An epidemic of lunacy

The news over the last few days has been nothing but COVID-19 over and over.  I understand it -- a pandemic on this scale is pretty stupendous -- but it's having the effect of making me not want to look at news sites.

The reason for that reluctance is not because I don't want to be informed, but because I'm tired of reading about people's idiotic responses to it.  Today the focus seemed to be on evangelical religious leaders, whose reactions are so absurd they beggar belief.  Here's a sampler:

• A group of pastors in Arkansas who think the virus doesn't exist, that it's an evil liberal plot to disparage Donald Trump.  "One pastor said half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” said John King, lead pastor at Second Baptist church in Conway, Arkansas, who unlike some of his fellow ministers, at least was urging his congregation to take precautions.  "In your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you.  It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype."
• Evangelical blogger Lori Alexander, who says that God is using the coronavirus as a way of "pushing a lot of women back into their homes."  She adds that she "is not a hand washer" and treats her own respiratory illnesses with elderberry juice.
• Jerry Falwell, Jr., who we can always count on for some entertaining counterfactual nonsense, says that COVID-19 is a plot by the North Koreans and Chinese and at the same time a plot by Democrats to take down the Trump presidency, so he's not closing Liberty University because that'd be capitulating to the Forces of Evil.  On Fox & Friends (of course), he said, "The owner of a restaurant asked me last night, he said: do you remember the North Korean leader promised a Christmas present for America back in December?  Could it be they got together with China, and this is that present?  I don’t know, but it really is something strange going on... It’s — you know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller Report didn’t work, and Article 25 [sic] didn’t work.  And so maybe now, this is their next — their next attempt to get Trump."
• Two conservative religious leaders, Rabbi Meir Mazuz and Pastor Steven Andrew, are in agreement about the cause of COVID-19 -- it's God taking revenge on the world because of LGBTQ people.  "All nations are being afflicted," Mazuz said, "except for the Arab countries that don't have this evil inclination."  Neglecting the teensy problem that Iran is one of the hardest-hit countries, but people like Mazuz never let a little thing like facts get in the way.  Andrew agrees, saying, "God’s love shows it is urgent to repent, because the Bible teaches homosexuals lose their souls and God destroys LGBT societies."  Which certainly sounds like the textbook definition of "a loving God," doesn't it?  He goes on to say, "Obeying God protects the USA from diseases, such as the coronavirus...  Our safety is at stake, since national disobedience of God’s laws brings danger and diseases, such as coronavirus, but obeying God brings covenant protection."
• Then there's the Alabama pastor who went a step further, saying that people who test positive for the disease should come to his services, that he and the congregants shouldn't be afraid, because God and prayer and so on.  "I am somewhat moved over the fact that all it takes to disassemble God‘s church is the threat of sickness by germ spreading. It seems the early church wouldn’t have made very far with this type of timidity," said Chris Bartlett, leader of the Boaz Church of God.  "Our top priority is not primarily the safety and health of our members, but that they advance in faith and godliness even on occasions at the expense of their safety and well-being...  So with boldness of faith if you have the coronavirus or feel threatened by such, you are most welcome at Boaz Church of God Sunday morning at 10 AM.  We will gladly anoint the sick with oil and pray the prayer of faith over you!"
• Lastly, there's Guillermo Maldonado, of the King Jesus International Ministry of Kendall, Florida, who said there was nothing to worry about.  "Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus?  Of course not," Maldonado said, adding that even if he was wrong, "If we die, we die for Christ!"

For years the right-wing talking heads -- people like Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell Sr. and Jr., Ann Coulter, and more recently, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham -- have been spreading the message that (1) you shouldn't believe the experts, (2) you shouldn't believe anything if Democrats agree with it, (3) everyone in the media is lying to you, and (4) conservative white Christians are being discriminated against, if not outright targeted for elimination.  What this has done is to create an entire group of people who are completely insulated from the facts.  Anything that happens is forced into this mold.  A pandemic?  The epidemiologists are lying.  The media are lying.  It's the evil Democrats trying to damage Dear Leader.  And besides, God will protect us even through adversity, so why bother following directives for isolation and quarantine, or even hand-washing?

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the World Health Organization]

What's ironic about all of this is that unless the pandemic dies down a lot faster than most experts believe it will, this group of people will be uniquely susceptible to infection.  You have to wonder what would happen if 90% of the congregation of one of these lunatics contracted COVID-19.

Nothing, is my guess.  People of this stripe seem to have as their motto, "Death before admitting I'm wrong."  And they don't see that the measures being recommended are intended to protect people, not to hamstring right-wing politicians, and that taking precautions not to infect yourself or others makes sense whether or not you believe in God.  After all, evangelical Christians still look both ways before they cross the street.

Or at least, I'm guessing they do.  The attitudes of the wackos mentioned above suggest that even that might be a stretch.

Let's hope that at least they don't take "Jesus, take the wheel!" literally.

Whether or not you're religious, a more sensible approach is the one recommended by Vermont-based clinical psychologist Lindsay Jernigan.  "Try this perspective shift," Jernigan said.  "Instead of seeing social distancing and travel bans as panic, try seeing them as acts of mass cooperation to protect the collective whole.  The plan is not about individuals going into hiding.  It's a global deep breath, an agreement among humans around the planet to be still.  Be still, in hopes that the biggest wave can pass without engulfing too many of the vulnerable amongst us."

But I'm guessing even that would fall on deaf ears.  The words "collective whole" would come up, and after that, the aforementioned wingnuts would hear only "socialism liberal plot hurr durr" and that'd be that.

You can't win, not against a wall of disinformation that's been built up this carefully for this long.  I can only hope that the human cost of these decades of anti-intellectual propaganda won't be too high.

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

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!]

Play ball!

The phenomenon of sports is a funny thing, isn't it?

I say this even though there are sports I thoroughly enjoy.  I've rooted wildly at many a Cornell University hockey game.  I always make a point of watching the Olympics, especially ski jumping and short-track speed skating (in winter), and the track and field events (in summer).  I don't currently participate in a team sport -- but even my favorite athletic activity, running, becomes a great deal more fun when I'm in an actual race.

Not that I ever win, mind you.  I like running, but that doesn't mean I'm fast.  I doubt I'll be in contention for a medal until I'm in the "Men Ninety and Over" group, and if at that point I'm still running at all, I'll feel pretty damn good about it even if (1) I'm the only person in that category, and (2) I come in last.

But the whole phenomenon of sports is a little peculiar, if you picture trying to explain it to an alien intelligence.  The conversation might go as follows:

You: So, there's this ball, and it's kicked around in a field, and you're trying to get it into the net. 

Alien: Why? 

You: Because that's how you score points.  Oh, and nobody can use their hands except the ones standing in front of the net. 

Alien: But doesn't that make it harder? 

You: Yes.  That's why they do it that way.  And each team is trying to get control of the ball and kick it toward their opponent's net. 

Alien: So the people on each team want the ball? 

You: Yes. 

Alien: Why don't they just give each team member their own ball? 

You: Because that's against the rules. 

Alien (radioing the mother ship): You were right, there's no intelligent life down here.  As soon as I beam up, vaporize the planet.

One possible explanation is that sports act as a proxy for warfare.  We can form tribes and vie for something pointless, and frequently beat the absolute shit out of each other, and at the end everyone goes home more or less intact.  As author Jonathan Haidt put it in his wonderful TED Talk "The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives," "This behavior is deeply rooted in our tribal psychology, and it... is so deeply pleasurable to us that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun.  Sports is to war as pornography is to sex; we get to exercise some ancient drives."

However odd it is, sports is ubiquitous.  As far as I've heard, anthropologists have found something in the way of team or individual sports competitions in every culture studied.  But if you think we take sports seriously here in the United States, consider the Aztecs.

The Aztecs played a sport called ullamaliztli.  It looked a little like a weird amalgam of soccer and basketball -- there was a stone ring at each end of a court, and players were trying to get a heavy rubber ball through the ring.  But like soccer, they couldn't use their hands -- they hit the ball with their hips.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Photograph: Manuel Aguilar-Moreno / CSULA Ulama Project, Ulama 37 (Aguilar), CC BY 2.5]

Now I don't know about you, but the idea of swiveling my hips so fast I could strike a rubber ball hard enough to propel it through a stone ring eight feet off the ground is so far out of the realm of possibility that I have a hard time even picturing it.  Archaeologists have found evidence that in some forms of the game bats, rackets, or the players' forearms were allowed, but to be honest, we really don't know much about the rules.  There's a form called ulama (the word comes directly from the Nahuatl name referenced above) still played in a few communities in Mexico, but no one knows if the rules are the same as the traditional game as it was played centuries ago.

It is known, however, to be a seriously rough sport.  Apparently ulama players are constantly covered with bruises from the hard rubber ball.  Still, it's not as bad as it used to be.  Aztec ball games frequently ended with human sacrifice -- whether of the losing or winning team or both is unknown.  (Being sacrificed to the gods was apparently considered an honor at some points during Aztec history, so competing to vie for who gets his heart cut out is not out of the realm of possibility.)

And it's been going on for a long time.  The reason this particular topic comes up is that this week a paper appeared in Science Advances that a ball court was uncovered by archaeologists in Etlatongo in the hills of southern Mexico that is 3,400 years old.

"The discovery of a formal ball court [at Etlatongo] … shows that some of the earliest villages and towns in highland Mexico were playing a game comparable to the most prestigious version of the sport known as ullamalitzli some three millennia later by the Aztecs," said Boston University archaeologist David Carballo, commenting on the study (he did not participate in the research). "This could be the oldest and longest-lived team ball game in the world."

For some reason, the Etlatongo ball court was burned, some time between 1174 and 1102 B.C.E.  Charred clay figurines of ball players have been found at the site, as well both human and non-human animal bones.  It's impossible to tell from what was found why the site was burned, but just the idea that this place has evidence of a 3,400 year old sport is pretty amazing.

You have to wonder how long evidence of our own sports would last in our absence.  Stadiums, courts of various sorts, ball fields... it's hard to see how any of them would clue in future archaeologists about what sorts of games we played and watched, even if they survived long enough to be recognizable.  Maybe kids' sports action figures would have a better chance, leaving the researchers a thousand years hence trying to puzzle out rules to our sports from the attire and stance of the players, captured in plastic.

A little like what we're doing with clay figurines left behind from the Mesoamerican ball games played more than three millennia ago.  Which shows that our penchant for competing over pointless stuff is very far from recent vintage.

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

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!]

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!]