The loss of memory

British science historian James Burke has a way of packing a lot of meaning into a small space.

I still recall the first time I watched his amazing series The Day the Universe Changed, in which he looked at moments in history that radically altered the direction of human progress.  The final installment, titled "Worlds Without End," had several jaw-hanging-open scenes, but one that stuck with me was near the beginning, where he's recapping some of the inventions that had led to our current scientific outlook and high-tech world.  "In the fifteenth century," Burke said, "the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg took our memories away."

Being someone who has always loved the written word, it had honestly never occurred to me that writing -- and, even more, mass printing -- had a downside; the fact that we no longer have to commit information to memory, but can rely on what amount to external memory storage devices.  Burke, of course, is hardly the first person to make this observation.  Back in around 370 B.C.E., Socrates (as recorded by his disciple Plato in the dialogue Phaedrus) comments that the invention of writing is as much a curse as a blessing, a viewpoint he frames as a discussion between the Egyptian gods Thamus and Thoth, the latter of whom is credited with the creation of Egyptian hieroglyphics:

"This invention, O king," said Thoth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered."  But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Thoth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.  Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.  You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Socrates also points out that once written, a text is open to anyone's interpretation; it can't say, "Hey, wait, that's not what I meant:"

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.  And the same may be said of speeches.  You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.  And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

And certainly he has a point.  A writer can write down nonsense just as easily as universal truth, and (as I've found out with my own writing!) two people reading the same passage can come to completely different conclusions about what it means.  Even the most careful and skillful writing can't avoid all ambiguity.

I'm not clear that we're on any surer footing with the oral tradition, though.  Not only do we have the inevitable "mutations" in lineages passed down orally (a phenomenon that was used to brilliant effect by sociolinguist Jamshid Tehrani in his delightful research into the phylogeny of "Little Red Riding Hood"), there's the problem that suppression of cultures from invasion, colonization, or conquest often wipes out (or at least drastically alters) the cultural memory.

How much of our history, mythology, and knowledge has been erased simply because the last person who had the information died without ever passing it on?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Planemad, Chart of world writing systems, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau seems to side with Socrates, though.  In his Essay on the Origin of Languages, he writes:

Writing, which would seem to crystallize language, is precisely what alters it.  It changes not the words but the spirit, substituting exactitude for expressiveness.  Feelings are expressed in speaking, ideas in writing.  In writing, one is forced to use all the words according to their conventional meaning.  But in speaking, one varies the meanings by varying one’s tone of voice, determining them as one pleases.  Being less constrained to clarity, one can be more forceful.  And it is not possible for a language that is written to retain its vitality as long as one that is only spoken.

I wonder about that last bit.  Chinese has been a written language for over eight millennia, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to defend the opinion that it has "lost its vitality."  Seems to me that like most arguments of this ilk, the situation is complex.  Writing down our ideas may mean losing nuance and increasing the dependence on interpretation, but the gain in (semi-) permanence is pretty damn important.

And of course, this has bearing on our own century's old-school pearl-clutching; people decrying the shift toward electronic (rather than print) media, and in English, the fact that cursive isn't being taught in many elementary schools.  My guess is that like the loss of memory Socrates predicted, and Rousseau's concerns over the "crystallization" of language into something flat and dispassionate, the human mind -- and our ability to communicate meaningfully -- will survive this latest onslaught.

So I'm still in favor of the written word.  Obviously.  My own situation is a little like the exchange between the Chinese philosophers Lao Tsu and Zhuang Zhou.  Lao Tsu, in his book Tao Te Ching, famously commented, "Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say."  To which Zhuang Zhou wryly responded, "If 'those who say don't know and those who know don't say,' why is Lao Tsu's book so long?"

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Halting the conveyor

The Irish science historian James Burke, best known for his series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed, did a less-well-known two-part documentary in 1991 called After the Warming which -- like all of his productions -- approached the issue at hand from a novel angle.

The subject was anthropogenic climate change, something that back then was hardly the everyday topic of discussion it is now.  Burke has a bit of a theatrical bent, and in After the Warming he takes the point of view of a scientist in the year 2050, looking back to see how humanity ended up where they were by the mid-21st century.

Watching this documentary now, I have to keep reminding myself that everything he says happened after 1991 was a prediction, not a recounting of actual history.  Some of his scenarios were downright prescient, more than one of them down to the year they occurred.  The Iraq War, the catastrophic Atlantic hurricane barrage in 2005, droughts and heat waves in India, East Africa, and Australia -- and the repeated failure of the United States to believe the damn scientists and get on board with addressing the issue.  He was spot-on that the last thing the climatologists themselves would be able to figure out was the effect of climate change on the deep ocean.  He had a few misses -- the drought he predicted for the North American Midwest never happened, nor did the violent repulsion of refugees from Southeast Asia by Australia.  But his batting average still is pretty remarkable.

One feature of climate science he went into detail about, that beforehand was not something your average layperson would probably have known, was the Atlantic Conveyor -- known to scientists as AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.  The Atlantic Conveyor works more or less as follows:

The Gulf Stream, a huge surface current of warm water moving northward along the east coast of North America, evaporates as it moves, and that evaporation does two things; it cools the water, and makes it more saline.  Both have the effect of increasing its density, and just south of Iceland, it reaches the point that it becomes dense enough to sink.  This sinking mechanism is what keeps the Gulf Stream moving, drawing up more warm water from the south, and that northward transport of heat energy is why eastern Canada, western Europe, and Iceland itself are as temperate as they are.  (Consider, for example, that Oslo, Norway and Okhotsk, Siberia are at the same latitude -- 60 degrees North.)

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center]

Just about any high school kid, though, has heard about the Gulf Stream, usually in the context of the paths of sailing ships during the European Age of Exploration.  What many people don't know, however, is that if things warm up, leading to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheets, it will cause a drastic drop in salinity at the north end of the Gulf Stream, making that blob of water too fresh to sink.

The result: the entire Atlantic Conveyor stops in its tracks.  No more transport of heat energy northward, putting eastern Canada and northwestern Europe into the deep freeze.  The heat doesn't just go away, though -- that would break the First Law of Thermodynamics, which is strictly forbidden in most jurisdictions -- it would just cause the south Atlantic to heat up more, boosting temperatures in the southeastern United States and northern South America, and fueling hurricanes the likes of which we've never seen before.

Back in 1991, this was all speculative, based on geological records from the last time something like that happened, on the order of thirteen thousand years ago.  The possibility was far from common knowledge; in fact, I think After the Warming was the first place I ever heard about it.

Well, score yet another one for James Burke.

A paper this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science describes research by Johannes Lohmann and Peter Ditlevsen of the University of Copenhagen indicating the that based on current freshwater output from the melting of Arctic ice sheets, that tipping point from "saline-enough-to-sink" to "not" might be too near to do anything about.  "These tipping points have been shown previously in climate models, where meltwater is very slowly introduced into the ocean," Lohmann said, in an interview with Gizmodo.  "In reality, increases in meltwater from Greenland are accelerating and cannot be considered slow."

The authors write -- and despite the usual careful word choice for scientific accuracy's sake, you can't help picking up the urgency behind the words:

Central elements of the climate system are at risk for crossing critical thresholds (so-called tipping points) due to future greenhouse gas emissions, leading to an abrupt transition to a qualitatively different climate with potentially catastrophic consequences...  Using a global ocean model subject to freshwater forcing, we show that a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation can indeed be induced even by small-amplitude changes in the forcing, if the rate of change is fast enough.  Identifying the location of critical thresholds in climate subsystems by slowly changing system parameters has been a core focus in assessing risks of abrupt climate change...  The results show that the safe operating space of elements of the Earth system with respect to future emissions might be smaller than previously thought.

The Lohmann and Ditlevsen paper is hardly the first to sound the alarm.  Five years ago, a paper in Nature described a drop in temperature in the north Atlantic that is precisely what Burke warned about.  In that paper, written by a team led by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the authors write, "Using a multi-proxy temperature reconstruction for the AMOC index suggests that the AMOC weakness after 1975 is an unprecedented event in the past millennium (p > 0.99).  Further melting of Greenland in the coming decades could contribute to further weakening of the AMOC."

Once again, the sense of dismay is obvious despite being couched in deliberately cautious science-speak.

Even if the current administration in the United States explicitly says that addressing climate change is one of their top priorities, they're facing an uphill battle.  Baffling though it is to me, we are still engaged in fighting with people who don't even believe climate change exists, who understand science so little they're still at the "it was cold today, so climate change isn't happening" level of understanding.  (To quote Stephen Colbert, "And in other good news, I just ate dinner, so there's no such thing as world hunger.")  Besides outright stupidity (and apparent inability to read and comprehend scientific research), there's the added problem of elected officials being in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry, the money from which gives them a significant incentive for keeping the voting public ignorant about the issues.

Until we hit the tipping point Lohmann and Ditlevsen warn about.  At which point the effects will be obvious.

In other words, until it's too late.

If the Atlantic Conveyor shuts down, the results will no longer be arguable even by climate-change-denying knuckle-draggers like James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe.  The saddest part is that we were warned about this thirty years ago by a science historian in terms a layperson could easily understand, and -- in Burke's own words -- we sat on our hands.

And as with Cassandra, the character from Greek mythology who was blessed with the gift of foresight but cursed to have no one believe what she says, we'll only say, "Okay, I guess Burke and the rest were right all along" as the world's climate systems are collapsing around us.

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 Many of us were riveted to the screen last week watching the successful landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance, and it brought to mind the potential for sending a human team to investigate the Red Planet.  The obstacles to overcome are huge; the four-odd-year voyage there and back, requiring a means for producing food, and purifying air and water, that has to be damn near failsafe.

Consider what befell the unfortunate astronaut Mark Watney in the book and movie The Martian, and you'll get an idea of what the crew could face.

Physicist and writer Kate Greene was among a group of people who agreed to participate in a simulation of the experience, not of getting to Mars but of being there.  In a geodesic dome on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, Greene and her crewmates stayed for four months in isolation -- dealing with all the problems Martian visitors would run into, not only the aforementioned problems with food, water, and air, but the isolation.  (Let's just say that over that time she got to know the other people in the simulation really well.)

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, Greene recounts her experience in the simulation, and tells us what the first manned mission to Mars might really be like.  It makes for wonderful reading -- especially for people like me, who are just fine staying here in comfort on Earth, but are really curious about the experience of living on another world.

If you're an astronomy buff, or just like a great book about someone's real and extraordinary experiences, pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.  You won't regret it.

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

Spirals and ice ages

New from the One Thing Leads To Another department, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia recently sent me a link that spells out why we're headed to another ice age, which precipitated my vanishing down the rabbit hole for almost two hours.

The gist of the first website I looked at is that we're headed for an ice age despite everything we're currently doing to send us into the climate change hothouse, because the current model of the Solar System is "not only boring, but incorrect."  This follows the well-known scientific law that if you're bored by a theory, that's evidence that it's wrong.

This startling revelation came from a post on the r/Conspiracy subreddit that could be used as an advertisement about why it's critical to take high school physics.  It starts with a video on YouTube called "The Helical Model: Our Solar System is a Vortex," wherein we find out that because the Sun is traveling in a (more-or-less) circular path around the center of the galaxy, the planets aren't traveling in circles, they travel instead in a "vortex."  "The Sun is like a comet," the video tells us, "dragging planets in its wake."

Because apparently comets do that.  Who knew?

"Rotational motion" and "vortex motion" are, we are told, "completely different things."  Then we're shown all sorts of pretty pictures of spiral stuff like ammonite shells and fern fiddleheads.

But so far, what we've been shown is hardly startling, if you know any physics at all.  Of course the motion of the planets looks different if you're viewing it from a different perspective.  Physicists call this a reference frame, and they know all about them -- the idea of reference frames is what gave Einstein the idea for the Theories of Relativity.  So it's not some kind of earthshattering idea to point out that if you're traveling with the Sun, the planets move in ellipses, and if you're not -- if you're at a fixed point above the center of the Milky Way, watching the stars zoom around in circles -- the planets will travel in a spiral-ish fashion.  The motion isn't different; what has changed is your reference frame.

But that's only the beginning.  We're then shown two drawings of "energy fields," one around a human and one around... um, something.  I'm not sure what.  The first one is marked "copyrighted," so out of respect for intellectual property rights (although this may be stretching the definition of the word "intellectual"), I'll just post a link to it.  The second, though, I'll reproduce here:

The original poster on r/Conspiracy called these "Taurus fields."  And I sat there for some time, wondering, "Why Taurus?  Why not Scorpio or Aquarius, or, for that matter, Camelopardalis?"  And then it came to me: he means "torus."  As in, a donut-shaped thing.  Although I do think that "Taurus" is correct in one sense, in that this seems to me to be a lot of bull.

In any case, this sets us up for the punch line, which I present here in toto:

...we are just on the outside of the Iron Age (the shaded in cone), and entering the Bronze Age.  Being we are still in the cone, this is causing us to travel in a spiral, but the spiral is widening.  This is causing us to gain speed, like a sling. 

This gain in speed is causing our sun to produce longer solar flares.  This will cause our planet to rise in temperature, causing our polar caps to melt.  This, of course, will cause major flooding.  We've yet to see the worst, and the worst will last about a month to a month and a half.  This will flood most of the world. 

And the sun progresses to increase, the planets will pull away (think of gravity like a bungee cord), and this will then cause global cooling, which will introduce us into a new ice age. 

The ice age will take about 300 years to fully manifest, but it will last between 12,000 - 16,000 years. 

This explains all the black projects costing trillions of dollars.  This explains all the underground bunkers being built.  This explains all the camps, all the militarization of police, all the crack down on rights.  This explains why people that seem to have all the money they need seem to need more money.

Wowza.  This may be one of the most concentrated samples of bullshit I've ever seen.  We have: a total lack of understanding of basic physics, apocalyptic stuff, "global cooling," government conspiracy theories, and underground bunkers, all in the space of just five short paragraphs.

We are then directed to two websites for further information.  The first is Half Past Human, which seems to be some kind of conspiracy site (although I did see references to "swirlies in the sky" and "spacegoat farts" as I scrolled down the entries, both of which I would prefer not to investigate, rabbit hole notwithstanding).  The second is DJSadhu.com, which is a blog with lots of videos and articles about how everything we know about physics is wrong.  Oh, and chemtrails and Cliven Bundy and music and pyramids.

It's a general rule of thumb that whenever some n00b comes down the pike, without any scientific training whatsoever, and claims to have discovered a Grand Theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything, (s)he is (1) probably insane, and (2) definitely wrong.  Scientists do make mistakes; as British science historian James Burke put it, in the episode "Worlds Without End" from his amazing series The Day the Universe Changed, "The so-called voyage of discovery has, as often as not, made landfall for reasons little to do with the search for knowledge."  Science sometimes backtracks, makes missteps, pursues what ultimately turn out to be dead ends.

But scientists do understand the method by which you achieve understanding, and because of that, the overall body of science becomes better refined, and closer to grasping the actual truth, as time goes on.  The bottom line: we may not understand everything, but we have a pretty good idea of how to explain a lot of what we see.  The likelihood of anyone finding anything that completely overturns our understanding of any branch of science is slim indeed.

And that includes vortex motion, Taurus fields and "spacegoat farts."

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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!]

Spirals and ice ages

New from the One Thing Leads To Another department, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia was spurred by yesterday's post to send me a link that spells out why we're headed to another ice age.

Yesterday, you may recall, we learned that the sun is going to go out because solar panels actively suck energy from the sun, in the fashion of giant photonic vacuum cleaners.  Today, we're going to take a look at another problem, which is that we're headed for an ice age regardless, because the current model of the Solar System is "not only boring, but incorrect."

This startling revelation came from a post on the r/Conspiracy subreddit that could be used as an advertisement about why it's critical to take high school physics.  It starts with a video on YouTube called "The Helical Model: Our Solar System is a Vortex," wherein we find out that because the sun is traveling in a (more-or-less) circular path around the center of the galaxy, the planets aren't traveling in circles, they travel instead in a "vortex."  "The Sun is like a comet," the video tells us, "dragging planets in its wake."

Because, apparently, comets do that.  Who knew?

"Rotational motion" and "vortex motion" are, we are told, "completely different things."  Then we're shown all sorts of pretty pictures of spiral stuff like ammonite shells and fern fiddleheads.

But so far, what we've been shown is hardly startling, if you know any physics at all.  Of course the motion of the planets looks different if you're viewing it from a different perspective.  Physicists call this a reference frame, and they know all about them -- the idea of reference frames is what gave Einstein the idea for the Theories of Relativity.  So it's not some kind of earthshattering idea to point out that if you're traveling with the sun, the planets move in ellipses, and if you're not -- if you're at a fixed point above the center of the Milky Way, watching the stars zoom around in circles -- the planets will travel in a spiral-ish fashion.  The motion isn't different; what has changed is your reference frame.

But that's only the beginning.  We're then shown two drawings of "energy fields," one around a human and one around... um, something.  I'm not sure what.  The first one is marked "copyrighted," so out of respect for intellectual property rights (although this may be stretching the definition of the word "intellectual"), I'll just post a link to it.  The second, though, I'll reproduce here:

The original poster on r/Conspiracy called these "Taurus fields."  And I sat there for some time, wondering, "Why Taurus?  Why not Scorpio or Aquarius, or, for that matter, Camelopardalis?"  And then it came to me:  he means "torus."  As in, a donut-shaped thing.  Although I do think that "Taurus" is correct in one sense, in that this seems to me to be a lot of bull.

In any case, this sets us up for the punch line, which I present here in toto:

...we are just on the outside of the Iron Age (the shaded in cone), and entering the Bronze Age. Being we are still in the cone, this is causing us to travel in a spiral, but the spiral is widening. This is causing us to gain speed, like a sling. 

This gain in speed is causing our sun to produce longer solar flares. This will cause our planet to rise in temperature, causing our polar caps to melt. This, of course, will cause major flooding. We've yet to see the worst, and the worst will last about a month to a month and a half. This will flood most of the world. 

And the sun progresses to increase, the planets will pull away (think of gravity like a bungee cord), and this will then cause global cooling, which will introduce us into a new ice age. 

The ice age will take about 300 years to fully manifest, but it will last between 12,000 - 16,000 years. 

This explains all the black projects costing trillions of dollars. This explains all the underground bunkers being built. This explains all the camps, all the militarization of police, all the crack down on rights. This explains why people that seem to have all the money they need seem to need more money.

Wowza.  This may be one of the most concentrated samples of bullshit I've ever seen.  We have: a total lack of understanding of basic physics, apocalyptic stuff, "global cooling," government conspiracy theories, and underground bunkers, all in the space of just five short paragraphs.

We are then directed to two websites for further information.  The first is Half Past Human, which seems to be some kind of conspiracy site (although I did see references to "swirlies in the sky" and "spacegoat farts" on the top couple of entries, both of which I would prefer not to investigate).  The second is DJSadhu.com, which is a blog with lots of videos and articles about how everything we know about physics is wrong.  Oh, and chemtrails and Cliven Bundy and pyramids.

It's a general rule of thumb that whenever some n00b comes down the pike, without any scientific training whatsoever, and claims to have discovered a Grand Theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything, (s)he is (1) probably insane, and (2) definitely wrong.  Scientists do make mistakes; as British science historian James Burke put it, in the episode "Worlds Without End" from his amazing series The Day the Universe Changed, "The so-called voyage of discovery has, as often as not, made landfall for reasons little to do with the search for knowledge."  Science sometimes backtracks, makes missteps, pursues what ultimately turn out to be dead ends.

But scientists do understand the method by which you achieve understanding, and because of that, the overall body of science becomes better refined, and closer to grasping the actual truth, as time goes on.  The bottom line: we may not understand everything, but we have a pretty good idea of how to explain a lot of what we see.  The likelihood of anyone finding anything that completely overturns our understanding of any branch of science is slim indeed.