Even spookier action

Once again, I've had my mind blown by a set of experiments about the behavior of subatomic particles that teeters on the edge of what my layman's brain can understand.  So I'm gonna tell you about it as best I can, and I would ask that any physics types in the studio audience let me know about any errors I make so I can correct 'em.

You're undoubtedly aware of the quote by Einstein having to do with "spooky action at a distance," which is how he viewed the bizarre and counterintuitive features of the physics of the very small such as quantum superposition and entanglement.  Both of these phenomena, though, have been explained by the model that particles aren't the little pinpoint masses we picture them as, but spread-out fields of probabilities that can interact even when they're not near each other.

But that still leaves intact the conventional view, certainly the common-sense one, that one object can't affect another unless the field generated by one of them intersects the field generated by the other, whether that field be gravity, electromagnetism, or either of the two less-familiar nuclear forces (strong and weak).  Not as obvious is that this influence is generally transmitted by some sort of carrier particle being exchanged between the two -- although the carrier particle that transmits the gravitational force has yet to be discovered experimentally.

This is one of the main reasons that unscientific superstitions like astrology can't be true; it's positing that your personality and life's path are affected by the position of the Sun or one of the planets relative to a bunch of stars that only appear to be near each other when viewed from our perspective.  Most of those stars are tens to hundreds of light years away, so any influence they might have on you via the four fundamental forces is about as close to zero as you could possibly get, because all four of them dramatically decrease in intensity the farther away you get.  (As Carl Sagan quipped, at the moment of your birth, the obstetrician who delivered you was exerting a greater gravitational pull on you than Jupiter was.)

So the bottom line appears to be: no interaction between the fields generated by two objects, no way can they influence each other in any fashion.

But.

In 1959, two physicists, Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm, published a paper on what has come to be known as the Aharonov-Bohm effect.  This paper concluded that under certain conditions, an electrically-charged particle can be affected by an electromagnetic field -- even when the particle itself is shielded in such a way that both the electric field and magnetic field it experiences is exactly equal to zero, and the particle's wave function is blocked from the region that is experiencing the field.

So that leaves us with one of two equally distasteful conclusions.  Either the measured electric and magnetic fields in a region don't tell us all we need to know to understand the electromagnetic potential a particle is experiencing, or we have to throw away the principle of locality -- that an object can only be influenced by the conditions in its local environment.

(Nota bene: in physics, "local" has a rigorous definition; two phenomena are local relative to each other if the amount of time a cause from one can precede an effect on the other is equal to or greater than the amount of time it would take light to travel from the position of the cause to the position of the effect.  This is the basis of the reluctance of physicists to believe in any kind of superluminal information transfer.)

What's more troubling still is that this isn't just some theoretical meandering; the Aharonov-Bohm effect has been demonstrated experimentally.  So as bafflingly weird as it sounds, it apparently is a built-in feature of quantum physics, as if we needed anything else to make it even crazier.

But maybe this is just some weirdness of electromagnetism, right?  Well, that might have been believable...

... until now.

In a paper three days ago in Science, five physicists at Stanford University -- Chris Overstreet, Peter Asenbaum, Joseph Curti, Minjeong Kim, and Mark Kasevich -- have demonstrated that the same thing works for gravitational interactions.

This is bizarre for a variety of reasons.  First, the Aharonov-Bohm effect is just bizarre, in and of itself.  Second, as I mentioned earlier, we don't even have experimental proof that gravity has a carrier particle, or if perhaps it is just a description of the curvature of space -- i.e., if gravity is a completely different animal from the other three fundamental forces.  Third, and weirdest, the equations governing gravity don't mesh with the equations governing the other three forces, and every effort to coalesce them and create a "Grand Unified Theory" has met with failure.  Combining the gravitational field equations with the ones in the quantum realm generates infinities -- and you know what that does.  

"Every time I look at this experiment, I’m like, 'It’s amazing that nature is that way,'" said study co-author Mark Kasevich, in an interview with Science News.

"Amazing" isn't how I would have put it.  In Kasevich's situation, I think what I'd have said would have been more like, "Holy shit, what the hell is going on here?"  But I'm kind of unsubtle that way.

So what it seems to indicate to me is that we're missing something pretty fundamental about how forces work, and that this is an indication that there's a serious gap in the theoretical underpinning of physics.

(Nota bene #2: I still think astrology is bullshit, though.)

It's tempting for us laypeople to just throw our hands up in despair and say, "Okay, this stuff is so weird it can't be true."  The problem is, if you buy into the methods of science -- which I hope all of us do -- that's the one response you can't have.  The experimental evidence is what it is, whether you like (or understand) it or not, and if it contradicts your favorite model of how things work, you have to chuck the model, not the evidence.  Or, as Neil deGrasse Tyson more eloquently and succinctly put it, "The wonderful thing about science is that it works whether or not you believe in it."

So it looks like we're stuck with this even-spookier-action-at-a-distance, as counterintuitive as it sounds.  Objects can interact with each other gravitationally even when the gravitational field produced by object #1 is exactly zero where object #2 is currently sitting.  And this is about the limit of what I can explain, so if you ask me to clarify further, I'm afraid my response will be a puzzled head-tilt much like what my dog gives me when I tell him something he just can't comprehend, like why I don't want to go outside and play ball with him when it's subzero temperatures and snowing.

But I'll end on a more academic note, with a quote by the famous biologist J. B. S. Haldane, that I've used before in posts about quantum physics: "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine."

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Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

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

The state of GRACE

One of NASA's ongoing experiments is the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE for short), which was launched, both literally and figuratively, in March 2002.  GRACE uses data from a pair of satellites to do detailed measurements of the Earth's gravitational field, information that can be used in such disparate fields as plate and mantle tectonics and the study of groundwater flow rates, deep ocean currents, and ice cap melting.

The data is frequently represented visually, using bulges, dips, and colors on the Earth's surface to represent various variables such as measured gravitational strength, temperature, and water salinity.  This generates images like the following:

And that's where the trouble started, because someone posted this image on the unfailingly bizarre site Godlike Productions with the caption, "This is the current shape of our planet?!!! WTF!!!  As modeled by the GRACE Gravity Data.  Planet being torn apart!"

Now, I don't know whether the original poster was a troll, or really believed that what (s)he was posting was true, but you'd think that once it was posted, there would be a Greek chorus' worth of shouts of "Are you a complete moron?  Or what?"  After all, if there really was something stretching the world into the shape depicted on the map, the folks in Australia would have something to say about it.

But no.  The vast majority of the responders thought that this, in fact, showed what the Earth really looks like, and that NASA was covering the whole thing up for their usual evil motives.

Oh, there were voices of reason, but they were the ones being shouted down.  Here are some comments that appeared, in order, after the original post.

Could it be since the moon is pulling away from Earth that it is pulling a chunk off Earth with it?

If that is really the current shape of our planet, then we are in deep shit. This is worse than anyone has thought! The moon is gonna pull a chunk off the planet. That or planet X's effect on our planet? No wonder there are so many quakes? The planet is being torn!!!

This is for real folks! This is imaged by GRACE Twin Satellites. This is so off from past projections. The planet is literally being torn apart.

This explains everything from sink holes, mass animal dies offs, weird weather, increase in quakes, oil leaks, continent movements, poles shifting etc...

Something is pulling a chunk off the planet, or the destabilization of the Arctic and Antarctica is distorting the planet.

Then, one person posted the following:

It is a GRAVITY map.  For fuck's sake.

But you don't stop a whole herd of Chickens Little that easily, because the outcry continued as if the Voice of Reason hadn't said a word:

Notice the three areas of extreme magnetic pressure and the weak area in the Indian Ocean. That is going to continue to sink and eventually break off completely, a chunk off the planet. Maybe it will become our new moon with an atmosphere to make it habitable.

None of the other planets look like that. The moon sure doesn't.

Seems to me like we are literally splitting ourselves apart.

the bible does say that the earth shall be destroyed including the heavens and a new heaven and earth shall be born or created. Maybe there is an earth being born within, black sun? Vril? Or the beast raising from the deep? Very interesting.

One person even responded directly to the Voice of Reason, implying that (s)he was the one who didn't understand:

No Duh! A gravity map also showing the current shape of our potato planet.

And on it goes:

Even the stretching effect can clearly be seen. It's starting to look like a skull?

Doesn't look normal to me.

After watching that again, I think the planet is rarely anything close to spherical. How come other planets don't look like that?

Then, we had one other person chime in who evidently has some understanding of what's going on here:

Wow.... I thought for a minute second that ultimate doom has befallen us.... Finally..... BUT, it's a gravity map. It's NOT a geophysical depiction... It's based on gravitational data. Kind of like the "hole in the ozone layer" enhancement maps. This is not the shape of the planet folks, it's the shape of the planet's gravitational plus and minuses, which change daily due to moon placement and other factors... Kind of like an mri if you will... If you remove certain colors from an mri does that mean you have removed parts of the person's brain?

Unfortunately, no real doom here. As this map will look very different on the next full moon.

But of course, the doomsayers paid no attention whatsoever.  They never do, somehow.

What gets me about all of this is how a quick internet search for "GRACE gravity survey" would have turned up websites -- several of them, in fact -- that explain what the image means.  So I've often railed against people who want to be able to talk about things like quantum mechanics without doing the hard work of learning what quantum mechanics really is; here we have people who are so catastrophically lazy that they can't even be bothered to do a search on Google before deciding whether or not Australia is being forcibly ripped off the surface of the Earth.

I don't know, folks.  I should have some sort of trenchant comment to make about all of this, but at the moment I can't think of anything to do but weep quietly into my coffee, and quote Professor Farnsworth:

Of course, if the people who think that the GRACE map actually represents the real, physical shape of the Earth are correct, I may get my wish sooner than I realize.