don't understand how there are people who don't find science exciting.

Yes, I know that identifies me as a science nerd.  No, I don't care.  I just can't fathom how you wouldn't find it fascinating to comprehend a little more about the way the universe works.

This comes up because of an article by Jake Parks I ran into a couple of days ago over at the site Astronomy, called, "Star is Confirmed Single and Ready to Test Einstein’s Theory."  Despite the sound of the title, this has nothing to do with a nice-looking young Hollywood actor who is ready to go out on the dating circuit.  It's about a confirmation of a corollary of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity -- the idea of gravitational redshift.

The idea here is that the presence of a massive object actually warps the fabric of space -- stretches it in rather the same fashion that a bowling ball would depress the surface of a trampoline.  This, in fact, is what gravity really is; the fact that the Earth travels in an elliptical orbit around the Sun is because the Sun's enormous mass bends space, and the Earth travels along the lines of that curvature. (Picture someone rolling a marble toward the bowling-ball-on-a-trampoline I referenced earlier for a two-dimensional analog.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Where it gets really interesting is that if you have a light-emitting object travel past something that's highly massive, not only would its path change, but it would bend the light being emitted.  Because the space itself is stretched by the presence of the more massive object, the light would be stretched out -- red-shifted -- as it tries to "climb out of the gravity well."

It's never been observed before -- but astronomers have a good chance of observing it in a few months.  A star called S0-2 is going to be making a pass in front of Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center.  As the star moves between us and the black hole, its light should be significantly redshifted -- a finding that would be a major win for Einstein's theory.

"It will be the first measurement of its kind,” said Tuan Do, deputy director of the Galactic Center Group, who co-authored the study.  "Gravity is the least well-tested of the forces of nature.  Einstein’s theory has passed all other tests with flying colors so far, so if there are deviations measured, it would certainly raise lots of questions about the nature of gravity!"

It was recently proven that S0-2 is not a binary (double) star system -- an important bit of information, as if it had been, it would have significantly complicated the possibility of observing the predicted redshift.

"We have been waiting 16 years for this," said Devin Chu, study co-author and graduate student of astronomy at UCLA.  "We are anxious to see how the star will behave under the black hole’s violent pull.  Will S0-2 follow Einstein’s theory?  Or will the star defy our current laws of physics?  We will soon find out!"

Can't you just hear the excitement in his voice?

I can already hear the naysayers as well, though -- how much money is being put into this research?  What useful outcome will it generate?  I don't know the answer to the first question, and I don't much care; but the answer to the second is, "we don't know yet -- and that's the point."

There are hundreds of discoveries that were made by scientists doing basic research -- what might appear to the layperson as simple messing around with something that interested them.  Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Henri Becquerel was investigating the effects of phosphorescent minerals on photographic plates in his lab, and used a rock to weight down some plates wrapped in black paper.  When he developed the plates, they had a smudge in the middle, as if they'd been exposed to light, which was impossible.  Turns out the rock was uranium ore.  The result was that he'd just discovered radioactivity.
2. Roy J. Plunkett was experimenting with some chlorofluorocarbon gases he thought might have a use as coolants.  One of his formulations didn't work so well, but condensed out into a solid film on the inside of the container.  He examined it, and found that it had a very low coefficient of friction, and that water and other substances seemed not to adhere to it.  He named it "Teflon."
3. George Beadle and Edward Tatum were studying something few of us would find interesting -- metabolic pathways in a mold species called Neurospora.  They found that there were varieties of the mold that seemed to be unable to metabolize certain nutrients, a finding that was mystifying until they proposed that these varieties were missing a key enzyme.  They made the guess that those enzymes were missing because there was a defect in a specific gene -- and that's how a study of mold led to the "One Gene, One Protein" model of gene expression.
4. Harry Coover was trying to find a new material to use in making the lenses in plastic gun sights.  He was working with a group of chemicals called cyanoacrylates, but found that they were too sticky to be useful in lens making.  One of them, though, struck him as being useful for something else.  He sold the patent to Kodak.  They named it "SuperGlue."
5. In the early 1990s, some researchers at Pfizer were working with a compound called UK92480, which showed promise for opening up blood vessels in patients with angina pectoris.  It worked okay, but the researchers' ears perked up when male test subjects noted an unusual side effect of taking the compound.  They patented it under the trade name "Viagra," which has brought great happiness, lo unto this very day.

And so on and so forth.  My point is, we need to be doing basic research.  No, the gravitational redshift experiment might not ever amount to anything practical.  But then again, it might.  The point is, we don't know, and if we limit research to things we already expect are going to be useful, it's going to hobble science -- and rob us of the next generation of serendipitous discoveries.

Besides, there's a value simply in knowing.  We are at a point in our civilization where we have the technology and insight to unravel the deep secrets of the universe, and it's worthwhile doing that for its own sake.  The inspiration and joy we get from understanding one more bit of the world we live in is a worthwhile end in and of itself.  As the eminent astronomer Carl Sagan put it:  "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

Weighty matters

Despite all of the daily litany of depressing and/or fury-inducing news, I'm pleased to say that the scientists are still hard at work showing us more of the internal workings of the universe, giving us better insights into the nature of the cosmos even as most of the rest of us focus on the minuscule doings of one species on a tiny planet around a completely ordinary star in the edge of a spiral galaxy that is one amongst billions.

Not to denigrate my fellow humans, of course.  I rather like being human, and I'm awfully fond of the little floating green-and-blue sphere where I live.  But it's nice to know that while we focus on our petty concerns, we have people who are looking outward, not downward.

The discovery I'm referencing is the observation by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) of the collision of two neutron stars.  Neutron stars are the phenomenally dense cores of exploded giant stars; their matter is so compressed that, in the famous comparison, one teaspoon of neutron star-stuff would weigh as much as Mount Everest.

What is stunning about this observation isn't just the thought of what it would be like to see two such dense objects collide; in fact, the collision itself is just part of what's fascinating about this event.  Other amazing features are:

• In the moments before the collision occurred, the two stars were circling their center of mass at a rate of a thousand times per second.
• The collision not only created gravitational waves and a burst of light across the spectrum, it's thought that such events are what create a lot of the heavy elements in the periodic table.  So yes: the gold in your ring was very likely formed in a cosmic cataclysm.
• It is possible that the combined mass of the two stars exceeded the mass limit for a neutron star, and after the collision the stars immediately vanished -- became a black hole.  That point isn't settled yet.

The coolest part of all of this, however, is that the light and the gravitational waves from the collision arrived at detectors at the same moment -- showing that gravitational waves do indeed travel at the speed of light, which is one of the predictions of the General Theory of Relativity.  Put simply: Einstein wins again.  

If that doesn't put relativity into the "proven beyond a shadow of a doubt" column, I don't know what would.

The result was a flurry of papers being published, including one in Astrophysical Journal Letters that had 4,500 authors from 910 different institutions -- which surely must be some kind of record.

Daniel Holz, astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, who worked on the LIGO project, said, "I can't think of a similar situation in the field of science in my lifetime, where a single event provides so many staggering insights about our universe."

So maybe it's time to take a step back from the dreary ongoing march of political news and think a little bit more about the bigger picture.  I mean, the really big picture.  The one that encompasses the entire universe in which we live.  And now, because of a cataclysmic event 130 million light years away, one piece of which we are now able to view with greater clarity and understanding.

Faith in the facts

I keep waiting for a day to go by in which someone in the Trump administration doesn't say something completely batshit insane.

The latest person to try to reach the summit of Mount Lunacy is Dr. Mark Green, nominee for Army Secretary, who apparently got his Ph.D. from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.  Because besides such bizarre statements as "the government exists... to crush evil," particularly evil in the form of transgender people who are just looking for a quiet place to pee, Green has gone on record as saying that he not only doesn't accept evolution, he doesn't believe in...

... the Theory of Relativity.

In a speech that focused not on what he would do in his role as Army Secretary, but on The Universe According To Mark Green, he said, "The theory of relativity is a theory and some people accept it, but that requires somewhat of a degree of faith."

No.  No, no, no.  Faith is exactly what it doesn't take.  Although religious folks will probably disagree with me on this definition, faith is essentially believing in stuff for which you have no evidence; and as such, I've never really understood the distinction between "faith" and "delusion."  All that it takes to accept the Theory of Relativity is understanding the evidence that has been amassed in its favor.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And at this point, the evidence is overwhelming.  Given its staggering conclusions -- weirdness like time dilation, the speed of light being the ultimate universal speed limit, and warped space -- it is understandable that after it was published, scientists wanted to make sure that Einstein was right.  So they immediately began designing experiments to test Einstein's theoretical predictions.

Needless to say, every single one of the experiments has supported that Einstein was 100% correct.  Every time there's some sort of suspected glitch -- like six years ago, when physicists at CERN thought they had detected a faster-than-light neutrino -- it's turned out to be an experimental error or an uncontrolled variable.  At this point, media should simply have a one-click method for punching in the headline "EINSTEIN VINDICATED AGAIN" whenever this sort of thing happens.

What is funniest about all of this is that the technology Green would be overseeing, as Army Secretary, includes SatNav guidance systems that use GPS coordinates -- which have to take relativistic effects into account.  If you decide that you "don't have enough faith" to accept relativity, your navigational systems will gradually drift out of sync with the Earth (i.e., with reality), and your multi-million-dollar tanks will end up driving directly off of cliffs.

So you need exactly zero faith to accept relativity.  Or evolution, or cosmology, or plate tectonics, or radioisotope dating, or any of the other scientifically sound models that Green and his ilk tend to jettison.  All you need to do is to take the time to learn some science.  What does take faith, however, is accepting that anyone who has as little knowledge of the real world as Mark Green does has any business running an entire branch of the military.

Anyhow, there you have it: our "alternative fact" of the day.  It's almost as good as the "alternative fact" of the day before, which came straight from Dear Leader Trump, to wit: Andrew Jackson was a good guy with a "big heart" who "was really angry about what he saw happening with the Civil War."  Oh, and the Civil War could "have all been worked out," and that "people don't ask the question" about why the Civil War started.

Except, of course, for the thousands of historians who have been writing about the causes of the Civil War for decades.  And Andrew "Big Heart" Jackson was responsible for the forced deportation of fifteen thousand Native Americans from their ancestral homes, in one of the biggest forced relocations ever perpetrated, and in which a quarter of them died of disease, starvation, and exposure.

Oh, yeah, and I don't think Jackson was particularly angry about the Civil War, given that he died sixteen years before it started.

So it'd be nice if our leaders would stop saying things that turn the United States into a world-wide laughingstock.  I'm planning on going to Ecuador this summer, and I'd really like it if I don't have to tell the Ecuadorians I meet that just because I'm an American doesn't mean I'm an ignorant, raving loon.  Thank you.

Weighty matters

Yesterday, we looked at how apparently it's impossible for some people to believe that a 79-year-old man in poor health could die in his sleep without there being a sophisticated Black Ops conspiracy to take him out.  Today, we find out that gravitational waves, the recent discovery that vindicated Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, are a sophisticated hoax.

Why would scientists do this, you might ask?  Is it so they can fool us into giving them more grant money?  Is it to put them in contention for a Nobel Prize?  Is it just so they can sit in their labs, surrounded by flasks of brightly-colored liquids, rubbing their hands together and cackling in maniacal glee?

Well, sure.  Of course it's all that.  But there's more.  There's always more, where these people are concerned.

First, we have the claim that the gravitational wave hoax is a clever scheme to convince the gullible public that the Earth is a sphere.  You think I'm making this up?  Watch this video by someone who goes by the handle "Stinky Cash," and which lays the whole thing out plainly.  Or, if you'd prefer not to waste five minutes and thousands of innocent brain cells in your prefrontal cortex, just read the following excerpt:

Unless you were in a coma, or living under a rock, you have heard that scientists have detected gravitational waves, and have proven Einstein right once and for all.  Every single science outlet and news outlet has reported this bullshit throughout the day.  The propaganda machine is working overtime right now.  First you have Reuters and the Associated Press, they wouldn't stop reporting this during the last twenty-four hours, then you had the Washington Post, you got The Wall Street Journal, you got CNN, you got BBC News, you got Fox News, you got MSNBC.  MSNBC and Fox News, reporting the same propaganda!  It's because they're owned and operated by the same people, with the same agendas.  Don't get fooled by that whole conservative/liberal crap.  NBC News, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, CBS News, ABC News, Discovery News, Newsweek, Gawker, Futurism, even Neil deGrasse Tyson got in on the action today!

Yes, and that's undoubtedly because Tyson is actually an astrophysicist, and knows what he's talking about.  But do go on.

The propaganda machine was in full force today, and this was solely as a reaction to the Flat Earth Movement.  It was a reaction to all of the videos up on YouTube explaining how gravity doesn't exist.

Of course it is.  Because all of the scientists I know decide what to research by looking at YouTube videos uploaded by lunatics, and designing experiments to prove them wrong.

Gravity is a theory, an unproven theory thought up by an occultist to explain away everything that doesn't make sense about living on a spinning ball.  Why you're sticking to the bottom of it and still feel upright.  Why you don't feel the spin, and why you don't fall off this magical ball.  Gravity was invented to explain away all common sense...  Even Einstein knew this relativity thing was a bunch of bullshit.

We then see a quote with Einstein's picture, and attributed to him, saying, "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts," which apparently there's reason to believe that either was (1) Einstein being sarcastic about scientific fraudsters, or (2) something he never said in the first place.  But you know how that goes.

But Stinky Cash is far from done yet:

These people are in serious damage control mode.  Let's look at this quote from Stephen Hawking about why gravity is so important to them.  Because every lie in the scientific community -- or I should say, the pseudoscientific community -- every lie in the community has one agenda, and this is what it comes down to:  "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."  Is the agenda becoming more clear?  All of the lies coming out of the scientific community have one agenda, and that's removing god from creation.  Gravity is the false god of this false science.

Righty-o.  Let's move on, shall we?  Because if you thought that the Flat Earthers are the only ones who have a problem with gravitational waves, you are sorely mistaken.

Next, we'll turn our attention to the folks who think that the gravitational waves announcement was a false flag, to turn our attention away from... um... wait, I'm sure it will come to me.  Um.  Something. Something big:

LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves using blind injection simulation which means it is basically a hoax or false flag...  People need to understand if they cannot make it they fake it. 100 years the best research labs could not confirm the assumption so they just fake it. 

There was a massive preparation for this with Hawkins [sic] doing special lectures and hinting he is going to get a Noble [sic] Prize (you see the narrative), its [sic] all showbiz. 

Astrophysics needs to be rescued. (I have never seen so much inferences made from so little data!) 

Then, we had the scientists themselves positing that the whole thing might be the work of an evil genius.  UCLA physicist and LIGO collaborator Alain Weinstein said the following in an interview with Gizmodo: 

An evil genius is, by definition, smarter than we are.  We cannot rule out the evil genius hypothesis because we’re not smart enough. 

We thought very hard about this, and concluded that we didn’t know how to do it.  So anyone who did do it had to be smarter than us.

Can't argue with that kind of logic.  And although I'll point out that Weinstein was making a joke, the conspiracy theorists -- who are kind of notorious for not getting humor -- will immediately go, "AHA!  The scientists have let the truth slip!  We're on to them now!"

So there you have it.  The thrilling announcement about gravitational waves a couple of weeks ago is just another in a long series of scientific hoaxes, conspiracies, and general screw-ups.  I'm disappointed, honestly.  Not in the scientists, who are doing phenomenal work, and richly deserve either a Nobel or a Noble Prize, whichever they end up winning.  I'm disappointed in the conspiracy theorists, who really need to come up with some new tropes.  Because everything can't be a false flag, you know?  Eventually something has to be the truth.  Even if it's the idea that gravity is real, and is what is holding us down to the surface of the Earth right now.  It'd have to be a pretty fucking huge false flag to distract us from that.

Race, ethnicity, Einstein, and King Tut

Today we have two stories that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

First, we have an article by Jo Marchant over at Medium entitled, "Tutankhamun's Blood," wherein we hear about the work done by Yehia Gad to sequence the young pharaoh's DNA -- and how it set off a war over what race/ethnic group gets to claim him.  First, there was concern that the test would show a connection between the Egyptian king and... *cue dramatic music* the Jews:

The editor of Archaeology magazine, Mark Rose, reported in 2002 that [proposed DNA testing] was cancelled “due to concern that the results might strengthen an association between the family of Tutankhamun and the Biblical Moses.” An Egyptologist with close links to the antiquities service, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, agreed: “There was a fear it would be said that the pharaohs were Jewish.”

Specifically, if the results showed that Tutankhamun shared DNA with Jewish groups, there was concern that this could be used by Israel to argue that Egypt was part of the Promised Land.

This might seem an outlandish notion, but given the context of the Middle Eastern history, it is understandable...  For many Egyptians, the idea that their most famous kings could share some common heritage with their enemies is a hard one to cope with.

Yet the possibility that Tutankhamun could share some DNA with ancient Jewish tribes is not far-fetched, says Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist and mummy specialist at the American University in Cairo. After all, the royal family might well have shared genes with others who originated in the same part of the world. “It is quite possible that you might find Semitic strains of DNA in the pharaohs,” she says. “Christians, Jews, Muslims—they all came from a similar gene pool originally.”

Yehia Gad finally was allowed to do the DNA testing, under the direction of an Egyptian antiquities expert, the archaeologist Zahi Hawass, and the results turned out to be controversial, but for a different reason:

A Swiss genealogy company named IGENEA issued a press release based on a blurry screen-grab from the Discovery documentary. It claimed that the colored peaks on the computer screen proved that Tutankhamun belonged to an ancestral line, or haplogroup, called R1b1a2, that is rare in modern Egypt but common in western Europeans...  This immediately led to assertions by neo-Nazi groups that King Tutankhamun had been “white,” including YouTube videos with titles such as King Tutankhamun’s Aryan DNA Results, while others angrily condemned the entire claim as a racist hoax. It played, once again, into the long-running battle over the king’s racial origins. While some worried about a Jewish connection, the argument over whether the king was black or white has inflamed fanatics worldwide. Far-right groups have used blood group data to claim that the ancient Egyptians were in fact Nordic, while others have been desperate to define the pharaohs as black African. A 1970s show of Tutankhamun’s treasures triggered demonstrations arguing that his African heritage was being denied, while the blockbusting 2005 tour was hit by protests in Los Angeles, when demonstrators argued that the reconstruction of the king’s face built from CT scan data was not sufficiently “black.”

If that's not ridiculous enough, just yesterday we had a story from Haaretz about an apparently insane Iranian cleric who claims that Albert Einstein was actually a Shi'a Muslim:

The report cites a video by Ayatolla Mahadavi Kani, described as the head of the Assembly of Experts in the Islamic Republic of Iran, who says that there are documents proving the Jewish scientist embraced Shiite Islam and was an avid follower of Ja'far Al-Sadiq, an eighth-century Shi'i imam.

In the video, Kani quotes Einstein as saying that when he heard about the ascension of the prophet Mohammed, "a process which was faster than the speed of light," he realized "this is the very same relativity movement that Einstein had understood."

The ayatollah adds: "Einstein said, 'when I heard about the narratives of the prophet Mohamad and that of the Ahle-Beit [prophet's household] I realized they had understood these things way before us.'"

What I find wryly amusing about all of this he's-mine-no-he's-mine tug-of-war over famous historical figures is how it ignores the reality of what race and ethnic identification actually are.  There is some biological basis for race, which is how we can generate cladograms for ethnic groups like the one pictured below:

Note what is, for some people, the most surprising thing about this tree; two very dark-skinned individuals, one a Native Australian and the other a Bantu from Zimbabwe, are far more distantly related to each other than an Englishman is related to a guy from Japan -- even though both the Bantu and the Australian are routinely lumped together as "Black," and the Englishman and the Japanese consider themselves different races.

Professor Emeritus Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the acclaimed and much-cited population geneticist at Stanford, writes, "Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the bands of modern taxonomists…  As one goes down the scale of the taxonomic hierarchy toward the lower and lower partitions, the boundaries between clusters become even less clear…  There is great genetic variation in all populations, even in small ones.  From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus…the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection."

That's not to say that there's nothing to race at all.  Self-perception, privilege, culture, religion, and language are all strongly connected to, and influenced by, race and ethnicity.  But the genetic connection is tenuous at best, which is why I always find it funny when someone tells me that (s)he is "1/32 Native American," and then decides to adopt a Native name, wear Native-style jewelry and clothing, and so on.  By the time your ancestry has that small a proportion from any ethnic group, you are hardly Native American in any cultural sense, so doing all that sort of stuff -- and yes, I know more than one person who does -- is little more than an affectation.

But it's also not to say that I'm not proud of my roots.  My family is predominantly French and Scottish, with some Dutch, German, English, Irish, and Native American thrown in for good measure (and the latter, I'm afraid, isn't much more than 1/32 of my heritage).  Ethnically, I'm a southern Louisianian, and if you don't think that's an ethnic and cultural group, you should spend some time in Lafayette, Louisiana.  But I am, at the same time, fully aware of how fluid a concept ethnic identification is.  I've lost most of my Cajun accent in the three decades I've lived in YankeeLand, and my children -- who share about the same proportion of Cajun blood I do, since their mother was also half south-Louisiana-French by ancestry -- were raised in upstate New York and therefore aren't ethnically Cajun at all.

And all of this is why the wrangling over whether King Tut was "actually" European (or Black, or Semitic, or whatever) and whether Albert Einstein was "actually" a Muslim, is ridiculous.  We are all mixtures of genetics and culture; and each of those brings along with it physical and cultural baggage.  It's wonderful when someone embraces his or her ethnicity for the positive features (the perspective on the world, the music, the language, the food) and jettisons the negative aspects (the divisive us-vs.-them mentality, the notions of superiority and inferiority, the assumption of privilege).  An understanding of what ethnicity and race are, and are not, is a critical step in growing into a world where we value each other's shared humanity more than we worry about what labels we choose to place on ourselves.