A matter of scale

In Douglas Adams's brilliant book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, spent millennia fighting each other mercilessly until they intercept a message from Earth that they misinterpret as being a threat.  They forthwith decide to set aside their grievances with each other, and team up for an attack on our planet in retaliation:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy...

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across -- which happened to be the Earth -- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

I was reminded of the Vl'Hurg and G'gugvuntt while reading the (much more serious) book The View from the Center of the Universe, by physicist Joel Primack and author and polymath Nancy Abrams.  In it, they look at our current understanding of the basics of physics and cosmology, and how it intertwines with metaphysics and philosophy, in search of a new "foundational myth" that will help us to understand our place in the universe.

What brought up Adams's fictional tiny space warriors was one of the most interesting things in the Primack/Abrams book, which is the importance of scale.  There are about sixty orders of magnitude (powers of ten) between the smallest thing we can talk meaningfully about (the Planck length) and the largest (the size of the known universe), and we ourselves fall just about in the middle.  This is no coincidence, the authors say; much smaller life forms are unlikely to have to have the complexity to develop intelligence, and much larger ones would be limited by a variety of physical factors such as the problem that if you increase length in a linear fashion, mass increases as a cube.  (Double the length, the mass goes up by a factor of eight, for example.)  Galileo knew about this, and used it to explain why the shape of the leg bones of mice and elephants are different.  Give an animal the size of an elephant the relative leg diameter of a mouse, and it couldn't support its own weight.  (This is why you shouldn't get scared by all of the bad science fiction movies from the fifties with names like The Cockroach That Ate Newark.  The proportions of an insect wouldn't work if it were a meter long, much less twenty or thirty.)

Pic from the 1954 horror flick Them!

Put simply: scale matters.  Where it gets really interesting, though, is when you look at the fundamental forces of nature.  We don't have a quantum theory of gravity yet, but that hasn't held back technology from using the principles of quantum physics; on the scale of the very small, gravity is insignificant and can be effectively ignored in most circumstances.  Once again, we ourselves are right around the size where gravity starts to get really critical.  Drop an ant off a skyscraper, and it will be none the worse for wear.  A human, though?

And the bigger the object, the more important gravity becomes, and (relatively speaking) the less important the other forces are.  On Earth, mountains can only get so high before the forces of erosion start pulling them down, breaking the cohesive electromagnetic bonds within the rocks and halting further rise.  In environments with lower gravity, though, mountains can get a great deal bigger.  Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars, is almost 22 kilometers high -- 2.5 times taller than Mount Everest.  The larger the object, the more intense the fight against gravity becomes.  The smoothest known objects in the universe are neutron stars, which have such immense gravity their topographic relief over the entire surface is on the order of a tenth of a millimeter.

Going the other direction, the relative magnitudes of the other forces increase.  A human scaled down to the size of a dust speck would be overwhelmed by electromagnetic forces -- for example, static electricity.  Consider how dust clings to your television screen.  These forces become much less important on a larger scale... whatever Gary Larson's The Far Side would have you believe:

Smaller still, and forces like the strong and weak nuclear forces -- the one that allows the particles in atomic nuclei to stick together, and the one that causes some forms of radioactive decay, respectively -- take over.  Trying to use brains that evolved to understand things on our scale (what we term "common sense") simply doesn't work on the scale of the very small or very large.

And a particularly fascinating bit, and something I'd never really considered, is how scale affects the properties of things.  Some properties are emergent; they result from the behavior and interactions of the parts.  A simple example is that water has three common forms, right?  Solid (ice), liquid, and gaseous (water vapor).  Those distinctions become completely meaningless on the scale of individual molecules.  One or two water molecules are not solid, liquid, or gaseous; those terms only acquire meaning on a much larger scale.

This is why it's so interesting to try to imagine what things would be like if you (to use Primack's and Abrams's metaphor) turned the zoom lens one way and then the other.  I first ran into this idea in high school, when we watched the mind-blowing short video Powers of Ten, which was filmed in 1968 (then touched up in 1977) but still impresses:

Anyhow, those are my thoughts about the concept of scale.  An explanation of why the Earth doesn't have to worry about either Vl'Hurgs and G'gugvuntts, enormous bugs, or static cling making your child stick to the ceiling.  A relief, really, because there's enough else to lose sleep over.  And given how quickly our common sense fails on unfamiliar scales, it's a good thing we have science to explain what's happening -- not to mention fueling our imaginations about what those scales might be like.

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Dimensional analysis

Adding to the long list of scientific words that woo-woos misdefine and then misapply, let's consider "dimension."

It's rising in popularity, and may soon outstrip "quantum" and "vibration" and "frequency," hard though that may be to believe.

Its misuse, of course, goes back a long way.  My wife got me the complete DVD set of the classic (i.e., terrible) science fiction series Lost In Space for my birthday a while back, a move she has lived to regret, because our son Lucas and I now constantly quote memorable lines from it, such as famous ones like "Danger, Will Robinson!  Danger!" and "Oh, my delicate back,' not to mention less-known ones like "Would you like another serving of Space Pie?" and "Golly!  They've turned him into a Cave Robot!"

But the subject comes up because of an episode I watched just a couple of days ago, called "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension."  In this wonderful piece of sf cinematography, we meet a pair of aliens who look a little like the love children of John Kerry and Stephen Miller:

These aliens are ultra-powerful because they come from the fifth dimension, we're told, and have made their spaceship impregnable by using a "fifth-dimensional force field."  Even so, they're no match for Will Robinson, who makes their spaceship blow up by, basically, feeling sad at them.

I'm not making this up.

In any case, this illustrates how the incorrect use of the word "dimension" isn't of recent vintage.  Back then, but lo unto this very day, woo-woos have somehow thought that "dimension" was a fancy way of saying "place," and that therefore a creature could "come from another dimension."

Take, for example, the piece that from Before It's News called "Inter-Dimensional Invasion Begins," which a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a couple of days ago, and wherein we learn that because "dimension" means "place," creatures can come from "between dimensions," just as you could say, for example, that you lived between Hoboken and Jersey City, even though you might not want to brag about that fact.

In this article, we're told that "when studying for his B.Sc. in physics," the author learned about string theory, which posits up to eleven spatial dimensions.  This, he says, opens the door for all sorts of weird stuff:

All events ever experienced by humans throughout history either from the mundane to the extraordinary have at best been reported or recorded using the language of 4 dimensions. 3 spatial (X,Y,Z) and one temporal (time). 

That leaves at least 7 dimensions that we are only dimly aware of.  If at all.  Most people intrinsically understand the spatial dimensions (X,Y, and Z) , it is the structure of all our movements, all the things in which we interact with , it is our life’s experiential structure.  But Time is also a dimension, albeit times [sic] arrow only runs in one direction under normal Newtonian situations.  But it is a dimension none-the-less.  It is a axis of freedom in which we move, ever trudging forward ceaselessly.  To quote William Shakespeare “Time is the fire in which we burn”.  What sort of experiences and entities burn in the higher 7 dimensions?

Right!  Whatever the hell that even means.

Later, though, he answers the question, of course. Those extra dimensions provide a place for Bigfoot to hide:

I believe that all forms of what we call “Paranormal” is normal, maybe just not in our 4 dimensional reality.  The “Inter-dimensional Hypothesis” states that UFOs, aliens, shadow people, crop circles, Bigfoot, and ghostly activity are all explained by the passage of beings from another dimension occasionally crossing into our dimension and being witnessed.  The method of cross overs are not understood at this time by science.

Okay, can we just hang on a moment, here?

The trouble I have with people like this is not only do they not understand science, they can't, apparently, even read a fucking Wikipedia page.  Because if you go to Wikipedia, and search for "Dimension," you are brought to a page wherein we are given, right in the first paragraph, the following definition:

In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a space or object is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it.  Thus a line has a dimension of one because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on it – for example, the point at 5 on a number line.  A surface such as a plane or the surface of a cylinder or sphere has a dimension of two because two coordinates are needed to specify a point on it – for example, both a latitude and longitude is required to locate a point on the surface of a sphere.   The inside of a cube, a cylinder or a sphere is three-dimensional because three coordinates are needed to locate a point within these spaces.

So saying that UFOs come from the seventh dimension is a little like saying that your Uncle Steve comes from "horizontal."

Higher dimensional spaces may exist, of course, although that point is controversial.  The alleged physics student who wrote the article for Before It's News cited string theory and M-theory as support for his position, even though the very same Wikipedia article says the following:

In physics, three dimensions of space and one of time is the accepted norm.  However, there are theories that attempt to unify the four fundamental forces by introducing more dimensions.  Most notably, superstring theory requires 10 spacetime dimensions, and originates from a more fundamental 11-dimensional theory tentatively called M-theory which subsumes five previously distinct superstring theories.  To date, no experimental or observational evidence is available to confirm the existence of these extra dimensions.  If extra dimensions exist, they must be hidden from us by some physical mechanism.  One well-studied possibility is that the extra dimensions may be "curled up" at such tiny scales as to be effectively invisible to current experiments.

So if Bigfoot lives there, he's not so much Bigfoot as he is Submicroscopicfoot.

Anyhow. I'll just reiterate my wish that people would learn some basic science before they go blathering on, throwing around scientific terminology as if they actually knew what they were talking about.  As for me, I'm off to get a second cup of coffee.   Maybe if I can put some in a four-dimensional Klein bottle, I'll never run out, you think?

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Last week's Skeptophilia book recommendation was a fun book about math; this week's is a fun book about science.

In The Canon, New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natalie Angier takes on a huge problem in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere), and does it with her signature clarity and sparkling humor: science illiteracy.

Angier worked with scientists from a variety of different fields -- physics, geology, biology, chemistry, meteorology/climatology, and others -- to come up with a compendium of what informed people should, at minimum, know about science.  In each of the sections of her book she looks at the basics of a different field, and explains concepts using analogies and examples that will have you smiling -- and understanding.

This is one of those books that should be required reading in every high school science curriculum.  As Angier points out, part of the reason we're in the environmental mess we currently face is because people either didn't know enough science to make smart decisions, or else knew it and set it aside for political and financial short-term expediency.  Whatever the cause, though, she's right that only education can cure it, and if that's going to succeed we need to counter the rote, dull, vocabulary-intense way science is usually taught in public schools.  We need to recapture the excitement of science -- that understanding stuff is fun.  

Angier's book takes a long stride in that direction.  I recommend it to everyone, layperson and science geek alike.  It's a whirlwind that will leave you laughing, and also marveling at just how cool the universe is.

Cosmic Jesus

Sometimes I sow the seeds of my own facepalms.

It happened just yesterday, when on a lark I clicked on the link to Skeptophilia's Google data, to see how people have been arriving here.  And one of the search queries that got four people to Skepto was...

... "was Jesus from an alternate universe?"

My first thought was, "I don't think I've ever written about that."  And scanning down the first two pages of hits (there were over 314,000 hits, something I don't even want to think about), I didn't see a link to my blog.  So either it was further down the list, or else they took a circuitous route to get here.

My second thought, of course, was, "What the actual fuck?  Four people wanted to know if Jesus was from an alternate universe?"  Given the number of hits, however, the amazing thing is that there weren't more of them.  Evidently, the idea of Jesus as having side-slipped here through a rip in the space-time continuum is something that has come up more than once.

314,000 times, in fact.

Something else I found in my Google search.  I was going to respond to this image, but after sitting here for some minutes, I got nothin'.

I share a besetting sin with Rudyard Kipling's "Elephant's Child," namely, an insatiable curiosity.  So even though a part of my brain was shouting at me that I did not want to go down this particular rabbit hole, I started clicking on the links on the first page of the Google search.

And all I can say is: merciful heavens, do people have no critical faculties at all?

Well, okay, as you might expect, that's not actually all I have to say.  In fact, in the interest of sharing the experience, I'm going to tell you about a couple of my better finds from the realm of Star Trek Jesus.

First, we have an article that appeared in (I shit you not) Huffington Post called, "Is Jesus in a Parallel Dimension?"  This brings up my pet peeve, which is the way woo-woos use "dimension" to mean "a world we can't see," when in reality it means, "a measurable extent in physical space."  So when the author, Dustin DeMoss, asks if Jesus lives in another dimension, it leaves me picturing the Lord and Savior as inhabiting, for example, "width."

But that's a mere quibble.  DeMoss explains what he means, as follows:

We live in four dimensional space while quantum physics suggest there are 11 dimensions.  We understand one instance of time as it is always going forward but in the Bible it says that God experiences time like this, “a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by.” (Psalm 90:4)...  Jesus could materialize and dematerialize while his body was still tangible (Luke 24:39-40, John 20:19, 26) and he could foretell the future (Matthew 24).  He suggested parallel realities open up to us, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20)

And did Jesus speak of other dimension [sic] when he said, “My kingdom is not of this world.  If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews - but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.” (John 18:35-36)

Welp, predictably I don't think any of those biblical passages has the least thing to do with quantum physics.  And, conversely, quantum physics doesn't have a damn thing to do with Jesus "dematerializing."  So I'm not seeing anything from modern physics as enlightening us with respect to biblical exegesis.

But this is far from the only source weighing in on this topic.  We have the delightfully loopy site Echoes of Enoch, wherein we read the following:

What if I could show you that the Bible tells us and Jesus alluded to the very fact that this mortal life, our linear existence is actually an altered dimension separated from the eternal one and yet existing at the same time!  Sounds too weird?  Consider just what the scripture above is saying.  Our past and our future have already been, and God requires an account of what is past!  The implication is that to God everything is already past history and he requires an account for it all!  It is not that God, sitting up in eternity has the plan all figured out and knows what he will do, it’s already been done!  You can’t hedge around this one.

This site also has a highly entertaining passage about how the Serpent got cursed to slither around after tricking Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, a small part of which I excerpt below:

He [the Serpent] is said to be subtler that all the other creatures created by God.  Subtle means intelligence applied in a crafty or manipulative manner.  This certainly is not talking about the reptile we know as a snake.  In Gen 3 we get the illustration that because the serpent deceived Adam and Eve he would be made to crawl on his belly and eat dust for the rest of his life.  Again by going back to the original language and redefining these words in light of 21st century knowledge, the story takes another very realistic twist.  The Hebrew, "al gachown yalak" for upon the belly and life can actually mean, "from above a reptile, (as superior) from the issue of the fetus as being outside the belly you will continue on in your material life."  Only in modern times could this scripture be understood for what it might imply.  A superior reptilian form that carries on life outside of normal reproduction can be by the means of cloning!  A seraphim is an order of angelic being.

Right!  Sure!  I mean, my only question would be, "What?" It does, however, put me in mind of a possibly apocryphal story about some scholars of the works of John Milton who were discussing how the Serpent got around prior to being cursed, and one of them suggested that he may have bounced on the coiled end of his tail.

Another scholar exclaimed in outraged tones, "Satan is not a fucking pogo stick!"

Last, we have the site Hidden Meanings weighing in on the topic.  The guy who writes for this site evidently knows a little science, but takes it and soars right out into the aether with it.  "Cosmology is not science," he states.  "It is a pagan philosophy."  As for as what we should believe instead, besides (obviously) the bible, we're told that quantum entanglement means that if you tickle one of a pair of twins, the other one will laugh, which then clearly leads us to the story of Jacob and Esau, as I'm sure you could have predicted.

After that, it gets a little weird.

So, there you have it.  Jesus in space and entangled twins from the Book of Genesis.  Which will teach me to try to track down how people arrive here at my blog.  I guess I should be glad that, however they got here, they did finally make their way, but I honestly don't want to know how many folks came away still believing that the Ascension had anything to do with quantum indeterminacy.

Dimensional analysis

Adding to the long list of scientific words that woo-woos misdefine and then misapply, let's consider "dimension."

It's rising in popularity, and may soon outstrip "quantum" and "vibration" and "frequency," hard though that may be to believe.

Its misuse, of course, goes back a long way.  In fact, my wife recently got me the first season of the classic (i.e., terrible) science fiction series Lost In Space for my birthday, a move she has lived to regret, because our son Nathan and I now constantly quote memorable lines from it, such as, "Would you like another serving of Space Pie?" and "Golly!  They've turned him into a Cave Robot!"

But the subject comes up because of an episode we watched just a couple of days ago, called "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension."  In this wonderful piece of sf cinematography, we meet a pair of aliens who look a little like the love children of John Kerry and Karl Rove:

These aliens are ultra-powerful because they come from the fifth dimension, we're told, and have made their spaceship impregnable by using a "fifth-dimensional force field."  Even so, they're no match for Will Robinson, who makes their spaceship blow up by, basically, feeling sad at them.

I'm not making this up.

In any case, this illustrates how the incorrect use of the word "dimension" isn't of recent vintage.  Back then, but lo unto this very day, woo-woos have somehow thought that "dimension" was a fancy way of saying "place," and that therefore a creature could "come from another dimension."

Take, for example, the piece that appeared a while back over at Before It's News called "Inter-Dimensional Invasion Begins," wherein we learn that because "dimension" means "place," creatures can come from "between dimensions," just as you could say, for example, that you lived between Hoboken and Weehawken, even though you might not want to brag about that fact.

In this article, we're told that "when studying for his B.Sc. in physics," the author learned about string theory, which posits up to eleven spatial dimensions.  This, he says, opens the door for all sorts of weird stuff:

All events ever experienced by humans throughout history either from the mundane to the extraordinary have at best been reported or recorded using the language of 4 dimensions. 3 spatial (X,Y,Z) and one temporal (time). 

That leaves at least 7 dimensions that we are only dimly aware of. If at all. Most people intrinsically understand the spatial dimensions (X,Y, and Z) , it is the structure of all our movements , all the things in which we interact with , it is our life’s experiential structure. But Time is also a dimension, albeit times arrow only runs in one direction under normal Newtonian situations. But it is a dimension none-the-less. It is a axis of freedom in which we move, ever trudging forward ceaselessly. To quote William Shakespeare “Time is the fire in which we burn”. What sort of experiences and entities burn in the higher 7 dimensions?

Right!  Whatever the hell that even means.

Later, though, he answers the question, of course.  Those extra dimensions provide a place for Bigfoot to hide:

I believe that all forms of what we call “Paranormal” is normal, maybe just not in our 4 dimensional reality. The “Inter-dimensional Hypothesis” states that UFOs, aliens, shadow people, crop circles, Bigfoot, and ghostly activity are all explained by the passage of beings from another dimension occasionally crossing into our dimension and being witnessed. The method of cross overs are not understood at this time by science.

Okay, can we just hang on a moment, here?

The trouble I have with people like this is not only do they not understand science, they can't, apparently, even read a fucking Wikipedia page.  Because if you go to Wikipedia, and search for "Dimension," you are brought to a page wherein we are given, right in the first paragraph, the following definition:

In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a space or object is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it.  Thus a line has a dimension of one because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on it – for example, the point at 5 on a number line.  A surface such as a plane or the surface of a cylinder or sphere has a dimension of two because two coordinates are needed to specify a point on it – for example, both a latitude and longitude is required to locate a point on the surface of a sphere.  The inside of a cube, a cylinder or a sphere is three-dimensional because three coordinates are needed to locate a point within these spaces.

So saying that UFOs come from the seventh dimension is a little like saying that your Uncle Steve comes from "horizontal."

Higher dimensional spaces may exist, of course, although that point is controversial.  The alleged physics student who wrote the article for Before It's News cited string theory and M-theory as support for his position, even though the very same Wikipedia article says the following:

In physics, three dimensions of space and one of time is the accepted norm.  However, there are theories that attempt to unify the four fundamental forces by introducing more dimensions.  Most notably, superstring theory requires 10 spacetime dimensions, and originates from a more fundamental 11-dimensional theory tentatively called M-theory which subsumes five previously distinct superstring theories.  To date, no experimental or observational evidence is available to confirm the existence of these extra dimensions.  If extra dimensions exist, they must be hidden from us by some physical mechanism.  One well-studied possibility is that the extra dimensions may be "curled up" at such tiny scales as to be effectively invisible to current experiments.

So if Bigfoot lives there, he's not so much Bigfoot as he is Submicroscopicfoot.

Anyhow.  I'll just reiterate my wish that people would learn some basic science before they go blathering on, throwing around scientific terminology as if they actually knew what they were talking about.  As for me, I'm off to get a second cup of coffee.  Maybe if I can put some in a four-dimensional Klein bottle, I'll never run out, you think?