Thought vs. experiment

To a scientist, there's no more fundamental approach to knowledge than experimentation.  You want to find something out?  Design an experiment to see if your idea about how the world works is correct.  Good scientists are always testing, questioning, and trying to find new ways to tweak the system and see how it responds.

What's fascinating from a historical perspective is that this is a fairly new way to approach knowledge.  In general, the pre-Enlightenment attitude was that if you wanted to learn, you simply had to think about stuff.  Thought was considered to be the purest way to gain knowledge; no need to contaminate your brain with dirty, clunky, uncooperative matter.  Even Kepler started out from this standpoint -- when he first started to work on the problem of the shapes of planetary orbits, he began from the assumption that they were circles (because circles are "perfect") and that the relationship between one planet's orbit and the next had something to do with the "Five Perfect Solids" of Greek mathematical theory.  Fortunately, Kepler was (1) working with a rigorous experimentalist, Tycho Brahe, and (2) honest, because he found out pretty quickly that his ideas weren't working -- and was forced to the uncomfortable conclusion that planetary orbits were messy, lopsided ellipses.  Galileo, you might recall, faced persecution for church officials not because of heresy with regards to religious doctrine, per se -- his problems with the Vatican started because of three claims, one famous (his acceptance of the heliocentric model) and the other two less-known (his rejection of Aristotle's claims that an object's falling speed is dependent on its mass, and that objects float or sink in water depending upon their shape).  It's fascinating, and not a little horrifying, that church officials had demonstrated for them experiments supporting Galileo's conclusions -- and they still didn't believe the evidence of their eyes, preferring instead the "pure thought" of Aristotle and Plato, for whom experimentation was somehow intrinsically suspect.

Amazingly, that idea -- that you can arrive at the truth just by thinking about it -- lingers still.  Some of it is relatively innocent, the sort of thing I see in high school science classes -- misconceptions that stem from the thought, "Well, of course it works that way.  That seems logical."  More insidious, though, are the schools of thought that embrace that approach, that deliberately eschew experimentation in favor of contemplation.  And in the last couple of days, I found two excellent examples of just this way of thinking.

The first one was in the online version of Fate magazine, so I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised, considering the source.  Entitled, "Auric Energy Fields and Their Effects on Electronics," the article in question, written by "noted wisdom teacher" Kala Ambrose, looks at the alleged phenomenon of people whose presence can somehow interfere with electronic devices from computers to DVRs to streetlights.  And she makes the following statement:

As a psychic, I see the aura around people, which is a flexible field of energy around the body with many layers. The level closest to your body, is described as the etheric body and in a sense, it’s the battery of the body, receiving and emitting electrical impulses in and out from your body. You bring energy in and you release energy, all through the auric body. There are many layers extending outward from the etheric body including the mental layer and the emotional layer, both of which are also energy fields where we store and emit energy and we bring this energy into and down into the physical body from these layers... For some people, who also tend to have psi abilities, they release this pent up energy in a wave. I refer to it as an energy blast, which can affect the environment around them. One way that these people begin to notice this effect, is that they will find when walking or driving by street lights, that the lights will go off or turn on when they pass by. If this has happened to you, you are releasing this pent up energy or someone near you is releasing their energy... The over-abundance of energy that you described, can affect lights and other electronics when released in a quick blast. Think of it as an energy surge. Typically this indicates that the person is not aware of the energy they are releasing and so it comes as a surprise when an electronic device is affected. For many people, they emit this energy the strongest when they are agitated, stressed or in a high emotional state (positive or negative).

Now, let's assume for a moment, just for fun, that the phenomenon is real; i.e., that the people who claim to interfere with electronic devices are telling the truth.  What I find the most interesting about Kala Ambrose's claims is that never once does she seem to think, "Hey!  If some guy's body is emitting enough energy to interfere with a computer, that has to be measurable!  Maybe we should build a device to measure, test, and study this 'auric energy field.'"  No, she seems to believe that all you need to do to understand this is to think about it:

The next time this occurs, stop right away and ask yourself, How am I feeling, What’s on my mind right now? Also ask those present what they noticed when it occurred. Gather this information to discern what the triggers are that set off the energy spikes.

An even more striking example of this philosophical approach to science comes from Joseph Farrell's blog Giza Death Star, in which he responds to a press release from the world of physics in a post titled "Space-Time Crystals."  Farrell, to his credit, posts a link to the original press release, and from that press release we learn that Frank Wilczek of MIT and Xiang Zhang and Tongcang Li of UC Berkeley are working on trapping loops of ions inside crystals, creating an rotating charge signal that would "(break) temporal symmetry."  Wilczek is careful to specify that the "space-time crystal" thus created would span only extremely small distances (a tenth of a millimeter) and exist only at phenomenally low temperatures (one-billionth of a degree Kelvin), and that "being in their ground states, such systems could not be employed to produce useful work."

Farrell, on the other hand, begs to differ.

He says that he beat Wilczek, Zhang, and Li to the punch years ago, and did it without ever performing a single experiment:

Way back when, when I began writing my high speculations and sharing them with the public, I began by deciding to “take the plunge” and “high dive” off the deep end, and share my hypothesis that the Great Pyramid may have been a sophisticated kind of phase conjugate mirror manipulating the fabric of the physical medium itself. And at the end of my first book on the subject, I speculated on a kind of crystal that would somehow be able to trap and rotate EM waves. Not knowing what to call such bizarre things, I simply call them “phi” crystals, since they were suggested to me by the constant phi, and by the Fibonacci sequence. My reason for thinking that such crystals would be an integral component of any such machine was simply that there would have to be some sort of coupled oscillator able to interact with the “rotation moment” of the fabric and structure of the local medium, or local space-time.

Now, from my admittedly rather rudimentary understanding of physics, this sounds like a lot of horse waste right from the get-go, but what I find the most interesting about all of Farrell's blathering on about this is that he jumps right past Wilczek's cautions that since space-time crystals are in their ground state, the laws of thermodynamics would render it impossible for them to perform work -- and describes how these curiosities could become "sources of energy" that would "make our largest thermonuclear bombs look like firecrackers."

And how did he arrive at all of this?  Apparently, just by pondering the Fibonacci sequence and other such constructs:

But imagine, for a moment, the possibility that such a technology could be turned into, say, a source of energy...  (T)o my mind anyway, the possibility – long term to be sure – opens up that such things could eventually become sources of energy. We’re a long way from that, to be sure, and even a long way of any such verified understandings of these wildly speculative ideas, but nonetheless, the possibility should be mentioned.

I find it even more curious that Farrell is weighing in on subtle concepts in physics when his own Ph.D. is in patristics.  What is patristics, you might ask?  I had to ask, because I didn't know, and found out that patristics is "the study of early Christian writers, known as the Church Fathers."  Yup, that will certainly prepare you to comprehend abstruse concepts in solid-state physics.

So, anyway, the Platonic ideal of arriving at knowledge just by analyzing it with Pure Thought is with us still, apparently.  And just as it did in the case of Galileo's detractors, without the foundation of data, evidence, and experiment to support it, theoretical musings are just as likely to go wrong as right.  It is exactly this error in approach that science corrects -- even though there are people out there who still don't see why all that silly experimentation should be necessary.

Grilled cheese sandwiches and sacred stones

A friend of mine, and frequent contributor of topics for Skeptophilia, read my frequently-used tag line on the description of my just-released essay collection ("... considering why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches"), and had the following to say: 

"What would you do if you saw the face of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich?  Would you eat it?  Sell it?  ... (and) what happens once the faithful show up at your door to venerate the miraculous image? Do you sell tickets? It is ethical for an atheist to profit from misguided believers? Is it respectful to destroy an object some see as holy?"

Which I thought were excellent questions.  The veneration of objects (and places) is so common that it's taken for granted; the statuary, chalices, and rosaries in the Catholic church, the scrolls and certain items of clothing for devout Jews, the Koran to Muslims -- all are treated with reverence, and in varying ways are considered the repository for the divine.

It is an interesting question, however, to consider how much reverence you are obliged to show these objects if you don't share in those beliefs.  Let's for a little while take this out of the realm of the mainstream religions, because that inevitably conjures up strong feelings of various sorts, and look at a curious situation that happened last month.  (Source)

79-year-old German artist Wolfgang von Schwarzenfeld had an idea for an artistic installation in Berlin's Tiergarten Park.  He obtained (legally and with permission, he claims) a large pinkish boulder from the Gran Sabana region of Venezuela, carved the word "love" in various languages on its surface, and placed it on a pedestal.  It has since become something of a mecca for New Agers, and is a frequent site for offerings of flowers, incense, and so on.

The problem is, the pink rock was an object of veneration for the Pemon natives of Gran Sabana, who claim that the rock is the sacred "Wise Grandmother" of their tribe, and that they have seen drought and food shortages since the rock was taken because the "Grandmother" is no longer there to watch over them.  Von Schwarzenfeld says he's not about to give it back, and the whole thing has become something of a cause célèbre for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who always seems to be spoiling for a fight.

There have been varying accusations flying back and forth -- that Chavez and others are stirring up trouble, that von Schwarzenfeld should never have taken something that was a vital part of the Pemon's "cultural heritage," even that the Pemon are lying about the importance of the stone in order to get money.  Now, I'm not an anthropologist (nor a political scientist), and I can't with authority state which of these claims (if any) is true.  But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the Pemon are telling the truth, and that the stone was a venerated object.  To what extent are von Schwarzenfeld and the rest of us, not sharing those beliefs, obliged to treat the stone with reverence?

Now, first off, I'm a big believer in just being nice.  There's no particular point in walking around being an asshole; if someone believes that an item is worthy of reverence, then my usual approach is to play along out of respect and kindness to the person.  But here, in a sense, the damage is already done (whether knowingly or not is a matter of conjecture).  Should von Schwarzenfeld destroy his art installation, and at what would be a great personal expense return the stone to Venezuela?  Does it matter that he'd already desecrated the stone by carving on it?

It's all very well for free-thinking westerners to sit in our comfortable living rooms and say, "For crying out loud, it's a rock.  It wasn't really protecting the Pemon from droughts, famine, and whatnot.  It doesn't matter."  The fact is, such things matter greatly to some people, and when different groups have competing interests, a resolution is decidedly non-trivial.  Almost the reverse situation is happening right now in Mali and Egypt -- where radical Islamists are destroying historical sites in the city of Timbuktu, and are calling for the demolition of the pyramids, because they are edifices that are "symbols of paganism."  (Source)  This isn't the first time this has happened -- recall the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, an act that one archaeologist called "an irreparable loss to humanity."

So, what do you do when different groups have different attitudes towards the sacred, the secular, and the profane?  I wish I had an answer.  When my friend asked me the question about what I'd do if I found a Holy Grilled Cheese Sandwich, I responded, "I'd write about it," which was true if somewhat disingenuous.  The bottom line is that I don't know that it's possible to reconcile these claims, given that they stem from mutually exclusive views of the world.  In the end, perhaps, there is no answer to this question other than, "Be as kind and respectful as you can manage to be, and hope like hell that it doesn't blow up in your face."

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.

Premonitions, the lottery, and statistics

An interesting post appeared yesterday over at Occult View.  Entitled, "If Psychic Ability Exists, Why Can't Anyone Predict Winning Lottery Numbers?", the post makes the claim that (1) psychic ability does exist, and (2) there have been people who have won the lottery based upon a premonition.  So, q.e.d., more or less.

As evidence, the author gives us three examples of people who allegedly won the lottery (or could have, in one case) because of precognition: Steve (dreamed of the numbers "2895," didn't play them, and six months later, those were the winning numbers); Frank (a friend of a friend who won a seven million dollar payout "around two decades ago" and "said he dreamed the winning numbers"); and Lillian (bought five Pick-Three tickets with the same three numbers, because she'd heard the numbers told to her by "a voice;" the tickets won, despite the fact that the odds were "one in a thousand").

So.  Where to start?

First, as a scientist, I must with some reluctance point out the quality of the evidence.  All of them are after-the-fact reporting -- the person had already won (well, other than Steve, who didn't even win), and reported afterwards that the numbers had come to them in a precognitive fashion.  So first, we run headlong into the problem with anecdotal reporting, which is the plasticity of the human memory and the unfortunate capacity of humans to make stuff up.

But let's assume, just for fun, that all three of these stories are true as written -- all three people did have some sort of hunch about the numbers ahead of time.  Does this constitute evidence for precognition?

Unfortunately, the answer is no.  I say "unfortunately" because it sure would be cool if it worked, wouldn't it?

Let's just look at the statistics first.

According to Matthew Sweeney, author of The Lottery Wars: Long Odds, Fast Money, and the Battle Over an American Institution, about $60 billion is spent annually on lottery tickets.  The number of tickets sold per year proved to be a hard number to find -- I'm not sure why -- but from a paper I looked at called How to Analyze the Lottery, by John Corbett and Charles Geyer, the number looked to be about 400 million annually.

Now, what about premonitions?  According to a 1987 survey conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, 67% of adults report having "regular episodes of precognition."  The current population of the US stands at a little more than 311 million people, so if we assume that the rates of precognition haven't changed in the last thirty years, it means that something on the order of 100 million people experience regular, accurate precognitive events.

Now, I'm no statistician, but we're talking about very big numbers here, both of ticket sales and of precognition. And with all of those precognitives walking around, you're telling me that the best evidence you could find were (1) a guy who dreamed of four numbers, didn't buy a ticket, and they came up six months later, (2) a guy who "heard from a friend" that the friend had dreamed his winning numbers "a couple of decades ago," and (3) a woman who won a one-in-a-thousand Pick-Three lottery because she heard the numbers from "a voice?"  Given that 67% of Americans claim that they have been able to predict the future, you would think that guessing the correct numbers would happen so often that the lottery commission would go bankrupt from the number of winning tickets sold.

One possible objection to all of this might be that precognitives can't control what their episodes of precognition are about; i.e., they can't choose what their mysterious skill will predict next.  But doesn't this just make all of this a giant case of dart-thrower's bias -- people only remember the times when their hunches proved correct, and forget about all of the hundreds of times that they didn't?  In order to be fair, we'd have to have some sort of accurate way of estimating the number of people who dreamed numbers, were told them by "a voice," or just had a hunch, and didn't win.  And because no one tends to advertise it when that happens, it's impossible even to venture a guess.  But if I can indulge in a hunch of my own, here, I suspect that it occurs a lot -- far more often than such "precognitive events" actually predict the future.

So, that's our look at psychic abilities for today.  If any Skeptophile in the studio audience is good at statistics, let me know what you thought of my analysis, and whether you think my point stands; and if you know of a quantitative way of approaching these data, do post it in the comments section.  Because, after all, the last thing I want to do is to do the same thing that our friends at Occult View did, which is to throw around a few numbers, tell a few stories, wave their arms around, and state a conclusion as if it were self-evident.

Atheism, agnosticism, and degrees of certainty

Friday's post -- about a commentator who claims to be an atheist, and yet states that she would not vote for an atheist -- provoked a lot of thoughtful commentary from my readers.  One email came from a gentleman named John DeLorez, who writes over at The Science of Metaphysical and Occult Philosophy.

John and I have corresponded before, and while (as you might guess from the name of his blog) we disagree in substance more often than we agree, he is a thoughtful and skilled writer and our e-conversations have never failed to get me thinking.  (And you should definitely check out his blog when you have a chance; it's worth a read.)  And regarding Friday's post,  he had (amongst other things) the following to say:

I know that you claim the title of atheist, but based upon your frequent statements similar to the one you made today, "I think that the religious view of the world is unsupported by the available evidence," I view you more of an Agnostic, than an Atheist.  Given proof in a form that you could except you would be willing to at least consider a change in belief.  It has been my experience that a dedicated atheist is unwilling to even consider any view other than their own.

I thought this comment was well-taken, and deserved some consideration not only as a response to John, but also to clarify this point to the rest of my readers, because I think it's a common misunderstanding.

The word agnostic literally means "one who does not know" (from the Greek a- "not" + gnosis "knowledge").  And in the strictest sense of the word, I'm an agnostic about everything.  A skeptic -- and all true scientists should be skeptics -- is never sure.  My training and background in biology focused heavily on genetics, so I consider that to be an area in which I am (to some extent) an expert.  Could my understanding of genetics be substantially wrong?  Of course.  What would it take for me to jettison what I thought to be true about genetics, and adopt a different model?  New, reliable data, from peer-reviewed sources, that lead to the inescapable conclusion that the previous model is incorrect.

So, in that sense, just as I am an agnostic (and not certain) in the realm of science, I am an agnostic (and not an atheist) with regards to the existence of a deity.  However, there is one thing that the previous paragraph ignores, and that is the likelihood that a particular hypothesis, theory, or model is correct.  And that's where the confusion comes in.

To take my previous example, what is the likelihood that our current model of genetics is wrong?  I would place that probability as so close to zero as to make no difference.  Genetics as a theory has been so extensively researched, using so many different modalities, and the mountain of data thus generated has been so thoroughly reviewed and cross-checked, that it is about as rock-solid an edifice as any I can think of.  (And sad to say for the young-earth creationists, but the same is true about the evolutionary model.)  So while a hair-splitter might still say that I am "an agnostic with respect to genetics," I am so close to certainty that one might as well call me certain.

All of this puts me in mind of a very old joke, which will probably only be funny to people who are (like me) old.  In bygone days, a young man was taking a math test, and was using his slide rule to perform calculations.  He was working on a problem that required him to multiply two times three, and he began frantically to work his slide rule.  "Let's see..." he mumbled to himself.  "Two... times three... is...  5.9999... oh, hell, let's just call it 6."

So, anyway, you can see where all of this is headed.  What about the existence of god?  Of course I consider my lack of belief as subject to revision.  If, like Moses, I was fortunate enough to have Yahweh speak to me from a Bush That Burned But Was Not Consumed, I would be forced to reconsider my position.  (And honesty demands that I would have somehow to be certain that there was no other explanation -- such as that I was having a hallucination, or that I was the victim of a prank.)  But assuming that I was reasonably sure that I wasn't delusional, and that no hoaxer had set me up, I would have no other choice but to change my stance.

As is, however, I see no evidence whatsoever that god exists.  If I had to place my degree of confidence in the existence of god, I'd have to put it lower than my degree of confidence in the existence of Bigfoot -- because honestly, there's more credible evidence for Bigfoot, in the form of tracks, sightings, and so on, than there is for god.  (As I've commented before, it seems to me that if a deity exists, wouldn't it result in the universe being left with some discernible, measurable trace of that deity's presence?  If there is such a trace, it's certainly escaped me.)

So, while technically I'm an agnostic, and would cheerfully revise my beliefs (after recovering from my shock and astonishment) should evidence for god appear, I'm close enough to the atheist end of the spectrum that it's easier just to refer to myself as such.  In the same sense that I'm an agnostic in the strict sense with regards to Yahweh, I'm also an agnostic with regards to Thor, Kuan Yin, Zeus, Apollo, and Brahma -- but I don't think that my degree of confidence in any of them is particularly lower than my degree of confidence in Yahweh.  So for all intents and purposes, I'm an atheist.

It's an interesting question to consider, however, and I thank John for bringing it up.  And as I said, you really should check out his blog.  Even the heartiest skeptic needs to have his/her views questioned -- and not infrequently.  Keeps us honest.

An atheist who wouldn't vote for atheists?

A news story today has me puzzled, but being that it appeared in Glenn Beck's online news source The Blaze, perhaps that's not to be wondered at.

In this story, S. E. Cupp, a commentator who writes for The Blaze, states for the record (in an interview with MSNBC) that she is an atheist -- but then says that she wouldn't vote for one.

Cupp was describing her support for Mitt Romney, and was asked if she would still vote for Mitt Romney if he were an atheist.  "No," she said.  "Because he would have no chance."

Well, okay, I guess that falls into the "don't bother voting for someone who is clearly going to lose anyway," department, which I suppose I can understand.  But then Cupp went further:

"And you know what?" she said. "I would never vote for an atheist president. Ever. Because I do not think that someone who represents 5 to 10 percent of the population should be representing and thinking that everyone else in the world is crazy, but me."

Well, I'm an atheist, and I don't exactly thing that "everyone else in the world is crazy but me."  I think that the religious view of the world is unsupported by the available evidence, which isn't exactly the same thing, is it?  For me, I'm perfectly willing to have a religious president -- unless part of his/her religion requires proselytizing of unbelievers (which, of course, a lot of them do).  I would like to think that the opposite would be true -- that a qualified atheist would, in the eyes of the religious, be fine, unless (s)he were foisting atheism upon the rest of the world.

Cupp continued, "The other part of it — I like that there is a check, OK? That there‘s a person in the office that doesn’t think he’s bigger than the state.  I like religion being a check and knowing that my president goes home every night addressing someone above him and not thinking all the power resides right here… Atheists don’t have that."

Again... atheists don't think the power resides with them.  I think Cupp may be confusing "atheism" with "megalomania."  And honestly, what she accuses atheists of is exactly why the idea of an extremely devout president gives me pause -- it's because the extremely devout think they're in touch with a bigger power that is above them, and they know what that power wants them to do.  It's the certainty that always makes me shudder, the starry-eyed statement "I'm doing god's will."

All of this makes me wonder how well Cupp understands what atheism actually is.  The darker side of my brain wonders if she actually is telling the truth about being an atheist; frankly, it's hard for me to see Glenn Beck hiring an atheist as one of his personal spokesmen.   But even if she is an atheist, she's not a very clear-thinking one -- which, as I said, should come as no surprise given who she works for.

Magnetic portals, and the trouble with catchy names

Sometimes scientists can be their own worst enemies.

Please note that I am saying this with a great measure of affection; I have the utmost respect for the way in which pure research has allowed us to understand our universe.  But in trying to bring their research to the masses, scientists inevitably have to dumb down what they've discovered.  Most scientific discoveries are couched in abstruse mathematics that is incomprehensible to anyone without an advanced degree in the field, and strewn with specialized vocabulary that the majority of us don't know.  So in order to give us non-scientists a glimpse of the amazing worlds that scientists view head-on, they have to find ways to communicate their knowledge accurately, but simply.

But in the desire to make their research catchy, and attractive to the media (and media consumers), they often give their discoveries clever names.  And that's when they get into trouble.

Look at "The God Particle," which was the subject of yesterday's post.  Leon Lederman, the physicist who coined the Higgs boson's popular nickname in the title of his book, The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?, has lived to regret his choice of words after the nickname of the recently-discovered particle has been taken literally by countless woo-woos, religious folks, and people who simply don't understand physics.  (Lederman famously quipped that he really wanted to call it "the goddamn particle" but doubted that his publisher would have allowed it.)

Today, we have another example of this phenomenon, with the announcement by scientists at NASA of the discovery of a phenomenon that has been nicknamed a "magnetic portal."  Before I tell you what it actually is, here are the responses to the discovery from a few websites:

"Science-fiction writers have toyed with the concept of a portal for many years, and scientists have been trying to discover such a structure in real life.  A new study backed by NASA has revealed the existence of a so-called magnetic portal, connecting the atmospheres of the Earth and the Sun.  Usually, a portal is defined as an opening through spacetime that enables a traveler to move over great distances, or over time, instantly. In other words, it represents a shortcut, or maybe a guiding pathway to a particular destination."

"Presently there are over 100,000 magnetic portals in existence on Earth with 40% of them located over large bodies of water. Magnetic portals all lead into another dimension. When you find one, you can step in and out quickly and nothing will happen. However, when you step in and have the courage to go all the way through, you will find yourself in a different dimension."

"Visualize the magnetic portal connection as a large umbilical cord tethering the Sun and Earth together allowing varying amounts of magnetized subatomic particles to pass from highly-charged areas (the Sun) to lesser-charges areas (the Earth) on regular eight-minute cycles. The slightly-smaller portal connection attaches, detaches and reattaches to our planet due to regular Earth rotation at just about 1000 miles per hour. The magnetic portal connection has a series of internal conduits that are active and inactive with a percentage of active conduits depending upon proximity to the Sun. In other words, the highest percentage of internal conduits are actively transferring magnetism through the magnetic portal, when the Earth is in perihelion position nearest the Sun. The lowest percentage of active conduits is present when the Earth is on the far side of the orbit in aphelion position farthest away from the Sun.  And it won't come as any shock to you to hear that the highest percentage of active conduits is predicted to occur on December 21, 2012."

And so forth and so on.  "Portal" means "doorway;" so laypeople are perhaps to be forgiven if they immediately assume that the "magnetic portals" discovered by NASA's research team, led by Jack Scudder, are going to be some kind of Deep Space 9-style wormhole through space.

However, if you actually read the press release from NASA, you find that the reality is that the "portals" are simply places where the magnetic fields of the Earth and the Sun intersect, creating a gap that allows highly-charged particles to strike the Earth's upper atmosphere.  So the only thing that will be passing through these "conduits" are particles in the solar wind -- a phenomenon of interest to atmospheric scientists, physicists, agencies that operate communications satellites, and possibly folks who like to watch the aurora borealis.

So why did they pick the word "portal?"  Probably because the other names -- "electron diffusion regions" and "flux transfer events" -- aren't nearly as sexy.  To be fair, the name "portal" is technically accurate (in that it's a gap allowing something in), but you know it was going to be misleading.  Even the NASA-created video (which you can watch here) starts out talking about science fiction and "extraordinary openings in space or time."  As soon as I saw the first fifteen seconds of the video, I did a facepalm, because I knew how it was going to be interpreted by people who already had a woo-woo view of the universe.  It took me about another fifteen seconds to find the three websites I quoted above.  And those were three of thousands.  The whole "portal" thing has the UFO/aliens/alternate universes/extra dimensions crowd leaping about making excited little squeaking noises, making me wonder if they got beyond the first fifteen seconds of the NASA video.

So, anyway.  Why do scientists do things like this?  I suppose it's to give their discoveries a certain cachet among the non-scientist multitudes.  The problem is, it so often backfires -- as it did with Lederman's "God Particle," and even as the choice of the term "global warming" for planetary climate change did, giving non-climatologists the erroneous idea that anthropogenic climate change would trigger a smooth, steady rise in temperature everywhere simultaneously.  I understand the necessity of bringing scientific research to the masses, and I applaud the work of popularizers like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Michael Shermer, and (in the previous generation) Carl Sagan and Jacques Cousteau.  However, the inevitable simplification necessary to allow non-scientists to understand complex research engenders a responsibility that they watch their wording of things carefully -- the intent to explain can very quickly devolve into an accidental muddying of the waters.