Ghost radio

I got an email yesterday with two links and a message.  The message said:

Wondering what you think of this.  I'm not convinced but I think it's interesting.  This guy says he's made a device that can allow two-way communication with the dead.  The messages he picks up do seem to be answering specific questions and comments he's making.  Not just random words or phrases. 

Watch the guy's video and see what you think.  I'm keeping an open mind about it, but I'm curious what you think. 

Sincerely, 

T. K.

The links he provided were to YouTube videos made by a guy named Steve Huff, selling software that is called "The Impossible Box."  He claims that this software is manipulable by the disembodied spirits of the dead, who apparently surround us.  The first link plays audio recordings of messages that Huff has received using the software; in the second, he explains to us how he thinks it works.

Here are a few of the messages he received:

• I am the portal
• Let there be light
• The light will surround you, Mr. Huff
• Blessed art thou
• Olee's at your side
• The devil's gonna profit from you

And so forth and so on.  The software is available for download for $49.95 (and can be purchased here).

So I watched both videos, and predictably, I'm unconvinced.

The way it works, which he does get to on the second video (about halfway through), is that the software scans internet radio, and pulls out words and phrases that it then plays for you.  Allegedly, this software only turns on when the ghosts have something to say.  "There is no continuous scan of audio," Huff tells us.  "The scan only starts when the spirits want to speak." 

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

When it comes to explaining how the programmer created code that can specifically be manipulated by the dead, he's a little cagier.  The Impossible Box contains "software with all kinds of tech," he says, giving no other real details presumably to protect his proprietary interest, but also preventing any kind of critical analysis of what's really going on in there. 

The real problem here, though, is the same one that plagues attempts to demonstrate that rock musicians have engaged in backmasking -- hiding demonic messages in songs, so that when you play them backwards you hear voices saying things like "Here's to my sweet Satan."  (That one is from one of the most famous claims of backmasking -- in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven.")  As Michael Shermer points out in his wonderful TED talk "Why People Believe Weird Things," the message only becomes clear when someone tells you what the demons are saying via a caption -- just as Huff does in his video.  Before we're primed by being told what the message is, it more or less sounds like gibberish.  "You can't miss it," Shermer says, "when I tell you what's there."

The other thing that is troubling is the question of why ghosts have to have source audio in order to speak.  If they can manipulate software, you'd think they'd be able to do the same thing without having to rely on picking out words from internet radio.  He tried making a "spirit box" that used white noise instead of scanning radio, Huff says, and it didn't work.  "Spirits have a hard time forming words out of white noise as a source audio," he tells us.  "They need audio with human words to really be able to leave you sentences "

Which I find awfully convenient.  We're given garbled phrases, made up from words pulled from internet radio, and we get to decide what it is we're hearing, and then assign meaning to it.  While it's possible that we're talking with ghosts, what's more likely is that we're seeing some kind of audio version of the ideomotor effect, where our own subconscious decisions and expectations of meaning are creating a message where there really is none.

Now, let me conclude with saying something I've said before; I'm not saying that the afterlife is impossible, nor that spirits (should such exist) might not try to communicate with the living.  All I'm saying is that the evidence I've thus far seen is unconvincing, and I find the perfectly natural explanations for what is going on in The Impossible Box (and other spirit communication devices) sufficient to account for any ghostly messages Huff and others have received.  If anyone does decide to shell out the fifty bucks for the software, however, I'd be really interested to hear what your experience is with it -- and especially, if you got information from Great-Aunt Marjorie that you couldn't have otherwise got, and not just vague messages like "The light will surround you."

Until then, however, I'm afraid that I'm still in the "dubious" camp.

Bee all and end all

It's unfortunate how wishful thinking can turn off the rational parts of your mind.

I know we all want to live healthy for as long as possible.  There are a lot of scary illnesses out there that everyone would love to avoid.  But this fear drives us sometimes to pursue preventatives and treatments that are completely bogus -- in our desperation to avoid disease, we grab on to anything that seems even remotely possible.

I can't think of any other explanation for the link a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a couple of days ago, in which we learn that to avoid getting sick, people are breathing air from beehives.

Here's the pitch:

This is a place in Slovenia.  It's proven that breathing air from a beehive is very beneficial for ones [sic] health.  Hive air contains ingredients that boost the body [sic] healing capacity.  This is just more evidence that backs up why it is that beekeeper [sic] a have the highest life expectancy in the world.  Everything the Bee produces is of the highest value to humans.

…Beekeepers have the lowest incidence of cancer of all the occupations worldwide. This fact was acknowledged in the annual report of the New York Cancer Research Institute in 1965. Almost half a century ago, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 9(2), Oct., 1948, published a report by William Robinson, M.D., et al., in which it was claimed that bee pollen added to food (in the ratio of 1 part to 10,000) prevented or delayed the appearance of malignant mammary tumour. 

L.J. Hayes, M.D had the courage to announce, “Bees sterilise pollen by means of a glandular secretion antagonistic to tumours.”  Other doctors, including Sigmund Schmidt, M.D., and Ernesto Contreras, M.D., seem to agree that something in pollen works against cancer. 

Dr W. Schweisheimer also said that scientists at the Berlin Cancer Institute in Germany had never encountered a beekeeper with cancer.  A French study concerning the cause of death of 1,000 beekeepers included only case of a beekeeper that died of cancer. The incidence of cancer-caused deaths in a group of French farmers was 100 times higher than the group of beekeepers. 

Till date, no study has faulted the fact that beekeepers have very low, almost negligible incidence of cancer worldwide.  Due to the weight of this fact and coupled with his experience, John Anderson, Professor of beekeeping, University of Aberdeen, unequivocally declared: “Keep bees and eat honey if you want to live long. Beekeepers live longer than anyone else”.

The problem is, the basis of this claim -- that beekeepers have a lower (or zero, as the post claims) incidence of cancer than the rest of us -- is simply untrue.

 All the way back in 1979, J. A. McDonald, F. P. Li, and C. R. Mehta decided to test this claim (which does date back to the mid-20th century).  Unsurprisingly, they found no correlation at all between beekeeping and low cancer incidence:

Beekeepers had a slightly lower than expected fraction of deaths from cancer.  The deficit of lung cancers in male beekeepers was significant (p less than 0.05) and may indicate that fewer beekeepers were cigarette smokers. The frequencies of other cancers did not differ significantly from expectation...  Mortality from diseases other than cancer showed no unusual patterns.  At least two persons died from accidents directly related to the care of beehives.  Analysis of a subgroup of 377 males with major roles in the beekeeping industry showed no substantial differences in distribution of causes of death.

But that hasn't stopped people from doing things like claiming that honey is better for you than sugar (honey basically is sugar, or a concentrated solution thereof) and that "bee pollen" is good for your health.  In fact, there have been no studies supporting any positive health effects from ingesting "bee pollen," and at least three cases of people experiencing life-threatening anaphylaxis after taking bee pollen supplements.

"Natural" doesn't mean "good for you."  Nature is full of toxins, and there's a significant fraction of nature that would love nothing better than to kill you and eat you for dinner.  And while bees are certainly beneficial insects -- the decline of bees from colony collapse disorder should be of tremendous concern to everyone, given the role of bees in pollination -- that doesn't mean that attaching a hose to a beehive and breathing air from it is going to do anything but piss off the bees.

This didn't stop people from waxing rhapsodic about the curative powers of bee air on the original post.  Here are just a few of the comments, so you can get the flavor of the conversation.  You're going to have to trust me that spelling and grammar is as written, because I don't want to use up my daily allotment of sics this early in the day.

Bees are our medicine.  Honour and respect our companion to evolve.  Bees don't respond well to greed. 

Alot of things I think would help ease and even cure alot of the sickness in the world today.  I do believe there was medicine before any of us were born that would work better.  With the manufacturers of the drugs all the accessories that goes with on inhalers needles etc. Is worth billions and they don't want to cure a dam thing.  I believe the make drugs just to keep illness under control so we the consumer still has to buy there product just like buying your milk an bread. 

I knew that bee keepers on Russia had the largest group of centurions I knew it had something to do with all the bee pollen and honey they were eating.  But huffing bee hive air ... cool

I have to admit that the last comment defeated me for quite some time, which I attribute to my not having had any coffee yet.  I simply stared at it with my head tilted to one side, wearing an expression similar to my dog's when I explain difficult concepts to him, like why he shouldn't roll in dead squirrel.

The other shoe dropped eventually, of course.  And I do think it would be cool if people who lived 100 years got to be centurions.  I think that on a person's 100th birthday, they should receive the entire outfit and be allowed to wear it wherever they want to.

But I digress.

It'd be awesome if there was some cheap, readily accessible preventative for diseases like cancer.  The problem is, if there was something like that, we would have found it by now, and its therapeutic value would have been established by scientific studies.  

So cancel your trip to Slovenia.  Your best bet for staying healthy is still eating a balanced diet, maintaining a reasonable weight, finding ways to reduce stress, and exercising frequently.  And if you can't manage any of those things, bees are unlikely to help.

Open season on Snorky

I know that there are many important things in the world I could be blogging about today. I could be devoting my writing to analyzing the candidates for the presidential election.   I could be posting about a prototype fusion reactor about to be turned on in Germany, which (if it works) could revolutionize clean energy production.  I could be discussing the ongoing problems in the Middle East.

But no.  My topic for the day is: why the hell do I have the theme song from The Banana Splits stuck in my head?

For those of you who are too young to remember the 60s, or who were, shall we say, otherwise occupied at the time, The Banana Splits was a short-lived and rather ill-conceived Saturday morning cartoon.  It ran, insofar as I can remember, on the variety-show model, with a number of short clips (both animated and live-action), music, and so forth.  It was hosted by a foursome of actors in animal suits (the eponymous "Banana Splits") -- Fleegle the dog, Snorky the elephant, Bingo the gorilla, and Drooper the lion.

It was, in a word, weird.  It is second only to H. R. Pufnstuf as being the trippiest Saturday morning cartoon ever aired.  And for those of you who haven't heard of this amazingly freaky cartoon, the only way I can give you a flavor for it is to imagine what would happen if J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a script for an episode of Barney and Friends while on LSD. 

You think I'm kidding? Ask anyone over 50. Or check out the Wikipedia entry, which gives an interesting take on the series, as well as many links to related sites.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the theme song of The Banana Splits -- whose lyrics I kindly won't share, partly out of consideration for my readers and partly because the bit of it that is currently whirling around in my brain consists mostly of "la la la" -- is one of the worst earworms in the world.  An earworm, as defined by psychologist James Kellaris, is a song, jingle, or fragment thereof, which gets lodged inside your skull and will never ever ever leave, even if you try to remove it using an electric drill and a shop-vac, until finally you go completely and totally MAD AND BEGIN TO FROTH AT THE MOUTH AND START CALLING ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS WHO ARE HUNTERS AND ASKING THEM IF THEY WOULD HAVE AN ETHICAL PROBLEM WITH KILLING AN ELEPHANT NAMED "SNORKY" EVEN THOUGH ELEPHANTS ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES.

Whoa, sorry, got a little carried away, there.  And perhaps I exaggerate a tad.  Even the most annoying earworm will eventually leave, but often only because it's been supplanted by an even worse one.  So once I have the theme song from The Banana Splits out of my head, who knows what musical adventures I have to look forward to?  Maybe "Copacabana."  Or "Benny and the Jets."  Or the "Kit-Kat" jingle ("Gimme a break, gimme a break, break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar.")  There are so many my brain can choose from!  I can hardly wait!

The worst of it is considering what a waste of mental energy this must be.  When I think of the amount of brain space I'm currently devoting to keeping "la la la, la-la la la, la la la, la-la la la" ricocheting off the inside of my skull, it just makes me depressed.  I could be writing a symphony, coming up with a Grand Unified Field Theory, solving world hunger, or figuring out why Carly Fiorina appears to be physiologically incapable of uttering a true statement.   But no. I'm sitting here, going "la la la."  And worse yet, writing about it.

Good lord, I just realized something.  Now I've infected all of you.  I'm really sorry about that, truly I am.  And if all of you go out and infect others, it'll be... it'll be.. a pandemic!  Bananasplitsitis!  US productivity will grind to a halt!  (The Russians and Chinese are immune, because during the 60s they were too busy having Cultural Revolutions and Great Leaps Forward and Sputniks and Missile Crises to come up with pointless, psychedelic cartoons.)  World markets will collapse.  Pandemonium will ensue.  And it will all be my fault.

Wow.  I feel just awful about this.  I think I need to lay low this morning, just to recover from the guilt feelings.  Find something to take my mind off all the trouble I've caused.  Maybe relax, daydream a little.  Daydream about... about a magic land... where everything is alive!  Filled with whimsy and weirdness!  Where the mayor is a brightly-colored dinosaur!

Ahem...  "H. R. Pufnstuf, where'd'ya go when things get rough, H. R. Pufnstuf, you can't do a little 'cause you can't do enough..."

Inconvenient evidence

There is nothing good to be gained by the politicization of science.

At its most fundamental level, science is not a political pursuit at all.  It is, or should be, the pursuit of a rigorous standard of inquiry to broaden our knowledge of how the universe works.  The goals and methods of science should not change based on whether you're liberal or conservative, political or apolitical, religious or secular.

Despite this, there are two points where politics impinges on science.  One of them, at least, is defensible; that is the decision regarding what to do when scientific findings impact directly the lives of humans.  For example, whether anthropogenic climate change exists, and predictions regarding how great an impact it will have on sea levels, storm intensity, and so on, are scientific questions.  Those should be answered irrespective of political concerns.  On the other hand, how a country responds to whatever threats do exist -- to what extent money should be appropriated to remedy the causes, or mitigate the effects -- those are political questions, and need to be decided by policymakers.

Unfortunately, there is a second, and more toxic, way that politics impinges on science.  Because science is a pursuit that requires funding, and funding for scientific research often comes from the government, there is a desire by many politicians to support only science that fits the current political narrative.  When it becomes expedient for scientific findings to be discredited, politicians begin weighing in on whether the science itself is valid, regardless whether they have any expertise in the field in question.  (Witness Ted Cruz's recent statement that "climate change is not science, it's religion" -- a comment that is odd from a variety of standpoints, but most strikingly that he's apparently calling something a "religion" to discredit its validity.)

It's not only the conservatives who do this, however.  The focus of the left on such issues as health, diet, and the environment has led to broadside criticism of anyone who calls into question the prevailing wisdom (Monsanto is evil, GMOs are dangerous, the pharmaceutical companies are corrupt).  Just this week an article appeared in The Globe and Mail about the harassment a Canadian scientist is receiving over his discovery that the radiation released from the Fukushima disaster is not causing any problems in the eastern Pacific.

Jay Cullen, of the Integrated Fukushima Ocean Radionuclide Monitoring project, conducted a serious of rigorous tests for radioactive contamination in the water along the Pacific Coast of North America, in response to considerable public concern over the potential for dangerous levels of radioisotopes showing up in seawater, and getting into the marine food chain.

Cullen was motivated by the best of intentions.  "The goal… was that people were asking me, family and friends and the public at large, what the impact of the disaster was on B.C. on the North Pacific and on Canada," he said.  "I started looking for quality monitoring information so I could answer those questions as honestly and accurately as I could."

And after detailed analysis of the data, Cullen determined that the threat was negligible.  Levels of radionuclides in seawater on the Pacific coast of North America were so low that they were barely detectable at all.

You'd think that ecologically-minded types would be glad about this, wouldn't you?

Nope.  Didn't fit the narrative, which is that the threat is too there, and that all of the powers-that-be are conspiring to cover it up.  Cullen was denounced as a shill for the nuclear power industry, and derided as a "sham scientist."

Ultimately, he received death threats.

Interestingly, Cullen is hardly an anti-environmental type.  He has repeatedly railed against the practices of overfishing and dumping trash in the mid-ocean.  The oceans are in peril, Cullen says.  No argument there.

Just not from the radiation released from Fukushima.

Nonsense, say his critics.  Look at this map released before the government clampdown, that shows the radiation plume from the disaster:

This map has been posted over and over again on blogs and environmental scare sites -- despite the fact that it's not a map of radioactive contamination, it's a map of wave heights from the tsunami.  (A clue would be that the scale on the right is labeled "centimeters," not usually a unit used to measure radioisotope concentration.)

Bringing us back once again to the wonderful quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts."

The trouble is that the people who do this sort of thing -- be it the right-wingers who claim that climate change isn't happening, or the left-wingers who claim that Monsanto is trying to kill us all -- are getting the whole process backwards.  Science should inform politics, not the other way around.  Data has no spin.  Because science is, at its best, one of the least biased ways there is to gain information, we should be using the science as a guiding force for determining policy, not using our political beliefs to figure out which bits of science are valid.

But such views aren't politically expedient, because that means we have to be willing to let ourselves be driven wherever the evidence demands, not plant our feet, science-be-damned, in order to retain the favor of our constituency.

Which in the current milieu would be political suicide.

Halloween hijinks

Happy Halloween!  The day that little children are rewarded for wandering around in the dark wearing plastic masks with improperly lined-up eyeholes by being given enough sugar to induce diabetes in the entire population of China!

Which, of course, makes me sound like a grumpy curmudgeon.  To be honest, it's the crass commercialism that bugs me, not the holiday itself.  I actually rather enjoy a good costume, and have been known to don one myself, on occasion.

So I don't have anything against Halloween.  I just wish the stores would hold off on pushing candy and plastic pumpkins and the like until a little closer to the day itself.  (And the same goes for Christmas decorations, which I've already seen in our local grocery store.)

But of course, there are people who have strong feelings about Halloween.  That it's not just an innocent fun time of putting on Elsa costumes and wandering around saying "trick or treat."  That it amounts to...

... giving your child directly to Satan.

At least, that's the contention of Linda Harvey of Mission America.  Harvey warns us that that any kind of participation in Halloween is tantamount to dropping your kids straight into the maw of hell:

It's Halloween time again, and parents need to use caution and discernment about their family's participation in Halloween events.  Here's why: it's all about the spiritual safety of our children...  Halloween celebrates the spirits of darkness like no other event.  Demons are real.  So is Satan.  And these forces are more active than ever in recent times in America because we are inviting their activity in our lives.  So here’s my question about Halloween: Why hand your children to dark spiritual powers on a silver platter?  Oh, sure, maybe your smaller children only collect candy at a few houses, but down the road, what will Halloween be in their lives?  It's sure to develop into trick-or-treating with their friends, minus parents, and then... parties.  And what goes on at a Halloween party?  I've been talking for years about the dangers for years, and I have not changed my mind; the dangers are more prevalent all the time.

No, not parties!  Anything but that!  What is the world coming to?  We start with little kids in Captain America suits, and before you know it, we have teenagers holding demonic parties with satanic blood sacrifice rituals.

Slippery slope, that.

Then we had the ever-amusing Rick Wiles, claiming that even donning a costume makes you a Satan-worshiper:

You really see this present in South America, where the Catholic Church recognizes very paganistic holidays and practices.  I've traveled to some Third World nations and developing nations, and I've seen some pretty bizarre things, the locals marching down the street in their costumes, devil masks and Satan and skeletons and so forth, and you stand there and you think, "What a bunch of uncivilized pagan barbarians!"  But you realize they're lost, they're spiritually lost, they don't know the truth, they don't know god, they don't know Jesus Christ.  But then you come to America on Halloween, and you go, "What a bunch of uncivilized pagan barbarians!"  It's the same group of people!  They're worshiping their god.  And that's what we have to tell people.  They're worshiping their god, their father.  Lucifer.  That's the reason they're drawn to this day.  It's because he is their father.  

Thus weaving together fear about demons with cultural insensitivity, prejudice, and white privilege to make a picture that is far uglier than some guy wearing a devil suit.

And the whole thing wouldn't be complete without Pat Robertson weighing in:

It used to be called All Saints' Eve.  Now we know it as Halloween...  That’s the day when millions of children and adults will be dressing up as devils, witches, and goblins … to celebrate Satan. They don’t realize what they’re doing.

So anyhow, that's this year's message from the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Paranoia.  Myself, I'm not going to wear a costume this year, but it's not out of any fear that I'm offering myself up to the Dark Lord.  It's more that living out in the middle of nowhere, we never get any trick-or-treaters, so the only ones I'd be in a position to scare are my wife and dogs.  My wife already thinks I'm odd enough, and my dogs would probably just give me the Canine Head-Tilt of Puzzlement and then take a nap.

Instead, I'm thinking of going with a friend of mine to investigate a claim that our high school auditorium is haunted, something I've heard more than once from people who've been there at night.  I downloaded a ghost-hunting app on my iPad, so I should be all set.  Plus, our local fortuneteller consulted her mystical future-reading device (a "Magic 8 Ball").  She asked if we were likely to detect a ghost if we went to the auditorium on Halloween night, and was told "My Sources Say Yes."  So I think we've got a sure bet, here.

Ghost wardrobe

Debating endlessly over silly conjectures is nothing new.  The claim has been endlessly circulated that the medieval scholastics, for example, conducted learned arguments over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.  Whether they actually argued over the issue is itself the subject of debate; it seems like the earliest iteration of the idea for which we have written evidence is in The Reasons of the Christian Religion by 17th century Puritan theologian Richard Baxter, wherein he writes:

And Schibler with others, maketh the difference of extension to be this, that Angels can contract their whole substance into one part of space, and therefore have not Extra Partes.  Whereupon it is that the Schoolmen have questioned how many Angels may fit upon the point of a Needle?

Which I think we can agree is equally silly.  Given that no one has actually conducted a scientific examination of an angel, determining whether they have Extra Partes is kind of a waste of time.

Although you may recall that Alan Rickman as the Angel Metatron in Dogma made a significant point about angels not having genitalia.  Whether that's admissible as evidence, however, is dubious at best.

So there's a good bit of precedent for people wasting inordinate amounts of time arguing over questions that there's no way to settle.  Which is why I have to admit to rolling my eyes more than once over the article by Stephen Wagner, "Paranormal Phenomena Expert," called, "Why Are Ghosts Seen Wearing Clothes?"

I have to admit, however, that it was a question I'd never considered.  If the soul survives, and some souls decide not to go on to their Eternal Reward but to hang around here on Earth to bother the living, you have to wonder why their clothes came along with them.  Clothes, I would imagine, have no souls themselves, so the idea that you're seeing the Undying Spirit of grandpa's seersucker jacket is kind of ridiculous.

Be that as it may, most ghosts are seen fully clothed.  There are exceptions; in 2011 a woman in Cleveland claims to have captured video of two naked ghosts having sex.  But I think we have to admit that such afterlife in flagrante delicto is pretty uncommon.

Wagner spoke with some ghost hunters, and turns out that there's a variety of explanations that have been offered for this.  Troy Taylor, of the American Ghost Society (did you know there was an American Ghost Society?  I didn't) said that ghosts are seen clothed because a haunting is the replaying of a deceased spirit's visualization of itself, and we usually don't picture ourselves in the nude.

On the other hand, Stacey Jones, who calls herself the "Ghost Cop," says that ghosts can project themselves any way they want to.  So what they're doing is creating an image of themselves that has the effect they're after, whether it is eliciting fear, pity, sympathy, or a desire for revenge.  Does that mean that Anne Boleyn, for example, could wander around the Tower of London wearing a bunny costume?  You'd think that she'd be mighty bored after nearly five centuries of stalking around with her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm.

Ghost hunters Richard and Debbie Senate were even more terse about the whole thing.  It's a "gotcha question," they say.  But if pressed, they'd have to say that "Ghosts appear as wearing clothes because that's how they appear to us."  Which I think we can all agree is unimpeachable logic.

I find it pretty amusing that this is even a topic for debate.  Shouldn't we be more concerned about finding scientifically sound evidence that ghosts exist, rather than fretting over whether we get to take our wardrobe with us into the next world?  As I've said more than once, I am completely agnostic about the afterlife; I simply don't know.  I find some stories of near-death experiences and hauntings intriguing, but I've never found anything that has made me come down on one or the other side of the debate with any kind of certainty.  I'll find out one way or the other at some point no matter what, and if I haven't figured it out before then, I'm content to wait.

So I suppose this falls into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  But it does raise the question of what kind of clothes I want to bring with me if it turns out you do get to choose.  If I end up haunting somewhere nice and tropical -- certainly my preference -- all I'll need is a pair of swim trunks.  On the other hand, if I'm stuck here in upstate New York, which seems more likely, I want my winter jacket, wool scarf, hat, and gloves.

Unless my spirit getting stuck here in perpetuity, with no cold-weather gear, is because I've been sent to hell by the powers-that-be.  Which unfortunately also seems fairly likely.

Spooky action, weeping angels, and quantum physics

One of the reasons I get so impatient with woo-woos is that science is plenty cool enough without making shit up.

There were two examples of this from the field of quantum physics this week.  Because quantum physics is already weird even without any embellishment or misinterpretation, it's been particularly prone to being co-opted by woo-woos in their search for explanations supporting (choose one or more of the following):

• homeopathy
• psychic abilities
• astrology
• the soul
• "chakras" and "qi"
• auras

But you don't need to do any of this to make quantum physics cool.  Let's start with an experiment regarding "quantum entanglement" -- the linking of two particles in a state describable by a single wave function.  While this might seem uninteresting at first, what it implies is that altering the spin state of particle A would instantaneously change the spin state of its entangled partner, particle B -- regardless of how far apart the two were.  It's almost as if the two were engaging in faster-than-light communication.

There is a further twist on this, and that's where things get even more interesting.  Most physicists couple the entanglement phenomenon with the idea of "local realism" -- that the two particles' spin must have been pointing in some direction prior to measurement, even if we didn't know what it was.  Thus, the two entangled particles might have "agreed" (to use an admittedly anthropomorphic term) on what the spin direction would be prior to being separated, simulating communication where there was none, and preserving Einstein's idea that the theories of relativity prohibit faster-than-light communication.

Scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have closed that loophole.  Using an extremely fast random number generator, they have altered the spin state of one of two entangled particles separated by 1.3 kilometers, and measured the effect on its partner.  The distance makes it impossible for sub-light-speed communication between the two.  This tosses out the idea of local realism; if the experiment's results hold -- and they certainly seem to be doing so -- the particles were indeed communicating faster than light, something that isn't supposed to be possible.  Einstein was so repelled by this idea that he called it "spooky action at a distance."

To quote the press release:

With the help of ICFO’s quantum random number generators, the Delft experiment gives a nearly perfect disproof of Einstein's world-view, in which "nothing travels faster than light" and “God does not play dice.”  At least one of these statements must be wrong. The laws that govern the Universe may indeed be a throw of the dice.

If this wasn't weird and cool enough, a second experiment performed right here at Cornell University supported one of the weirdest results of quantum theory -- that a system cannot change while you're watching it.

Graduate students Yogesh Patil and Srivatsan K. Chakram cooled about a billion atoms of rubidium to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, and suspended them between lasers.  Under such conditions, the atoms formed an orderly crystal lattice.  But because of an effect called "quantum tunneling," even though the atoms were cold -- and thus nearly motionless -- they could shift positions in the lattice, leading to the result that any given atom could be anywhere in the lattice at any time.

Patel and Chakram found that you can stop this effect simply by observing the atoms.

This is the best experimental verification yet of what's been nicknamed the "Quantum Zeno effect," after the Greek philosopher who said that motion was impossible because anyone moving from Point A to Point B would have to cross half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half again, and so on ad infinitum -- and thus would never arrive.  Motion, Zeno said, was therefore an illusion.

"This is the first observation of the Quantum Zeno effect by real space measurement of atomic motion," lab director Mukund Vengalattore said.  "Also, due to the high degree of control we've been able to demonstrate in our experiments, we can gradually 'tune' the manner in which we observe these atoms.  Using this tuning, we've also been able to demonstrate an effect called 'emergent classicality' in this quantum system."

Myself, I'm not reminded so much of Zeno as I am of another thing that doesn't move while you watch it.

See what I mean?  You don't need to add all sorts of woo-woo nonsense to this stuff to make it fascinating.  It's cool enough on its own.

Of course, the problem is, understanding it takes some serious effort.  Physics is cool, but it's not easy.  All of which supports a contention I've had for years; that woo-wooism is, at its heart, based in laziness.

Me, I'd rather work a little harder and understand reality as it is.  Even if it leaves me afraid to blink.