Reality vs. allegory

When I was about twenty, I stumbled upon the book The Dancing Wu-Li Masters by Gary Zukav.  The book provides a non-mathematical introduction to the concepts of quantum mechanics, which is good, I suppose; but then it attempts to tie it to Eastern mysticism, which is troubling to anyone who actually understands the science.

But as a twenty-year-old -- even a twenty-year-old physics major -- I was captivated.  I went from there to Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, which pushes further into the alleged link between modern physics and the wisdom of the ancients. In an editorial review of the book, we read:

First published in 1975, The Tao of Physics rode the wave of fascination in exotic East Asian philosophies.  Decades later, it still stands up to scrutiny, explicating not only Eastern philosophies but also how modern physics forces us into conceptions that have remarkable parallels...  (T)he big picture is enough to see the value in them of experiential knowledge, the limits of objectivity, the absence of foundational matter, the interrelation of all things and events, and the fact that process is primary, not things.  Capra finds the same notions in modern physics.

In part, I'm sure my positive reaction to these books was because I was in the middle of actually taking a class in quantum mechanics, and it was, to put not too fine a point on it, really fucking hard.  I had thought of myself all along as quick at math, but the math required for this class was brain-bendingly difficult.  It was a relief to escape into the less rigorous world of Capra and Zukav.

To get a feel for the difference, first read a quote from the Wikipedia article on quantum electrodynamics, chosen because it was one of the easier ones to understand:

(B)eing closed loops, (they) imply the presence of diverging integrals having no mathematical meaning.  To overcome this difficulty, a technique called renormalization has been devised, producing finite results in very close agreement with experiments.  It is important to note that a criterion for theory being meaningful after renormalization is that the number of diverging diagrams is finite. In this case the theory is said to be renormalizable.  The reason for this is that to get observables renormalized one needs a finite number of constants to maintain the predictive value of the theory untouched.  This is exactly the case of quantum electrodynamics displaying just three diverging diagrams.  This procedure gives observables in very close agreement with experiment as seen, e.g. for electron gyromagnetic ratio.

Compare that to Capra's take on things, in a quote from The Tao of Physics:

Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction.  The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another. For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.  As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon.  Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes.  In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Arpad Horvath, CERN shiva, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It all sounds nice, doesn't it?  No need for hard words like "renormalization" and "gyromagnetic ratio," no messy mathematics.  Just imagining particles dancing, waving around their four little quantum arms, just like Shiva.

The problem here, though, isn't just laziness; and I've commented on the laziness inherent in the woo-woo movement often enough that I don't need to write about it further.  But there's a second issue, one often overlooked by laypeople, and that is "mistaking analogy for reality."

Okay, I'll go so far as to say that the verbal descriptions of quantum mechanics sound like some of the "everything that happens influences everyone and everything, all the time" stuff from Buddhism and Hinduism -- the interconnectedness of all, a concept that is explained in the beautiful allegory of "Indra's Net:"

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions.  In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number.  There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.  If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.  Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.  [Francis Cook, Hua-Yen Buddhism, 1977]

But does this mean what some have claimed, that the Hindus discovered the underlying tenets of quantum mechanics millennia ago?

Hardly.  Just because two ideas have some similarities doesn't mean that they are, at their basis, saying the same thing.  You could say that Hinduism has some parallels to quantum mechanics -- parallels that I would argue are accidental, and not really all that persuasive when you dig into them more deeply.  But those parallels don't mean that Hinduism as a whole is true, or that the mystics who devised it were somehow prescient.

In a way, we science teachers are at fault for this, because so many of us teach by analogy.  I did it all the time: antibodies are like cellular trash tags; enzyme/substrate interactions are like keys and locks; the Krebs cycle is like a merry-go-round where two kids get on and two kids get off at each turn.  But hopefully, our analogies are transparent enough that no one comes away with the impression that they are describing what is really happening.  Fortunately, I can say that I never saw a student begin an essay on the Krebs cycle by talking about merry-go-rounds and children.

The line gets blurred, though, when the reality is so odd, and the actual description of it (i.e. the mathematics) so abstruse, that most non-scientists can't really wrap their brain around it.  Then there is a real danger of substituting a metaphor for the truth.  It's not helped by persuasive, charismatic writers like Capra and Zukav, nor the efforts of True Believers to cast the science as supporting their religious ideas, because it helps to prop up their own worldview (you can read an especially egregious example of this here).

After a time in my twenties when I was seduced by pretty allegories, I finally came to the conclusion that the reality was better -- and, in its own way, breathtakingly beautiful (albeit still really fucking hard).  Take the time to learn what the science actually says, and I think you'll find it a damnsight more interesting and elegant than Shiva and Indra and the rest of 'em.  And best of all: it's actually true.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

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

A monster of a problem

Apparently, it's easier than I thought to give your soul to Satan.

You don't have to attend a Black Mass, or hold a séance, or even wear an upside-down crucifix.  Nothing that flashy, or even deliberate, is necessary.

All you have to do is drink the wrong energy drink.

I am referring, of course, to "Monster," that whiz-bang combination of sugar, vitamins, various herbal extracts of dubious health effect, and truly staggering amounts of caffeine, which misleadingly does not include "demons" on the ingredients list.

At least that's the contention of the also-misleadingly named site Discerning the World, which would be more accurately called Everything Is Trying To Eat Your Soul.  This site claims that the "Monster" logo, with its familiar trio of green claw marks on a black background, is actually a symbol for "666" because the individual claw marks look a little like the Hebrew symbol for the number six:

Which, of course, is way more plausible than the idea that it's a stylized letter "M."  You know, "M" as in "Monster."

But no. Every time you consume a Monster energy drink, you are swallowing...

... pure evil.

Now lest you think that these people are just making some kind of metaphorical claim -- that the Monster brand has symbolism that isn't wholesome, and that it might inure the unwary with respect to secular, or even satanic, imagery -- the website itself puts that to rest pretty quickly.  It's a literal threat, they say, ingested with every swallow:

The Energy Drink contains ‘demonic’ energy and if you drink this drink you are drinking a satanic brew that will give you a boost...  People who are not saved, who are not covered by the Previous [sic] Blood of Jesus Christ are susceptible to their attacks.  Witchcraft is being used against the world on a scale so broad that it encompasses everything you see on a daily basis – right down to children’s clothing at your local clothing store.

So that's pretty unequivocal. Never mind that if you'll consult the Hebrew numeral chart above, the logo looks just as much like "777" as it does like "666."

Or, maybe, just like a capital "M."  Back to the obvious answer.

Unfortunately, though, there are people who think that the threat is real, which is a pretty terrifying worldview to espouse.  Not only did I confirm this by looking at the comments on the website (my favorite one: "It is truly SCARY that all the little kids who play their Pokemon and video games are being GROOMED to enter this gateway to hell.  Satan wants to devour our young and he will do it any way he can."), a guy posted on the r/atheism subreddit just last week saying that he'd been enjoying a Monster drink on a train, and some woman came up to him and snarled, "I hope you enjoy your drink IN HELL," and then stalked away.

What, exactly, are you supposed to say to something like that?  "Thank you, I will?"  "Here, would you like a sip?"  "Yes, it fills me with everlasting fire?"  Since quick thinking is not really my forté, I'm guessing that I'd probably just have given her a goggle-eyed stare as she walked off, and thought of many clever retorts afterward.

"It's damned good."  That's what I'd like to say to her.

Not, of course, that it would be the truth, since my opinion is that Monster tastes like someone took the effluent from a nuclear power plant, added about twenty pounds of sugar, and let it ferment in the sun all day long.  But that's just me.

And of course, there's my suspicion that the owner of the Monster trademark is probably thrilled by this notoriety -- they pride themselves on being edgy, and their target advertising demographic is young, athletic, iconoclastic rebel types, or those who fancy themselves as such.  So no doubt this whole demonic-entity thing fits right into Monster's marketing strategy.

Convenient for both sides.  The perennially-fearful hell-avoiders have something else to worry about, and the Monster people have an extra cachet for their product.  One hand washes the other, even if one of them belongs to Satan, who (if he were real) would probably approve wholeheartedly of capitalism and the profit motive.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

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

The tree planter

Yesterday I was thinking about issues of empowerment versus despair.

I guess it's understandable enough, given our current state of affairs, with an ongoing pandemic, and countries all over the world being swallowed up by a me-first populism that values short-term expediency over everything else, including the quality of human lives.  Hard to stay positive in a situation like this.

A lot of times, the issue is framed in a religious context.  Being an atheist, how can I not let my perception that the world is without a divinely-guided plan and final purpose drive me downward emotionally?  And linked to this is the similar question of how, as someone who is very aware of human failings (both in the intellectual and social realms), I don't give up on our species entirely.

I think it has to do with my attitude that even if all I make are small steps, it is still better to make those steps than to give up and stand still.  It is my motivation for writing this blog.  Perhaps a lot of what I do here at Skeptophilia is preaching to the choir; I suspect that most of my readership comes from people who, like myself, are questioners and skeptics and rationalists.  But if by what I write I can prod even one person to take a closer look at his or her basic assumptions about how the universe works, then what I am doing is worth it.

The same impetus kept me teaching for thirty-two years.  I knew all too well that most of my students wouldn't become scientists, but I was (and am) absolutely fine with that.  I also knew I wouldn't be able to reach them all, a truth which is discouraging and perhaps inevitable.  But if I opened up the eyes of some of the people in my classes -- showed them a bit of the world they hadn't ever thought about, made them go, "Wow, this universe is a strange and cool and wondrous place!" -- then in my view, I succeeded.

Which brings me to Wangari Maathai.

In this disillusioned and jaded world, Maathai was a true hero.  She was born in Kenya in 1940, and grew up in traditional Kikuyu culture -- strict gender roles, and an attitude toward the land that it was meant to be used, not protected.  Her shattering of the terribly low glass ceiling for women in east Africa started early, though.  She graduated with a Ph.D. in veterinary medicine 1971, becoming the first east African woman to earn a doctorate, and shortly afterwards was hired to teach veterinary science at the University of Nairobi.

Wangari Maathai [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA, Wangari Maathai in 2001, CC BY-SA 2.0]

But Maathai was not content with being a college lecturer, as groundbreaking as that was for a woman of her culture.  She looked around her at the environmental devastation in her beloved country, and the lack of empowerment many women felt, and decided that there was no reason she had to accept either of those things.

So she changed the world.

She started the Green Belt Movement, a campaign for tree replanting.  "When resources are degraded, we start competing for them," Maathai wrote, "whether it is at the local level in Kenya, where we had tribal clashes over land and water, or at the global level, where we are fighting over water, oil, and minerals.  So one way to promote peace is to promote sustainable management and equitable distribution of resources."

She fought for the rights of women, successfully instituting a small business loan program in rural Kenya with the hopes of making villages self-sufficient, and making women no longer dependent on men for income.  She fostered tree replanting and environmental protection programs all over east Africa, while simultaneously encouraging sustainable farming practices that did not rely on cutting down forests and exhausting farmland.

And it worked, but it was not without cost.  Her husband divorced her in 1977, claiming that she was "too strong-minded for a woman" and that he was "unable to control her."  The government, then a one-party dictatorship, tried to silence her, first with a disinformation program (they called her women's rights group "a bunch of divorcees controlled by a crazy woman").  She was attacked and beaten by policemen, arrested more than once, and was on a list of people targeted by President Daniel arap Moi for assassination.

It didn't stop her.  "In order to accomplish anything," Maathai said, "we must keep our feelings of empowerment ahead of our feelings of despair.  We cannot do everything, but still there are many things we can do."

Many things.  Yes, she did indeed.  She was instrumental in Kenya's return to a multi-party democracy.  She singlehandedly drove the regreening of Kenya's rural areas.  In 2002, she was elected to Kenya's parliament.

In 2004, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

All this from a woman who would not accept the role she'd been cast in, would not simply sit back and weep over the way things are.  Maathai never gave up on her vision, and because of that, she overturned generations of repression and sexism and environmental degradation.

No, she didn't eradicate those things entirely.  Kenya, and the rest of the world, still has a long way to go.  Yet Maathai never let the pitfalls and backslides get in the way of her belief that humans are fundamentally good, and the world is worth saving.  When she died in 2011 at the age of 71, she had accomplished more than most of us would in ten lifetimes -- all through being steadfast and brave and, most importantly, not accepting that the status quo was inevitable.

She remained, to the end, modest about what she'd done.  Any of us, Maathai said, could do the same; all it takes is a vision and sufficient courage.  "I don't really know why I care so much," Maathai said.  "I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it...  It's the little things citizens do.  That's what will make the difference."

She smiled, and added, "My little thing is planting trees."

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for people who are fascinated with the latest research on our universe, but are a little daunted by the technical aspects: Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Oxford University astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.

A whirlwind tour of the most recent discoveries from the depths of space -- and I do mean recent, because it was only released a couple of weeks ago -- Smethurst's book is a delightful voyage into the workings of some of the strangest objects we know of -- quasars, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, blazars, gamma-ray bursters, and many others.  Presented in a way that's scientifically accurate but still accessible to the layperson, it will give you an understanding of what we know about the events of the last 13.8 billion years, and the ultimate fate of the universe in the next few billions.  If you have a fascination for what's up there in the night sky, this book is for you!

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

The long sleep

The concept of suspended animation has been a staple of science fiction for as long as I can recall.  Even the generally abysmal 1960s series Lost in Space got that much right; despite really fast flight speeds, it was still a long enough voyage to Alpha Centauri that the intrepid crew of the Jupiter 2 were better off flash-frozen in big glass tubes for the majority of the voyage through the vast -- and boring -- dark of interstellar space.

Unfortunately, science fiction being what it is, usually something goes wrong.  In the case of Lost in Space, it was a robot that had been corrupted by the evil Doctor Zachary Smith.  Sort of the same thing happened in 2001: A Space Odyssey, if you'll recall; the computer system, HAL 9000, more or less lost its marbles and killed almost the entire crew, all but two of whom were in suspended animation.

Then there's poor Han Solo, frozen in carbonite for delivery to Jabba the Hutt.

So we'd have to be careful with it.  It's an idea with multiple beneficent Earth-bound applications, however.  If doctors had the capacity to induce suspended animation in humans, it could be a literal lifesaver -- in cases of stroke, a short-term shutdown of body and brain might slow the irreversible death of neural tissue, giving surgeons more time to effect repairs.  There's also the possibility of cryogenics, the (safe) freezing of people with incurable diseases, who are then held in stasis until a cure is discovered.

What's curious is that it's been known for years that many animals do this naturally; it's called hibernation.  People usually think of bears, but bear hibernation isn't that remarkable -- their core body temperatures drop by only five or six degrees.  (To be fair, an equal drop would usually be fatal to a human.)  The champion hibernators are Arctic ground squirrels (Spermophilus parryii) whose body temperatures drop to -2 C in the middle of winter.  You read that right; their body temperatures are actually below the freezing temperature of water, but their blood and other bodily fluids stay liquid because the solutes dissolved in them lower the freezing point (for the same reason that salting an icy sidewalk melts the ice).  And when they're hibernating, ground squirrels are mentally gone.  Anyone who has done back-country winter camping knows not to mess with a hibernating bear -- they'll wake up and defend themselves pretty quickly.

On the other hand, you could juggle hibernating ground squirrels and they won't stir.

Not that I'm recommending it, mind you.

It's not known why some mammals can get away with this, and others -- like us -- simply die if our core temperature drops too much.  But one step toward the safe induction of suspended animation was the subject of a paper this week in Nature, in which scientists found that to induce hibernation-like torpor in mice, all you had to do was to stimulate a particular neural pathway.  Block the stimulation, and the mice woke right back up, apparently none the worse for the experience.

In the paper "Neurons That Regulate Mouse Torpor," by a team led by neurobiologist Sinisa Hrvatin of Harvard Medical School, we read about a gene called Fos that is active in neurons when mice are in natural torpor.  Stimulate that gene in awake mice, the researchers believed, and it would induce torpor.

That's exactly what happened.  The gene acted almost like a switch, rapidly flipping mice between being active and being asleep, with no apparent side effects.  Whether humans -- who also have a Fos gene -- would respond the same way, however, is a matter of conjecture at this point.  We don't undergo natural torpor, so it's anyone's guess whether stimulating Fos in the corresponding neurons in a human brain would make us conk out, or if it would just make us tired and grumpy, or something else entirely.

Also unknown is whether individuals in suspended animation for a long time would continue to age while their metabolic processes were being suppressed.  The guess is that they wouldn't -- but that point has yet to be conclusively demonstrated.

But it's a promising start.  "Our findings open the door to a new understanding of what torpor and hibernation are, and how they affect cells, the brain and the body," study lead author Hrvatin said, in a press release from Harvard Medical School.  "We can now rigorously study how animals enter and exit these states, identify the underlying biology, and think about applications in humans.  This study represents one of the key steps of this journey."

Study senior author Michael Greenberg is thinking big, though.  "It’s far too soon to say whether we could induce this type of state in a human, but it is a goal that could be worthwhile," Greenberg said.  "It could potentially lead to an understanding of suspended animation, metabolic control and possibly extended lifespan.  Suspended animation in particular is a common theme in science fiction, and perhaps our ability to traverse the stars will someday depend on it."

Which is a pretty exciting possibility.  I'm hoping that if this becomes a reality, the planners will take into account homicidal robots and computer systems, not to mention huge slug-like crime lords.  Because I'm tempted to volunteer, but I'd rather not end up frozen in a slab of carbonite, hanging as a wall decoration in some intergalactic gangster's palace of debauchery.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for people who are fascinated with the latest research on our universe, but are a little daunted by the technical aspects: Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Oxford University astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.

A whirlwind tour of the most recent discoveries from the depths of space -- and I do mean recent, because it was only released a couple of weeks ago -- Smethurst's book is a delightful voyage into the workings of some of the strangest objects we know of -- quasars, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, blazars, gamma-ray bursters, and many others.  Presented in a way that's scientifically accurate but still accessible to the layperson, it will give you an understanding of what we know about the events of the last 13.8 billion years, and the ultimate fate of the universe in the next few billions.  If you have a fascination for what's up there in the night sky, this book is for you!

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

Traces of vanished worlds

Every civilization is built on the remains of prior ones, something that I recall finding a little startling when I first read C. W. Ceram's wonderful Gods, Graves, and Scholars when I was in tenth grade.  Being fascinated with Greek mythology, I had read the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, so I was familiar with Troy -- and shocked to find out that the excavated ruins of Troy span nine levels, bottom to top, and the seventh ("Troy VII"), dating to the 13th century B.C.E., is thought to have been the Troy of Homer.  But the city itself rebuilt itself at least nine times, with previous iterations being abandoned for one reason or another (at least two seem to have been destroyed by earthquakes, and Troy VII shows the expected signs of having been burned and demolished by battle).

This is a well-studied example, but really, everywhere is like that.  We all stand on the ruins of the civilizations that occupied these lands before us, and future civilizations will rise from the ruins of ours.  If you want good evidence of this, check out these two papers that came out last week -- showing that traces of occupation by the Romans are still detectable underground, after the passage of two millennia.

First, in the journal Britannia, we have a paper by Toby Driver, Barry Burnham, and Jeffrey Davies which studied a pattern of dead grass during a drought in 2018 in Wales, and found that the dieback revealed patterns that conformed to Roman roads, plazas, and building foundations.  The compression of the soil from the construction made it more prone to drying out, and as the grass there died, aerial surveys showed what looked like a map of ancient Roman settlements.

It looks like Wales is heading into another exceptionally dry summer, and the archaeologists are a lot more excited about this than the farmers are.  "There are still huge gaps," said study lead author Toby Driver in an interview with the BBC.  "We're still missing a Roman fort at Bangor, we've got the roads, we've got the milestones – but no Roman fort.  We're still missing a Roman fort near St Asaph, and near Lampeter in west Wales we should have one as well."

Next, we have a paper in the journal Antiquity by Cambridge University archaeologists Lieven Verdonck, Alessandro Launaro, Frank Vermeulen, and Martin Millett, describing the use of ground-penetrating radar to produce a detailed map of a city that was abandoned by the Romans 1,300 years ago.

The city was named Falerii Novi, and is first attested in historical records in 241 B.C.E.  It sits fifty kilometers north of Rome, and was occupied continuously during the Republic and Empire periods, and well into the "Dark Ages" -- the site was last inhabited in about 700 C.E., although the exact date (and reason) it was abandoned isn't known.

But gradually the ruins were covered up by vegetation and eventually all visible traces were gone.  But the remains were still there, underground.

And now Verdonck's team has used radar to see where they lie, generating 28 billion data points and a map of the city of astonishing detail.

What's most amazing about this is that the researchers created this map without disturbing the site at all.  As study senior author Martin Millett said, in an interview with Gizmodo, it's taken two hundred years to excavate Pompeii to a similar degree of detail, and -- despite the care that was taken -- in that more famous site, the process of uncovering the ruins undoubtedly damaged some of the structures underneath.

Here, we have a picture, and a quantity of data that will take years to analyze, without moving one speck of dirt.

These papers make me wonder what might lie beneath the soil on which I walk.  Where I live has been occupied (rather sparsely) by people of European descent for only two hundred years or so, but for thousands of years before that by indigenous people of the Cayuga and Seneca Nations.  What traces of those people are under my feet right now?  We all stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, and even if they're not as celebrated in literature as Homeric Troy and Imperial Rome, they're still there beneath our own dwellings, businesses, and roads, just as ours will lie beneath the ones that will be built by our far-distant descendants.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for people who are fascinated with the latest research on our universe, but are a little daunted by the technical aspects: Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Oxford University astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.

A whirlwind tour of the most recent discoveries from the depths of space -- and I do mean recent, because it was only released a couple of weeks ago -- Smethurst's book is a delightful voyage into the workings of some of the strangest objects we know of -- quasars, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, blazars, gamma-ray bursters, and many others.  Presented in a way that's scientifically accurate but still accessible to the layperson, it will give you an understanding of what we know about the events of the last 13.8 billion years, and the ultimate fate of the universe in the next few billions.  If you have a fascination for what's up there in the night sky, this book is for you!

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

Color my world

Perception is such a mystery.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman, in his brilliant TED talk "Can We Create New Senses For Humans?", touches on this with a concept he calls the umwelt -- the slice of the objective reality we're aware of.  That differs from animal to animal -- as he points out, for dogs, the umwelt is all about smell; it's sound-related for echolocating bats; it consists of electrical field fluctuations for the black ghost knife-fish; and so on.  Eagleman says:

What this means is that our experience of reality is constrained by our biology.  And that goes against the common-sense notion that our eyes and our ears and our fingertips are just picking up the objective reality that's out there.  Instead, our brains are sampling just a little bit of the world...  Now, presumably, every animal assumes that its umwelt is the entire objective reality out there, because why would you ever stop to imagine that there's something beyond what we can sense?  Instead, what we all do is that we accept reality as it's presented to us. 

What never ceases to amaze me is that even the parts of the human umwelt most of us are pretty good at picking up on are still made largely of faulty and incomplete information.  Our brains have evolved to fill in the gaps in what we see and hear -- so your perception of the world is built of what you're actually sensing of the real world, and what your brain assumes is there and fills in for you.  (That it sometimes does this incorrectly is the basis of a lot of optical illusions.)

If you need further evidence that you're seeing some bits of reality but otherwise just kind of making shit up, consider a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Michael Cohen (of Amherst College) and Thomas Botch and Caroline Robertson (of Dartmouth University).  In "The Limits of Color Awareness During Active, Real-World Vision," Cohen, Botch, and Robertson tested something that's been known for years -- that the acuity of our color vision in the periphery of our visual field is fairly poor -- and challenged the prevailing explanation, which is that cones (our color-sensitive retinal cells) are dense in the fovea (center of the retina) and sparse in the edges.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

For one thing, "sparse" is comparative, and not even especially accurate.  In a normal retina, the periphery still has four thousand cones per square millimeter.  Plus, even the statement that peripheral color vision is bad turns out to be a misstatement; we can detect the color of a small, brightly-colored object almost as well in the periphery as we can in the dead center of the visual field.

However, Cohen, Botch, and Robertson did an experiment that turns the whole question upside down.  They gave test subjects head-mounted visual displays that were equipped with devices for tracking eye movements.  They then showed the test subjects images of outdoor scenes, and without alerting them, began to decrease the color saturation in the edges of the image.  The test subjects failed to notice the fact that the image was gradually turning to black-and-white from the edges inward until the colored bit spanned an angle of only 37.5 degrees, something that "does not correspond to known limitations imposed by retinal or neuroanatomy."

It appears that what's going on is that the edges of our visual field are reasonably good at recognizing color, but our brain simply ignores the input.  Motion, on the other hand, is quickly detected even in the peripheral vision; makes some sense evolutionarily, where seeing the lion coming up from behind you is way more critical than determining what color his fur is.

It was a fairly shocking result even for the researchers.  "We were amazed by how oblivious participants were when color was removed from up to 95 percent of their visual world," said study senior author Caroline Robertson, in an interview with EurekAlert.  "Our results show that our intuitive sense of a rich, colorful visual world is largely incorrect.  Our brain is likely filling in much of our perceptual experience."

How and why the brain does this, however, is still a mystery.  The authors write:

If color perception in the real world is indeed as sparse as our findings suggest, the final question to consider is how this can be.  Why does it intuitively feel like we see so much color when our data suggest we see so little?  While we cannot offer a definitive answer, several possibilities can be explored in future research.  One possibility is that as observers spend time in an environment, their brains are able to eventually “fill-in” the color of many items in the periphery.  Of course, providing direct evidence for this explanation is challenging since it is extremely difficult to differentiate between scenarios where a subject knows the color of an object (i.e., “I know the tree behind me is green even though I currently cannot see the color green”) from instances where the subject is experiencing the color of that object online (i.e., “I can see the color green at this very moment”).

So our umwelt is apparently an even smaller slice of reality than we'd thought.  A little humbling, and something to think about next time you're in an argument with someone and you are tempted to say, "I know it happened that way, I saw it with my own eyes."

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for people who are fascinated with the latest research on our universe, but are a little daunted by the technical aspects: Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Oxford University astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.

A whirlwind tour of the most recent discoveries from the depths of space -- and I do mean recent, because it was only released a couple of weeks ago -- Smethurst's book is a delightful voyage into the workings of some of the strangest objects we know of -- quasars, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, blazars, gamma-ray bursters, and many others.  Presented in a way that's scientifically accurate but still accessible to the layperson, it will give you an understanding of what we know about the events of the last 13.8 billion years, and the ultimate fate of the universe in the next few billions.  If you have a fascination for what's up there in the night sky, this book is for you!

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

Post-apocalyptic pet care

The American public has quite a taste for the dire predictions from the Book of Revelation.  Consider, for example, the 2014 Rapture-based movie Left Behind starring Nicolas Cage.  Cage plays a character called "Rayford Steele," meaning that he is of course the action hero, similar to David Ryder in Space Mutiny, whose many names are chronicled in this not-to-be-missed montage courtesy of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  (You should watch this right now.  Seriously.  However, don't try to drink anything while doing so.  You have been warned.)

But unfortunately, the critics weren't exactly enamored of Left Behind.  It ran at an abysmal 2% approval rating at the site Rotten Tomatoes, which is the lowest I can ever recall seeing.  Here are a few of my favorite reviews:

• Left Behind is one of those films so deeply, fundamentally terrible that it feels unwittingly high-concept.
• Aside from [its] faulty conceit, the movie, on a pure thriller level, is a massive collection of awkward, poorly written character moments and supposedly spectacular set pieces that are stretched far too thin.
• Score one for Satan.

And the best one of all:

• I can't wait for Nic Cage to explain THIS one to God on Judgment Day.

But the fact remains that a sizable number of Americans believe that this movie is reflective of reality, and that it is accurate in concept if not in the exact details.  Sooner or later, probably sooner, the holy will be assumed bodily up into heaven, leaving the rest of us poor slobs to duke it out down here, not to mention contending with the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons, the Beast With Seven Heads and Ten Crowns, and other special offers.

But this does raise certain inevitable theological quandaries.  What about innocents who are caught up, all unwary, in the whole end-of-the-world free-for-all?  It hardly seems fair that the sins of us Bad Guys should be visited upon individuals who don't really deserve it, like little infidel children and so on.

And it's not just the kids, you know.  What about the pets?  Well, at least that we can do something about, at least if you believe the efforts of Lansing, Michigan True Believer Sharon Moss and her unbelieving best friend Carol, who have founded a company called "After the Rapture Pet Care."

Guinness looks a little worried about the issue, doesn't he?  He shouldn't fret.  There's no chance his owners are gonna end up getting Raptured.

While I was reading this, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop -- for there to be some sort of "We're kidding!" announcement, or at least an admission that it was a money-making enterprise by some scheming atheists trying to bamboozle (and simultaneously make fun of) gullible Christians.  But apparently, this thing is for real.  For a "small fee" (I think a ten-dollar registration charge is all it takes, although I could be misreading the fine print), holy individuals will be paired up with "nice non-Christians" who are willing to take and care for any Left Behind Pets.  Right from their website:

When all the Christians on the planet disappear, there will certainly be massive confusion.  However, the majority of people will still be on earth, and communications will be their first priority to maintain.  Therefore, I believe it will not be a problem to coordinate activities to rescue and care for your pets.  As far as the data about all registered pets, it is located on Google servers (the most secure servers in the world) as well as our own server in Lansing, Michigan (away from political and military hot spots to minimize chance of destruction if there is a post-Rapture war).  The non-Christian administrators assigned to coordinate our efforts after we’re gone are also located in multiple locations, all with log in information.

You can even purchase a stylish "After the Rapture Pet Care Volunteer Pet Caregiver" t-shirt for only $38.

Although the thought crosses my mind: wouldn't wearing such a t-shirt identify you as a sinner?  After all, if you sign up to take care of Raptured people's pets, it's pretty much equivalent to admitting you're one of the lost.  I'd wear one just for fun, and also because I don't think anyone has any particular questions about my status apropos of the Last Judgment, but I'm not forking over $38 to do it.

But if you're interested, you can also get mugs, bumper stickers, and totes.  Me, I'm gonna save my money.  Certain as I am that I'll still be around should the Rapture actually happen, I have no particular desire to look after pets left behind by the pious.  I already have two dogs whose capacity for bringing chaos and filth into the house is unparalleled, and frankly, that's about all I can handle.

On the other hand, if there's anyone who is wondering what will happen to their collection of classic sports cars After the Rapture, and wants someone to be ready to step in, I'm happy to help.  Selfless, that's me.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for people who are fascinated with the latest research on our universe, but are a little daunted by the technical aspects: Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Oxford University astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.

A whirlwind tour of the most recent discoveries from the depths of space -- and I do mean recent, because it was only released a couple of weeks ago -- Smethurst's book is a delightful voyage into the workings of some of the strangest objects we know of -- quasars, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, blazars, gamma-ray bursters, and many others.  Presented in a way that's scientifically accurate but still accessible to the layperson, it will give you an understanding of what we know about the events of the last 13.8 billion years, and the ultimate fate of the universe in the next few billions.  If you have a fascination for what's up there in the night sky, this book is for you!

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