Wibbly-wobbly...

Have I told you my favorite joke?

Heisenberg and Schrödinger are out for a drive, and a cop pulls them over.

The cop says to Heisenberg, who was driving, "Hey, buddy, do you know how fast you were going?"

Heisenberg says, "No, but I know exactly where I am."

The cop says, "You were doing 70 miles per hour!"

Heisenberg throws his hands up in annoyance and says, "Great!  Now I'm lost."

The cop scowls and says, "Okay, if you're going to be a wiseguy, I'm gonna search your car."  So he opens the trunk, and there's a dead cat inside.

The cop says, "Did you know there's a dead cat in your trunk?"

Schrödinger says, "Well, there is now."

*brief pause so you can all stop chortling*

The indeterminate nature of reality at the smallest scales always tends to make people shake their head in wonderment at how completely weird the universe is, if they don't simply disbelieve it entirely.  The Uncertainty Principle, peculiar as it sounds, is a fact.  It isn't a limitation of our measurement technique, as if you were trying to find the size of something small and had a poorly-marked ruler, so you could get a more accurate number if you found a better one.  This is something fundamental and built-in about reality.  There are pairs of measurements for which precision is mutually exclusive, such as velocity and position -- the more accurate your information is about one of them, the less you can even theoretically know about the other.

Likewise, the collapse of the wave function, which gave rise to the story of the famous (but ill-fated) cat, is an equally counterintuitive part of how reality is put together.  Outcomes of purely physical questions -- such as where a particular electron is at a given time -- are probabilities, and only become certainties when you measure them.  Again, this isn't a problem with measurement; it's not that the electron really is in a specific location, and you just don't know for sure where until you look.  Before you measure it, the electron's reality is that it's a spread-out field of probabilities.  Something about interacting with it using a measuring device makes that field of probabilities collapse into a specific location -- and no one knows exactly why.

But if you want your mind blown further -- last week in a paper in Physical Review Letters we found out how long it takes.

It turns out the wave function collapse isn't instantaneous.  In "Tracking the Dynamics of an Ideal Quantum Measurement," by a team led by Fabian Pokorny of Stockholm University, the researchers describe a set of experiments involving "nudging" a strontium atom with a laser to induce the electrons to switch orbits (i.e. making them assume a particular energy, which is one of those quantum-indeterminate things like position).  The fidelity of the measurement goes down to the millionths of a second, so the scientists were able to keep track of what happened in fantastically short time intervals.

And the more they homed in on what the electron was doing, the fuzzier things got.  The theory is that as you get down on those scales, time itself becomes blurred -- so the shorter the time interval, the less certain you are about when exactly something happened.

"People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear non-subjective viewpoint, it's more of a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey... stuff." -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"

I don't know about you, but I thought I had kinda sorta wrapped my brain around the quantum indeterminacy of position thing, but this just blew my mind all over again.  Even time is fuzzy?  I shouldn't be surprised; for something so damn familiar, time itself is really poorly understood.  With all of the spatial dimensions, you can move any direction you want; why is time one-way?  It's been explained using the Second Law of Thermodynamics, looking at ordered states and disordered states -- the explanation goes something like this:

Start with an ordered state, such as a hundred pennies all heads-up.  Give them a quick shake.  A few will flip, but not many.  Now you might have 83 heads and 17 tails.  There are a great many possible ways you could have 83 heads and 17 tails as long as you don't care which pennies are which.  Another shake, and it might be 74/26, a configuration that there are even more possibilities for.  And so on.  Since at each turn there are a huge number of possible disordered states and a smaller number of ordered ones, each time you perturb the system, you are much more likely to decrease orderliness than to increase it.  You might shake a 50/50 distribution of pennies and end up with all heads -- but it's so fantastically unlikely that the probability might as well be zero.  This push toward disorder gives an arrow to the direction of time.

Well, that's all well and good, but there's also the problem I wrote about last week, about physical processes being symmetrical -- there are a great many of them that are completely time-reversible.  Consider, for example, watching a ten-second clip of a single billiard ball bouncing off the side of a pool table.  Could you tell if you were watching the clip backward or forwards?  It's unlikely.  Such interactions look as sensible physically in real time or time-reversed.

So what time actually is, and why there's an arrow of time, is still a mystery.  Because we certainly feel the passage of time, don't we?  And not from any probabilistic perception of "well, I guess it's more likely time's flowing this way today because things have gotten more disorderly."  It feels completely real -- and completely fixed and invariable.

As Einstein put it, "The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, but it is a stubbornly persistent one."

Anyhow, that's our bizarre scientific discovery of the day.  But I better get this post finished up.  Time's a wasting.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a classic -- Martin Gardner's wonderful Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Gardner was a polymath of stupendous proportions, a mathematician, skeptic, and long-time writer of Scientific American's monthly feature "Mathematical Games."  He gained a wonderful reputation not only as a puzzle-maker but as a debunker of pseudoscience, and in this week's book he takes on some deserving targets -- numerology, UFOs, "alternative medicine," reflexology, and a host of others.

Gardner's prose is light, lucid, and often funny, but he skewers charlatans with the sharpness of a rapier.  His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to work toward a cure for gullibility -- a cure that is desperately needed these days.

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

A celestial haystack

Today's cool science story is remarkable not only for the discovery the researchers made, but the extraordinary way in which they made it.

First, a little background.

In the earliest days of astronomy, skywatchers noticed that some of the points of light up there didn't behave like the others.  Instead of being fixed into position relative to one another, they shifted night to night and season to season.  The Greeks called these ἀστέρες πλανῆται, "astéres planetai, wandering stars" -- so our word "planet" translates loosely to "wanderer."

It took a long while to figure out exactly why this was happening, a process confounded by the ancients' determination that the skies be a place that was unchanging and eternal.  But once Copernicus and Kepler and the gang sorted out how things actually worked, it became obvious that the planets' apparent movement was because they were so much closer than the stars.  And other bodies in orbit around the Sun -- comets and asteroids, for example -- did the same thing.  This provided astronomers a method for finding hitherto-unknown bodies in the Solar System.

Look for a point of light that appears to move against the backdrop of distant stars, and you've found something that's (relatively) close by, and moving with respect to the Sun.

That's how the thousands of known asteroids and hundreds of known comets were discovered -- a painstaking study of the night skies, looking for something that's in one position today and a different one tomorrow.  It's how the remarkable object 'Oumuamua (the name means "advance scout" in Hawaiian) was discovered, the first verified object of interstellar origin to trek its way through the Solar System -- and which is almost certainly of completely natural origin, despite the wishes of those of us who grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.

As the bigger and nearer (and therefore brighter) objects are discovered, though, finding any remaining ones becomes increasingly difficult.  A typical view of the night sky in a decent telescope looks like this:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Now, imagine that your task is to compare this photograph to one exactly like it except for the fact that one of the fainter dots has moved a couple of millimeters.

That's what comet-hunters are up against.

All of that is background on today's amazing discovery, which is that astronomers at the University of Pennsylvania have combed through six years of data from the Dark Energy Survey Project, and have identified no less than three hundred "trans-Neptunian objects" -- dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets that orbit beyond Neptune.  In some cases, way beyond -- they found "TNOs" that were ninety times the distance of the Earth from the Sun (three times further away than Neptune itself is).

The way they did this is mind-boggling.  They started with seven billion objects in photographs -- dots of light, really -- and using sophisticated image-analysis software, eliminated any that were obviously not shifting position.  This whittled it down to a mere 22 million.  They then used the software in a giant game of connect-the-dots -- linked objects to two nearby ones to form a triangle, then checked to see if the triangle changed size or configuration from night to night.  After all was said and done, they identified three hundred out of the original seven billion that aren't stars, but small objects in orbit around the Sun out past the orbit of Neptune.

This gives the phrase "needle in a haystack" new meaning, doesn't it?

The most amazing thing about this is that the data they've collected and analyzed will be invaluable for astronomers looking for much larger objects circling the Sun much farther away.  Now that the TNOs have been identified, keeping track of their positions will allow for calculation of their orbits, so it will be possible to see if any are being "gravitationally perturbed" by larger objects out there.  This was the way Alexis Bouvard discovered Neptune -- small disturbances in the motion of Uranus clued him and others in to the possibility that there was another planet out there pulling on it, deflecting it from its predicted path.  Now we've got three hundred possible sources of data to use as a means to locate other larger objects that may be out there.

"There are lots of ideas about giant planets that used to be in the solar system and aren't there anymore, or planets that are far away and massive but too faint for us to have noticed yet," said study co-author Gary Bernstein.  "Making the catalog is the fun discovery part.  Then when you create this resource; you can compare what you did find to what somebody's theory said you should find."

Which is all kind of stunning to me.  Our level of sophistication in studying the skies has increased so dramatically in the last twenty years that new and fascinating discoveries are being made nearly on a daily basis.  It also makes me wonder what else is out there still to discover -- surely worlds upon worlds, out there in the vastness of space, just waiting for us to find them.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

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

A bird in amber

Last week I mentioned the fact that since fossilization requires such precise (and uncommon) conditions, for every one prehistoric species we know about, there are thousands of others we don't.  The biodiversity of the ancient world was orders of magnitude beyond what we glean from the fossil record.

So it's always exciting when we get to add a new character to the menagerie.  Even though it's still going to be (very) far from complete, each new species found gives us a new window into a lost world.

The contribution that appeared in Nature this week is an odd one, even by comparison to some of the other weird critters we've discovered.  Called Oculudentavis khaungraae -- the genus name meaning "toothed eye-bird" and the species name in honor of Khaung Ra, the Burmese collector who donated the fossil for study -- it lived around 99 million years ago in an island arc that is now part of the country of Myanmar.  As the name would suggest, it is a bird, and in fact is closer in relationship to modern birds than the famous Archaeopteryx.

But it was a mighty peculiar bird.

First, it was tiny, about the size of the smallest known modern bird, the Bee Hummingbird, which weighs in at a whopping two grams and has an average length of six centimeters.  But Oculudentavis had teeth.  Lots of them.  From the jaw structure and tooth orientation, it seems to have been a predator, just a really tiny one -- small enough that this particular specimen died after getting tangled in tree sap, leaving its skull preserved in a drop of amber.

The paper, by a team led by Lida Xing of the Chinese Academy of Geosciences, is titled "Hummingbird-Sized Dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period of Myanmar," and provides a thorough analysis of the fossil.  The morphology of the skull is an odd amalgam of birdlike and lizard-like features, especially the bones around the eyes; modern birds have a "scleral ring," a ring of bones that support the eye, while in Oculudentavis the bones are spoon-shaped, like many lizards.

"It's the weirdest fossil I've ever been lucky enough to study," said study coauthor Jingmai O'Connor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in an interview with BBC News.  "I just love how natural selection ends up producing such bizarre forms.  We are also super lucky this fossil survived to be discovered 99 million years later."

Without further ado, here's an artist's reconstruction of what Oculudentavis may have looked like, courtesy of Han Zhixin:

And a close-up of the face:

So it might have been little, but its expression says very clearly, "Do not fuck with me."

"It's lucky this tiny creature was preserved in amber, as such small, fragile animals aren't common in the fossil record," said study coauthor Luis Chiappe, of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  "This finding is exciting because it gives us a picture of the small animals that lived in a tropical forest during the age of dinosaurs."

So once again, a fortuitous discovery has given us a lens into the time of the dinosaurs, and added another branch to the evolutionary tree.  But it once again brings home how little we actually know about the distant past -- and makes me wonder what kind of surprises we'd be in for if we somehow invent a time machine and go back there.  I think what we'd find would beggar belief, and make even Charles Darwin's grand words about "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" seem an insufficient description.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

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

The symmetrical universe

I try to avoid writing about topics I don't fully understand, because that's just too great an opportunity for my sticking my foot in my mouth (and having to write a retraction afterwards).  Because of this reluctance, and because I'm pretty up-front about it when I don't know something, I don't get caught out very often, and I'd like to keep it that way.

So I'm gonna put a disclaimer right here at the beginning of this post: today's topic is one I have only a shallow understanding of.  If you ask me for more information, I'm likely to give you a puzzled head tilt, the same look my dog gives me when I ask him questions he doesn't have a good answer to, like why he chewed up my magazine before I had a chance to read it.  And if you are an expert in this field, and I get some of the facts wrong, let me know so I can fix 'em.

Okay, that being said: have you heard of CPT symmetry?

The initials stand for "charge," "parity," and "time," and the idea goes something like this: if you take any physical process, and reverse the charges (replace particles with their antiparticles), reverse the parity (reverse everything left-to-right), and run time backwards, the two would be indistinguishable.  Such a mirror universe would proceed according to exactly the same physical laws as ours does.

(As far as I know, it would not generate the scientific result elucidated in the Lost in Space episode "The Antimatter Man," wherein the mirror universe had an evil Don West with a beard.)

Initially, physicists thought that there was also CP symmetry -- that processes needed only charge and parity reversal to maintain symmetry, but that was found to be false when CP violations were found, most notably the decay of the particle called a neutral kaon.  The fact that symmetry is not preserved with reversal of charge and parity is thought to be the key to why there were unequal amounts of matter and antimatter produced in the Big Bang.  Fortunately for us.  If the matter/antimatter ratio had been exactly 1:1, ultimately it would all have mutually annihilated, and the universe would now be devoid of matter -- just space filled with photons zinging merrily about.

So CPT symmetry and CP violations are apparently fundamental to the nature of matter.  Which is why physicists have been pushing on the CPT symmetry idea, trying to find out if it holds -- or if there are circumstances, as there were with CP symmetry, where CPT symmetry is not preserved.

The latest test, described in a paper this week in Nature Physics, finds that even one of the oddest particles ever created in a laboratory preserves CPT symmetry.  In "Measurement of the Mass Difference and the Binding Energy of the Hypertriton and Antihypertriton," written by a team of particle researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, we read about bizarre particles that instead of the "up" and "down" quarks (and antiquarks) found in ordinary matter (and antimatter, if there's such a thing as "ordinary antimatter"), additionally have "strange" quarks (and antiquarks), which have higher mass and only form under extremely high energy conditions.  These particles -- the hypertritons and antihypertritons in the title -- have never had their masses calculated accurately before, and the theory is that if the masses are different, it would break CPT symmetry and require a huge rethinking of how matter works on the smallest scales.

The result?  Hypertritons and antihypertritons have exactly the same mass.  CPT symmetry -- the fact that a charge reversed, mirror-image, time-running-backwards universe would look exactly the same as ours -- is preserved.  "It is conceivable that a violation of this symmetry would have been hiding in this little corner of the universe and it would never have been discovered up to now," said study co-author Declan Keane of Kent State University.  "But CPT symmetry was upheld even in these high-energy conditions."

This discovery gives physicists a clue about what might be happening in some of the most extreme and hostile spots in the universe -- the interiors of neutron stars.  The heat and crushing pressure in the core of a neutron star is thought to have enough energy to produce strange quarks and antiquarks, and therefore if those quarks (and the particles made from them) broke CPT symmetry, it would be a lens into a place where the known laws of physics do not hold.

But the symmetrical models won out.  Also, the measured energy of the hypertriton and antihypertriton were higher than expected, which squares with known neutron star masses.  "The presence of hyperons would soften the matter inside neutron stars," said Morgane Fortin, of the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.  "Softer neutron stars would more easily collapse into black holes, so neutron stars couldn’t become as massive.  That feature makes hyperons’ potential presence difficult to reconcile with the largest neutron stars seen in the cosmos — which range up to about two solar masses.  But the newly measured, larger binding energy of the hyperon helps keep alive the idea of a hyperon-filled center to neutron stars.  The result suggests that hyperons’ interactions with neutrons and protons are stronger than previously thought. That enhanced interaction means neutron stars with hyperons are stiffer and could reach higher masses.  So neutron stars may still have strange hearts."

Strange indeed.  Mirror universes, neutron stars, and symmetry preserved to the smallest scales and highest energies.  Amazingly cool stuff, even if (1) I don't understand it all that well, and (2) it doesn't involve evil Don West with a beard.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

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

Downplaying a pandemic

Let me be up front that I'm fully in favor of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

That said, I have to ask: what the fuck are the people who run Fox News thinking?

They've been irresponsible before.  Hell, they've lied outright before.  (Yes, yes, I know other media are guilty of the same thing.  If your only defense of your behavior is "He does it, too!", you might want to consider whether you have a defensible point in the first place.)  But yesterday morning, I saw a clip from Fox Business that aired Monday night and takes irresponsibility and dishonesty to new and unscaled heights.

Those of you keep your eyes on the news no doubt already know that I'm talking about Trish Regan's rant about how the COVID-19 pandemic is being deliberately used by Democrats to take down Donald Trump.  (If you doubt that's the message, consider that the banner next to her during the entire segment said, "Coronavirus Impeachment Scam.")  Here's the bit that stood out:

The chorus of hate being leveled at the President is nearing a crescendo as Democrats blame him -- and only him -- for a virus that originated halfway around the world.  This is yet another attempt to impeach the President.  And sadly it seems they care very little for any of the destruction they are leaving in their wakes.  Losses in the stock market, all this unfortunately just part of the political casualties for them...  The hate is boiling over.  Many in the liberal media are using -- and mean using -- coronavirus in an attempt to demonize and destroy the President.

First, to correct a few of the most egregious lies.

No one blames Trump for the virus.  The virus is a naturally-occurring pathogen that does what it does irrespective of your nationality or political leanings.  What a lot of people are blaming him for is his bungled handling of the pandemic response, starting with the fact of his calling it a "hoax" at one of his rallies.  Yeah, okay, he amended it later, saying he only meant that the Democrats' response to it had been a hoax, but look, I watched the video clip.  The exact quote was, "Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus.  They have no clue, they can't even count their votes in Iowa.  This is their new hoax."

If you don't come away from listening to that with the message, "The coronavirus pandemic is a hoax," you're much better at reading between the lines than I am.

All along, Trump's reaction has been to downplay the seriousness of the situation.  After a visit to the CDC, he did a press conference in which he said -- again, this is verbatim: "As of the time I left the plane with you, we had 240 cases.  That's at least what was on a very fine network known as Fox News.  And you love it.  But that's what I happened to be watching.  And how was the show last night?  Did it get good ratings, by the way?  I heard it broke all ratings records, but maybe that's wrong.  That's what they told me."

Meh, 240 cases.  No biggie.  But look at my ratings, amirite?

He also said that the number of cases in Italy was decreasing (it wasn't), that anyone in the United States who wanted a COVID-19 test could have one (they can't), and that the pandemic was going to be good for the economy because people wouldn't go overseas to spend their money.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the Center for Disease Control]

So sorry, Trish, no one, liberal or conservative, is saying Trump is to blame for the virus.  No one, liberal or conservative, wants to see the stock market crash.  (That's a personal one for me; I retired last June, and have been in a state of panic watching my investments sliding into the abyss.)

But this goes beyond an ill-informed, ignorant talking head spewing nonsense.  Because this nonsense is gonna kill people.

Don't believe me?  Already this morning on social media, I've seen the following:

• The media need to simmer down.  They're making people panic for no reason.
• I can't believe they hate the president so much they would make up a plague to destroy the economy just to take him down.
• I heard it's not very contagious.  I'm not worried.  I'm more worried about what the liberals are trying to do to our country.
• We'll have a vaccine in a couple of weeks, and then this will be over and forgotten just like all the other leftist attempts to destroy the United States.
• Only old people who are already sick are in danger.

Now let's look at what actual epidemiologists are saying.

The World Health Organization and the CDC are in agreement that realistically, by the time the dust settles between 40% and 70% of the world's population will have been infected.  If the 2% mortality rate figure holds (and taking the mean value of 55% infected), that means 77 million people dead.

Which is twice the total killed by the Spanish flu -- the deadliest pandemic on record.

What Trish Regan did on Fox Business two nights ago puts people's lives in danger by convincing them the risk is minimal.  China got ahead of the epidemic by enacting the largest quarantine in the history of the world.  At the moment, Italy is following suit, and has the entire damn country on lockdown -- no unnecessary travel, stay home except for emergencies.  They're taking this seriously, as well they should.

But with idiots like Trish Regan trying to convince everyone that the whole thing is a plot by the evil Democrats to ruin Donald Trump, how much likelihood is there of that working here -- and even if it were mandated, for people to go along with it?

Look, I'm a biologist.  I know enough about viruses and disease pathology that I don't panic every time the flu goes around in winter.  But this thing is qualitatively different.  This has the potential to kill a huge number of people, especially older people and those with compromised immune systems.

Like I said, I support free speech and freedom of the press.  But this is shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater.  And I hope like hell I'm wrong, but my gut tells me that Trish Regan and Fox News are going to be responsible for a lot of people dying before this is over.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

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

Analysis of a cold snap

Almost exactly 12,800 years ago -- and yes, we know it to that degree of accuracy -- there was a sudden plunge in the global temperature.

It's known as the "Younger Dryas" event, after the steppe wildflower Dryas octopetala, which only grows well when the conditions are very cold in winter.  The proxy records (bubbles in ice cores, patterns of glaciation, and types of pollen found in ice and sediments -- such as the aforementioned Dryas) are all in good agreement that in only ten or twenty years, the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere plunged, in some places by as much as 6 C.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bjoertvedt, Dryas octopetala IMG 5641 reinrose reinsdyrflya, CC BY-SA 3.0]

That may not seem like very much, but six degrees is huge.  In fact, the word that comes to mind is "catastrophic."  The glaciers that had been receding -- this is, or at least was, an interglacial period -- suddenly began to extend their reach.  The cold period didn't abate for over a thousand years, with enormous impact on the humans around at the time.  The Younger Dryas correlates with the collapse of two of the dominant cultures, the Clovis civilization of North America and the Natufian culture of the Middle East.

But what could cause such a sudden and calamitous change in the temperature?

For years, the culprit was thought to be Lake Agassiz, a colossal freshwater lake that encompassed all five of the Great Lakes (and a lot more square milage as well), which was held back by an ice dam across what is now the Saint Lawrence Seaway.  As the temperature warmed -- remember, interglacial period -- the dam became unstable and finally collapsed, causing a humongous (I'm running out of words for "big," here) outflow of cold fresh water into the North Atlantic.  The result was a drastic slowing of the North Atlantic Meridional Turnover, which powers the Gulf Stream and keeps the Northeastern United States, Great Britain, Iceland, and Scandinavia at least reasonably warm.  The Turnover is caused by saline water (which is denser) sinking south of Iceland, and when the ice dam collapsed and the lake drained, the entire North Atlantic was covered by a sheet of water that was too fresh to sink.  The result: a slowdown of the circulation, and a return of glacial conditions.

Another, more far-fetched possibility is that the Earth got blasted by the shock wave of a supernova in the constellation Vela.  There is good evidence that the Vela supernova was coincident with the beginning of the Younger Dryas -- but connecting this to the drop in temperature is a bit of a stretch for most climatologists.

Recently, a third option has been gaining strength, and that's the fallout from the impact of a comet or meteor.  Here, the idea is that the debris thrown skyward by the impact blocked sunlight and caused a drop in temperature.  The impact hypothesis just got a boost last week with a paper in Scientific Reports, about a microanalysis of sediments from a place called Abu Hureyra that show good evidence of being flash-fried 12,800 years ago.

The sediments were collected decades ago, because the site itself was drowned when the Taqba Dam was put in place in 1970.  Archaeologists figured they better get what they needed from Abu Hureyra before the waters rose, and that included samples of everything they could get their hands on.  And an analysis by a team led by Andrew Moore of the Rochester Institute of Technology found that the bits of rock and other debris from the site dating to -- you guessed it, 12,800 years ago -- were coated with melted glass, indicative of a temperature of at least 2,200 C.

"To help with perspective," said James Kennett of University of California-Santa Barbara, who co-authored the paper, "such high temperatures would completely melt an automobile in less than a minute."

So the impact hypothesis is sounding more and more plausible.  What this kind of research always brings home for me, though, is how fragile the Earth's climate balance is.  Climate change deniers like to point out that there have been climatic ups and downs in the past, and the Earth has recovered; what they seldom add is that those ups and downs often resulted in mass extinctions.  So sure, the temperature rebounded after the Abu Hureyra collision.

A fat lot of good that did for the Pleistocene megafauna, such as mastodons, dire wolves, North American camels, and gomphotheres -- a bizarre North American elephant relative.  The humans didn't do much better; the ones who didn't get cooked and/or flattened by the impact very likely starved to death because of the mass die-off of plants and animals in the years following the collision.  How many made it through the bottleneck, and became our direct ancestors, is unknown, but it probably wasn't many.

So that's our cheery scientific discovery of the day.  A meteor impact triggering temperatures hot enough to melt glass, followed by a shower of debris and a drastic drop in global temperature.  I'd like to think this would be a cautionary tale, showing the effect one event can have on the climate, but at this point I know better.  We've pretended that everything is hunky-dory and ignored the scientists so far, so we'll be fine, right?

Of course right.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

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

Pearlin Jean

I got into an interesting (and quite cordial) exchange with a loyal reader of Skeptophilia a couple of days ago.

He's an open-minded sort but definitely more likely than I am to credit tales of the paranormal, especially those having to do with hauntings.  We talked a little about some of the better-known ghostly claims, and he said, "The thing is, how could all of those stories be false?  Okay, I'm willing to admit that a lot of them are.  Maybe most.  But what you're telling me is that of all the thousands of allegedly-true ghost stories out there, 100% of them are fabrications.  That seems to me to take more faith than a belief in ghosts does."

My answer was first to correct a misapprehension; I don't disbelieve all those claims.  As he points out, at least for some of them, we don't have hard evidence that they are hoaxes, because there's no hard evidence of any kind.  My position is that none of the ones I've seen meet the minimum standard that science demands.

And that's it.  If your grandmother's sister's best friend's husband's second cousin saw a ghost with her own eyes, that's all well and good.  It might be true.  It might be that she made it up, or that she was tricked by a fault in human perception (heaven knows, there are enough of those), or that whatever it was she saw has a perfectly natural, non-ghostly explanation.  That's where we have to leave it: we don't know.

But.

As skeptics, the default belief is that what you see around you has a natural scientific cause.  When something goes bump in the night, and you can't figure out what that bump was, you fall back on "well, it must have been an animal or a tree branch hitting the roof or something like that."  You don't jump to it being the ghost of the old lady who owned this house in 1850 and died after falling down the stairs unless you have some pretty damn good evidence.

There's one other issue that confounds our ability to accept tales of hauntings, and that's the unfortunate talent humans have for embellishment.  Hey, I'm a novelist, and I know all about that; there's no story that can't be made better by adding new twists and turns and details after the fact.  What this does, though, is to obscure any facts that the story does contain, and leave you with no real knowledge of where the truth ends and fiction begins.

One hallmark of a story like this -- that may have started out with bare-bones truth, but grew by accretion thereafter -- is when there are several versions of the story.  Take, for example, the Scottish legend of Pearlin Jean, in which the main characters were very real.

The central figure of the story is Robert Stewart (or Steuart) (1643-1707), 1st Baronet of Allanbank (Berwickshire).  Stewart was a nobly-connected merchant in Leith, and like a lot of rich folk of the period, when he was a young man his parents sent him to do a tour of continental Europe as part of his education.  He spent some time in Rome, but apparently while in France did another thing that young men often do, which was to have a torrid affair, in this case with a young woman named Jean (or Jeanne).

The liaison was never intended to be permanent, at least not by Stewart, and he made it clear he intended to return to Scotland to take his place in the upper crust.  But after that, things kind of went awry.

If you've read any traditional ghost stories, you can probably predict what happened next -- Jean dies, and Stewart ends up being plagued with a vengeful ghost.  But the way this happens depends on which version you read.  Here are three I found:

• Jean was a nun in the Sisters of Charity of Paris, and in fooling around with Robert had broken her vow of chastity.  She tried to follow him home but he rebuffed her, and while trying to get aboard his carriage fell underneath and was killed when the wheel hit her in the head.  Her dying words were, "I'll be in Scotland afore ye!", perhaps after taking the low road to Loch Lomond.
• Robert left Jean in France (in this version very much alive) and made it back to Scotland, but Jean followed him, as jilted lovers in ghost stories are wont to do.  Her death in a carriage accident happened on Robert's home estate of Allanbank in Scotland.
• Jean not only followed him back to Scotland, but brought with her the baby she'd borne after their illicit hanky-panky.  Stewart killed the child, and distraught, Jean threw herself beneath the wheel of the carriage.

Afterward, the ghost -- nicknamed "Pearlin Jean" because of the dress of gray pearlin lace she wore, which in one version of the tale had been given to her by Robert Stewart -- followed her lover around, generally making his life miserable by appearing at inopportune times (although is there an opportune time for the ghost of your dead mistress to show up?), slamming doors and running up and down the staircase.  On one occasion -- at least in one iteration of the story -- Stewart got the crap scared out of him after returning home from a drive, and when he was ready to climb out of the carriage was stopped cold by an apparition of a woman in a lace dress with blood all over her face.  He was frozen in place until one of his servants came out to see what was amiss and the ghost disappeared.

Creepy tale, no doubt about that.  But what part of it is true?

Alleged ghost photograph, most likely a double exposure (1899) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Robert Stewart was a real person, that's certain enough.  As far as Pearlin Jean -- who knows?  I find it a little suspicious that Stewart is known to have married twice, and both of his wives were named Jean -- first to Jean Gilmour, daughter of John Gilmour of Craigmillar, and second to Jean Cockburn, daughter of Alexander Cockburn of Langton.

But who knows?  Maybe the guy just had a thing for women named Jean.  "Hey, babe, how about a tumble?... *pauses*  Wait a minute, is your name Jean?  Oh, okay, then, let's have at it."

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that when people remembered Stewart's relationships with two (real) women named Jean, adding a third just sort of happened.

The difficulty here is that some parts of the legend are true, and of the remainder, there might be bits of it that are as well -- but which bits?  Needless to say, I'm not buying the ghostly business, and even with the tragic but non-supernatural parts -- a rich young man's dalliance with a poor and vulnerable young woman, that led to her death -- there are too many different versions to know exactly what did happen and what were later embellishments or outright fabrications.

And the problem is, a great many ghost stories are like this.  Multiple versions, and no real scientifically admissible evidence.  So my friend's comment that some of them could be true is a possibility, but figuring out after the fact which ones is very often an impossibility.

This is why with modern claims of the paranormal, I'm very much of the opinion that any reasonably coherent ones deserve exploration when they happen, rather than waiting until afterward and the inevitable human tendency toward embellishment (and outright misremembering) occurs.  I fully support groups like the excellent Society for Psychical Research -- they're committed to investigating claims from the standpoint of scientific evidence, and are unhesitating in calling a hoax a hoax.

So I'm open to being convinced.  Yes, it might take a good bit of convincing, but as with just about everything, if presented with adequate evidence I'll have no option but to accept that my default position -- that there is a natural, non-paranormal explanation -- was wrong.

But thus far, Pearlin Jean and the hundreds of other stories like it just aren't doing it for me.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

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