Time is running out

New from the "Sublime-to-Ridiculous" department -- following up on our discussion yesterday about abstruse concepts from physics, today we're going to look at a much more pressing issue, which I need to discuss while I have the time.

That issue is whether time is speeding up.  I'm sure we can all relate to wondering about this.  It's becoming harder and harder to get everything done that needs doing, and there just seem not to be enough hours in the day.  Well, according to a story that a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me... there aren't.

The article is entitled "Is Time Speeding Up?", and follows Betteridge's Law (any article headline phrased as a question can be answered "No.").  Be that as it may, let's not be hasty (to borrow a line from the inimitable Treebeard), and look at what they're claiming:

Einstein’s calculations showed that the closer an object comes to the speed of light, the slower time passes.  Scientists have done experiments that prove Einstein’s theory to be correct using clocks moving at different speeds.

 
The opposite then must be true that as our speed decreases, time speeds up.  Researcher Greg Braden confirms this, he says that the rotation of the Earth is slowing down, and time is speeding up.  Evidence for his assertions comes from the Schumann Resonance.  The Schumann Resonance is like the Earth’s heartbeat.  It is the Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) of the Earth’s magnetic field.  In the 1950s, when the Schumann resonance was discovered, it was recorded to be an average of 7.8 Hertz. It has been stable for thousands of years; but now, according to Swedish and Russian researchers, says Braden, it is an average of 12 Hertz.  This means that the normal 24-hour day feels like a 16-hour day.

Okay.  I mean, my only question would be, "What the fuck?"  The Schumann resonance is an atmospheric phenomenon, an electromagnetic resonance caused by lightning discharges in the ionosphere, and has bugger-all effect on the angular velocity of the Earth.  And even if the frequency of the resonance is increasing (which I could find no credible evidence of in any case), there's no way we could know if it's been stable "for thousands of years," because it was only discovered in 1952.  And anyway, why would this have anything to do with how fast time is passing?

That doesn't stop "researcher Greg Braden," who says that if you think that's amazing, you ain't seen nothin' yet:

Eventually, Greg Braden says, the Earth’s rotation around the Sun will stop and start rotating in the opposite direction...  Braden says that when the Schumann resonance hits 13 Hertz, time will speed up to infinity.  The outcome of this has been explained as those living at this time will experience a shift in consciousness.  There will be no ‘separation’ between this mortal existence and the spirit realm.  Some call it ascension.

Some also call it "bullshit."

Anyhow, I decided to do a little research, and it turns out that this is only scratching the surface of the "accelerating time" theory.  I found one post from a guy whose proof that time is speeding up was that the clock in his bedroom is running fast.  Another said that he knew time was speeding up because he used to be able to say "One Mississippi, two Mississippi," and keep up with the seconds ticking on his clock, and now he can't.  But by far my favorite commentary I found on the topic came from a guy who evidently thinks that time is like a giant cosmic game of tetherball.  He gives this convoluted explanation of a ball hanging on a string tied to a rotating pole, and as the string winds around the pole, the ball spins faster (i.e. time speeds up), and the string gets shorter and shorter and the ball spins faster and faster and then finally SPLAT the ball hits the pole.

At that point, he says, "the Galactic Alignment... with the heart of the galaxy will open a channel for cosmic energy to flow through the earth, cleansing it and all that dwells upon it, raising it to a higher level of vibration."

So at least that's something for us all to look forward to.

[Image credit: Robbert van der Steeg]

Interestingly, the whole subject has even permeated discussions on physics forums.  In one thread I looked at, titled "Universe Expanding or Time Speeding Up?", there were a bunch of woo-woos who blathered on for a while about the expansion of the universe and how time would have to speed up to "compensate" for the expansion of space, and so on, and finally one reputable physicist responded, in some exasperation, "Most of the responses above are gibberish.  No one has even asked the question, 'Speeding up relative to what?'  General Relativity established that time passes at different rates in different reference frames, but these posters seem to think that time as a whole is speeding up -- which is a meaningless proposition, since there is nothing outside of time against which you could detect such a change."

Well. I guess he told them.  Of course, it won't make any difference, because people who think this way are never going to believe some dumb Ph.D. in physics when they've got the whole internet to rely on.  (I'll bet "they did their research.")  Besides, this physicist is probably a reptilian alien Man-in-Black from the Planet Nibiru who is part of the Bilderberg Group and works for the Illuminati, and is trying to spread disinformation. 

 You know how that goes.

So anyway, that's today's heaping helping of pseudoscientific absurdity.  I think I'll wrap this up, because (1) if I read any more websites like the ones I had to peruse to write this, my brain will turn into cream-of-wheat, and (2) I'm running short on time.

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Dreaming the past

My novel In the Midst of Lions opens with a character named Mary Hansard -- an ordinary forty-something high school physics teacher -- suddenly realizing she can see the future.

More than that, really; she now has no reliable way of telling the future from the past.  She "remembers" both of them, and if she has no external context by which to decide, she can't tell if what's in her mind occurred in the past or will occur in the future.  Eventually, she realizes that the division of the passage of time she'd always considered real and inviolable has changed.  Instead of past, present, and future, there are now only two divisions: present and not-present.  Here's how she comes to see things:

In the past two months, it felt like the universe had changed shape.  The linear slow march of time was clean gone, and what was left was a block that was unalterable, the people and events in it frozen in place like butterflies in amber.  Her own position in it had become as observer rather than participant.  She could see a wedge of the block, extending back into her distant past and forward into her all-too-short future.  Anything outside that wedge was invisible...  She found that it completely dissolved her anxiety about what might happen next.  Being not-present, the future couldn’t hurt her.  If pain lay ahead of her, it was as removed from her as her memories of a broken arm when she was twelve.  Neither one had any impact on the present as it slowly glided along, a moving flashlight beam following her footsteps through the wrecked cityscape.

 I found myself thinking about Mary and her peculiar forwards-and-backwards perception while I was reading physicist Sean Carroll's wonderful and mind-blowing book From Eternity to Here: A Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, which looks at the puzzling conundrum of what physicists call time's arrow -- why, when virtually all physical laws are time-reversible, there is a clear directionality to our perceptions of the universe.  A classic example is the motion of billiard balls on a table.  Each ball's individual motion is completely time-reversible (at least if you discount friction with the table); if you filmed a ball rolling and bouncing off a bumper, then ran the recording backwards, it would be impossible to tell which was the original video and which was the reversed one.  The laws of motion make no differentiation between time running forward and time running backward.

But.

If you played a video of the initial break of the balls at the beginning of the game, then ran the recording backwards -- showing the balls rolling around and after a moment, assembling themselves back into a perfect triangle -- it would be blatantly obvious which was the reversed video.  The difference, Carroll explains, is entropy, which is a measure of the number of possible ways a system can exist and be indistinguishable on the macro level.  What I mean by this is that the racked balls are in a low-entropy state; there aren't that many ways you can assemble fifteen balls into a perfect equilateral triangle.  On the other hand, after the break, with the balls scattered around the table seemingly at random -- there are nearly an infinite number of ways you can have the balls arranged that would be more or less indistinguishable, in the sense that any of them would be equally likely to occur following the break.  Given photographs of thousands of different positions, not even Commander Data could determine which one was the pic taken immediately after the balls stopped moving.

Sure, it's possible you could get all the balls rolling in such a way that they would come to rest reassembled into a perfect triangle.  It's just extremely unlikely.  The increase in entropy, it seems, is based on what will probably happen.  There are so many high-entropy states and so few low-entropy states that if you start with a low-entropy arrangement, the chances are it will evolve over time into a high-entropy one.  The result is that it is (very) strongly statistically favored that entropy increases over time.  

The Arrow of Time by artist benpva16 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 license: creativecommons.org/licenses/b…]

The part of the book that I am still trying to parse is chapter nine, "Information and Life," where he ties the physical arrow of time (an example of which I described above) with the psychological arrow of time.  Why can't we all do what Mary Hansard can do -- see the past and future both -- if the only thing that keeps us knowing which way is forward and which way is backward is the probability of a state's evolution?  After all, there are plenty of cases where entropy can locally go down; a seed growing into a tree, for example.  (This only occurs because of a constant input of energy; contrary to what creationists would have you believe, the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't disprove evolution, because living things are open systems and require an energy source.  Turn off the Sun, and entropy would increase fast.)

So if entropy actually explains the psychological arrow of time, why can I remember events where entropy went down -- such as yesterday, when I took a lump of clay and fashioned it into a sculpture?

Carroll's explanation kind of made my mind blow up.  He says that our memories themselves aren't real reflections of the past; they're a state of objects in our environment and neural firings in our brain in the present that we then assemble into a picture of what we think the past was, based on our assumption that entropy was lower in the past than it is now.  He writes:

So let's imagine you have in your possession something you think of as a reliable record of the past: for example, a photograph taken of your tenth birthday party.  You might say to yourself, "I can be confident that I was wearing a red shirt at my tenth birthday party, because this photograph of that event shows me wearing a red shirt."...

[Is] the present macrostate including the photo... enough to conclude with confidence that we were really wearing a red shirt at our tenth birthday party?

Not even close.  We tend to think that [it is], without really worrying about the details too much as we get through our lives.  Roughly speaking, we figure that a photograph like that is a highly specific arrangement of its constituent molecules.  (Likewise for a memory in our brain of the same event.)  It's not as if those molecules are just going to randomly assemble themselves into the form of that particular photo -- that's astronomically unlikely.  If, however, there really was an event in the past corresponding to the image portrayed in the photo, and someone was there with a camera, then the existence of the photo becomes relatively likely.  It's therefore very reasonable to conclude that the birthday party really did happen in the way seen in the photo.

All of those statements are reasonable, but the problem is that they are not nearly enough to justify the final conclusion...  Yes, the photograph is a very specific and unlikely arrangement of molecules.  However, the story we are telling to "explain" it -- an elaborate reconstruction of the past, involving birthday parties and cameras and photographs surviving essentially undisturbed to the present day -- is even less likely than the photo all by itself...

Think of it this way: You would never think to appeal to some elaborate story in the future to explain the existence of a particular artifact in the present.  If we ask about the future of our birthday photo, we might have some plans to frame it or whatnot, but we'll have to admit to a great deal of uncertainty -- we could lose it, it could fall into a puddle and decay, or it could burn in a fire.  Those are all perfectly plausible extrapolations of the present state into the future, even with the specific anchor point provided by the photo here in the present.  So why are we so confident about what the photo implies concerning the past?

The answer, he says, is that we're relying on probability and the likelihood that the past had lower entropy -- in other words, that the photo didn't come from some random collision of molecules, just as our surmise about the billiard balls' past came from the fact that a perfect triangular arrangement is way less likely than a random one.  All we have, Carroll says, is our knowledge of the present; everything else is an inference.  In every present moment, our reconstruction of the past is a dream, pieced together using whatever we're experiencing at the time.

So maybe we're not as different from Mary Hansard, with her moving flashlight beam gliding along and spotlighting the present, as I'd thought.

Mind = blown.

I'm still not completely convinced I'm understanding all the subtleties in Carroll's arguments, but I get enough of it that I've been thinking about it ever since I put the book down.  But in any case, I'd better wrap this up, because...

... I'm running short on time.

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Watching the clock

 If I had to pick the scientific law that is the most misunderstood by the general public, it would have to be the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The First Law of Thermodynamics says that the total quantity of energy and mass in a closed system never changes; it's sometimes stated as, "Mass and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed."  The Second Law states that in a closed system, the total disorder (entropy) always increases.  As my long-ago thermodynamics professor put it, "The First Law says you can't win; the Second Law says you can't break even."

Hell of a way to run a casino, that.

So far, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly non-intuitive about this.  Even from our day-to-day experience, we can surmise that the amount of stuff seems to remain pretty constant, and that if you leave something without maintenance, it tends to break down sooner or later.  But the interesting (and less obvious) side starts to appear when you ask the question, "If the Second Law says that systems tend toward disorder, how can a system become more orderly?  I can fling a deck of cards and make them more disordered, but if I want I can pick them up and re-order them.  Doesn't that break the Second Law?"

It doesn't, of course, but the reason why is quite subtle, and has some pretty devastating implications.  The solution to the question comes from asking how you accomplish re-ordering a deck of cards.  Well, you use your sensory organs and brain to figure out the correct order, and the muscles in your arms and hands (and legs, depending upon how far you flung them in the first place) to put them back in the correct order.  How did you do all that?  By using energy from your food to power the organs in your body.  And to get the energy out of those food molecules -- especially glucose, our primary fuel -- you broke them to bits and jettisoned the pieces after you were done with them.  (When you break down glucose to extract the energy, a process called cellular respiration, the bits left are carbon dioxide and water.  So the carbon dioxide you exhale is actually broken-down sugar.)

Here's the kicker.  If you were to measure the entropy decrease in the deck of cards, it would be less -- way less -- than the entropy increase in the molecules you chopped up to get the energy to put the cards back in order.  Every time you increase the orderliness of a system, it always (1) requires an input of energy, and (2) increases the disorderliness somewhere else.  We are, in fact, little chaos machines, leaving behind a trail of entropy everywhere we go, and the more we try to fix things, the worse the situation gets.

I've heard people arguing that the Second Law disproves evolution because the evolutionary model claims we're in a system that has become more complex over time, which according to the Second Law is impossible.  It's not; and in fact, that statement betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of what the Second Law means.  The only reason why any increase in order occurs -- be it evolution, or embryonic development, or stacking a deck of cards -- is because there's a constant input of energy, and the decrease in entropy is offset by a bigger increase somewhere else.  The Earth's ecosystems have become more complex in the 4.5 billion year history of life because there's been a continuous influx of energy from the Sun.  If that influx were to stop, things would break down.

Fast.

The reason all this comes up is because of a paper this week in Physical Review X that gives another example of trying to make things better, and making them worse in the process.  This one has to do with the accuracy of clocks -- a huge deal to scientists who are studying the rate of reactions, where the time needs to be measured to phenomenal precision, on the scale of nanoseconds or better.  The problem is, we learn from "Measuring the Thermodynamic Cost of Timekeeping," the more accurate the clock is, the higher the entropy produced by its workings.  So, in effect, you can only measure time in a system to the extent you're willing to screw the system up.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Robbert van der Steeg, Eternal clock, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The authors write:

All clocks, in some form or another, use the evolution of nature towards higher entropy states to quantify the passage of time.  Due to the statistical nature of the second law and corresponding entropy flows, fluctuations fundamentally limit the performance of any clock.  This suggests a deep relation between the increase in entropy and the quality of clock ticks...  We show theoretically that the maximum possible accuracy for this classical clock is proportional to the entropy created per tick, similar to the known limit for a weakly coupled quantum clock but with a different proportionality constant.  We measure both the accuracy and the entropy.  Once non-thermal noise is accounted for, we find that there is a linear relation between accuracy and entropy and that the clock operates within an order of magnitude of the theoretical bound.

Study co-author Natalia Ares, of the University of Oxford, summarized their findings succinctly in an article in Science News; "If you want a better clock," she said, "you have to pay for it."

So a little like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the more you try to push things in a positive direction, the more the universe pushes back in the negative direction.  

Apparently, even if all you want to know is what time it is, you still can't break even.

So that's our somewhat depressing science for the day.  Entropy always wins, no matter what you do.  Maybe I can use this as an excuse for not doing housework.  Hey, if I make things more orderly here, all it does is mess things up elsewhere, so what's the point?

Nah, never mind.  My wife'll never buy it.

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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!]

Guest post: Smaller than a dust mote

Today we're fortunate to feature a guest post by my friend, fellow blogger, and twin-separated-at-birth, Andrew Butters, whose blog Potato Chip Math is a must-read.  Like myself, Andrew is a devotee of astronomy, and here he'll take us on a voyage into deep space -- and give you a change of perspective you might never have considered.

Enjoy!

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I'll admit it, I'm a space nerd. I have been since high school and only got more intense when I started studying Applied Physics at university. There is a lot of weird science at the astronomical level and to comprehend it you have to wrap your head around concepts that you won't ever encounter in your daily life and then understand how to measure them. The two measurements that trip up just about everyone who hasn't studied them are time and distance. At an astronomical level those two things are astonishingly gigantic, so much so that to the average person they might as well have no meaning at all.

This is why, when I read a recent article on space.com, my mind, which studied this at a university level for several years, was sufficiently blown. Space.com does a decent job putting in lay terms what authors Linhua Jiang, Nobunari Kashikawa, Shu Wang, Gregory Walth, Luis C. Ho1, Zheng Cai, Eiichi Egami, Xiaohui Fan, Kei Ito, Yongming Liang, Daniel Schaerer, and Daniel P. Stark of the published article, "Evidence for GN-z11 as a luminous galaxy at redshift 10.957," explained in painstaking mathematical and scientific detail for the journal Nature Astronomy. I'll summarize it even further: space is fucking huge.

In the article, the authors prove rather conclusively that the farthest observable galaxy to date is a whopping 13.4 billion light years away. Don't let the word "years" in there fool you. A light year is a measure of distance and 13.4 billion of them are the equivalent of 127 nonillion kilometers (127,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km). To put that into a different perspective, there are 3600 seconds in an hour, a million seconds is a little over 11.5 days, and a billion seconds is 31.7 years. What about 127 nonillion seconds? That's 4.25 x 10^22 centuries or roughly five orders of magnitude longer than the age of the Universe itself.

So, space is huge. So what? Well, for me, it puts my existence on this third rock spinning in circles around a rather average sun as part of a rather average galaxy into perspective. As with any good conversation on this topic, it’s probably a good idea to lead with a little Carl Sagan. Many of you have seen this picture before:

[NASA – Image in the public domain]

It was taken in 1990 by the Voyager I probe on February 14 at the request of Carl Sagan. It took a decade for the request to come to fruition, but after it did here’s what he had to say about it:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known." — Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994

To give you an idea of exactly how far away Voyager I was when it took that photograph, here’s a picture, though it’s not to scale. As we’ll see in a bit the scale of the Solar System, and indeed the Universe, is staggeringly massive.

Joe Haythornthwaite and Tom Ruen [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons

How far away is that? It’s far. I mean, really far. The Pale Blue Dot photograph was taken 6 billion kilometers away. Voyager 1 launched in September 1977 and traveled at an average speed of roughly 60,000 km/h, and it still took thirteen years for it to get that far away. Neptune, the most distant planet in the Solar System takes 165 years to make a single trip around the Sun. When Neptunians say, “Winter is coming,” and have a look of concern on their faces it’s for good reason.

What if the Moon were the size of a single pixel on your screen right now? It’s a cool exercise to ponder and it gives us a real sense of the vastness of our surroundings. In fact, someone thought it was so cool that they created a model for it. Spend a few minutes scrolling (and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling) through it.

If the Moon Were 1-Pixel

This is all well and good, but what about beyond our Solar System? We orbit but one star out of hundreds of billions in our galaxy alone and our galaxy is but one of trillions in the observable Universe. To get a sense of what lies immediately beyond our Sun there are a couple of really cool, interactive sites you can visit Our Stellar Neighborhood, http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/, which allows you to zoom and pan and view 100,000 of the nearest stars. Solar System Model, https://www.solarsystemscope.com/, is a similar tool, but this one has more features and also includes options to show spacecraft, constellations, dwarf planets, comets, and a lot more. Still, nothing we’ve seen so far gets us out of our galaxy, the Milky Way, at the center of which is a black hole.

What about beyond our galaxy? A few years ago, while pondering the vastness of the Universe, some smart person at NASA decided that they would take the Hubble Telescope and point it at a small square of nothingness to see what they could see. Suffice it to say they were not disappointed.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/xdf.html

Every bit of light you see in that picture is a galaxy. In each galaxy are hundreds of billions of stars. This picture represents only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the sphere of our night sky. To photograph the rest of it you would need to take another 12,913,983 pictures.

Which is all fine and dandy, but again, people have a hard time comprehending the scale. All of our reference points are too small and too slow. Fortunately, someone at NASA put together something that shows that even if you travel at the upper limit for speed – the speed of light – it takes a really long time to get anywhere. One could say that the speed of light in that respect is rather slow. Put another way, space is huge.

How long it takes for light to travel between the Earth and the Moon

How long it takes for light to travel between the Earth and Mars 

Finally, for anyone wondering where God and religion fit in, I will leave you with this (enlarge the photo when it loads and scroll): 

[Source link]

~ Andrew


Other Important and Interesting Links:

Ten Female Astronomers

Ten Inspiring Women in Science

Eight Free Science Resources

Levels of Infinity

Space Missions

Two Trillion Galaxies

LA to New York Earth Timeline

Exoplanet Orbits

A Virtual Universe

Daylight Map

ISS Payload Camera

Scale of Solar System & Universe

Black Hole Size Comparison

How Big is the Universe?

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is apt given our recent focus on all things astronomical: Edward Brooke-Hitching's amazing The Sky Atlas.

This lovely book describes our history of trying to map out the heavens, from the earliest Chinese, Babylonian, and Native American drawings of planetary positions, constellations, and eclipses, to the modern mapping techniques that pinpoint the location of stars far too faint to see with the naked eye -- and objects that can't be seen directly at all, such as intergalactic dust clouds and black holes.  I've always loved maps, and this book combines that with my passion for astronomy into one brilliant volume.

It's also full of gorgeous illustrations showing not only the maps themselves but the astronomers who made them.  If you love looking up at the sky, or love maps, or both -- this one should be on your list for sure.

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

Wibbly-wobbly...

Have I told you my favorite joke?

Heisenberg and Schrödinger are out for a drive, and a cop pulls them over.

The cop says to Heisenberg, who was driving, "Hey, buddy, do you know how fast you were going?"

Heisenberg says, "No, but I know exactly where I am."

The cop says, "You were doing 70 miles per hour!"

Heisenberg throws his hands up in annoyance and says, "Great!  Now I'm lost."

The cop scowls and says, "Okay, if you're going to be a wiseguy, I'm gonna search your car."  So he opens the trunk, and there's a dead cat inside.

The cop says, "Did you know there's a dead cat in your trunk?"

Schrödinger says, "Well, there is now."

*brief pause so you can all stop chortling*

The indeterminate nature of reality at the smallest scales always tends to make people shake their head in wonderment at how completely weird the universe is, if they don't simply disbelieve it entirely.  The Uncertainty Principle, peculiar as it sounds, is a fact.  It isn't a limitation of our measurement technique, as if you were trying to find the size of something small and had a poorly-marked ruler, so you could get a more accurate number if you found a better one.  This is something fundamental and built-in about reality.  There are pairs of measurements for which precision is mutually exclusive, such as velocity and position -- the more accurate your information is about one of them, the less you can even theoretically know about the other.

Likewise, the collapse of the wave function, which gave rise to the story of the famous (but ill-fated) cat, is an equally counterintuitive part of how reality is put together.  Outcomes of purely physical questions -- such as where a particular electron is at a given time -- are probabilities, and only become certainties when you measure them.  Again, this isn't a problem with measurement; it's not that the electron really is in a specific location, and you just don't know for sure where until you look.  Before you measure it, the electron's reality is that it's a spread-out field of probabilities.  Something about interacting with it using a measuring device makes that field of probabilities collapse into a specific location -- and no one knows exactly why.

But if you want your mind blown further -- last week in a paper in Physical Review Letters we found out how long it takes.

It turns out the wave function collapse isn't instantaneous.  In "Tracking the Dynamics of an Ideal Quantum Measurement," by a team led by Fabian Pokorny of Stockholm University, the researchers describe a set of experiments involving "nudging" a strontium atom with a laser to induce the electrons to switch orbits (i.e. making them assume a particular energy, which is one of those quantum-indeterminate things like position).  The fidelity of the measurement goes down to the millionths of a second, so the scientists were able to keep track of what happened in fantastically short time intervals.

And the more they homed in on what the electron was doing, the fuzzier things got.  The theory is that as you get down on those scales, time itself becomes blurred -- so the shorter the time interval, the less certain you are about when exactly something happened.

"People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear non-subjective viewpoint, it's more of a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey... stuff." -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"

I don't know about you, but I thought I had kinda sorta wrapped my brain around the quantum indeterminacy of position thing, but this just blew my mind all over again.  Even time is fuzzy?  I shouldn't be surprised; for something so damn familiar, time itself is really poorly understood.  With all of the spatial dimensions, you can move any direction you want; why is time one-way?  It's been explained using the Second Law of Thermodynamics, looking at ordered states and disordered states -- the explanation goes something like this:

Start with an ordered state, such as a hundred pennies all heads-up.  Give them a quick shake.  A few will flip, but not many.  Now you might have 83 heads and 17 tails.  There are a great many possible ways you could have 83 heads and 17 tails as long as you don't care which pennies are which.  Another shake, and it might be 74/26, a configuration that there are even more possibilities for.  And so on.  Since at each turn there are a huge number of possible disordered states and a smaller number of ordered ones, each time you perturb the system, you are much more likely to decrease orderliness than to increase it.  You might shake a 50/50 distribution of pennies and end up with all heads -- but it's so fantastically unlikely that the probability might as well be zero.  This push toward disorder gives an arrow to the direction of time.

Well, that's all well and good, but there's also the problem I wrote about last week, about physical processes being symmetrical -- there are a great many of them that are completely time-reversible.  Consider, for example, watching a ten-second clip of a single billiard ball bouncing off the side of a pool table.  Could you tell if you were watching the clip backward or forwards?  It's unlikely.  Such interactions look as sensible physically in real time or time-reversed.

So what time actually is, and why there's an arrow of time, is still a mystery.  Because we certainly feel the passage of time, don't we?  And not from any probabilistic perception of "well, I guess it's more likely time's flowing this way today because things have gotten more disorderly."  It feels completely real -- and completely fixed and invariable.

As Einstein put it, "The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, but it is a stubbornly persistent one."

Anyhow, that's our bizarre scientific discovery of the day.  But I better get this post finished up.  Time's a wasting.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a classic -- Martin Gardner's wonderful Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Gardner was a polymath of stupendous proportions, a mathematician, skeptic, and long-time writer of Scientific American's monthly feature "Mathematical Games."  He gained a wonderful reputation not only as a puzzle-maker but as a debunker of pseudoscience, and in this week's book he takes on some deserving targets -- numerology, UFOs, "alternative medicine," reflexology, and a host of others.

Gardner's prose is light, lucid, and often funny, but he skewers charlatans with the sharpness of a rapier.  His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to work toward a cure for gullibility -- a cure that is desperately needed these days.

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

The symmetrical universe

I try to avoid writing about topics I don't fully understand, because that's just too great an opportunity for my sticking my foot in my mouth (and having to write a retraction afterwards).  Because of this reluctance, and because I'm pretty up-front about it when I don't know something, I don't get caught out very often, and I'd like to keep it that way.

So I'm gonna put a disclaimer right here at the beginning of this post: today's topic is one I have only a shallow understanding of.  If you ask me for more information, I'm likely to give you a puzzled head tilt, the same look my dog gives me when I ask him questions he doesn't have a good answer to, like why he chewed up my magazine before I had a chance to read it.  And if you are an expert in this field, and I get some of the facts wrong, let me know so I can fix 'em.

Okay, that being said: have you heard of CPT symmetry?

The initials stand for "charge," "parity," and "time," and the idea goes something like this: if you take any physical process, and reverse the charges (replace particles with their antiparticles), reverse the parity (reverse everything left-to-right), and run time backwards, the two would be indistinguishable.  Such a mirror universe would proceed according to exactly the same physical laws as ours does.

(As far as I know, it would not generate the scientific result elucidated in the Lost in Space episode "The Antimatter Man," wherein the mirror universe had an evil Don West with a beard.)

Initially, physicists thought that there was also CP symmetry -- that processes needed only charge and parity reversal to maintain symmetry, but that was found to be false when CP violations were found, most notably the decay of the particle called a neutral kaon.  The fact that symmetry is not preserved with reversal of charge and parity is thought to be the key to why there were unequal amounts of matter and antimatter produced in the Big Bang.  Fortunately for us.  If the matter/antimatter ratio had been exactly 1:1, ultimately it would all have mutually annihilated, and the universe would now be devoid of matter -- just space filled with photons zinging merrily about.

So CPT symmetry and CP violations are apparently fundamental to the nature of matter.  Which is why physicists have been pushing on the CPT symmetry idea, trying to find out if it holds -- or if there are circumstances, as there were with CP symmetry, where CPT symmetry is not preserved.

The latest test, described in a paper this week in Nature Physics, finds that even one of the oddest particles ever created in a laboratory preserves CPT symmetry.  In "Measurement of the Mass Difference and the Binding Energy of the Hypertriton and Antihypertriton," written by a team of particle researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, we read about bizarre particles that instead of the "up" and "down" quarks (and antiquarks) found in ordinary matter (and antimatter, if there's such a thing as "ordinary antimatter"), additionally have "strange" quarks (and antiquarks), which have higher mass and only form under extremely high energy conditions.  These particles -- the hypertritons and antihypertritons in the title -- have never had their masses calculated accurately before, and the theory is that if the masses are different, it would break CPT symmetry and require a huge rethinking of how matter works on the smallest scales.

The result?  Hypertritons and antihypertritons have exactly the same mass.  CPT symmetry -- the fact that a charge reversed, mirror-image, time-running-backwards universe would look exactly the same as ours -- is preserved.  "It is conceivable that a violation of this symmetry would have been hiding in this little corner of the universe and it would never have been discovered up to now," said study co-author Declan Keane of Kent State University.  "But CPT symmetry was upheld even in these high-energy conditions."

This discovery gives physicists a clue about what might be happening in some of the most extreme and hostile spots in the universe -- the interiors of neutron stars.  The heat and crushing pressure in the core of a neutron star is thought to have enough energy to produce strange quarks and antiquarks, and therefore if those quarks (and the particles made from them) broke CPT symmetry, it would be a lens into a place where the known laws of physics do not hold.

But the symmetrical models won out.  Also, the measured energy of the hypertriton and antihypertriton were higher than expected, which squares with known neutron star masses.  "The presence of hyperons would soften the matter inside neutron stars," said Morgane Fortin, of the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.  "Softer neutron stars would more easily collapse into black holes, so neutron stars couldn’t become as massive.  That feature makes hyperons’ potential presence difficult to reconcile with the largest neutron stars seen in the cosmos — which range up to about two solar masses.  But the newly measured, larger binding energy of the hyperon helps keep alive the idea of a hyperon-filled center to neutron stars.  The result suggests that hyperons’ interactions with neutrons and protons are stronger than previously thought. That enhanced interaction means neutron stars with hyperons are stiffer and could reach higher masses.  So neutron stars may still have strange hearts."

Strange indeed.  Mirror universes, neutron stars, and symmetry preserved to the smallest scales and highest energies.  Amazingly cool stuff, even if (1) I don't understand it all that well, and (2) it doesn't involve evil Don West with a beard.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

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

Cart both before and after the horse

Let's end the week on a happy, if surreal, note with a new experiment in quantum physics that calls into question the arrow of time.

The "arrow of time" has bedeviled physicists for decades -- why time only flows one direction, while in the three spatial dimensions you can move any way you like (up/down, backwards/forwards, right/left).  But with time, there's only one way.

Forward.

The causality chain -- that events in the past cause the ones in the future -- certainly seems rock-solid.  It's hard to imagine it going the other way, Geordi LaForge's weekly rips in the space/time continuum notwithstanding.  Although I must admit I riffed on the idea myself in my short story "Retrograde," about a woman who perceives time running backwards.  It's going to be in a short story collection I'm releasing next year, but you can read it for free on my fiction blog.

But in real life, we take the arrow of time for granted.  It's why no one was especially surprised when Stephen Hawking threw a champagne party in 2009 for time travelers, but mailed the invitations after the event was over... and no one showed up.

In any case, the arrow of time and causality chains would seem to make it certain that if there are two events, A and B, either A preceded B, A followed B, or they occurred at the same time.  (I'm ignoring the wackiness introduced by relativistic effects; here, we're simplifying matters by saying the observation and both events occurred in the same frame of reference.)

So far, so good, right?  The order of two events is a sure thing.

An experiment performed at the University of Queensland (Australia) has just proven that to be wrong.

In a paper called "Indefinite Causal Order in a Quantum Switch" that appeared last week in Physical Review Letters, by Kaumudbikash Goswami, Christina Giarmatzi, Michael Kewming, Fabio Costa, Cyril Branciard, and Andrew G. White, we find out about research that blows away causality by creating a device where a beam of light undergoes two operations -- but in our choices of A following B or B following A, what actually happens is...

... both.

[Image is in the Public Domain}

The setup is technical and far beyond my powers to explain in a way that would satisfy a physicist, but the bare bones are as follows.

Light has a property called polarization.  In effect, that means it vibrates in a particular plane.  As an analogy, think of someone holding a long spring, with the other end tied to a post.  The person is jiggling it to create a wave in the spring.  Are they waving it up and down?  Side to side?  Diagonally?

That's polarization in a nutshell.

(An interesting side-note: this is why polarized sunglasses work.  Light reflecting off a surface gets polarized in the horizontal direction, so if you have a material that blocks horizontally-polarized light, it significantly reduces glare.)

Anyhow, what Goswami et al. did was to rig up a device wherein a horizontally-polarized photon goes down a path where it experiences A before B, while a vertically-polarized one a path where it experiences B before A.  But here's where it gets loony; because of a phenomenon called quantum superposition, in which a photon can be in effect polarized in both directions at the same time, when you pass it through the device, event A happens before event B, and B happens before A, to the same photon at the same time.

Okay, I know that sounds impossible.  But in the quantum realm, seriously weird stuff happens.  It's counterintuitive -- even the eminent Nobel laureate Niels Bohr said, "[T]hose who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."  Thus we have not only loopy ideas like Schrödinger's Cat, but experimentally-verified claims such as entanglement (what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance"), an electron being in two places at once, and the fuzziness of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (that the more you know about an object's velocity, the less you know about its position -- and vice versa).

Which is a deliberate setup for my favorite joke of all time.  Ready?

Schrödinger and Heisenberg are going down the highway in Schrödinger's car, Heisenberg at the wheel, and a cop pulls them over.

"Buddy," the cop says, "do you know how fast you were going?"

Heisenberg says, "No idea.  But I can tell you exactly where I was."

The cop says, "Okay, if you're gonna be a smartass, I'm gonna search your car."  When the cop opens the trunk, there's a dead cat inside.

The cop says, "Did you know there's a dead cat in your trunk?"

Schrödinger says, "Well, there is now."

Ba-dump-bump-kssh.  Ah, nerd humor is a wonderful thing.

But I digress.

As impossible as quantum mechanics sounds, it seems to be true.  John Horgan, in his book The End of Science, writes, "Physicists do not believe quantum mechanics because it explains the world, but because it predicts the outcome of experiments with almost miraculous accuracy.  Theorists kept predicting new particles and other phenomena, and experiments kept bearing out those predictions."

Which is a nicer way of saying that if your common sense rebels when you hear this stuff, sucks to be you.

So as bizarre as it is, we're forced to the conclusion that the universe is a far weirder place than we thought.  Myself, I think it's kind of cool.  Despite my B.S. in physics -- and let me tell you, I was no great shakes as a physics student, and I'm convinced some of my professors passed me just so I wouldn't have to retake their courses -- my mind is overwhelmed with awe every time I read about this stuff.  I wonder, though, if it's even possible for the human mind to truly conceptualize how quantum mechanics works; we are so locked into our ordinary, classical, three-dimensional world, where first you turn the key in the ignition and then your car starts, we're completely at sea even trying to think about the fact that on some level, we can't take any of those things for granted.

So this is looking like opening up a whole new area of study.  Very exciting stuff.  And it may be naive of me, but I'm still hoping it's going to lead to a time machine.

First thing I'm going to do is crash Stephen Hawking's party, temporal paradox or no.  It may cause the universe to end, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

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

Time is running out

Today I was going to tell you about the conference of exorcists meeting in Poland to tackle the worldwide problem of vampires, but a much more pressing issue has arisen that I need to discuss while I have the time.

The issue is that time is speeding up.  I'm sure we've all noticed this.  It's becoming harder and harder to get everything done that needs doing, and there just seem not to be enough hours in the day.  Well, according to a story that popped up in my news feed today... there aren't.

The article, entitled "Is Time Speeding Up?", contains the following paragraphs:

Einstein’s calculations showed that the closer an object comes to the speed of light, the slower time passes.  Scientists have done experiments that prove Einstein’s theory to be correct using clocks moving at different speeds. 

The opposite then must be true that as our speed decreases, time speeds up.  Researcher Greg Braden confirms this, he says that the rotation of the Earth is slowing down, and time is speeding up.  Evidence for his assertions comes from the Schumann Resonance.  The Schumann Resonance is like the Earth’s heartbeat.  It is the Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) of the Earth’s magnetic field. In the 1950’s, when the Schumann resonance was discovered, it was recorded to be an average of 7.8 Hertz.  It has been stable for thousands of years; but now, according to Swedish and Russian researchers, says Braden, it is an average of 12 Hertz.  This means that the normal 24-hour day feels like a 16-hour day.

Okay.  I mean, my only question would be, "What the fuck?"  The Schumann resonance is an atmospheric phenomenon, an electromagnetic resonance caused by lightning discharges in the ionosphere.  And even if the frequency of the resonance is increasing (which I could find no credible evidence of in any case), there's no way we could know if it's been stable "for thousands of years," because it was only discovered in 1952.  And anyway, why would this have anything to do with how fast time is passing?

That doesn't stop "researcher Greg Braden," who says that if you think that's amazing, you ain't seen nothin' yet:

Eventually, Greg Braden says, the Earth’s rotation around the sun will stop and start rotating in the opposite direction...  Braden says that when the Schumann resonance hits 13 Hertz, time will speed up to infinity.  The outcome of this has been explained as those living at this time will experience a shift in consciousness.  There will be no ‘separation’ between this mortal existence and the spirit realm.  Some call it ascension.

Some also call it "bullshit."

Anyhow, I decided to do a little research, and it turns out that this is only scratching the surface of the "accelerating time" theory.  There was one post from a guy whose proof that time is speeding up was that the clock in his bedroom is running fast.  Another said that he knew time was speeding up because he used to be able to say "One Mississippi, two Mississippi," and keep up with the seconds ticking on his clock, and now he can't.  But by far my favorite commentary I found on the topic came from a guy who evidently thinks that time is like a giant cosmic game of tetherball.  He gives this convoluted explanation of a ball hanging on a string tied to a rotating pole, and as the string winds around the pole, the ball spins faster (i.e. time speeds up), and the string gets shorter and shorter and the ball spins faster and faster and then finally SPLAT the ball hits the pole.

At that point, he says, "the Galactic Alignment... with the heart of the galaxy will open a channel for cosmic energy to flow through the earth, cleansing it and all that dwells upon it, raising it to a higher level of vibration."

So at least that's something to look forward to.

[image courtesy of photographer Robbert van der Steeg and the Wikimedia Commons]

Interestingly, the whole subject has even permeated discussions on physics forums.  In one thread I looked at, titled "Universe Expanding or Time Speeding Up?", there were a bunch of woo-woos who blathered on for a while about the expansion of the universe and how time would have to speed up to "compensate" for the expansion of space, and so on, and finally one reputable physicist responded, in some exasperation, "Most of the responses above are gibberish.  No one has even asked the question, 'Speeding up relative to what?'  General Relativity established that time passes at different rates in different reference frames, but these posters seem to think that time as a whole is speeding up -- which is a meaningless proposition, since there is nothing outside of time against which you could detect such a change."

Well. I guess he told them.  Of course, it won't make any difference, because people who think this way are never going to believe some dumb Ph.D. in physics when they've got the whole internet to rely on.  Besides, this physicist is probably a reptilian alien Man-in-Black from the Planet Nibiru who is part of the Bilderberg Group and works for HAARP, and is trying to spread disinformation.  You know how that goes.

So anyway, that's today's heaping helping of pseudoscientific absurdity.  I think I'll wrap this up, because (1) if I read any more websites like the ones I had to peruse to write this, my brain will turn into cream-of-wheat, and (2) I'm running short on time.