Mystery disk

I'm always fascinated by a good mystery, and that's definitely the appropriate category for an artifact called the Phaistos Disk.

Found in the Minoan palace of Phaistos, on the island of Crete, in 1908, the Phaistos Disk is fifteen centimeters in diameter, made of fired ceramic clay, and (most interestingly) has an inscription on it.  Here's a photograph:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons C messier, Δίσκος της Φαιστού πλευρά Α 6380, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Disk is thought to have been made in the second millennium B.C.E., making it approximately contemporaneous with the Linear B script of Crete, which was successfully deciphered in the early 1950s by Alice Kober, Michael Ventris, and John Chadwick.  This accomplishment was the first time that anyone had cracked a script where not only was the sound/letter correspondence unknown, but it wasn't even known what language the script was representing.  (As it turned out, it was an early form of Mycenaean Greek.  Earlier guesses were that it represented Etruscan, a proto-Celtic language, or even Egyptian.  The script itself was mostly syllabic, with one symbol representing a syllable rather than a single sound, and a few ideograms thrown in just to make it more difficult.)

The problem is, the Phaistos Disk is not Linear B.  Nor is it Linear A, an earlier script which remains undeciphered despite linguists' best attempts at decoding it.  The difficulty here is that the Phaistos Disk has only 242 different symbols, which is not enough to facilitate translation.  Some seem to be ideographic, but as you undoubtedly know, many symbols that start out as pictographic end up representing phonetic units, so we can't rely on "it looks like a dog so it means 'dog'."  Once again, we're not sure what the language is, although it's a good guess that it's some form of Greek (other linguists have suggested it might be Hittite or Luwian, both languages spoken in ancient Anatolia (now Turkey), and which had their own alphabet that bears some superficial similarities to the symbols on the Disk).

This lack of information has led to wild speculation.  Various people have claimed it's a prayer, a calendar, a story, a board game, and a geometric theorem, although how the hell you'd know any of that when you can't even begin to read the inscription is beyond me.  But it only gets weirder from there.  Friedhelm Will and Axel Hausmann back in 2002 said that the Disk "comes from the ruins of Atlantis."  Others have suggested it's of extraterrestrial origin.  (Admit it, you knew the aliens were going to show up here somehow.)

Others, more prosaically, think it's a fake.  In 2008 archaeologist Jerome Eisenberg proclaimed the Disk a modern hoax, most likely perpetrated by Luigi Pernier, the Italian archaeologist who claimed to have discovered it.  Eisenberg cites a number of pieces of evidence -- differences in the firing and in how the edges were cut, as compared to other ceramic artifacts from the same period; the fact that it's incredibly well-preserved considering how old it supposedly is; and vague similarities to Linear A and Linear B characters, with various odd ones thrown in (Eisenberg says the symbols were chosen to be "credible but untranslatable" and selected "cleverly... to purposely confuse the scholarly world."

Of course, this didn't settle the controversy.  Archaeologist Pavol Hnila cites four different artifacts, all discovered after the Disk, that have similar characters to the ones on the Disk, and that there is not enough evidence to warrant accusing Pernier and his team of something as serious as a deliberate hoax.

So the mystery endures, as mysteries are wont to do.  I find this fascinating but more than a little frustrating -- to know that there is an answer, but to accept that we may never find out what it is.  That's the way it goes, though.  If you're a true skeptic, you have to be willing to remain in ignorance, indefinitely if need be, if there is insufficient evidence to decide one way or the other.  This leaves the Phaistos Disk in the category of "Wouldn't this be fun to figure out?" -- a designation that is as common in science as it is exasperating.

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Wishing wells and chicken curses

Combatting magical thinking can be an uphill battle, sometimes.

Even as a diehard skeptic, I get where it comes from.  It can sometimes be an amazingly short trip from "I wish the world worked this way" to believing the world does work that way.  Besides wishful thinking, superstitions can sometimes arise from correlation/causation errors; the classic example is going to watch your favorite sports team while wearing a particular shirt, and your team wins, so you decide the shirt's a lucky charm and proceed to wear it to subsequent games.

This reminds me of one of my college philosophy teachers, who recounted to us something that happened the previous evening.  There'd been a big thunderstorm, and the power went out, and his three-year-old daughter got scared and said, "Daddy, make the lights come back on!"

So he stood up and said, in a thunderous voice, "LET THERE BE... LIGHT."

And the power came back on.

His daughter really respected him after that.  But I bet she started getting suspicious the next time there was a power outage, and his magical ability suddenly didn't work so well any more.

Once a superstitious belief is in place, it can be remarkably hard to eradicate.  You'd think that, like my professor's daughter, once you had some experience disconfirming your belief, you'd go, "Oh, okay, I guess my lucky shirt doesn't work after all."  But we've got a number of things going against us.  Confirmation bias -- we tend to give more weight to evidence that supports what we already believed to be true.  The sunk-cost fallacy -- when we've already put a lot of energy and time into supporting a claim, we're very reluctant to admit we were wrong and it was all a waste.

Another, and weirder, reason superstitions can get cemented into place is the peculiar (but substantiated) nocebo effect.  As you might guess, the nocebo effect is kind of an anti-placebo effect; nocebo is Latin for "I will harm" (placebo means "I will please").  When somebody believes that some magical action will cause them injury, they can sometimes sustain real harm -- apparently the expectation of harm manifests as actual, measurable symptoms.  (This has sometimes been used to explain cases where "voodoo curses" have resulted in the targets becoming ill.)

The reason this comes up is because of two recent discoveries of artifacts for delivering curses in ancient Greece.  The ancient Greeks were a fascinating mix of science and superstition -- but, as I mentioned above, that seems to be part of the human condition.  When we think of them, it's usually either in the context of all the scientific inquiries and deep thought by people like Aristarchus, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Aristotle, or because they had gods and sub-gods and sub-sub-gods in charge of damn near everything.  

This latter tendency probably explains the 2,500 year old tablets that were recovered from a well in Athens, each one containing a detailed curse targeting a specific person.  The people who wrote each one didn't sign them; apparently, cursing someone and then signing it, "cordially yours, Kenokephalos" was considered a stupid move that was just asking for retribution.

The tablets, which were made of lead, were found by a team led by Jutta Stroszeck, director of the Kerameikos excavation on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens.  They were found in a well supplying a bath-house near the Dipylon -- the city gate near the classical Athenian Academy.

One of the curse tablets discovered by Stroszeck et al.

Apparently throwing the curses into the well started happening because the previous technique was to put them in the coffins of recently-deceased persons, with the intent that the dead guy's spirit would bring the curse-tablet down to the Underworld and say to Hades, "Hey, bro, get a load of this," and Hades would obligingly smite the recipient.  But around that time Athens tried to put the kibosh on people practicing the Black Arts, and made it illegal to put curses in coffins, so the would-be hexers started to throw them into wells instead.

You have to wonder if any ill effects their targets suffered upon drinking the well water came not from the curse, but from lead poisoning.

The second discovery, which was described in the journal Hesperia last week, is even more gruesome; the remains of a dead chicken that had been chopped up, its beak tied shut, then put in a clay vessel pierced with a nail.  It also contained a coin, presumably to pay whatever evil spirit found the cursed Chicken-o-Gram for carrying out the intent of the spell, which was probably to render the target unable to talk.  The paper describes a similar spell launched against one Libanos, a fourth-century C. E. Greek orator:

To his despair, Libanos had lost the ability to speak before an audience.  He could neither read nor write; he was plagued by severe headaches, bodily pain, and gout.  Libanos's condition improved upon the discovery and removal of a mutilated, dismembered chameleon, which had been hidden in his classroom -- a place where he spent much time.  The animal's head was bent between its hind legs, one of its front limbs cut off, and the other was stuffed into its mouth.

The weird mutilations and twisted pose had an obvious aim; to visit upon Libanos painful symptoms and an inability to speak.  What I suspect, though, is that the problems he had were purely natural in origin, and the discovery and removal of the curse acted as a placebo -- he thought, "Okay, now I should get better!", and did.

Why exactly the nocebo and placebo effects work isn't known; it may have to do with the production or inhibition (respectively) of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which are known to have long-term bad effects if levels stay high.  But honestly, that's just a guess.

Although I still think it's more likely than damage delivered directly by cursed chickens.

In any case, the discoveries are fascinating, and illustrate that the magical thinking we're still fighting today has a long genealogy.  Wouldn't it be nice if logical and science came as readily?

You have to wonder what the human race would have accomplished by now if we had an inborn tendency toward evidence-based thinking rather than believing in evil curses and wishing wells.

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Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

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

Pseudohistory of the world

I have wondered for some time what starts a person down the path of inventing some crazy crackpot theory.  When I was a teenager, I went through a wishful-thinking, proto-woo-woo stage myself, during which I desperately wanted stuff like Tarot cards to work.  But after I messed around a little with them, I figured out pretty quickly that (1) the card patterns were entirely random, and (2) any meaning that emerged consisted of what I, or the person for whom the reading was being done, was imposing upon them.

I.e., Tarot cards don't work.  Another cool idea smashed to smithereens upon the shores of reality.

But for some folks, apparently that fact-checking protocol never kicks in.  So what starts out as a minor glitch in thinking grows, and grows, and eventually becomes this enormous counterfactual ball of bullshit, and all the while its inventor sits there thinking (s)he has revolutionized human knowledge.

Take, for example, Anatoly Fomenko, a Russian mathematician who for some reason left his chosen field of study and decided to become a historian.  But he didn't do what most historians do, to wit, examining primary documents and reading scholarly papers on historical research; he set out to revise history.

Because evidently, we've been doing history wrong.

Passage from a 10th century manuscript of Thucydides's The Peloponnesian War, even though it apparently never happened [Image is in the Public Domain]

He invented something that he calls the New Chronology.  And when he calls it "new," he's not just whistlin' Dixie.

Here are a few features of his "New Chronology:"

• None of the dating methods we use are accurate.  I mean, none.  This includes archaeological stratigraphy, dendrochronology, proxy records, and radioisotope dating.
• Pretty much nothing that occurred before the Early Middle Ages (8th century C. E.) actually occurred.  What we think we know about those times comes from Renaissance-era forgeries, hoaxes, and lies.
• This includes the entire Roman Empire, the city-states of the Ancient Greeks, and the pharaonic period of Egypt.
• Jesus never existed.  The biblical story of Jesus is a mythologized account of the life of Byzantine emperor Andronikos I Komnenos.
• The 2nd century Almagest of Ptolemy, one of the most famous mathematical treatises of the ancient world, was written in the 17th century.
• The Tatar and Mongol invasions never happened.  Russia has pretty much always been inhabited by Russians.  And lemme tell you, the Russians are awesome.  They are pretty much the awesomest people ever.
• The Old Testament Jerusalem is the same place as Constantinople.  Why then, you might ask, do we have a city that is now called "Jerusalem" which is in a completely different location?   Stop asking questions.
• The Anglo-Saxon King Egbert of Wessex is the same person as Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great.
• Because the name "England" is a cognate to the Byzantine imperial dynasty, the "Angeli."
• Yes, I know that England and Byzantium are on opposite sides of Europe.  I believe I've already told you once to stop asking questions.

And so on and so forth. Jason Colavito, writing for Skeptic magazine, did a blistering takedown of Fomenko's theory (if I can dignify it with that name), which you would think would be unnecessary, given that a better name for "New Chronology" would be "My First Big Book of Batshit Insane Ad Hoc Assumptions."

Now, the fact that some crank has written some crazy books (seven of them, in fact) isn't an indicator of anything particularly odd, except that it still doesn't answer my original question of how someone wouldn't realize pretty quickly that what they were proposing made no sense whatsoever (with luck, before (s)he'd written seven books about it).  But what I find more surprising is that there are people who believe Fomenko.  And they include Russian chess grand master Garry Kasparov.

Yes, I realize that being a chess grand master doesn't necessarily mean that you're sane in other respects.  But Kasparov seems to be a pretty reasonable guy, all things considered -- he's a political activist and has been articulate in his criticism of Vladimir Putin, and currently is on the board of directors of the Human Rights Foundation.

And yet, somehow, he thinks that Anatoly Fomenko's "New Chronology" makes sense.

All of which hammers home the point that I don't really understand human thought processes all that well.  Because however good you are at chess or mathematics, you're not going to convince me that the ancient Greeks didn't exist.

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Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

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

Laptops of the ancients

Every once in a while, I run into a crazy claim that is so weird that it's actually kind of charming.

That was my reaction to an article sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday, about a guy who thinks that there are images from Ancient Greece that show people using laptop computers.

Those images include this marble sculpture:

And this black-on-red ware vase:

In case that isn't sufficiently convincing, we're told that the sculpture even has cable connection ports:

Once again illustrating that you can't misinterpret it if I tell you what it is ahead of time.

The whole thing is the brainchild (to use the term loosely) of YouTube contributor StillSpeakingOut, who seems pretty convinced. "I can’t help but think," StillSpeakingOut tells us, "that Erich von Däniken had been right all this time and that most of these myths of magical artifacts given by the gods to a very restricted group of individuals in ancient civilizations were high-tech devices similar to what we have today...  I am not saying that this is depicting an ancient laptop computer, but when I look at the sculpture I can’t help but think about the Oracle of Delphi, which was supposed to allow the priests to connect with the gods to retrieve advanced information and various aspects."

No, labeling the diagram with a red arrow and the text "Laptop?" is definitely not saying that the sculpture depicts a laptop, presumably by virtue of adding the question mark.

Of course, those silly old rationalist historians have been quick to squelch the whole idea of the Ancient Greeks inventing wifi.  The "laptop" depicted in both pieces, they say, is actually one of the following:

• a wax tablet, used for writing
• a jewelry box
• a mirror

But I think we can all agree that when it comes to speculating over the identity of an object in a piece of ancient art, one should definitely choose the answer that requires you to believe that the ancients had a piece of technology that they didn't, in fact, have.

Because if you think the Ancient Greeks had laptops, it kind of brings up a few questions, you know?  Like why haven't we found any traces of them in archaeological dig sites?  Where are depictions of all of the other things that you'd need to make a laptop go, like modems, routers, cables, and a mechanism for producing electricity?

And most damning of all, if the Greeks had computers, why is there no mention in their literature of people spending their free time sending each other comical pictures of cats and poorly-spelled memes suggesting that people of the opposite political party are brainless, spineless, heartless, soulless, and depraved?

When you think about it, all you have in both pieces of art are objects made of two flat things hinged together, and it's not like laptops are the only possibility for that configuration.

So I'm not buying it.  And I'm especially not impressed that as support, StillSpeakingOut brought up Erich von Däniken, who kind of sucks as an expert witness, given that he thinks that Odin, Thor, Loki et al. were aliens from another planet.  Sad to say, but the prosaic answer is almost certainly right, and the folks depicted in the art work were almost certainly not checking their Biblos-prosópou, which is as close as I can get to the Ancient Greek equivalent of "Facebook."