Reality, nightmares, and the paranormal

I was giving some thought this morning to why I've turned into such a diehard doubter of paranormal occurrences.  And I think one of the main reasons is because I know enough neuroscience to have very little faith in my own brain and sensory organs.

I'm not an expert on the topic, mind you.  I'm a raving generalist, what some people describe as "interested in everything" and more critical sorts label as a dilettante.  But I know enough about the nervous system to have taught a semester-long elective in introductory neuroscience for years, and that plus my native curiosity has always kept me reading about new developments.

This is what prompted a friend of mine to hand me the late Oliver Sacks's book Hallucinations.  I love Sacks's writing -- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia are tours de force -- but this one I hadn't heard of.

And let me tell you, if you are the type who is prone to say, "I know it happened, I saw it with my own eyes!", you might want to give this book a read.

The whole book is a devastating blow to our confidence that what we see, hear, and remember is reality.  But the especially damning part began with his description of hypnopompic hallucinations -- visions that occur immediately upon waking.  Unlike the more common hypnagogic experiences, which are dreamlike states in light sleep, hypnopompic experiences have the additional characteristic that when you are in one, you are (1) convinced that you are completely awake, and (2) certain that what you're seeing is real.

Sacks describes one of his own patients who suffered from frequent hypnopompic hallucinations.  Amongst the things the man saw were:

• a huge figure of an angel
• a rotting corpse lying next to him in bed
• a dead child on the floor, covered in blood
• hideous faces laughing at him
• giant spiders
• a huge hand suspended over his face
• an image of himself as an older man, standing by the foot of the bed
• an ugly-looking primitive man lying on the floor, with tufted orange hair

Fortunately for him, Sacks's patient was a rational man and knew that what he was experiencing was hallucination, i.e., not real.  But you can see how if you were even slightly inclined to believe in the paranormal, this would put you over the edge (possibly in more than one way).

But it gets worse.  There's cataplexy, which is a sudden and total loss of muscular strength, resulting in the sufferer falling to the ground while remaining completely conscious.  Victims of cataplexy often also experience sleep paralysis, which is another phenomenon that occurs upon waking, and in which the system that is supposed to re-sync the voluntary muscles with the conscious mental faculties fails to occur, resulting in a terrifying inability to move.  As if this weren't bad enough, cataplexy and sleep paralysis are often accompanied by hallucinations -- one woman Sacks worked with experienced an episode of sleep paralysis in which she saw "an abnormally tall man in a black suit...  He was greenish-pale, sick looking, with a shock-ridden look in the eyes.  I tried to scream, but was unable to move my lips or make any sounds at all.  He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically."

After this the paralysis resolved, and the image of the man "became more and more blurry until he was gone."

Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare (1790) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then there are grief-induced hallucinations, an apparently well-documented phenomenon which I had never heard of before.  A doctor in Wales, W. D. Rees, interviewed three hundred people who had recently lost loved ones, and found that nearly half of them had at least fleeting hallucinations of seeing the deceased.  Some of these hallucinations persisted for months or years.

Given all this, is it any wonder that every culture on Earth has legends of ghosts, demons, and spirits?

Of course, the True Believers in the studio audience (hey, there have to be some, right?) are probably saying, "Sacks only calls them hallucinations because that's what he already believed to be true -- he's as guilty of confirmation bias as the people who believe in ghosts."  But the problem with this is, Sacks also tells us that there are certain medications which make such hallucinations dramatically worse, and others that make them diminish or go away entirely.  Hard to explain why, if the ghosts, spirits, et al. have an external reality, taking a drug can make them go away.

But the psychics probably will just respond by saying that the medication is making people "less attuned to the frequencies of the spirit world," or some such.  You can't win.

In any case, I highly recommend Sacks's book.  (The link to the Amazon page is posted above, if you'd like to buy a copy.)  It will, however, have the effect of making you doubt everything you're looking at.  Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; a little less certainty, and a little more acknowledgement of doubt, would certainly make my job a hell of a lot easier.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

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

... gang aft agley

When I taught environmental science, I frequently ran into what I call the "Why Don't We Just...?" mentality.

Presented with an ecological problem -- say, plastic pollution in the ocean -- someone would inevitably propose something that drastically oversimplified the issue.  "Why don't we just equip ships with giant nets to scoop it all up?"  The problems with this include:

• There is way too much plastic trash in the ocean to feasibly remove by ships with nets.
• A lot of the problem isn't the big stuff, but the microplastics -- fragmentary pieces of plastic debris -- that get into the food chain, clog up the feeding apparatus of filter-feeding animals, cloud the water, and may be directly toxic.  These microplastics would almost certainly slip right through.
• Any scoop operation would inevitably catch and kill marine organisms that got caught up in the nets.
• Even if it was possible, what would we do with the trash once it was scooped up?

It brings to mind the quote by H. L. Mencken: "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong."

The difficulty is, the global ecosystem is an intricate web of relationships that connect to each other in sometimes unexpected ways, meaning that perturbing the balance is easy and fixing it once you've perturbed it is not.  Take, for example, the attempt to eradicate rats from Palmyra Atoll, which was the subject of a paper in Biotropica last month.

The problem seemed simple enough.  Black rats were accidentally introduced to Palmyra during World War II, and as they have done in so many places, they more or less proceeded to take over.  The low-lying island proved to be a smorgasbord for the invasive rodents, with seabird eggs and young and the seeds and fruits of native trees to feast upon.  The result was predictable enough: seabird populations dropped precipitously, and native plant species were in trouble as well, because the rats ate the seeds so voraciously that there were literally no new saplings to replace any that died.

So, what to do?  To save the ecosystem, a trio of agencies overseeing the island -- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy, and Island Conservation -- got the funding for a massive rat eradication program.  It was successful, and amazingly enough, the last rats on Palmyra were killed in 2011.

All better, right?  Pristine wilderness resurgent?

Not exactly.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Let's start with the good stuff first.  The Asian tiger mosquito, another exotic import, didn't last too long after the rats were gone.  They're specialists in feeding on mammal blood, and the rats were all there was, so the bloodsucking little fiends all starved to death.  (I love wildlife as much as the next tree-hugger, but I have to say that in the case of the tiger mosquito, good riddance.)  The seabirds bounced back pretty well, with no predators eating the young.

The forests, however, were a different story.

It turned out the rats were not only eating native seeds and fruit, they were keeping down the population of another exotic -- the coconut palm.  With a flourishing rat population, only a very small percent of the coconuts produced made it to the ground without being gnawed to pieces.  Now that the rats are gone, the palms are going nuts (*ba-dum-bum-kssh*) and outcompeting just about every other kind of vegetation on the island.

"I was on the island in 2012, just after the eradication, and could easily navigate through the open jungle understory," said study lead author Anna Miller-ter Kuile, of the University of California - Santa Barbara, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Two years later when I went back, I was wading through an infuriating carpet of seedlings that were taller than me, tripping over piles of coconuts...  While there was a fourteen-fold increase in seedling biomass, most of these new seedlings were juvenile coconut palms, their proliferation left unchecked by the removal of the rats."

As Robert Burns put it, "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley."

It brings to mind the Precautionary Principle: it's always easier and cheaper to prevent a problem than it is to fix it afterward.  The classic example of this is the mess down in south Florida created by the straightening of the Kissimmee River, which used to be a slow, meandering stream snaking its way through the Everglades.  Mostly motivated by draining swampland for agriculture and suburban expansion, the Army Corps of Engineers launched a project in the 1940s to change the river's course, reducing its fifty-kilometer pathway by about half.

They succeeded.  In the process, they destroyed wetlands that had been pristine wildlife habitats, reducing bird populations in some places by 90%.  The deepening of the channel caused a faster water flow, draining so much water from the surrounding land that sinkholes started opening up, some of them actually swallowing up houses.  Silt runoff into the Gulf of Mexico caked coral reefs and wiped out shallow-water marine ecosystems, including the ones supporting lucrative fisheries.

So in the 1970s, the Army Corps of Engineers kind of went, "Oops," and launched the Kissimmee River Restoration Project.  The current cost to return the area to where it was prior to trying to improve things: $578 million.  And that's not even considering how feasible it is to actually fix it.  As the study on Palmyra Atoll shows, it's not easy to repair a damaged ecosystem even if you try.  The "Why Don't We Just...?" mentality is almost always tempting, and almost always wrong.

It seems fitting to end all this with a quote from John Muir, the American environmentalist who founded the Sierra Club: "When you try to pick out one thing by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

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

Divine meddling

In Paul McCaw's musical comedy The Trumpets of Glory, angels back various causes on Earth as a kind of competitive contest.  Anything from a soccer game to a war is open for angelic intervention -- and there are no rules about what kind of messing about the angels are allowed to do.  Anything is fair, up to and including deceit, malice, and trickery.  The stakes are high; the angel whose side wins goes up in rank, and the other one goes down.

It's an idea of the divine you don't run into often. The heavenly host as competitors in what amounts to a huge fantasy football game.

While McCaw's play is meant to be comedy, it's not so far off from what a lot of people believe -- that some divine agent, be it God or an angel or something else, takes such an interest in the minutiae of life down here on Earth that (s)he intercedes on our behalf.  As an example, take Paula White -- the "White House Spiritual Adviser" -- who just yesterday led a prayer service in which she called on "angelic reinforcements" to make sure that the vote counting went Donald Trump's way.

While this may seem kind of loony to a lot of us, it's a remarkably common attitude.  How often do you hear someone say things like, "I found my car keys!  Thank you Lord Jesus!"?  The problem for me, aside from the more obvious one of not believing that any of these invisible beings exist, is why Lord Jesus or the Heavenly Host would care more about whether you find your keys than, for example, about all of the ill and starving children in the world.

You'd think if interference in human affairs is allowable, up there in heaven, that helping innocent people who are dying in misery would be the first priority.

It's why I was so puzzled by the story in The Epoch Times that a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me.  It's called, "When Freak Storms Win Battles, Is It Divine Intervention or Just Coincidence?"  The article goes into several famous instances when weather affected the outcome of a war, to wit:

• A tornado killing a bunch of British soldiers in Washington D. C. during the War of 1812
• The storm that contributed to England's crushing defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588
• A massive windstorm that smashed the Persian fleet as it sailed against Athens in 492 B.C.E.
• A prolonged spell of warm, wet weather, which fostered the rise of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century, followed by a pair of typhoons that destroyed Kublai Khan's ships when they were attacking Japan in 1274

What immediately struck me about this list was that each time, the winners attributed the event to divine intervention, but no one stops to consider how the losers viewed it.  This isn't uncommon, of course; "History is written by the victors," and all that sort of thing.  But what's especially funny about the first two is that they're supposed to be events in which God meddled and made sure the right side won -- when, in fact, in both cases, both sides were made up of staunch Christians.

And I'm sorry, I refuse to believe that a divine being would be pro-British in the sixteenth century, and suddenly become virulently anti-British two hundred years later.

Although that's kind of the sticking point with the last example as well, isn't it?  First God (or the angels or whatever) manipulate the weather to encourage the Mongols, then kicks the shit out of them when they try to attack Japan.  It's almost as if... what was causing all of this wasn't an intelligent agent at all, but the result of purely natural phenomena that don't give a rat's ass about our petty little squabbles.

Fancy that.

But for some reason, this idea repels a lot of people.  They are much more comfortable with a deity that fools around directly with our fates down here on Earth, whether it be to make sure that I win ten dollars on my lottery scratch-off ticket or to smite the hell out of the bad guys.

If I ever became a theist -- not a likely eventuality, I'll admit -- I can't imagine that I'd go for the God-as-micromanager model.  It just doesn't seem like anyone whose job was overseeing the entire universe would find it useful to control things on that level, notwithstanding the line from Matthew 10:29 about God's hand having a role in the fall of every sparrow.

I more find myself identifying with the character of Vertue in C. S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress -- not the character we're supposed to like best, I realize -- when he recognized that nothing he did had any ultimate reason, or was the part of some grand plan:

"I believe that I am mad," said Vertue presently.  "The world cannot be as it seems to me.  If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it: if I can go, then there is nothing to go to."  

"Vertue," said John, "give in.  For once yield to desire.  Have done with your choosing.  Want something."

"I cannot," said Vertue.  "I must choose because I choose because I choose: and it goes on for ever, and in the whole world I cannot find a reason for rising from this stone."

So those are my philosophical musings for this morning.  Seeing the divine hand in everything here on Earth, without any particular indication of why a deity would care, or (more specifically) why (s)he would come down on one side or the other.  Me, I'll stick with the scientific explanation.  The religious one is, honestly, far less satisfying, and opens up some troubling questions that don't admit to any answers I can see.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

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

Dog travels

The human/dog association goes back a long way.

No one knows for sure how it began.  It may be that our distant ancestors fed scraps to wolves, buying their loyalty in order to gain protection for their dwellings from other predators (and hostile humans).  They might have been utilized for their specific skills -- herding, hunting, pulling sleds.

Or it may be that the dogs themselves gave up their wariness when they discovered that humans have sofas.

I can say from my own experience that my own two canine companions, Lena (L) and Guinness (R), are of fairly dubious utility.  The only things they've successfully defended the house from are squirrels and the UPS Guy.  Whenever we get a package the dogs go into a frenzy of vicious barking, and it always results in the UPS Guy leaving, reinforcing their conviction that they're providing a vital service.  

"Hey, look at that!  He's driving away!  We did it!"  *canine high-five*  "I think we deserve biscuits."

But whatever the reason, humans and dogs have been inseparable for as long as we have records, including genetic ones, as a paper last week in Science showed.  A trio of teams of researchers, one led by Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute of London, another by Greger Larson of the University of Oxford, and the third by Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna, joined forces to combine cutting-edge genetics research with archaeology to analyze the genomes of dogs from 100 to 11,000 years ago.

Amongst the many cool features of this study is the window it gives us into human migration, in some cases movements which occurred before there were any written records to keep track.  When human groups moved, they took their dogs with them, so the relationship between domestic dog populations over time acts as a proxy record for the wanderings of their owners.  The study identified different, genetically-distinct lineages, each of which followed humans pretty much wherever they went.

"Dogs are a separate tracer dye for human history," said study co-author Pontus Skoglund.  "Sometimes human DNA might not show parts of prehistory that we can see with dog genomes...  Already, 11,000 years ago, there were at least five different groups of dogs across the world, so the origin of dogs must have been substantially earlier than that."

One interesting outcome of the study is that one of the lineages studied -- European dogs -- became less diverse as time went on.  I wonder if that's due to selection, and the gradual shift of dogs from workers to companions.  Working dogs have to have skills compatible with their jobs, be it herding, hunting, pulling sleds, or whatnot.  Companion dogs just have to be cute and friendly, because honestly, they're mostly home décor items and lap warmers.

Whatever the reason, this analysis of Our Best Friends is pretty fascinating not only for what it tells us about our own history, but the window it gives us into the long relationship between us and our furry friends.  Speaking of which, I gotta go.  Guinness and Lena are barking like hell at something, and I gotta go see if it's a squirrel or the UPS Guy.

He's a cunning one, that UPS Guy.  You gotta watch him like a hawk, or he'll do something awful like put a package on the front porch and then drive away.  

If you can imagine someone doing something that evil.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

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

The way it crumbles

If -- as some believe -- we're in a giant computer simulation, then I have to say that the aliens running it have lost the plot.

I'm not, surprisingly enough, talking about the United States presidential election here, although that's been surreal enough.  The latest, if you haven't heard, is Donald Trump throwing a pre-emptive tantrum, saying that if he doesn't win outright today he's already got a fleet of lawyers ready to challenge the results and fight until it turns out the way he wants.

Which aren't the actions of a sociopathic, narcissistic toddler, or anything.

What increasingly strikes me, though, is not just how bad 2020 has been, but how completely fucking weird.  For example, consider the following multiple-choice question:

A near miss by a sizable asteroid has spurred people to construct an impact-proof vault in the permafrost on the island of Svalbard.  What is this vault intended to store and protect, to ensure that it is preserved for posterity?

1. Critical historical documents and archaeological relics.
2. Examples of important technological devices and instructions on how to build them.
3. Top secret information on satellites, security, and communication contributed by world leaders.
4. A stash of Oreo cookies and the recipe thereof.

If you selected #4, congratulations, you've gotten into the True Spirit of 2020.

My first reaction, upon seeing this story, was that this couldn't possibly be true, that it had to be a parody news story of the type done so very well by sites like The Onion and The Babylon Bee.  But no, the Oreo vault is completely real, and its existence has been verified repeatedly by Nabisco, producers of the iconic cookie.  In fact, they provided coordinates (78°08’58.1”N, 16°01’59.7″E) in case you want to check it out from satellite images.  If you're not that motivated, they gave us the following photo:

"As an added precaution," Nabisco announced, "the Oreo packs are wrapped in mylar, which can withstand temperatures from -80 degrees to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and is impervious to chemical reactions, moisture and air, keeping the cookies fresh and protected for years to come."

So we can all relax.  If there's a catastrophic meteor strike, nuclear war, or whatnot, all we have to do is get to Svalbard somehow and we can all share some tasty cookies.

And access the recipe so we can make more, even though this is unlikely because (1) Svalbard doesn't look like a place that has a baking ingredients aisle, (2) the catastrophe that sent us there probably didn't leave many of the grocery stores elsewhere open for business, and (3) it's unlikely that if there's a worldwide disaster, any of us will say, "You know what?  I think I'll bake some cookies."

So I'm not sure what to think about the Oreo vault.  I mean, Nabisco can do what it wants, I guess, and if the government of Norway is okay having a cookie vault on Svalbard, that's fine by me.  But once again, 2020 has proven to resemble some kind of global fever-dream.  I've stopped saying "what's going to happen next?" because every time I do, things just get weirder.

And I say that fully aware that today Americans might well re-elect the worst president in our history, someone who is not only entirely amoral, but is so stupid that he would be out of his depth in a kiddie pool.

But I probably shouldn't stress about any of it.  At any moment, the aliens running the computer simulation could just shut it off.  Or maybe they'll come down from the acid trip they've been on, and things will return to normal.

Until then, I'll just quote the Oracle from The Matrix:

"Here.  Have a cookie."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

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

The lure of the ocean

We spent a good chunk of last week, including my birthday, in Montauk, New York, at the very eastern tip of Long Island.  I love the ocean, even when it's a cool, stormy, rainy October, and I have to do my beach runs dressed in several layers rather than my typical attire of a pair of shorts, a pair of running shoes, and damn little else.

There's something about the ocean that I find magnetic.  The crashing of the waves, keening of the gulls, smell of salt... it's magical.  There's also the overwhelming sense of power and immensity I get from it.  Staring out across the wind-tossed sea toward the misty horizon, there was literally nothing between me and the west coast of Africa except for salt water.  We sometimes see the ocean as willful and dangerous, but I think of it more as wielding a power so much greater than ours that we're simply inconsequential by comparison.  I'm reminded of the quote from H. P. Lovecraft that captures that sense of awe:

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.  Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.  All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well.  At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and in time.  Sometimes at twilight the grey vapours of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath.  And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of time.

The mystique has captured the human imagination for as far back as we have cultural memory, and because of it we have always linked the ocean to strange and uncanny tales.  Mermaids and sirens and water kelpies and the ningen and the kraken and the shape-shifting seal/human selkies only scratch the surface of lore that reaches into our very distant past. 

It's no wonder that even some of our modern lore associates the ocean and oceanside land as being uncanny.  Shortly after our arrival, Carol mentioned the "Montauk Project" -- something I'd heard of but really didn't know much about.

Turns out, the legend is centered around Camp Hero, a state park that is at the site of the decommissioned Montauk Air Force Station.  What's left behind is distinctly eerie, and includes a decrepit radar antenna mounted on the top of a building:

I find the sign on the fence a little puzzling.  Where do the falling objects originate, is what I wonder.  The whole place is a gentle, grassy hill with a few trees.  Do they drop objects from helicopters or something, so as to discourage trespassers?

Then there are the concrete bunkers that were the site of giant gun emplacements dating back to World War II.  They're still there, locked securely and with threatening signs discouraging visitors from trying to get inside:

The whole place has a distinctly sinister air, and it was no surprise to me that the conspiracy theorists think the place is still being used for secret experiments, possibly involving psychological warfare, extraterrestrial weaponry, and time travel.  In fact, the series Stranger Things was inspired by Camp Hero -- the original proposed name for the series was Montauk -- but the decision was made to site it instead in the heartland of Indiana, believing that putting the evil research station trying to reach into the Upside Down in the middle of Small Town America made the series a lot more scary.  (I think they're right, actually.)

But there's no doubt that there's an uncanny feeling about Camp Hero.  I kept expecting guys to drive up in black cars and demand that I give them my phone.  That feeling wasn't improved any when, as we were leaving the area, our car got buzzed by a drone -- that followed us for about a hundred feet, then zoomed away.

The odd ambience of the Montauk area was helped considerably in 2008 when the "Montauk monster" washed ashore -- a strange-looking carcass that immediately made people think of a hideous mutant escapee from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.  Plum Island is fifteen miles offshore and on a clear day can be seen, low on the horizon -- about all you'll ever get to see of it, because it is entirely owned by the United States government and access is severely restricted, ostensibly to prevent the spread of animal diseases (and the potential for bioweapon development by hostile nations).  As it turns out, the "Montauk monster" had nothing to do with Plum Island and almost certainly was a decomposing carcass of a raccoon, but try to convince the conspiracy theorists of that.

Anyhow, the place was well worth a visit (Montauk, not Plum Island).  We only had one afternoon of sunny weather -- by a fortunate happenstance, the afternoon we went to Camp Hero, when I took the above photos -- and the rest was mostly rainy, windy, and gray.  But it was a lovely place to spend my sixtieth birthday.  Many (well-bundled) beach walks were taken, much seafood was eaten, and much wine enjoyed.

And, happily, I didn't get abducted by the Men in Black.

But here I am, back safe and sound in my little village in upstate New York.  Much as I loved Montauk, I don't think I could live there.  For one thing, the housing prices are absurd; Carol found an advertisement for a single-wide trailer on a half-acre of land going for $845,000.  For another, the traffic is terrible, even considering that we were there during the off season.  Plus, you have to wonder what climate change and sea level rise is going to do; Long Island is basically a giant sandbar, the terminal moraine of the last (Wisconsin) Continental Glaciation, that retreated about twenty thousand years ago after having shoved unsorted rocks and sand ahead of it like a plow, leaving behind a low ridge as it retreated.  The average elevation in Montauk is about ten meters; it wouldn't take much of a rise in sea level to swamp some of the lower-lying areas.

So I'll stay right where I am, frigid winters and all.  Great place to visit, though.  Getting up in the morning and going for a run on the beach, listening to the roar of the waves and the whistling of the wind through the dune grass, is a magical experience -- looking out to sea, sensing the restless, surging immensity before you, and feeling very, very small.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

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

Five dozen trips

Dear Skeptos...

After today I'm taking a quick break -- this will be my only post this week.  I'll be back on Monday, November 2.  Until then, please keep topic suggestions coming!

cheers,

Gordon

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Today is my sixtieth birthday.

I'm not a big believer in the significance of milestones, but this one seems to be pretty major.  Partly, it's my incredulity over turning sixty when I don't feel sixty.  Well, in some ways I do; I've got more aches and pains and minor physical issues than I used to.  Fortunately, at this point, nothing at all serious.  I've got some gray, especially in my facial hair, so I keep it trimmed really short to minimize the impact.  I have a few more wrinkles and laugh lines.  I need reading glasses (either that, or my conjecture that everyone is printing in smaller and smaller fonts is correct).  My stamina for running is less than it used to be.

Overall, though, I can't complain.  I've made it here relatively unscathed.

What sixty looks like

Part of that is good luck, and part is good genes.  I come from a family of long-lived people.  My parents both made it to 83, and my dad especially looked a consistent ten years younger than he actually was, pretty much his whole life.  His mom, my beloved Grandma Bertha, lived to 93, and her eccentric Aunt Clara died at 101.  (Great Aunt Clara was almost completely blind during the last ten years of her life, but still walked daily around her home town of Wind Ridge, Pennsylvania with her red-tipped cane.  The story is that she made a point of whapping people she didn't like with her cane as she passed them.  "Accidentally."  Just showing that irascibility runs in my father's family as well as longevity.)

So as far as genetics goes, I got dealt a pretty good hand.

I also attribute some of it, though, to the fact that I still have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old.  Nothing keeps you young like retaining your ability to laugh at fart jokes.

Looking back, it's been a wild ride.  I've come a long way in sixty years, both literally and figuratively.  I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel to exotic places like Ecuador and Trinidad and Malaysia.  I live in upstate New York, which I would put in contention for the most beautiful place in the world.  I have two sons I'm proud of.  Despite off-the-scale shyness and social anxiety I'm happily married to the love of my life.  I'm a published author with fifteen books to my name.  I just retired a couple of years ago after a 32-year career teaching science to teenagers, a vocation that was some combination of challenging, fun, frustrating, and exhilarating -- truly a job where you never know what's going to happen next.  With the support of family and friends, two years ago I finally came out publicly as bisexual, shedding decades of shame and fear and finally stepping into the light and saying, "This is who I am."  I've learned a lot about myself and others, especially the deep, aching truth of what a family friend told me when I was six: "Always be kinder than you think you need to be, because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."  Through it all, I've come out mostly happy, mostly healthy, and entirely glad to be where I am.

I am an incredibly lucky man.

Still, it's a little mind-boggling that I've made five dozen trips around the Sun.  It's hard to fathom that it's been that long.  When someone says "twenty years ago," I immediately think, "1980?"  No, that's forty years ago.  Twenty years ago is 2000.  Today's twenty-year-olds were infants when 9/11 happened.  So many of the things I think of as high-magnitude historical events -- the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the start of the Gulf War, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the development of the World Wide Web and email, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the siege of Sarajevo, the Oklahoma City bombing, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that officially ended the Irish "Troubles" -- all happened before today's twenty-year-olds were born.

I can't fool myself.  I haven't been young for quite some time.  It brings back memories of my grandma, then about eighty, dropping into her favorite rocking chair with a groan, then cocking an eyebrow at me and saying, "You know, Gordon, I'm no spring chicken any more."  I'd usually grin and say, "Grandma, when were you a spring chicken?"  To which she'd retort something like, "Last Thursday, you little pipsqueak.  Now fix me a martini."  And we'd both crack up.

Then I'd fix her a martini.

That's the kind of eighty-year-old I want to be.

I guess there's no avoiding aging, although I do think a lot of it boils down to attitude.  You can't escape the physical stuff completely, although you can ameliorate it by staying active; I'm glad I'm still a runner, and I suspect that I'd be in way worse shape than I am if I'd become sedentary.  But I'm damned if I'll let it get me down.  I remember a friend of mine turning sixty, and he went into a serious depression -- it was so much harder than fifty, he said, "because there's no doubt you're past halfway.  Some people make it to a hundred, but almost no one makes it to a hundred and twenty."

Which might be true, but it's not going to stop me from trying.

So anyhow: happy birthday to me.  Despite my friend's hang-dog attitude, here's to the next five dozen trips.  Maybe my attitude is a little like the guy who fell off the roof of a skyscraper, and as he passes the twentieth floor, someone yells out of a window at him to ask how he's doing, and he shrugs and says, "So far, so good."

But it's better than the alternative.  Much better to relax, enjoy the view, and have a martini.

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Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

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