The legend of the lost sister

The difficult thing about any sort of historical research is that sometimes, the evidence you're looking for doesn't even exist.

In my own field of historical linguistics, for example, we're trying to determine what languages are related to each other (creating, as it were, a family tree for languages), figuring out word roots, identifying words borrowed from other languages, and reconstructing the ancestral language -- based only on the languages we now have access to.  There are times when there simply isn't enough information available to solve the particular puzzle you're working on.

The further back in time you go, the shakier the ground gets.  You'll see in etymological dictionaries claims like "the Proto-Indo-European word for 'settlement' or 'town' was *-weyk," but that's an inference; there aren't many Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days to verify if this is correct.  It's not just a guess, though.  It was reconstructed from the suffixes -wich and -wick you see in a lot of English place names (Norwich, Warwick), the Latin word vicus (meaning "a village in a rural area"), the Welsh gwig and Cornish guic (which mean approximately the same as the Latin does), the Greek word οἶκος (house), the Sanskrit viś and Old Church Slavonic vĭsĭ (both meaning "settlement"), and so on.  Using patterns of sound change, we can take current languages (or at least ones we have written records for) and backpedal to make an inference about what the speakers of PIE four thousand years ago might have said.

Still, it is only an inference, and the inherent unverifiability of it sometimes leaves practitioners of "hard science" scoffing and quoting Wolfgang Pauli, that such claims "aren't even wrong."  I think that's unduly harsh (but of course, given that this is basically what my master's thesis was about, it's no surprise I get a little defensive).  Even so, I think we have to be careful how hard to push a claim based on slim evidence.

That was my immediate thought when I read an article by Jay Norris, of Western Sydney University, in The Conversation.  It was about the mythology associated with my favorite naked-eye astronomical feature -- the Pleiades.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rawastrodata, The Pleiades (M45), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Norris and another astronomer, Barnaby Norris (not sure if they're related, or if it's a coincidence), have authored a paper that appeared in a book in 2022 called Advancing Cultural Astronomy which looks at a strange thing: in cultures all over the world, the Pleiades are associated with a collection of seven individuals.  They're the Seven Sisters in Greece, and also in many indigenous Australian cultures, for example.  And Norris and Norris realized two things that were very odd; first, that even on a clear night, you can only see six stars with the naked eye, not seven; and in both the Greek and Australian myth, the story involves a "lost sister" -- one of the seven who, for some reason or another, disappeared or is hidden.

So they started looking in other traditions, and found that all over the world, in cultures as unrelated as Indonesian, many Native American groups, many African cultures, the Scandinavians, and the Celts, there was the same tradition of associating the Pleiades with the number seven, and with one of the group who was lost.

They then went to the astronomical data.  They found that the stars in the Pleiades are moving relative to each other, and that a hundred thousand years ago there would have been seven stars visible to the naked eye in the cluster, but in the interim two of them moved so close together (from our perspective, at least) that they appear to be a single star unless you have a telescope.  That, they say, is the "lost sister," and is why cultures all over the world have a tradition that the group used to have seven members, but now only has six.

And this, they said, was evidence that the myth of the Pleiades is one of the oldest stories humans have told.  At least fifty thousand years old -- when the indigenous Australians migrated across a grassy valley that (when the sea level rose) became the Bay of Carpentaria -- and perhaps as much as a hundred thousand years old, when the common ancestors of all humans were still living in Africa and (presumably) shared a single cultural tradition.

It's a fascinating claim.  I have to admit that the commonalities of the myths surrounding the Pleiades in cultures all over the world are a little hard to explain otherwise.  Still, I can't say I'm a hundred percent sold.  I know from my work in reconstructive linguistics that chance similarities are weirdly common, and can lead to some seriously specious conclusions.  (Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall my rather brutal takedown a few years ago of a guy named L. M. Leteane, who used cherry-picked chance similarities between words to support his loony claim that the Pascuanese -- or Easter Islanders -- were originally from Egypt, as were the Olmecs of Central America, and both languages were descended from Bantu.)

So as far as the claim that the story of the Seven Sisters is over fifty thousand years old, count me as interested but unconvinced.  I think it's possible; it's certainly intriguing.  But to me, it's too hard to eliminate the simpler possibility, that the "loss" of one of the stars in the Pleiades was noted by many ancient cultures -- separately, and much more recently -- and became incorporated into their legends, rather than all the legends of the Pleiades and the lost sister coming from a single, very ancient ancestral story.

But it'll give you something to think about, when you see the Pleiades on the next clear night.  Whatever the origins of the myths surrounding it, it's awe-inspiring to think about our distant ancestors looking up at the same beautiful cluster of stars on a chilly, clear winter's night, and wondering what it really was -- same as we're doing today using the tools of science.

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The world of the trickster

Sometimes I run across a piece of research that is just so charming I have to tell you about it.

This particular one comes from the European University of St. Petersburg, where anthropologist and folklorist Yuri Berezkin has been working on tracking down the origins of trickster myths worldwide.  Every culture seems to have them -- characters from folk tales who are clever, wily, getting themselves into and then deftly out of trouble, often helping we humans out as they go (although we're the butt of the joke just as frequently; one of the persistent themes is that tricksters may be dashing and funny, but they can't be trusted).

I remember first coming across trickster myths when I was a kid, and had a positive obsession with mythology.  Loki, from Norse mythology, was a trickster of a more malevolent kind; the Greek god Hermes was the messenger of Olympus, but got his start as a small child stealing his brother Apollo's sacred cattle; and Coyote, a character in the stories of many Indigenous American cultures, one that was generally more benevolent to his human acquaintances.  When as a teenager, I read Richard Adams's amazing novel Watership Down -- in the characters' tales of the wise and daring El-Ahrairah (his name means "The Prince With a Thousand Enemies," translated from Lapine), I recognized the tropes right away.  El-Ahrairah is courageous, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness; out for his own gain and that of his friends, even if it means breaking the rules; not above taking every opportunity to make his foes look like idiots; fiercely loyal to the weak and powerless who call on him for help.

What Berezkin found is that trickster figures fall into three broad categories: fox/coyote/jackal, the most common, found throughout Europe, Siberia, East Asia, North Africa, much of central and eastern North America, and the Andes region down into Patagonia; hare/rabbit, found in the tales from southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (from which it jumped to North America via the slave trade; thus the Bre'r Rabbit tales, and ultimately, Bugs Bunny); and raven/crow, found in northwestern North America and across central Canada, far eastern Siberia, and a few spots in east Asia and Australia.

Coyote the Trickster (Edward Curtis, ca. 1915) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What's fascinating is that it appears that as people moved, they carried their stories with them, but upon settling in new areas, simply applied the same stories to a different set of anthropomorphized animals, based on whatever wildlife lived in the new region.  (For example, as Indigenous Americans moved from the Northwest into the Plains, their stories remained similar in theme, but they substituted Coyote for Raven.)

Berezkin writes:

The existence of two major zones of trickster tales in Eurasia and Africa, one with the fox/jackal and another with the hare/rabbit, seems to reject the differentiation of Homo sapiens populations after entering Eurasia from Africa.  During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) the Pacific borderlands of Asia and the northern/continental Eurasia were isolated from each other by sparsely populated mountainous and desert areas.  Each of the major zones populated by modern people during the LGM produced its own cultural forms.  When the LGM was over, the bearers of both cultural complexes took part in the peopling of the New World.

Humans have been storytellers for a very long time.  If Berezkin is right, trickster stories go back at least to the Last Glacial Maximum, which is on the order of twenty thousand years ago.  How much older they are than that is anyone's guess, but given how widespread they are, and the commonalities between them worldwide, they might be twice that old or more.

So the next time you tell folk tales to your children, or read mythical accounts of the derring-do, cleverness, and craftiness of figures like Prometheus and Anansi and Kokopelli and Veles, you are participating in a tradition that far antedates written language, and has been passed down through the oral tradition back into a shadowy and unknown past.  You are helping to keep alive something that unites every culture on Earth.

I think Coyote would be proud.

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The ghost children

It's often difficult to look at other cultures, especially ones in the distant past, in a dispassionate way, without making value judgments about them based on the way we do things in our own.

I've written recently about the Roman Empire, which is a culture a lot of people in the western world revere for its dedication to art, architecture, and literature.  The fact remains, however, that they were (from our standpoint) classist and sexist, had no problem with slavery, and punished people for minor offenses in a way most of us would describe as extremely brutal.  You can't laud them for their (very real) accomplishments without simultaneously opening your eyes to the many ways in which their culture, from a modern perspective, breaks all manner of standards for conventional morality and ethics.  Those practices were as much an integral part of Roman society as were the beautiful things they created.

I'm not saying we should condone what they did, but it's important to try to understand it. 

Another example, and the reason the topic comes up, is the Classical Mayan civilization, which lasted from the third to the ninth century C.E., at which point the government collapsed from what appears to be internecine warfare triggered by a massive drought and famine.  The Mayans had some traditions that are difficult for us to comprehend -- a good example is the ritual ball game.  It was played on a court ruled by the Lords of Xibalba (the underworld), and so was considered to be a liminal space somewhere between the real world and the spirit world.  The losers were often sacrificed -- but it was considered to be an honor to lose your life in a ball game, and it assured you a high place in the next plane of existence.

Strange, perhaps.  Although given our adulation of sports superstars, maybe it's not as far away from our culture as it might appear at first.

Even further from our norms is their practice of ritual child sacrifice.  A paper in Nature last week describes the discovery in Chichén Itzá of 64 skeletons, mostly young boys, who were apparently sacrificed to the gods -- most intriguingly, the DNA evidence shows that many of them were closely related to each other, and a few were pairs of identical twins.  There's a legend recorded in the Mayan sacred document Popol Vuh of a pair of hero twins fighting (and winning) against hostile deities, and it's possible that this is why the twins were chosen for sacrifice.  The children died toward the end of the Classic Period, and the conjecture, based upon inscriptions in the tunnels where the skeletons were found, is that the sacrifices were to the rain god Chaac.

Understandable considering what was unfolding climatically at the time.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Escritura maya, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Unfortunately, too little is known for sure about pre-contact Mayan practices to be all that certain about the context in which these sacrifices were made.  The Christian missionaries who came into what is now Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala did far too thorough a job of stamping out indigenous beliefs and destroying the Native people's artifacts and writings to have very much to go on.  But what's certain is that child sacrifice was widely practiced -- and not of captured children of conquered enemies, but of their own offspring, leaving behind these pathetic remains, the ghost children of a long-gone civilization.

It's hard to fathom.  "Protect your children" is one of the foundational moral values of most of the world's cultures.  But what I wonder is, what if they believed this was protecting them -- dedicating them to the gods, assuring their place in the afterlife, just as the losers of the ball game believed?  Belief can make people act oddly -- at least, oddly from our perspective.  If the climate was careening toward drought, crops failing, wells and sinkholes drying up, maybe parents felt it was an honor to offer their children up, both for the sake of improving their fate in the next world but for the good of the entire community.

I'm not saying I understand it, not really.  This sort of thing still strikes me as the darkest side of what superstition can drive people to do.  But you have to wonder how an advanced alien civilization would view our own culture.  How many of our own accepted practices would horrify and disgust them?  We routinely turn our faces away from homelessness, poverty, and hunger in our own communities.  The same people who proudly call themselves "pro-life" and follow a deity who said "Let the little children come unto me" regularly vote against programs to help our own society's poor children obtain access to food and medical care.  We shrug our shoulders at famine and war and suffering, as long as the ones affected are The Other -- a different skin color, language, ethnic identity, or religion than our own.  We marginalize people -- in some countries, imprison or execute them -- because they are LGBTQ+.

Once again, perhaps we're not so different from the cultures of the past as we'd like to believe.

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The songs of the ancestors

My grandmother was born in Wind Ridge, Pennsylvania, a little village in the Allegheny hill country in the southwestern corner of the state.  It's a beautiful region, whose first European settlers came in the eighteenth century from Scotland and Northern Ireland, with some later influxes from Germany and eastern Europe.

It's also got more than its fair share of poverty.  The soil is rocky and poor, and farming was never really going to work for more than the barest subsistence.  Until the coal boom of the 1880s, and then the discovery of natural gas there in the 1920s, a lot of people -- my grandmother's family included -- did little more than scrape by.  Despite her hardscrabble roots, and far more than their fair share of troubles, my grandma was always proud of the people she'd come from.  I remember spending many hours as a child listening to her stories of growing up there, and how proud she was of her Scottish ancestry.

One constant thread for her, and one I've inherited, was music.  She knew scores of old ballads, which I now know were carried across the Atlantic Ocean from Scotland and Northern England by my grandmother's ancestors and others like them -- "Annie Laurie," "Ye Banks and Braes," "Barbara Allen," "The Four Marys," and "Lord Randall" amongst them, all songs I still love not only for their nostalgia but because they're honestly beautiful.  A study by British historian and musicologist Cecil Sharp found that many songs and tunes that still persist both in the Appalachians and in the Scottish lowlands have actually changed less in their western versions; put another way, the Appalachian musical tradition preserves virtually unchanged the musical culture from its English and Scottish roots three centuries ago.

As fascinating as this is (and however important for my own personal family history), this is far from the most astonishing example of persistence in musical tradition despite distance, time, and hardship.  In fact, the reason this comes up is an article last week in Smithsonian Magazine that was sent to me by a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a song still sung in Sierra Leone that was preserved close to perfectly in the Gullah Geechee culture of the Sea Islands in Georgia.

Here are the bare bones of the story -- but you really should read the entire account at the link above, because it's amazing.

In 1933, a Black linguist and anthropologist named Lorenzo Dow Turner was studying the Gullah language of coastal Georgia and South Carolina.  Gullah is a creole -- a language formed by the mixture of other languages, sometimes beginning so that people of different languages could communicate with each other for purposes of trade, but eventually solidifying into a true complex language with its own syntax, morphology, and lexicon.  In the case of Gullah, its roots come from various West African languages and English, but due to the remoteness (and difficulty of travel) of the region where it's spoken, it's had a couple of hundred years to go its own way.

Yoruba musicians [Image licensed under the Creative Commons 4toscenethesis, Mirror Children, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Anyhow, Turner was doing a linguistic analysis of Gullah, and came across a native speaker who knew a song she said had been passed down to her by her grandmother and great-grandmother.  It wasn't in Gullah; only a few words were clearly from that language.  The woman herself didn't know what the lyrics meant, only that she was singing it as her great-grandmother had.

Well, a Sierra Leonean student of Turner's recognized the lyrics as being in the Mende language -- spoken by about a third of the citizens of modern Sierra Leone, and which is related to other West African languages such as Mandinka, Bambara, and Susu.  It wasn't until much, much later that Yale University anthropologist Joseph Opala came across Turner's account, and together with ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and Sierra Leonean linguist Tazieff Koroma set out to see if they could find the song's roots...

... and they found, in the remote village of Senehun Ngola, Sierra Leone, a woman who sang an almost identical version of the song.

Here are the lyrics in Mende:

A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei tambee
A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei ka
Haa so wolingoh sia kpande wilei
Haa so wolingoh, ndohoh lii, nde kee
Haa so wolingoh sia kuhama ndee yia

 And the English translation:

Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace.
Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be very much at peace.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a firing gun.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, oh elders, oh heads of the family.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a distant drumbeat.

I don't know about you, but my reaction was... wow.

That not only a song, but a song that powerful, was preserved for over two hundred years on both sides of the Atlantic is truly extraordinary.  And in the Sea Islands, without even knowing what the words meant.  Gullah and Mende have some shared vocabulary, but not nearly enough that they're mutually intelligible -- making the song's persistence in coastal Georgia even more astonishing.  And you have to wonder if that little village in Sierra Leone is the place from which the Gullah singer's ancestors were kidnapped and transported by the horrific Atlantic slave trade.

Music is one of the things that is common to the human experience, and the songs of a people are part of their cultural memory.  I'll never cease being grateful to my my grandma for instilling in me early the love of music, and for her teaching me the songs she'd grown up with.  It's a tie to my ancestors a long way back.  Our cultural roots are as much a part of our lineage as our DNA -- something British singer Rose Betts celebrates in her lovely song "Irish Eyes," which you should all put on your playlists:

It's essential that we sing -- new songs and old, the ones written yesterday and the songs of the ancestors first sung centuries ago.  The music is the important thing, whatever it is.

Whatever you choose to sing, just keep singing.

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The honey hunters

One of the things I learned from 32 years of teaching biology is that many non-human animals are way smarter than we give them credit for -- and its corollary, which is that we humans are not as far separated from the rest of the natural world as many of us would like to think.

A charming piece of research in Science this week illustrates this point brilliantly.  It's about a species of African bird, the Greater Honeyguide (its scientific name, which I swear I'm not making up, is Indicator indicator).  It's found in open woodland in most of sub-Saharan Africa, and has a very specialized diet -- it lives on bee eggs, larvae, and wax (it's one of the few known animals that can digest wax).

Illustration of a Greater Honeyguide by Nicolas Huet (1838) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Because of its diet, local residents have developed a mutualistic relationship with honeyguides, a relationship that is what gives the birds their common name.  People living in the region listen for the bird's call and then follow it to find the bees' nests it was attracted to.  The people tear open the nests and take the honey -- and the bird gets the larvae and the wax.  Many cultures that live in the honeyguides' range have developed specific calls to attract the birds when they're ready to go on a honey hunt.

The study, led by ecologist Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge, looked at the fact that honeyguides seem to learn the specific calls used by the people they live near.  Initially, it was uncertain if the people had figured out what the birds responded to, or if the reverse was true and the birds had learned what noises the people made.  So she and her team decided to test it; they used recordings of individuals from two cultures that are known to use honeyguides, the Hadza of Tanzania and the Yao of Malawi and Mozambique.  The Hadza employ a complex series of whistles to summon their helpers, while the Yao make a "brrr-huh" sound.

Both signals work just fine, but only in particular regions.  When a recording of the Hadza signal is played in Malawi, or a recording of the Yao signal is played in Tanzania, the birds don't respond.  The birds have evidently learned to recognize the specific calls of their partners in the region where they live -- and don't "speak the language" used elsewhere.

Spottiswoode's team also found there are two places where the symbiotic relationship is falling apart.  In more urban areas, where commercial sugar is widely available, there are fewer people engaged in honey hunting, so the birds have decided they're better off working as free agents.  Even more interesting, in some areas in Mozambique, the Yao discovered that if they destroy the wax and the rest of the hive, the honeyguides will stay hungry and look for other nests.  But... the birds are learning that their human partners are stiffing them, and they're becoming less likely to respond when called, so the human honey hunters are having less overall success.

So even birds can recognize when they're getting a raw deal, and put a stop to it.

The more we find out about the other life forms with which we share the planet, the more commonality we find.  Everything in the natural world exists on a continuum, from our physiology and our genetics to characteristics many thought of as solely human traits, like emotion, empathy, and intelligence.

So be careful when you throw around terms like "bird-brain" -- they're not as far off from us as you might like to believe.

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Dog tales

People who know me are well aware that I consider our two dogs, Guinness and Cleo, to be family members, not just pets.

They're kind of an odd couple.  Guinness ("Dorkus Maximus") is a big, lumbering pit bull mix, whose thick coat and curly tail comes from some husky and chow ancestry turned up by DNA analysis; Cleo ("Dorkus Minimus") is a tiny, one-eyed pure-bred Shiba Inu rescue, whose personality supports the contention that Shibas are dogs for people who really wanted a cat instead.  Despite the fact that they seem to have nothing in common, they are best friends.  When they play tug-of-war, even though Guinness outweighs Cleo by a factor of four, he lets her win sometimes, as a good big brother should.

I've dealt here before with the fascinating questions surrounding how dogs were domesticated, and how since then they've coevolved to live with (i.e. manipulate) their owners.  So it was no surprise that a recent piece of research in the journal Anthropozoologica caught my eye.  The author, Julian d'Huy of the Collège de France, has been studying the mythology that has grown up around dogs in cultures across the world, and found some fascinating commonalities -- suggesting that our mythologizing dogs has as long a history as our domesticating them.

d'Huy found that there were three themes that seemed to be universal: (1) dogs as faithful companions to heros/heroines; (2) dogs as protector spirits and guides to the afterlife; and (3) an association between dogs and the star Sirius (the "Dog Star," the brightest star in the night sky, in the constellation Canis Major -- the "Big Dog").  

The first one is hardly surprising, given the fact that humans have had dogs as companion animals for thousands of years.  The second I find a little more puzzling.  Neither of our dogs is what you might call an effective guard dog, unless you count their mortal hatred of the Evil UPS Guy.  When the Evil UPS Guy shows up, both Guinness and Cleo go berserk, running around and barking, Guinness's booming "WOOF" punctuated by Cleo's comical and high-pitched "Ruff!", until finally the Guy gets scared and intimidated and leaves.  At least that's how they interpret it.  What seems to go through their heads is "we barked and he ran away, go us!"  Then they high-five and go back to sleep, so worn out that they wouldn't even twitch if an actual burglar were to show up.  In fact, if the burglar had some chunks of cheese in his pocket, Cleo would probably show him where the valuables are hidden.

I do think it's kind of fascinating, though, despite my own dogs' failings in the Guardian of House and Hearth department, that so many cultures associate dogs with being protector spirits, many of them shapeshifters who were thought to continue their loyal defense even in the afterlife.  Part of the elaborate tattoo on my back, shoulder, chest, and arm contains a design of two Celtic-style dogs, a tribute not only to my personal furry friends but to their role as spiritual guides and protectors.

But the oddest of all is the third of d'Huy's observations -- that apparently, Sirius was associated with dogs by more cultures than just the ancient Greeks.  Given the dubious resemblance of the constellations to the things they're supposed to represent, I always figured that most of them were completely arbitrary, and our current designations were probably the result of some ancient Greek guy looking up into the night sky at a random cluster of stars, probably after drinking way too much ouzo, and saying, "Hey, y'ever notice that bunch o' stars over there?  Looks just like a dude pouring water out of a pitcher."  And that's how "Aquarius" was born.

d'Huy's contention is that the association of Sirius with dogs isn't because there's anything especially doggy about it, but that the connection goes way back -- so much so that it's been passed down in many different cultures, and maintained even as populations traveled all over the world.  I don't know how you'd prove such an assertion, but in any case, it's kind of a strange coincidence otherwise. 

So dogs have worked their way not only into our hearts and homes, but into our stories, lore, and mythology.  I guess it only makes sense that these creatures who have become so close to us would show up in the tales we tell.  Dogs have made appearances in my own books, most notably the characters of Ahab (in Signal to Noise) and Baxter (in Kill Switch), the latter of which was the cause of one of the funniest interactions I've ever had with a reader.  I was walking down the street in my home village, and a guy I barely know came up to me and said he was reading Kill Switch, and so far, enjoying it.

"I just wanted to let you know one thing, though," he said.  "I know it's a thriller.  I know people are gonna die.  But..." -- and here, he grabbed me by the arm and looked me straight in the eye with a grim expression -- "... if you kill Baxter, I will never speak to you again."

We care deeply about our pets, even fictional ones, I guess.

But now I need to wind this up, and go see why Guinness and Cleo are barking.  My guess is it's the Evil UPS Guy again.  He just never gives up, that Guy.

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The legend of the lost sister

The difficult thing about any sort of historical research is that sometimes, the evidence you're looking for doesn't even exist.

In my own field of historical linguistics, for example, we're trying to determine what languages are related to each other (creating, as it were, a family tree for languages), figuring out word roots, identifying words borrowed from other languages, and reconstructing the ancestral language -- based only on the languages we now have access to.  There are times when there simply isn't enough information available to solve the particular puzzle you're working on.

The further back in time you go, the shakier the ground gets.  You'll see in etymological dictionaries claims like "the Proto-Indo-European word for 'settlement' or 'town' was *-weyk," but that's an inference; there aren't many Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days to verify if this is correct.  It's not just a guess, though,  It was reconstructed from the suffixes -wich and -wick you see in a lot of English place names (Norwich, Warwick), the Latin word vicus (meaning "a village in a rural area"), the Welsh gwig and Cornish guic (which mean approximately the same as the Latin does), the Greek word οἶκος (house), the Sanskrit viś and Old Church Slavonic vĭsĭ (both meaning "settlement"), and so on.  Using patterns of sound change, we can take current languages (or at least ones we have written records for) and backpedal to make an inference about what the speakers of PIE four thousand years ago might have said.

Still, it is only an inference, and the inherent unverifiability of it sometimes leaves practitioners of "hard science" scoffing and quoting Wolfgang Pauli, that such claims "aren't even wrong."  I think that's unduly harsh (but of course, given that this is basically what my master's thesis was about, it's no surprise I get a little defensive).  Even so, I think we have to be careful how hard to push a claim based on slim evidence.

That was my immediate thought when I read an article by Jay Norris, of Western Sydney University, in The Conversation.  It was about the mythology associated with my favorite naked-eye astronomical feature -- the Pleiades.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rawastrodata, The Pleiades (M45), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Norris and another astronomer, Barnaby Norris (not sure if they're related, or if it's a coincidence), have authored a paper that will appear in a book next year called Advancing Cultural Astronomy which looks at a strange thing: in cultures all over the world, the Pleaides are associated with a collection of seven individuals.  They're the Seven Sisters in Greece, and also in many indigenous Australian cultures, for example.  And Norris and Norris realized two things that were very odd; first, that even on a clear night, you can only see six stars with the naked eye, not seven; and in both the Greek and Australian myth, the story involves a "lost sister" -- one of the seven who, for some reason or another, disappeared or is hidden.

So they started looking in other traditions, and found that all over the world, in cultures as unrelated as Indonesian, many Native American groups, many African cultures, the Scandinavians, and the Celts, there was the same tradition of associating the Pleiades with the number seven, and with one of the group who was lost.  

They then went to the astronomical data.  They found that the stars in the Pleiades are moving relative to each other, and that a hundred thousand years ago there would have been seven stars visible to the naked eye in the cluster, but in the interim two of them moved so close together (from our perspective, at least) that they appear to be a single star unless you have a telescope.  That, they say, is the "lost sister," and is why cultures all over the world have a tradition that the group used to have seven members, but now only has six.

And this, they said, was evidence that the myth of the Pleiades is one of the oldest stories humans have told.  At least fifty thousand years old -- when the indigenous Australians migrated across a grassy valley that (when the sea level rose) became the Bay of Carpentaria -- and perhaps as much as a hundred thousand years old, when the common ancestors of all humans were still living in Africa and (presumably) shared a single cultural tradition.

It's a fascinating claim.  I have to admit that the commonalities of the myths surrounding the Pleiades in cultures all over the world are a little hard to explain otherwise.  Still, I can't say I'm a hundred percent sold.  I know from my work in reconstructive linguistics that chance similarities are weirdly common, and can lead to some seriously specious conclusions.  (Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall my rather brutal takedown two years ago of a guy named L. M. Leteane, who used cherry-picked chance similarities between words to support his loony claim that the Pascuanese -- or Easter Islanders -- were originally from Egypt, as were the Olmecs of Central America, and both languages were descended from Bantu.)

So as far as the claim that the story of the Seven Sisters is over fifty thousand years old, count me as unconvinced.  I think it's possible; it's certainly intriguing.  But to me, it's too hard to eliminate the simpler possibility, that the "loss" of one of the stars in the Pleaides was noted by many ancient cultures -- separately, and much more recently -- and became incorporated into their legends, rather than all the legends of the Pleiades and the lost sister coming from a single, very ancient ancestral story.

But it'll give you something to think about, when you see the Pleiades on the next clear night.  Whatever the origins of the myths surrounding it, it's awe-inspiring to think about our distant ancestors looking up at the same beautiful cluster of stars on a chilly, clear winter's night, and wondering what it really was -- same as we're doing today using the tools of science.

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I've always loved a good parody, and one of the best I've ever seen was given to me decades ago as a Christmas present from a friend.  The book, Science Made Stupid, is a send-up of middle-school science texts, and is one of the most fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious things I've ever read.  I'll never forget opening the present on Christmas morning and sitting there on the floor in front of the tree, laughing until my stomach hurt.

If you want a good laugh -- and let's face it, lately most of us could use one -- get this book.  In it, you'll learn the proper spelling of Archaeopteryx, the physics of the disinclined plane, little-known constellations like O'Brien and Camelopackus, and the difference between she trues, shoe trees, and tree shrews. (And as I mentioned, it would make the perfect holiday gift for any science-nerd types in your family and friends.)

Science education may never be the same again.

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

I feel pretty

The drive to adorn our bodies is pretty close to universal.

Clothing, for example, serves the triple purpose of protecting our skin, keeping us warm, and making us look good.  Well, some of us.  I'll admit up front that I have a fashion sense that, if you were to rank it on a scale of one to ten, would have to be expressed in imaginary numbers.  But for a lot of people, clothing choice is a means of self-expression, a confident assertion that they care to look their best.  

Then there are tattoos, about which I've written here before because I'm a serious fan (if you want to see photos of my ink, take a look at the link).  Tattooing goes back a long way -- Ötzi the "Ice Man," a five-thousand-year-old body discovered preserved in glacial ice in the Alps, had no fewer than 61 tattoos.  No one knows what Ötzi's ink signifies; my guess is that just like today, the meanings of tattoos back then were probably specific to the culture, perhaps even to the individual.  

Then there's jewelry.  We know from archaeological research that jewelry fashioned from gems and precious metals also has a long history; a 24-karat gold pendant found in Bulgaria is thought to have been made in around 4,300 B.C.E., which means that our distant ancestors used metal casting for more than just weapon-making.  So between decorative clothing, tattoos, and jewelry, we've been spending inordinate amounts of time and effort (and pain, in the case of tattooing, piercing, and scarification) altering our appearances.  

Why?  No way to be sure, but my guess is that there are a variety of reasons.  Enhancing sexual attractiveness certainly played, and plays, a role.  Some adornments were clearly signs of rank, power, or social role.  Others were personal means of self-expression.  Evolutionists talk about "highly conserved features" -- adaptations that are between common and universal within a species or a clade -- and the usual explanation is that anything that is so persistent must be highly selected, and therefore important for survival and reproduction.  It's thin ice to throw learned behaviors in this same category, but I think the same argument at least has some applicability here; given that adornment is common to just about all human groups studied, the likelihood is that it serves a pretty important purpose.  What's undeniable is that we spend a lot of time and resources on it that could be used for more directly beneficial activities.

What's most interesting is that we're the only species we know of that does this.  There are a few weak instances of this sort of behavior -- for example, the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea, in which the males collect brightly-colored objects like flower petals, shells, and bits of glass or stone to create a little garden to attract mates.  But we seem to be the only animals that regularly adorn their own bodies.

How far back does this impulse go?  We got at least a tentative answer to this in a paper this week in Science Advances, which was about an archaeological discovery in Morocco of shell beads that were used for jewelry...

... 150,000 years ago.

"They were probably part of the way people expressed their identity with their clothing," said study co-author Steven Kuhn, of the University of Arizona.  "They’re the tip of the iceberg for that kind of human trait.  They show that it was present even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that humans were interested in communicating to bigger groups of people than their immediate friends and family."

A sampling of the Stone Age shell beads found in Morocco

Like with Ötzi's tattoos, we don't know what exactly the beads were intending to communicate.  Consider how culture-dependent those sorts of signals are; imagine, for example, taking someone from three thousand years ago, and trying to explain what the subtle and often complex significance of appearances and behaviors that we here in the present understand immediately.  "You think about how society works – somebody’s tailgating you in traffic, honking their horn and flashing their lights, and you think, ‘What’s your problem?'" Kuhn said.  "But if you see they’re wearing a blue uniform and a peaked cap, you realize it’s a police officer pulling you over."

Unfortunately, there's probably no way to know whether the shell beads were used purely for personal adornment, or if they had another religious or cultural significance.  "It’s one thing to know that people were capable of making them," Kuhn said, "but then the question becomes, 'OK, what stimulated them to do it?'...  We don’t know what they meant, but they’re clearly symbolic objects that were deployed in a way that other people could see them."

So think about that next time you put on a necklace or bracelet or earrings.  You are participating in a tradition that goes back at least 150,000 years.  Maybe our jewelry-making ability has improved beyond shell beads with a hole drilled through, but the impulse remains the same -- whatever its origins.

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Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

The natural pharmacy

A couple of weeks ago, we looked at the discovery and decipherment of a codex written in Nahuatl, one of the languages spoken by the Aztecs (and still spoken in central Mexico).  The study highlighted the fact that language is one of the most critical pieces of culture, embodying a unique way of describing the world.  When languages disappear, that perspective is forever lost.

It's even worse than that, according to another study, that appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a couple of months ago.  In "Language Extinction Triggers the Loss of Unique Medicinal Knowledge," authors Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Jordi Bascompte of the University of Zürich look at the role of language in preserving information about medicinal plants -- information that might well be encoded in only a single one of the estimated 6,500 languages currently spoken on Earth.

Cámara-Leret and Bascompte considered indigenous languages in three places -- New Guinea, Amazonia, and North America -- lining up those languages with databases of medicinal native plants.  Specifically, they were looking at whether the knowledge of the medicinal value of native flora crossed linguistic boundaries, and were known (and used) in the cultures of the speakers of different languages.

Some, of course, were.  The use of willow bark as an analgesic was widely known to Native Americans throughout the eastern half of North America.  The sedative nature of poppy sap was also widespread, and has a long (and checkered) history.  (It's no coincidence that these two plants produce compounds -- aspirin and morphine, respectively -- that are part of the modern pharmacopeia.)

Illustration and uses of mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) from Dioscurides's De Materia Medica (7th century C.E.) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But what about the rest of the myriad species of medicinal plants that have been catalogued?  What Cámara-Leret and Bascompte found is simultaneously fascinating and alarming.  They looked at 12,495 species of medicinal flora native to the regions they studied, and found that over 75% of them were only named and known as pharmacologically valuable in a single language.

Worse, the researchers found that there was a correlation between the languages with the rarest medicinal knowledge, and how endangered the language is.  "We found that those languages with unique knowledge are the ones at a higher risk of extinction," Bascompte said, in an interview with Mongabay.  "There is a sort of a double problem in terms of how knowledge will disappear."

That knowledge isn't purely of interest to anthropologists, as a sort of cultural curiosity.  Consider how many lives have been saved by quinine (from the Peruvian plant Cinchona officinalis, used in treating malaria), vincristine (from the Madagascar periwinkle, Catharanthus rosea, used in treating leukemia and Hodgkin's disease), digoxin (from the foxglove plant, Digitalis purpurea, used for treating heart ailments), taxol (from the Pacific yew, Taxus brevifolia, used in treating a variety of cancers), and reserpine (from the south Asian plant Rauvolfia serpentina, used in treating hypertension).  And that's just some of the better-known ones.  The whole point of the Cámara-Leret and Bascompte study is that the majority of pharmacologically-useful plants aren't known outside of a single indigenous ethnic group -- and when those languages and cultures are lost or homogenized into the dominant/majority culture, that information is lost, perhaps forever.

"There is life outside English," Bascompte said.  "These are languages that we tend to forget—the languages of poor or unknown people who do not play national roles because they are not sitting on panels, or sitting at the United Nations or places like that.  I think we have to make an effort to use that declaration by the United Nations [the UNESCO decision that 2022 to 2032 will be the "Decade of Action for Indigenous Languages"] to raise awareness about cultural diversity and about how lucky we are as a species to be part of this amazing diversity."

I can only hope that it works, at least to slow down the cultural loss.  It's probably hopeless to stop it entirely; currently, the top ten most common first languages (in order: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, and Punjabi) account for almost fifty percent of the world's population.

The remaining 6,490 languages account for the other half.  

I understand the drive to learn one of the more-spoken languages, from the standpoint of participation in the business world (if that's your goal).  You probably wouldn't get very far international commerce if you only spoke only Ainu.  But the potential for losing unique knowledge from language extinction and cultural homogenization can't be overestimated.  Nor can the purely practical aspects of this knowledge -- including the possibility of life-saving medicinal plants that might only be recognized as such by a single small group of people in a remote area of New Guinea. 

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Like graphic novels?  Like bizarre and mind-blowing ideas from subatomic physics?

Have I got a book for you.

Described as "Tintin meets Brian Cox," Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a graphic novel about the explorations of a researcher, Bob, and his dog Rick, as they investigate some of the weirdest corners of quantum physics -- and present it at a level that is accessible (and extremely entertaining) to the layperson.  The author Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist, so his expertise in the cutting edge of physics, coupled with delightful illustrations by artist Mathieu Burniat, make for delightful reading.  This one should be in every science aficionado's to-read stack!

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

A sense of place

A student of mine once said that he was sick of Stephen King's books because he was "tired of reading about people in Maine."  "He needs to find new places to write about," he said.  "All of his stories are either set in Maine or Colorado."

The reason, of course, is simple; King lives in Maine, and has spent a lot of time in Colorado.  He writes about them because those are the places he knows the best.  The same could be said about most writers, honestly.  Most of my stories are set in upstate New York, southern Louisiana, or the Pacific Northwest -- all places I've lived for at least ten years each.

It's an interesting question whether a fiction writer can write convincingly about a place (s)he's never lived, or (even worse) never been.  My general sense is "no."  I tried that once, back in my cocky, I-can-get-away-with-it days, and set part of a story in Ireland -- a country I've still (unfortunately) never visited.  I finished the story, but it never set well with me, and ultimately I destroyed the manuscript (which will no doubt frustrate my future biographer).  It just didn't ring true.

The whole episode reminds me of the anecdote about Mark Twain, whose penchant for swearing was legendary.  His wife, trying to shock him into reforming his ripe vocabulary, one day went on a five-minute rant, using every obscene word and vulgarity she'd heard her husband use.  After a moment's stunned silence, Twain commented, "My dear, you've got the words, but you just don't have the music."

That's the problem about writing about a place you don't know; you can do your research, and get the words, but you still won't have the music.  That takes spending some time there; it requires an intimacy with the setting.  It takes gaining a sense of place.  The little things are what are important here; the strange little turns of phrase characteristic of the locals, the oddities of behavior that everyone there takes for granted, the features of the landscape that show up on no map.  I think you'd have to live in a little village in upstate New York, for example, to learn that on Sundays in June there are dozens of outdoor chicken barbecues where you can buy lunch, John Deere rider lawn mowers are de rigueur even if you have a small lawn, one of the most common causes of traffic jams is slow-moving farm equipment, and only people in "big cities like Ithaca" ever lock their doors.  Speaking of Ithaca, you'd have to have a long history here -- at least twenty-five years -- to understand why older residents still call the intersection between Route 96 and Route 13 in Ithaca "the Octopus."  

"The Octopus."  Yes, it really did have eight legs -- count the roads in black -- until a major re-routing project dissected the Octopus and straightened out some of this nonsense back in the mid-90s.

 

This is why there are some bits of humor that are drop-dead funny to people who live in a place, and mildly amusing to downright baffling to people who don't.  Here's an upstate New York one: "Upstate New York has a 'four-season climate.'  The four seasons are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction."

I've also heard our climate described as "nine months of expectations followed by three months of disappointments."

The same subtlety about a sense of place is true everywhere, of course.  Very few people outside of southern Louisiana know that "howzyamommandem?" is an expected greeting (and yes, it is one word).  Given how important food is in the culture where I was raised, it's unsurprising that there are a few unique culinary items -- if you set a story in southern Louisiana and there are any scenes with people eating a meal, there better be one or more of the following represented: gumbo, boudin, po' boys, cracklins, courtbillon, Tabasco sauce, filé, and Tony's.  And here's a Cajun country regional joke, sure to get a guffaw from anyone who's lived there:

Q: How can you tell a Cajun chocolate cake recipe?

A: It starts with, "First, you make a roux."

It may be easier to get away with writing about a place you don't know well if you set the story in the past, because the distance in time automatically engenders an unfamiliarity in setting.  I've only written three stories (that have survived) set in places I haven't lived, one in Iceland (Kári the Lucky) and two in England (the novellas We All Fall Down and The Tree of Knowledge).  In my own defense, I have visited both places and studied their history fairly extensively, but still, it's no coincidence that all three stories are set in the past -- in the eleventh, fourteenth, and nineteenth centuries, respectively.  (Whether I got away with it or not I'll leave the reader to decide.)

I think that the most successful stories are the ones which envelop the reader in a setting that feels real -- in which you are experiencing first hand the sights and sounds of a place almost as if you were there.  Whether a talented writer could do that by sheer academic research, without visiting a place, I question.  For myself, I'm more comfortable writing what I know.  It feels like I'm home.

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

One of the most enduring mysteries of neuroscience is the origin of consciousness.  We are aware of a "self," but where does that awareness come from, and what does it mean?  Does it arise out of purely biological processes -- or is it an indication of the presence of a "soul" or "spirit," with all of its implications about the potential for an afterlife and the independence of the mind and body?

Neuroscientist Anil Seth has taken a crack at this question of long standing in his new book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, in which he brings a rigorous scientific approach to how we perceive the world around us, how we reconcile our internal and external worlds, and how we understand this mysterious "sense of self."  It's a fascinating look at how our brains make us who we are.

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

Personality in music

A few weeks ago I was in my office working, and while writing on my computer I was listening to the London Symphony Orchestra (under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle) performing Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

It's a profound, beautiful, disturbing work.  But it's not everyone's cup of tea.  My wife came in to ask me a question while it was playing, and  as she walked into my office she said, "What the hell are you listening to?"  [Nota bene: she said it with a smile on her face; it was curiosity, not criticism.  We've known for years that we have very, very different tastes in music, and each of us finds it more interesting than off-putting when the other is listening to, and enjoying, some oddball piece.]

But to say that Stravinsky is not on my wife's "favorite composer list" is a bit of an understatement.  To her, it sounded a bit like a random note generator, and definitely didn't have the thrilling impact it has on me.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I've been curious for years about where tastes in music come from.  My own playlist is wildly eclectic; when I put my iTunes on shuffle, I can end up with musical whiplash, going from Bach directly to Nine Inch Nails.  But why (for example) does my taste differ so completely from my wife's, when in so many other ways we're similar?  I know my own preferences are for music with strong rhythms, unexpected or odd harmonies, and an emotional edginess.  ("Music with teeth," I call it.)  That's true regardless of genre. 

But why?  What is it about my personality that makes my heart pound when I listen to Shostakovich, but leaves me yawning when I listen to Mozart?

Turns out there was a study done about this very question five years ago, led by the same person who led the research I described in yesterday's post, about the psychological effects of making music in groups -- David Greenberg, then of the University of Cambridge, now at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.  I found out about it because a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia read yesterday's post, and sent me an email saying, "You think that's cool, take a look at what else this guy has done," along with a link to a paper in the journal Social, Psychological, and Personality Science entitled, "The Song is You: Preferences for Musical Attribute Dimensions Reflect Personality."  The paper so directly addresses the question I've wondered about for ages that I'm kind of stunned I'd never run across it before.

What Greenberg et al. did was look at three musical attributes in pieces from various genres:

1. Arousal -- intense, forceful, abrasive, thrilling vs. gentle, calming, mellow
2. Valence -- fun, lively, enthusiastic, joyful, happy vs. depressing, sad
3. Depth -- intelligent, sophisticated, inspiring, complex, poetic, thoughtful vs. light, entertaining, simple, "party" or "dance" music

These broke down into 38 different descriptors, and the first thing the researchers did was to have judges evaluate 102 different pieces of music from various genres with respect to each descriptor.

After generating composite scores for each attribute, the 102 pieces were thrown out to a total of 9,454 participants.  Each participant gave each piece a rating, and also took a psychological/personality assessment.

Then the researchers started looking for correlations.

The results are downright fascinating, and I refer you to the paper itself for the full lowdown.  But here are a few of the connections they found:

Agreeableness was negatively associated with preferences for arousal and valence in music and positively associated with depth...  [P]reference for arousal was positively associated with modesty but negatively associated with trust, morality, altruism, cooperation, and sympathy.  Valence was negatively associated with modesty.  Preference for depth was positively associated with cooperation but negatively associated with modesty...  Conscientiousness was negatively associated with preferences for arousal in music and negatively associated with depth...  [In fact] arousal was negatively associated with all the conscientiousness facets [in personality] except for self-discipline.  Valence was positively associated with self-efficacy and cautiousness, and depth was positively associated with all of the conscientiousness facets except for self-discipline.

What this study would say about my own personality, given my love for The Rite of Spring, has been left as an exercise for the reader.

I was also fascinated by their look at what personality correlates exist in people who have diverse tastes in music as compared to those who have strong genre preferences.  Apparently, we people who listen as often to metal as to classical score high in measures of openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, and low in neuroticism.  So... yay?  I've always thought of myself as being something of a neurotic introvert, so I have to admit this one came as a bit of a surprise, although by my own assessment I'm pretty open, agreeable, and conscientious.  I guess on balance, this one works as well.  And despite coming from totally different genres, mood-wise there's a lot of commonality between Stravinsky and The Hu, an amazing Mongolian metal band whose song "Wolf Totem" is one of my favorite tunes to listen to while running:

So maybe the genre isn't as important as the emotional content.

In any case, I thought the whole thing was fascinating, and the entire paper is well worth reading.  Music affects a great many of us on a completely visceral level, and it's unsurprising that just about every culture in the world makes music in some form or another.  The fact that what music we respond to is a reflection of who we are is perhaps unsurprising, but it's kind of cool that we can find out a little about ourselves by looking at our playlists. 

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In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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