Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Thursday, April 1, 2021

The water world

Coming hard on the heels of an encouraging paper about the possibilities of near-light-speed travel, at which we might potentially have probe data from the nearest star to the Sun in ten years or so, we have an even more encouraging study of a place right here in the Solar System that might be worth looking at as a home of extraterrestrial life.

The place is Enceladus, the sixth largest moon of the planet Saturn.  It's a pretty decent-sized object, about one-seventh the diameter of the Earth.  Flyby data from the spacecraft Cassini in 2014 showed that it's a curious place, with a liquid water ocean capped by a shell of solid ice.  There are geysers coming up through cracks in the surface, and Cassini was able to sample the spray and confirm that it is, indeed, water.

Enceladus [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL and the Cassini probe]

But it's kind of a topsy-turvy world even so.  Here on the Earth, oceans are warmest at the top and coolest at the bottom; the deep parts of the ocean are the most stable ecosystems on Earth, always completely dark, under crushing pressure, and about four degrees Celsius (the temperature at which water is densest).  On Enceladus, it's the other way around; coldest on top, where it's in contact with the undersurface of the ice cap, and warmest at the bottom, where it's in contact with the core of the moon.  There's no land surface; the oceans on Enceladus are estimated at thirty kilometers deep (contrast that to an average three kilometers for Earth's oceans).

The upside-down temperature structure on Enceladus is what makes it an excellent place to look for extraterrestrial life, but to see why, we'll need to take a brief digression for a physics lesson.

One of the main drivers of ocean currents -- the movement of water not only horizontally, but vertically -- is convection, which is fluid flow because of differences in density.  One of the best-studied examples, which I described more fully in a post a few weeks ago, is the Atlantic Conveyor (known to scientists as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), in which evaporation from the warm Gulf Stream as it flows north cools the water and makes it more saline, both of which have the effect of increasing its density.  Eventually, the blob of water becomes cool and saline enough that it exceeds the density of the water surrounding it, and it sinks.  This usually occurs in the North Atlantic southwest of Iceland, and that draw-down is what pulls more warm water north, keeping the whole system moving.

This has multiple effects, two of which concern us here.  The first is that it acts as a heat transfer mechanism, warming the air (and the land near it) and giving the American Northeast, the Maritimes of Canada, Iceland, and northwestern Europe the temperate climate they have, which otherwise would be a lot more like Siberia.  Second, the water carries with it nutrients of various sorts, and redistribution of those nutrients forms the basis of phytoplankton growth and the food chain.  (The most obvious example of this latter effect is the El Niño Southern Oscillation, in which upwelling of nutrient-laden water off the coast of Peru supports a huge population of fish -- until an El Niño year, when warm water flowing east blocks the upwelling, and the entire food chain collapses.  The four-year lots-of-fish to no-fish cycle was observed as far back at the seventeenth century, when the Spanish rulers of Peru noted that the collapse often started in midwinter, and gave it the name El Niño, which refers to the baby Jesus.)

So as long as you have alterations in density, a fluid will move.  It's what drives all weather, in fact; ground heating raises the temperature of air, lowering its density and making it rise, generating a low-pressure system that draws in more air to replace what's moving aloft.  This causes wind, and if the air has moisture, it'll condense out as it rises and cools, causing rain and/or snow.

Of course, the water drawn down by the sinking of the Gulf Stream near Iceland (or the air moving upward because of warming) is only half the picture.  It's got to come back somehow, and both the atmosphere and ocean are filled with convection cells, swirling, more-or-less circular currents following the motion both vertically and horizontally.  And once again -- to return to why the topic comes up -- these redistribute not only heat, but (in the case of water), nutrients.

On Enceladus, the pattern is upside down as compared to Earth's oceans.  Water in contact with the underside of the ice shell cools and eventually sinks, drawing warmer water up from near the center of the moon.  This mixing stirs the pot, and any potential nutrient chemicals don't just settle out on the bottom.  Thus, Enceladus is a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life of some sort.

To be sure, it'd be different from what we have here on Earth.  A lot different.  Despite the cracks and geysers, the ice shell on Enceladus is thick and pretty much solid, so any living things under there would never come into contract with direct rays of the Sun (as dim as they'd be out there).  The only energy source would be the warmth of the core, so there'd be no photosynthesis, only chemosynthesis, perhaps similar to the weird organisms near Earth's hydrothermal vents in the deep oceans.  

Even so, it's a prime spot to look for signs of life.  And unlike Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, which in a best-case scenario would require ten years for an outward-bound near-light-speed probe and returned signal back on Earth, the same round-trip to Enceladus would take on the order of three hours.  

Once again highlighting that the universe is freakin' huge.

If we can develop near-light-speed travel, maybe the first thing to do is to send some probes to explore our own Solar System more thoroughly.  Not only Enceladus, but a similar water-world moon of Jupiter, Europa, which is even closer.  I'd say the likelihood of finding intelligent life on either one is slim to none, so I wouldn't be looking for anything like the super-tech civilization on a planet orbiting Vega in the movie Contact, but I think there's an excellent chance that there's something living down there, even if it turns out to be only as complex as bacteria.

But even so.  How cool would that be?  A life form completely unrelated to anything we have down here.  And if we did find life on Europa or Enceladus, it would really bolster the hunch I've had for years, which is that life is common in the universe.

And I, for one, would settle for that in a heartbeat.

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

The sad truth of our history is that science and scientific research has until very recently been considered the exclusive province of men.  The exclusion of women committed the double injury of preventing curious, talented, brilliant women from pursuing their deepest interests, and robbing society of half of the gains of knowledge we might otherwise have seen.

To be sure, a small number of women made it past the obstacles men set in their way, and braved the scorn generated by their infiltration into what was then a masculine world.  A rare few -- Marie Curie, Barbara McClintock, Mary Anning, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind -- actually succeeded so well that they became widely known even outside of their fields.  But hundreds of others remained in obscurity, or were so discouraged by the difficulties that they gave up entirely.

It's both heartening and profoundly infuriating to read about the women scientists who worked against the bigoted, white-male-only mentality; heartening because it's always cheering to see someone achieve well-deserved success, and infuriating because the reason their accomplishments stand out is because of impediments put in their way by pure chauvinistic bigotry.  So if you want to experience both of these, and read a story of a group of women who in the early twentieth century revolutionized the field of astronomy despite having to fight for every opportunity they got, read Dava Sobel's amazing book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

In it, we get to know such brilliant scientists as Willamina Fleming -- a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid, but who after watching the male astronomers at work commented that she could do what they did better and faster, and so... she did.  Cecilia Payne, the first ever female professor of astronomy at Harvard University.  Annie Jump Cannon, who not only had her gender as an unfair obstacle to her dreams, but had to overcome the difficulties of being profoundly deaf.

Their success story is a tribute to their perseverance, brainpower, and -- most importantly -- their loving support of each other in fighting a monolithic male edifice that back then was even more firmly entrenched than it is now.  Their names should be more widely known, as should their stories.  In Sobel's able hands, their characters leap off the page -- and tell you a tale you'll never forget.

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



Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Breaking the speed limit

I grew up watching television shows like Lost in Space and Star Trek, and the first movie I ever saw in the theater was 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I was about ten at the time, and it also stands out as the first time I ever heard an adult who wasn't a family member swear.  I watched the movie with the combination of awe and total bafflement that apparently is a common reaction to it, and as we were leaving the theater a thirty-something guy turned to me and said, "Kid, do you have any idea what the fuck that was about?"

I'm not sure why he thought a ten-year-old would have a decent chance of understanding a movie that flummoxed the majority of adults.  And in fact, I had no idea why HAL had gone off his rocker and killed most of the crew, why we spent a good fifteen minutes watching swirling rainbow colors superimposed on a man's eye blinking, nor why the main character got turned into a Giant Space Baby at the end.  So I just grinned and shrugged and said, "Nope."

He nodded, and looked relieved.  "Glad I'm not the only one."


Anyhow, having had a continuous diet of science fiction as a kid, I was seriously dismayed when I found out in my high school physics class that the speed of light was a hard-and-fast speed limit, and that superluminal travel was impossible.  Not just beyond our current technology, like Lost in Space's cryogenic hibernation tubes, or Star Trek's tricorders; but really impossible, a contradiction of the fundamental laws of physics, whereof even Chief Engineer Scott said ye canna break despite the fact that the entire crew broke multiple laws of physics every week and none of them ever seemed any the worse for it, except for the ones who had red shirts.

Anyhow, I was heartened to find out that there was nothing ruling out almost-light-speed travel, and in fact you can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light, just not over it.  (Again, I'm talking in a theoretical sense; the practical bit I'll deal with in a moment.)  But my hopes were dashed again when I got a sense of how big the universe actually is.  To take a round trip at the maximum speed to the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, would still take ten years.  And you get caught in the loopy time-dilation effects of General Relativity, even so; the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down for you relative to the people you left behind on Earth, and you'd get back from your ten-year trip to find that hundreds, or thousands, of years had passed on Earth.  The idea was riffed on in one of Queen's least-well-known but coolest songs, written by astrophysicist and lead guitarist Brian May, which -- when you realize what it's saying -- is devastatingly sad:


And things only get worse the farther out you go.  The star Vega, home of the advanced civilization in the movie Contact, is twenty-five light years away, so a round trip would be at least fifty years, and the relativistic effects even more pronounced.  I mean, I'd love to see what's out there, but I'd rather (1) survive long enough to make the return journey, and (2) not find the Earth ruled by hostile, super-intelligent monkeys when I get back.


Anyhow, the reason this comes up is because of some new work on what I'd call a warp-ish drive.  It's not the Alcubierre warp drive, about which I wrote eight years ago in what has turned out to be unjustifiably optimistic terms.  The Alcubierre model has three problems, of increasing difficulty: (1) even if it worked, it would expose the crew to lethal levels of radiation; (2) it requires an energy source larger than the Sun; and (3) it requires exotic matter capable of warping space both in front of and behind the spaceship, and we don't even know if the exotic matter exists.

But, Alcubierre said, if we could do it, we could scoot around General Relativity and achieve superluminal speeds.

That "if" has pretty much put the kibosh on research into the question, because even if turns out to be theoretically possible, the technical difficulties seem to be insurmountable.  But a paper in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity last week has scaled things down, back to almost-light-speed travel, and the designs they're coming up with are intriguing, to say the least.

The current paper, by Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire of Lund University, describes a set of solutions to the problem of near-light-speed travel that seem to be practical, even if the technology to achieve them is still currently out of reach.  The authors are cautious about how their work will be perceived by laypeople -- understandably, given the hype that has surrounded other such work.  "If you read any publications that claim we have figured out how to break the speed of light, they are mistaken," Martire said, in an interview with The Debrief "We [instead] show that a class of subluminal, spherically symmetric warp drive spacetimes, can be constructed based on the physical principles known to humanity today."

The encouraging thing is that they were able to show the feasibility of near-light-speed travel without recourse to some as-yet-undiscovered exotic matter with negative mass density.  And while we're back to most of the universe being still too ridiculously far away to reach, at least the nearer stars are potential candidates for study.  As Martire points out, "If we can send a probe to reach another star within ten years, it is still incredibly useful."

I can't help myself, though; even given my background in science, I'm still hoping for a loophole around the speed of light and General Relativity.  The idea of being able to get to nearby stars in a couple of weeks rather than a couple of decades is just too attractive.  I'm fully cognizant of how unlikely it is, though.

But maybe, just maybe, someday we'll find out that ye can break the laws of physics -- at least the ones we currently know about.  If so, I'll make sure not to wear a red shirt.

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

The sad truth of our history is that science and scientific research has until very recently been considered the exclusive province of men.  The exclusion of women committed the double injury of preventing curious, talented, brilliant women from pursuing their deepest interests, and robbing society of half of the gains of knowledge we might otherwise have seen.

To be sure, a small number of women made it past the obstacles men set in their way, and braved the scorn generated by their infiltration into what was then a masculine world.  A rare few -- Marie Curie, Barbara McClintock, Mary Anning, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind -- actually succeeded so well that they became widely known even outside of their fields.  But hundreds of others remained in obscurity, or were so discouraged by the difficulties that they gave up entirely.

It's both heartening and profoundly infuriating to read about the women scientists who worked against the bigoted, white-male-only mentality; heartening because it's always cheering to see someone achieve well-deserved success, and infuriating because the reason their accomplishments stand out is because of impediments put in their way by pure chauvinistic bigotry.  So if you want to experience both of these, and read a story of a group of women who in the early twentieth century revolutionized the field of astronomy despite having to fight for every opportunity they got, read Dava Sobel's amazing book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

In it, we get to know such brilliant scientists as Willamina Fleming -- a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid, but who after watching the male astronomers at work commented that she could do what they did better and faster, and so... she did.  Cecilia Payne, the first ever female professor of astronomy at Harvard University.  Annie Jump Cannon, who not only had her gender as an unfair obstacle to her dreams, but had to overcome the difficulties of being profoundly deaf.

Their success story is a tribute to their perseverance, brainpower, and -- most importantly -- their loving support of each other in fighting a monolithic male edifice that back then was even more firmly entrenched than it is now.  Their names should be more widely known, as should their stories.  In Sobel's able hands, their characters leap off the page -- and tell you a tale you'll never forget.

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



Tuesday, March 30, 2021

The horse warriors

I'm always drawn to a historical mystery.

The difficulty, of course, is given that a huge amount of our history has either highly unreliable records or else no records at all, a lot of mysteries will never get resolved satisfactorily.  Two examples I read about recently which are as fascinating as they are frustrating are the true identity of Jack the Ripper, and the fate of the "Princes in the Tower" -- the two young sons of English King Edward IV, who disappeared in around 1483 and were probably murdered.  

As a quick aside, it bears mention that in the latter case the alleged culprit, King Richard III, was not the horrific, amoral villain you might think, if your only source is the play by Shakespeare.  He was actually competent and not a selfish monster, nor was he a hunchback; the Shakespearean smear job makes for great theater, and appeased the anti-Yorkist monarchy of the time, but has unfairly tarred a man who -- if Henry Tudor hadn't decided to swipe the throne -- probably would have been considered a pretty good leader.  He may still have had the princes killed, though; such behavior by a king anxious to eliminate rivals and put his own claim to the throne beyond question was not at all uncommon at the time.  But Shakespeare having Queen Margaret call him a "deformed, bunch-backed toad" seems a little excessive.

Sometimes there's an entire ethnic group that is mysterious, again usually because we have mostly archaeological evidence to go by, supplemented by dubiously accurate accounts written down by other (often hostile) cultures.  In fact, the whole reason why the subject of historical mysteries comes up is because of a paper I read a couple of days ago about the Scythians, the central Asian "horse warriors" who bumped up against the cultures their territory bordered -- principally Greece, Rome, China, and Persia -- and whose accounts form the basis of our knowledge of who they were.

The Golden Stag of Kostromskaya, one of the most famous Scythian artifacts (ca. 7th century B.C.E.) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joanbanjo, Placa en forma de cérvol tombat, trobada al túmul de Kostromskoy a Kuban, segle VII aC, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In "Ancient Genomic Time Transect from the Central Asian Steppe Unravels the History of the Scythians," which appeared last week in Science Advances and was authored by a huge team led by Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, we read about a genomic study of the remains of over a hundred individuals from Scythian burial sites, and find out that they were hardly a single unified ethnic group -- their genomes show a significant diversity and represent multiple origins.  So the Scythians seem more like a loose confederation of relatively unrelated people than the single unified, monolithic culture of fierce nomads depicted in the writings of their rivals.

The authors write:

The Scythians were a multitude of horse-warrior nomad cultures dwelling in the Eurasian steppe during the first millennium BCE.  Because of the lack of first-hand written records, little is known about the origins and relations among the different cultures.  To address these questions, we produced genome-wide data for 111 ancient individuals retrieved from 39 archaeological sites from the first millennia BCE and CE across the Central Asian Steppe.  We uncovered major admixture events in the Late Bronze Age forming the genetic substratum for two main Iron Age gene-pools emerging around the Altai and the Urals respectively.  Their demise was mirrored by new genetic turnovers, linked to the spread of the eastern nomad empires in the first centuries CE.

 If that's not intriguing enough, last week there was also new information uncovered about an artifact from the same place but a lot earlier, the "Shigir idol," which was uncovered from a peat bog in the Ural Mountains in 1890.  Its age is apparently greater than scientists have thought -- the new study suggests it's about 12,500 years old, making it the oldest wooden representation of a human figure known.



"The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia," said study lead author Thomas Terberger, of the University of Göttingen, in an interview in the New York Times.  "The landscape changed, and the art—figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock—did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered."

What it brings home to me is the humbling thought of how little we actually know of our own history.  For every mystery we know about -- like Jack the Ripper and the Princes in the Tower we began with -- there are probably thousands of other equally fascinating events we don't have any way of knowing about.  The vast majority of humans died without leaving any extant traces, and since human remains and biodegradable artifacts (like the Shigir idol) only survive under specific (and uncommon) conditions, the vast majority of those are gone beyond recall, too.  When we luck out and find tangible evidence, like the Scythian burials, we can sometimes glean further information about a culture we knew little about.  The unfortunate but tantalizing truth, though, is that most of our own history is both unknown and unknowable.

Which for me makes it even more appealing, although inevitably, as frustrating as it is fascinating.

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

The sad truth of our history is that science and scientific research has until very recently been considered the exclusive province of men.  The exclusion of women committed the double injury of preventing curious, talented, brilliant women from pursuing their deepest interests, and robbing society of half of the gains of knowledge we might otherwise have seen.

To be sure, a small number of women made it past the obstacles men set in their way, and braved the scorn generated by their infiltration into what was then a masculine world.  A rare few -- Marie Curie, Barbara McClintock, Mary Anning, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind -- actually succeeded so well that they became widely known even outside of their fields.  But hundreds of others remained in obscurity, or were so discouraged by the difficulties that they gave up entirely.

It's both heartening and profoundly infuriating to read about the women scientists who worked against the bigoted, white-male-only mentality; heartening because it's always cheering to see someone achieve well-deserved success, and infuriating because the reason their accomplishments stand out is because of impediments put in their way by pure chauvinistic bigotry.  So if you want to experience both of these, and read a story of a group of women who in the early twentieth century revolutionized the field of astronomy despite having to fight for every opportunity they got, read Dava Sobel's amazing book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

In it, we get to know such brilliant scientists as Willamina Fleming -- a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid, but who after watching the male astronomers at work commented that she could do what they did better and faster, and so... she did.  Cecilia Payne, the first ever female professor of astronomy at Harvard University.  Annie Jump Cannon, who not only had her gender as an unfair obstacle to her dreams, but had to overcome the difficulties of being profoundly deaf.

Their success story is a tribute to their perseverance, brainpower, and -- most importantly -- their loving support of each other in fighting a monolithic male edifice that back then was even more firmly entrenched than it is now.  Their names should be more widely known, as should their stories.  In Sobel's able hands, their characters leap off the page -- and tell you a tale you'll never forget.

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



Monday, March 29, 2021

Viral reality

If you are of the opinion that more evidence is necessary for demonstrating the correctness of the evolutionary model, I give you: a paper by biologist Justin R. Meyer of the University of California-San Diego et al. that has conclusively demonstrated speciation occurring in the laboratory.

The gist of what the team did is to grow populations of bacteriophage Lambda (a virus that attacks and kills bacteria) in the presence of populations of two different potential food sources, more specifically E. coli that had one of two different receptors where the virus could attach.  What happened was that the original bacteriophages were non-specialists -- they could attach to either receptor, but not very efficiently -- but over time, more of them accrued mutations that allowed them to specialize in attacking one receptor over the other.  Ultimately, the non-specialists became extinct, leaving a split population where each new species could not survive on the other's food source.

Diagram of a bacteriophage [Image licensed under the Creative Commons GrahamColm at English Wikipedia, Phage, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Pretty amazing stuff.  My response was, "If that isn't evolution, what the hell is it?"  Of course, I'm expecting the litany of goofy rejoinders to start any time now.  "It's only microevolution."  "There was no novel gene produced."  "But both of them are still viruses.  If you showed me a virus evolving into a wombat, then I'd believe you."

"Anti-evolutionists," see "Goalposts, Moving the."

Nevertheless, this sticks another nail in the coffin of both Intelligent Design proponents and the young-Earth creationists, the latter of whom believe that all of the Earth's species were created as-is six thousand or so years ago along with the Earth itself, and that the two hundred million year old trilobite fossils one sometimes finds simply dropped out of God's pocket while he was walking through the Garden of Eden or something.

So as usual, you can't logic your way out of a stance you didn't logic your way into.  Still, I have hope that the tide is gradually turning.  Certainly one cheering incident comes our way from Richard Lenski, who is justly famous for his groundbreaking study of evolution in bacteria and who co-authored the Meyer paper I began with.  But Lenski will forever be one of my heroes for the way he handled Andrew Schlafly, who runs Conservapedia, a Wikipedia clone that attempts to remodel reality so that all of the ultra-conservative talking points are true.  Schlafly had written a dismissive piece about Lenski's work on Conservapedia, to which Lenski responded.  The ensuing exchange resulted in one of the most epic smackdowns by a scientist I've ever seen.  Lenski takes apart Schlafly's objections piece by piece, citing data, kicking ass, and taking names.  I excerpt the end of it below, but you can (and should) read the whole thing at the article on the "Lenski Affair" over at RationalWiki:
I know that I’ve been a bit less polite in this response than in my previous one, but I’m still behaving far more politely than you deserve given your rude, willfully ignorant, and slanderous behavior.  And I’ve spent far more time responding than you deserve.  However, as I said at the outset, I take education seriously, and I know some of your acolytes still have the ability and desire to think, as do many others who will read this exchange.

Sincerely, Richard Lenski
And if that's not spectacular enough, check out one of the four P.S.s:
I noticed that you say that one of your favorite articles on your website is the one on “Deceit.”  That article begins as follows: “Deceit is the deliberate distortion or denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another.  Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong.  For example, the Old Testament says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’”  You really should think more carefully about what that commandment means before you go around bearing false witness against others.
I can only hope that there was a mic around after that so that Lenski could drop it.

So there you have it.  Science finding out cool stuff once again, because after all, that's what science does.  The creationists, it is to be hoped, retreating further and further into the corner into which they've painted themselves.  It's probably a forlorn wish that this'll make Ken Ham shut up, but maybe he'll eventually have to adapt his strategy to address reality instead of avoiding it.

You might even say... he'll need to evolve.

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

The sad truth of our history is that science and scientific research has until very recently been considered the exclusive province of men.  The exclusion of women committed the double injury of preventing curious, talented, brilliant women from pursuing their deepest interests, and robbing society of half of the gains of knowledge we might otherwise have seen.

To be sure, a small number of women made it past the obstacles men set in their way, and braved the scorn generated by their infiltration into what was then a masculine world.  A rare few -- Marie Curie, Barbara McClintock, Mary Anning, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind -- actually succeeded so well that they became widely known even outside of their fields.  But hundreds of others remained in obscurity, or were so discouraged by the difficulties that they gave up entirely.

It's both heartening and profoundly infuriating to read about the women scientists who worked against the bigoted, white-male-only mentality; heartening because it's always cheering to see someone achieve well-deserved success, and infuriating because the reason their accomplishments stand out is because of impediments put in their way by pure chauvinistic bigotry.  So if you want to experience both of these, and read a story of a group of women who in the early twentieth century revolutionized the field of astronomy despite having to fight for every opportunity they got, read Dava Sobel's amazing book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

In it, we get to know such brilliant scientists as Willamina Fleming -- a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid, but who after watching the male astronomers at work commented that she could do what they did better and faster, and so... she did.  Cecilia Payne, the first ever female professor of astronomy at Harvard University.  Annie Jump Cannon, who not only had her gender as an unfair obstacle to her dreams, but had to overcome the difficulties of being profoundly deaf.

Their success story is a tribute to their perseverance, brainpower, and -- most importantly -- their loving support of each other in fighting a monolithic male edifice that back then was even more firmly entrenched than it is now.  Their names should be more widely known, as should their stories.  In Sobel's able hands, their characters leap off the page -- and tell you a tale you'll never forget.

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



Saturday, March 27, 2021

The ghost of Robert Schumann

Yesterday, I was driving home from work, and was listening to Symphony Hall, the classical music station on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, and the announcer said that we'd be hearing the Violin Concerto in D Minor of the brilliant and tragic composer Robert Schumann.


"And there's quite a story to go with it," he said, and proceeded to tell us how the composer had written the piece in 1853, three years before his death, for his friend and fellow musician Joseph Joachim.  Joachim, however, thought the piece too dark to have any chance at popularity, and after Schumann attempted suicide in 1854 the sheet music was deposited at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and everyone forgot about it.

In 1933, eighty years later, two women conducting a séance in London were alarmed to hear a "spirit voice" that claimed to be Schumann, and that said they were to go to the Prussian State Library to recover an "unpublished work" and see to it that it got performed.  So the women went over to Berlin, and found the music -- right where the "spirit" said it would be.

Four years later, in 1937, a copy was sent anonymously to the great conductor Yehudi Menuhin.  Impressed, and delighted to have the opportunity to stage a first performance of a piece from a composer who had been dead for 84 years, he premiered it in San Francisco in October of that year.  But the performance was interrupted by one of the two women who had "talked to Schumann," who claimed that she had a right to first performance, since she'd been in touch with the spirit world about the piece and had received that right from the dead composer himself!

We then got to hear the piece, which is indeed dark and haunting and beautiful, and you should all give it a listen.


Having been an aficionado of stories of the paranormal since I was a teen -- which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a long time ago -- it's not often that I get to hear one that I didn't know about before.  Especially, given my love for music, one involving a famous composer.  So I thought this was an intriguing tale, and when I got home I decided to look into it, and see if there was more known about the mysterious piece and its scary connection to séances and ghosts.

And -- sorry to disappoint you if you bought the whole spirit-voice thing -- there is, indeed, a lot more to the story.

Turns out that the announcer was correct that violinist Joachim, when he received the concerto, didn't like it much.  He commented in a letter that the piece showed "a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy, though certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist."  And he not only tucked it away at the Prussian State Library, he included a provision in his will (1907) that the piece should not be performed until 1956, a hundred years after Schumann's death.  So while it was forgotten, it wasn't perhaps as unknown as the radio announcer wanted us to think.

Which brings us up to the séance, and the spirit voice, and the finding of the manuscript -- conveniently leaving out the fact that the two woman who were at the séance, Jelly d'Arányi and Adila Fachiri, were sisters -- who were the grand-nieces of none other than Joseph Joachim himself!

Funny how leaving out one little detail like that makes a story seem like it admits of no other explanation than the supernatural, isn't it?  Then you find out that detail, and... well, not so much, any more.

It's hard to imagine that d'Arányi and Fachiri, who were fourteen and nineteen years old, respectively, when their great-uncle died, wouldn't have known about his will and its mysterious clause forbidding the performance of Schumann's last major work.  d'Arányi and Fachiri themselves were both violinists of some repute, so this adds to their motivation for revealing the piece, with the séance adding an extra frisson to the story, especially in the superstitious and spirit-happy 1930s.  And the forwarding of the piece to Menuhin, followed by d'Arányi's melodramatic crashing of the premiere, has all of the hallmarks of a well-crafted publicity stunt.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to discover how easy this one was to debunk.  Of course, I don't know that my explanation is correct; maybe the two sisters were visited by the ghost of Robert Schumann, who had been wandering around in the afterlife, pissed off that his last masterwork wasn't being performed.  But if you cut the story up using Ockham's Razor, you have to admit that the spirit-voices-and-séance theory doesn't make nearly as much sense as the two-sisters-pulling-a-clever-hoax theory.

A pity, really, because a good spooky story always adds something to a dark, melancholy piece of music.  I may have to go listen to Danse MacabreThe Drowned Cathedral, and Night on Bald Mountain, just to get myself back into the mood.

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

Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Simon Singh's The Code Book, prompted a reader to respond, "Yes, but have you read his book on Fermat's Last Theorem?"

In this book, Singh turns his considerable writing skill toward the fascinating story of Pierre de Fermat, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who -- amongst many other contributions -- touched off over three hundred years of controversy by writing that there were no integer solutions for the equation  an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2, then adding, "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain," and proceeding to die before elaborating on what this "marvelous proof" might be.

The attempts to recreate Fermat's proof -- or at least find an equivalent one -- began with Fermat's contemporaries, Evariste de Gaulois, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, and John Wallis, and continued for the next three centuries to stump the greatest minds in mathematics.  It was finally proven that Fermat's conjecture was correct by Andrew Wiles in 1994.

Singh's book Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 350 Years describes the hunt for a solution and the tapestry of personalities that took on the search -- ending with a tour-de-force paper by soft-spoken British mathematician Andrew Wiles.  It's a fascinating journey, as enjoyable for a curious layperson as it is for the mathematically inclined -- and in Singh's hands, makes for a story you will thoroughly enjoy.

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



Friday, March 26, 2021

The phantom whirlpool

The universe is a dangerous place.

I'm not talking about crazy stuff happening down here on Earth, although a lot of that certainly qualifies.  The violence we wreak upon each other (and by our careless actions, often upon ourselves) fades into insignificance by comparison to the purely natural violence out there in the cosmos.  Familiar phenomena like black holes and supernovas come near the top of the list, but there are others equally scary whose names are hardly common topics of conversation -- Wolf-Rayet stars, gamma-ray bursters, quasars, and Thorne-Zytkow objects come to mind, not to mention the truly terrifying possibility of a "false vacuum collapse" that I wrote about here at Skeptophilia a while back.

It's why I always find it odd when people talk about the how peaceful the night sky is, or that the glory of the cosmos supports the existence of a benevolent deity.  Impressive?  Sure.  Awe-inspiring?  Definitely.

Benevolent?  Hardly.  The suggestion that the universe was created to be the perfectly hospitable home to humanity -- the "fine-tuning" argument, or "strong anthropic principle" -- conveniently ignores the fact that the vast majority of the universe is intrinsically deadly to terrestrial life forms, and even here on Earth, we're able to survive the conditions of less than a quarter of its surface area.

I'm not trying to scare anyone, here.  But I do think it's a good idea to keep in mind how small and fragile we are.  Especially if it makes us more cognizant of taking care of the congenial planet we're on.

In any case, back to astronomical phenomena that are big and scary and can kill you.  Even the ones we know about don't exhaust the catalog of violent space stuff.  Take, for example, the (thus far) unexplained invisible vortex that is tearing apart the Hyades.

The Hyades is a star cluster in the constellation Taurus, which gets its name from the five sisters of Hyas, a beautiful Greek youth who died tragically.  Which brings up the question of whether any beautiful Greek youths actually survived to adulthood.  When ancient Greeks had kids, if they had a really handsome son, did they look at him and shake their heads sadly, and say, "Well, I guess he's fucked"?  

To read Greek mythology, you get the impression that the major cause of death in ancient Greek was being so beautiful it pissed the gods off.

Anyhow, Hyas's five sisters were so devastated by the loss of their beloved brother that they couldn't stop crying, so the gods took pity on them even though Zeus et al. were the ones who caused the whole problem in the first place, and turned them into stars.  Which I suppose is better than nothing.  But even so the sisters' weeping wouldn't stop -- which is why the appearance of the Hyades in the sky in the spring is associated with the rainy season.  (In fact, in England the cluster is called "the April rainers.")

The Hyades [Image licensed under the Creative Commons NASA, ESA, and STScI, Hyades cluster, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In reality, the Hyades have nothing to do with rain or tragically beautiful Greek youths.  They are a group of fairly young stars, on the order of 625 million years old (the Sun is about ten times older), and like most clusters was created from a collapsing clump of gas.  The Hyades are quite close to us -- 153 light years away -- and because of that have been intensively studied.  Like many clusters, the tidal forces generated by the relative motion of the stars is gradually pulling them away from each other, but here there seems to be something else, something far more violent, going on.

A press release from the European Space Agency this week describes a study of the motion of the stars in the Hyades indicating that their movements aren't the ordinary gentle dissipation most clusters undergo.  A team led by astrophysicist Tereza Jerabkova used data from the European Southern Observatory to map members of the cluster, and to identify other stars that once were part of the Hyades but since have been pulled away, and they found that the leading "tidal tail" -- the streamer of stars out ahead of the motion of the cluster as a whole -- has been ripped to shreds.

The only solution Jerabkova and her team found that made sense of the data is that the leading tail of the Hyades collided -- or is in the process of colliding -- with a huge blob of some sort, containing a mass ten million times that of the Sun.  The problem is, an object that big, only 153 light years away, should be visible, or at least detectable, and there seems to be nothing there.

"There must have been a close interaction with this really massive clump, and the Hyades just got smashed," Jerabkova said.

So what is this "really massive clump" made of?  Given the absence of anything made of ordinary matter that is anywhere nearby, the team suggests that it might be something more exotic -- a "dark matter sub-halo."  These hypothesized objects could be scattered across the universe, and might provide the energetic kick to objects whose trajectories can't be explained any other way.  But what exactly they are other than a bizarre phantom gravitational whirlpool, no one knows.

Nor what the risk is if we're close to one.

So add "dark matter sub-halos" to our list of scary astronomical phenomena.  I find the whole thing fascinating, and a little humbling.  I'll still find the beauty of a clear night sky soothing, but that's only if I can get my scientific mind to shut the hell up long enough to enjoy it.  Because the truth is, a lot of those twinkling lights are anything but peaceful.

But I suppose it's still better than the gods killing you if you're too handsome.  That would just suck, not that I'd be likely to be on the receiving end of it anyhow.

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

Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Simon Singh's The Code Book, prompted a reader to respond, "Yes, but have you read his book on Fermat's Last Theorem?"

In this book, Singh turns his considerable writing skill toward the fascinating story of Pierre de Fermat, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who -- amongst many other contributions -- touched off over three hundred years of controversy by writing that there were no integer solutions for the equation  an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2, then adding, "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain," and proceeding to die before elaborating on what this "marvelous proof" might be.

The attempts to recreate Fermat's proof -- or at least find an equivalent one -- began with Fermat's contemporaries, Evariste de Gaulois, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, and John Wallis, and continued for the next three centuries to stump the greatest minds in mathematics.  It was finally proven that Fermat's conjecture was correct by Andrew Wiles in 1994.

Singh's book Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 350 Years describes the hunt for a solution and the tapestry of personalities that took on the search -- ending with a tour-de-force paper by soft-spoken British mathematician Andrew Wiles.  It's a fascinating journey, as enjoyable for a curious layperson as it is for the mathematically inclined -- and in Singh's hands, makes for a story you will thoroughly enjoy.

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



Thursday, March 25, 2021

A tsunami of lies

One of the ways in which the last few years have changed me is that it has made me go into an apoplectic rage when I see people sharing false information on social media.

I'm not talking about the occasional goof; I've had times myself that I've gotten suckered by parody news accounts, and posted something I thought was true that turns out to be some wiseass trying to be funny.  What bothers me is the devastating flood of fake news on everything from vaccines to climate change to politics, exacerbated by "news" agencies like Fox and OAN that don't seem to give a shit about whether what they broadcast is true, only that it lines up with the agenda of their directors.

I've attributed this tsunami of lies to two reasons: partisanship and ignorance.  (And to the intersection of partisanship and ignorance, where lie the aforementioned biased media sources.)  If you're ignorant of the facts, of course you'll be prone to falling for an appealing falsehood; and partisanship in either direction makes you much more likely to agree unquestioningly with a headline that lines up with what you already believed to be true.

Turns out -- ironically -- the assumption that the people sharing fake news are partisan, ignorant, or both might itself be an appealing but inaccurate assessment of what's going on.  A study in Nature this week has generated some curious results showing that once again, reality turns out to be more complex than our favored black-and-white assessments of the situation.


[Image is in the Public Domain]

A study by Ziv Epstein, Mohsen Mosleh, Antonio Arechar, Dean Eckles, and David Rand (of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Gordon Pennycook (of the University of Regina) decided to see what was really motivating people to share false news stories online, and they found -- surprisingly -- that sheer carelessness played a bigger role than either partisanship or ignorance.  In "Shifting Attention to Accuracy Can Reduce Misinformation Online," the team describes a series of experiments involving over a thousand volunteers that leads us to the heartening conclusion that there might be a better way to stem the flood of lies online than getting people to change their political beliefs or engaging in a massive education program.

The setup of the study was as simple as it was elegant.  They first tested the "ignorance" hypothesis by taking test subjects and presenting them with various headlines, some true and some false, and asked them to determine which were which.  It turns out people are quite good at this; there was a full 56-point difference between the likelihood of correctly identifying true and false headlines and making a mistake.

Next, they tested the "partisanship" hypothesis.  The test subjects did worse on this task, but still the error rate wasn't as big as you might guess; people were still 10% less likely to rate true statements as false (or vice versa) even if those statements agreed with the majority stance of their political parties.  So partisanship plays a role in erroneous belief, but it's not the set of blinders many -- including myself -- would have guessed.

Last -- and this is the most interesting test -- they asked volunteers to assess their likelihood of sharing the news stories online, based upon their headlines.  Here, the difference between sharing true versus false stories dropped to only six percentage points.  Put a different way, people who are quite good at discerning false information overall, and still pretty good at recognizing it even when it runs counter to their political beliefs, will still share the news story anyhow.

What it seems to come down to is simple carelessness.  It's gotten so easy to share links that we do it without giving it much thought.  I know I've been a bit shame-faced when I've clicked "retweet" to a link on Twitter, and gotten the message, "Don't you want to read the article first?"  (In my own defense, it's usually been because the story in question is from a source like Nature or Science, and I've gotten so excited by whatever it was that I clicked "retweet" right away even though I fully intend to read the article afterward.  Another reason is the exasperating way Twitter auto-refreshes at seemingly random moments, so if you don't respond to a post right away, it might disappear forever.)  

Improving the rate at which people detected (and chose not to share) fake headlines turned out to be remarkably easy to tweak.  The researchers found that reminding people of the importance of accuracy at the start of the experiment decreased the volunteers' willingness to share false information, as did asking them to assess the accuracy of the headline prior to making the decision about whether to share it. 

It does make me wonder, though, about the role of pivotal "nodes" in the flow of misinformation -- a few highly-motivated people who start the ball of fake news rolling, with the rest of us spreading around the links (whatever our motivation for doing so) in a more piecemeal fashion.  A study by Zignal Labs, for example, found that the amount of deceptive or outright false political information on Twitter went down by a stunning 73% after Donald Trump's account was closed permanently.  (Think of what effect it might have had if Twitter had made this decision back in 2015.)

In any case, to wrap this up -- and to do my small part in addressing this problem -- just remember before you share anything that accuracy matters.  Truth matters.  It's very easy to click "share," but with that ease comes a responsibility to make sure that what we're sharing is true.  We ordinary folk can't dam the flow of bullshit singlehandedly, but each one of us has to take seriously our role in stopping up the leaks, small as they may seem.

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

Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Simon Singh's The Code Book, prompted a reader to respond, "Yes, but have you read his book on Fermat's Last Theorem?"

In this book, Singh turns his considerable writing skill toward the fascinating story of Pierre de Fermat, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who -- amongst many other contributions -- touched off over three hundred years of controversy by writing that there were no integer solutions for the equation  an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2, then adding, "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain," and proceeding to die before elaborating on what this "marvelous proof" might be.

The attempts to recreate Fermat's proof -- or at least find an equivalent one -- began with Fermat's contemporaries, Evariste de Gaulois, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, and John Wallis, and continued for the next three centuries to stump the greatest minds in mathematics.  It was finally proven that Fermat's conjecture was correct by Andrew Wiles in 1994.

Singh's book Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 350 Years describes the hunt for a solution and the tapestry of personalities that took on the search -- ending with a tour-de-force paper by soft-spoken British mathematician Andrew Wiles.  It's a fascinating journey, as enjoyable for a curious layperson as it is for the mathematically inclined -- and in Singh's hands, makes for a story you will thoroughly enjoy.

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