The conservation conundrum

A major underpinning of our understanding of physics has to do with symmetry and conservation laws.

Both have to do with order, balance, and the concept that you can't get something for nothing.  A lot of the most basic research in theoretical physics is driven by the assumption that despite the seeming complexity and chaos in the universe, at its heart is a deep simplicity, harmony, and beauty. 

The mathematical expression of this concept reaches its pinnacle in the laws of conservation.

You undoubtedly ran into conservation laws in your high school science classes.  The law of the conservation of matter and energy (you can move matter and energy around and change its form, but the total amount stays the same).  Conservation of charge (the total charge present at the beginning of a reaction is equal to the total charge present at the end; this one is one of the fundamental rules governing chemistry).  Conservation of momentum, conservation of spin, conservation of parity.

All of these are fairly well understood, and physicists use them constantly to make predictions about how interactions in the real world will occur.  Add to them the mathematical models of quantum physics, and you have what might well be the single most precise system ever devised by human minds.  The predictions of this system match the actual experimental measurements to a staggering accuracy of ten decimal places.  (This is analogous to your taking a tape measure to figure out the length of a two-by-four, and your answer being correct to the nearest billionth of a meter.)

So far, so good.  But there's only one problem with this.

Symmetry and conservation laws provide no explanation of how there's something instead of nothing.

We know that photons (zero charge, zero mass) can produce pairs of particles -- one matter, one antimatter, which (by definition) have opposite charges.  These particles usually crash back together and mutually annihilate within a fraction of a second, resulting in a photon with the same energy as the original one had, as per the relevant conservation laws.  Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe (such as it was) was filled with extremely high energy photons, so this pair production was going at a furious rate, with such a roiling sea of particles flying about that some of them survived being annihilated.  This, it's thought, is the origin of the matter we see around us, the matter we and everything else are made of.

But what we know about symmetry and conservation suggests that there should have been exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter created, so very quickly, there shouldn't have been anything left but photons.  Instead, we see an imbalance -- an asymmetry -- favoring matter.  Fortunately for us, of course.

So there was some matter left over after everything calmed down.  But why?

One possibility is that when we look out at the distant stars and galaxies, some of them are actually antimatter.  On the surface, it seems like there'd be no way to tell; except for the fact that every particle that makes it up would have the opposite properties (i.e. protons would have a negative charge, electrons a positive charge, and so on), antimatter would have identical properties to matter.  (In fact, experimentally-produced antihydrogen was shown in 2016 to have the same energy levels, and therefore exactly the same spectrum, as ordinary hydrogen.)  From a distance, therefore, it should look exactly like matter does.

So could there be antimatter planets, stars, and galaxies out there?  Maybe even with Evil Major Don West With A Beard?

The answer is almost certainly no.  The reason is that if there was a galaxy out there made of antimatter, then between it and the nearest ordinary matter galaxy, there'd be a boundary where the antimatter thrown off by the antimatter galaxy would be constantly running into the matter thrown off by the ordinary galaxy.  So we'd see a sheet dividing the two, radiating x-rays and gamma rays, where the matter and antimatter were colliding and mutually annihilating.  Nothing of the sort has ever been observed, so the conclusion is that what we see out in space, out to the farthest quasars, is all made of matter.

This, though, leaves us with the conundrum of how this happened.  What generated the asymmetry between matter and antimatter during the Big Bang?

One possibility, physicists thought, could be that the particles of matter themselves are asymmetrical.  If the shape or charge distribution of (say) an electron has a slight asymmetry, this would point to there being a hitherto-unknown asymmetry in the laws of physics that might favor matter over antimatter.  This conjecture is, in fact, why the topic comes up today; a paper last week in Science described an experiment at the University of Colorado - Boulder to measure an electron's dipole moment, the offset of charges within an electron.  Lots of molecules have a nonzero dipole moment; it's water's high dipole moment that results in water molecules having a positive end and a negative end, so they stick together like little magnets.  A lot of water's odd properties come from the fact that it's highly polar, including why it hurts like a sonofabitch when you do a belly flop off a diving board -- you're using your body to break simultaneously all of those linked molecules.

What the team did was to create a strong magnetic field around an extremely pure collection of hafnium fluoride molecules.  If electrons did have a nonzero dipole moment -- i.e., they were slightly egg-shaped -- the magnetic field would cause them to pivot so they were aligned with the field, and the resulting torque on the molecules would be measurable.

They found that to the limit of their considerable measuring ability, electrons are perfectly spherical and have an exactly zero dipole moment.

"I don’t think Guinness tracks this, but if they did, we’d have a new world record," said Tanya Roussy, who led the study.  "The new measurement is so precise that, if an electron were the size of Earth, any asymmetry in its shape would have to be on a scale smaller than an atom."

That's what I call accuracy.

On the other hand, it means we're back to the drawing board with respect to why there's something instead of nothing, which as a scientific question, is kind of a big deal.  At the moment, there don't seem to be any other particularly good candidates out there for an explanation, which is an uncomfortable position to be in.  Either there's something major we're missing in the laws of physics -- which, as I said, otherwise give stunningly accurate predictions of real-world experimental results -- or we're left with the even less satisfying answer of "it just happened that way."

But that's the wonderful thing about science, isn't it?  Scientists never write the last word on a subject and assume nothing will ever change thereafter.  There will always be new information, new perspectives, and new models, refining what we know and gradually aligning better and better with this weird, chaotic universe we live in.

So I'm not writing off the physicists yet.  They have a damn good track record of solving what appear to be intractable problems -- my guess is that sooner or later, they'll figure out the answer to this one.

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Beauty, truth, and the Standard Model

A couple of days ago, I was talking with my son about the Standard Model of Particle Physics (as one does).

The Standard Model is a theoretical framework that explains what is known about the (extremely) submicroscopic world, including three of the four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force), and classifies all known subatomic particles.

Many particle physicists, however, are strongly of the opinion that the model is flawed.  One issue is that one of the four fundamental forces -- gravitation -- has never been successfully incorporated into the model, despite eighty years of the best minds in science trying to do that.  The discovery of dark matter and dark energy -- or at least the effects thereof -- is also unaccounted for by the model.  Neither does it explain baryon asymmetry, the fact that there is so much more matter than antimatter in the observable universe.  Worst of all is that it leaves a lot of the quantities involved -- such as particle masses, relative strengths of forces, and so on -- as empirically-determined rather than proceeding organically from the theoretical underpinnings.

This bothers the absolute hell out of a lot of particle physicists.  They have come up with modification after modification to try to introduce new symmetries that would make it seem not quite so... well, arbitrary.  It just seems like the most fundamental theory of everything should be a lot more elegant than it is, and that there should be some underlying beautiful mathematical logic to it all.  The truth is, the Standard Model is messy.

Every one of those efforts to create a more beautiful and elegant model has failed.  Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in a brilliant but stinging takedown of the current approach that you really should watch in its entirety, puts it this way: "If you follow news about particle physics, then you know that it comes in three types.  It's either that they haven't found that thing they were looking for, or they've come up with something new to look for which they'll later report not having found, or it's something so boring you don't even finish reading the headline."  Her opinion is that the entire driving force behind it -- research to try to find a theory based on beautiful mathematics -- is misguided.  Maybe the actual universe simply is messy.  Maybe a lot of the parameters of physics, such as particle masses and the values of constants, truly are arbitrary (i.e., they don't arise from any deeper theoretical reason; they simply are what they're measured to be, and that's that).  In her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, she describes how this century-long quest to unify physics with some ultra-elegant model has generated very close to nothing in the way of results, and maybe we should accept that the untidy Standard Model is just the way things are.

Because there's one thing that's undeniable: the Standard Model works.  In fact, what generated this post (besides the conversation with my science-loving son) is a paper that appeared last week in Physical Review Letters about a set of experiments showing that the most recent tests of the Standard Model passed with a precision that beggars belief -- in this case, a measurement of the electron's magnetic moment which agreed with the predicted value to within 0.1 billionths of a percent.

This puts the Standard Model in the category of being one of the most thoroughly-tested and stunningly accurate models not only in all of physics, but in all of science.  As mind-blowingly bizarre as quantum mechanics is, there's no doubt that it has passed enough tests that in just about any other field, the experimenters and the theoreticians would be high-fiving each other and heading off to the pub for a celebratory pint of beer.  Instead, they keep at it, because so many of them feel that despite the unqualified successes of the Standard Model, there's something deeply unsatisfactory about it.  Hossenfelder explains that this is a completely wrong-headed approach; that real discoveries in the field were made when there was some necessary modification of the model that needed to be made, not just because you think the model isn't pretty enough:

If you look at past predictions in the foundations of physics which turned out to be correct, and which did not simply confirm an existing theory, you find it was those that made a necessary change to the theory.  The Higgs boson, for example, is necessary to make the Standard Model work.  Antiparticles, predicted by Dirac, are necessary to make quantum mechanics compatible with special relativity.  Neutrinos were necessary to explain observation [of beta radioactive decay].  Three generations of quarks were necessary to explain C-P violation.  And so on...  A good strategy is to focus on those changes that resolve an inconsistency with data, or an internal inconsistency.  

And the truth is, when the model you already have is predicting with an accuracy of 0.1 billionths of a percent, there just aren't a lot of inconsistencies there to resolve.

I have to admit that I get the particle physicists' yearning for something deeper.  John Keats's famous line, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty; that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know" has a real resonance for me.  But at the same time, it's hard to argue Hossenfelder's logic.

Maybe the cosmos really is kind of a mess, with lots of arbitrary parameters and empirically-determined constants.  We may not like it, but as I've observed before, the universe is under no obligation to be structured in such a way as to make us comfortable.  Or, as my grandma put it -- more simply, but no less accurately -- "I've found that wishin' don't make it so."

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Return to sender

One of the hardest things about understanding quantum physics is that it is so fundamentally different from the way things act on the macroscopic level.

Even a layperson's grasp of the subject -- leaving aside all the abstruse mathematics -- requires one to jettison every expectation that the everyday objects we see and interact with will behave in the same fashion as the "objects" (as it were) on the subatomic level.  I put the word "objects" in quotes advisedly; the word "particle" brings to mind a hard, discrete little lump of matter, and that's still how they're drawn in science books:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Richie Bendall, Atomic structure of Lithium-7, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reality is far weirder, and far harder to picture; particles, all the way down to photons of light, aren't little miniature bullets zinging around, they're actually smeared-out fields of probabilities.  The reassuringly solid matter we, and everything else, are made of turns out to be (at its basis) composed of something that is ephemeral, not even existing at one particular location in any real sense.

But it bears mention that however bizarre this is, it is not just a wild guess.  The predictions of quantum mechanics have been tested every which way from Sunday, and each time, the results have been spot-on.  So it may be unsettling, it certainly is counter-intuitive, but if we buy the methods of science at all, we have to conclude that whether we like it or not, this is what reality is.

Take, for example, the quantum boomerang effect, which I only found out about a couple of days ago because of some research out of the University of California - Santa Barbara.  The idea here, so far as I understand it -- and I will once again throw in the caveat that I'm not much better than a layperson myself, so bear with me -- has to do with what occurs when electrons in a substance are given a repeated kick of energy.

Picture, for example, something that spins freely on an axle, like a fan.  Imagine taking a fan (Nota bene: Mr. Safety says unplug it first!), and giving a regularly-timed tap on the blades with one finger.  The fan would absorb the energy, overcoming any resistance in the axle due to friction, and the blades would begin to turn; if you timed it right, you could get it spinning at a decent clip.

So far, nothing odd.  Now, imagine an analogous situation on the subatomic level.  Suppose you had a substance with atoms arranged in a lattice, but there are some defects in the lattice -- impurities, gaps, and so on.  In a metallic lattice, electrons are fairly free to move (this is why metals make good conductors); but the defects inhibit electron transfer, just as friction was working against you in turning the rotor blades.  Here, though, something completely different happens when you disturb the system.  If you give the lattice regular pulses of energy, the electrons are jolted out of their position, but they don't keep moving -- they immediately turn around and settle back down in their original positions.

Thus the nickname "the boomerang effect."

"It's really a fundamentally quantum mechanical effect," said physicist David Weld, who co-authored the paper, in an interview with Science Daily.  "There's no classical explanation for this phenomenon...  In a classical system, a rotor kicked in this way would respond by constantly absorbing energy from the kicks.  Take a quantum version of the same thing, and what you see is that it starts gaining energy at short times, but at some point it just stops and it never absorbs any more energy.  It becomes what's called a dynamically localized state."

The explanation, Weld says, lies in the dual particle-wave nature of subatomic particles.  Because matter on the smallest scales has both particle-like and wave-like properties, it's going to exhibit some weird properties as compared to the solid stuff we see around us.  "That chunk of stuff that you're pushing away is not only a particle, but it's also a wave, and that's a central concept of quantum mechanics," Weld said.  "Because of that wave-like nature, it's subject to interference, and that interference in this system turns out to stabilize a return and dwelling at the origin."

So we can add that to our list of weird and counterintuitive behavior on the quantum level.  The universe is a strange, compelling, beautiful place, and the more you study it, the stranger it gets.  Me, I kind of like that.  I don't mind that things aren't as they seem.  How boring things would be if our "common sense" got it right every single time.

Even if I don't fully understand it -- even if I never fully understand it -- I'd much prefer that the cosmos never loses its ability to astonish us.

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A smile without a cat

Every time I hear some new discovery in quantum physics, I think, "Okay, it can't get any weirder than this."

Each time, I turn out to be wrong.

A few of the concepts I thought had blown my mind as much as possible:

• Quantum superposition -- a particle being in two states at once until you observe it, at which point it apparently decides on one of them (the "collapse of the wave function")
• The double-slit experiment -- if you pass light through a closely-spaced pair of slits, it creates a distinct interference pattern -- an alternating series of parallel bright and dark bands.  The same interference pattern occurs if you shoot the photons through one of the slits, one photon at a time.  If you close the other slit, the pattern disappears.  It's as if the photons passing through the left-hand slit "know" if the right-hand slit is open or closed.
• Quantum entanglement -- two particles that somehow are "in communication," in the sense that altering one of them instantaneously alters the other, even if it would require superluminal information transfer to do so (what Einstein called "spooky action-at-a-distance")
• The pigeonhole paradox -- you'd think that if you passed three photons through polarizing filters that align their vibration plane either horizontally or vertically, there'd be two of them polarized the same way, right?  It's a fundamental idea from set theory; if you have three gloves, it has to be the case that either two are right-handed or two are left-handed.  Not so with photons.  Experiments showed that you can polarize three photons in such a way that no two of them match.

Bizarre, counterintuitive stuff, right there.  But wait till you hear the latest:  three physicists, Yakim Aharonov of Tel Aviv University, Sandu Popescu of the University of Bristol, and Eliahu Cohen of Bar Ilan University, have demonstrated something they're calling a quantum Cheshire Cat.  Apparently under the right conditions, a particle's properties can somehow come unhooked from the particle itself and move independently of it -- a bit like Lewis Carroll's cat disappearing but leaving behind its disembodied grin.

The Cheshire Cat from John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland (1865) [Image is in the Public Domain]

I'll try to explain how it works, but be aware that I'm dancing right along the edge of what I'm able to understand, so if you ask for clarification I'll probably say, "Damned if I know."  But here goes.

Imagine a box containing a particle with a spin of 1/2.  (Put more simply, this means that if you measure the particle's spin along any of the three axes (x, y, and z), you'll find it in an either-or situation -- right or left, up or down, forward or backward.)  The box has a partition down the middle that is fashioned to have a small, but non-zero, probability of the particle passing through.  At the other end of the box is a second partition -- if the particle is spin-up, it passes through; if not, it doesn't and is reflected back into the box.

With me so far?  'Cuz this is where it gets weird.

In quantum terms, the fact that there's a small but non-zero chance of the particle leaking through means that part of it does leak through; this is a feature of quantum superposition, which boils down to particles being in two places at once (or, more accurately, their positions being fields of probabilities rather than one specific location).  If the part that leaks through is spin-up, it passes through the right-hand partition and out of the box; otherwise it reflects back and interacts with the original particle, causing its spin to flip.

The researchers found that this flip occurs even if measurements show that the particle never left the left-hand side of the box.

So it's like the spin of the particle becomes unhooked from the particle itself, and is free to wander about -- then can come back and alter the original particle.  See why they call it a quantum Cheshire Cat?  Like Carroll's cat's smile, the properties of the particle can somehow come loose.

Whatever a "loose property" actually means.

The researchers have suggested that this bizarre phenomenon might allow counterfactual communication -- communication between two observers without any particle or energy being transferred between them.  In the setup I described, the observer left of the box would know if the observer on the right had turned the spin-dependent barrier on or off by watching to see if the particle in the left half of the box had altered its spin.  More spooky action-at-a-distance, that.

What I have to keep reminding myself is that none of this is some kind of abstract idea or speculation of what could be; these findings have been experimentally verified over and over.  Partly because it's so odd and counterintuitive, the theories of quantum physics have been put through rigorous tests, and each time they've passed with flying colors.  As crazy as it sounds, this is what reality is, despite how hard it is to wrap our minds around it.

"What is the most important for us is not a potential application – though that is definitely something to look for – but what it teaches us about nature," said study co-author Sandu Popescu.  "Quantum mechanics is very strange, and almost a hundred years after its discovery it continues to puzzle us.  We believe that unveiling even more puzzling phenomena and looking deeper into them is the way to finally understand it."

Indeed.  I keep coming back to the fact that everything you look at -- all the ordinary stuff we interact with on a daily basis -- is made of particles and energy that defy our common sense at every turn.  As the eminent biologist J. B. S. Haldane famously put it, "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine -- it is queerer than we can imagine."

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Some of the most enduring mysteries of linguistics (and archaeology) are written languages for which we have no dictionary -- no knowledge of the symbol-to-phoneme (or symbol-to-syllable, or symbol-to-concept) correspondences.

One of the most famous cases where that seemingly intractable problem was solved was the near-miraculous decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris, but it bears keeping in mind that this wasn't the first time this kind of thing was accomplished.  In the early years of the nineteenth century, this was the situation with the Egyptian hieroglyphics -- until the code was cracked using the famous Rosetta Stone, by the dual efforts of Thomas Young of England and Jean-François Champollion of France.

This herculean, but ultimately successful, task is the subject of the fascinating book The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, by Edward Dolnick.  Dolnick doesn't just focus on the linguistic details, but tells the engrossing story of the rivalry between Young and Champollion, ending with Champollion beating Young to the solution -- and then dying of a stroke at the age of 41.  It's a story not only of a puzzle, but of two powerful and passionate personalities.  If you're an aficionado of languages, history, or Egypt, you definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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

Twinkle, twinkle, little antistar

It's a big mystery why anything exists.

I'm not just being philosophical, here.  According to the current most widely-accepted cosmological model, when the Big Bang occurred, matter and antimatter would have formed in equal quantities.  As anyone who has watched Star Trek knows, when matter and antimatter come into contact, they mutually annihilate and all of the mass therein is converted to a huge amount energy in the form of gamma rays, the exact quantity of which is determined by Einstein's law of E = mc^2.

So if we started out with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, why didn't it all eventually go kablooie, leaving a universe filled with nothing but gamma rays?  Why was there any matter left over?

The answer is: we don't know.  Some cosmologists and astrophysicists think that there may have been a slight asymmetry in favor of matter, driven by random quantum fluctuations early on, so while most of the matter and antimatter were destroyed by collisions, there was a little bit of matter left, and that's what's around today.  (And "a little bit" is honestly not an exaggeration; the vast majority of the universe is completely empty.  An average cubic meter of space is very unlikely to have much more than an atom or two in it.)

One question this sometimes brings up is whether the stars and galaxies we see in the night sky are matter; if, perhaps, some entire galaxies are made of antimatter, and there really are equal amounts of the two.  After all, antimatter is predicted to act exactly like matter except that its fundamental particles have the opposite charges -- its protons are negative, its electrons positive, and so forth.  So a planet entirely formed of antimatter would look (from a safe distance) exactly like an ordinary planet.

And just to throw this out there, an antiplanet wouldn't have copies of all of us except for having the opposite personalities, for example some people who are good guys being evil and/or having beards, as outlined in the highly scientific Lost in Space episode "The Antimatter Man:"

Nor would there be a creepy bridge between the two universes, covered with fog and backed by eerie music:

Which is a shame, because I always kinda liked that episode.

Considerations of evil Major Don West with a beard notwithstanding, here are two arguments why most physicists believe that the stars we see, even the most distant, are made of ordinary matter.  The first is that there is no known process that would have sorted out the matter from the antimatter early in the universe's life, leaving isolated clumps of each to form their respective stars and galaxies.  Secondly, if there were antistars and antigalaxies, then there'd be an interface between them and the nearest clump of ordinary stars and galaxies, and at that interface matter and antimatter would be constantly meeting and mutually annihilating.  This would produce a hell of a gamma ray source -- and we haven't seen anything out there that looks like a matter/antimatter interface (although I will return to this topic in a moment with an interesting caveat).

A paper last year found that the key to understanding why matter prevailed might lie in the mysterious "ghost particles" called neutrinos.  There are three kinds of neutrinos -- electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos -- and one curious property they have is that they oscillate, meaning they can convert from one type to another.  The rate at which they do this is predicted from current theories, and it's thought that antineutrinos do exactly the same thing at exactly the same rate.

The experiment described in the paper took place in Japan, and found that there is an unexpected asymmetry between neutrinos and antineutrinos.  Beams of muon neutrinos and muon antineutrinos were sent on a six-hundred-kilometer journey across Japan, and upon arriving at a detector, were analyzed to see how many had converted to one of the other two "flavors."  The surprising result was that the neutrinos had oscillated a lot more than predicted, and the antineutrinos a lot less -- something called a "CP (charge-parity) violation" that shows antimatter doesn't, in fact, behave exactly like matter.  This asymmetry could lie at the heart of why the balance tipped in favor of matter.

But now a new analysis of data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has thrown another monkey wrench into the works.  The study was undertaken because of a recent puzzling detection by an instrument on the International Space Station of nuclei of antihelium, which (if current models are correct) should be so rare in the vicinity of ordinary matter that they'd be entirely undetectable.  But what if the arguments against antistars and antigalaxies I described earlier aren't true, and there are such odd things out there?  Antistars would be undergoing fusion just like the Sun does, and producing antihelium (and other heavier antielements), which then would be shed from the surface just like our Sun sheds helium.  And some of it might arrive here, only to fall into one of our detectors.

But what about the whole gamma-rays-at-the-interface thing?  Turns out, the study in question, the subject of a paper last week in the journal Physical Review D, found that there are some suspicious gamma-ray sources out there.

Fourteen of them, in fact.

These gamma-ray sources are producing photons with an energy that's hard to explain from known sources of gamma rays -- pulsars and black holes, for example.  In fact, the energy of these gamma rays is perfectly consistent with the source being ordinary matter coming into contact with an antistar.

Curiouser and curiouser.

It doesn't eliminate the problem of why the universe is biased toward matter; even if these are antistars, their frequency in the universe suggests that only one in every 400,000 stars is an antistar.  So we still have the imbalance to explain.

But it's a strange and fascinating finding.  Astrophysicists are currently re-analyzing the data from every angle they can think of to try and account for the odd gamma-ray sources in any way other than it being evidence of antistars, so it may be that the whole thing will fizzle.  But for now, it's a tantalizing discovery.  It brings to mind the famous quote from J. B. S. Haldane -- "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it's queerer than we can imagine."

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When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

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

A lens into the dark sector

I don't really regret the weird, meandering path I took through the educational system -- but I have to admit to a bit of envy when it comes to people who are true experts in their field.

My inveterate dilettantism means I'm reasonably conversant in a lot of areas, but don't really have a deep understanding of anything.  Being a dabbler is neither a bad background to have as a high school teacher nor as a blogger, but it does mean that I often run into topics and think, "Wow, I really wish I could wrap my brain around this."

This happened just yesterday when I happened upon a paper in The European Physical Journal C called, "A Warped Scalar Portal to Fermionic Dark Matter."  My Bachelor of Science diploma in physics should have come with a sticky note appended to it that says, "... yeah, but he pretty much sucked as a physics student."  I struggled in virtually all of my upper-level physics classes, due to a combination of lack of focus and troubles with mathematics that I never figured my way out of.  The result is that I have a degree in physics, but reading an academic paper on the topic loses me after the first couple of paragraphs.

But so much of physics is so incredibly cool that I wish I understood it better.  The paper I took a look at yesterday (it'd be a vast exaggeration to say I "read" it) is a real coup -- if its findings bear out, it stands a good chance of solving two of the most perplexing questions of subatomic physics.

The first is akin to the planetary spacing issue I dealt with here a couple of days ago.  It asks a curious question: why do the fundamental particles have the masses they do?  Photons are massless; neutrinos damn close, but have a very tiny amount of mass; electrons are next (along with their relatives, muons), then protons and neutrons, and on up the scale to very heavy (and short-lived) particles like the "double-charmed xi baryon" which has four times the rest mass of a proton and a half-life so short it hasn't been measured yet, but is probably less than 10 ^-14 seconds (that's a decimal point, followed by thirteen zeros and a one -- better known to us non-physicists as "really, really short").

The other question is one I've looked at here before; the nature of the mysterious "dark matter" that makes up something like a quarter of the known mass of the universe, but thus far has resisted all detection by anything but its mysterious gravitational signature.  We don't know what it's made of, nor how (or if) it interacts with itself or other forms of matter.

I've commented about it that just as the odd constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum regardless of the reference frame of the observer waited around for a genius -- in this case, Einstein -- to explain it, the baffling dark matter is waiting for this century's Einstein to have the requisite insight.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Illustris Collaboration, Illustris Dark Matter and Gas, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Well, the waiting may be over.  A trio of physicists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz -- Adrian Carmona, Javier Castellano Ruiz, and Matthias Neubert -- have come up with a theoretical framework that, if it bears out, explains both the fundamental particle masses and the nature of dark matter in one fell swoop, by proposing an additional fundamental particle and force that act on matter through a tightly-coiled extra spatial dimension.

A press release at Science Daily describes their research this way:

In a recent paper published in the European Physical Journal C, the researchers found a spectacular resolution to this dilemma.  They discovered that their proposed particle would necessarily mediate a new force between the known elementary particles (our visible universe) and the mysterious dark matter (the dark sector).  Even the abundance of dark matter in the cosmos, as observed in astrophysical experiments, can be explained by their theory.  This offers exciting new ways to search for the constituents of the dark matter -- literally via a detour through the extra dimension -- and obtain clues about the physics at a very early stage in the history of our universe, when the dark matter was produced.

"After years of searching for possible confirmations of our theoretical predictions, we are now confident that the mechanism we have discovered would make the dark matter accessible to forthcoming experiments, because the properties of the new interaction between ordinary matter and dark matter -- which is mediated by our proposed particle -- can be calculated accurately within our theory," said study co-author Matthias Neubert.  "In the end -- so our hope -- the new particle may be discovered first through its interactions with the dark sector."

This, gentle readers, is what is known as "Nobel Prize material."

If, of course, it is confirmed by further research and investigation.  The thing that makes me hopeful is that the theories with the greatest likelihood of success are the ones that explain several problems at once; consider, for example, how the quantum mechanical model simultaneously accounted for the energy levels in hydrogen atoms, the bizarre double-slit experiment, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and the collapse of the wave function (most famous for being responsible for the Schrödinger's Cat phenomenon).  A really powerful model has enormous breadth, depth, and explanatory power, and this one -- at least from a preliminary look -- seems to have all three.

But, as I pointed out at the beginning, that's from the point of view of a dilettante.  I'm hardly qualified to assess whether the Carmona et al. paper will withstand scrutiny from the experts or will end up as another in the very long list of ideas that didn't pan out.  So keep your eyes on the news.

It might be that we are about to turn the lights on in the dark sector for the first time ever.

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Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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

ConCERNing Osiris

Many of you undoubtedly know about CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the world's largest particle physics laboratory, located on the border of France and Switzerland.  It's home to six particle accelerators and some of the most impressive discoveries in subatomic and high-energy physics in the world, including last year's demonstration of the existence of the elusive Higgs field, the field that confers the property of mass to every bit of matter in the universe.

Pretty impressive stuff, and most of it over my head even given my bachelor's degree in physics.

Now, switch gears for a moment.  You'll see why in a bit.

Many of you undoubtedly also know about Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, although perhaps not the same ones who knew about CERN.  Osiris was one of the most important gods in ancient Egypt, given their fixation on the afterlife.  Unlike his fellow deities, who had animals' heads, Osiris looked pretty much like an ordinary guy, except that he had green skin.

Osiris became the god of rebirth when he was killed by his brother Set, who chopped his body up and threw it into the Nile river.  Osiris's wife Isis found her husband, in chunks, and sort of stuck the chunks back together and brought him back to life, only to find out afterwards that there was a chunk missing.  Unfortunately for Osiris, that chunk turned out to be a body part that most of us males are pretty fond of, if you get my drift.  Understandably upset at his wife for not finding a fairly important bit of him, he convinced Isis to make him a new one out of gold, which strikes me as a pretty poor substitute, all things considered.  But it must have worked, because soon after Isis gave birth to the god Horus, who looked just like his parents hoped except for the possible problem of having a falcon's head.

Then Osiris died again.  Poor guy just couldn't catch a break.

Now, by this time you're probably wondering what CERN and Osiris can possibly have to do with one another.  So let me explain.  CERN, you see, isn't just a place where physicists go to conduct complex and far-reaching experiments about the subtle structure of matter; it is actually a portal whose chief purpose is to create a wormhole, which will allow Osiris to be raised from the dead.

Again.  Hopefully they'll remember to bring along his penis this time.

Don't believe me?  Take a look at this article over at UFO Sightings Hotspot, called "Ta-Wer AKA Osiris AKA CERN."  Here's the main argument, if I can dignify it by that name:

According to researcher William Henry, the ancient Egyptian object named Ta-Wer aka “Osiris” device, was a stargate machine capable to open wormholes or dimensional openings used by Seth and Osiris to “travel across the underworld.”Is CERN the new “Osiris Ta-Wer”? A modern stargate machine based on ancient technology?

When work at CERN's Large Hadron Collider is completed in 2015, the collider should have twice the power and be able to help unlock more of the universe's mysteries and to explore an entirely new realm of physics.

With the LHC power doubled, they will start looking for what they think is out there and they hope that something will turn up that no one had ever thought of.

It is known that the secret societies are obsessed with the raising of Osiris and maybe they already know what they are looking for and was the placement of a Shiva Statue outside the CERN Hadron Collider a hint?

Sure.  Because a green-skinned Egyptian god and a multi-armed Hindu god are clearly the same guy.  But do go on:

According to Stephen Hawking: “ bending space-time is theoretically possible— by exploiting black holes, or wormholes if they exist, or by traveling at super speeds, based on Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

Although many people believe that time travel is science fiction, it is not, and taking into account the obsession of the illuminati to use CERN as a stargate machine, it may be possible in the near future, we will face God’s miracles as seen by the ancient Hindu people when their Gods travelling through stargate devices. 

You know, if I were Stephen Hawking, I would be really pissed at the way nutjobs use quotes from legitimate research, lectures, and interviews to support their bizarre ideas.  These guys cherry-pick almost as much as the fundamentalist Christians do.  And at least the evangelical Christians basically understand the stuff they're reading.  With articles like this one, though, you get the impression that the folks that write this sort of woo-woo horse waste have about as much actual comprehension of quantum mechanics as my dog.

They end, though, with a question:

Is there some occult ritual being carried within the LHC facility and is Shiva the one they are attempting to bring to Earth?

No and no.  Thanks for asking.  And once again, Shiva and Osiris aren't the same dude.  By no stretch of the imagination is a three-eyed, eight-armed dude wearing a necklace of skulls even remotely like a green-skinned bearded dude with a missing wang.  Are we clear on that now?

 And CERN has nothing to do with gods of any kind.  They do physics there.  End of story.

It's a regrettable tendency on the part of a lot of people to hear bits and pieces of stuff they don't understand, combine it with other stuff they only partially understand, and come to drastically wrong conclusions.  The cure, of course, is to try and find out a little about the actual facts, to learn some real science, but that, unfortunately, is a level of hard work that some people are unwilling to undertake.  So we haven't seen the end of this kind of thing.

Woo-woo wingnuttery, it seems, will be with us always, sort of like death and taxes but even more annoying.

God particle jewelry

It's simultaneously amusing and frustrating to see the woo-woos trying to incorporate the latest scientific findings into their wooism.

Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, there was a great deal of babbling about "etheric bodies" -- basically, their conception of the soul, which could project through time and space and which survived the physical body after death.  The "etheric body" was, supposedly, made of "ether," the mysterious substance suggested by scientists as the medium through which light waves propagated in the depths of space.

Because, after all, if the "etheric body" is made of "ether," then if the scientists say that the "ether" exists, the "etheric body" must, too.  Right?

Of course right.

But then the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity demonstrated conclusively that the "ether" didn't exist, and unfortunately, the woo-woos of the time didn't use the reverse logic, and conclude that souls didn't, either.  They just changed the name to "astral body" and kept right on blathering.

Bait-and-switch, that's the ticket.

The master of this technique these days is the inimitable Diane Tessman, who uses scientific words incorrectly so often that someone should design a drinking game based on her writings.  (It is not recommended that you take a shot whenever she uses the word "quantum," however.  I'd prefer not to have any of my readers end up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning.)

Yesterday, though, I ran into the pinnacle, the epitome, the crowning glory of this technique.  If you know of a better one, I don't want to hear about it, because this one caused so many faceplants that I'm already going to have to go to school this morning with an icepack strapped to my forehead.

Most of you probably have heard of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle whose existence was proposed by Peter Higgs way back in 1964 as the manifestation of the Higgs field, which permeates space, interacting with matter and giving it the property of mass.  Higgs, now age 84, was fortunate enough to live to see his theory vindicated.  In March of 2013 an experiment in CERN generated traces of a high-energy particle that most physicists believe was the Higgs.

Unfortunately, twenty years earlier, physicist Leon Lederman had given the elusive particle the nickname "the God Particle" -- apparently because his publisher wouldn't let him use his first choice for a nickname, which was "the goddamned particle."

But far be it from the woo-woos to let an objection like "it's just the nickname, for cryin' in the sink!" stand in their way.  Because now we have someone is selling jewelry made from ball bearings pilfered from CERN...

... and claiming that they are infused with God Particles, and that wearing it will bring you divine guidance.

Here's the pitch:

The God Particle, which was recently discovered by our colleagues in CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, forever the Holy Grail of particle physics and nuclear research. The God particle is regarded as one of the fundamental forces of the cosmos. Many religious philosophers believe it constitutes the very ground of being, while others assert that it is the fabric of creation upon which the tapestry of the universe is woven. There are some who refer to the God particle as the clay of existence, whereas the Shaivites of India know it as Brahman and regard it quite reverently as sacred supreme Consciousness.

We still don't know if one of these theories is true, or maybe they all are. What we do know is that you are on the verge of a once in a lifetime opportunity of letting this infinite power into your life.

You deserve God's help, you deserve God's particle.

So these people apparently pilfered bits of scrap from CERN -- although frankly, they could just as well be steel ball bearings they picked up from Home Depot for $0.99 each, there's no way to tell for certain -- and made them into jewelry.

And are selling them for two hundred bucks each.

But the bullshit doesn't end there.  Oh, no.  These people are way more sophisticated than those "etheric body" yokels from the 19th century.  Read on, and be amazed:

Samples from the parts exposed to the surge of energy which showed substantial evidence of having the God Particle were sent to the leading universities and research centers in the world.

According to preliminary evidence found thus far by researches in the medical field, the energy of the God Particle has some amazing effects on migraine prevention, on treating different kinds of skin conditions, up to a surprising improvement among those who ailing from sexual dysfunction disorders. All those among a long list of other medical conditions.

The effects of the God Particle is also tested in the field of mental health and in this field the patients are also getting some surprising improvements in a wide range of medical cases, for example treating phobias and depressions of different kinds.

One of the theories being researched by the scientists is that the God Particle doesn't really cure the listed conditions but provides the human body with the energy needed to normalize and cure itself.

All those researches are performed in scientific methods demanding them to comply with a strict criteria before publication.

Therefore all the above should not be taken as a scientific fact, but should only be understood the way it is, a positive influence of material exposed to the God Particle on treating and preventing a wide range of medical problems.

The results of the researches are still censored. But there is an increasing assumption in the scientific community that in the future, when it becomes less expensive to produce the particle, it will completely change the face of modern medicine.

I especially love the penultimate paragraph, which to my ears reads like the woo-woo alternative-medicine's "Not intended to treat, cure, or diagnose human illness" that appears in microscopic print on things like herbal remedies.

And how did these folks come by chunks of one of the most famous pieces of scientific apparatus in the world, you might ask?

We are a part of a maintenance team in CERN. Among our responsibilities is to replace some of the worn out parts inside the collider.

We notices that something amazing was happening to many people during those days, and when we were summoned for tests by the research groups we realized that we were not the only ones who felt that way.

When the moment came to replace some of the parts around the center of the collision, we felt that we cannot dispose this material as waste. Instead, we started collecting the remaining bearings from the section which is under our responsibility. This material was exposed to the most powerful energy.

After the remaining bearings are collected, we remove them from the compound and later from the country, back to our countries of origin. Initially we gave small spheres which came from the collected bearings to our relatives and friends. In a short period of time the spheres started to leave their mark, and along with great responses we were flooded with requests from other acquaintances who heard about the amazing experience.

Which is either an outright lie, or else illegal, since profiting off of materials taken secretly from a scientific research facility is usually considered theft.  Of course, given that they are also making fraudulent claims about what said ball bearings can do, there are so many ethical angles from which you could attack this website that I almost wouldn't know where to begin.

So I think, instead, that I'm just going to stop here and leave it up to your consideration.  For one thing, in doing the research for this post, I did such a colossal headdesk that I think I jarred a Higgs boson loose from my skull, and my etheric body needs some time to recover before I go to work.

The LHC, lawsuits, and the time-traveling seagull of doom

Sometimes I feel like all I do in this blog is to deliver bad news.  Gullibility and credulousness are rampant, not to mention hoaxers and charlatans who are eager to turn a quick buck by ripping off the less rational segment of society.  All around us we see examples of absurd, counterfactual nonsense, and evidence that a regrettably small number of laypeople have any idea of how science actually works.

It thrills me no end that today I have a cheering story, a story of the triumph of critical thinking over fearful, superstitious woo-woo.  The gist: German courts have ruled, once and for all, that the Large Hadron Collider is what physicists say it is -- a scientific device designed to investigate the subatomic world -- and that it most definitively is not going to destroy the entire universe, or even just the Earth.  [Source]

Claims that the LHC is going to kill us all have been going around for some time.  I suppose that it was inevitable that people would be afraid of the device, given the fact that subatomic physics is a fairly esoteric area of study, poorly understood by anyone who doesn't have a master's degree or better in physics.  For another thing, it's hard not to be awestruck simply by how amazingly big it is.  The tube down which particles are accelerated to near-light speed, and then smashed into targets, is 27 kilometers in circumference.  The magnets in the device alone weigh over 27 tons, and require 96 tons of liquid helium to keep them at the right (extremely cold) temperature.

So it shouldn't be surprising that the woo-woos got freaked out by the thing.  Here are a few cheery suggestions they made about what was going to happen when the LHC was activated:

• It would produce a mini black hole that would devour the Earth.
• It would produce a Higgs boson that would then generate a new universe inside ours, ripping apart our universe from the inside out.
• It would create a particle called a "strangelet" that then would convert everything it touched into "strangelets," and the whole world would explode in a burst of, um, strangeness.
• The beam would break loose from containment and vaporize France.  Some American conservatives, of the sort who still eat "Freedom Fries" with their cheeseburgers, thought this was a good idea.

Of course, it didn't help that the first year that the LHC was up and running, it was plagued with problems.  There were funding shortfalls, technical difficulties, and even a shutdown caused by a seagull dropping a piece of a baguette on the power lines near the facility, causing an electrical short.  All of this, the alarmists said, couldn't be a coincidence.  There were religious folks that claimed that god himself was sabotaging the LHC to stop it from destroying everything.  My favorite version of this theory was dreamed up by, of all people, two physicists -- Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya -- who wrote a paper suggesting that scientists in the future were reaching back in time and stopping the LHC from operating because they (the future scientists) know that the LHC will cause widespread destruction, havoc, and chaos.  The seagull, presumably, was one of their minions, sent here from the future with a Death Baguette to short-circuit the place.

Well, of course, now that the LHC has been running off and on since 2009, and we haven't died, a lot of the furor has died down.  There have been no black holes, new universes, or strangelets, France remains unvaporized, and there have been no further visits from the Time-Traveling Seagull of Doom.  But not all of the craziness has ceased, of course.  Whatever else you might say about woo-woos, they're tenacious.  Just because the destruction of The Universe As We Know It hasn't happened yet, they claim, doesn't mean that it won't ever.

So there have been lawsuits to try to stop the research.  The most recent was launched by a German woo-woo who filed suit in both Germany and Switzerland to halt operations, because, after all, you never know when we might all be swallowed by a black hole, and when that happens it will be too late.

And unlike the court case earlier this week in Italy, where unscientific foolishness won the day, here the courts ruled in favor of science.  There is no evidence, the judge ruled, that anything being done at the LHC is dangerous in the global sense.  Physicists are quite certain that any claims of black holes and new universes are impossible, and that was good enough for the court.  The suit was thrown out, and (it is to be hoped) the plaintiff was instructed to become better educated in science before wasting the legal system's time further.

So, it might be rare, but we should cheer it when it happens: sometimes the rationalists win.

The Higgs boson, uncertainty, and the scientific method

It's begun, just as I predicted it would.

This week, a pair of physicists at Cornell, Joseph Lykken and Gabe Shaughnessy, published a paper calling the Higgs boson finding into question.  (Source)  What was described in the widely-publicized press release from CERN ten days ago could be the Higgs, Lykken and Shaugnessy say -- or maybe not.  The relevant sentence is, "... a generic Higgs doublet and a triplet imposter give equally good fits to the measured event rates of the newly observed scalar resonance."

In other words, there are other possible explanations for the CERN findings other than it having been a Higgs boson.  "Currently the uncertainties in these quantities are too large," Lykken and Shaugnessy say, "to make a definitive statement."

Like I said, I predicted this, and it certainly isn't because I have some kind of ESP regarding scientific discoveries.  Nor is it (more prosaically) because I even understand all that well what the Higgs boson is, and what the CERN findings meant.  My expectation that the CERN results would be challenged came from a more general understanding of how the scientific process works.  And this is why I make another prediction; the paper by Lykken and Shaughnessy will be widely misunderstood by the lay public.

In order to see why, let's imagine that you're at work, and there's a general meeting of staff.  Your boss states that there's a problem, one that will ultimately affect everyone in the business, and it's up to the staff at the meeting to propose a solution.  (S)he assigns all of you to go off, by yourselves or in small groups, and brainstorm a solution to the problem.  You and two others spend the better part of a day hammering out a solution.  You and your pair of friends look at it from all angles, and you are absolutely convinced that your solution will work to fix the problem.  At the end of the day, you bring back your solution to your boss and the staff.

Now, let's envision two possible scenarios of what happens next.

(1)  Everyone looks at your idea, and applauds, and tells you that you clearly have a working solution.

(2)  Each member of the staff takes his/her turn tearing at your idea, stating why it might not work, proposing ways to prove that it won't work, and recommends testing every single one of the ways that your solution could fail.  "Let's beat this solution," they say, "and try to see if we can get it not to work!"

Which one, in your opinion, is the better outcome?

If you said #1, you are in agreement with the vast majority of humanity.  #2 seems somehow mean-spirited -- why would your colleagues want you to fail?

#2, however, is the way science is done.

I see no greater misunderstanding about scientific matters that is more pervasive than this one.  While specific ideas in science are frequently the subject of erroneous thinking, there is no area in which there is more widespread lack of comprehension by the lay public than the general method by which science is accomplished.  When a scientific discovery is announced, when a new theory or model is proposed, the first thing that happens is that it is challenged by every researcher in the field.  Is there another explanation for the results?  Are the data themselves accurate, or did some inaccuracy or bias slip into the experiment despite the researchers' best efforts?  Can the results be replicated?

The last one, of course, isn't always possible -- and the Higgs boson result from CERN is an excellent example.  It took decades, and millions of dollars of equipment and research time, to get this single result -- it would be decidedly non-trivial to replicate it.  This, in part, is why the other physicists are hammering so hard on the data CERN generated -- it's not like they can go home to their own labs and try to make a Higgs of their own. 

So Lykken and Shaugnessy's paper isn't mean, it isn't some kind of bomb launched at the CERN team's reputation in the scientific world -- and it was bound to happen.  This is how science is done -- and why it is so often misunderstood by the lay public.  And now, I'll make a second prediction -- there will be a flurry of stories in the media about how "the CERN results aren't certain," which will cause large quantities of influential non-scientists to bloviate about how those damn scientists don't know what they're doing, for criminy's sake with all of those advanced degrees and all of that money and time you'd think they'd at least be sure what they were looking at.  So, inevitable as this announcement was, it is likely to have the result of further undermining the standing of science itself in the eye of the layperson.

And that's just sad.

Sending pucks to Bolivia

In yesterday's post, I made the claim that men don't necessarily always think only about sports or sex, that sometimes we think about other things, such as quantum mechanics.  This caused a couple of my female readers to snort with derision, and remark that they've never seen evidence of any such thing.  Just to prove that my statement was true, today's subject is:  quantum mechanics.

Actually, I've been thinking about quantum mechanics a good bit lately, as I've been re-reading Brian Greene's awesome and mind-blowing book The Fabric of the Cosmos, surely one of the most lucid, readable books ever to be written on the subject of how completely freakin' weird the universe is.  No offense to Stephen Hawking, but it beats A Brief History of Time by about a megaparsec.  Even the illustrated version.

I think the thing that strikes me the most, every time I think about such things, is that our perception of the objects in our lives as ordinary misses how strange even everyday objects actually are.  I have no claims to be an expert -- despite the "B. S. Physics" on my diploma, I was a lackluster physics student at best, and most of what I understand about such things has come in the last fifteen years when I really started reading up on the subject -- but what I do understand about it rocks my world.

Here are a few bits of physics weirdness, just to turn your Sunday morning inside-out.  Please keep in mind as you read this that all of this isn't speculation -- it's hard science, experimentally verified over and over.

1)  You never see the present.  Everything you've ever seen is in the past.  Even these words you're reading right now.  You are seeing your computer screen as it was about a billionth of a second ago, when the light left the screen.  The further away something is, the further back in time you're looking.  You see the moon as it was three seconds ago; the sun as it was nine minutes ago; and the closest star (Alpha Centauri) as it was 4.3 years ago.  If Alpha Centauri vanished at 8:00 this morning, you would have no way of knowing it for another 4.3 years.

2)  What the word "now" means isn't the same for everyone.  Einstein did away with that notion.  Not only does relativity predict that individuals traveling relative to each other experience differences in the rate at which time passes, they don't even agree on whether two events were simultaneous or not.  So if I snap my fingers, and at that moment Steve and Joe were the same distance away from me but Steve was moving toward me and Joe was moving away from me, by Steve's clock the snap would have occurred earlier than it would by my clock, and by Joe's clock it would have happened later... and we'd all be correct.  Further, if (by my perspective) Steve and Joe both snapped their fingers simultaneously, neither Steve nor Joe would think those two events were simultaneous at all -- both Steve and Joe would perceive his own snap as coming first!  Three different measurements of the same events -- and once again, all three perceptions would be 100% correct.

3)  Particles aren't hard little billiard balls.  Remember the protons, neutrons, and electrons your chemistry teacher drew on the board, looking like little dots?  Forget that.  They don't exist.  Or at least, that's not the most fundamental reality.  Electrons aren't particles, they're fields of probabilities -- a smear of likelihoods that the electron is in one place or the other.  It's convenient to say that "an electron is here" -- but what this really means is that "here" is the location where the probability field has its highest value.  Now, don't misunderstand this; physicists aren't using "probability" to mean "it's definitely either here or there, and we just happen not to know," in the same sense that I could say that the probability of rolling a four on a fair die is 1/6, and that (even if I can't see the outcome) it either is or isn't a four.  No, it's weirder than that: the electron is the probability field.  If I use a detector, I can pinpoint its location for a moment, but before that moment and after it, the electron really is a spread-out haze of probabilities.  The experimental confirmation of this idea, revolving around the mind-boggling principle called Bell's Inequality (after the brilliant Irish physicist John Bell), showed that until it hits a detector, an electron flying from a source takes all possible paths to get there.  It's as if when Joe Nieuwendyk winds up for a slapshot, the puck travels between his stick and the net by all possible trajectories at the same time, including pathways that went from stick to net via Bolivia, Mars, and the Andromeda Galaxy.  What we see -- that the puck goes straight from stick to net -- is just the average of all of the possible pathways!

(Drat, I slipped back into talking about sports, didn't I?  And I was doing so well, up until that point.)

Again, recall that this is not just some metaphorical way of talking about things; this is the reality of the universe, experimentally confirmed every which way from Sunday.  Even our conventional perception of objects as solid is an illusion -- most of matter is empty space, and the feeling of solidity when you give a passionate kiss to your significant other is just because you're feeling the mutual repulsion between the electrons in your lips and the electrons in your sweetheart's.  Your lips never really touch, as peculiar as that sounds.

(Admit it: after I slipped up with sports, you knew I'd have to work in sex, as well.)

I wish I knew more about this subject (quantum mechanics, not sex).  I find it fascinating that our simplistic understanding through classical physics can be simultaneously so useful and so wildly incomplete.  I, for one, enjoy having my mind blown occasionally, to see that the world is amazing and beautiful and bizarre.  Or, as J. B. S. Haldane once said, "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer than we can imagine."