Service station ghosts, haunted wells, and bloodless cows

I get a lot of odd links sent to me, which I suppose I should expect, given that strange claims are kind of our stock-in-trade here at Skeptophilia headquarters.  I hasten to add that I really appreciate the effort my readers make to keep me informed as to what's going on in the Wide World of Weirdness, so as the talk show hosts used to say, "Keep those cards and letters comin'."

In the last couple of days I was sent links to three stories (one of them was sent to me four times), so I thought I should let my readers know what's going on in ParanormalLand.

First, we have a claim out of Mayfield, County Cork, Ireland, that a ghost has been spotted haunting a service station.

Twice, apparently.  The first time was caught on closed-circuit camera from inside the service station convenience store, where the ghost tossed about a package of cookies and a basket of bananas; the second time was on the CCTV outside the station.  The videos are both on the link provided.  The first one was pretty obvious, although I maintain that someone trying to create a hoopla could easily have accomplished the whole thing using a piece of string tied to the cookie package and banana basket.  As far as the second one goes, I'm... unimpressed.  I've watched it through twice, and frankly, I don't see a damned thing.  There's some repeated blurring, but that looks to me like water on the camera lens (this is southwestern Ireland, after all, so it was probably raining), but nothing that looks even remotely like a "figure of a woman."

That hasn't stopped people from acting like it's incontrovertible proof of the existence of the spirit world.

"I started Wednesday morning and saw biscuits on the ground and thought nothing of it," said shop owner Tom O'Flynn.  "Then I went around and saw a large fruit bowl on the ground so we checked CCTV and it looks as though it was pushed off.  I would have been very skeptical with things like this, but I looked at all angles and I'm at a loss with this...  This was at 12:30 at night and both incidents happened about 10 minutes part.  The bowl was full of bananas, oranges, and apples, and it got pulled over and there was no one around...  Jesus, when I saw it my heart kind of pounded.  I didn't know what to make of it, I looked at all angles and couldn't get my head around it."

Suffice it to say I wasn't quite as taken aback, but then, I wasn't there when it happened.

Then there's an investigation of a "haunted well" near Basildon, Essex, England, where people allegedly burst into tears and want to kill each other.

Called Cash's Well, the place is named after one Edwin Cash, who true to his name tried to make some quick money off "healing waters" from the site in the early twentieth century, but went bankrupt when people reported the well water making them sick.  Since then, the area around the well has gotten the reputation for being haunted (aficionados of ghosts claim that's why the water had the ill effects it did -- it was cursed, or something).  A recent investigation resulted in people confirming feeling wonky when they got near the well -- several reported feeling cold, "goosebumpy," or sad, and one reported they had unexplained violent urges.

The group worked with "spirit guides," who fulfilled their duties to the letter when the investigators got lost looking for the well, and one of the guides said, "Turn left."

Being a rather rabid fan of Doctor Who, I'm not sure I would have responded that that positively.

Anyhow, I was intrigued until I heard the explanation given by Russell (no last name provided), of Essex Ghost Hunters, about the nature of the phenomenon.  "We've all got an aura, which is scientifically proven," Russell told a reporter for Essex Online.  "We've all got a two-inch energy bubble that surrounds us all the time.   When spirits come close they will interact with that bubble, something has moved your aura and it's wobbling.  The two energies pull apart and that's what causes the vibration."

Righty-o.  Wobbly auras and energy bubbles and energies pulling apart.  "Scientifically proven."

Next.

Last, there's the link that's been sent to me (as of this writing) four times, about a rather gruesome situation on a ranch in eastern Oregon, where five cattle have been completely exsanguinated -- and had specific body parts removed -- most bizarrely, leaving no evidence in the way of tire tracks, footprints, or other marks.

The five bulls were all found this summer, missing their tongues and testicles, and -- according to rancher Colby Marshall -- "without one drop of blood."  This is a major loss to the ranch, so it's crazy to assume that the ranchers themselves had anything to do with it; unlike the ghost in the service station, they've got nothing to gain from fifteen minutes of fame, and (again, according to Marshall) lost thirty thousand dollars from the bulls' deaths.  

The Harney County Sheriff's Office has been looking into the incident, and Silvies Valley Ranch -- owner of the dead cattle -- are offering a $25,000 reward for anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator(s).  But the whole thing has the investigators baffled, because it's not like accomplishing this would have been easy.  "[The area is] rugged," Marshall said.  "I mean this is the frontier.  If some person, or persons, has the ability to take down a 2,000-pound range bull, you know, it's not inconceivable that they wouldn't have a lot of problems dealing with a 180-pound cowboy."

So employees of the ranch have been instructed to always go out (at least) in pairs, and never to leave the ranch building unarmed.

Of course, given the nature of the crime, the whole "aliens abducting cattle" thing has come up, but there's no evidence of that.  The problem is, there's no evidence at all.  Andie Davis, who with her husband operates a ranch nearby (and who two years also had cattle die under mysterious circumstances), found the absence of marks the most perplexing thing.

"Everything you do leaves tracks," Davis said.

So of the three stories, this is the one I find the oddest and the least explicable.  I'm still not going with aliens -- not without more to go on -- but I have to admit there's no other ready explanation.  Unlike flying cookies and goosebumpy auras, at least this story has some evidence that it's hard to explain away as a hoax or confirmation bias.

***************************

I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness. Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and which has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.   Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Metro Centric, Sophie Snyder Berkeley Square, CC BY 2.0]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late 18th century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the top floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the 19th century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttleton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition, that appeared to him as a brown mist, and that terrified him -- he shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttleton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttleton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand.  The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth.  The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall.  He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter, because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" that tried to strangle Martin -- beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.   It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers, and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttleton.

In my opinion, the entire thing seems to be spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual accuracy as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttleton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction, Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what it actually is.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.

***************************

I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

Strange places

I remember when I took Quantum Physics as an undergraduate, many, many (many) years ago, my professor, Dr. John Matese, was fairly disparaging about the naming of the (then newly-discovered) quarks.  Up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm, he said, were (1) misleading, because the names sound like they tell you something about the particle but don't, and (2) were cutesie, giving laypeople an impression of scientists as being "whimsical."

He said the last word in tones that left us in no doubt about his opinion of whimsy.

At least one of those names is apt, though, and that's "strange."  There's a hypothesis going around -- among serious physicists, I hasten to state, not among the whimsical -- that under sufficient pressure, matter can form which contains strange quarks.  (Ordinary matter is formed entirely of the two lightest-mass quarks, up and down.)  This "strange matter" has the property of being able to convert surrounding matter to strange matter, a little like "Ice-Nine" in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.  And if that's not weird enough, if a hypothesis pieced together from papers by A. R. Bodmer in 1971 and Edward Witten in 1984 is correct, it might be that the ordinary matter you see around us is the fluke; it's "metastable," meaning given the right conditions it could convert to the more stable strange matter, and our regular old atoms and molecules would condense into droplets...

... called "strangelets."

Speaking of cutesie names.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brianzero, Quark wiki, CC BY-SA 3.0]

A paper published in the Journal of Astrophysics last week pushes the "strange matter hypothesis" a step further by suggesting that some of the astronomical objects we see may be strange, rather than ordinary, matter.  One possible place this stuff could live is the interior of neutron stars -- up till now thought to be extremely dense stuff, but the usual sort.  A team made up of physicists Abudushataer Kuerban, Jin-Jun Geng, Yong-Feng Huang, Hong-Shi Zong, and Hang Gong, of Nanjing University, has suggested that such bizarre matter may not just be confined to the cores of neutron stars -- it may be that there are whole planets of the stuff orbiting pulsars and even white dwarfs.

The authors write:

Since the true ground state of the hadrons may be strange quark matter (SQM), pulsars may actually be strange stars rather than neutron stars.  According to this SQM hypothesis, strange planets can also stably exist.  The density of normal matter planets can hardly be higher than 30 g cm−3. As a result, they will be tidally disrupted when its orbital radius is less than ∼5.6×10^10 cm, or when the orbital period (Porb) is less than ∼6100s.  On the contrary, a strange planet can safely survive even when it is very close to the host, due to its high density.  The feature can help us identify SQM objects.  In this study, we have tried to search for SQM objects among close-in exoplanets orbiting around pulsars. Encouragingly, it is found that four pulsar planets completely meet the criteria... and are thus good candidates for SQM planets.  The orbital periods of two other planets are only slightly higher than the criteria.  They could be regarded as potential candidates.  Additionally, we find that the periods of five white dwarf planets are less than 0.1 days.  We argue that they might also be SQM planets.  It is further found that the persistent gravitational wave emissions from at least three of these close-in planetary systems are detectable to LISA [the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna].  More encouragingly, the advanced LIGO [the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] and Einstein Telescope are able to detect the gravitational wave bursts produced by the merger events of such SQM planetary systems, which will provide a unique test for the SQM hypothesis.

 These planets would be, in a word, strange.  Their densities aren't just "high," as the authors state; they're "really fucking high."  (I realize that descriptor might not pass the editors for the Journal of Astrophysics, but I maintain that it's more accurate.)  For purposes of comparison, gold -- one of the densest familiar substances -- has a density of 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter.  The material making up a strange planet is predicted to be on the order of 400 trillion grams per cubic centimeter.

A planet with this density would have a gravitational pull so intense that taking one step up onto a hill a centimeter high would require more energy than leaping from sea level to the top of Mount Everest in one bound.

Suffice it to say that walking about on a strange planet would be pretty much out of the question.

Of course, the idea that the planets analyzed by Kuerban et al. are made of strange matter may not turn out to bear up under further scrutiny.  But the fact that it's even possible we've located some large chunks of such an exotic material is pretty fantastic.  Whether it pans out or no, I think we can all agree on one thing:

The universe is a very strange place.

***************************

I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

Pulled from the fires

Note bene: If you haven't read Umberto Eco's brilliant medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose and are planning to, be aware that the next couple of paragraphs contain spoilers.  If you'd like to read the book and don't want to know the solution, skip down to the stars!

One of the most devastating scenes in The Name of the Rose happens right near the end, when the main characters, the Sherlock-Holmes-like Brother William of Baskerville and his friend and pupil, Brother Adso of Melk, confront the murderous old religious nutter Brother Jorge of Burgos in the place that is the center of all the action -- the labyrinthine Library at the top of the Aedificium of the (unnamed) monastery where the story takes place.  The Library was built not to collect and disperse knowledge but to hide it; Librarian after Librarian voraciously hoarded manuscripts of all sorts but always wanted to be in control of who got to read what, feeling that some books were not fit reading material for anyone but the most holy.

Brother Jorge himself was the Librarian before he had to resign the position because of his failing eyesight, but still kept a tight rein over who got to read what, acting through his proxy (and the nominal Librarian after Jorge retired), Brother Malachi of Hildesheim.  And when Jorge discovered that there was a copy of a particular manuscript in the Library -- the long-lost second volume of Aristotle's Poetics -- that implied that the main purpose of living was not prayer and self-mortification but laughter and joy, he was willing to go to any length to stop people from finding out about it and (in his mind) destroying the solemn foundation of the Church itself.  In the end, he sets fire to the Library, destroying all of the thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts (and himself in the process) rather than let Brother William get his hands on the copy and make others aware of its existence.

All through the book, the Library was built up to mythic proportions.  Eco recreates in us a sense of what it must have been like to witness the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, an event that it pains me to think about even now.  But now, some scientists have found a way to salvage at least some manuscripts thought lost to fire forever.

*******************

Everyone's familiar with the devastation Mount Vesuvius wrought on the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum on the 29th of August in the year 79 C.E.  If you haven't already done so, you should watch this amazing, nine-minute-long animation that puts you right in the middle of the eruption -- something that makes me very, very thankful I'm in a tectonically benign part of the world.

The main explosion of the volcano occurred at about one o'clock in the afternoon (we have a good account of the details from the historian Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the cataclysm and survived, and his uncle Pliny the Elder -- who wasn't so lucky).  The blowout vaporized a good chunk of the top of the mountain and triggered a pyroclastic surge that geologists estimate was around 300 C and traveling at over 100 kilometers an hour.  Anyone who had survived the previous rains of ash and rock that morning was flash-fried, and then covered up by 25 meters of volcanic ash deposited in the six hours that followed.

Some artifacts survived.  Buildings (although damaged by the pyroclastic flow and the concomitant earthquakes) were found preserved when excavations began in earnest in the eighteenth century.  Tiles and paintings were remarkably unscathed, and there are pieces of art from the ruined city that look like they were created yesterday.  Rather horrifyingly, there are casts and molds of a good many of the victims, who were cooked by the blast, encased in ash, and then once their bodies decayed, the cavity was filled with minerals seeping in, leaving bizarre human shapes still in the contorted positions where they fell.

Anything else made of organic matter, though, was pretty well incinerated.  Any bits of charred wood that survived rotted away within a few years after the eruption.  Even less likely to survive were parchments -- written records -- although the carbonized remains of almost two thousand scrolls were found when the city of Herculaneum was excavated.

Tantalizing to think there still could be readable information there, to wonder what lost treasures of literature and history those blackened cylinders might be.  But there was no way to see if anything was still there other than ash, nor a way to unroll them and find out without having them crumble to powder...

... until now.

Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky, working with a team made up of Jens Dopke, Francoise Berard, Christy Chapman, Robert Atwood, and Thomas Connolley, has pioneered a technique that hinges on the fact that a lot of the inks used by the ancients had traces of lead and other heavy metals which are still present in the tracery of script on the burned fragments.  By taking the scrolls -- without unwrapping them and causing further damage -- and using a targeted beam of x-rays, scientists can see inside them and possibly piece together what the text actually said.

One of the scrolls charred by Vesuvius and recovered from Herculaneum

"A new historical work by Seneca the Elder was discovered among the unidentified Herculaneum papyri only last year, thus showing what uncontemplated rarities remain to be discovered there," said Dirk Obbink of the University of Oxford, who has worked with the team to train the algorithm to read the burned scrolls using parchments that have already been (at least partially) deciphered.  "It's my hope that the scrolls might even contain lost works, such as poems by Sappho or the treatise Mark Antony wrote on his own drunkenness.  I would very much like to be able to read that one."

As would a lot of us.  The idea that something thought lost forever might be restored is thrilling, and the work Seales's team is doing is groundbreaking.  Until we develop time travel and go back to save the manuscripts from the Library of Alexandria, it's our best chance to find new primary sources from the ancients -- something that historians, and bibliophiles like myself, have dreamed about for years.

***************************

I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

The cosmic net

A fascinating new piece of research by the astrophysicists is using information from twelve billion light years away to elucidate what happened 13.8 billion years ago, at the moment of the Big Bang -- they've found the long-hypothesized "cosmic filaments," streaks of (mostly) hydrogen that extend from galaxy to galaxy and cluster to cluster.  In a paper that appeared in Science this week, titled "Gas Filaments of the Cosmic Web Located Around Active Galaxies in a Protocluster," a team led by Michele Fumagalli of Durham University found hard evidence of yet another prediction of the Big Bang Theory: that random variations ("anisotropies") in the first fraction of a second of the universe led to clumps of matter connected by streamers, with huge voids in between.

The authors write:

Cosmological simulations predict that the Universe contains a network of intergalactic gas filaments, within which galaxies form and evolve.  However, the faintness of any emission from these filaments has limited tests of this prediction.  We report the detection of rest-frame ultraviolet Lyman-α radiation from multiple filaments extending more than one megaparsec between galaxies within the SSA22 protocluster at a redshift of 3.1.  Intense star formation and supermassive black-hole activity is occurring within the galaxies embedded in these structures, which are the likely sources of the elevated ionizing radiation powering the observed Lyman-α emission.  Our observations map the gas in filamentary structures of the type thought to fuel the growth of galaxies and black holes in massive protoclusters.

So very early on, the universe was a network of thin (well, thin on a cosmic scale, anyhow) filaments of matter, and where they crossed the matter density was high enough to trigger star, and eventually galaxy, formation.

The large-scale structure of the universe.  Each of those pale blue curves is made up of millions, possibly billions, of galaxies.  [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

Almost against my will I was reminded of a rather captivating image from Buddhist philosophy called "Indra's Net."  I first ran into this when I was an undergraduate, and I and some friends took a class in which we were required to read Douglas Hofstadter's mindblowing chef d'oeuvre, entitled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.  This book, which combines charm, wit, music, art, and a confounding amount of high-level number theory, was a fascinating read, but there are large parts of it that -- although I was a reasonably good math student, and in fact minored in the subject -- went over my head so fast they didn't even ruffle my hair.

But the parts that I found accessible were brilliant, and he drew together a great many disciplines -- one of which was Zen Buddhism.  In that section, he described the great net that stretches across the universe as follows:

The Buddhist allegory of "Indra's Net" tells of an endless net of threads throughout the universe, the horizontal threads running through space, the vertical ones through time.  At every crossing of threads is an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead.  The great light of "Absolute Being" illuminates and penetrates every crystal bead; moreover, every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net—but also every reflection of every reflection throughout the universe.

It's a cool metaphor for interconnectedness in whatever realm you like to apply it to, be it social interactions, ecological connections, the evolutionary tree of life, whatever.  But I always hesitate to bring this kind of thing up, because it's so tempting to take the metaphor as the reality -- the heart of the problem with books like Frijtof Capra's The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, where the authors take a rather hand-waving explanation of quantum physics (about all you can do if you remove the math), draw some comparisons to Taoist and Buddhist philosophy, and forthwith conclude that the success of quantum physics as a model shows that Taoism and/or Buddhism is the real explanation for everything we see.

Confusing the model for the reality is a hazard on a lot of levels, and I had to watch that constantly when I was teaching.  I had a number of analogies I used -- the Krebs Cycle as a merry-go-round where two kids get on and two kids get off on every turn, active transport gateway proteins as revolving doors you have to pay to use, DNA as a universal recipe book.  I tried to keep the comparisons so silly that there was no way anyone would think they were real, but I still remember the student who started an essay, "So, antibodies are trash tags..."

But the comparison between the cosmic filaments crossing and generating galaxies at each intersection, and the magical Net of Indra spanning the cosmos with a reflecting jewel everywhere the threads cross, was just too pretty not to mention.  I hope it won't get in the way of your appreciation of the actual research, though, which is even more beautiful.  It's astonishing that sitting here, on this little spinning ball in the outer reaches of a quite ordinary galaxy, we've been able to learn about the structure of the universe from the very largest scales to the very smallest.  So whatever else you can say about human accomplishments, you have to admit that one is pretty impressive.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is by the team of Mark Carwardine and the brilliant author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams.  Called Last Chance to See, it's about a round-the-world trip the two took to see the last populations of some of the world's most severely endangered animals, including the Rodrigues Fruit Bat, the Mountain Gorilla, the Aye-Aye, and the Komodo Dragon.  It's fascinating, entertaining, and sad, as Adams and Carwardine take an unflinching look at the devastation being wrought on the world's ecosystems by humans.

But it should be required reading for anyone interested in ecology, the environment, and the animal kingdom. Lucid, often funny, always eye-opening, Last Chance to See will give you a lens into the plight of some of the world's rarest species -- before they're gone forever.

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

Ignoring the unimportant

Before I get into the subject of today's post, I want all of you to watch this two-minute video, entitled "Whodunnit?"

*****

How many of you were successful?  I know I wasn't.  I've watched it since about a dozen times, usually in the context of my neuroscience class when we were studying perception, and even knowing what was going on I still didn't see it.  (Yes, I'm being deliberately oblique because there are probably some of you who haven't watched the video.  *stern glare*)

This comes up because of some recent research that appeared in Nature Communications about why it is we get tricked so easily, or (which amounts to the same thing) miss something happening right in front of our eyes.  In "Spatial Suppression Promotes Rapid Figure-Ground Segmentation of Moving Objects," a team made up of Duje Tadin, Woon Ju Park, Kevin C. Dieter, and Michael D. Melnick (of the University of Rochester) and Joseph S. Lappin and Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University) describe a fascinating experiment they conducted that shows how when we look at something, our brains are actively suppressing parts of it we've (subconsciously) decided are unimportant.

The authors write:

Segregation of objects from their backgrounds is one of vision’s most important tasks.  This essential step in visual processing, termed figure-ground segmentation, has fascinated neuroscientists and psychologists since the early days of Gestalt psychology.  Visual motion is an especially rich source of information for rapid, effective object segregation.  A stealthy animal cloaked by camouflage immediately loses its invisibility once it begins moving, just as does a friend you’re trying to spot, waving her arms amongst a bustling crowd at the arrival terminal of an airport.  While seemingly effortless, visual segregation of moving objects invokes a challenging problem that is ubiquitous across sensory and cognitive domains: balancing competing demands between processes that discriminate and those that integrate and generalize.  Figure-ground segmentation of moving objects, by definition, requires highlighting of local variations in velocity signals.  This, however, is in conflict with integrative processes necessitated by local motion signals that are often noisy and/or ambiguous.  Achieving an appropriate and adaptive balance between these two competing demands is a key requirement for efficient segregation of moving objects.

The most fascinating part of the research was that they found you can get better at doing this -- but only at the expense of getting worse at perceiving other things.  They tested people's ability to detect a small moving object against a moving background, and found most people were lousy at it.  After five weeks of training, though, they got better...

... but not because they'd gotten better at seeing the small moving object.  Tested by itself, that didn't change.  What changed was they got worse at seeing when the background was moving.  Their brains had decided the background's movement was unimportant, so they simply ignored it.

"In some sense, their brain discarded information it was able to process only five weeks ago," lead author Duje Tadin said in an interview in Quanta.  "Before attention gets to do its job, there’s already a lot of pruning of information.  For motion perception, that pruning has to happen automatically because it needs to be done very quickly."

The last thing a wildebeest ever ignores.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nevit Dilmen, Lion Panthera leo in Tanzania 0670 Nevit, CC BY-SA 3.0]

All of this reinforces once again how generally inaccurate our sensory-integrative systems are.  Oh, they work well enough; they had to in order to be selected for evolutionarily.  But a gain of efficiency, and its subsequent gain in selective fitness, means ignoring as much (or more) than you're actually observing.  Which is why we so often find ourselves in situations where we and our friends relate a completely different version of events we both participated in -- and why, in fact, there are probably times we're both right, at least partly.  We're just remembering different pieces of what we saw and heard -- and misremembering other pieces different ways.

So "I know it happened that way, I saw it" is a big overstatement.  Think about that next time you hear about a court case where a defendant's fate depends on eyewitness testimony.  It may be the highest standard in a court of law -- but from a biological perspective, it's on pretty thin ice.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is by the team of Mark Carwardine and the brilliant author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams.  Called Last Chance to See, it's about a round-the-world trip the two took to see the last populations of some of the world's most severely endangered animals, including the Rodrigues Fruit Bat, the Mountain Gorilla, the Aye-Aye, and the Komodo Dragon.  It's fascinating, entertaining, and sad, as Adams and Carwardine take an unflinching look at the devastation being wrought on the world's ecosystems by humans.

But it should be required reading for anyone interested in ecology, the environment, and the animal kingdom. Lucid, often funny, always eye-opening, Last Chance to See will give you a lens into the plight of some of the world's rarest species -- before they're gone forever.

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

Breaking the world in two

It's no revelation to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I'm fascinated with quantum physics.

In fact, some years ago I was in the car with my younger son, then about 17, and we were discussing the difference between the Many-Worlds and the Copenhagen Interpretation of the collapse of the wave function (as one does), and he said something that led to my writing my time-travel novel, Lock & Key: "What if there was a place that kept track of all the possible outcomes, for every decision anyone makes?"

And thus was born the Library of Possibilities, and its foul-mouthed, Kurt-Cobain-worshiping Head Librarian, Archibald Fischer.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation -- which, put simply, surmises that at every point where any decision could have gone two or more ways, the universe splits -- has always fascinated me, but at the same point, it does seem to fall into Wolfgang Pauli's category of "not even wrong."  It's not falsifiable, because at every bifurcation, the two universes become effectively walled off from each other, so we wouldn't be able to prove or disprove the claim either way.  (This hasn't stopped fiction writers like me from capitalizing on the possibility of jumping from one to the other; this trope has been the basis of dozens of plot lines in Star Trek alone, where Geordi LaForge was constantly having to rescue crew members who fell through a rip in the space-time continuum.)

So it was with great curiosity that I read an article written by physicist Sean Carroll that appeared in Literary Hub last week, that looks at the possible outcome in our own universe if Many-Worlds turns out to be true -- and a way to use quantum mechanics as a basis for making choices.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Carroll writes:

[Keep in mind] the importance of treating individuals on different branches of the wave function as distinct persons, even if they descended from the same individual in the past.  There is an important asymmetry between how we think about “our future” versus “our past” in Many-Worlds, which ultimately can be attributed to the low-entropy condition of our early universe. 

Any one individual can trace their lives backward in a unique person, but going forward in time we will branch into multiple people.  There is not one future self that is picked out as "really you," and it’s equally true that there is no one person constituted by all of those future individuals.  They are separate, as much as identical twins are distinct people, despite descending from a single zygote. 

We might care about what happens to the versions of ourselves who live on other branches, but it’s not sensible to think of them as "us."

Carrol's point is whether, if you buy Many-Worlds, we should concern ourselves with the consequences of our decisions.  After all, if every possible outcome happens in some universe somewhere -- if everything that can happen, will happen -- then the net result of our decision-making is exactly zero.  If in this branch, you make the decision to rob a bank, and in the other, you decide not to, this is precisely the same outcome as if you decided not to in this branch and your counterpart decided to go through with the robbery in the other one.  But as Carroll points out, while it doesn't make any overall difference if you take into account every possible universe, that's a perspective none of us actually have.  Your decision in this branch does matter to you (well, at least I hope it does), and it certainly has consequences for your future in the universe you inhabit -- as well as restricting what choices are available to you for later decision-making.

 If you'd like to play a little with the idea of Many-Worlds, you can turn your decision-making over to a purely quantum process via an app for iPhones called "Universe Splitter."  You ask the app a two-option question -- Carroll's example is, "Should I have pepperoni or sausage on my pizza tonight?" -- and the app sends a signal to a physics lab in Switzerland, where a photon is sent through a beam-splitter with detectors on either side.  If the photon goes to the left, you're told to go with option 1 (pepperoni), and if to the right, option 2 (sausage).  So here, as in the famous Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment, the outcome is decided by the actual collapse of an actual wave function, and if you buy Many-Worlds, you've now chopped the universe in two because of your choice of pizza toppings.

What I wonder about, though, is that after you get the results, the decision-making isn't over; you've just added one more step.  Once you get the results, you have to decide whether or not to abide by them, so once again you've split the universe (into "abide by the decision" and "don't" branches).  How many of us have put a decision up to a flip of the coin, then when the results come in, think, "That's not the outcome I wanted" and flip the coin again?  What's always bothered me about Many-Worlds is that it's an embarrassment of riches.  We're constantly engaging in situations that could go one of two or more ways, so within moments, the number of possible outcomes in the entire universe becomes essentially infinite.  Physicists tend to be (rightly) suspicious of infinities, and this by itself makes me dubious about Many-Worlds.  (I deliberately glossed over this point in Lock & Key, and implied that all human choices could be catalogued in a library -- albeit a very, very large one.  That may be the single biggest whopper I've told in any of my fiction, even though as a speculative fiction writer my stock in trade is playing fast-and-loose with the universe as it is.)

Carroll is fully aware of how bizarre the outcome of Many-Worlds is, even though (by my understanding) he appears to be in favor of that interpretation over the seemingly-arbitrary Copenhagen Interpretation.  He says -- and this quote seems as fitting a place to stop as any:

Even for the most battle-hardened quantum physicist, one must admit that this sounds ludicrous.  But it’s the most straightforward reading of our best understanding of quantum mechanics.   

The question naturally arises: What should we do about it?  If the real world is truly this radically different from the world of our everyday experience, does this have any implications for how we live our lives?

Largely—no. To each individual on some branch of the wave function, life goes on just as if they lived in a single world with truly stochastic quantum events...  As counterintuitive as Many-Worlds might seem, at the end of the day it doesn’t really change how we should go through our lives.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is by the team of Mark Carwardine and the brilliant author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams.  Called Last Chance to See, it's about a round-the-world trip the two took to see the last populations of some of the world's most severely endangered animals, including the Rodrigues Fruit Bat, the Mountain Gorilla, the Aye-Aye, and the Komodo Dragon.  It's fascinating, entertaining, and sad, as Adams and Carwardine take an unflinching look at the devastation being wrought on the world's ecosystems by humans.

But it should be required reading for anyone interested in ecology, the environment, and the animal kingdom. Lucid, often funny, always eye-opening, Last Chance to See will give you a lens into the plight of some of the world's rarest species -- before they're gone forever.

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