The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday, that I thought would make a great topic for this week's Fiction Friday: does a good story always have a moral?

My contention is even stories that are purely for entertainment still often do have morals.  Consider Dave Barry's novel Big Trouble, a lunatic romp in south Florida that for me would be in the running for the funniest novel ever written.  Without stretching credulity too much, you could claim that Big Trouble has the theme "love, loyalty, and kindness are always worth it."  Certainly the humor is more the point, but the end of the story (no spoilers) is so damn sweet that the first time I read it, it made me choke up a little.

Another favorite genre, murder mysteries, could usually be summed up as "murdering people is bad." 

But that's not what most people mean by "a moral to the story."  Generally, a story with a moral is one where the moral is the main point -- not something circumstantial to the setting or plot. 

The moral is the reason the story was written.

I'm a little ambivalent about overt morals in stories.  I've seen it done exceptionally well; Thornton Wilder's amazing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is explicitly about a man trying to find out if things happen for a reason, or if the universe is simply chaotic.  His conclusion -- that either there is no reason, or else the mind of God is so subtle that we could never parse the reason -- is absolutely devastating in the context of the story.  The impact on me when I first read it, as an eleventh grader in a Modern American Literature class in high school, turned my whole worldview upside down.  In a lot of ways, that one novel was the first step in shaping the approach to life I now have, forty-odd years later.

If I can be excused for detouring into my favorite television show, Doctor Who, you can find there a number of examples of episodes where the moral gave the story incredible impact.  A couple that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looked at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, and "Silence in the Library," with a subtext of the terrible necessity of self-sacrifice.

But if you want examples of bad moralistic stories, you don't have to look any further.  In the most recent incarnation of the Doctor, the episode "Orphan 55" pissed off just about everyone -- not only because of the rather silly cast of characters, but because at the end the Doctor delivers a monologue that amounts to, "Now, children, let me tell you how all this bad stuff happened because humans are idiots and didn't address climate change."

So what's the difference?

In my mind, it all has to do with subtlety -- and respect for the reader's (or watcher's) intelligence.  A well-done moral-based story has a deep complexity; it tells the story and then leaves us to see what the lesson was.  Haruki Murakami's brilliant and heartbreaking novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about what happens when people are in a lose-lose situation -- and that sometimes a terrible decision is still preferable when the other option is even worse.  But Murakami never comes out and says that explicitly.  He lets his characters tell their tales, and trusts that we'll figure it out.

Bad moral fiction -- often characterized as "preachy" -- doesn't give the reader credit for having the intelligence to get what's going on without being walloped over the head repeatedly by it.  One that immediately comes to mind is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is so explicitly about Big Government Is Bad and Individualism Is Good and Smart Creative People Need To Fight The Man that she might as well have written just that and saved herself a hundred thousand words.

I think what happens is that we authors have an idea what our stories mean, and we want to make sure the readers "get it."  The problem is, every reader is going to bring something different to the reading of a story, so what they "get" will differ from person to person.  If that weren't the case, why would there be any difference in our individual preferences?  But authors need to trust that our message (whatever it is) is clear enough to shine through without our needing to preach a sermon in a fictional setting.  Stories like "Orphan 55" don't work because they insult the watcher's intelligence.  "You're probably too dumb to figure out what we're getting at, here," they seem to say.  "So let me hold up a great big sign in front of your face to make sure you see it."

A lot of my own work has an underlying theme that I'm exploring using the characters and the plot, but I hope I don't fall into the trap of preachiness.  Two of my most explicitly moralistic tales, the short stories "Last Bus Stop" and "Loose Ends" (both available in my collection Sights, Signs, and Shadows), are about the fragility of life and how we should look after each other because we never know how long we have -- but I think in both cases the moral comes out of the characters' interactions organically, not because I jumped up and down and screamed it at you.

But it can be a fine line, sometimes.  Like I said, we all have different attitudes and backgrounds, so our relationship to the stories we read is bound to differ.  There are undoubtedly people who loved "Orphan 55" and The Fountainhead, so remember that all this is just my own opinion.  

And maybe that's the overarching moral of this whole topic; that everyone is going to take away something different.  After all, if everyone hated explicitly moralistic stories, the Hallmark Channel would be out of business by next week.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

Megarhino

Yesterday, we dealt with how freaking huge the universe is.  Today, we're going to look at something that, on its own scale, is also freaking huge.  

Paleontologists working at a site in the Linxia Basin, in Gansu Province in northwestern China, found a skull and spine of what appears to be the largest land mammal that ever walked the Earth.  Called Paraceratherium, this thing was distantly related to modern rhinos, something that is apparent from the artist's reconstructions of what it may have looked like, except for being (1) hornless and (2) absolutely enormous, even by rhinocerosian standards.

Paraceratherium stood five meters tall at the shoulder.  That means if you took a typical twelve-foot extension ladder and propped it against one (Caution!  Do Not Try This At Home!), climbed to the top and reached as high as you could, you'd maybe be able to pat it on the back.  Its head was about seven meters off the ground, and it was on the order of eight meters long from nose to butt.

It's estimated to have weighed 24 tons, which for reference, is about as much as six full-grown African elephants.

Indricotherium, one of Paraceratherium's slightly smaller cousins [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Creator:Dmitry Bogdanov, Indricotherium11, CC BY 3.0]

I don't know about you, but to me that is staggering.  Think of how much energy that thing used just to walk.  Think of the booming sounds it made when it set its feet down.  Think of how loud the vocalizations of that thing could have been.

Also, think about the piles of dung it must have left around.  "It's your turn to pooper-scoop the Paraceratherium" must have been a devastating thing to hear, back then.

Fortunately, there were no humans around to worry about such matters.  Paraceratherium lived during the Oligocene Epoch (between 34 and 25 million years ago), a time when a lot of groups of mammals got really large -- no one knows why, although there does seem to be a tendency for selection toward large body size when the climate is clement and there's plenty of food.  Also, this was the peak of recovery from the devastating Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a climatic spike that had occurred about twenty million years earlier and which coincided with worldwide oceanic anoxia and widespread extinctions, so there was very high biodiversity, and probably equally high competition between species in similar niches.

In any case, that's the current holder of the "Largest Land Mammal Ever" award.  Given how stupendous they must have looked, it's sad they became extinct, although maybe it's just as well.  Imagine what it'd be like with these behemoths stomping around.  We have enough problems keeping deer out of our vegetable garden, I don't even want to think about how we'd keep out a Paraceratherium looking for a quick snack.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

The cosmic whirligig

It seems like whenever I look at the realm of the very large or the very small, I quickly get overwhelmed by scale.

I remember, for example, when a teacher in high school was trying to impress upon us kids how small atoms were, and asked us the following question: if you counted up the number of atoms in a typical raindrop, then someone gave you that many grains of sand, how much sand would you have?

A bucket?  A swimming pool full?  A whole beach full?  All of those, it would seem, constitute a crapload of sand grains.  Surely there can't be more atoms in a raindrop than there are sand grains on a typical beach.

But there are.  By several orders of magnitude.  Her answer was that you'd have enough sand to fill a trench a meter deep and a kilometer across, stretching from New York to San Francisco.  (I've never checked her math, but from other similar analogies, it seems pretty spot-on.)

The same happens when I'm considering things that are very large; as much as I've studied astronomy, I never fail to be blown away simply by how enormous the universe is.  In fact, this is why the topic comes up -- a paper in Nature Astronomy last week by astrophysicists Peng Wang and Noam Liebeskind (of the University of Potsdam), Elmo Tempel (of the University of Tartu, Estonia), Xi Kang (of Zhejiang University, and Quan Guo (of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory) has demonstrated that there are filaments spanning entire galactic superclusters, and possibly longer than that.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons The cosmic web, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The presence of these filaments, which seem to be composed largely of dark matter, comes from their effects on the galaxies they pass near.  As if they were the axle of an enormous whirligig, the filaments cause the galaxies to circle around them, drawn in by the gravitational pull.  The existence of the filaments was demonstrated by the fact that the galaxies on one side exhibit a lower than expected red shift and the ones on the other side a higher than expected red shift, meaning one side is moving away from us and the other side toward us -- just as you'd expect if the galaxies were circling some invisible center of gravity.

As with any groundbreaking discovery, it's opened up as many questions as it's answered.  "It's a major finding,” said study co-author Noam Libeskind, in an interview with Vice.  "It's a pretty big deal that we've discovered angular momentum, or vorticity, on such a huge scale.  I think it will help people understand cosmic flows and how galaxies are moving throughout the cosmic web and through the universe... [and] to understand the important scales for galaxy formation and ultimately, why everything in the universe is spinning and how spin is generated.  That is a really, really hard question to solve.  It's an unsolved question in cosmology."

That was my first reaction; what on earth (or off it, in this case) could generate that kind of angular momentum?  Think of the mass of a typical galaxy, and imaging that you tie that amount of mass at the end of a long rope and try to swing it in circles.

That's the quantity of energy we're talking about, here.  Multiplied by the number of galaxies in the universe.

But the upshot is that the universe on the largest scales seems to have an intrinsic spin, and no one knows why.  All I know is that it makes me feel very, very small.

Of course, I'm way larger than the atoms in a raindrop.  So there's that.  Now that my mind is sufficiently blown, I think I need to go huddle under my blanket for a while, because the universe is sometimes a really overwhelming place to live.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

Through a glass, darkly

I was chatting with my younger son a couple of days ago.  He's a professional scientific glassblower, so anything having to do with the properties, chemistry, or uses of glass is going to interest him automatically.  And this was how he ran into the name of Walter John Kilner.

My son asked me if I'd ever heard of him, which I hadn't, and he suggested I look into him as a possible topic for Skeptophilia.  What I found out was pretty interesting -- straddling that gap between "fascinating" and "crazy."

Kilner, who lived from 1847 to 1920, studied medicine, physics, and engineering at Cambridge University, eventually earning a master's degree as well as a doctorate in medicine.  He had a private medical practice as well as being a "medical electrician" -- then a brand-new field -- at St. Thomas Hospital in London.

So the man was certainly not lacking in brains.  But he veered off into an area that is fringe-y at best, and to this day we don't know if what he was seeing was real.

The basic idea is familiar to us today as the "aura," but what most people mean by that -- some sort of spiritual halo around humans (and supposedly, all living things) that conveniently can't be measured by any known technique -- is several shades more woo-woo than what Kilner meant.  He seems to have latched onto the idea of there being a kind of electromagnetic radiation given off by the human body that was outside the range of human vision, and which could potentially be used as a diagnostic tool if a device was developed that allowed us to see it.

In fact, there is invisible radiation coming from our bodies; it's infrared light, which is light that has a longer wavelength than red light.  (Nota bene: it took me some pondering to get past the misunderstanding that infrared and thermal radiation aren't the same thing.  Thermal radiation can be in any region of the spectrum -- think of the red light given off by a hot stove burner.  The wavelength of thermal radiation is dependent upon the temperature of the source.  Infrared, which can be emitted thermally, is defined by having wavelengths longer than that of visible light, regardless of how it's generated.)

More germane to Kilner and his goggles, although the human eye can't detect it, mosquitoes' eyes can (one of the ways they find us in the dark), and it can be sensed by the "loreal pits" of pit vipers that they use for finding prey at night, not to mention the infrared goggles used by the military, which convert long-wavelength infrared light to shorter wavelengths that we can see.  

So there was at least some scientific basis for what he proposed, and remember that this would have been in the late nineteenth century, when the properties of electromagnetic radiation were still largely mysterious.  What Kilner proposed was that since light is altered when it passes through filters of any kind, there might be a filter that could take the electromagnetic radiation from the aura and convert it to visible light.

His approach was to take thin layers of alcohol-soluble dyes, most derived from coal tar, sandwiched between two sheets of clear glass.  He claimed he found one that worked -- a blue dye he called dicyanin -- but according to Kilner, it was difficult to produce, so he started fishing around for a substitute.

Along the way, he convinced a lot of people that his dicyanin filter allowed him to see the human aura, and generated a huge amount of enthusiasm.  People suggested other blue dyes -- cobalt-based ones, and other coal tar derivatives like pinacyanol -- but the results he obtained were equivocal at best.  Nobody was able to produce dicyanin again, or even figure out what its chemical composition was, which certainly made any skeptics raise an eyebrow.  But to the end of his life, Kilner swore that his dicyanin filter allowed him to see clearly an aura around his volunteers' naked bodies, despite an analysis by the British Medical Journal stating bluntly, "Dr. Kilner has failed to convince us that his 'aura' is more real than Macbeth's visionary dagger."

So what, if anything, did Kilner see?  The easiest answer is: we don't know.

The whole thing reminds me of Kirlian photography -- those familiar (and striking) photographs that result from placing a photographic plate on top of a high voltage source, then adding a flat object of some kind.  This produces a coronal discharge, a purely physical effect caused by the voltage creating temporary ionization of the air molecules.  Pretty much anything works; I've seen Kirlian photographs of coins.  But this doesn't stop the woo-woos from claiming that Kirlian photographs are capturing the aura, and giving it all sorts of spiritual and/or esoteric overtones.

Kirlian photograph of a dusty miller leaf [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rarobison11, MDR Dusty Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In the case of Kilner, though, the effect was never successfully replicated.  This hasn't stopped people from making "Kilner goggles" that you can still buy online, if you've got no better use for your money.  But as far as Kilner himself, he seems to have been entirely sincere -- i.e., not a charlatan or outright liar.  He pretty clearly believed he'd seen something that deserved an explanation.  Whether it was some kind of optical effect produced by his mysterious dicyanin, or a faint blur in the image that he then gave more significance than it deserved, we honestly don't know.  (This is reminiscent of the "canals of Mars," first described by astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, which were clearly an artifact of poor telescope quality -- when the optical equipment improved, the Martian canals mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again.)

Another possibility, though, was brought up by my wife; a lot of the dyes and solvents that Kilner used are neurotoxic.  It could be that what he was seeing was a visual disturbance caused by inhaling the fumes from nasty compounds like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, common in the coal tar he was using to prepare his dyes.

The interesting thing is that Kilner completely dismissed the esoteric spin that auras were given during the last decade of his life, primarily by the Theosophists and Spiritualists who were skyrocketing in membership during the first decades of the twentieth century.  Kilner remained to the end a staunch believer in the scientific method, and that anything he'd seen had a purely physical origin that was explainable in terms of the properties of light and electromagnetism.

It's an interesting case.  The fact that in the hundred years since he died, no one's ever been able to replicate his findings, strongly supports the fact that he was simply wrong -- he'd seen something, but it had nothing to do with anything that could be called an aura.  Even so, he's an interesting example of someone who was clearly trying to do things the right way, but his own determination to prove his conjecture blinded him to the obvious conclusion.

Further stressing the truth of Leonardo da Vinci's statement that "We must doubt the certainty of everything that passes through our senses."

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

A moment of Judeo-Christian silence

Let me start out with a reality check: despite what the Religious Right and the pseudo-pundits on Fox News want you to believe, there is no law against students praying in public school.  Nor is it against the rules for any student in any public school in the United States to have, or read, a Bible.  Nor to cite it (or Jesus) as an influence in their lives in personal essays.  No school has stopped students from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance because it contains the words "under God."  Bible study and Christian fellowship groups are allowed to hold meetings on school property as long as attendance is completely voluntary.

Anyone who claims otherwise is wrong at best, and flat-out lying through their teeth at worst.

What is not legal is mandating prayer in school, or using Christian membership or affirmation as a qualification for... well, anything.  Schools cannot legally force students to follow the precepts of any religion.  The upshot is that public schools are simply not the venue for generating religious adherence, or (for that matter) preventing it.  It is no more teachers' place to alter their students' religious views in either direction than it is for churches to teach their congregations algebra.

As a personal case in point:

• I responded to questions about my own religious beliefs with "that isn't relevant to the discussion" -- even while we were studying fraught topics like evolution.
• I had a Bible on the bookshelf in my classroom.  I was given it by a student many years ago, and saw no reason it shouldn't be there.
• I saw students praying before exams and saying grace before lunch, and no one ever stopped them or had any problem with it.

As a brief aside, there is an explicit conflict in the "under God" part of the Pledge, in my opinion, because if it's recited by students -- which it still is, in public schools across the country -- it pressures non-religious students to affirm something they don't believe it (i.e., to lie).  I find that people who argue against taking out the words "under God" (which, by the bye, were not original to the Pledge but were added in the 1950s) often can't come up with a cogent reason why the words should be recited in a public school where (1) attendance is compulsory, and (2) there are students (and adults) of all different gradations of belief and disbelief.

But of course, that "live and let live" (or, as my mom used to put it, "your rights end where my nose begins") attitude isn't enough for the sanctimonious spokespeople of the Religious Right, who will stop at nothing to inject religion back into public schools.  And not just any religion, of course:

If there was any doubt about this, it should be put to rest by what happened in Florida (of course it was in Florida) last week.  A new law was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that will mandate a sixty-second "moment of silence" that must be observed in all public schools.  The proponents gave some lip service to a broad-minded sentiment behind this -- that students need to have time to engage in meditative self-reflection -- but the real reason was given away by the bill's sponsor, Representative Randy Fine, who tweeted triumphantly, "Just joined Governor DeSantis to sign my fourth bill of the 2021 Legislative Session, allowing prayer back into schools via a moment of silence for all our schoolchildren.  I won't stop fighting against woke radicals who which [sic] to drive out Judeo-Christian values from every aspect of our lives!"

You'd think that anyone with any sense would recognize that saying this explicitly is just asking for the filing of lawsuits to invalidate the new legislation, but DeSantis, who certainly wouldn't be in contention for the "smartest governor in the United States" award, not only didn't contradict Fine but immediately agreed.  "The idea that you can push God out of every institution and be successful," DeSantis said, "I'm sorry, our Founding Fathers did not believe that."

"Students are free to believe what they want" isn't enough for these people; Fine and DeSantis make it clear that the "moment of silence" bill is just a foot in the door for reinserting prayer -- Christian prayer, of course -- back into public school classrooms.  And call me a "woke radical" if you like, but no compulsory prayer of any kind belongs in publicly funded institutions.

And for fuck's sake, it's not like public school teachers have time to do some kind of subversive anti-religious indoctrination.  I was a teacher for 32 years, and never once did I say, "Okay, kids, we've got an extra twenty minutes today, I will now teach you how to blaspheme!"  I had enough on my hands trying to get high schoolers to understand the Krebs Cycle and Mendel's Laws and the reactions of photosynthesis, I definitely didn't have the space in the curriculum to devote to undermining students' dearly-held religious beliefs.

Nor, might I add, did I have the desire to.  I may be a staunch atheist myself, but I am firmly of the opinion that everyone arrives at their understanding of how the universe works in their own time and fashion, and while I may disagree with someone's worldview, it's not my place to criticize it -- or honestly, even to make a judgment about it at all.

Unless that worldview involves compelling others to alter their own beliefs and actions.  It's all very well to say, "I do this because it's required by my religion;" when you start saying "you have to do this because it's required by my religion," you're going to have a fight on your hands.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

Under the ancient skies

I find it fascinating how long humans have been curious about the nature of the universe.  Our drive to understand the world and its workings certainly goes back a very long way.  Some of it can be explained purely pragmatically -- a commonly-cited example is the development of accurate sidereal calendars by the ancient Egyptians to get the timing right for the annual Nile floods, critical not only from a safety standpoint but because figuring out a way to manage all that water was essential for agriculture in what was then a rapidly-growing population.  But it goes far beyond that.  It seems like as far back as we have any kind of records at all, we've wanted to know what makes the cosmos tick.

A particularly fascinating example of this came my way via my friend, the brilliant writer Gil Miller, who seems to have an uncanny knack for finding stuff that (1) I will find really interesting, and (2) I haven't heard about before.  Yesterday he sent me a link from the site New Scientist about an archaeological find in Turkey that -- if the researchers' conclusions are borne out, will provide another example of how early we developed our compulsion to understand what was going on up there in the night skies.

The site is called Yazılıkaya, and it was built by the Hittites 3,200 years ago near their capital city of Ḫattuša.  (The nearest modern town is Boğazkale, in central Turkey.)  It has hundreds of images carved into the rock surfaces, and according to this new study, they represent not only solar, lunar, and sidereal calendars, they are a representation of their concept of the structure of the universe.

The shrine at Yazılıkaya

The current study was the product of a tremendous amount of work.  "There are many connotations with the names of the deities and the arrangements and groups, and so in retrospect it’s pretty easy to figure it out," said Eberhard Zangger, one of the researchers who investigated the site.  "But we worked on it for seven years...  [The Hittites] had a certain image of how creation happened.  They imagined that the world began in chaos, which became organized into three levels: the underworld, and then the earth on which we walk, and then the sky.  The second aspect of Hittite cosmology was a recurrent renewal of life – for instance, day following night, the dark moon turning into a full moon and winter becoming summer.  The calendar-like carvings reflect this cyclical view of nature."

Of course, back then, there was no particularly accurate way to measure stellar and planetary positions, and anything like a telescope was still two millennia in the future.  But even so, they did pretty damn well with what they had access to, especially given how long ago this was.  The Hittites controlled most of what is now modern Turkey from 1,700 to 1,100 B.C.E., at which point attacks from the Phrygians and Assyrians pretty much smashed the power structure and subsumed the culture.

From our modern knowledge of cosmology, the Big Bang and stellar evolution and astrophysics, their conclusions seem pretty rudimentary.  They, like most of the contemporaneous societies, put the whole thing in the hands of gods and sub-gods and so on, giving the whole thing a religious rather than scientific veneer.  "Obviously that makes sense, because that’s exactly what religion does," said archaeologist Efrosyni Boutsikas, of the University of Kent, who was not involved in the current research.  "It addresses universal concerns and the place of the people in the world."  She added that she's not 100% sold on the conclusions of Zangger and his colleagues, but that the site and others near it are deserving of further study.

I'm certainly not qualified to judge the quality of the research nor the legitimacy of the team's conclusions, but I am fascinated with how long we've been trying to figure out how everything works.  As Boutsikas said, religion is a common first-order approximation, and although in many cases it became solidified into a compulsory belief system that then became a hindrance to scientific advancement, it does represent our drive to reach beyond our day-to-day concerns and glimpse the mechanisms controlling not only the movements of things here on Earth, but of those unreachably distant points of light we see gliding through the night skies.  Awe-inspiring, isn't it, to think that our ancestors 3,200 years ago were looking at those ancient skies, and trying to make sense of it all -- just as we're still doing today.

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

In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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

Finding the "cauld grue"

I had a recommendation from a reader to devote one day a week to my other passion besides science and critical thinking -- fiction.  I thought it was an interesting idea, so we'll give a try to Fiction Fridays.  I'm planning some book reviews, excerpts, essays, and so on -- let me know if you like it!

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Most of my books are about the supernatural, and some of them are intended to be downright terrifying.  Along the way I've been influenced by many superlative writers of scary fiction, so I thought I'd start Fiction Friday with a few recommendations for some of my favorite Tales of the Supernatural.  I'll be curious to see what my readers think -- and to hear what your favorites are.  Always looking for new stories to read...

I have fairly definite opinions about reading material (okay, to be truthful, I have fairly definite opinions about most things, as long-time readers of Skeptophilia know all too well).   To me, a good horror story is one that is evocative, in which there is a subtle touch – the imagination, I find, is far more powerful than the written word in creating frightening imagery.  As Stephen King pointed out in his wonderful analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, it's often as scary to leave the door closed and let the readers spend the rest of their lives speculating about what was behind it than it is to actually open the door and reveal the monster (and take the chance they'll say, "Is that all it was?").

This is why gruesome stories really don't do much for me.  A story about a murderer with a chainsaw might disgust me, it might incite me to check to see if my doors are securely locked, but it doesn't give me that thrill of fear up the backbone that is what I'm looking for in a good spooky story, what the Scots call "the cauld grue."  Sheer human perversity doesn't fill the bill; there has to be some sort of supernatural element, to me, for a story to really cross the line into the terrifying.  Reading about homicidal maniacs simply is neither very appealing nor very scary (however scary actually meeting one would be).

All this is rather funny, because I don't actually believe in the supernatural, and I obviously do believe in the existence of homicidal maniacs.  The fact that something that doesn't exist can scare me far worse than something dangerous that does exist is probably just evidence that I'm not as highly evolved in the logic department as I often claim to be.

In any case, if you're curious, here are my top ten choices for the scariest stories of all time.  Let's hear what you think -- if you agree, disagree, or if you were prompted to find and read any of these.  Could make for an interesting discussion!

These are in no particular order, and there are no spoilers -- just a brief idea of what the plot is.

"What Was It?" by FitzJames O'Brien.  A house is haunted by a real, corporeal creature that also happens to be invisible.  And insane.

"The Dunwich Horror" by H. P. Lovecraft.  This is one of the most eerily atmospheric stories I've ever read, about an old man obsessed with recovering ancient lost magical lore, who should have left well enough alone.  Set in the wooded hills of northern Massachusetts, it is serious nightmare fuel, and one of Lovecraft's best.

"The Mirror" by Haruki Murakami, from his collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.  If I had to vote for the single best-crafted short story I've ever read, this would be a strong contender.   A group of friends gets together for an evening of drinking and chatting, and someone notices that the host's apartment has no mirrors, and asks why.  Reluctantly, he explains.  You'll see why he was reluctant...

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The Shining by Stephen King.  Combines haunting with the familiar horror fiction trope of "we're all stuck here and can't get away," in absolutely masterful fashion.  Skip the movie and read the book.  You'll never look at a bathtub, or an old-fashioned elevator, or a long hotel hallway the same way again.

"Oh, Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad" by M. R. James.  A regrettably little-known story which is one of the flat-out scariest things I've ever read.  A British tourist finds an antique whistle half-buried in the sand on the beach, and blows it.  He shouldn't have.

"The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs.  Embodies the old saying "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it," and is the classic example of -- literally, in this case -- not opening the door.

"Afterward" by Edith Wharton.  If this story doesn't scare the absolute shit out of you, you're made of stone.  A story about... a retroactive haunting?

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson.  Not a supernatural thriller, as per my original description (so sue me).  But still a classic of horror fiction.

"August Heat" by William Fryer Harvey.  What if you happened upon a stranger, a maker of marble monuments, and he was making a headstone -- with your name, and today's date, on it?

"Ligeia" by Edgar Allan Poe.  One of the earliest stories of possession.

So, those are my top ten.  Agree?  Disagree?  Any additional that you would recommend?  What stories have chilled your blood, that would be appropriate to sit in front of the fire with, late at night, when no one is awake in the house but you?

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

In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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