Lending a hand

After seven years in the business of writing six times a week about bizarre beliefs, it's a little astonishing that I can still run across ones that I've never heard of before.

It is less surprising, perhaps, that the source of this claim was the inimitable Nick Redfern, whose inquiries into ghosts, the paranormal, and cryptozoology has made him something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia.  This time, though, he came up with something pretty unique:

That a road in Dartmoor, Devonshire, England is haunted by a pair of gigantic hairy hands.

According to the legend, the road between the villages of Postbridge and Two Bridges is fraught with peril.  People driving along it (or, in an earlier day, riding a horse) were putting themselves at risk of being accosted by a pair of disembodied hands that appear out of nowhere, grab the steering wheel (or reins), and cause the car (or horse) to veer off the road.  The tale is interesting enough that Redfern has actually written about it twice, first back in 2011, and most recently last week.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I will leave you to check out Redfern's accounts of the Hairy Hands causing accidents, some of which go back to 1910, and will just quote one -- an encounter that allegedly happened in 2008:

Michael Anthony worked, at the time, for a supplier of photo-copying machines in Britain, and spent a lot of time traveling the length and breadth of the country meeting clients and promoting – and hopefully selling and/or leasing – his company’s products.  Late on the night of January 16, 2008, Anthony was driving along the B3212 road when he had a terrifying encounter with the unknown... 

According to Anthony, it was around 11.00 p.m., and he had been visiting a customer in Postbridge.  The evening had gone very well, a deal had been struck, contracts had been signed and exchanged, and a pleased and satisfied Anthony was now homeward bound to the city of Bristol... 

Anthony had barely left Postbridge, when his skin began to feel distinctly cold and clammy, and a sense of dread and fear completely enveloped him...  He explained further that perhaps two minutes after the atmosphere in his car became oppressive, fear-filled, and even somewhat malevolent, he felt his hands begin to “go numb.”  He added: “I actually thought I was having a stroke.”  Fortunately, it was no stroke.  In some ways, however, it was far worse. 

Anthony could only look on in both complete horror and disbelief as, just as had been the case so many decades earlier, a very large pair of hair-covered hands, or “paws,” as he intriguingly described them, encased his own hands, and then suddenly attempted to forcibly steer the car towards the edge of the road and skidded onto the cold, moonlit moors.  To his credit, Anthony struggled valiantly with the wheel and, on three occasions, fought off the actions of the spectral, hairy intruder in his midst. 

Interestingly, after the third attempt, said Anthony, the hands simply vanished into thin air, amid a brief flash of light.  The shaken driver floored the accelerator and did not stop until he reached one of the service stations on the M5 motorway.

So there you have it.  I can say with some certainty that, skeptic though I am, if this happened to me, I'd scream like a little girl and wet my pants.  Because although I'm a skeptic about the paranormal, I'm also a great big coward.

Be that as it may, I'm a little disappointed that I only found out about this now, because I was in England two summers ago and took a train right through the middle of Dartmoor.  Had I known about the Hairy Hands legend, I would have definitely made a detour to Postbridge, and dared the Hands to do their worst, even knowing that if the whole thing turned out to be true, I'd have certainly regretted that decision.

But still.  So near and yet so far.

Anyhow, there is is -- a paranormal legend that I'd never run across.  You should definitely check out Redfern's accounts, which are highly entertaining reading.  I wasn't able to find out where the Hands supposedly came from -- whether they're supposedly from a ghost, a werewolf (the hair, right?), or something else.  Whoever they belong to, however, might want to consider driving lessons.  Better safe than sorry.

Life out of balance

As anyone who is a regular reader of Skeptophilia knows, I have a bit of an obsession with alien life.

My students know this, too, not because I bring it up in class, but because I have a poster from the Roswell UFO Museum, the Fox Mulder "I Want to Believe" poster, and a ceramic pot shaped like an alien head in my classroom.

I also have a lot of Bigfoot-related stuff, but we'll save that for another time.

Despite my obsession, I recognize the problem with the claim that extraterrestrial life has been detected, or (even more) that alien intelligence has made it here to Earth.  I've examined a lot of claims for both, and none of them have held up to scientific scrutiny.  It's too bad, really; I think one of the best moments I've ever seen in a science fiction movie was when Zefram Cochrane shakes hands with the Vulcan at the end of Star Trek: First Contact.

I've imagined myself many times in the position of being the first human to welcome a friendly alien intelligence to Earth.  The sad truth is that, without warp drive, the interstellar distances are simply too large.  Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which sets the speed of light as the ultimate universal speed limit, has never been shown to have an exception -- nor that there's some kind of technological workaround.

Dilithium crystals notwithstanding.

So we're kind of stuck here, meaning that if we do detect life on other planets, it'll have to be remotely.  And now three scientists, from the University of Washington and the University of California-Riverside, have shown us how we might do that.

In a paper that came out in Science:Advances this week, titled, "Disequilibrium Biosignatures Over Earth History and Implications for Detecting Exoplanet Life," astronomers Joshua Krissansen-Totton, Stephanie Olson, and David C. Catling have developed a method of figuring out whether an exoplanet hosts life -- by simply analyzing the spectral lines from its atmosphere.

The idea here is that life keeps Earth's atmosphere out of balance -- more specifically, out of chemical equilibrium.  The most obvious example is the presence of diatomic oxygen, which is highly unstable (it is, unsurprisingly, a strong oxidizer).  If all life on Earth were to vanish, the amount of atmospheric oxygen would decline until it was very close to zero, as it interacted with (and was chemically bound up in) rocks and sediments.

As has been so often pointed out in seventh-grade life science classes, without photosynthesis, we'd be monumentally screwed.

So what Krissansen-Totton, Olson, and Catling did is to figure out how far out of chemical equilibrium an atmosphere would have to be to be a significant indicator for the presence of life.  The authors write:

Chemical disequilibrium in planetary atmospheres has been proposed as a generalized method for detecting life on exoplanets through remote spectroscopy.  Among solar system planets with substantial atmospheres, the modern Earth has the largest thermodynamic chemical disequilibrium due to the presence of life.  However, how this disequilibrium changed over time and, in particular, the biogenic disequilibria maintained in the anoxic Archean or less oxic Proterozoic eons are unknown.  We calculate the atmosphere-ocean disequilibrium in the Precambrian using conservative proxy- and model-based estimates of early atmospheric and oceanic compositions.  We omit crustal solids because subsurface composition is not detectable on exoplanets, unlike above-surface volatiles.  We find that (i) disequilibrium increased through time in step with the rise of oxygen; (ii) both the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic may have had remotely detectable biogenic disequilibria due to the coexistence of O2, N2, and liquid water; and (iii) the Archean had a biogenic disequilibrium caused by the coexistence of N2, CH4, CO2, and liquid water, which, for an exoplanet twin, may be remotely detectable.  On the basis of this disequilibrium, we argue that the simultaneous detection of abundant CH4 and CO2 in a habitable exoplanet’s atmosphere is a potential biosignature.  Specifically, we show that methane mixing ratios greater than 10−3 are potentially biogenic, whereas those exceeding 10-2 are likely biogenic due to the difficulty in maintaining large abiotic methane fluxes to support high methane levels in anoxic atmospheres.  Biogenicity would be strengthened by the absence of abundant CO, which should not coexist in a biological scenario.

So that's what is known, in scientific circles, as "pretty freakin' cool."  The SETI Project and other programs designed to detect electromagnetic signals from ET are awesome, but the problem is, it tells us nothing about forms of life out there that for one reason or another might not use electromagnetic transmissions.  In fact, some scientists think that the era of using EM carriers for information might be fairly short -- for us here on Earth, it began about 120 years ago, and could well be drawing to a close already because of better technology.

The proposal by Krissansen-Totton et al. might give us a means of detecting life of all sorts -- not just intelligent life.  Which, as a biologist, I find tremendously exciting.  I mean, if a Vulcan ship isn't going to land in my back yard, I'll take what I can get, you know?

Foundations on sand

I try to be polite, but there are times that there really is no reasonable response to a person other than, "I hate to have to point this out, but you're lying."

Surprisingly, I am not talking about either Donald Trump or Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Even more surprisingly, I'm not referring here to any politician.  I'm referring to a story that I ran into yesterday where people are taking seriously the claim by a Lithuanian woman named Stanislava Monstvilene that she not only has lived on, but has cured her own stage-4 brain tumor with, a diet composed solely of wet sand.

I know I say this a lot, but I wish I was making this up.  Sadly, this is true, and what's worse, there are some natural-diet alternative-medicine types who think this is really (1) possible, and (2) a good idea.  But let Monstvilene speak for herself:

I had a late stage brain tumor.  They said I wouldn’t last long.  My hemoglobin level was 60 [some five times over the normal range].  I was passing by and once an idea came to my mind – take the sand and eat it.  For the first time I choked but then I got used to it.  You should not mix it with food or water.  You should not eat anything else, otherwise you will feel sick.  And the water should not be drunk.  I used to eat wet sand so after it I do not want to drink.

Just reading this makes me want to drink, and I'm not talking about water.  But six AM is a little early for a double scotch, so I'll just soldier on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There is a condition where people feel compelled to eat non-food materials, especially dirt, chalk, stones, hair, and paper.  It's called pica, and is associated with mineral deficiencies, anemia, and mental instability.

And although some of those substances -- particularly dirt and chalk -- are mineral-rich, your body is generally incapable of handling minerals in that form.  Most minerals (such as calcium, iron, zinc, magnesium, cobalt, and so on) that are necessary for health are only absorbed easily if they're chelated -- bonded to an organic compound.  (This is why, for example, zinc supplements are usually in the form of zinc gluconate, and you will not achieve the same effect by chewing on a galvanized nail.)

So pica might result in a compulsion to eat weird stuff, but there's no indication that eating the weird stuff does anything for the underlying condition that caused the pica.

But back to the Sand Lady.  Because she's not just saying she's supplementing her diet with wet sand; she's saying that wet sand is all she eats.  Ever.  (Or drinks.)

To which I respond: bullshit.

Sand, and it pains me even to have to state this, has zero calories.  Most sand is finely ground silica and various types of feldspars (the exactly composition, naturally, depends on the kind of rock the sand was eroded from).  But in no case does sand contain enough nutrients to survive on.

So at the risk of appearing as a scoffer, I'm 100% sure that Ms. Monstvilene is chowing down on sand when the reporters are around, and when no one's looking, she's sneaking out for a cheeseburger with extra mayo.

It's a bit like the couple who claimed to be "Breatharians" (living on nothing but air and the "energy of the universe") and the Seattle woman who said she was going to spend a hundred days "living on light" (this didn't work out so well, as her health deteriorated from the combination of starvation and vitamin deficiency so much that she had to discontinue the stunt on day 47, at which time she had lost 20% of her body weight).

You can't subsist on light and/or dirt for the very good reason that you are not a plant.  Now, I know that loony people make loony claims, kind of by definition.  But that doesn't mean you need to believe them, or necessarily even consider them seriously.  There is enough out there that deserves investigation and is actually scientifically verifiable; last thing we need is to spend our time trying to figure out how some woman in Lithuania is living on a sand diet, when in fact, she is not.

(The irony that in writing this point, I am spending my time addressing this situation, is not lost on me.)

So there you are.  There are times when it is perfectly justifiable to respond "You are talking complete horse waste" to a claim.  Now, you'll have to excuse me, because all of this talk of eating is making me hungry.  Not for dirt, fortunately.  I'm thinking more of bacon and eggs.

Children of the sun

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may remember that a few years ago, I did a piece on the "Indigo Children" -- kids who are the "next step in evolution," as evidenced by the fact that they're sensitive, have paranormal abilities, and indigo-colored auras.  But these woo-woo ideas tend to become passé pretty quickly; before you knew it, every other family in your neighborhood claimed that their offspring was an "Indigo Child."

So there was no way the woo-woos were going to have their kids labeled with something so common and pedestrian.  They came up with the next level, which were the "Crystal Children" -- who you could recognize because they had "large eyes and an intense stare" and were able to "function as a group consciousness rather than as individuals."  Which was clearly much more special than those dumb Indigo Children were, even though it makes them sound like the scary kids in Children of the Corn.

But that wasn't enough, either.  So -- I shit you not -- they've leveled up again.  And this one's a doozy.

Meet... the "Sun Children."

Here's a little bit about the "Sun Children:"

It has been scientifically proven that the new children, being born since 2007, have been born with 13-strand DNA, which means that they will have far greater abilities than we have ever had.

So plain old two-stranded DNA's not enough?  I've taught genetics for thirty years, and I never knew about the principle of "the more strands, the better."

These children are volunteer souls, who are now being born, to become the New Leaders, who will be leading the world, from 2050 and onwards. By then the New Golden Age will have been anchored in by the Indigo, Crystal and Rainbow children, who have incarnated after the World War II. 

A lot of the Indigo, Crystal, and Rainbow children were COSMIC souls, from other galaxies and star systems, who were involved with the CREATION of this planet, when it was birthed.

Well, hell.  I missed the "Rainbow Children."  I wonder how many strands their DNA has?  Probably nine or so, I would expect, if you kind of split the difference.

And hey, I was born after World War II myself!  I wonder what kind of child I was?  My parents would probably have answered that question "a pain in the ass," but maybe they didn't know how to see auras.

It is of great IMPORTANCE, for the PARENTS of these new SUN children, to understand, that what worked for them and their parents, will simply not work for these children! 

Fact is, because of their 13 strand DNA, they will have all 12 chakras fully activated: - which means that they HAVE THEIR STELLAR GATEWAY WIDE OPEN!  This means they are EXTREMELY SENSITIVE TO LIGHT, TO SOUND VIBRATIONS, TO FREQUENCIES, AND MOST OF ALL, TO THE UNSEEN WORLD - WHICH TO US IS NOT REAL - BUT TO THEM IT IS.  THIS MAKES THEM HIGHLY PSYCHIC, WITH ABILITIES THAT WE HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO USE: TELEPORTATION, KENESIS [sic], TELEPATHY, SHAPE-SHIFTING, MOVING OBJECTS, HEARING WHAT IS SAID IN OTHER ROOMS, ABLE TO REMOTE VIEW, ETC.

I'd be satisfied if they had the ability to turn off their caps lock.

But man, that's a lot of abilities, isn't it?  Makes me kind of glad I'm not in the planning-for-a-family stage of things.  My two sons were hard enough to handle as toddlers; I can't imagine how life would have been if they'd been able to teleport, shape-shift, and hurl heavy objects around with their minds. They kind of fought with each other constantly as children, being personality types so different from each other that it's hard to comprehend how they came from the same gene pool, and if they'd been able to fight using telekinesis, I'm seriously in doubt that there'd have been any survivors, and that includes our house.  They did enough damage hitting each other with stuff the ordinary, non-Sun-Children way.

So I'm a little mystified as to how all of those would be good things.

Oh, and about the wide-open stellar gateway (whatever the fuck that means) and the sensitivity to stuff, she has more to say:

THIS MEANS THAT THESE CHILDREN WILL HAVE TO BE KEPT AWAY FROM ELECTRONIC DEVICES WHICH ARE JAMMING THEIR FREQUENCIES: Television sets, computers, mobile phones etc.  They will be fascinated with it, but beware: some of the members of a certain group of people on this planet, KNOW THIS, and are PURPOSEFULLY JAMMING THE FREQUENCY WAVES OF CHILDREN AND ADULTS, VIA SATELLITE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AND THIS IS DONE AT SUCH A FREQUENCY, THAT WE ARE NOT EVEN AWARE THAT WE ARE BEING HELD HOSTAGE.  This is ESPECIALLY TRUE FOR VIDEO GAMES, PLAYSTATIONS, etc. for all of it is attempting to DE-ACTIVATE these children, so that the planet will not be able to move forward and into the New Age.

Man, it would suck to go through life with jammed frequencies.  I want my frequencies to be all hangy-loosey, you know?  On the other hand, I tend to agree about television, but mostly from the standpoint that 99.8% of television content is blatantly idiotic.  So mostly what it seems to de-activate is people's critical thinking faculty.

Which, if you believe in "Sun Children," must not be that highly developed in the first place.

Anyhow, I'll leave you to check out what else she has to say.  And she does have a lot to say, most of it in all caps.  As for me, I'm wondering what the next incarnation of even more special children will be.  Maybe "Star Children."  Or hell, go big or go home, right?  "GALAXY Children."  Or if we go with the whole frequency thing, "Hypersonic Children."  I know the high-pitched whining ability of many little kids seems to bore a hole directly into my skull, so maybe that's the most accurate one of all.

Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Beelzebub

As further evidence that there is nothing so innocent and sweet that someone can't interpret it so as to make it appear satanic, today we consider the song "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo."

For those of you who don't have young children, this is the song from Cinderella that has the following dark, terrifying lyrics:

Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
Put 'em together, and what have you got?
Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo

So I think we can all agree that scare-wise, this ranks right up there with the pea-soup-puke scene from The Exorcist.

No, but really.  I'm not making this up.  I had no idea that this was a thing until I was sent a link by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, which had the following passage:

Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo (also called the Magic Song) is a novelty song written in 1948 and featured in the 1950 animated Disney film Cinderella, performed by actress Verna Fulton.  It is also a transformation spell, with which the fairy godmother transforms Cinderella into a princess, a pumpkin into a coach and mice into footmen...   [M]agic is REAL; evil Satanic rituals aimed at harnessing and producing energy.  There is fraudulent stage magic, based on tricks and illusion, but even this requires invocations of demons and chanting of spells. 

Magicians work by exercising control over demons who are other-dimensional beings.  They often do this by calling the demons by name, by means of mental discipline and by leveraging symbols that are both concrete and imagined, as drawn in the air itself or expressed through other gestures.  Sometimes implements like bells, candles, incense, salt, knives or artifacts of various kinds are used, which are charged spiritually with demonic presence.

So that's pretty horrifying.  Here I thought that Disney just had old ladies in brightly-colored dresses dancing around singing nonsense to charm the children, when they were actually conjuring up other-dimensional demonic presences.

On the other hand, I always kind of pictured demons as having scary-sounding names like "Beelzebub" and "Mephistopheles."  You know, something with a little gravitas.  I'm don't think I'd be very frightened of a demon who answered to "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo."

Anyhow, I started to look into this, and down the Rabbit Hole I went.  Of course there was a mention of this over at the phenomenally wacky David Icke Forum:

Anyone else ever think about this phrase as being actual magik?...  Also interesting that the Dragon Ball Z creator used the three B's as evil magik characters within the series.  Bu had the ability to "absorb" his victims to make himself more powerful.  He would eventually kill both the wizards Bibbidi and his son Bobbidi.

Because the creator of Dragon Ball Z clearly didn't get the idea for the names from Cinderella, or anything.

But that was hardly the only mention.  The site Life, Hope, and Truth did a piece on the song, and others like it:

[T]he Bible is clear—light (God’s way) and darkness (Satan’s way) have no commonalities (2 Corinthians 6:14).  The same power fuels the magic that goes “bibbidi-bobbidi-boo” in Cinderella (from a fairy godmother—a “good” witch) and the darkly prophetic “double, double toil and trouble” in Macbeth(from the evil witches). The power behind all witchcraft is Satan the devil. 

It is important to remember that many forms of media, even children’s entertainment, promote the idea of “good” witchcraft.  This is a very sly attempt to deceive the world about the true source of all power apart from God: demonic darkness.

And here I thought both Cinderella and Macbeth were fiction.  Shows you what I know.

It wouldn't be complete, however, unless Focus on the Family got involved, which they did, with an article called, I shit you not, "Is 'Bibbidy-Bobbidi-Boo' Taboo?  Magic in Children’s Entertainment." At least the author comes to the conclusion that Cinderella is probably okay, although it's still better not to mess around with magic at all:

We’d suggest that it is important for parents to pay close attention to the manner in which spiritual power is presented in any story.  It’s crucial to ask questions like, "Who is the source of this power?  How is it portrayed?  What are the results of its use?"  Good spiritual power – for example, the power by which the apostles healed the sick and the lame in Jesus’ name – comes from God.  He gives it to His people to accomplish His purposes, and it is always used for His glory.  Occultic or evil spiritual power, on the other hand, serves the user’s own selfish interests.  It is dangerous, destructive and manipulative in nature.

You have to wonder where turning mice into horses falls on that spectrum.

But to return to my earlier point: fiction, people.  This is all fiction.  I.e., not true.  You can bibbidi and bobbidi all you want, you can even boo occasionally, and you're never going to improve your wardrobe or get a garden vegetable to turn into a transportation device.

I invite you to try, though.  It'd be entertaining for the rest of us.

Anyhow, to the person who sent me the first link, all I can say is: thanks.  The imprint of the keyboard I now have on my forehead will be a source of much amusement for my students.  As far as the people who believe all this horseshit: please, please don't go see Fantasia.  You'd probably piss yourself during the walking-broom scene.

Bigotry division

I find it infuriating the way certain phrases have become dog whistles for people who live for the opportunity to take rights away from others.

For example, "religious freedom."  Of course, that one was appropriated by the narrow-minded centuries ago, when the Puritans came to North America seeking "religious freedom" and proceeded to harass, jail, torture, and execute people who didn't follow their religion.

It'd be nice if we'd outgrown that sort of thing, but we haven't, as evidenced by the announcement last week that there was going to be a new division of the Office of Civil Rights, within Department of Health and Human Services:

The "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division."

Make no mistake about it; this is not about protecting anyone's right to attend the house of worship they choose (or none at all).  That right was never in jeopardy.  This is about protecting the rights of Christians to deny services to people they disapprove of, and call it "exercising religious freedom."  This is giving license to the bakers who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay marriage.  This is about the hospital that refused to perform a hysterectomy for a transgender man.  This is siding with the pharmacist who refused to fill a prescription for birth control.

What is most galling about this is that many of the people who are crowing with delight about this are the same ones who were howling that America was on the verge of enacting Sharia law when a Target store in Minneapolis/St. Paul decided to accommodate some Muslim cashiers who refused to ring up pork products.

Folks, it's the same thing.  Whatever "religious freedom" means, it is not "being forced to abide by the rules of Christianity whether you want to or not."

And these people don't seem to realize how quickly this could be turned on its head.  What happens when a gay doctor refuses to provide service to a Christian patient?  Or atheist cashiers refuse to ring up a purchase of Christmas cards?  Or, for that matter, Muslim cashiers state that they won't handle bacon?

You'll have these same folks screaming bloody murder.

Look, it's simple.  If you went into the pharmacy business and didn't know you were going to be expected to sell birth control, you're an idiot.  Besides, the rules of your church don't say your job is to prevent others from using birth control; they just say you're not supposed to use it yourself.

Same for the bakers.  What, you didn't know there were gay weddings?  And hospital directors didn't know they were going to be expected to perform vasectomies, tubal ligations, and gender reassignment surgery?

If any of that is true, then you're more in need of a "Moron Protection Division" than you are a "Religious Freedom Division."

So it's not about freedom.  It never has been.  It's about maintaining the hegemony of the in-power majority (and yes, Christians, you're still in the majority, whatever Fox News's hysterical diatribes about how imperiled Christianity is in the United States have to say about it).  It's about maintaining the right of one group to refuse service to another group based upon simple bigotry.

But right now, the current administration is pushing this agenda full-throttle.  How much of it is deeply-held belief and how much cynical, calculated appeasement of the party base, I have no idea.  What I do know, however, is that this is a profoundly immoral stance.  It is no more moral than the "Whites Only" signs of the Civil Rights Era.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Sad that we have to fight these same battles again, isn't it?

I live in hope that wiser (and more just) heads will prevail here, but at the moment, the bigots are still in the ascendancy.  It's a scary time, and not just for this reason, but I believe that right will prevail.  As Stephen King put it, in his novel The Stand, "The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short."

May we see it end soon.

Bubble physics

I'm going to ask you for a favor, and yes, this applies even to anyone reading this who is a non-science type: before you post and/or comment excitedly upon the latest popular-media article about some scientific research, go to the original research and see if it's really what the popular media are claiming it is.

I mean, at least read the abstract.  That's often enough to convince yourself that no, NASA hasn't developed warp drive yet; no, almost no reputable astronomers think that the mysterious light-intensity wobble from "Tabby's Star" is due to an alien megastructure; and no, the Yellowstone Supervolcano is not going to have a cataclysmic eruption soon (unless you consider "some time in the next 100,000 years" soon).

All, by the way, claims that I've seen posted on social media in the last month.

The latest example of this, however, comes from some research published a couple of months ago by physicists at the University of Rochester, in which they are said to have "created a device that generates 'negative mass.'"

This resulted in a number of near-hysterical articles about antigravity and "unknown forces in nature" and "rewriting everything we know about physics."

To which I respond: just hang on a minute.

Let's go to the original paper itself, which has the remarkably unsexy title, "Anomalous Dispersion of Microcavity Trion-Polaritons," which appeared in Nature: Physics.  Here's the abstract:

The strong coupling of excitons to optical cavities has provided new insights into cavity quantum electrodynamics as well as opportunities to engineer nanoscale light–matter interactions.  Here we study the interaction between out-of-equilibrium cavity photons and both neutral and negatively charged excitons, by embedding a single layer of the atomically thin semiconductor molybdenum diselenide in a monolithic optical cavity based on distributed Bragg reflectors.  The interactions lead to multiple cavity polariton resonances and anomalous band inversion for the lower, trion-derived, polariton branch—the central result of the present work.  Our theoretical analysis reveals that many-body effects in an out-of-equilibrium setting result in an effective level attraction between the exciton-polariton and trion-polariton accounting for the experimentally observed inverted trion-polariton dispersion.  Our results suggest a pathway for studying interesting regimes in quantum many-body physics yielding possible new phases of quantum matter as well as fresh possibilities for polaritonic device architectures.

Got all that?  Frankly no, neither did I, and I have a degree in physics.  But if you go through it carefully, and look up a few terms like "exciton" and "polariton" and "optical cavity," you find out that the researchers didn't invent a new sort of matter with "negative mass," as at least some of the popular-media summaries claimed.

It turns out that an "exciton" is related to a concept I ran into when I was taking a course in electromagnetism as an undergraduate; that you can treat the absence of an electron -- a "hole" -- as an actual particle, map how it moves, interacts, and affects other electrons or holes in the vicinity.  No physicist claims that these holes are actual things; simply that you can model how electrically-charged particles act by treating them as if they were.

In that sense, they're a bit like bubbles rising in water.  You can model the behavior of bubbles as if they are made of some exotic negative-mass object being repelled by gravity, and come up with completely consistent physics about their behavior; that doesn't mean they actually have negative mass.

They simply behave as if they did, so it's convenient to look at them that way.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem, of course, is that this is not nearly as thrilling to the general public as saying that bubbles represent some strange new form of matter that experiences antigravity and will lead to Star Trek-style transporters and faster-than-light travel.  And since clicks and/or subscriptions are what keep popular media in business, you can be certain that they're going to characterize it whatever way it takes to make you click the link.  The vast majority of media outlets honestly don't give a damn what happens after that, up to and including whether you actually end up understanding what you read.

So please, please go to the source.  Look, it's not like I'm perfect in this regard myself all the time.  I get carried away by wishful thinking and confirmation bias, especially with regard to warp drive, which I really really REALLY want to be real.  But try to hold your preconceived notions in abeyance for at least as long as it takes to find the original research and see if what's being claimed is what the scientists actually said.

Then, and only then, decide whether you want to share the link.

My guess is that this would cut the amount of spurious media sharing by about 90%.  Of course, it's not like I've done any research on this myself.  Only a supposition based on no particular empirical evidence.

I.e.  I pulled the 90% figure out of my ass.

So please don't quote me on that.