Egyptian light speed

There's a claim I've now seen three times on social media stating that the ancient Egyptians knew the speed of light.

This is pretty outlandish right from the get-go, as there is no evidence the Egyptians had invented, or even had access to, any kind of advanced technology.  Plus, even with (relatively) modern technology, the first reasonably decent estimate of the speed of light wasn't made until 1676, when Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer used the difference in the timing of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter when the Earth was moving toward them as compared to when the Earth was moving away from them, and came up with an estimate of 225,300,000 meters per second -- not too shabby given the limited technology of the time (the actual answer is just shy of 300,000,000 meters per second).

But there's something about those ancient Egyptians, isn't there?  There have been "secrets of the Pyramids" claims around for years, mostly of the form that if you take the area of the base of the Pyramid of Khufu in square furlongs and divide it by the height in smoots, and multiply times four, and add King Solomon's shoe size in inches, you get the mass of the Earth in troy ounces.

Okay, I made all that up, because when I read stuff about the "secrets of the Pyramids" it makes me want to take Ockham's razor and slit my wrists with it.  But I was forced to look at the topic at least a little bit when the aforementioned post about the speed of light started popping up on social media, especially when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia said, "You have got to deal with this."

The gist is that the speed of light in meters per second (299,792,458) is the same sequence of numbers as the latitude of the Pyramid of Khufu (29.9792458 degrees north).  Which, if true, is actually a little weird.  But let's look at it a tad closer, shall we?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jerome Bon from Paris, France, Great Pyramid of Giza (2427530661), CC BY 2.0]

29.9792458 degrees of latitude is really specific.  One degree is approximately 111 kilometers, so getting a measurement of location down to seven decimal places is pretty impressive.  That last decimal place -- the ten-millionths place -- corresponds to a distance of 0.0111 meters, or a little over a centimeter.

So are they sure that last digit is an 8?  Measuring the position of the Great Pyramid to the nearest centimeter is a little dicey, given that the Great Pyramid is big (thus the name).  Even if the claim is that they're measuring the position of the top -- which is unclear -- the location of the top has some wiggle room, as it doesn't come to a perfect point.

But if you're just saying "somewhere on the Great Pyramid," there's a lot of wiggle room.  The base of the Pyramid of Khufu is about 230 meters on an edge, so that means that one-centimeter accuracy turns into "somewhere within 23,000 centimeters."

Not so impressive, really.

There's a second problem, however, which is the units used in all the measurements in the claim.  The second wasn't adopted as a unit of time until the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656.  The meter as a unit of length wasn't proposed until 1668, and was not adopted until 1790.  (And some countries still don't use the metric system.  *glares at fellow Americans*)  So why would the ancient Egyptians have expressed the speed of light -- even assuming they could figure it out -- in meters per second, and not cubits per sidereal year, or whatever the fuck crazy units of measurement they used?

Oh, and while we're at it, the first person to slice a circle up into 360 degrees -- the basis, of course, of our system of latitude -- was Hipparchus, who lived in the second century B.C.E.  Which, not to put too fine a point on it, was two-thousand-odd years after the Great Pyramids were built.  So to sum it up: what we're being asked to believe is that the ancient Egyptians sited the Great Pyramid based upon a quantity they didn't know how to measure, expressed in terms of three units that hadn't been invented yet.

Makes perfect sense.

So as expected, this claim is pretty ridiculous, and not even vaguely plausible if you take it apart logically.  Not that there was any doubt of that.  In fact, this is only one of dozens of examples of pseudoscientific metrology, which is the general name for claims that the measurements of ancient structures have some relevance to scientific findings.  The bottom line is that the ancient Egyptians were cool people, and the pyramids they built are really impressive, but they weren't magical or advanced or (heaven help us) being assisted by aliens.

No matter what you may have learned from the historical documentary Stargate.

Oh, and for the record, I didn't invent the unit of "smoot" for length.  A smoot is 1.70 meters, which was the height of Harvard student Oliver R. Smoot, who in 1958 got drunk with his fraternity buddies, and as they were dragging the semi-conscious Smoot home, they decided to measure the length of Harvard Bridge in Smoot-heights.  It turned out to be 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus the length of Oliver R. Smoot's ear.

And considering they were drunk at the time, it's pretty impressive that they thought of including error bars in their measurement.  Better than the damn Egyptian-speed-of-light people, who couldn't even get their measurement to within plus or minus 230 meters.

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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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Light speed

There's a claim I've now seen three times on social media that claims the ancient Egyptians knew the speed of light.

This is a pretty outlandish claim right from the get-go, as there is no evidence the Egyptians had invented, or even had access to, any kind of advanced technology.  Plus, even with (relatively) modern technology, the first reasonably decent estimate of the speed of light wasn't made until 1676, when Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer used the difference in the timing of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter when the Earth was moving toward them as compared to when the Earth was moving away from them, and came up with an estimate of 225,300,000 meters per second -- not too shabby given the limited technology of the time (the actual answer is just shy of 300,000,000 meters per second).

But there's something about those ancient Egyptians, isn't there?  There have been "secrets of the Pyramids" claims around for years, mostly of the form that if you take the area of the base of the Pyramid of Khufu in square furlongs and divide it by the height in smoots, and multiply times four, and add King Solomon's shoe size in inches, you get the mass of the Earth in troy ounces.

Okay, I made all that up, because when I read stuff about the "secrets of the Pyramids" it makes me want to take Ockham's razor and slit my wrists with it.  But I was forced to look at the topic at least a little bit when the aforementioned post about the speed of light started popping up on social media, especially when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia said, "You have got to deal with this."

The gist is that the speed of light in meters per second (299,792,458) is the same sequence of numbers as the location of the Pyramid of Khufu (29.9792458 degrees north latitude).  Which, if true, is actually a little weird.  But let's look at it a tad closer, shall we?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jerome Bon from Paris, France, Great Pyramid of Giza (2427530661), CC BY 2.0]

29.9792458 degrees of latitude is really specific.  One degree is approximately 111 kilometers, so getting a measurement of location down to seven decimal places is pretty impressive.  That last decimal place -- the ten-millionths place -- corresponds to a distance of 0.0111 meters, or a little over a centimeter.

So are they sure that last digit is an 8?  Measuring the position of the Great Pyramid to the nearest centimeter is a little dicey, given that the Great Pyramid is big (thus the name).  Even if the claim is that they're measuring the position of the top -- which is unclear -- the location of the top has some wiggle room, as it doesn't come to a perfect point.

But if you're just saying "somewhere on the Great Pyramid," there's a lot of wiggle room.  The base of the Pyramid of Khufu is about 230 meters on an edge, so that means that one-centimeter accuracy turns into "somewhere within 23,000 centimeters."

Not so impressive, really.

There's a second problem, however, which is that the second wasn't adopted as a unit of time until the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656.  The meter as a unit of length wasn't proposed until 1668, and was not adopted until 1790.  (And some countries still don't use the metric system.  I'm lookin' at you, fellow Americans.)  So why would the ancient Egyptians have measured the speed of light -- even assuming they could -- in meters per second, and not cubits per sidereal year, or whatever the fuck crazy units of measurement they used?

So as expected, this claim is pretty ridiculous, and not even vaguely plausible if you take it apart logically.  Not that there was any doubt of that.  The bottom line is that the ancient Egyptians were  cool people, and the pyramids are really impressive, but they weren't magical or advanced or (heaven help us) being assisted by aliens.

No matter what you may have learned from the historical documentary Stargate.

Oh, and for the record, I didn't invent the unit of "smoot" for length.  A smoot is 1.70 meters, which was the height of Harvard student Oliver R. Smoot, who in 1958 got drunk with his fraternity buddies and decided to measure the length of Harvard Bridge in Smoot-heights.  It turned out to be 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus the length of Oliver R. Smoot's ear.

And considering they were drunk at the time, it's pretty impressive that they thought of including error bars in their measurement.  Better than the damn Egyptian-speed-of-light people, who couldn't even get their measurement to within plus or minus 230 meters.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a charming inquiry into a realm that scares a lot of people -- mathematics.  In The Universe and the Teacup, K. C. Cole investigates the beauty and wonder of that most abstract of disciplines, and even for -- especially for -- non-mathematical types, gives a window into a subject that is too often taught as an arbitrary set of rules for manipulating symbols.  Cole, in a lyrical and not-too-technical way, demonstrates brilliantly the truth of the words of Galileo -- "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

Creationist lab research

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post, wherein we looked at a creationist website and its unfortunate collection of misinterpreted and cherry-picked quotes in support, today we're going to examine the latest hijinks of the Adam-rode-a-dinosaur crowd.  Namely, a group of Dallas researchers who want to set out to prove "scientifically" that the biblical account is literally true.

The effort is headed up by Henry Morris III, who has 49 people on his payroll and an annual budget of seven million dollars and who is affiliated with the Institution for Creation Research.  And he apparently is earnest.  "Our attempt is to demonstrate that the Bible is accurate, not just religiously authoritative," Morris told reporters for the Dallas News.  "The rationale behind it is this: If God really does exist, he shouldn’t be lying to us.  And if he’s lying to us right off the bat in the book of Genesis, we’ve got some real problems."

Well, yeah, I can't argue with that.

But his staff members, of course, don't take that statement the same way as I do.  One of them, astrophysicist Jason Lisle, said, "I think everyone here is doing it because we believe in the message and we ultimately want people to be saved.  We want people to realize the Bible is trustworthy in matters of history and when it touches science.  And because you can trust it in those areas, you can trust it when it comes to how to inherit eternal life."

Which makes me scratch my head in puzzlement, mostly because I cannot conceive how you could be an astrophysicist and a biblical literalist at the same time.  Astrophysicists study objects that are unimaginably distant, some of them millions of light years away.  And if you believe that the universe and everything in it is only six thousand or so years old, then six thousand light years should be the furthest we can see -- because if there was anything more distant, its light wouldn't have reached us yet.

For reference, the Andromeda Galaxy, which you can easily see with binoculars on a clear night, is a bit over 2.5 million light years away.

Oh, wait, the speed of light might not be constant.  Or time might not be constant.  Or maybe god created the starlight already in transit.  Never mind.  (For a facepalm-worthy explanation of why stellar distances don't bother the creationists, go here.  Don't say I didn't warn you.)

So anyway, you have to wonder what these "scientists" -- and I use the word with some hesitation -- will come up with.  As I have commented before, when you assume your conclusion, magic happens.

But what places all of this nonsense in the realm of inadvertent comedy is a revelation broken over at the wonderful blog Why Evolution Is True, wherein we find out that an interview with the aforementioned Jason Lisle on the Dallas Morning News was green-screened in front of a fake lab and a whiteboard with a bunch of meaningless scribbles, including a bulleted list that says, and I quote, "Dino's, Ice, Rocket Man."  (Click the link to see the shot of the whiteboard; it's a hoot, and the site deserves your visit.)

So right from the get-go they're not exactly being honest about their "research," which should surprise no one.  There's no way you actually could do honest scientific research and come to these conclusions.  The evidence that the universe was created six thousand years ago is nonexistent -- making me curious about what they're doing with their seven million bucks annual budget other than paying their "scientists" to scribble random shit on the lab whiteboard.

Anyway, that's our news from the Genesis crowd.  I'm expecting the whole thing to fizzle, given the fact that there's pretty much nothing there to be studied.  On the other hand, expect a glowing report of success on the ICR's website to appear forthwith.  Given their history, they won't let a little thing like abject failure stop them.