Skeptophilia

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Thunderstorms on Titan

Sometimes I bump into a piece of research that's just so cool I have to tell you about it.

Yesterday when I was casting about for a topic for today's post, I found a link to a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research called "The Physics of Falling Raindrops in Diverse Planetary Atmospheres," by Kaitlyn Loftus and Robin Wordsworth, of Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In it, they consider the models of how raindrops alter as they fall -- evaporating, changing shape because of atmospheric drag, interacting with nearby drops -- and how that might differ not only in different environments on Earth, but on other planets.

You may already know that raindrops aren't as they're usually pictured, with a teardrop shape that's bulbous on the bottom and tapers to a point at the top; they're more or less spherical. Large raindrops, or drops in high winds, will sometimes be deformed into fat ellipses, but modeling raindrop shapes as spheres is going to be a pretty good approximation most of the time. Where things get interesting, though, is the fact that they sometimes coalesce with other drops, or partially evaporate as they fall. In fact, it's the evaporation of rain on the way down, especially when falling into warm, dry air, that gives rise to my all-time favorite atmospheric phenomenon: a convective microburst.

Microbursts don't occur where I live, here in central New York, which I'm disappointed about because it'd be cool to experience one, and relieved about because having your stuff blown into the next time zone is kind of inconvenient. They're much more common in areas that have turbulent updrafts from a layer of warm air near the surface -- like the American Midwest. (It's no coincidence that places with microbursts are usually also prone to tornados.)

What happens is something like this. A moisture-laden cloud reaches the point where the droplets of water are heavy enough to fall, so they do, dropping into the layer of warm, dry air underneath. This makes the drops begin to evaporate. Evaporation cools the air layer, and if the gradient -- the temperature difference between the blob of rain-cooled air and the hot, dry air below it -- gets big enough, the cool air literally falls out of the sky like an Acme anvil in a Roadrunner and Coyote cartoon.

If you're underneath this, all you know is that it's lightly raining, and then all of a sudden, WHAM. The winds go from zero to a hundred kilometers per hour in thirty seconds flat. Then equally quickly, it's all over, leaving you to pick yourself up and wander around trying to figure out where your trash cans and patio furniture went.

A microburst near Denver, Colorado in 2006. There aren't many good photographs of them because they're over so quickly, and also because if you're in one, the last thing you'll be thinking about is taking pictures. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Unixluv, Denver-microburst, CC BY 3.0]

Anyhow, raindrops are way more interesting than a lot of people realize, as is weather in general. If I hadn't become a science teacher I think I'd have been a tornado chaser. As things stand, I have to content myself with frequently updating my wife about such critical information as the status of frontal systems in North Dakota, usually eliciting a comment of, "Yes, dear," which I choose to interpret as a sign of breathless fascination.

But back to the study. What Loftus and Wordsworth did was to model raindrop behavior, and then extrapolate that model to other, less familiar environments -- like the thunderstorms on Titan, which are made of droplets of ammonia. The authors write:

The behavior of clouds and precipitation on planets beyond Earth is poorly understood, but understanding clouds and precipitation is important for predicting planetary climates and interpreting records of past rainfall preserved on the surfaces of Earth, Mars, and Titan. One component of the clouds and precipitation system that can be easily understood is the behavior of individual raindrops. Here, we show how to calculate three key properties that characterize raindrops: their shape, their falling speed, and the speed at which they evaporate. From these properties, we demonstrate that, across a wide range of planetary conditions, only raindrops in a relatively narrow size range can reach the surface from clouds. We are able to abstract a very simple expression to explain the behavior of falling raindrops from more complicated equations, which should facilitate improved representations of rainfall in complex climate models in the future.

Which I think is amazingly cool. The idea that we could use information about rainfall here on Earth to make some guesses about what weather is like on other planets is astonishing. I'm sure if we ever get real data from extrasolar planets, or better data from places like Titan and Enceladus here in our own Solar System, we'll still be in for plenty of surprises; I'm reminded of the cyclic violent downpours of liquid methane on the planet where the Robinsons are stranded in the remake of Lost in Space (which, unlike the original series, is actually good).

But even having a start at understanding the weather on exoplanets, based upon speculation about the conditions and knowledge of how raindrops behave on Earth, is nothing short of fascinating.

So who knows. Maybe soon I'll be able to update my wife about what the low-pressure systems are doing on Titan. With luck, that will produce a better reaction than "Yes, dear."

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a bit of a departure from the usual science fare: podcaster and author Rose Eveleth's amazing Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide to the Possibly (and Not-So-Possible) Tomorrows.

Eveleth looks at what might happen if twelve things that are currently in the realm of science fiction became real -- a pill becoming available that obviates the need for sleep, for example, or the development of a robot that can make art. She then extrapolates from those, to look at how they might change our world, to consider ramifications (good and bad) from our suddenly having access to science or technology we currently only dream about.

Eveleth's book is highly entertaining not only from its content, but because it's in graphic novel format -- a number of extremely talented artists, including Matt Lubchansky, Sophie Goldstein, Ben Passmore, and Julia Gförer, illustrate her twelve new worlds, literally drawing what we might be facing in the future. Her conclusions, and their illustrations of them, are brilliant, funny, shocking, and most of all, memorable.

I love her visions even if I'm not sure I'd want to live in some of them. The book certainly brings home the old adage of "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it." But as long as they're in the realm of speculative fiction, they're great fun... especially in the hands of Eveleth and her wonderful illustrators.

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

Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Space nation

It probably is readily apparent to anyone who is a regular reader of Skeptophilia that I am frequently perplexed by the behavior of my fellow human beings.

Some of my perplexity is over things that people do which are unpleasant -- I find the motivations for such things as racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia not simply repellent, but (on some level) incomprehensible. Why anyone would think that gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation was a valid basis for discrimination is absolutely baffling to me.

On the other hand, there's the behavior that falls into the "harmless but weird" department. As an example of this latter tendency, we have the founding by Russian scientist Igor Ashurbeyli of the "independent space nation" of "Asgardia."

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

Ashurbeyli has called for people to sign up for citizenship, and in two weeks got a half a million names. (Apparently further sign ups are on hold for now, but when they're reopened Ashurbeyli expects them to continue with undiminished fervor.) As far as why he's doing it, he says, "Today, many of the problems relating to space law may never be solved in the dark woods of modern international law... It is time now to create a new judicial reality in space."

Which may well be true -- I am certainly no expert in, um, "space jurisprudence" -- but his goals may be a little bit on the lofty side. That's not discouraging him one bit, however. Now that the number of applications has exceeded 100,000, Ashurbeyli says, "we can officially apply to the UN for the status of state."

Which I kind of wonder about. Of course, the whole thing about what constitutes a nation and what does not isn't exactly clear. It's not enough, apparently, to declare yourself an independent sovereign state; there's this thing called "recognition" wherein a more powerful nation can basically put its hands over its ears and say "la la la la la not listening" and pretend a less powerful nation doesn't exist, and the less powerful nation has no recourse but to keep whining "Yes, I am! I'm real, I swear!" until the more powerful nation gives up and says, "Oh, okay, I guess."

It's also unclear how Asgardia can be a nation given that it doesn't have any actual territory to speak of. The concept of "nation" is tangled up in the control of land, and unless Ashurbeyli and the other Asgardians are laying actual physical claim to space, it's hard to see how this can be a state in the conventional definition of the word. "A state in the classical sense has a territory and has a significant portion of its population living on that territory," said Frans von der Dunk, professor of law at the University of Nebraska. "As long as nobody's going into space, you can have as many signatures as you want, but you are not a state."

Which is probably true -- far be it from me, non-lawyer that I am, to argue with an expert in legal matters -- but kind of overlooks the fact that the whole concept of national borders is itself pretty bizarre. The idea that there's an arbitrary invisible line drawn on the ground, and on the west side of that line it's legal to drink alcohol and on the east side it isn't, is really peculiar. If aliens ever land on Earth, you have to wonder what they'll think of the fact that we have sliced up the planet into competing pieces, sometimes with blatant disregard for geography and/or culture, and they all have mutually contradictory sets of laws, and we'll fight to the death to keep the invisible lines where they are.

The aliens will probably up stakes and return home, and the next thing we know we'll find we're the subjects of an interstellar reality show called The Derpazoids of Dumbass-3.

Of course, I can't argue with Ashurbeyli's motivations. On the "concept" page of the Asgardia website, he writes:

The essence of Asgardia is Peace in Space, and the prevention of Earth’s conflicts being transferred into space.

Asgardia is also unique from a philosophical aspect – to serve entire humanity and each and everyone, regardless of his or her personal welfare and the prosperity of the country where they happened to be born.

Asgardia's philosophical envelope is to ‘digitalise’ the Noosphere, creating a mirror of humanity in space but without Earthly division into states, religions and nations. In Asgardia we are all just Earthlings!

Which I can't honestly argue with. And I suppose it's good that we have idealists like Ashurbeyli who are willing to throw themselves into a high-flown project like this, even if it's not immediately apparent how it will all work.

In any case, I may sign up, once they re-open registration. Not entirely sure why except to say that I did it.

So I guess my initial statement that "humans are weird" is only accurate if I include myself in that assessment.

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

Monday, April 5, 2021

Coincidence and meaning

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to an interview with author Sharon Hewitt Rawlette about her recent book, The Source and Significance of Coincidences, along with a note saying, "Would love to hear your thoughts about this."

I'm usually loath to give my opinion about a claim after reading a summary, book review, or interview without reading the book itself, but considering that I had issues with just about everything in the interview I can say with some confidence that it's unlikely the book would make me any less doubtful. Rawlette's idea is that coincidences -- at least some of them -- "mean something." Other than two events coinciding, which is the definition of coincidence. Here's how she defines it:

For me, a coincidence is something that is not blatantly supernatural. It could be just chance. But there’s part of you that says, "This seems more meaningful than that." And maybe just seems a little too improbable to be explained as chance. It seems too meaningful to you, personally, given where you are in your life. It’s something that makes you wonder, "Is there something more?"

Coincidences can certainly be startling, I'll admit that. I was on my way to an appointment a while back and was listening to Sirius XM Radio's classical station "Symphony Hall," and one of my favorite pieces came on -- Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I was maybe two-thirds of the way through the first movement when I arrived, and I was short on time so regretfully had to turn the music off and get out of the car.

When I opened the door to the waiting room, there was music coming over the speakers. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata -- at almost precisely the same spot where I'd turned off the radio.

Immediately, I wondered if they were also listening to Sirius XM, but they weren't. It was the usual selection of calming music you hear in doctors' offices everywhere. It really had been... "just a coincidence."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Karry manessa", Coincidence with Smile, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But did it mean anything? How would I know? And if it did mean something... what?

Rawlette tells us what her criteria are:

I don’t think there’s a really cut and dry answer. There are a variety of factors that I look at in my own life when I’m trying to figure out whether something is just a coincidence or something more. One of those is how improbable it really is... But I also think an important element is how you feel about it. What is your intuition telling you? How strongly do you feel about it? And is it telling you something that really seems to help you emotionally? Spiritually? Is it providing you with guidance?

Here, we're moving onto some seriously shaky ground.

First of all, there's improbability. How do you judge that? I'd say that the probability of a random selection on a classical music station being the same as the selection playing in a doctor's office at the same time is pretty damn low, but that's just a hand-waving "seems that way to me" assessment. Amongst the difficulties is that humans are kind of terrible at statistical reckoning. For example, let's say you throw two coins twenty times each. With the first coin, you get twenty heads in a row. With the second coin, you get the following:

HTTHHHTHTHTTHHHTHTTH

Which one of those two occurrences is likelier?

It turns out that they have exactly the same probability: (1/2)^20. A very, very small number. The reason most people pick the second as likelier is that it looks random, and comes close to the 50/50 distribution of heads and tails that we all learned was what came out of random coin-flips back in the seventh grade. The first, on the other hand, looks like a pattern, and it seems weird and improbable.

The second problem is that here -- as with Rawlette's coincidences -- we're only assessing their probability after the fact. In our coin flip patterns above, after they happen the probability that they happened is 100%. I'll agree with her insofar as to say that in the first case (twenty heads in a row), I'd want to keep flipping the coin to see what would come up next, and if I keep getting heads, to see if I could figure out what was going on. The second, corresponding much more to what I expected, wouldn't impel me to investigate further.

But the fact remains that as bizarre as it sounds, if you throw a (fair) coin a huge number of times -- say, a billion times -- the chance of there being twenty heads in a row somewhere in the array of throws is nearly 100%. (Any statisticians in the studio audience could calculate for us what the actual probability is; suffice it to say it's pretty good.)

Third, of course, is that we run smack into our old friend dart-thrower's bias -- our hard-wired tendency to notice what seem to us to be outliers. We don't pay any attention to all the times we walk into the doctor's office (or anywhere else) and the music playing isn't what we were just listening to, because it's so damn common. The times the music is the same stand out -- and thus, we tend both to overcount them and weigh them more heavily in our attention and our memories.

Rawlette also doesn't seem to have any sort of criteria for telling the difference between random coincidence, meaningful coincidence, and something that is a deliberately targeted "sign" or "message" directed at you personally, other than how you feel about it:

I think the most impactful coincidences in people’s lives tend to be most improbable. It’s very hard to explain them away. But, the counterpart to that is that those coincidences also seem to have a very strong emotional impact on us. They’re not only very improbable—very strange—but they carry a very strong emotional weight. And we can’t escape that they’re significant somehow, even if we’re not exactly sure what the message is. And, often, they do turn out to be life-changing.

So you are estimating how likely something is, assessing whether it was likely after the fact, deciding what the event's significance is, and deciding what the message (if any) consisted of. It's putting a lot of confidence in our own abilities to perceive and understand the world correctly. And if there's one thing I've learned from years of teaching neuroscience, it's that our sensory/perceptive and cognitive systems are (as Neil deGrasse Tyson put it) "poor data-taking devices... full of ways of getting it wrong." I don't trust my own brain most of the time. It's got a poor, highly-distractible attention span, an unreliable memory, and gets clogged up with emotions all too easily. It's why I went into science; I learned really early that my personal interpretations of the world were all too often wrong, and I needed a more rigorous, reliable algorithm for determining what I believed to be true.

Now, I won't say I'm never prone to giving emotional weight to events after the fact. As an example, I was quite close to my Aunt Pauline, my grandfather's youngest sister (youngest of twelve children!). Pauline was a sweet person, childless and ten years a widow, when I was going to college at the University of Louisiana. Every once in a while -- maybe every two or three months or so -- I'd stop by her house on the way home from school. It wasn't far out of the way, and she was always thrilled to see me, and would bring out the coffee and a tray of cookies to share as we chatted. One day, it occurred to me that it'd been a while since I'd seen her. I don't know why she came to my mind; nothing I can think of reminded me. I just suddenly thought, "I should stop by Aunt Pauline's and see how she's doing."

So I did. She was cheerful as ever, and we had a lovely visit.

Two days later, she died of a heart attack at age 73.

I don't think I'd be human if the thought "how strange I was impelled to visit her!" didn't go through my mind. But even back then, when I was twenty years old and much more prone to believe in unscientific explanations for things, it didn't quite sit right with me. I visited with Aunt Pauline regularly anyhow; it certainly wasn't the first time I'd gotten in my car at the university and thought, "Hey, I should drop by." I had lots of other older relatives who had died without my being at all inclined to visit immediately beforehand. The "this is weird" reaction I had was understandable enough, but that by itself didn't mean there was anything supernatural going on.

I was really glad I'd gotten to see her, but I just didn't --and don't -- think I was urged to visit her by God, the Holy Spirit, the collective unconscious, or whatnot. It was simply a fortuitous, but circumstantial, coincidence.

Rawlette then encourages us not to passively wait around for meaningful coincidences to occur to us, but to seek them out actively:

I think one of the most important things, when you experience a coincidence, is to keep an open mind about where it’s coming from and what it might mean. Because it’s very easy to try to fit a coincidence into the way of thinking about the world that we already have—whatever our worldview is. And coincidences generally come into our lives to expand that worldview. They generally won’t fit neatly into the boxes that we have. We might try to shove them in there, so we can stop thinking about it and make them less mysterious, but they generally are going to make us question some things that we thought we knew about the world.

What this puts me in mind of is the odd pastime of being a "Randonaut" -- using a random number generator to produce a set of geographical coordinates near you, going there, and looking for something strange -- about which I wrote a couple of years ago. People report finding all sorts of bizarre things, some of them quite disturbing, while doing this. I won't deny that it's kind of a fun concept, and no intrinsically weirder than my wife's near-obsession with geocaching, but it suffers from the same problems we considered earlier when you try to ascribe too much meaning to what you find. If you're told to go to a random location and look around until you find something odd, with no criteria and no limitations, you're putting an awful lot of confidence in your own definition of "odd." And, as I point out in the post, in my experience Weird Shit is Everywhere. Wherever you are, if you look hard enough, you can find something mysterious, something that seems like a coincidence or a message or (at least) a surprise, but all that means is you had no real restrictions on what you were looking for, and that the world is an interesting place.

As an aside, this reminds me of my college friend's proof that all numbers are interesting:

Assume that there are some numbers that are uninteresting.
Let "x" be the first such number.
Since being the first uninteresting number is itself interesting, this contradicts our initial assumption, and there are no uninteresting numbers.

Anyhow, all this rambling is not meant to destroy your sense that the universe we live in is mysterious and beautiful. It is both, and much more. I am just exceedingly cautious about ascribing meaning to events without a hell of a lot more to go on than my faulty intuition. I'd much rather rely on the tried-and-true methods of science to determine what's out there, which for me uncovers plenty enough stunningly bizarre stuff to occupy my mind indefinitely.

But like I began with: I haven't read Rawlette's book, and if you have and I'm missing the point, please enlighten me in the comments section. I don't want to commit the Straw Man fallacy, mischaracterizing her claim and then arguing against that mischaracterization. But from her interview, all I can say is that I'm not really buying it.

On the other hand, if the next few times I go from my car to an office, exactly the same music is playing again and again, I'll happily reconsider my stance -- all arguments about the statistics of flipping twenty heads in a row notwithstanding.

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

Saturday, April 3, 2021

Dirt magnets

New on the market for people with more money than sense, we have: magnetized balls that you put in with your laundry to clean your clothes better.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons File:Bar magnet.jpg: Photo taken by Aney / derivative work: MikeRun, Bar magnet crop, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Called the "Life Miracle® Magnetic Laundry System," the idea is that putting magnets in your washing machine will somehow suck dirt particles off the clothes. Or something like that. It's hard to tell, frankly, because most of their sales pitch sounds like this:

The concept behind the Life Miracle Laundry System is that you can achieve similar results using a chemical-free, completely renewable magnetic basis, without using non-renewable petrochemicals. Magnetic force is one of the most powerful forces on earth. In fact, the earth itself is like a giant magnet with a north and south pole. It is an amazing source of natural energy. Even the weak magnets on your refrigerator defy the force of gravity without batteries or being plugged into any power source. They will stay on your refrigerator, doing work and holding up papers for decades with no external power source. Where does all this natural power come from? From the environment around us. It is completely renewable and totally free. We are simply harnessing that amazing force and focusing it in your home washing machine to affect the water.

Okay, a few things right out of the starting gate.

The magnetic force is not "one of the most powerful forces on Earth;" in fact, if you rank the four fundamental forces, it comes in at #3. "Even overcoming gravity" isn't so surprising given that gravitation is by far the weakest of the four; electromagnetism is a factor of ten to the thirty-sixth power stronger than gravity. For those of you not comfortable with scientific notation, electromagnetism is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times stronger than the gravitational force. But it's still weaker than the other two fundamental forces.
The magnets on your fridge do zero work. "Work" is defined as the product of the force exerted and the distance traveled. Since the magnets on your fridge aren't moving, they do zero work.
I'm not even sure what you mean by calling magnetism "renewable."
If the claim is correct, you'd think (since the Earth has such a "powerful magnetic field") our clothes would never get dirty in the first place. If dirt particles were pulled away from your clothes by magnets, seems like all you'd have to do is walk around and the dirt would fall off. Or, in the case of really dirty clothes, it'd suffice to give yourself a good rubdown with a bar magnet.
On the other hand, maybe since the Earth's magnetic field is what pulls dirt downward, this is why you find the majority of dirt on the ground. I dunno.

Be that as it may, they have a great scientific explanation of how it works:

At an atomic level, everything is affected by magnetics. All you need to do it try is for yourself and see the results with your own eyes.

So there you have it. Atomic forces you can see with the naked eye!

Later on, though, they throw in a few caveats. In the FAQs, in fact, we're given an answer to the question of whether the magnet balls will actually get our clothes clean and bright:

That depends on your definition of “clean” and “bright”. When comparing the usage of the Magnetic Laundry System with laundry detergent, you need to factor in a few things... We define clean as chemical-free, non-harmful to the wearer and non-toxic to the environment, in addition to being optically acceptable. But only you, the user and owner of the product can determine that.

So apparently whether the magnets work to make your clothes clean depends on what you mean by "work."

We also find out that the Magnetic Laundry System gives you best results when you also use detergent:

The Life Miracle Laundry System® is a laundry detergent alternative only. Just like when using laundry detergent, separate products used for other functions must be used separately, like spot stain treatments, and whitening bleach products. These are separate from the Laundry System just as they are separate from detergent... [and] nothing whitens like chlorine bleach, but there are few chemicals that are more toxic for the environment and health. Bleach is very harsh and damaging to your clothes as well. That said, if you don’t mind the tradeoffs, you can still use diluted bleach with Life Miracle Laundry System® if you choose.

Then we're told that the magnet balls also don't kill microorganisms, either:

Laundry detergent is not used to kill microorganisms, and neither is the Laundry System, but the cleaning process itself washes away most bacteria. However, hot water will kill most microorganisms in the water, and a little bleach will do the same (although bleach works best at high temperatures). An extremely effective natural alternative: Numerous studies show that a straight 5 percent solution of vinegar—such as you can buy in the supermarket—kills 99% of bacteria, 82% of mold, and 80% of germs (viruses).

So if you still have to use detergent, bleach, and hot water, what exactly is it that the magnet balls do, then?

Um... well... they're all-natural! And non-toxic! And don't pollute the environment! And never need to be replaced!

What more can you ask for?

Until today, I didn't realize that the placebo effect applied to doing your laundry, but apparently it does. Who knew?

So anyway. Here again we have a good case for why we should put more emphasis on teaching science. Anyone who has taken an introductory high-school-level physics course would be able to explain why the only way magnets would clean your clothes is if they were covered with iron filings. For getting anything else washed clean -- especially anything oily -- you need a surfactant.

I.e., detergent or soap.

On the other hand, if they could develop magnets that attract dog hair, I'd be all for it. As long as the magnets were "chemical-free," of course. Can't have any chemicals around, you know. Those things are dangerous.

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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!]

Friday, April 2, 2021

The power of relentless positivity

I have a friend whom I frequently take out for walks. I'll call him Jim. Jim doesn't have it easy; he's of normal intelligence but has a lot of serious developmental disabilities, and things that most of us don't even give much thought to -- brushing teeth, shaving, showering, changing clothes -- are time-consuming and arduous chores for him. His only living relative is a five-hour drive away, so he is completely reliant on non-family members for his care.

Despite this, Jim is the single most positive person I've ever met. Whoever coined the term "sunny disposition" must have known him. Whenever we get together, he always tells me how much he appreciates my help and companionship. At the end, he thanks me again, and says, "I had a lot of fun. It was a good outing. Thank you so much."

He also cares deeply about the people around him. He always asks me how I'm doing, and unlike with some people -- for whom "how are you?" is a perfunctory and rather meaningless greeting -- Jim honestly seems delighted when I tell him what's going on in my life.

He's like that about almost everything. One Friday I told him I wouldn't see him till Monday, but I hoped he had a good weekend.

He gave me a big smile and said, "Gordon, I hope you have a great weekend more than you hope I have a great weekend."

Yesterday we went for a walk in Cass Park, a big, sprawling piece of parkland along the west shore of Cayuga Lake. We'd only been out for a few minutes when Jim said, "It sure is a beautiful day. Isn't it a beautiful day?"

For the record, at the time he said this it was about thirty degrees Fahrenheit, spitting snow, and there was a stiff breeze off the lake. Here's a photo I took of Jim's beautiful day:

Okay, the Finger Lakes region of New York, where we both live, is pretty gorgeous even in midwinter, but I was immediately struck by the fact that no one I've ever met -- other than Jim -- would have characterized the day as "beautiful." We were both well-wrapped with coats, scarves, and gloves, so we were comfortable enough, but it was still gray, chilly, and windy.

But for Jim, it really was a beautiful day. For him, a beautiful day is a long walk with a friend out in the fresh air in a place he loves. He's not impervious to discomfort; when we got back to the car, I turned the heater up, and he said, "That feels nice. My hands are cold." But what stands out to me is that Jim chooses to accept the discomfort because he appreciates what he has so deeply.

As we walked, it came to me that there was a descriptor for Jim: he's relentlessly positive. There's nothing forced about it. It's completely genuine. He doesn't do it to be polite, or because it'll get me to come back and walk with him another day, or to make me feel good.

He's relentlessly positive because he chooses to focus on the beautiful things in his world rather than the (many) difficulties.

I wonder what it'd be like if more of us were like Jim. Recognizing the problems we face and doing what we can about them, but first and foremost appreciating what we have. As a lifelong sufferer of depression and anxiety, I know that telling a person "just be happy" is the opposite of helpful; and that's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is make the choice to look at the positive things first, and be grateful for them. Make a practice of aiming for relentless positivity.

Jenny Lawson puts it differently in her amazing book Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things, which should be on everyone's reading list. Lawson has struggled with serious, debilitating mental illness her whole life, and this memoir (and her first book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened) are the only books I can think of that made me ugly cry and howl with laughter, sometimes on the same page.

Hell, sometimes in the same damn paragraph.

Lawson writes:

I’ve often thought that people with severe depression have developed such a well for experiencing extreme emotion that they might be able to experience extreme joy in a way that “normal” people also might never understand, and that’s what Furiously Happy is all about. It’s about taking those moments when things are fine and making them amazing, because those moments are what make us who we are, and they’re the same moments we take into battle with us when our brains declare war on our very existence. It’s the difference between “surviving life” and “living it”... To all who walk the dark path, and to those who walk in the sunshine but hold out a hand in the darkness to those who travel beside them: Brighter days are coming. Clearer sight will arrive. And you will arrive too. No, it might not be forever. The bright moments might be for a few days at a time, but hold on for those days. Those days are worth the dark.

It's like my walk yesterday with Jim. There were probably people walking that same path in Cass Park yesterday who spent the entire time focusing on how miserable the cold is, how gray it all was, how a cold snap on the first day of April was a bummer. Jim chose to look instead at the stark beauty of the lake under the gray clouds, the way the wind was making the fallen leaves tumble and rattle under our feet, how pretty the snowflakes looked swirling past our faces.

All of us were cold, out there in the park. But some of us were cold and miserable; Jim was cold and relentlessly positive. And I'm guessing that despite the continuous difficulties he lives with, he's the only one who got home and grinned and said, "Nice to be in a warm house again... but wasn't that fun?"

I'll end with one more quote from Jenny Lawson, that captures what I'm trying to say better than I ever could: "I see that there is dust in the air that will eventually settle onto the floor to be swept out the door as a nuisance, but before that, for one brilliant moment I see the dust motes catch sunlight and sparkle and dance like stardust. I see the beginning and the end of all things. I see my life. It is beautifully ugly and tarnished in just the right way. It sparkles with debris. There is wonder and joy in the simplest of things."

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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.

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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.

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