Advanced elegance

I think it's a natural human tendency to be awed by what we don't understand.

I know when I see some abstruse concept that is far beyond my grasp, I'm impressed not only by how complex the universe can be, but that there are people who can comprehend it.  I first ran into this in a big way when I was in college, and took a class called Classical Mechanics.  The topic was the mathematics of why and how objects move, how that motion affects other objects, and so on.

It was the first time in my life I had ever collided with something that regardless of my effort, I couldn't get.  The professor, Dr. Spross, was a very patient man, but his patience was up against a classical-mechanics-proof brain.  On the first exam, I scored a 19.

Percent.

And I'm convinced that he had dredged up the 19 points from somewhere so I wouldn't end up with a single-digit score.  I ended that class with a C-, which I think Dr. Spross gave me simply because he didn't want me back again the following semester, spending another four months ramming my poor physics-deficient head up against a metaphorical brick wall.

There's one memory that stands out from that experience, over forty years ago, besides the overwhelming frustration.  It was when Dr. Spross introduced the concept of the "Hamiltonian function," a mathematical framework for analyzing motion.  He seemed so excited about it.  It was, he said, an incredibly elegant way to consider velocity, acceleration, force, momentum, and so on.  So I thought, "Cool!  That sounds pretty interesting."

Following that cheerful thought was an hour and a half of thinking, "I have no fucking idea what any of this means."  It was completely opaque.  The worst part was that a number of my classmates were nodding their heads, writing stuff down, and seemed to get it with no problem.

So either I was the only complete dunderhead in the class, or they were just better at hiding their dismay than I was.

Anyhow, I think that was the moment I realized a career in research physics was not in the cards for me.

To this day, the "Hamiltonian function" remains something that in my mind symbolizes the Unknowable.  I have deep and abiding admiration for people for whom that concept makes sense (first and foremost, William Rowan Hamilton, who developed it).  And I'm sure it is elegant, just as Dr. Spross said.  But experiencing that elegance was (and probably still is) entirely beyond me.

It's this tendency to find what we can't understand awe-inspiring that has led to the idea of the God of the gaps -- in which gaps in our scientific knowledge are attributed to the incomprehensible hand of the divine.  Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer realized what the problem with this was, at least for people who are religious:

How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge.  If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat.  We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.

Anyhow, that was a long-winded preamble as an explanation of why all of this comes up in today's post.  I immediately thought of the awe-inspiring nature of what we don't understand when I read an article yesterday about two researchers at the University of Rochester, Tamar Friedmann and Carl Hagen, who found that a method for calculating the energy levels of a hydrogen atom generates the well-known number pi.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It turns out to have something to do with a mathematical function called the Wallis product, which says that you can generate π/2 by a simple series of multiplications:

π/2 = (2/1) x (2/3) x (4/3) x (4/5) x (6/5) x (6/7) x (8/7) x (8/9)....

The pattern is that the numerators of the fractions are 2, 2, 4, 4, 6, 6, 8, 8... and the denominators 1, 3, 3, 5, 5, 7, 7, 9, 9...  And the cool thing is, the more terms you add, the closer you get to π/2.

Now, as for why this is so... well, I tried reading the explanation, and my eyes started spinning.  And I've taken lots of math courses, including calculus and differential equations, and like I said earlier, I majored in physics (as much of a mistake as that turned out to be).  But when I took a look at the paper about the energy levels of hydrogen and the Wallis product and gamma functions, I almost could hear Dr. Spross's voice, explaining it in a tone implying it would be immediately clear to a small child, or even an unusually intelligent dog.

And all of those feelings from Classical Mechanics came bubbling up to the surface.

So I'm left with being a little in awe about it all.  Somehow, even though I have no real understanding of why, the same number that I learned about in geometry class as the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter shows up in the energy levels of hydrogen atoms.  Predictably, I'm not inclined to attribute such correspondences to the hand of the divine, but they do seem to be (in Dr. Spross's words) "elegant."  And even if I never get much beyond that, I can still appreciate the minds of the people who can.

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The mystery plague

Ever heard of cocoliztli?

In one way, it's shocking if you haven't, and in another, hardly surprising at all, because the vast majority of its victims were the indigenous people of Mexico and Central America, and history has a way of ignoring what happened to brown-skinned people.  Cocoliztli is the Nahuatl name for a contagious, usually fatal disease that struck Mesoamerica repeatedly, with the worst recorded outbreaks in the sixteenth century, killing an estimated ten million people.  This puts it in fifth place for the worst pandemics known, after the Black Death (estimated one hundred million casualties), Justinian's plague (fifty million), HIV/AIDS (forty million), and the Spanish flu (thirty million).  [Nota bene: if we're adding up total death toll, one of the worst is smallpox, but as that was endemic and widespread, I'm not counting that as a true pandemic.  In eighteenth-century Europe, for example, it's estimated that four hundred thousand people died of smallpox per year; and its introduction into the Americas decimated Native populations.  It's likely we'll never know for sure how big the death toll was, but it was huge.]

The symptoms of cocoliztli were awful.  Severe headache, high fever, vertigo, jaundice, and abdominal cramps.  The worst was the hemorrhaging -- victims bled from every orifice including the tear ducts.  Most of the victims died, usually between four and seven days after onset.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

There are two curious things about cocoliztli.  The first is that there hasn't been a confirmed case of it since 1813.

So where has it gone?  Ordinarily, infectious diseases occur at low rates until a confluence of events triggers a more widespread outbreak.  Consider, for example, the Black Death.  Bubonic plague (caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis) has been present in humans for millennia, but a perfect storm occurred in the mid-fourteenth century that caused the most devastating pandemic in history.  First, it was the beginning of the Little Ice Age, and the lower temperatures drove rats (and the fleas they carried) indoors, and into contact with humans.  Second, trade throughout Europe, and with Asia (via the Silk Road), had really just started to gear up, and rats are notorious for stowing away on ships.  And third, the population had risen -- and larger, more crowded cities facilitate disease spread.

Cocoliztli, though, hit Mesoamerica hard, and seemingly out of nowhere.  Repeated outbreaks in 1545, 1576, 1736, and 1813 killed millions, but in between, we don't know where it went -- or why after 1813 it apparently vanished completely.

The second odd thing is that we still don't know what caused it.

The bones of presumed victims have offered up only debatable information.  Back in 2018, Johannes Krause, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, found DNA in bones from victims of the 1545 outbreak that seems to come from a Salmonella enterica strain called Paratyphi C, but that doesn't mean that's what killed them -- and one epidemiologist has pointed out that typhoid fever, which is caused by S. enterica, doesn't have the same symptoms as cocoliztli.  Others suggest that its symptoms are more consistent with a viral hemorrhagic fever like Ebola, Lassa, and Marburg, but there are no viruses known that are endemic to the Americas and cause symptoms like that.

A rather sobering possibility is that the pathogen, whatever it is, resides in an animal vector -- that is, it's a zöonotic disease, one that exists in an animal population and is reintroduced to humans periodically upon contact.  If so, it's unknown what that vector might be -- but the jungles of Central America are a big place, and there are lots of animals there in which a pathogen might hide.

Whatever causes it, and wherever it went, it's to be hoped it's gone for good.  This would put it in the same class as the mysterious European sweating sickness, that caused repeated outbreaks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and then vanished, apparently permanently.  It, like cocoliztli, was highly infectious -- but the pathogen remains unidentified.

Cocoliztli left its mark on history.  The population of Mexico collapsed in the sixteenth century, largely due to the outbreaks, dropping from an estimated twenty-two million in 1500 to two million a hundred years later.  This undoubtedly contributed to the Spanish takeover -- something that reverberates to the present day.

It's also an enduring mystery.  How such a virulent disease could strike so hard, decimating an entire region, and then vanish utterly is bizarre.  But it does highlight how important epidemiological research is -- helping us to understand how pathogens cause disease, and how they jump from one host to the other.  Giving us, it is to be hoped, the tools for stopping the next pandemic before it happens.

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Stolen voices

AI scares the hell out of me.

Not, perhaps, for the reason you might be thinking.  Lately there have been scores of articles warning about the development of broad-ability generative AI, and how we're in for it as a species if that happens -- that AI will decide we're superfluous, or even hazardous for its own survival, and it'll proceed to either enslave us (The Matrix-style) or else do away with us entirely.

For a variety of reasons, I think that's unlikely.  First, I think conscious, self-aware AI is a long way away (although it must be mentioned that I'm kind of lousy at predictions; I distinctly recall telling my AP Biology class that "adult tissue cloning is at least ten years in the future" the week before the Dolly the sheep research was released).  For another, you have to wonder how, practically, AI would accomplish killing us all.  Maybe a malevolent AI could infiltrate our computer systems and screw things up royally, but wiping us out as a species is very hard to imagine.

However.

I'm seriously worried about AI's escalating impact on creative people.  As a fiction writer, I follow a lot of authors on Twitter, and in the past week there's been alarm over a new application of AI tools (such as Sudowrite and Chat GPT) that will "write a novel" given only a handful of prompts.  The overall reaction to this has been "this is not creativity!", which I agree with, but what's to stop publishers from cutting costs -- skipping the middle-man, so to speak -- and simply AI-generating novels to sell?  No need to deal with (or pay) pesky authors.  Just put in, "write a space epic about an orphan, a smuggler, and a princess who get caught up in a battle to stop an evil empire," and presto!  You have the next Star Wars in a matter of minutes.

If you think this isn't already happening, you're fooling yourself.  Every year, the group Queer Science Fiction hosts a three-hundred-word flash fiction contest, and publishes an anthology of the best entries.  (Brief brag; I've gotten into the anthology two years running, and last year my submission, "Refraction," won the Director's Pick Award.  I should hear soon if I got the hat trick and made it into this year's anthology.)  J. Scott Coatsworth (a wonderful author in his own right), who manages the contest, said that for the first time this year he had to run submissions through an algorithm to detect AI-generated writing -- and caught (and disqualified) ten entires.

If people are taking these kinds of shortcuts to avoid writing a three-hundred-word story, how much more incentive is there to use it to avoid the hard work and time required to write a ninety-thousand-word novel?  And how much longer will it be before AI becomes good enough to slip past the detection algorithms?

And it's not just writing.  You've no doubt heard of the issue with AI art, but do you know about the impact on music?  Musician Rick Beato did a piece on YouTube about AI voice synthesis that is fascinating and terrifying.  It includes a clip of a "new Paul McCartney/John Lennon duet" -- completely AI-created, of course -- that is absolutely convincing.  He frames the question as, "who owns your voice?"  It's a more complex issue than it appears at first.  Parodists and mimics imitate famous voices all the time, and as long as they're not claiming to actually be the person they're imitating, it's all perfectly legal.  So what happens if a music producer decides to generate an AI Taylor Swift song?  No need to pay the real Taylor Swift; no expensive recording studio time needed.  As long as it's labeled "AI Taylor Swift," it seems like it should be legal.

Horrifyingly unethical, yes.  But legal.

And because all of this boils down to money, you know it's going to happen.  "Write a novel in the style of Stephen King."  "Create a new song by Linkin Park."  "Generate a painting that looks like Salvador Dalí."  What happens to the actual artists, musicians, and writers?  Once your voice is stolen and synthesized, what need is there for your real voice any more?

Of course, I think that creatives are absolutely critical; our voices are unique and irreplaceable.  The problem is, if an AI can get close enough to the real thing, you can bet consumers are going to go for it, not only because AI-generated content will be a great deal cheaper, but also for the sheer novelty.  ("Listen to this!  Can you believe this isn't actually Beyoncé?")  As an author, I can vouch for the fact that it's already hard enough to get your work out to the public, have it seen and read and reviewed.

What will we do when the market is flooded with cheap, mediocre-but-adequate AI-generated content?

I'm no legal expert, and I don't have any ready solutions for how this could be fairly managed.  There are positive uses for AI, so "ban it all" isn't the answer.  And in any case, the genie is out of the bottle; any efforts to stop AI development at this point are doomed to failure.

But we have to figure out how to protect the voices of creatives.  Because without our voices, we've lost the one thing that truly makes us human.

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A new field

I was fortunate enough that the day-job of my bandmate of many years, Kathy Selby, was working as a physicist at Cornell University.

As you might suspect, our conversations while traveling to gigs were pretty interesting.

One time we were on our way to play for a dance in Rochester, and I asked her what she thought about dark matter and dark energy -- which according to current models make up, respectively, 27% and 68% of the mass-energy content of the universe.  [Nota bene: the use of the word "dark" in both names does not mean that they are in any sense the same thing.  Dark matter is a name for the observation that the gravitational attraction of conventional matter is insufficient to account for the measured velocities of galaxies and galaxy clusters; there must be some other, unseen matter there that does not interact with ordinary matter electromagnetically, or else our model for gravity is incorrect.  Dark energy, on the other hand, is a theoretical energy inherent in space itself that might explain the accelerating expansion of the universe.]

So yes, only five percent of the universe is the regular stuff we see around us on a daily basis.  The other 95% is largely unexplained, and is yet to be detected directly.

In any case, I asked Kathy what her opinion was about the rather uncomfortable situation of having the vast majority of the universe thus far inaccessible to scientific study.

"In my opinion," she said, "we're in a situation a bit like physicists were in the late nineteenth century.  They knew light had strange properties.  It acted like a wave much of the time, so they'd postulated a medium -- the luminiferous aether -- through which the wave was propagating.  The problem was, every attempt to detect the aether failed.  Then Michelson and Morley came along and showed that the prediction of an 'aether drag' caused by the motion of the Earth through space didn't exist, suggesting very much that the aether didn't either.  The speed of light in a vacuum seemed to be the same in all reference frames, which was unlike any other wave ever studied.  Then Einstein said, 'Well, let's start by assuming that the speed of light in a vacuum is the same regardless of your reference frame, and see what happens,' and the aether became unnecessary.  Of course, what came out of that shift in perspective was the Theories of Relativity.

"What I think," she concluded, "is that we're waiting for this century's Einstein to tell us that we've been looking at everything the wrong way -- and suddenly the problems of dark matter and dark energy will evaporate, just like the aether did."

Well, we may have just gotten a glimpse at one possibility for that shift in perspective, courtesy of physicist Lucas Lombriser of the Université de Genève.

A paper published two weeks ago in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity started by looking at what has been called "the worst prediction in physics" -- the value of the cosmological constant, which sets the expansion rate of the universe.  The prediction by theoretical physicists of what the cosmological constant should be given what we know about matter, and what we actually measure it to be, differ by 120 orders of magnitude -- that's 1 followed by 120 zeroes.

Oops.  Major oops.  This is what gave rise to the mysterious dark energy, some peculiar property of space itself that solves the mismatch.  But as far as what exactly this dark energy might be, physicists have come up empty-handed, so more and more it's seemed like a placeholder to cover up for the fact that we don't really understand what's going on.

This, Lombriser says, is because -- like with Einstein's solution to the aether -- we're starting out with the wrong assumption.

Maybe the universe is flat and static, as Einstein himself believed (after the discovery of red shift and the expansion of the universe, Einstein was forced unwillingly to accept an expanding universe and a cosmological constant -- which he later called "the greatest blunder of my career").  Perhaps space isn't expanding; it's the masses of particles that have changed over time.  The altered masses change the gravitational field that permeates space, and that's what generates red shift and the appearance of expansion.  So there is a cosmological constant, but it comes from the particles themselves, and the field in which they reside, evolving.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Original image by User:Vlad2i, slightly modified by User:mapos., Gravitational red-shifting2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This new take solves three problems at once.  It does away with the cosmological constant mismatch; dark energy pretty much disappears completely; and the field itself that's responsible for the mass change could account for dark matter, as it shares many properties with an axion field, and axions are one of the leading candidates for the constituents of dark matter.  

This simultaneous solution of three vexing problems is certainly intriguing.  But the question is, is Lombriser right?  "The paper is pretty interesting, and it provides an unusual outcome for multiple problems in cosmology," said physicist Luz Ángela García, of the Universidad ECCI Bogotá, who was not involved in the research.  "The theory provides an outlet for the current tensions in cosmology.  However, we must be cautious.  Lombriser's solution contains elements in its theoretical model that likely can't be tested observationally, at least in the near future."

Which, of course, is the issue, and is all too common in this branch of science.  Even though Einstein's Theories of Relativity did a good job of accounting for various anomalies in the properties of light, the first precise confirmation of his predictions didn't occur until 39 years after he wrote his seminal paper in 1915.  How to detect the fluctuating field Lombriser postulates -- and, more importantly, how to distinguish its effects from the current model of expanding space -- is currently beyond us.

So maybe Lombriser is what my bandmate Kathy called "this century's Einstein."  Or maybe his ideas will prove to be just another unverified or (worse) unverifiable hypothesis.  But I have to say, when I read about what he's proposing, my ears did perk up.  It has the feel of a paradigm shift -- just what we've been waiting for.

And you can bet that the physicists are going to be all over this, looking for ways either to confirm or refute what he's saying.

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Rock recall

First, we had a "Quantum Pendant" that was supposed to realign your chakra frequencies (or something like that), but was recalled when the authorities found the rock it was made from was actually radioactive.  Then we had the warning issued because people with ear wax impactions were sticking lit candles in their ears to "suck out the wax," which resulted in several hospitalizations and at least one person setting their house on fire. Yet another warning was put out by doctors when the woo-woos started recommending taking off all your clothes and exposing your butthole to direct sunlight, risking a sunburn that I don't even want to think about.  Then there were the homeopathic "remedies" that were taken off the shelves because, by some horrific mistake, they turned out to have some actual active ingredients.

So you'd think after all this -- and, allow me to say, I didn't make any of the above up -- either (1) the general public would realize that the woo-woo alt-med types are full of shit and stop listening to anything they say, or (2) I'd stop being surprised by what new idiotic "natural health" fads crop up.

Neither of those, in fact, has happened.

This comes up because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a link to a story out of Australia about a company that distributes chunks of a rock called rough serpentine to stores specializing in woo-woo crystal nonsense.  Serpentine is common -- it's a characteristic rock found in areas that once were part of oceanic plates -- but it's pretty enough.  It often has green and black bands, and occurs in two main forms, a shiny, smooth "platy" variety (sometimes nicknamed "false jade"), and a fibrous, grainy "rough" variety.  If you're curious about what they claim serpentine can do, one source says that it "is believed to help establish control over one's life.  According to metaphysical beliefs, serpentine provides a clearing of thought to better facilitate meditation.  Serpentine is said to clear clouded areas of the chakras and stimulate the crown chakra, promoting spiritual understanding and psychic abilities."

Pretty impressive, no?

There's a wee problem with rough serpentine, though.

It contains asbestos.

Rough serpentine [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tiia Monto, Talk on Serpentine, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Asbestos exposure, as I probably don't need to mention, is associated with lung cancer, emphysema, and mesothelioma.

"Consumers should immediately stop using this product and wrap it in thick sturdy plastic or a heavy duty sturdy plastic bag where the seal cannot be broken," said a spokesperson for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.  "The supplier – Alliz Trading Pty Ltd – will contact consumers to provide advice about safe disposal of the stones and arrange a full refund."

I really shouldn't be surprised this happened.  It's all part and parcel of the "if it's natural, it must be good for you" mentality, which conveniently ignores the fact that strychnine is all-natural and 100% organic.

For what it's worth, this was completely natural, too.  I'm guessing the dinosaurs' chakras were pretty fucking clouded afterward, though.  Pity no one was around to give them some serpentine.

In any case, it brings home the fact that modern science and medicine have done a good job of improving our lives.  Yes, they're far from perfect.  I'm aware of the issues with the pharmaceuticals industry, and the ongoing health insurance mess here in the United States.  I know that modern technology has created a good many problems itself.  But on balance, we live longer, healthier lives, and more of our children survive to adulthood, than ever before, and that's not because more of us are waving crystals around, taking "remedies" that have been diluted to the point that there's basically nothing left but water, or (heaven forfend) exposing our nether orifices to direct sunlight.

So learn a little science, okay?  And stay away from rocks containing asbestos.  Those things are dangerous.

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Out of line

Every so often, I run into a claim that some archaeological site aligns with a particular astronomical object, and all too often, everyone decides that the alignment is why the site was built where and how it was.

Trying to parse the motives of long-dead people who left nothing in the way of written records is a dicey business.  In fact, sometimes it's hard enough even when you're talking about extant cultures.  This was brilliantly lampooned in Horace Miner's rightly famous 1956 article "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," which appeared in American Anthropologist, and took a rigorous and scholarly look at the mysterious "shrines" we all have in our houses...

... better known as "bathrooms."  And, of course, reached the wrong conclusions about the purposes of nearly everything in them.

The problem arises because the human brain is a pattern-finding device, so it's often hard to resist our tendency to see a pattern when there is none there.  This is the origin of the phenomenon of ley lines -- which I wrote about twelve years ago, in one of my earliest Skeptophilia posts -- the claim that towns, cities, and religious sites are laid out along "lines of power" generated by some unknown forces in the Earth itself.  There are a couple of completely prosaic reasons this alignment happens:

1. Populated sites in areas with relatively flat topography are frequently connected by straight lines, because as Papa Euclid taught us, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
2. More interestingly -- and germane to the pattern-finding tendency referenced above -- if you aren't given any constraints about what particular places you're trying to connect, you can almost always find completely accidental correlations that look like deliberate alignment.

The latter is why the whole topic comes up, because of a fun site I stumbled on called Spurious Alignments: Bad Archaeoastronomy At Your Fingertips.  What this site does is allow you to overlay various astronomical benchmarks (e.g. sunrise on the Winter Solstice, the northernmost point on the horizon where Jupiter rises, and so on) on top of particular geographic locations -- and see what correlations you can find.

One of the best ones anyone's found so far is the airport in Palermo, Italy.  Here are a few of the relevant discoveries:

• Runway 07/25 tracks the relative motions of the Moon.
• Runway 02/20 aligns with the rise of the star Capella.
• Taxiways Bravo and Charlie align with the setting of the star Procyon.
• Taxiway Delta points directly toward the setting of the star Arcturus.

From this, we can clearly see that the Palermo Airport is a site built by ancient astronomers, and the whole complex is an observatory, or possibly the center of a sky-worshiping cult.

The difficulty, of course, is some sites were created because of astronomical alignments.  Many of our distant ancestors knew the motions of the skies better than your average person does today.  A good example, not really explainable any other way, is the famous Sun Dagger on Fajade Butte in New Mexico.  A spiral design carved into the side of a rock facing is across from a crack between two stones, and -- only on the Summer Solstice -- this crack allows light from the Sun at midday to form a "dagger" that perfectly bisects the spiral.

The Sun Dagger is pretty clearly a solstice marker, allowing people to keep track of the seasons in a climate that was hostile to say the least.

But as for most of the other "ancient astronomical observatory" claims -- well, maybe.  It's too easy to find spurious correlations and alignments, especially when there are no rules about what you're trying to get the site to align to.

Or, maybe, the people who built the Palermo Airport really were trying to tell us something.  You never know.

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Heavy-duty nonsense

Yesterday I ran into a claim that, even by comparison with most alt-med nonsense, is way out there. The gist of it is that you can fix all your physical ailments if you just stop drinking water with deuterium in it.

Deuterium, as I probably don't need to explain, is "heavy hydrogen" -- hydrogen atoms whose nucleus contains a proton and a neutron (rather than only a proton, as in ordinary hydrogen).  Heavy water has a few different physical and chemical properties from ordinary water -- such as (unsurprisingly) being 10.6% more dense and being more viscous.  It has an ability to slow high-energy neutrons down without absorbing them, making heavy water important in nuclear fission reactors. Additionally, deuterium forms stronger bonds to carbon and oxygen than ordinary hydrogen.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dirk Hünniger; Derivative work in english - Balajijagadesh, Hydrogen Deuterium Tritium Nuclei Schmatic-en, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The "Beginner's Guide to Deuterium and Health," however, has some information that would be seriously scary if it weren't for the fact that nearly all of it is wrong.  It starts with a definition of "deuterium," which is correct, and is honestly the last thing on the entire webpage that is.  You're put on notice about the veracity of the site in the first paragraph, wherein we find that the details of how awful deuterium is for you is only accessible to "those with an understanding of advanced bio-chemistry, bio-physics and quantum health."

What, pray, is "quantum health?"  The health of your subatomic particles?  The health of people who are so extremely small that they can only be detected with sensitive instruments?  The health of people who jump from "sick" to "well" and back again without passing all the stages in between?

Or, perhaps, does it refer to someone who is both sick and well at the same time until they go to a doctor, at which point the Alt-Med Wave Function collapses, and they become one or the other?

Then we find out that our health depends on how fast our mitochondria are spinning.  No lie, here's the relevant passage:

At a quantum level hydrogen plays a vital role in mitochondria function.  Mitochondria are the powerhouse batteries of the body.  They ultimately facilitate energy production.  Within the mitochondria there is a spinning head that rotates very fast, the rotation speed of this spinning head determines how efficiently you create energy.  The faster the spinning head rotates the more energy you make and the healthier you will be.  The slower the spinning head rotates the less energy you will make and this leaves you more susceptible to chronic mismatch diseases and faster aging.

What this is referring to, insofar as I can understand it, is the electron transport chain, wherein electrons in your mitochondria give up some of their energy through a series of oxidation/reduction reactions, and that energy is used to shuttle hydrogen ions across the mitochondrial membrane.  The ultimate result is the generation of ATP, a crucial energy storage molecule.

The amusing part is that the rate of this reaction is controlled incredibly tightly.  You need about seventy million ATP molecules per second, per cell, and you use them equally quickly -- ATP doesn't store well.  If your rate of production went up without your rate of consumption going up, you wouldn't be healthier; the ATP would break down, liberating the energy as heat, and you'd spontaneously burst into flame.

So the site is right to the extent that if this happened, worrying about illness and aging would be down near the bottom of your Priorities List.

Anyhow, what we're told is that deuterium kind of gums up the works, making the "spinning head" run more slowly, giving us chronic diseases.  What kind of chronic diseases is never specified, because apparently they're all caused by the same thing, whether you're talking about arthritis or high blood pressure.

The pièce de resistance, however, is when the website tells us what to do about all this.  In order to avoid this bad stuff, the solution is simple: we have to start drinking water with the deuterium removed.

But how do you do this?

Easy.  You take ordinary tap water, and freeze it.

If you put water in the freezer, they say, the heavy water will freeze first.  So you wait until a crust of ice forms, and either chip off and remove that, or else pour off the still-liquid part of the water.  Do it again and again, and eventually you'll have healthful "deuterium-depleted" water.

It works even better, they say, if you start with water "from glacial regions," because it's already been de-deuterium-ized naturally.

I know that the people who construct nuclear reactors would be glad to hear this.  The current method of producing heavy water for industry is called the Girdler sulfide process, which produces one ton of heavy water for every 340,000 tons of water you start with.  This means the stuff's expensive -- one place I looked is charging $680 per liter.  If all they had to do is freeze regular water and pull off the ice, it'd be quite a cost savings.

As with many wacky claims, there's a (small) grain of truth to this stuff.  Heavy water does have a higher freezing point than ordinary water (3.7 C as compared to 0 C).  It's also toxic, but only if you replace 25% of your body's water content with heavy water -- an expensive proposition given its cost.  (One source said, "accidental or intentional poisoning with heavy water is unlikely to the point of practical disregard.  Poisoning would require that the victim ingest large amounts of heavy water without significant normal water intake for many days to produce any noticeable toxic effects.")

What about our consumption of heavy water from contamination of ordinary water?  Well, since in virtually all tested water sources, the concentration of heavy water is one part in 3,200, I don't think you have much to worry about.  But if it amuses you to partly freeze your drinking water and throw away the icy part, by all means have at it.

Oh, and the website also says that once you "flush out the deuterium" from your body, your "energy level will increase, along with your magnetic field."  Which sounds potentially dangerous to me.  I would hate to have just made myself all healthy and deuterium-free, then I walk into Home Depot and my magnetic field starts attracting metal implements, and I get impaled in the forehead by a screwdriver or something.

So there you have it.  How to go through a lot of folderol to remove something from your water that (1) is there in vanishingly small amounts, and (2) has no toxic effects at that dosage.  Me, I'm more inclined to eat right and exercise regularly, but maybe I'm only saying that because the deuterium has gummed up the "spinning heads" in my brain's mitochondria and I'm not thinking straight.  You can see how that could happen.

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