The woo-woos go high tech

I suppose it was only a matter of time.  The woo-woos have gotten hold of high tech.

I find this a kind of curious idea, given how they harp so continuously on how their beliefs are Ancient Magick Passed Down From The Elders -- it never occurred to me that they would jump on the "app" bandwagon.  But given the utility, ease of use, and low cost of your typical iPhone or iPad app, it was bound to happen.

So, put away your crystals and dowsing rods and sacred knives, and get out your electronic device of choice.  Here's a few of the hundreds of apps I found. 

Rune Magic ($2.99) - "Rune Magic is a state of the art application for rune divination and studying. Ask runes about your destiny, fortune, love, health and business.  The application provides four types of runic divination with the detailed descriptions of rune meanings.  The runes will tell you about the past, the present and the future, and also will give an advice about your problems.  The application is also perfect for studying runes.  A strict compliance with all magical rules makes application predictions highly accurate. Try it, you would be impressed! The application is on sale, it is the best time to buy it."

Ouija Board version 6.2 ($1.99) - "A talking board, generically referred as "Ouija Board" and also known as spirit board, witch board, oracle board, mystic board or channeling board, is any flat board printed with letters, numbers, and other symbols, to which a planchette or movable indicator points, answering questions from people at a séance. The fingers of the participants are placed on the planchette that is moved by the spirits about the board to spell out messages. These boards are considered to be a spiritual gateway used to contact the dead or to receive information from beyond."

New Age Stone and Crystal Guide ($3.99) - "New Age Stones and Crystals Guide provides metaphysical property information for hundreds of stones and crystals. Search through indexes of stone names or property types to find the exact stone needed for your self development. The most extensive virtual stone and crystal guide available, this application identifies stones helpful for improvement of spiritual, mental and psychological aspects."

Erzulie's Voodoo ($3.99) - "Learn all about the secrets of Voodoo & Vodou with the world’s FIRST authentic Voodoo app, from Erzulie’s Authentic Voodoo in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Erzulie’s Voodoo “Advanced” app delves into the roots, detailed history, advanced spiritual concepts, Vodou rituals and magic of this vast and mysterious tradition, written by highly experienced, initiated, Vodou priests and priestesses.  Erzulie’s Voodoo Advanced App offers comprehensive information on Voodoo beliefs, performing your own authentic Voodoo spells, extensive sections on the Divine Voodoo Spirits (Lwa), how they are served in Vodou, and their Catholic Counterparts plus Magical Veve’s (sacred symbols of the Spirits), Spiritual Possession, New Orleans Voodoo, Palo Mayombe, Voodoo dolls, fetishes, Voodoo magic and much more... Perform your very own powerful Voodoo Love Spells, Wealth Spells and Banishing Spells with our extensive collection of authentic Voodoo rituals found only in the Erzulie’s Voodoo Advanced App, complete with their very own detailed instructions and resources."

Goddess Inspiration Oracle (free) - "Get inspired! The Goddess Inspiration Oracle offers a free one card oracle reading to grant you guidance for your day. It features eighty goddesses from around the world, all whom offer inspiration and guidance. These powerful feminine role models range from Abeona, goddess of gateways, to the Zorya, each of whom are represented in this app with gorgeous art and inspiring, well-researched text... Since time immemorial, humans have invoked the wisdom of goddesses by using oracles. Oracles provide an experience of synchronicity, a term created by Jung to describe a series of random events that connect within us to gain a deeper meaning. By doing so, the oracle helps us release information we already possess, thus allowing inspiration to strike when we most need it."

iTarot Classic (free) - "iTarot Classic provides straightforward two-card readings --"Daily Tarot" and "Love Tarot"-- with a streamlined design that makes consulting the Tarot effortless.
Features:
• Draw new cards with a simple shake
• Display only a one-card reading, if desired
• Use only the Major (or only the Minor) Arcana
• Allow or prohibit reversed cards
• Draw "Daily" and "Love" cards independently, from separate decks"


And those are just six out of hundreds.  I'm kind of overwhelmed, and not just because I'm a Luddite.  I just never would have thought that the whole electronic media thing would have caught on with these folks.  My question is: do they really think it's the same thing?  I mean, isn't the basis of these beliefs that when you handle the crystals, Tarot cards, rune stones, or whatever, the act of touching the objects is what is creating some kind of mystical interconnectedness of being?  Can putting your fingers on a touch screen made in China really accomplish the same thing?

Maybe we should try a different app to see if we can get an answer to this question.  How about:

Magic 8 Ball ($0.99) - "Magic 8 Ball™ has all the answers!  And now it’s available for your iOS device!   Ask it any yes or no question, shake your device (or tap the screen) and, “without a doubt,” it will give you an answer to life’s most complicated questions.  Inquire about romance, friendship, school, work…whatever! "


Let's see...  "Reply hazy, try again."


I shoulda known.

Bias, self-awareness, and evil spirits

If there's anything that is a sign of true intelligence, it's caution regarding accepting ideas at face value.  The tendency of many, unfortunately, is to accept whatever is being said, or read, without question, especially if the claim comes from a reputable-looking source.

The issue becomes further complicated when we're biased ahead of time to accept (or reject) the source itself.  A study (here) by Charles Lord and Cheryl Taylor, of Texas Christian University, indicates that people are more likely to accept as correct false statements if they're told that the false statement came from someone whose political or religious stance they share, and conversely, to think true statements are false if they're told that the true statement came from a source in the opposite ideological camp.  Another study (here), by Emily Pronin, Daniel Yin, and Lee Ross of Stanford University, further indicates that just about everyone believes him/herself to be unbiased as compared to others; and worse still, a study by David Dunning (here) suggests that we are likely to rate ourselves as "above average" in knowledge, even in realms in which we score in the bottom quartile.

In other words, none of us is aware of how unperceptive, biased, and ignorant we actually are.

So, the salient question becomes: given that this is the case, how do we know what is true or false?

Well, in the absolute sense, we can't.  We're trapped inside our own skulls, and certainty about anything is probably unrealistic.  Science helps, because it establishes a baseline for validity, along with a reliance on hard data.  But even science doesn't solve the problem entirely; as James Burke, one of the finest thinkers I know of, said, in his wonderful documentary series The Day the Universe Changed, "Even when you get the raw data, the situation doesn't improve.  Because it isn't raw data.  It's what you expected to find.  You'd designed your equipment based on what you already thought was going to happen, so what your equipment is good at doing is finding the kind of data you reckoned you were going to find."

Still, the situation isn't as dire as all that, or we'd be in doubt about everything.  There are ways we can detect specious thinking, and an assortment of red flags that will alert us to bias, slant, and outright lies.  Let's look at one fairly simple example, which appeared in the rather goofy online magazine Who Forted? (although let's not dismiss it just because of the source; see paragraph 2).

Entitled "Bad Vibes: Can Dealing With Evil Spirits Kill You?", this article makes the claim that delving too deeply into the occult puts you in touch with "forces" that can have negative effects on your health.  "(W)hat about those few people who make it a career to deliver the mortal souls of sinners from the grip of evil?" the author, Greg Newkirk, asks.  "What of exorcists, demonologists, and ghost hunters with a flair for the dramatic and a reality show audience?  Is there a risk in placing yourself between a negative spirit and it’s [sic] prey?  Surely the religious will believe that it’s your own soul at stake, but do the scars of spiritual warfare have a physical manifestation?  What I’m asking essentially amounts to one question: Can the pursuit of evil spirits affect your heath?"

Newkirk then goes on to describe the various ways in which evil spirits could cause you harm, including (to his credit) the practitioner simply experiencing continuous stress, fear, and negative emotions -- i.e., the effect could be real even if the spirits themselves aren't.  (This, then, might qualify as a sort of nocebo effect -- a documented phenomenon in which a person who believes himself to be in harm's way from supernatural causes actually experiences negative health effects.)

The most interesting part, to me, is when Newkirk begins to list off various psychic researchers, exorcists, black magicians, and so on, gives a brief curriculum vitae for each, and describes how and at what age each died.  If you want the complete stories, check out the link, but here's a list of names, ages, and causes of death:

• Malachi Martin, 78, brain hemorrhage
• Ed Warren, 79, cause not listed (but was chronically ill during the last five years of his life)
• Lou Gentile, early 40s, cancer
• George Lutz, 59, cancer
• Tom Robertson, still alive (from his photograph, he appears to be 60-ish), has prostate cancer
• Ryan Buell, still alive (age 30), has pancreatic cancer

Several things jump out at me about this list:

1) It's short.  Beware of small sample sizes.  Given a small enough sample size, you can find just about any sort of statistically unlikely pattern you'd like.  (Sort of like if you rolled a die four times in a row, and got four sixes -- and decided that the chance of rolling sixes on a fair die was 100%.)

2)  Given that the writer already had decided that working with evil spirits is dangerous, it's pretty likely he'd have selected examples that supported the conclusion he already had, and ignored ones that didn't.  This kind of cherry-picking of data isn't always this obvious -- unfortunately.

3)  Even despite #2, this was the best he could do?  The first two men listed actually lived longer than the average American (US male average life expectancy currently stands at 75.6 years).  A third, Tom Robertson, is still alive, and has a form of cancer that is often treatable.  A fourth, George Lutz, died young of cancer -- but one of two photographs of Lutz in the article shows him sitting with a cigarette in his hand, in front of a full ashtray!

My point here is that there's a middle ground between accepting a source whole-cloth or rejecting it out of hand.  There's no substitute for taking a cautious look at the argument presented, asking yourself some pointed questions about bias and slant (especially, given the Lord and Taylor study, if the source is one you habitually agree or disagree with!), and engaging your brain, before deciding one way or the other.  And, if there isn't enough information to decide, there's nothing wrong with simply holding a judgment in abeyance for a while -- indefinitely, if need be.

A wonderful take on the whole idea of how to analyze claims is the chapter entitled "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection" in Carl Sagan's wonderful book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (which, in my opinion, should be required reading in every high school science curriculum in the world).  Check it out, while you're taking a break from expelling evil spirits.  It'll be good for your health.

*ding* You've got mail!

I'm frequently the recipient of posted responses and emails, and I'm pleased to say that the majority of them are quite pleasant and supportive.  Some, unfortunately, are downright hostile.  Others fall somewhere in the middle -- questioning my views, requesting that I reconsider, providing me with additional source material that I didn't have before.  And while compliments are awesome, I really appreciate the people who take the time to provide me with constructive criticism -- because, as I recently commented, I'm always happy to revise my views when presented with facts, evidence, or even a logical argument I hadn't heard before.

Last week, I was the recipient of three responses to recent posts, that I thought were worthy of responding to in a subsequent post.  So, lo, here is the response.  In order not to leave my readers on a negative note, I present them in decreasing order of vitriol.

The first one was a reply to my last post, regarding the "Baltic Sea Anomaly," in which I described the beliefs of certain folks that the structure is a sunken Nazi superweapon.  The response I got said, in part, that the structure was "perfectly circular" with "vertical straight lines," and therefore couldn't be natural in origin; the writer then went on to say that "no one except me" claimed that the thing could interfere with planes, and asked why if I "obviously had no understanding of the facts" I "waste my time and my reader's time writing this drivel."

Well, okay, then.  First of all, I'm not the one claiming that the alleged "Nazi superweapon" was interfering with airplanes; the source did, which I both quoted and posted a link to.  I, you might recall if you'd read more carefully, was the one that doubted such claims were true.  Second, I don't know where the responder took geometry class, but the "Anomaly" is certainly not a perfect circle.  And as far as straight lines -- those abound in nature.  In fact, I just saw yesterday, in a park not ten miles from my house, fault lines in a cliffside so straight they look like they were cut with a saw.

However, allow me to clarify one thing, because perhaps I did overstate my case.  The point of the post was to rail against people who seem bound and determined, without any hard evidence, to turn this thing into something bizarre.  My statement, "It's just a pile of rocks," should have said, "As far as the evidence we now have, there is no reason to reject the conclusion that it's just a pile of rocks."  Could it be something else?  Of course.  It could be a drowned structure from a Stone Age settlement, constructed when the sea level was far lower.  It could be a something-or-another from the Nazis.  It could, although it is much less likely, be a crashed spaceship.  But thus far, all we have is a few images, and some anecdotal reports of electronic equipment malfunctioning -- and myself, I am hanging onto the conclusion that William of Ockham would have favored, which is that it is some sort of geological formation, such as a faulted pillow basalt.  If hard evidence proves me wrong, that's fine, and will undoubtedly be more interesting than my rather ho-hum explanation -- and I will happily eat crow and print a retraction here.  But until that time, the wild speculation is getting to be rather tiresome.


The second response came as an email, shortly after I posted "Thought vs. experiment," which was about how experimentation (and data, and hard evidence) should be the sine qua non of understanding -- that knowledge, in my opinion, is seldom ever arrived at by simply "thinking about stuff."  This generated a response, which I quote in part:

You have written more than once in your blog that you will only accept something if you have hard evidence, and that beliefs in the absence of hard evidence are what you call "woo-woo."  I think the flaw in your argument has to do with what you would consider "hard evidence."  Why couldn't there be a natural phenomenon that we haven't yet designed a machine to detect?  Maybe ghosts exist, and the only way to sense them is with our minds.  You would rule that out because you don't see a needle moving on a device, and yet it's real.  And my sense is that you're so closed-minded that even if you were to be presented with evidence for the supernatural, you'd rule it out because you'd already decided that none of that stuff is true.

First of all, I must point out that the latter is the hazard not only with perennial skeptics like myself, but with everyone.  We all come with our set of preconceived notions about how the world works.  If I hear a creaking noise in an old house at night, of course my first inclination will be to assume that it's some sort of natural phenomenon (a branch rubbing the roof, an animal in the attic, or the like).  But how is that different than the True Believer?  To him/her, a creaking of the floorboards is automatically assumed to be evidence of haunting.

The difference, I think, is that for a skeptic (and I would include here skeptics who are inclined to believe in ghosts -- and there are a few out there), you don't stop at that assumption.  You examine your evidence, and you keep your biases out front where you can see them -- and you look for more data.  Skeptics, I think, tend to have restless minds, and aren't content with just saying, "Oh, okay, I know what that is, I can stop thinking about it now."  We are, in our best moments, open to a revision of our explanations -- but only if the evidence supports it.

And as far as there not being a machine to detect ghosts, that one I've heard before -- the argument that goes along the lines of, "We didn't know x-rays existed until scientists built a sensor that could detect them.  Maybe there are energies we haven't learned to detect, yet."  That is possible, but I'd put it in the "doubtful" category -- physicists have become exceedingly good at measuring energy of varying types, even when those traces are faint (to give just one example, look at the Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy study, which detects extremely small fluctuations in the microwave background radiation in the sky as a way of elucidating the structure of the early universe).  I find it hard to believe that with all of the big effects that the woo-woos claim -- telekinesis, telepathy, spirit survival, and so on -- that none of our current devices can demonstrate unequivocal hard evidence of any of them.


The third response was to my post, "Grilled cheese sandwiches and sacred stones," which looked at the rather difficult question of how to respond to people who claim that you're not showing proper respect to an object that they venerate and you don't:

You shouldn't scoff at people for venerating, or finding spirituality, in objects.  All of our ancestors did that very thing.  I'll bet that there are objects you are attached to -- for sentimental reasons, perhaps, but still, it's not "just a thing" for you.  And maybe the people who find spirituality in objects are right, and you're missing a big part of the universe by considering everything around you to just be inanimate matter.

Well, first of all, I reread my post, and I didn't think I did much scoffing.  At least, not nearly as much as I usually do.  Maybe I did some covert, implied scoffing, I dunno.  But in any case, the responder is correct that I don't think there is "spirit" in matter, and that our ancestors did, in general, believe that there was.  Our ancestors, you might recall, believed a lot of other things, too, and a good many of them have since been proven to be false, so just because some great-great-grandmother of mine thought that a particular ring had magical powers doesn't impel me to believe it out of some sense of familial respect.

In any case, it all comes back to my favorite word, "evidence."  A random pattern burned into a piece of toast is just not sufficient for me to conclude that Jesus has sent me his Holy Image.  Some people in Venezuela declaring that a particular rock is their Wise Grandmother doesn't mean that out of respect for their cultural beliefs, I have to accept that it is literally true.  I will fall back on what I said in the post; I believe in treating all people with respect, dignity, and kindness, but that does not require me to accept that what they're saying is correct.


In any case, I really appreciate the feedback, and although I would prefer not to have what I write referred to as "drivel," it's better to have hostile responses than no responses.  As Brendan Behan famously said, "There's no such thing as bad publicity."  So keep those cards and letters comin'.

The Baltic Sea Anomaly, the Nazis, and "Vril"

The "Baltic Sea Anomaly" is becoming the woo-woo phenomenon that will not die.

You probably remember that the whole thing started last year, when some Swedish treasure-hunters discovered a pile of rocks on the floor of the Baltic Sea that was vaguely circular.  The presence of a circular pile of rocks on these people had exactly the effect it would on anyone, provided he had the IQ of a jar of peanut butter: the people who took the photograph decided it was a downed spaceship.

This caused all sorts of excitement amongst the world of woo-woo, especially when the Ocean Explorer team who had made the initial "discovery" told the press that they couldn't go back because of funding problems and the onset of winter.  They promised, however, to return this year, and anticipation grew, until a couple of months ago, they went back, took more photographs, and found that the downed spacecraft was...

... still just a pile of rocks.  But they were really special rocks!  Really!  And this definitely isn't a publicity stunt intended to draw the whole thing out interminably!

The latter, of course, is happening anyway, because woo-woos are nothing if not tenacious.  So, now we have a new proposal, based on the claim by the Ocean Explorer team that the "Baltic Sea Anomaly" (as the rocks have come to be known) was interfering with electronic equipment, that their cameras and so on "refused to work" when they got close to it.

So now, the pile of rocks has been morphed from a downed spacecraft into...

... wait for it...

... a superpowerful Nazi secret weapon.  (Source)

Yes, this is quite an amazing pile of rocks, isn't it?  It is a remnant of "super-secret WWII technology" that was "designed to block enemy radar and even causing ships and airplanes to lose their way, either crashing into the sea or sinking below the waves."

And as I've commented before, there is no silly idea that someone can't make sillier, so now the buzz is that this is the at-long-last evidence needed to prove the discovery by the Nazis of an ultrapowerful energy source called "Vril."

The whole Vril thing has been going around for years -- that the Nazis had found evidence of alien technology from a civilization on Alpha Centauri, and were working on a doomsday weapon that would be powered by "Vril."  Apparently the story of the Nazis looking for Vril is true; it was one of a whole lot of ridiculous, pseudo-mystical lines of "research" the Nazis were pursuing.  The fact that they were looking for Vril, though, is especially comical, because the whole idea came from an 1871 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton called Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, which the Nazis evidently didn't notice had been shelved in the "Fiction" section of the bookstore.

But that, of course, never stops either Nazis or conspiracy theorists, because they always have recourse to saying, "Of course it's shelved as fiction -- it was written in the guise of a fictional novel to cover up the fact that it was all true!  How's that for a clever strategy?"  And the result is that there are numerous secret and not-so-secret societies today that base their philosophy (if I can dignify it with that name) on the truth of the Vril story.  (Here's a webpage that goes into detail about the Nazi Vril program, but unfortunately seems to take the whole thing a little too seriously; and a highly, but inadvertently, comical page that tells you how to purchase your very own hand-held "Vril Generator.")

So.  Anyway.  Can we just clarify a couple of things, here?

1)  The "Baltic Sea Anomaly" is a PILE OF ROCKS.  How many times do I have to say this?  The Ocean Explorer team, in a sudden fit of honesty, admitted this when they went back there in May.

2)  Call me a cynic, but I just flat-out don't believe that the pile of rocks is interfering with electronic equipment.  That's just too convenient.

3)  There's no such thing as "Vril."  Bulwer-Lytton made it up for his novel.

4)  The Nazis were, for the most part, superstitious, irrational loons, whose only use for science was to make weapons.  Many of the reputable scientists they had fled to safety when the Nazis came to power, including Albert Einstein, Max Born, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, Erwin Schrödinger, Hans Krebs, and Bernard Katz, with the result that most of the "science" they accomplished with the ones who stayed behind was pure garbage.

5)  Can we just move on to some other crazy idea, now?  Because this one is seriously getting old.

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.