The meaning of "Two Dignified Spinsters Sitting in Silence"

I have frequently ranted at length about how silly the practice of astrology is.  The last mention of my general disdain for the practice prompted one of my readers to send me an email, the gist of which was, "You haven't even begun to plumb the depths of the silliness," and attached a link to a page called, "The Degrees and Meanings of the Sabian Symbols."

For those of you who would prefer not to risk valuable brain cells even opening this link, allow me to explain that the Sabian Symbols are mystical images, one for each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac.  Another site, simply called "Sabian Symbols," describes them as follows:

Renowned worldwide as both an uncanny divination system and an insightful tool for astrologers, the Sabian Symbols were channeled in San Diego in 1925 by Marc Edmund Jones, a well reknowned [sic] and respected astrologer, and Elsie Wheeler, a spiritualist medium.  They consist of 360 word images corresponding to the 360 degrees of the zodiac (each zodiac sign comprising of 30 degrees)...  The Sabian Symbols are extraordinary for insight, revelation and guidance.  Miracles, big and small, happen in your life when you tap into their field... (it is) an "ancient mind matrix."

Well.  Alrighty, then.  Let's just take a look, shall we?  Here are a few selected Sabian Symbols from various degrees of the zodiac.  Let me know of any insight, revelation, or guidance you got from them, okay?

• Aries, 7-8 degrees: A large woman's hat with streamers blown by the east wind.
• Taurus, 15-16 degrees: An old teacher fails to interest his pupils in traditional knowledge.
• Leo, 1-2 degrees: An epidemic of mumps.
• Virgo, 15-16 degrees: In the zoo, children are brought face-to-face with an orangutan.
• Sagittarius, 20-21 degrees: A child and a dog wearing borrowed eyeglasses.
• Capricorn, 16-17 degrees: A repressed woman finds psychological release in nudism.
• Aquarius, 22-23 degrees: A big bear sitting down and waving all of its paws.

Okay, so that gives you an idea.  And no, I didn't make any of these up.  Nor did I pick these out because they sound especially weird; they all sound like this.  All I can say is: whatever drugs this guy was on when he came up with these, can I have some?

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Of course, the people who believe in this stuff don't think that it was drugs.  They think that Marc Edmund Jones was really channeling a mystical presence.  Once again, quoting from "Sabian Symbols:"

The Sabian Symbol story is embedded in the ancient cultures of the Middle East.  Marc Edmund Jones felt that there was an "unseen agency" - an external, esoteric mind-set at work in the birthing of the Sabian Symbols.  Connection was made through a 'Brother', a member of the ancient Mesopotamian brotherhood, the Sabian Brotherhood.  He believed that they were the 'voices' that were spiritually behind Elsie Wheeler, delivering the messages that became the Symbols...  As we move out of the Piscean age and into the Aquarian age, we are transmuting in many ways, with the vibration of our spiritual and intellectual minds moving into higher gears as we evolve.  In such hectic times, we hunger for meaning and guidance, but often don't have the time or the patience to pause and reflect deeply on our situation.  The Sabian Oracle opens the doorway between our inner feelings and intentions and our conscious mind.  They do this by helping to put what is within us into words.  Being provided with possibilities enables us to act positively and confidently, and think rationally.

My general response to all of that is that if you were thinking rationally you wouldn't be relying on astrology in the first place.  And, of course, the usual problem with symbolic fortunetelling occurs here, just as it does with the Tarot, the I Ching, runes, and so on; the symbols are so weird and open to interpretation that you can make just about anything out of them that you want.  Suppose that for some reason, the "oracle" told me that my symbol for today was Libra, 29-30 degrees ("Three mounds of knowledge on a philosopher's head.")  My first response would be that I didn't know that knowledge came in mounds.  But after that, what does it mean?  Is it saying that I'm smart?  Or that I'm not smart enough and should go study and try to gain more mounds of knowledge?  Or that today would be good for contemplation?  Or that I should be looking for guidance from three different sources?  Or that I could find answers in books by philosophers?

This is why the "Sabian Symbols" site offers "professional Sabian astrology consultations" -- because slobs like me just aren't qualified to interpret what "A butterfly with a third wing on its left side" (Libra, 23-24 degrees) means.

The take-home lesson here, I suppose, is that there is no realm of woo-woo so goofy that someone can't elaborate on it in such a fashion as to make it way goofier.  Wondering whether there might be anything else I could learn from all the time I spent reading this stuff, I clicked on the link that said "Clear your mind and click on this picture of a galaxy" to get wisdom from the oracle.  I got Scorpio, 16-17 degrees, which is "A woman, fecundated with her own spirit, is the father of her own child."   Which, I think, was a symbolic way for the oracle to tell me to go fuck myself.

Oracles can be so hostile, sometimes.

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The illusion of cynicism

"All politicians are liars."

"I don't trust anyone."

"You have to watch your back constantly."

"Nothing you read in media is true."

When I taught Critical Thinking -- one of my favorite classes to teach -- I found that it was much harder to counteract cynicism than it was gullibility.  Just about everyone knows that gullibility is a mistake; if you "fall for anything," or "believe whatever's told to you," you are automatically considered to be less smart or less sophisticated (at least by people who aren't gullible themselves).  Many of my students thought that the primary reason to learn critical thinking strategies was to make themselves less likely to get suckered by lies and half-truths.

This is itself half true.  As I told my classes, cynicism is exactly as lazy as gullibility.  Disbelieving everything without consideration is no wiser than believing everything without consideration.  It's why I hate the use of the word "skeptic" to mean doubter.  A true skeptic believes what the evidence supports.  The people who disbelieve in anthropogenic climate change, for example, aren't skeptics; they're rejecting the evidence collected over decades, and the theories that have passed the rigors of peer review to become accepted by 97% of the scientific establishment.

But somehow, cynicism has gained a veneer of respectability, as if there's something brave or smart or noble about having the sour attitude that no one and nothing can be trusted.  This was the subject of a paper that appeared in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin last week, called "The Cynical Genius Illusion: Exploring and Debunking Lay Beliefs About Cynicism and Competence."  The authors, Olga Stavrova of Tilburg University and Daniel Ehlebracht of the University of Cologne, studied a huge amount of data, and found that the public tends to think cynics and scoffers are smarter than average -- but on actual tests of intelligence, people identified as cynics tend to perform more poorly.  The authors write:

Cynicism refers to a negative appraisal of human nature—a belief that self-interest is the ultimate motive guiding human behavior.  We explored laypersons’ beliefs about cynicism and competence and to what extent these beliefs correspond to reality.  Four studies showed that laypeople tend to believe in cynical individuals’ cognitive superiority.  A further three studies based on the data of about 200,000 individuals from 30 countries debunked these lay beliefs as illusionary by revealing that cynical (vs. less cynical) individuals generally do worse on cognitive ability and academic competency tasks.  Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment.  Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that—at low levels of competence—holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others’ cunning.

So a strategy that might have come about because of a desire to avoid being hoodwinked morphs into the conviction that everyone is trying to hoodwink you.  While I understand why someone would want to avoid the former, especially if (s)he's fallen prey in the past, assuming everyone is out to get you is not only the lazy way out, it's factually wrong.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wetsun, Cynicism graffiti, CC BY 2.0]

You know, I think that's one of the most important things I've learned from all the traveling I've done; that everywhere you go, there are good people and bad, kind people and unkind, and that regardless of differences of culture the vast majority of us want the same things -- food, shelter, security, love, safety for our families and friends, the freedom to voice our opinions without fear of repercussions.  The number of people I've run into who really, honestly had ill intent toward me (or toward anyone) were extremely few.

I'll admit, though, that maintaining a healthy, balanced skepticism is hard at times, especially given the polarization of the media lately.  We are very seldom presented with a fair assessment of what's happening, especially insofar as what the opposite side is doing.  Much of the media is devoted to whipping up hatred and distrust of the "other" -- convincing listeners/readers that the opposite party, the other religion(s), the other races or ethnic groups, are unequivocally bad.  Presenting the more complex, nuanced view that there are a few horrible people in every group but that most people are on balance pretty okay, takes a lot more work -- and doesn't attract sponsorship from the corporations who are profiting off the fear, panic, and anger.

It's nice that the Stavrova and Ehlebracht paper supports what I've been claiming for years.  And I'd like to ask you to make a practice of this -- setting aside your preconceived notions and what you've heard from the media, simply looking at the facts and evidence rather than the spin.  I think you'll find that the world is neither the Pollyanna paradise that the gullible believe nor the horrid hellscape in the cynics' minds, but somewhere in that wide middle ground.

And that honestly, it's a much better place to live than either extreme.

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If looks could kill

New from the Why Didn't I Think Of That First department, we have: a guy who performs psychic healing just by looking at people.

Here I thought you had to at least do something to affect a woo-woo cure -- swing some crystals around, say a chant or two, give your patient a homeopathic pill that doesn't contain any medicine -- at least something.

Enter the Croat healer known only as "Braco" (his real name is Josip Grbavac).  Braco, who has apparently been on tour for years and performs to packed houses, gets paid big bucks to sit on a stage for a half hour and stare at the audience.  He doesn't say a word -- just stares, then gets up and leaves, and goes backstage to collect his paycheck.  His gaze is said to have "healing powers."  "People aren't even sure what they're feeling," devotee Sahaja Coventry told a reporter after Braco's appearance at the Renaissance Hotel in Cleveland.  "But it is a sweetness, it is a loving energy and some people get physical healing, some just feel a sense of peace."

If I had to sit there for a half hour in a dimly-lit room in total silence for a half-hour, I bet I'd feel a sense of peace, too -- I'd probably fall asleep.  But of course, that's not what Coventry et al. are talking about.  Neither do they think they're being hypnotized, which is another possibility.  They really think that Braco is doing something with his eyes, somehow affecting "energy levels" in the room.  Braco, of course, does everything he can to beef up this claim; children and pregnant women are not allowed to attend, because the "energies could be too strong," and he does not let his face be broadcast on television for more than seven-second clips, presumably to prevent some sort of electronically-transmitted overdose of Braco Stare.

My objections, of course, are the usual ones.  First: show me the mechanism.  If you think this guy's gaze can cure your chronic headaches, show me how that could work in such a way that it eliminates the possibility of auto-suggestion.  Another of his followers who was interviewed hinted at the problem when she said, "You have to have an open mind and an open heart, more or less to get this feeling."  Why on earth should this be so?  If the guy is doing something real, how could my attitude make any difference?  You'd think it'd be even more impressive if Braco cured someone who thought he was a fraud.

Second, of course, there's the fact that the whole thing flies in the face of how vision actually works.  When you see, it's not because something's going out from your eyes, it's because something's going into your eyes (namely, light reflected from the object you're looking at).  Vision is receptive, not productive.  The ancients didn't get this, and we see this in some relic expressions like to "throw a glance" at someone, and in holdover beliefs such as the "evil eye."  Certainly, the eyes and face can communicate information; a lot of work has been done on the ease with which the human brain picks up on subtle "microexpressions," and how that effects social interaction.  But that's not what Braco's followers think is happening, here.  They really think that some "force" is leaving his body through his eyes, and traveling to you, and changing your mental and/or physical condition.  To which I say: I seriously doubt it.

In any case, if you'd like to see him (or, actually, to have him see you), you can check out his tour schedule at his website.  And because I just have to, here's a photograph of him, screen-capped from his YouTube channel (of course he has a YouTube channel).  I suggest putting on eye protection before looking at this, and whatever you do, don't leave it staring at you for more than seven seconds!  Don't say I didn't warn you.

On the other hand, I see from his current schedule that he's currently offering live online Braco Gaze.  If there's anything goofier than the idea that a guy on stage could send something to the audience via his gaze, it's that he could do the same thing virtually through a computer monitor.  It reminds me of the piece I did a while back about "Quantum Downloadable Medicines," wherein you pay money to get a download link that when you click it, allegedly downloads curative medicines directly into you.  How it works is never explained; presumably it realigns the qi of your chakras and increases the quantum frequencies of your harmonic resonant subatomic coupling to the universe.

You can see how that makes perfect sense, right?  

Of course, right.

I do wonder, though, about Braco's live online sessions.  How is this any different from seeing him on television?  If it isn't, do you pay money and then only get seven seconds of Braco Stare?  Or does he put some kind of filter on the webcam so that the dosage won't get too high?  So many questions.

Honestly, though, like I said initially, I kind of wish I'd thought of it first.  It seems an easier way to make a living than to do what I do, which is to write novels and hope like hell someone will read them.  If I could make a living just by staring at people from a stage for a half-hour every few nights, I'd could ditch all the editing and promotion and marketing and so on, and have a great deal more free time than I currently have (not to mention making a great deal more money).  But Braco seems to have cornered the Psychic Stare market, so I'll have to come up with a different angle.  Hey, I know!  Maybe you could just send me a check for a hundred dollars, and I'll gently place my fingertips on your signature for five minutes.  It will communicate healing energy through the psychic link established through your signature.  You'll feel better immediately.  Trust me.

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What's bred in the bone

See this innocent-looking face?

This is Cleo.  She's a Shiba Inu, a Japanese breed (the name means "underbrush dog" because they were used for hunting small game in overgrown places).  We adopted her from a rescue facility in December, and she has settled right into our home, including becoming best buds with our other dog, a big, goofy pittie mix named Guinness.

Cleo is sweet, charming, funny, playful, and cuddly.  However, she is also stubborn, independent, willful, and has zero interest in learning commands for rewards.  For any rewards.  She is the only dog I have ever met who is completely unmotivated by food.  She sort of likes cheese, so that occasionally works, but she approaches everything with the attitude, "I'm doing this only because I want to.  And if I don't want to, even cheese doesn't tempt me."

For example, shortly after we adopted her, we installed a dog door (once it became obvious that she wanted in and out dozens of times a day).  And for weeks, she steadfastly refused to use it.  We were becoming convinced that she wasn't smart enough to figure out how it worked.  Turns out she understood perfectly well, she just didn't want to.  Last week she started using the dog door -- going through it, both directions, as if it was nothing.  Apparently she wasn't going to do it until she made it clear to us that it was her decision.

Then there's her volubility.  There's a phenomenon called the "Shiba scream," which was one of many things we didn't find out about her breed until after we adopted her.  When she's excited by something good like my wife pulling into the driveway, or there's a red-alert situation like the FedEx guy or a cyclist going past or a squirrel farting somewhere in the next county, she goes -- and this is as accurate a transcription of it as I can manage -- "ruff ruff ruff rrrrOOOWWRRROOO WAAAAAHHWAAH WAAHWAAH."  She also barks when she's excited, or (especially) when she wants something and we are not providing it right away as we, of course, should.  This includes taking her on a walk at two in the morning, a habit that led my wife to christen her "Demon-Spawn Dog," or, more succinctly, "Beelzebark."

It's not that we don't love her, or don't appreciate her positive qualities, of which there are lots.  Something my wife and I have said about 358 times since adopting her is, "She is so cute -- fortunately for her."  It turns out we're not alone in this experience of Shiba Inus.  Here's what the site Shiba Rescue has to say:

In their eyes, Shibas can take on the world no matter how big the foe or the task.  They are dominant with other dogs and do not usually get along well with other "bossy" dogs of the same sex.  Many Shibas will, however, get along great with another dog or cat that agrees the Shiba is boss.

Shibas always like to be in charge; their favorite word is "mine."  Although not "barky" dogs, they do yodel and scream anytime they feel they are being violated, such as nail trimming, bathing, and leash training.  Shibas can be runners.  The Shiba Inu is a natural hunter.  Given a chance, Shibas will take off in search of game.  It is advisable to never trust your Shiba off-lead unless in a fenced yard.

The Shiba's least favorite word is "come."  They will usually take your number and get back to you, when called.

Shibas have a mind of their own.  While it is possible to obedience train a Shiba, it is a challenge.  Tell him to sit and he sits . . . sometimes.  If there is something in it for him, and it is convenient at the time.

The first thing I thought after reading this (besides "Amen!") was how interesting it is that you can characterize an entire breed like this, irrespective of how an individual animal was raised.  Not that prior treatment is inconsequential; one thing that Cleo still exhibits is wariness from having been abused as a puppy (you'll notice if you look closely at the photograph that she's missing her left eye).  But the fact that you can draw a detailed picture of a typical Shiba personality like this indicates something fascinating -- that a great deal of dog behavior is controlled by genetics, not by training.

Way back in 2008, a paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics considered this phenomenon, and suggested that these kinds of behavioral trends are caused by a fairly small number of genes (and speculated that the same sort of thing may be true of human personality types).  A more recent 2019 study looked specifically at canine aggression and fearfulness, and found that those have between sixty and seventy percent heritability.  Consider how many breeds you characterize in a word or two  -- the friendliness of Golden Labs, the intelligence and always-on-the-job attitude of a Border Collie, the aggressiveness (despite its size) of a Chihuahua.  And Shibas are not the only ones who have built-in, almost certainly genetic, difficult behaviors; a friend of mine once told me that if you want an exercise in frustration, try to house-train a Cocker Spaniel.  This kind of thing has an unfortunate effect on dog owners who are unprepared or uninformed.  A particularly sad example is that after the movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians aired, there was a run on Dalmatian puppies -- and six months later, an influx of Dalmatians being given up at shelters.  Far from the cute, cuddly stereotype of the puppies from the movie, as a breed Dalmatians tend to be high-stung, nervous, reserved, and aggressive; they are considered to be one of the top-ten breeds most likely to bite, and a great many of the people who adopted a Dalmatian puppy very quickly regretted their choice.

I say this knowing, of course, that "unprepared and uninformed" is a pretty good description of my wife and I when we adopted Cleo.  However, in our defense I have to add that we're experienced dog owners with a history of adopting rescues, just about all of whom have had bad pasts and the attendant behavior problems -- and we have yet to own a dog who hasn't turned out to be a wonderful and charming, if quirky, companion.  We strongly believe that pet adoption is forever; if you can't commit, don't adopt.  (I do reconsider that stance on occasion when Cleo starts screaming in the middle of the night, but those lapses are short-lived.)

So we're not expecting Cleo's personality to change, and indeed, we don't want it to.  She's a charmer even when she's being a pain in the ass.  We'd like to modify some of it -- such as the twice-aforementioned barking for something in the wee hours -- but by and large, those kinds of characteristics are what make dogs interesting.

It reminds me of the famous quote from John Heywood, "What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh."  There's a lot of truth to that, for better or worse.  For better at the moment; right now, Cleo is cuddled up at the foot of the bed, paws twitching as she dreams of chasing squirrels.  And she's already become part of the family, difficulties and all.  Whatever the source, each dog's personality is as rich and varied as each person's is, something I've come to appreciate more and more with every dog we've adopted.  And we've always been rewarded tenfold by having pets -- receiving love for kindness, devotion for care, deep trust for patience.

For me, that makes it all worthwhile.

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Zoom!

Today I'm going to continue on my exploration of weird physics, which has happened not only because I find it fascinating but because I keep finding new research that blows my mind.

It's what I love about science in general, really.  This won't be any shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia -- I'm always seeming to bump into just-published papers on crazy cool topics, especially having to do with astronomy, biology, physics, geology, and paleontology, and then telling you about them here.  As I've said before, delve into science if you want to guarantee you'll never be bored again.

Today's topic came to me via a paper in Physical Review Letters by Barbara Šoda and Achim Kempf (of the University of Waterloo), and Vivishek Sudhir (of MIT), and made reference to a phenomenon I'd never heard of before: the Unruh effect.  It was named for Canadian physicist William Unruh, who did some of the earliest theoretical work on it, but major contributions were made by Stephen Fulling of the United States and Paul Davies of England.  And it all has to do with what an observer would see if (s)he was accelerating rapidly through empty space.  (Although in a moment we'll have to redefine what we mean by "empty," because a vacuum isn't actually empty at all.)

We're all familiar with the science fiction movie image of what it looks like to jump to superluminal speeds.  Every time the commander of a spaceship shouts "jump to warp!" or "engage hyperdrive!", they're treated to a view like this:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

There's no way to tell if this is what such a space traveler going faster than light would actually see, because (1) no one has ever actually experienced it, and (2) it's almost certainly impossible anyway (Cf. the Special Theory of Relativity and my summary of all the papers written on the topic as "Yay!  Einstein wins again!")  But even if actual warp drive and faster-than-light velocities aren't possible, what would it look like if you gazed out of the front window of a spaceship that was accelerating rapidly toward the speed of light?

The idea of stars turning into blurred streaks as we whiz past, as engaging as it is, doesn't seem to capture what we'd actually see in such a situation.  

The Unruh effect is what we'd observe.  This is a quantum effect caused by accelerating in a vacuum, which would cause an apparent increase in temperature ahead of us -- it would appear to have a thermal glow.  The reason is that seemingly empty space isn't empty in the conventional sense.  It is filled with quantum fields -- which exist everywhere in the universe -- and the word "empty" here means that those fields are in the ground state, the lowest possible energy configuration space can have.

To a stationary observer, it would indeed appear empty.  But to our space traveler, the rapid acceleration would cause an apparent increase in temperature ahead of the spacecraft.  A stationary observer would consider the empty space ahead as being in the ground state; an accelerating space traveler would measure it to be in a mixed state, in thermodynamic equilibrium with a non-zero ambient temperature.

The vacuum of space would seem to glow.  That's the Unruh effect.

Just like our discussion on Monday of simultaneity, asking "so what temperature is it really?" is a meaningless question.  The measured temperature -- like just about anything else you could measure -- depends on your frame of reference.  The only thing that every observer, in every reference frame (accelerating or not), measures as precisely the same is the speed of light.  (In fact, it's the constancy of the speed of light in every frame of reference that springboarded our understanding of the relativistic nature of the universe, and directly gave rise to all of the other bizarre effects in the model.)

Nobody has actually observed the Unruh effect; the temperature increase is small, and the acceleration required is huge.  Even if you could achieve those accelerations, you'd have to eliminate all the other possible sources of a perceived increase in temperature, which are numerous.

Well -- no one has observed it yet.  Šoda, Kempf, and Sudhir believe they have found a way to isolate the system so that the only possible source of temperature rise is due to the detector's acceleration.  "To see this effect in a short amount of time, you'd have to have some incredible acceleration," Sudhir said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "If you instead had some reasonable acceleration, you'd have to wait a ginormous amount of time -- longer than the age of the universe -- to see a measurable effect...  We believe we have found a way to shave that time down to a few hours.  Now at least we know there is a chance in our lifetimes where we might actually see this effect.  It's a hard experiment, and there's no guarantee that we'd be able to do it, but this idea is our nearest hope."

So with luck, this team might have found a way to observe something that no one has ever seen before -- what it would be like to look through the front window of a rapidly-accelerating spaceship.  It may not be as dramatic as the stars-turned-into-streaks effect known and loved by fans of Star Trek and Star Wars, but it's still amazingly cool that we have a chance to see, for real, what they'd see.

Engage hyperdrive!

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A sun with no size

When I was in college, the original series Cosmos, hosted by Cornell University astrophysicist Carl Sagan, aired for the first time.

I was absolutely captivated.  I'd been an astronomy buff since middle school.  I was given my own telescope as a birthday present when I was thirteen, and spent many a happy evening in my parents' front yard trying to find the cool-looking astronomical objects I found on the star maps I collected obsessively.  (This is when I first fell in love with the Pleiades -- still my favorite naked-eye star group -- and when I found out that these were recently-created stars, almost fifty times younger than the Sun, I thought that was so cool.  It wasn't until I took an astronomy course in college that I learned how astronomers knew this.)

But when Cosmos came on, it took my interest to a whole new level.  For the time, the special effects and animations were stunning.  The soundtrack was nothing short of brilliant (in fact, it was my first introduction to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, who has been one of my top three favorite composers ever since).  Sagan's writing and delivery were captivating; like many people who've seen it, if you read quotes from the scripts, you'll hear them in Sagan's unmistakable voice.  I'm not the only one who responded this way; the wildly talented rapper Greydon Square's song "Galaxy Rise" from his album The Mandelbrot Set is a tribute to Sagan and American physicist Michio Kaku.  Square himself majored in physics in college and includes concepts from science in a great many of his songs.

There were a couple of moments, though, that stand out in my memory as being jaw-dropping.  One was the breathtaking animation of colliding galaxies -- all generated from then cutting-edge computer models -- in episode ten, "The Edge of Forever."  But one passage from episode nine, "The Lives of the Stars," impressed me so much that now, forty-two years later, I can very nearly quote it from memory:

There are three ways that stars die.  Their fates are predestined; everything depends on their initial mass.  A typical star with a mass like the Sun will one day continue its collapse until its density becomes very high, and then the contraction is stopped by the mutual repulsion of the overcrowded electrons in its interior.  A collapsing star twice as massive as the Sun isn't stopped by the electron pressure.  It goes on falling in on itself until nuclear forces come into play, and they hold up the weight of the star.  But a collapsing star three times as massive as the sun isn't stopped even by nuclear forces.  There's no force known that can withstand this enormous compression.  And such a star has an astonishing destiny: it continues to collapse until it vanishes utterly.

Each star is described by the force that holds it up against gravity.  A star that's supported by its gas pressure is a normal, run-of-the-mill star like the Sun.  A collapsed star that's held up by electron forces is called a white dwarf.  It's a sun shrunk to the size of the Earth.  A collapsed star supported by nuclear forces is called a neutron star.  It's a sun shrunk to the size of a city. And a star so massive that in its final collapse it disappears altogether is called a black hole.

It's a sun with no size at all.

I can't imagine hearing the last line and not being a little goggle-eyed.

Since Sagan's time, we've learned a great deal more, but by and large, his series still holds up pretty well.  In fact, three years ago astronomers captured the first-ever photograph of a black hole (visible because of the x-ray emission of matter spiraling down toward its event horizon).  And just last week a paper appeared in Physical Review Letters about an event of cataclysmic proportions -- the collision of two black holes.

The collision was detected because of gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of spacetime that propagate outward from accelerating masses at the speed of light.  Most gravitational waves are tiny, so it takes huge masses moving really fast to detect them here on Earth; but these were so enormous that they were picked up by two separate detectors (LIGO and Virgo) from 1.2 billion light years away.  Here's artist Aurore Simonnet's conception of what this would have looked like from (much) closer:

It's hard to describe this event without lapsing into superlatives.  One of the most amazing things about it is that apparently, there was an asymmetry in the production of gravitational waves, and that gave a kick to the (larger) black hole produced once they coalesced, because of Newton's Third Law.

Well, "kick" doesn't begin to describe it.  The recoil from this particular gun left the bullet traveling at 0.5% of the speed of light -- about 1,500 kilometers per second.  Imagine the force it would require to propel a mass that large at that speed.  (Remember that Sagan said black holes only form from stars with a minimum mass of three times that of the Sun.  Minimum.  And this was two of them put together.)

So that's our mind-blowing news from astronomy for today.  Even though I have (on some level) known about this stuff for more than four decades, I still can't help being left in awe by the grandeur and beauty of the universe we live in, and by what we continue to add to our body of knowledge about how it works.

I think Carl Sagan would be delighted.

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The stubbornly persistent illusion

I was driving through Ithaca, New York a while back, and came to a stoplight, and the car in front of me had a bumper sticker that said, "Time is that without which everything would happen at once."

I laughed, but I kept thinking about it, because in one sentence it highlights one of the most persistent mysteries of physics: why we perceive a flow of time.  The problem is, just about all of the laws of physics, from quantum mechanics to the General Theory of Relativity, are time-reversible; they work equally well in forward as in reverse.  Put another way, most physical processes look the same both ways.  If I were to show you a short video clip of two billiard balls colliding on a pool table, then the same clip backwards, it would be hard to tell which was which.  The Laws of Conservation of Momentum and Conservation of Energy that describe the results of the collision work in either direction.

There are exceptions, though.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the most commonly-cited one: closed systems always increase in entropy.  It's why when I put sugar in my coffee in the morning and stir it, the sugar spreads through the whole cup.  If I were to give it one more stir and all the sugar molecules were to come back together as crystals and settle out on the bottom, I'd be mighty surprised.  I might even wonder if someone had spiked the sugar bowl with something other than sugar.

In fact, that's why I had to specify a "short clip" in the billiard ball example.  There is a time-irreversible aspect of such classical physics; as the balls roll across the table, they lose momentum, because a little of the kinetic energy of their motion leaks away as thermal energy due to friction with the surface.  When they collide, a little more is lost because of the sound of the balls striking each other, the (slight) physical deformation they undergo, and so on.  So if you had a sensitive enough camera, or a long enough clip, you could tell which was the forward and which the reverse clip, because the sum of the kinetic energies of the balls in the forward clip would be (slightly) greater before the collision than after it.

But I am hard-pressed to see why that creates a sense of the flow of time.  It can't be solely from our awareness of a movement toward disorder.  When there's an energy input, you can generate a decrease in entropy; it's what happens when a single-celled zygote develops into a complex embryo, for example.  There's nothing in the Second Law that prevents increasing complexity in an open system.  But we don't see those situations as somehow running in reverse; entropy increase by itself doesn't generate anything more than expected set of behaviors of certain systems.  How that could affect how time is perceived by our brains is beyond me.

The problem of time's arrow is one of long standing.  Einstein himself recognized the seeming paradox; he wrote, "The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."  "Persistent" is an apt word; more than sixty years after the great man's death, there was an entire conference on the nature of time, which resolved very little but giving dozens of physicists the chance to defend their own views, and in the end convinced no one.

It was, you might say, a waste of time.  Whatever that means.

One of the most bizarre ideas about the nature of time is the one that comes out of the Special Theory of Relativity, and was the reason Einstein made the comment he did: the block universe.  I first ran into the block universe model not from Einstein but from physicist Brian Greene's phenomenal four-part documentary The Fabric of the Cosmos, and it goes something like this.  (I will append my usual caveat that despite my bachelor's degree in physics, I really am a layperson, and if any physicists read this and pick up any mistakes, I would very much appreciate it if they'd let me know so I can correct them.)

One of the most mind-bending things about the Special Theory is that it does away with simultaneity being a fixed, absolute, universal phenomenon.  If we observe two events happening at exactly the same time, our automatic assumption is that anyone else, anywhere in the universe, would also observe them as simultaneous.  Why would we not?  But the Special Theory shows conclusively that your perception of the order of events is dependent upon your frame of reference.  If two individuals are in different reference frames (i.e. moving at different velocities), and one sees the two events as simultaneous, the other will see them as sequential.  (The effect is tiny unless the difference in velocities is very large; that's why we don't experience this under ordinary circumstances.)

This means that past, present, and future depend on what frame of reference you're in.  Something that is in the future for me might be in the past for you.  This can be conceptualized by looking at space-time as being shaped like a loaf of bread; the long axis is time, the other two represent space.  (We've lost a dimension, but the analogy still works.)  The angle you are allowed to slice into the loaf is determined by your velocity; if you and two friends are moving at different velocities, your slice and theirs are cut at different angles.  Here's a picture of what happens -- to make it even more visualizable, all three spatial dimensions are reduced to one (the x axis) and the slice of time perceived moves along the other (the y axis).  A, B, and C are three events, and the question is -- what order do they occur in?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons User:Acdx, Relativity of Simultaneity Animation, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As you can see, it depends.  If you are taking your own velocity as zero, all three seem to be simultaneous.  But change the velocity -- the velocities are shown at the bottom of the graph -- and the situation changes.  To an observer moving at a speed of thirty percent of the speed of light relative to you, the order is C -> B -> A.  At a speed of fifty percent of the speed of light in the other direction, the order is A -> B -> C.

So the tempting question -- who is right? what order did the events really occur in? -- is meaningless.

Probably unnecessarily, I'll add that this isn't just wild speculation.  The Special Theory of Relativity has been tested hundreds, probably thousands, of times, and has passed every test to a precision of as many decimal places as you want to calculate.  (A friend of mine says that the papers written about these continuing experiments should contain only one sentence: "Yay!  Einstein wins again!")  Not only has this been confirmed in the lab, the predictions of the Special Theory have a critical real-world application -- without the equations that lead directly to the block universe and the relativity of simultaneity, our GPS systems wouldn't work.  If you want accurate GPS, you have to accept that the universe has some seriously weird features.

So the fact that we remember the past and don't remember the future is still unexplained.  From the standpoint of physics, it seems like past, present, and future are all already there, fixed, trapped in the block like flies in amber.  Our sense of time flowing, however familiar, is the real mystery.

But I'd better wrap this up, because I'm running out of time.

Whatever that means.

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