The Earth's dance partner

Ever heard of 3753 Cruithne?

I hadn't, which is surprising considering my obsession with astronomy.  It's an asteroid which is in a 1:1 orbital resonance with Earth -- in simpler terms, it is co-orbital.  It's sometimes been called "Earth's second moon," which is inaccurate because it doesn't orbit the Earth; in fact, its actual orbit is highly elliptical.  At its perigee, 3753 Cruithne is near the orbit of Mercury, and is outside the orbit of Mars at its apogee.

[Nota bene: the name "Cruithne" is from Gaelic, and because of the strange letter-to-phoneme correspondence in the Gaelic language, is pronounced "kroo-in-ya."  It's the name of an obscure king of the ancient Picts; its discoverer, astronomer Duncan Waldron, is Scottish, which probably explains the choice.]

Orbital resonance is one restricted solution to the more general three-body problem, which has yet to be solved by physicists.  The orbital interactions between two objects is thoroughly understood; add a third, and suddenly the math kind of blows up in your face.  You can run computer simulations starting with three objects of specific masses and velocities and see what happens, but a general set of equations governing any three (or more) body system has proven to be impossibly complex.  It's known that a few starting points generate stable orbits (resonance being one of those), and lots more of them prove unstable and eventually result in the objects colliding or flying apart, but trying to come up with the overarching mathematical scheme is currently out of reach.

3753 Cruithne's orbit, at least from our vantage point here on Earth, is a strange one.  If you were out in space, looking down on the Solar System, it wouldn't seem odd; an ellipse, tilted at a little less than twenty degrees away from the orbital plane of Earth:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Derivative work: User:Jecowa, Orbits of Cruithne and Earth, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But because of the weird perspective of being in a non-inertial (accelerated) reference frame, what we see on Earth is quite different.  As we watch 3753 Cruithne, it appears to be traveling in a bean-shaped orbit, first approaching us and then backing away as if we'd said something inappropriate:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons User:Jecowa, Horseshoe orbit of Cruithne from the perspective of Earth, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Makes me realize how hard it is to come up with any reasonable model of moving objects in non-inertial reference frames.  Looking at 3753 Cruithne's strange wanderings almost leaves me sympathetic with Ptolemy and his nested epicycles.  (Isaac Newton, who understood the problem better than just about anyone else, wasn't nearly so forgiving, and called Ptolemy "an outrageous fraud.")

Its orbit classifies it as an Aten asteroid, a group of asteroids whose orbits cross that of the Earth.  For those of you who are of an apocalyptic bent, however, no need to lose sleep over 3753 Cruithne; its orbital tilt makes it no threat.  Its position has been run forward by computer models for thousands of years, and it has a zero chance of striking Earth.

That's assuming the orbital resonance remains stable, of course, and there's no guarantee it will.  There are other players in this gravitational game of pinball besides the Earth and the Sun; Venus and Mercury also come close to 3753 Cruithne on occasion, and a near pass could give the asteroid enough of a gravitational tug to destroy the resonance and destabilize the orbit.  The great likelihood if this happens, though, is it falling into the Sun or being flung out of the Solar System entirely; the chance of some gravitational slingshot effect propelling it into the Earth is about as close to zero as you can calculate.

So that's today's astronomical oddity that I, at least, had never heard of.  An asteroid in an ongoing celestial dance with the Earth.  Just goes to show that to find strange new stuff out in space, you don't need to peer out at the far reaches of the universe -- there's enough right here near home to keep the astronomers busy for a long while.

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

The celestial dance

It's interesting how the approach to science has changed in the last four centuries.

It's easy to have the (mistaken) impression that as long as we humans have been doing anything scientific, we've always done it the same way -- looked at the evidence and data, then tried to come up with an explanation.  But science in Europe before the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was largely done the other way around; you constructed your model from pure thought, based on a system of how you believed things should act, and once you had the model, you cast about for information supporting it.

It's why Aristotle's statement that the rate of speed of a falling object is directly proportional to its mass stood essentially unchallenged for over a millennium and a half despite the fact that it's something any second grader could figure out was wrong simply by dropping two different-sized rocks from the same height and observing they hit the ground at exactly the same time.  As odd as it is to our twenty-first century scientific mindset, the idea of figuring out if your claim is correct by testing it really didn't catch on until the 1700s.  Which is why the church fathers got so hugely pissed off at Galileo; using a simple experiment he showed that Aristotle got it wrong, and then followed that up by figuring out how things up in the sky moved (such as the moons of Jupiter, first observed by Galileo through the telescope he made).  And this didn't result in the church fathers saying, "Whoa, okay, I guess we need to rethink this," but their putting Galileo on trial and ultimately under permanent house arrest.

That "think first, observe later" approach to science plagued our attempts to understand the universe for a long time after Galileo; people first came up with how they thought things should work, often based on completely non-scientific reasons, then looked for data to support their guess.  That we've come as far as we have is a tribute to scientists who were able to break out of the straitjacket of what the Fourth Doctor in Doctor Who called "not altering their views to fit the facts, but altering the facts to fit their views."

One of the best examples of this was the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler.  He was a deeply religious man, and lived in a time when superstition ruled pretty much everything -- in fact, Kepler's mother, Katharina (Guldenmann) Kepler, narrowly escaped being hanged for witchcraft.  Kepler, and most other European astronomers from his time and earlier, were as much astrologers as scientists; they expected the heavens to operate by some kind of law of divine celestial perfection, where objects moved in circles (anything else was viewed as imperfect) and their movements had a direct effect on life down here on Earth.

At the beginning, Kepler tried to extend his conviction of the mathematical perfection of the cosmos to the distances at which the planets revolved around the Sun.  He became convinced that the spacing of the planets' orbits was determined by conforming to the five Platonic solids -- cube, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, icosahedron, and octahedron -- convex polyhedra whose sides are made up only of identical equal-sided polygons.  He tried nesting them one inside the other to see if the ratios of their spacing could be made to match the estimated spacing of the planets, and got close, but not close enough.  One thing Kepler had going for him was he was firmly committed to the truth, and self-aware enough to know when he was fudging things to make them fit.  So he gave up on the Platonic solids, and went back to "we don't know why they're spaced as they are, but they still travel in perfect circles" -- until careful analysis of planetary position data by the Danish observational astronomer Tycho Brahe showed him again that he was close, but not quite close enough.

This was the moment that set Kepler apart from his contemporaries; because instead of shrugging off the discrepancy and sticking to his model that the heavens had to move in perfect circles, he jettisoned the whole thing and went back to the data to figure out what sort of orbits did make sense of the observations.  After considerable work, he came up with what we now call Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion, including that planets move in "imperfect" elliptical, not circular, orbits, with the Sun at one focus.

Start with the data, and see where it drives you.  It's the basis of all good science.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gonfer, Kepler-second-law, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What got me thinking about Kepler and his abandonment of the Platonic-solid-spacing idea was a paper this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics showing that even though Kepler initially was on the wrong track, there are sometimes odd mathematical regularities that pop up in the natural world.  (A well-known one is how often the Fibonacci series shows up in the organization of things like flower petals and the scales of pine cones.)  The paper, entitled "Six Transiting Planets and a Chain of Laplace Resonances in TOI-178," by a team led by Adrien Leleu of the Université de Genève, showed that even though hard data dashed Kepler's hope of the motion of the heavens being driven by some concept of mathematical perfection, there is a weird pattern to the spacing of planets in certain situations.  The patterns, though, are driven not by some abstract philosophy, but by physics.

In physics, resonance occurs when the physical constraints of a system make them oscillate at a rate called the "natural frequency."  A simple example is the swing of a pendulum; a pendulum of a given length and mass distribution only will swing back and forth at one fixed rate, which is why they can be used in timekeeping.  The motion of planets (or moons) is also an oscillating system, and a given set of objects of particular masses and distances from their center of gravity will tend to fall into resonance, the same as if you try to swing a pendulum at a different rate than the rate at which it "wants to go," then let it be, it'll pretty much immediately revert to swinging at its natural frequency.

The three largest moons of Jupiter exhibit resonance; they've locked into orbits that are the most stable for the system, which turns out to be a 4:2:1 resonance, meaning that the innermost (Io) makes two full orbits in the time the next one (Europa) makes a single orbit, and four full orbits in the time it takes for the farthest (Ganymede).

This week's paper found a more complex resonance pattern in five of the planets around TOI-178, a star two hundred light years away in the constellation Sculptor.  It's a 18:9:6:4:3 resonance chain -- the nearest planet orbits eighteen times as the farthest orbits once, the next farthest nine times as the farthest orbits once, and so on.  This pattern was locked in despite the fact that the planets are all quite different from each other; some are small, rocky planets like Earth, others low-density gaseous planets like Neptune.

"This contrast between the rhythmic harmony of the orbital motion and the disorderly densities certainly challenges our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems," said study lead author Adrien Leleu, in an interview with Science Daily.

So the dance of the celestial bodies is orderly, and shows some really peculiar regularities that you wouldn't have guessed.  But unlike Kepler's favored (but ultimately abandoned) idea that the perfect heavens had to be arranged by perfect mathematics, the Leleu et al. paper shows us that those patterns only emerge by analysis of the data itself, rather than the faulty top-down attempt to force the data to conform to the way you think things should be.  Once you open your mind up to going where the hard evidence leads, that's when the true wonders of the universe begin to emerge.

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

Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

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

Frequency flim-flam

One of the things that strikes me, both about many purveyors of alt-med bullshit and their customers, is how little effort they exert even to make their arguments sound like legitimate science.

I mean, it's not like the science is inaccessible, or something.  Whatever else you can say about Wikipedia, it's a pretty good resource for quick, substantially accurate information.  (In fact, a 2005 study found that Wikipedia was close to Encyclopedia Brittanica in terms of overall accuracy.)

So finding out how stuff works is, honestly, only a click away.  Which is why the link a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a couple of days ago is appalling on so many levels.

It's called "A Bright Future for Lyme -- AmpCoil."  What it claims is that it can reduce the symptoms of Lyme disease by 84-93% through "non-invasive sound wave vibrations" delivered by a "pulsed electromagnetic field."  I live in an area of the United States where Lyme is common, and have two friends who have struggled dreadfully with it, so naturally, I wanted to know what this was all about.  I clicked the "Science & Technology" link they provided.  Here's what I found:

When parts of your body become stressed or diseased, they no longer produce the correct sound vibrations.  In other words, your body and its organs are not vibrating at its optimal resonant frequency.  By introducing the tones of healthy organs, minerals, nutrients, electrolytes, enzymes, flora, etc. back into your body, you can relax knowing that the rejuvenation and restoration process is underway... 

All matter (everything around us) is a result of a frequency and if you amplify the frequency, the structure of the matter will vibrate and change.  To many, sound vibration is simply something you hear such as music.  The idea that frequency can have an effect on our familiar physical reality seems a far-fetched notion.  But it's not far-fetched at all - it's quantum mechanics! 

It’s hard to argue against the fact that music makes you feel good, but can sound vibration actually shift your body?  Everything in nature owes its existence solely and completely to frequency and sound vibration.  Sound is the basis for form and shape and the component that holds life together.

Well, I think this might be the odds-on favorite for the Most Highly Distilled Bullshit Ever contest.  Amongst the inaccuracies I found:

1. Disease has nothing to do with "resonant frequencies."  Resonant frequencies (also called natural modes of vibration) are the modes of vibration that an object tends to oscillate at in the absence of a driving or damping force.  A simple example is a child's swingset.  You may have noticed how hard it is to get a swing to oscillate at anything but one frequency -- this is because that is its resonant frequency, the one that requires the least amount of energy input.  It's true that everything has a particular resonant frequency, but it has nothing to do with disease, all it has to do with is mass distribution around the axis of oscillation, which is why you so seldom see sick swingsets.
2. "Amplifying the frequency" doesn't make things improve, all it does is (if you're talking about light) move it toward the violet end of the spectrum, or (if you're talking about sound) raise the pitch.  High frequencies aren't good and low frequencies bad, or else everyone would instinctively prefer piccolos over cellos.  If anything, I suspect the opposite is true.
3. Matter is not the "result of a frequency."  Matter, or at least its distinctive property of mass, is apparently the result of the interaction of its constituent fundamental particles with the Higgs field.  "Matter is a result of frequency" comes as close to a meaningless pseudoscience-babble statement as anything I can think of.
4. Sound vibrations and electromagnetic field vibrations are not the same thing.  At all.  Sound vibrations are compression waves in a medium such as air or water.  EMF vibrations are oscillating changes in the electromagnetic field in space (and do not require a medium to travel through, which mystified the hell out of scientists at the turn of the 20th century, until Einstein came along and said, "Hey, guys, take a look at this.")  Light is an example of an EMF oscillation.
5. Quantum mechanics has zero to do with the effect of sound waves on matter.
6. Sound vibrations have zero to do with holding matter together.

And that's just from the bit I posted.  If you'll check out the link, you'll see that it goes on for pages and pages in that fashion.  Along the way, you find out that the AmpCoil -- the thing they're peddling -- is supposed to cure not only Lyme disease, but fibromyalgia, headaches/migraines, chronic back pain, arthritis, and a host of autoimmune diseases.

One other statement from their home page stood out, that I just have to tell you about:

Imagine the possibilities if harmful pathogens could no longer hide from beneficial hertz frequencies by burrowing into cell walls?

From one sentence, I have two further responses:

1. What the fuck is a "hertz frequency?"  "Hertz" is the unit for measuring frequency.  So "hertz frequency" is a little like saying "inch distance" or "liter volume."
2. I'm not terribly concerned about Lyme pathogens burrowing into my cell walls, for the very good reason that my cells don't have cell walls, given that I'm not a plant.

Then, at the bottom of the page, in teensy print, is the following:

AmpCoil units have not been evaluated by governments and are Consumer Products for personal use.  Disclaimer: The AmpCoil System is not intended for use in the diagnosis, treatment, cure or prevention of any disease, medical condition, physical or psychological disorder.  It should not be considered a replacement for medical advice or treatment.

Say what?  What, exactly, do you call the following statements, taken right from their website?

• Safe & simple alternative Lyme treatment for everyone.
• The AmpCoil, powered by the BetterGuide App, can help reshape the form and function of vibrational imbalances in the body by re-tuning each and all parts of one’s physiology and anatomy.  AmpCoil is like a tuning fork for the human body!
• The AmpCoil is a non-invasive PEMF sound technology that brings the body back in tune, vibrating in its original, pure state faster than you might expect.

So okay, enough for the ranting.  But what appalls me about all of this is how quickly these claims would vanish into a puff of foul-smelling vapor if you just looked up some of this shit on Wikipedia.  That's all you have to do.  You don't need a Ph.D. in physics or biology.  You don't need to be a microbiologist.  You don't have to understand how to build a machine that can deliver a pulsed electromagnetic field.

All you have to be able to do is to go online and read critically for about five minutes.

What's worst is that there's legitimate research out there on the effect of electromagnetic field stimulation on a variety of disorders.  TCMS (trans-cranial magnetic stimulation) has shown promise in treating cases of intractable depression, for example.  But you will get nowhere (1) diagnosing yourself, and (2) buying an electric field generator, and (3) applying it to random body parts.  All that'll happen is either the placebo effect, or worse, you'll avoid getting legitimate medical care for an actual disease.

Amazingly, the scientists actually know what they're doing.  Listen to them.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

So that's today's dip in the deep end.  Bottom line: do some research.  If someone makes a claim, see if you can find independent corroboration.  And remember what Tim Minchin has to say about this kind of stuff: "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

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

This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just mindblowing fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.

Rainbow DNA resonance

After yesterday's post, about Bodie Hodge, the creationist whose ideas are so loony they're almost inspired, today we take a look at his counterpart in the world of woo-woo.

Ever heard of Leonard Horowitz?  He's a guy who's been around a while, and who in fact is well-known enough to merit a page in The Skeptic's Dictionary, wherein he is described as "... an evangelical huckster.  The only people who love him are talk show hosts and the good people who are so paranoid that they will believe anything that supports their deranged thought processes."

Which is pretty unequivocal.

Horowitz himself was a dentist, who despite the medical training that is required for the field, evidently never absorbed much in the way of standard biological information, nor (for that matter) common sense.  He claims, for example, that flu vaccines cause sterility, which I know will come as a great shock to the thousands of individuals who get flu shots yearly and go on to have children.   Instead of getting a flu shot, Horowitz says, you should merely dose up on vitamin C and D, and purchase from his website (c'mon, you knew he was selling something) "alkalanizing water" and "covalently-bonded silver hydrosols" that will render you invincible.

Dr. Horowitz is nothing if not modest.  On his website, he says the following about himself: 

There is no more knowledgeable, credible, credentialed, and prolific professional in the world addressing the duplicity of geopolitics and economics influencing “healthcare,” and the solutions to these and other urgent problems affecting global populations, than Dr. Horowitz.

So there you are.  

He also has a lot to say about his own books, which are of course brilliant:

His 2007 decryption of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous drawing revealed the mathematics of LOVE: The Real da Vinci CODE; and his follow-up text, the most monumental of his 30-year career, The Book of 528: Prosperity Key of LOVE, reveals “God’s creative technology,” available for revolutionizing music, recording artistry, healthcare and medicine, environmental protection, natural resource restoration, along with civilization’s transformation as an “enlightened species” choosing peaceful sustainable collaboration versus murderous degenerative competition and lethal consumption.

Two other wonderful Horowitz creations are the "Water Resonator" (a sticker you apply to the water jug in your fridge) that "displays the precise sound frequencies of universal creation to restore nature's resonance energy and electromagnetic purity of water," and the "DNA Enhancer," another sticker that you place on your acupuncture points, which works because "DNA is nature's bioacoustic and electromagnetic (that is, 'spiritual') energy receiver, signal transformer, and quantum sound and light transmitter."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But by far my favorite Horowitz claim is that the standard musical tuning of A = 440 hertz is gradually turning music listeners into mindless zombies.  The problem, apparently, is that the "natural" tuning of A = 444 hertz was suppressed by the Rockefellers, who realized that tuning orchestral instruments to 440 would allow them control the minds of anyone exposed to music.  The whole thing involves the Illuminati, the Federal Reserve, Lucifer, Muzak, the Manhattan Project, Elvis Presley, Pat Robertson, the Nazis, Pythagoras, Nikola Tesla, and the Beatles.  Which, I believe, makes it the single most comprehensive conspiracy theory ever invented, needing only a mention of HAARP to make it a shoo-in for the Gold Medal of Woo-Woo.

You can wade through his website, if you like; just the illustrations make it one of the most inadvertently hilarious things I've ever read.   But in case you don't have the time, inclination, or spare brain cells to kill, here's the abstract of a paper he wrote (yes, it's set up like a traditional scientific paper, with an abstract, introduction, background, methodology, and so on):

This article details events in musical history that are central to understanding and treating modern psychopathology, social aggression, political corruption, genetic dysfunction, and cross-cultural degeneration of traditional values risking life on earth.  This history concerns A=440Hz “standard tuning,” and the Rockefeller Foundation’s military commercialization of music.  The monopolization of the music industry features this imposed frequency that is “herding” populations into greater aggression, psychosocial agitation, and emotional distress predisposing people to physical illnesses and financial impositions profiting the agents, agencies, and companies engaged in the monopoly.   Alternatively, the most natural, instinctively attractive, A=444Hz (C5=528Hz) frequency that is most vividly displayed botanically has been suppressed.  That is, the “good vibrations” that the plant kingdom obviously broadcasts in its greenish-yellow display, remedial to emotional distress, social aggression, and more, has been musically censored.  Thus, a musical revolution is needed to advance world health and peace, and has already begun with musicians retuning their instruments to perform optimally, impact audiences beneficially, and restore integrity to the performing arts and sciences.  Music makers are thus urged to communicate and debate these facts, condemn the militarization of music that has been secretly administered, and retune instruments and voices to frequencies most sustaining and healing.

Myself, I like the "greenish-yellow good vibrations" part the best, and will now immediately re-tune my flute to A = 444 hertz.  (I'd also attempt to do the same with my bagpipes, but given that "soothing psychosocial agitation" is really not something most people associate with bagpipe music, I probably shouldn't bother.  Besides, tuning bagpipes is kind of a losing proposition in the first place.)

Oh, yeah, and he says that 528 Hertz vibrations "resonate the heart of rainbows."  Whatever the fuck that means.

His "About the Author" bit (in case you didn't get that far) also makes for good reading, and includes a mention of various accolades he's received:  "Dr. Horowitz has been honored as a 'World Leading Intellectual' by officials of the World Organization for Natural Medicine for his revelations in the musical mathematics of creationism that are impacting the fields of metaphysics, creative consciousness, sacred geometry, musicology, and natural healing according to his life’s mission―to help fulfill humanity’s Divine destiny to actualize world peace and permacultural sustainability."

Whoooo.  Those are some serious credentials, dude.  You had me at the "revelations in the musical mathematics of creationism" part, not to mention the whole "sacred geometry" thing, which always makes me picture people worshiping equilateral triangles and chanting Euclid's Postulates while burning incense.

Anyway.  That's our woo-woo of the day, and one of my particular favorites.  Whatever else you can say about Dr. Horowitz, he's certainly earnest, and one should never discount the humor value of some of these people.  So thanks for the chuckles, Lenny.  Keep up the good work.

Music of the spheres

When I went to graduate school, I think the most surprising thing for me was that we were supposed to think creatively about science.  While I had, for the most part, excelled in my science classes in high school and college, they had mostly required me only to master concepts and then be able to demonstrate my mastery on an exam.  I had never had to synthesize, put ideas together in a novel way, apply concepts from one field in an entirely different one.  Nor had I been expected to critique ideas or arguments; I had merely been expected to understand them.

So my leap into the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Washington was a bit of a rude awakening, and was (on the whole) kind of a failure.  I was not, at that point in my life, prepared intellectually for the challenge of applying scientific ideas in a creative way, largely because I'd never had any practice in doing so.

No wonder, then, that I lasted exactly one semester in the School of Oceanography

I have since come to appreciate the role of creativity, lateral "outside of the box" thinking, and pure cleverness in approaching scientific questions.  I still suspect I wouldn't be very good at it -- on the whole, I think it was a good decision to leave the educational track headed toward research -- but at least I understand now that in science, the capacity for creative synthesis is as important as pure knowledge.

I ran into an especially good example of that yesterday, in a field that has always been a source of fascination for me; the study of exoplanets.  There have thus far been over a thousand exoplanets discovered, with new ones being reported all the time.  The most exciting part is when one is found that is in the "Goldilocks Zone" (not too hot, not too cold, juuuuuussst right), where liquid water can exist, and therefore where life is thought to be far more likely.

One of the most exciting planetary systems so far discovered is called "Trappist-1," and is about forty light years from Earth.  Trappist-1 has no less than seven Earth-sized planets, at least a few of which are thought to be in the habitable zone.  But the coolest thing about the Trappist-1 system is that an astrophysicist has explained the relative rates of revolution of the seven planets...

... using principles of harmony in music.

Artist's conception of the Trappist-1 system [image courtesy of the Spitzer Space Telescope and NASA/JPL]

What's funny about this is that famed astronomer Johannes Kepler nearly drove himself insane trying to show that the orbits of the planets in our Solar System were connected somehow to the "five Platonic solids" -- cube, octahedron, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron -- thereby proving that there was some divine order in the heavens rather than (as it appeared) the planets all orbiting at different distances in a seemingly random fashion.  He wrote a book called the Mysterium Cosmographicum (Secret of the Universe) elaborating on this theory.  (Kepler had evidently never heard that Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit, because the full title of his book is 46 words long, which is why everyone just calls it the Mysterium Cosmographicum.)

In any case, Kepler's attempt at forcing the Solar System into a pattern based on the five Platonic solids was a complete flop, and it was only after he abandoned this idea that he made the discovery for which he became famous -- that planets travel in ellipses, not circles, and that regardless of the distance they are from the Sun, their orbits sweep out equal areas in equal times.

In a discovery that would have warmed the cockles of Kepler's heart, a team of astronomers, led by Daniel Tamayo of the University of Toronto-Scarborough, just published a paper last week in Astrophysical Journal Letters suggesting that while the orbits of planets have nothing to do with the five Platonic solids, they do have something to do with the phenomenon of resonance -- when the oscillation of one body influences the oscillation of another.  Tamayo found that the seven planets around Trappist-1 are in stable orbits because they are in a resonance pattern that resembles the relationships between frequencies of notes in a chord.  For example, the second planet in the system completes five orbits in the time taken for the innermost planet to make eight; the fourth planet makes two revolutions every time the third one makes three; and so on.  The combined effect of this is to make the entire system operate in a regular, predictable fashion.

The coolest part of this is that Tamayo turned the periods of revolution for all seven planets into musical notes, with the relationships between the pitches representing the ratios between the period length.  You can hear his recording of the musical representation of the Trappist-1 system at the link above.

You'll be listening to the actual music of the spheres.

"I think Trappist is the most musical system we'll ever discover," said Matt Russo, who is a member of Tamayo's team as well as being a musician, and who designed computer simulations of planetary systems in musical resonance (and ones that were not) to see if they remained stable over time.

Tamayo compared resonance in a planetary system to musicians in an orchestra.  "It's not enough for members merely to keep time," he said.  "Simulating the formation of a system in its birth disk is analogous to an orchestra tuning itself before playing.  When we create these harmonized systems, we find that the majority survive for as long as we run our supercomputer simulations."

So there you have it; a melding of music and astrophysics.  I find myself in awe of this sort of research, mostly because I can't imagine my coming up with an idea this creative myself.  So maybe it's best I decided on teaching and writing as a career.  I may not have much of a facility for connecting disparate concepts myself, but I certainly love to tell others about the delightful research of people who do.

Deep waters

There's something about water that is mysterious.  It comprises, by some estimates, an average of 65% of the mass of living tissue.  We're drawn to it, and not just because we need a steady source of it to remain alive.  Look at how attracted we are by lakes, rivers, and oceans; consider how much more people will pay for houses with a view of a body of water.

Even the chemists tell us that water is weird.  It has a number of odd properties, including high polarity, specific heat, and heat of vaporization, and is (to my knowledge) the only common substance that expands when it freezes.  (If it weren't for this peculiarity, ice would sink, and bodies of water would freeze from the bottom up -- so there would probably be a permanent ice layer at the bottom of the world's lakes and oceans.)

So I guess it's no surprise that the woo-woos love making claims about water.  It seems like lately I've been seeing more and more of them -- mostly advertisements for devices that allegedly make your water... better.  Or healthier.  Or more nutritious.  Or waterier.  It's hard to tell, sometimes, exactly what they are claiming, because they don't seem all that sure about it themselves.

Take the "MRET Water Activator," offered for sale by the Sound & Consciousness Institute of San Francisco.  Here's the claim:

The patented i-H2O Activation System is the most effective hydration technology available today. This easy-to-use wellness breakthrough allows you to transform ordinary, filtered water into ultra-hydrating, "living water" within 30 minutes. During the automated i-H2O activation process, the chaotic structure of water molecules is transformed into a single-file alignment, mimicking the body's own natural state of healthy cell water, thereby creating optimally energized, bio-available water.

I don't know about you, but the idea of my water molecules marching along in single file is a little... creepy.  But no worries, because they put you on notice right away that they haven't the vaguest idea what they're talking about:

This device infuses the Schumann Resonance (7.83 hertz) into the water. The Schumann Resonance is an electromagnetic frequency that resonates in our atmosphere between the earth and the ionosphere. It is triggered by lightning, which strikes every second somewhere on the planet. Based on the laws of brainwave entrainment, this frequency entrains every brain on the planet (including animals) into this state, which is right on the threshold of the brainwave states of theta and alpha. In fact, over millions of years, we have become addicted to this frequency and it is a core part of who we are as humans. However, the problem is that this frequency gets obscured in cities by all of the ambient electromagnetism. NASA has found that astronauts actually get sick when they go outside of the atmosphere and don't receive the frequency. Currently, all astronauts now receive this frequency electromagnetically.

What is it with these people and the Schumann Resonance?  They love the Schumann Resonance.  For those of you who aren't aficionados of obscure features of atmospheric physics, the Schumann Resonance is an ultra-low-frequency electromagnetic standing wave in the ionosphere.  Here's how Wikipedia describes it:

This global electromagnetic resonance phenomenon is named after physicist Winfried Otto Schumann who predicted it mathematically in 1952. Schumann resonances occur because the space between the surface of the Earth and the conductive ionosphere acts as a closed waveguide. The limited dimensions of the Earth cause this waveguide to act as a resonant cavity for electromagnetic waves in the ELF band. The cavity is naturally excited by electric currents in lightning. Schumann resonances are the principal background in the electromagnetic spectrum beginning at 3 Hz and extend to 60 Hz, and appear as distinct peaks at extremely low frequencies (ELF) around 7.8 (fundamental), 13.7, 19.6, 25.5, 31.4, 37.3 and 43.2 Hz.

It has nothing to do with brainwaves.  It is not "obscured in cities."  NASA doesn't "give this frequency to astronauts."  And we are not "addicted to this frequency."

Oh, and there's no way to "infuse a frequency" into water.

If you keep reading, though, the claims just get wilder and wilder.  "Activated water" that has been "infused with the Schumann resonance" has the property of "super liquidity."  It's "bio-available."  (As opposed to ordinary water, which is just "available.")  And then after telling you how all of this nonsense has to do with the special properties of water, they tell you you can use their device to "activate" other substances...

...such as oil.  Which last I checked doesn't have much water in it.

If "MRET Activated Water" isn't bad enough, just today I ran into another claim, this one that we should all be drinking water in its "fourth phase."  What the hell could that mean, you might ask?

Well, you all learned in grade school how substances usually exist in one of three states -- solid, liquid, and gas.  (As you'll see in a moment, that is a dramatic oversimplification.)  But these people claim that these phases somehow aren't good enough, that we should be drinking water in a "fourth phase:"

4th Phase is a liquid water purifier!

It removes and renders harmless an enormous number of contaminants that are commonly found in water, whether from natural or man-made sources. It then puts water into what scientists are now calling the fourth phase of water (a liquid that has a beautiful, crystalline structure to it).

Ah, yes, those conveniently anonymous "scientists," always ready and waiting to be trotted out to support whatever idiotic claim is being made.

So what, exactly, is this stuff?  Check out the FAQs, and you find out:

4th Phase is a concentrated, water based solution of ionic minerals. The mother concentrate is made by extracting mineral salts from the stone, biotite mica, which are then diluted in purified water, bottled and sold, primarily as a liquid based water purifier. The resulting minerals are in sulfate form rather than the chloride form that most companies offer (The requirement for sulfur is nearly twice the requirement for chloride in the human body).

This, they tell us, comes out of the work of Dr. Gerald Pollack of the University of Washington, who tells us the following:

Dr. Pollack asserts that water, in it’s [sic] maximum potential as a substance that enlivens and hydrates us, needs to be highly energized and it reaches this high energy state through a variety of ways, one of which is that it creates this liquid crystalline structure when it is in the presence of external energy sources like light (sunlight, for example.) When water is in this high energy state, it mimics the water that surrounds our cells and is found throughout the body, and it has many other properties as well.

I'm so relieved to hear that now the water in my body will have many other properties!  That sounds great!  I'd hate to think that my water had "few properties."

What's interesting is how these people are using half-truths, incorrectly interpreted research, and out-and-out falsehoods to sell a product.  For example, the whole premise of a "fourth phase" of water, a mystical and energized phase, ignores the fact that the chemists have known for decades that water can exist in at least eighteen different phases (fifteen solid phases, plus liquid, vapor, and supercritical fluid), depending on temperature and pressure:

And unfortunately for these claimants, here at sea-level atmospheric pressure and typical room temperature, we're stuck in one boring old phase: liquid.

Now, Dr. Pollack himself, as far as I have been able to find, seems to have some degree of credibility in his field, and has been the author of a good many peer-reviewed papers.  On the other hand, the fault may not lie entirely with the purveyors of "4th Phase" hijacking Pollack's work.  At least one of Pollack's colleagues, neurobiologist Alexander Stein, has given an evaluation of Pollack's research that is nothing short of scathing:

Dr. Pollack is an embarrassment to his field and his University. This book [Cells, Gels, and the Engines of Life] is a collection of old results (from as far back as 50 years ago) that puzzled the world's scientists at the time they were first published. There has been much progress in the intervening decades that Dr. Pollack would do well to read and understand. All of the ancient science upon which Pollack's argument depends has since been explained or refuted. People are entitled to write, or say, whatever they choose. However, that doesn't necessarily make it true. Before purchasing this book, people should browse Dr. Pollack's publication record. They should note that in those instances when his science has escaped the peer-review process, references to his ridiculous opinions about cell biology have been omitted. Prospective buyers should also note that this book was published using the private funds of Pollack's family, and not solicited or endorsed by any scientific organization. I fully support anyone who wishes to read this comedy of ignorance, provided they then turn the pages of a good cell biology textbook. This book may change the way you look at the world around you, but so will psychoactive drugs and head trauma. Pollack is a laughing-stock. He will tell you that he is a persecuted genius. It is important to remember, though, that sometimes people are laughed at because they are genuine fools.

Ouchie.  So suffices to note that Pollack himself may not exactly be the solidest foundation on which to rest your claim.

Now, I'm not a chemist, and I would be unqualified to comment upon Pollack's research into the properties of water; but I do teach biology, and I can say without particular fear of error that the claims of the "4th Phase" people with respect to the biological effects of this Magic Water are bogus.  The bottom line: save your money.  Plain old tap water (in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, at least) is safe, hydrates you just fine, and has the additional advantage of being cheap.

So, there you have it; yet another example of combining "a fool and his money are soon parted" and "there's a sucker born every minute."  Myself, I think you can solve the whole thing by switching to red wine.  Except... uh-oh...

Tomorrow: Do the antioxidants in red wine actually prevent cancer?  Or do people just like getting drunk?