Stretching time

You know, I'm beginning to think that every time I want to write a piece about cosmology or physics, I should just write "Einstein wins again" and call it good.

One of my favorite science vloggers, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, gives a wry nod to this every time Einstein's name comes up in her videos -- which is frequently -- giving a little sigh and a shake of the head, and saying "Yeah, that guy again."

Maybe we should just stop arguing with him.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I did a post about a possible paradigm shift in cosmology that could account for the mysterious "dark energy," a property of spacetime that is causing the apparent runaway expansion of the universe.  While acknowledging that finding solid evidence for the contention is currently beyond our technical capabilities, I pointed out that it simultaneously does away with two of the most perplexing and persistent mysteries of physics -- dark energy, and the mismatch between the theoretical and experimentally-determined values of the cosmological constant.  (Calling it a "mismatch" is as ridiculous an understatement as you could get; the difference is about 120 degrees of magnitude, meaning the two values are off by a factor of 1 followed by 120 zeroes).

But this week a new study out of the University of Sydney has shown that another of Einstein's relativistic predictions about an expanding universe has been experimentally verified, so maybe -- to paraphrase Mark Twain -- rumors of the death of dark energy were great exaggerations.  A bizarre feature of the Theory of Relativity is time dilation, the fact that from the perspective of a stationary observer, the clock for a moving individual would appear to run more slowly.  This gives rise to the counterintuitive twin paradox, which I first ran into on Carl Sagan's Cosmos when I was in college.  If one of a pair of twins were to take off on a spaceship and travel for a year near the speed of light, then return to his starting point, he'd find that his twin would have aged greatly, while he only aged by a year.  To the traveler, his clocks seemed to run normally; but his stay-at-home brother would have experienced time running much faster.

As an aside -- this is the idea behind my favorite song by Queen, the poignant and heartbreaking "'39," the lyrics for which were penned by the band's lead guitarist, astrophysicist Brian May.  Give it a listen, and -- if you're like me -- have tissues handy.

In any case, the recent research looks at a weird feature of the effects of relativity on time.  The prediction is that the expansion of the universe should affect all the dimensions of spacetime -- and therefore, in the early universe, time should (from our perspective) seem to have been running more slowly.

And that's exactly what they found.  (Recall that when you're looking outward in space, you're looking backward in time.)  The trick was finding a "standard clock" -- some phenomenon whose rate is steady, predictable, and well-understood.  They used the fluctuations in emissions from quasars -- extremely distant, massive, and luminous proto-galaxies -- and found that, exactly as relativity predicts, the farther away they are (i.e. the further back in time you're looking), the more slowly these "standard clocks" are running.  The most distant ones are experiencing a flow of time that (from our perspective) is five times slower than our clocks run now.

"[E]arlier studies led people to question whether quasars are truly cosmological objects, or even if the idea of expanding space is correct," said study co-author Geraint Lewis.  "With these new data and analysis, however, we’ve been able to find the elusive tick of the quasars and they behave just as Einstein’s relativity predicts."

The bizarre thing, though, is the "from our perspective" part; just like the traveling twin, anyone back then would have thought their clocks were running just fine.  It's only when you compare different reference frames that things start getting odd.  So it's not that "our clocks are right and theirs were slow;" both of us, from our own vantage points, think time is running as usual.  Neither reference frame is right or wrong.  The passage of time is relative to your velocity with respect to another frame.

Apparently it's also relative to what the fabric of spacetime around you is doing.

I'm not well-versed enough in the intricacies of physics to know if this really is a death blow to the paradigm-shifting proposal of a flat, static universe I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, but at least to my layperson's understanding, it sure seems like it would be problematic.  So as far as the nature of dark energy and the problem of the cosmological constant mismatch, it's back to the drawing board.

Einstein wins again.

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Let's do the time warp

Dear Readers,

I will be taking a short break -- this will be my last post until Thursday, April 27.  Please keep suggesting topics, though!

See you when I return.

cheers,

Gordon

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I find it fascinating, and frequently a bit dismaying, the range that exists in what people consider "sufficient evidence."

There are us hardcore skeptics, who basically say, "Incontrovertible hard data, right in front of my face, and sometimes not even that."  It then runs the whole spectrum down to people who basically have the attitude, "if my mother's first cousin's sister-in-law's gardener's grandma says she remembers seeing it one time, that's good enough for me, especially if it confirms my preconceived beliefs."

I saw a good example of the latter a while back over at Mysterious Universe in an article by Brett Tingley entitled, "Researcher Discovers Time Warp Near Las Vegas."  Tingley, to his credit, treated the whole thing with a scornful attitude, which (when you hear the story) you'll see was fully warranted.

Turns out "noted paranormal researcher" Joshua Warren, whose name you might know from his television work (some of his finer achievements are Aliens on the Moon: The Truth Exposed!, Weird or What?, Inside the Church of Satan, Possessed Possessions, and -- I shit you not -- Inbred Rednecks), claims to have found a spot north of Vegas where he says that time is running slower than in the surrounding areas.

Okay, let me just state up front that I have a degree in physics.  I certainly wasn't God's gift to the physics department by any stretch, but I did complete my degree.  (I didn't graduate summa cum laude, or anything.  More persona non grata.  But still.)  I bring this up only to say that with all due modesty, I have more knowledge of physics than the average dude off the street.  And because of this, I know that because of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, there are only two ways to get time to slow down locally; (1) go really really fast; or (2) get close to a powerful gravitational field, such as a black hole.  Even the Earth's gravitational field, huge as it seems to us, causes a time dilation effect so small that it took years simply for physicists to be able to measure it and confirm it exists.  (For reference; your clock here on the surface of the Earth ticks more slowly, compared to a satellite orbiting at 20,000 kilometers, by a factor of 1 in 10,000,000,000.  So being here on Earth is not exactly the answer to lengthening human lifespan.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kjordand, Treval, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So the whole story is pretty fishy right from the get-go.  But Warren thinks he's proved it.  Here's what he has to say:

At this spot, on June 18 of 2018, I actually measured for the first and only time, time itself slowing down for 20 microseconds.  The weird thing, the real holy grail here, was what we picked up with this brand-new piece of technology.  That signal is always supposed to travel at the same rate of time at any particular place.  The only way that could change is if a black hole approached Earth or something like that, which is never supposed to happen.

You could substitute "never supposed to happen" with "hasn't happened," or "almost certainly never will happen," or "we'd all be fucked sideways if it did happen."  Now, twenty microseconds may not seem like very much, but that kind of discrepancy is not only many orders of magnitude greater than any expected relativistic time dilation effect, it is also well within the range of what would be easily measurable by good scientific equipment.  (Cf. the previous example of the physicists measuring a one-part-in-ten-billion slowdown.)  In other words, if this were real, it not only would be bizarre that it hadn't already been discovered, it would be simple to confirm -- or refute.

But here's the kicker: Warren is basing his amazing, groundbreaking, "holy grail" discovery on...

... one measurement with one piece of equipment.

So my first question is: time ran slower as compared to what?

Of course, even the equipment itself sounds suspicious to me.  It's called a "DT Meter," and no, in this context, "DT" doesn't stand for "delirium tremens," although it might as well.  It's a "differential time meter," and here's how Brett Tingley describes it:

KVVU-TV in Las Vegas reports that Warren made the discovery using a gizmo called a DT Meter, or differential time rate mater.  Warren says the device was created by a Silicon Valley engineer named Ron Heath, who has no discernible presence on the internet.  The device apparently consists of a 100-foot cable with a sensor on one end.  The device sends a signal down the length of the cable and measures the time it takes to reach the other end; theoretically, the device can detect small perturbations or differences in the speed of time itself.

Now, I ask you, which is more likely: that (1) there's a spot in Nevada where time runs slowly, for no apparent reason, or (2) Warren and Heath's gizmo has a glitch?

Of course, that's not slowing down Warren one iota (as it were).  He says that the time warp he discovered is the explanation for all sorts of other things for which he also has no proof:

I think it’s really interesting when you consider that this site where we got this reading, showing this time anomaly, also happens to be one of the most popular UFO hotspots in the area.  The big question at this point is not whether or not we have these anomalies, but what’s causing them?  Is this something natural that gives us a window a gateway into another world or another level of reality?  Or is this the byproduct of some kind of weird technology, be it something secret and man-made or something that’s extraterrestrial?

So the "big question" is not whether the anomaly exists?  I think that's a pretty big question, myself.  But no, we're supposed not only to believe his time warp, but that his time warp explains UFO sightings, and is caused by gateways into another world, etc.

What's baffling is that there are lots of people who apparently find this line of... um... well, I can't call it reasoning... this line of baloney convincing.  Poking about on the interwebz for about ten minutes found lots of places this "discovery" has been posted, mostly by people claiming either that ha-ha, this proves those dumb old physicists are wrong about everything, or that there's clearly a coverup by the government to prevent us from finding out about it, and thank heaven for Joshua Warren bravely posting this online, or even that we should watch this spot closely because it's likely to be where the alien invasion of Earth starts.

All of which left me weeping quietly and smacking my forehead on the keyboard.

Anyhow.  Like I said, I'm glad Tingley scoffed at Warren's claim, because Warren is not even within hailing distance of what anyone with a background in science would find convincing.  It also made me feel marginally better that I'm not the only one scoffing.  But I'd better wrap this up, because for some odd reason I feel like I'm running short on time.

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Tiny timepieces

One of the most mind-blowing revelations from science in the past two hundred years came out of a concept so simple that a sixth-grader could understand it.

You've all observed that the motion of objects is relative.  Picture a train with glass sides (only so you can see into it from outside).  The train is moving forward at 5 kilometers per hour, with an observer standing next to it watching it roll past.  At the same time, a guy is walking toward the back of the train, also at 5 kilometers per hour.

From the point-of-view of anyone on the train, the walking man is moving at 5 kilometers per hour.  But from the point-of-view of the stationary observer outside the train, it appears like the man on the train isn't moving -- he's just walking in place while the train slides out from under him.  This is what is meant by relative motion; the motion of an object is relative to the frame of reference you're in.  We don't observe the motion of the Earth because we're moving with it.  It, and us, appear to be motionless.  In the frame of reference of an astronaut poised above the plane of the Solar System, though, it would seem as if the Earth was a spinning ball soaring in an elliptical path around the Sun, carrying us along with it at breakneck speed.

With me so far?  Because here's the simple-to-state, crazy-hard-to-understand part:

Light doesn't do that.

No matter what reference frame you're in -- whether you're moving in the same direction as a beam of light, in the opposite direction, at whatever rate of speed you choose -- light always travels at the same speed, just shy of 300,000,000 meters per second.  (Nota bene: I'm referring to the speed of light in a vacuum.  Light does slow down when it passes through a transparent substance, and this has its own interesting consequences, but doesn't enter into our discussion here.)

It took the genius of Albert Einstein to figure out what this implied.  His conclusion was that if the speed of light isn't relative to your reference frame, something else must be.  And after cranking through some seriously challenging mathematics, he figured out that it wasn't one "something else," it was three: time, mass, and length.  If you travel near the speed of light, in the frame of reference of a motionless observer your clock would appear to run more slowly, your mass would appear greater, and your length appear shorter.  (Where it starts getting even more bizarre is that if you, the one moving near light speed, were to look at the observer, you'd think it was him whose watch was running slow, who had a greater mass, and who was flattened.  Each of you would observe what seem to be opposite, contradictory measurements... and you'd both be right.)

All of this stuff I've been described is called the Special Theory of Relativity.  But Einstein evidently decided, "Okay, that is just not weird enough," because he did another little thought experiment -- this one having to do with gravity.  Picture two people, both in sealed metal boxes.  One of them is sitting on the surface of the Earth (he, of course, doesn't know that).  The other is out in interstellar space, but is being towed along by a spacecraft at an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second (the acceleration due to gravity we experience here on the Earth's surface).  The two trapped people have a communication device allowing them to talk to each other.  They know that one is sitting on a planet's surface and the other is being pulled along by a spaceship, but neither knows which is which.  Is there anything they could do, any experiment they could perform, anything that would allow them to figure out who was on a planet and who was being accelerated mechanically?

Einstein concluded that the answer was no.  Being in a gravitational field is, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same as experiencing accelerated motion.  So his conclusion was that the relativistic effects I mentioned above -- time dilation, mass increase, and shortening of an object's length -- not only happen when you move fast, but when you're in a strong gravitational field.  If you've seen the movie Interstellar, you know all about this; the characters stuck on the planet near the powerful gravitational field of a black hole were slowed down from the standpoint of the rest of us.  They were there only a year by their own clocks, but to everyone back home on Earth, decades had passed.

Maybe you're thinking, "But isn't the Earth's gravitational field pretty strong?  Shouldn't we be experiencing this?"  The answer is that we do, but the Earth's gravity simply isn't strong enough that we notice.  If you travel fast -- say on a supersonic airline -- your clock does run slow as compared to the ones down here on Earth.  It's just that the difference is so minuscule that most clocks can't measure the difference.  Even if supersonic seems fast to us, it's nearly standing still compared to light; if you're traveling at Mach 1, the speed of sound, you're still moving at only at about one ten-thousandth of a percent of the speed of light.  The same is true for the gravitational effects; time passes more slowly for someone at the bottom of a mountain than it does for someone on top.  So on any ordinary scale, there are relativistic effects, they're just tiny.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mysid, Spacetime lattice analogy, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But that's what brings the whole bizarre topic up today -- because our ability to measure those tiny, but very real, effects just took a quantum leap (*rimshot*) with the development of a technique for measuring the "clocks" experienced by a cluster of atoms only a millimeter long.  A stack of about 100,000 strontium atoms that had been cooled down to near absolute zero were tested to see what frequency of light would make their electrons jump to the next energy level -- something that has been measured to a ridiculous level of accuracy -- and it was found that the ones at the bottom of the stack (i.e. nearer to the Earth's surface) required a different frequency of light to jump than the ones at the top.  The difference was incredibly small -- about a hundredth of a quadrillionth of a percent -- but the kicker is that the discrepancy is exactly what Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicts.

So Einstein wins again.  As always.  And if you're wondering, it means your feet are aging slightly more slowly than your head, assuming you spend as much time right-side-up as you do upside-down.  Oh, and your feet are heavier and flatter than your head is, but not enough to worry about.

All of this because of pondering whether light behaved like someone walking on a train, and if someone being towed by an accelerating spaceship could tell he wasn't just in an ordinary gravitational field.  It brings home the wonderful quote by physicist Albert Szent-Györgyi (himself a Nobel Prize winner) -- "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought."

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My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

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

Let's do the time warp

I find it fascinating, and frequently a bit dismaying, the range that exists in what people consider "sufficient evidence."

There are us hardcore skeptics, who basically say, "Incontrovertible hard data, right in front of my face, and sometimes not even that."  It then runs the whole spectrum down to people who basically have the attitude, "if my mother's first cousin's sister-in-law's gardener's grandma says she remembers seeing it one time, that's good enough for me, especially if it confirms my preconceived beliefs."

I saw a good example of the latter yesterday over at Mysterious Universe in an article by Brett Tingley entitled, "Researcher Discovers Time Warp Near Las Vegas."  Tingley, to his credit, treated the whole thing with a scornful attitude, which (when you hear the story) you'll see was fully warranted.

Turns out "noted paranormal researcher" Joshua Warren, whose name you might know from his television work (some of his finer achievements are Aliens on the Moon: The Truth Exposed!, Weird or What?, Inside the Church of Satan, Possessed Possessions, and -- I shit you not -- Inbred Rednecks), claims to have found a spot north of Vegas where he says that time is running slower than in the surrounding areas.

Okay, let me just state up front that I have a degree in physics.  I certainly wasn't God's gift to the physics department by any stretch, but I did complete my degree.  (I didn't graduate summa cum laude, or anything.  More persona non grata.  But still.)  I bring this up only to say that with all due modesty, I have more knowledge of physics than the average dude off the street.  And I know that because of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, there are just two ways to get time to slow down locally; (1) go really really fast; or (2) get close to a powerful gravitational field, such as a black hole.  Even the Earth's gravitational field, huge as it seems to us, causes a time dilation effect so small that it took years simply for physicists to be able to measure it and confirm it exists.  (For reference; your clock here on the surface of the Earth ticks more slowly, compared to a satellite orbiting at 20,000 kilometers, by a factor of 1 in 10,000,000,000.  So being here on Earth is not exactly the answer to lengthening human lifespan.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kjordand, Treval, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So the whole story is pretty fishy right from the get-go.  But Warren thinks he's proved it.  Here's what he has to say:

At this spot, on June 18 of 2018, I actually measured for the first and only time, time itself slowing down for 20 microseconds.  The weird thing, the real holy grail here, was what we picked up with this brand-new piece of technology.  That signal is always supposed to travel at the same rate of time at any particular place.  The only way that could change is if a black hole approached Earth or something like that, which is never supposed to happen.

You could substitute "never supposed to happen" with "hasn't happened," or "almost certainly never will happen," or "we'd all be fucked sideways if it did happen."  Now, twenty microseconds may not seem like very much, but that kind of discrepancy is not only many orders of magnitude greater than any expected relativistic time dilation effect, it is also well within the range of what would be easily measurable by good scientific equipment.  (Cf. the previous example of the physicists measuring a one-part-in-ten-billion slowdown.)  In other words, if this were real, it not only would be bizarre that it hadn't already been discovered, it would be simple to confirm -- or refute.

But here's the kicker: Warren is basing his amazing, groundbreaking, "holy grail" discovery on...

... one measurement with one piece of equipment.

The equipment itself sounds a little suspicious to me.  It's called a "DT Meter," and no, in this context, "DT" doesn't stand for "delirium tremens," although it might as well.  It's a "differential time meter," and here's how Brett Tingley describes it:

KVVU-TV in Las Vegas reports that Warren made the discovery using a gizmo called a DT Meter, or differential time rate mater.  Warren says the device was created by a Silicon Valley engineer named Ron Heath, who has no discernible presence on the internet.  The device apparently consists of a 100-foot cable with a sensor on one end.  The device sends a signal down the length of the cable and measures the time it takes to reach the other end; theoretically, the device can detect small perturbations or differences in the speed of time itself.

Now, I ask you, which is more likely: that (1) there's a spot in Nevada where time runs slowly, for no apparent reason, or (2) Warren and Heath's gizmo has a glitch?

Of course, that's not slowing down Warren one iota.  He says that the time warp he discovered is the explanation for all sorts of other things for which he conveniently has no proof:

I think it’s really interesting when you consider that this site where we got this reading, showing this time anomaly, also happens to be one of the most popular UFO hotspots in the area.  The big question at this point is not whether or not we have these anomalies, but what’s causing them?  Is this something natural that gives us a window a gateway into another world or another level of reality?  Or is this the byproduct of some kind of weird technology, be it something secret and man-made or something that’s extraterrestrial?

So the "big question" is not whether the anomaly exists?  I think that's a pretty big question, myself.  But no, we're supposed not only to believe his time warp, but that his time warp explains UFO sightings, and is caused by gateways into another world, etc.

What's baffling is that there are lots of people who apparently find this line of... um... well, I can't call it reasoning...  this line of baloney convincing.   Poking about on the interwebz for about ten minutes found lots of places this "discovery" has been posted, mostly by people claiming either that ha-ha, this proves those dumb old physicists are wrong about everything, or that there's clearly a coverup by the government to prevent us from finding out about it, and thank heaven for Joshua Warren bravely posting this online, or even that we should watch this spot closely because it's likely to be where the alien invasion of Earth starts.

All of which left me weeping quietly and smacking my forehead on the keyboard.

Anyhow.  Like I said, I'm glad Tingley scoffed at Warren's claim, because Warren is not even within hailing distance of what anyone with a background in science would find convincing.  But I'd better wrap this up, because for some odd reason I feel like I'm running short on time.

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This week's book recommendation is the biography of one of the most inspirational figures in science; the geneticist Barbara McClintock.  A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller not only explains to the reader McClintock's groundbreaking research into how transposable elements ("jumping genes") work, but is a deft portrait of a researcher who refused to accept no for an answer.  McClintock did her work at a time when few women were scientists, and even fewer were mavericks who stood their ground and went against the conventional paradigm of how things are.  McClintock was one -- and eventually found the recognition she deserved for her pioneering work with a Nobel Prize.