Spookier action

One of the downsides of being a layperson rather than a scientist (and I very much consider myself to be the former, despite having been a science teacher for over three decades) is that my understanding is hampered simply because it's impossible to know all the details of research by people who are way smarter than I am.

This is worst in completely counter-intuitive disciplines like quantum physics.

That doesn't prevent me from being really interested in all this stuff.  I was just discussing quantum entanglement with a dear friend a couple of days ago (as one does), and his question was, "Could you use it to communicate information?"  On the surface, it seems like it should be possible, right?

It's not -- at least as far as our current understanding goes.  But the reason isn't obvious on first glance.  In entanglement, a pair of particles is created which can be described by a single wave function; this means that their states are correlated, and knowing the state of one of them automatically tells you the state of the other, regardless of how far apart they are.  Let's say you and I create an entangled pair that has a net spin of zero.  You take your particle to Tokyo and I take mine to Lisbon.  Then you measure yours, and find it has a spin axis pointing upward.  I know immediately that if I measure mine, it will have a spin axis pointing downward.

Graph of the wave function of a single particle [Image is in the Public Domain]

So far, it seems like, "what's so weird about that?"  It doesn't seem any more remarkable than having a matched pair of gloves each in its own sealed box, and if you open your box in Tokyo and find it's a left-handed glove, mine in Lisbon has to be a right-handed glove.  The reality of the particles is weirder -- the members of the entangled pair are neither spin-up nor spin-down until they're measured, but in a state of superposition -- existing in a field of probabilities of both states at the same time.  Only once one of them is measured does it lock in to a particular state, and that measurement is what locks in the other particle simultaneously -- something Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance."

Okay, so why couldn't that be used for communication?  The reason is rather subtle.  Let's say you want to communicate something simple, something that can be answered "yes" or "no."  So you and I take the two particles in our entangled pair to Tokyo and Lisbon, respectively.  We agree ahead of time that once you get there, you are going to go outside to see if it's a clear day and whether you can see Mount Fuji.  If you can, you will force your particle into a spin-up state; won't that force mine into a spin-down state, thus communicating the information to me instantaneously, thousands of miles away?

The answer is no.  The reason is, you didn't just measure your particle's state, you changed it.  And this breaks the entanglement.  The moment you do anything to alter the state of your particle, it decouples it from mine, and my particle now has a 50/50 chance of being spin-up or spin-down; it's no longer affected by what happens to yours.  Every kind of information transfer known requires changing the state of the particles you're using to carry the information, and that transfer can only travel at the speed of light or slower.

So it seems like the faster-than-light "subspace communication" used in Star Trek is impossible, right?

Well... maybe.

This is where I skate out over very thin ice, because what got all this started (besides the conversation with my friend) was a paper last week in Quantum Science and Technology which -- if I'm reading it right, and I might well not be -- suggests that there might be a way around this, by sending information (1) without using particles, and (2) by having the information go directly from sender to receiver without traveling through the intervening space.

If you're thinking, "That sounds like a wormhole" -- exactly.  Hatim Salih, of the University of Bristol, says he's found a way to create a "traversable wormhole" that could transfer quantum information instantaneously.

Salih calls this even-spookier-action-at-a-distance counterportation.  "Here’s the sharp distinction," he said in a news release.  "While counterportation achieves the end goal of teleportation, namely disembodied transport, it remarkably does so without any detectable information carriers traveling across.  If counterportation is to be realized, an entirely new type of quantum computer has to be built: an exchange-free one, where communicating parties exchange no particles.  By contrast to large-scale quantum computers that promise remarkable speed-ups, which no one yet knows how to build, the promise of exchange-free quantum computers of even the smallest scale is to make seemingly impossible tasks – such as counterportation – possible, by incorporating space in a fundamental way alongside time."

"We experience a classical world which is actually built from quantum objects," said John Rarity, Salih's colleague at the University of Bristol.  "The proposed experiment can reveal this underlying quantum nature showing that entirely separate quantum particles can be correlated without ever interacting.  This correlation at a distance can then be used to transport quantum information (qbits) from one location to another without a particle having to traverse the space, creating what could be called a traversable wormhole."

Okay... that's just nifty, but... but... Einstein?  Speed of light?  How do you avoid the paradoxes that come with faster-than-light information transfer?

Maybe there's something I'm not understanding, here.  All right, to be fair, I'm sure there's a gazillion things I'm not understanding, here.  Cf. my aforementioned layperson status.  But it sure seems like if you can do this, you're talking about something that would break the cosmic speed limit for information transfer, and shake physics down to its roots.

Much as I'd love to see the world of Star Trek realized, I'm pretty certain that I'm missing something critical, and this isn't going to turn out to be what it sounds like.  There's probably some subtlety -- like the measuring-versus-changing distinction in entanglement -- that isn't apparent.

What that might be, however, escapes me.  If any physicists read this post, do enlighten me.  While I don't relish the idea of my hopes being dashed, I'm virtually certain they will be.  And as Carl Sagan so trenchantly put it, "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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Hipster math

One of the guiding principles of teenagerhood is "I want to be unique, just like everyone else."

Not, mind you, that I'm criticizing efforts toward individuality.  We all have to find a way to express ourselves, be it how we dress, talk, or style our hair.  But what's always struck me as funny is how the drive to be different often pushes people toward the same solution, creating stereotypical pseudo-rebellious subcultures that are often parodied because they all on some level look and act alike.

This subject has been the focus of mathematician Jonathan Touboul, of Brandeis University, who looks at how information transfer through societies affects behavior.  And he's been studying something he calls the "hipster effect" -- that rejecting conformity simply drives people to conform to something else.  Even more interesting, he's found that these patterns of synchronization have parallels in how many other systems interact, in areas as different as neural firing patterns and reactions by investors to information about the stock market, and may well be describable by the same mathematical model.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Infrogmation of New Orleans, Redbeans15 Downtown Hipsters, CC BY-SA 2.5]

In his paper "The Hipster Effect: When Anticonformists All Look the Same," which appeared in the online journal arXiv, he has the following to say:

In such different domains as neurosciences, spin glasses, social science, economics and finance, large ensemble of interacting individuals following (mainstream) or opposing (hipsters) to the majority are ubiquitous.  In these systems, interactions generally occur after specific delays associated to transport, transmission or integration of information.  We investigate here the impact of anti-conformism combined to delays in the emergent dynamics of large populations of mainstreams and hipsters.  To this purpose, we introduce a class of simple statistical systems of interacting agents composed of (i) mainstreams and anti-conformists in the presence of (ii) delays, possibly heterogeneous, in the transmission of information.  In this simple model, each agent can be in one of two states, and can change state in continuous time with a rate depending on the state of others in the past...  [W]hen hipsters are too slow in detecting the trends, they will consistently make the same choice, and realizing this too late, they will switch, all together to another state where they remain alike.  Similar synchronizations arise when the impact of mainstreams on hipsters choices (and reciprocally) dominate the impact of other hipsters choices, and we show that these may emerge only when the randomness in the hipsters decisions is sufficiently large.  Beyond the choice of the best suit to wear this winter, this study may have important implications in understanding synchronization of nerve cells, investment strategies in finance, or emergent dynamics in social science, domains in which delays of communication and the geometry of information accessibility are prominent.

Which is kind of cool.  Although it's a little humbling to think that our choices about how to express who we are, which feel so important and deeply personal, can be emulated by a simple mathematical model that works equally well to describe how nerves fire and how investors make their stock trading decisions.

What's funniest is the outcome when Touboul tried to model a population with equal numbers of conformists and hipsters.  It resulted in a seesawing oscillation between different outcomes -- for a while the hipsters have beards and the conformists don't, but if you wait for a while, the reverse becomes true.

Of course, life is usually more complex than a bunch of binary choices.  But when this is the situation, the result is remarkably predictable.  "For example, if a majority of individuals shave their beard," Touboul said in an interview with Technology Review, "then most hipsters will want to grow a beard, and if this trend propagates to a majority of the population, it will lead to a new, synchronized, switch to shaving."

Touboul wants to expand his model to include choices where there are more than two options, and see if it continues to emulate observed trends in social dynamics.  My guess is it will, although I don't begin to understand how you'd manage the mathematics involved.  As for me, I've got to look around and count the number of guys with facial hair, and decide whether I should shave off my beard.  You know how it goes.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Peter Gariaev, wave genetics, and the problem of being a dilettante

There's an inherent problem with skepticism, and the heart of it is that you can't be an expert in everything.

There are, in fact, damn few things that I do consider myself an expert in.  Judging by my ability to read technical, peer-reviewed papers, I can handle myself decently in the fields of evolutionary biology and population genetics (which I focused on in college, and which I teach every year) and historical linguistics (the subject of my master's degree).  Outside of that... well, I'm a dilettante.  So despite my B.S. in physics, research papers in Science on just about any topic in physics lose me after the first two sentences.  Even in biology -- a subject I've taught with (I think) at least some degree of competence for 27 years -- I am instantaneously lost in the details in scholarly papers on a variety of topics, including (but not limited to) cellular biology, physiology, ecosystem dynamics, and most of biochemistry.

Now, let me say up front that there's nothing inherently wrong about being a dilettante.  Dilettantes make good high school teachers, and my opinion is that it's more fun to be a generalist than a specialist.  Dilettantism was positively celebrated in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was the sport of gentlemen (and more than a few gentlewomen) -- some of whom have some significant and far-reaching research to their credit.

But being a generalist does bring with it a problem, and that is that it leaves you unqualified to weigh in on topics where specialized knowledge would be required to know if the person in question was even making sense.  And the specialists aren't much better off -- because even they are out of their element in all but their chosen field.

So how, as skeptics, do we make a decision about whether someone is a groundbreaking pioneer or a spouter of bullshit -- when the field in which they are making their pronouncements is less than familiar to you?

I ran into an especially good example of this a couple of days ago, when a friend asked me what I thought about Dr. Peter Gariaev.  I hadn't heard of Dr. Gariaev's research, so I did a little digging.  And what I found left me with the same impression my friend had -- his comment was that it "sounded like a bunch of woo."

But let's face it, relativity sounded like a "bunch of woo" when it was first proposed.  So did quantum mechanics.  So, honestly, did the germ theory of disease.  None of these ideas were particularly intuitive; none gained instant acceptance; all three seemed, for a while, to be blatant nonsense.  So let's look at some of Gariaev's writing, and see if he's an Einstein or a Schrödinger -- or a David Icke or a Richard C. Hoagland.

Here are a few paragraphs from Gariaev's own website about his theory, called "Wave Genetics:"

The quintessence of the wave genome theory may be represented as following: genome of the highest organisms is considered to be a bio-computer which forms the space-time grid framework of a bio-systems.

In that bio-system, as the carriers of a field epi-gene-matrix - wave fronts are being used, which are assigned by gene-holograms and so-called solitons on DNA – distinct type of acoustic and electromagnetic fields, produced by biogenetic apparatus of the organism/bio-system under consideration and being a medium of strategic regulatory data/information exchange between cells, tissues and organs of the bio-system.

It is also vital to note that the holographic grids/frameworks, which are also the elements of fluctuating structures of solitons, are, in fact, discrete simplest cases of code-originated information, anchored in chromosome continuum of an organism...


A group of scientists headed by P P Gariaev and M U Maslov, developed a theory of so called fractal representation of natural (human) and genetical languages. Within the confines of this theory it is said that the quasi-speech of DNA possesses potentially inexhaustible “supply of words” and, moreover, what had been a sentence on the scales of DNA–“texts” “phrases” or a “sentence” becomes/turns into a word or a letter on the other scale. Genetical apparatus can be viewed as the triunity of its structure-functional organization consisting of holographic, soliton and fractal structures.

This theory allows a refined quantitative comparison of symbolic structure of any texts including genetical. Thereby a possibility has been wide open to approach a deciphering of a lexicon of one’s own gene-code, and accordingly, more accurate composition of algorithms of addressing a genome of a human with an aim of potentially any type of programming of one’s vital activity such as treatment, increasing one’s life expectancy and so on and so forth.

Empirical tests of wave genetic theory in the light of “speech” characteristics of DNA demonstrate strategically correct stance and direction of the research.

Made it through all that?  There's lots more, but it all pretty much sounds like what you just read.  Lots of use of words like "holographic" and "fractal" and "soliton;" not much in the way of data.  As far as his qualifications, Gariaev himself apparently has a Ph.D., even though nowhere could I find any mention of where it's from.  To be fair, this may just be that his biographical details aren't widely known outside of his native Russia.  So given that, is there a way we can parse his research, despite not being molecular biologists ourselves?  (Well, maybe some of my readers are, but I'm not.) 

When I run across something like this, the first thing I look for is to see where he's been published.  And when you look at his publications list, an interesting pattern emerges.  Back in the early 1990s, Gariaev was publishing in what seem to be reputable, peer-reviewed journals -- the Journal of the Society of Optical Engineering and Laser Physics, for example.  Even back then, though, you could see what appears to be a trend toward oddball interpretations of science, with his solo paper "DNA as source of new kind of God 'knowledge'" (published in the Act and Facts/Impact series, N12, pp. 7-11).  I'm just going off the title, here -- I wasn't able to find the paper itself -- but unless he was using the term "God knowledge" metaphorically, which doesn't seem very likely in a scholarly paper, I think this one already shows that he'd gone off the beam.

Since then, though, he's not had a single publication in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, with the exception of a 2002 paper in the International Journal of Computing Anticipatory Systems.  His other publications have appeared in places like the Journal of Non-Locality and Remote Mental Interactions (and lest you think that I'm being too harsh, here, a quick survey of other articles they'd published include one having to do with using "Qigong" to treat cancer, one trying to use quantum mechanics to explain telepathy, and one called "A Scientific Validation of Planetary Consciousness"). 

Other papers by Gariaev have appeared in DNA Decipher Journal -- which just this summer published a paper called "Quantum Intelligent Design in Contrast to Mindless Materialists' Evolution."

Mercy me.

So, if Gariaev is the next Einstein, why no papers in Nature or Science?

Why, too, is he cited all over -- but only in places of highly dubious reputation, like Above Top Secret and Godlike Productions?

And don't start with me about how he is a Maverick and a Pioneer and the other scientists hate him and are suppressing his work because it is too revolutionary.  C'mon, now.  How many careers were made based on the ground broken by the likes of Einstein and Schrödinger?  Peter Higgs just won the Nobel Prize, for fuck's sake.

I may not be an expert in biophysics; but I do know that if Gariaev really had shown (as he has claimed) that "genetic traits can be changed, activated and disactivated by use of resonant waves, beamed at the DNA" and that this was going to allow humans "to regrow vital internal organs, in vivo, without the requirement of difficult, dangerous and expensive surgical procedures," then he'd be elbowing Higgs out of the way to get to Stockholm.

So we can, as generalists (or as specialists outside our particular specialty) still use the principles of skepticism to come to some sort of judgment about what we read.  Fortunate for me; a dilettante I always have been, and (I'm afraid) a dilettante I always will be.  If it weren't possible for us to think through such situations, we'd fall prey to just about every crazy claim that came along.

Some of us still do, of course -- which is why it's absolutely critical to train your brain to be, well, absolutely critical.

Crowd funding for antigravity

I've commented before how the advent of the internet has changed information transfer -- both in good ways (such as the availability of databases for quick fact-checking) and bad (such as offering a rapid, and virtually unstoppable, conduit for bullshit).  What I want to look at today is the way that the internet has changed how we view ideas and innovation -- again, in good ways and bad.

In the past, informal groups of like-minded individuals generally coalesced in some kind of formal setting -- a school, a church, a community center.  Now, there are places like Reddit where people, most of whom have never met, come together to discuss everything from gaming to world news.   This is all to the good, of course; I check several "subreddits" daily, including the ones that specialize in stories on science and skepticism.

The problem is, of course, like-minded people are... like-minded.  Groups form that seem to have the sole purpose of reinforcing the opinions that the members already had.  (And for every group, there's an equal and opposite group.  Check out "Conspiracy" and "Conspiratard" for a pair of good examples.)

Reddit isn't the only place this happens.  The same devolution into self-reinforcing silliness can even infect groups that started with the best of intents.  Take "Kickstarter," for example.

Kickstarter started out as a way for people with great ideas in any field, but who lacked the funds to see them realized, to get small donations from large numbers of people.  From their front page, the organizers of Kickstarter say,

Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative projects.

We’re a home for everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of projects, big and small, that are brought to life through the direct support of people like you. Since our launch in 2009, more than 3.9 million people have pledged over $577 million, funding more than 39,000 creative projects. Thousands of creative projects are raising funds on Kickstarter right now.

There's no doubt it's a groundbreaking idea.   CNN called Kickstarter "paradigm-shifting" -- which is certainly apt.  But the problem is that once you've opened up the gates to anyone, you've opened up the gates to... anyone.  The field starts widening to include people who are, to put not too fine a point on it, wingnuts.  Take the Kickstarter proposal by Peter Fred, for example, that has as its aim making an anti-gravity device:

The gravity theory that I am trying to promote has the fundamental hypothesis that gravitational phenomena is the result of transferred momentum produced by "stopped wind" a term which will be described. We already know a lot about momentum and the dynamics of wind.  Thus the fundamental idea of my theory is further interpretable in terms of familiar physics.

Of course, there's the obligatory declaration that everything we think we know about physics is wrong:

This lesson from the past seems to be lost on today's scientists who seem once again to be championing an unphysical idea that is supported by widespread observation.   The unthinking acceptance of the observationally supported "strange" and mysterious  idea that mass can warp space or that it can attract other mass has resulted in a preposterous universe where 95% of it is little understood.   This situation does not call for hordes of experimenters spending billions keeping the ancient basic mysterious hypothesis in place.  What it calls for is a lone self-financed theorists working for years the attic trying to come up with an idea that would replace the idea mass can attract other mass or warp space. 

He then goes on to explain what he believes to be the real mechanism causing the pull of gravity, which is that cool air is "attracted to" warm air, causing lift.  To illustrate this, he uses the following diagram, which apparently comes from a middle school Earth Science text, with some added clumsy application of Photoshop:

 Note that he has simply blurred out the return arrows, showing the complete movement of air in the convection cell -- so that it looks like some mysterious force is making the cool air over the ocean move toward the warm air on land.  (For those of you who haven't had any atmospheric science, what's actually happening is that the warm air is rising because of a change in density, and the cool air from the ocean is being pulled in to replace it; the reverse happens at high altitudes, creating an "overturning" of air between the land and the ocean.)

So, what's my problem with this?  A crank has a silly idea.  Big deal.

Well, the big deal is that it was launched two weeks ago and he's already raised almost $500, presumably donated by people whose training in physics ended in sixth grade.  As with the Conspiracy subreddit, wingnuts attract other wingnuts.  Now, I know that he's unlikely to reach his goal ($15,000), and by the policy of Kickstarter, if the goal isn't reached no one loses their money.  But my worry is twofold: first, dumb ideas gain credibility by appearing here; and second, Kickstarter itself loses credibility by hosting them.

Maybe I should temper this, however, with the admission that the same kind of altered approach has changed the publishing industry -- and has allowed me to e-publish my own fiction (note the handsome lineup of book covers on the right of your screen, ready for your Kindle or Nook).  And while this change has, in some sense, opened the floodgates to people publishing garbage, it has offered an entrée to talented writers who became frustrated with the gatekeeping aspect of the old agent/publishing editor route.  And there's a Darwinian aspect to all this; lousy novels can't compete with good ones, and get lost in the morass of self-published manuscripts after having sold copies only to the writer's significant other, parents, and best friend.  Likewise, ideas such as the aforementioned antigravity device simply don't get enough money to launch.

So maybe the fact that the bad ideas on Kickstarter won't get funded is its saving grace.  I have to admit that there have been some cool projects that have succeeded; consider the 3-D Pen (you should definitely watch the video on this one), the workout shirt that changes color to show your muscle activity, and, of course the Cthulhu knitted ski mask:

Also comes in "Slime of R'lyeh green."

So there you are.  Look around at some of the Kickstarter projects -- there are some really interesting ones.  Whatever else you might say about it, Kickstarter is a unique approach to funding innovation, just as e-publishing is to writing, and Reddit is to the formation of intellectual communities.  And if each of those things comes with a downside, what doesn't?  It's just another feature of our technological evolution, an outcome of human intelligence that never fails to fascinate and surprise me.

"Friday," the JFK assassination, and ancient astronauts

I am fascinated by networks, connectivity, and information transfer.  I know that this has become a science in and of itself, with complex mathematical models and theories, almost all of which are beyond the scope of my understanding; but the whole concept still draws me.  I first ran into it years ago, when the "Six Degrees of Separation" idea first became common knowledge.  Besides the generally appealing idea that I could actually be connected with everyone on Earth within six degrees, I found especially interesting the idea that certain people could be "nodes" -- people who are multiply connected because of their belonging to several different disjoint social groups, and therefore who would act to reduce significantly the average number of links between myself and a farmer in Nepal.

Now, of course, with electronic media, people are connected far more, and across far greater distances, than ever before.  I'd suspect that most people are linked in fewer than six degrees of separation these days.  And while this has some positive features, it also (as with most things) has a downside.

Being multiply, and rapidly, connectible means that information flows faster, easier, and further than in the past, it also means that there is a much quicker conduit for bullshit than previously.  I had two interesting demonstrations of this just in the past couple of days.

Most of you by now have probably heard Rebecca Black's "song" "Friday," which catapulted to fame by virtue of being the worst song ever recorded, worse even (if you can believe this) than either "I Write the Songs" or "Copacabana."  Maybe even worse than all of Barry Manilow's repertoire put together.  Most people, after listening to about twenty seconds of this song, respond by sticking any available objects into their ears, even if the objects are steak knives.  The spread of this song, which resembles in so many ways the spread of an infectious disease, is itself an interesting example of connectivity; but even more fascinating is the spread of a meme that claims that "Friday" is about the JFK assassination.  Here is a version of this claim, copied verbatim:

"The driver of the car that JFK was assassinated in, had the name Samuel Kickin (kickin in the front seat, sitting in the back seat...).  The assassination occurred on a Friday and when was shot the Secret Service yelled at Jackie Kennedy to "get down" (got to get down on Friday).  Part about the cold war and spread of communism are also referenced [everybody rushin' (russian)] and to top it all off, in the hotel that morning JFK declined a breakfast of sausage, eggs and toast for a bowl of Bran Flakes instead (got to have my bown, got to have my cereal).  Also, the following Monday JFK was supposed to sign a bill into law requiring all public schools to provide bus transportation for their students. (got to catch my bus...).  Now obviously, "fast lanes, switching lanes" refers to the arms race between the US and the USSR. Fast productions of nuclear weapons, switching up whoever had more control, etc."

About two minutes of quick online research was enough to prove that this was virtually entirely made up.  The driver of JFK's car was William Greer, not "Samuel Kickin."  There is apparently no truth to the whole "bran flakes" claim, nor to the "bus transportation bill" claim.  But so far, so what?  This is just another of those weird things, initially probably intended to be humorous, that someone wrote.  However, the whole thing has gone viral; I've been asked at least five times in the last three days if I have "heard that 'Friday' was about the JFK assassination."

Then, two days ago, I ran across a reference to a claim that I first saw in the 1970s -- that the Dogon tribe of Africa had prior knowledge, through contact with "ancient astronauts" from another planet, that the star Sirius had a companion star that was too small to see with the naked eye.  According to this story, they even got the orbital period of this star correct.  Aficionados of UFOs and aliens and so on just love this story, because if true, it would seem to be evidence that a relatively primitive tribe had information that they could only have gotten from an advanced society.

Of course, that last statement is literally true; the advanced society they got it from is France.  The anthropologist who first made the claim of the Dogon's knowledge, Marcel Griaule, is thought to be the one who "contaminated" the Dogon with outside information in the first place.  The discovery of Sirius' companion star ("Sirius B") was all over the news in the 1920s, when Griaule was working with the Dogon, and the Dogon themselves are peculiarly fascinated with the stars.  It doesn't take much of a reach to guess that Griaule was the source of the information, especially given that subsequent researchers into the Dogon culture found that the only ones who had actually heard of "po tolo," as they called Sirius B, were the people in the village Griaule had visited.

Nonetheless, this story is still circulating.  A search for the keywords "Sirius" and "Dogon" garnered 109,000 hits, and a quick perusal of the first three pages was enough to demonstrate that almost all of them buy Griaule's idea wholesale.  And this points to another, and more depressing conclusion; skeptical thought seems to travel slower than bullshit does.  Ridiculous ideas, like Griaule's claim that ancient astronauts had visited the Dogon, have more of a panache than do prosaic statements such as "Griaule told 'em himself, and then claimed he'd discovered something amazing."  Who would be motivated to tell a friend something like the latter?  While the former... well, you can see how that story might have a little more tendency to get passed along.

The eye-opener, for me, is how easy it is now for ideas to spread.  Prior to the internet, ideas moved as fast as people did, or as fast as books could be passed along.  Now, in the blink of an eye, an idea -- good or bad -- can travel halfway around the world.  And given the tendency of most people not to question sources that give an appearance of authority, it's hardly to be wondered at that "I read it on a website," or (even better) the "my friend sent me a link," has become the mode for meme spread. 

It should also always be a red flag for skeptics.  Websites like Snopes, which vets current stories for veracity, help to some extent; but there's no substitute for critical thinking and a little bit of good research, and also for responsible people refusing to pass along links to websites that claim that listening to Rebecca Black's song "Friday" is what drove Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate JFK, and afterwards she escaped to Mali where she lived with the Dogon, until she caught a ride on an alien spacecraft and escaped to Sirius B, where she now lives as Barry Manilow's love slave.

Although, you have to admit, that does make for a pretty plausible story.