The beat goes on

I am blessed with a good innate sense of rhythm.

I've always felt rhythms in my body; I never had to struggle to keep the beat while playing music.  One of my band members nicknamed me "The Metronome," and quipped that if one of us missed a note, it might well be me -- but if someone screwed up the rhythm, it was definitely not me.

I've often wondered about the origin of this.  I've listened to music ever since I can remember, but I dropped out of band in sixth grade, was not allowed to take music lessons however much I begged my parents, and didn't participate in anything in the way of formal music training until I was in my mid-twenties.  The result is that I'm largely self-taught -- with all of the good and bad that kind of background brings.

I've always loved music with odd rhythms.  There's a reason two of my favorite classical composers are Igor Stravinsky and Dmitri Shostakovich.  Then, I discovered Balkan music when I was in my teens, and even before I knew cognitively what was going on, was magnetically attracted to the strange, asymmetrical beat patterns.

For example, what do you make of this tune?

If you know any Slavic languages, the name of it will give you a clue -- Dvajspetorka.  There are twenty-five beats (!) per measure; the name comes from the Macedonian word for "twenty-five" (dvaeset i pet).  But if you're wondering how the hell you count that, you'll no doubt be relieved to find that you don't count up to twenty-five and then start back at one.  Most of these Balkan tunes are dances (or derived from them), and they're all broken down into slow steps (that get a count of three beats) and fast steps (that get a count of two beats).  This one is slow-fast-fast, slow-fast-fast, fast-fast-slow-fast-fast.  When I've taught Balkan music workshops, I've found it helps to speak the rhythm, using the word "apple" for the fast, two-beat steps and "cinnamon" for the slow, three-beat ones.

So the rhythm of Dvajspetorka would be cinnamon-apple-apple, cinnamon-apple-apple, apple-apple-cinnamon-apple-apple.

Which, if you count it up, adds to an entire apple pie with twenty-five beats per measure.

What got me thinking about all of this is a couple of papers I ran into yesterday, one from PLOS-One Biology called, "The Nature and Perception of Fluctuations in Human Musical Rhythms," by Holger Henning et al., and the other from Psychonomic Bulletin and Review called, "Sensorimotor Synchronization: A Review of Recent Research" by Bruno Repp and Yi-Huang Su.  And what I learned from these is as fascinating as it is puzzling.  Among the takeaways:

• Humans tend not to like perfectly steady rhythms.  When musical recordings are made using a computer-synchronized beat, they're judged as "emotionless" and "devoid of depth."  So small, deliberate fluctuations in the tempo are part of what give music its poignancy.
• Throwing in random fluctuations doesn't work.  Test subjects caught on to that immediately, saying the alterations in tempo sounded like mistakes.  There's something about the fluid, organic sound of actual human musicians making minor shifts in rhythm that are what create emotional resonance in the listener.
• That said, really good musicians have extraordinarily accurate abilities to keep a steady beat when they want to.  Told to hold a rhythm as rock-solid as they can, professional percussionists deviated from the pulse of the music by an average of only a few milliseconds per beat.
• fMRI studies have shown that there is a specific part of the brain -- the basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical circuitry in the cerebellum -- that fires like crazy when people try to match a rhythm.  So the rhythmic ability in humans is hardwired.  In fact, research suggests that are are other animals that have this ability as well -- other primates, rats, and some birds all show various levels of rhythmic awareness.
• As far as why this apparently innate ability to keep a musical rhythm exists, evolutionary biologists admit that their current answer is "damned if we know."

It seems like an odd thing to evolve, doesn't it?  The obvious guess is that it might have something to do with communication, but there's no human language (or non-human animal communication we know of) that is sensitive to rhythm to an accuracy of a few milliseconds.  If I say "I'm leaving for work now" to my wife, and say it with various rhythms and speeds, the meaning doesn't change (although for certain speed and rhythm combinations, she might well give me a perplexed look).

So how such an incredibly precise ability evolved is still a considerable mystery.

Anyhow, that's our curious bit of science for the day.  How humans keep the beat.  And if you'd like to end with another challenge, what time signature do you think this is in?  Have fun!

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The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

One of the most difficult things about establishing what actually happened in an incident is that people are so damn suggestible.

It's nobody's fault, and psychologists understand the phenomenon pretty well, but it really complicates matters when you're trying to piece together what happened based on eyewitness testimony.  Once our brains have been contaminated by someone's suggestion of what they think happened, our memories simply aren't reliable any more.

Even a single word choice can make a difference.  Way back in 1989, researchers D. S. Lindsay and M. K. Johnson showed the same video of a car accident to a bunch of teenagers, and then afterward asked them to estimate how fast the vehicles were traveling at the time.  However, the researchers used different words to ask the question -- "How fast were they moving when they (bumped, contacted, collided, hit, crashed)?"  They found that the intensity/violence of the word choice strongly affected the volunteers' estimates of the speed -- they thought the cars were traveling far more slowly if the researchers used the word "bumped" as compared to using the word "crashed."

The video was the same each time; a single word choice by the researchers changed how the teenagers remembered it.

Suggestibility also comes into play when our emotions get involved, especially strong emotions like fear or anger.  This is thought to be the cause of mass hysteria (more formally known as mass psychogenic illness), when symptoms of an apparent illness spread through a population even though there's no known organic cause.  One person experiences symptoms -- whether from an actual physical illness or not -- and one by one, other people interpret their own conditions in that light.  Susceptible people then become frightened, and focus their attentions on every aberrant ache, pain, or twinge, which (of course) makes them more frightened.  The whole thing snowballs.  (This is likely the origin of the "witch fever" during the Salem Witch Trials -- combine mass hysteria with religious mania, and you've got a particularly deadly combination.)

This brings us to today's topic, which is the Mad Gasser of Mattoon.

On August 31, 1944, a man named Urban Raef, of Mattoon, Illinois, woke in the middle of the night because there was a strange, sweet odor in his house.  He felt nauseated and weak, and in fact threw up twice.  He woke his wife for help, but she found she was partially paralyzed and unable to get out of bed.  At some point the Raefs recovered sufficiently to open the windows, and made their way downstairs to the kitchen to see if there was a gas leak from the stove.  (Although gas leaks don't exactly smell "sweet.")  Everything seemed in order.

In the wee hours that same day, a neighbor living nearby experienced the same symptoms -- coughing, the presence of a cloyingly sweet odor "like cheap perfume," and temporary paralysis.

Within two days, four homes total had been affected, and that's when it hit the press.  A local paper blared the headline, "Anesthetic Prowler on the Loose!"  Between September 5 and September 13, twenty more incidents were reported to the police, including sisters Frances and Maxine Smith who claimed to have been attacked three separate times -- during one of which, they said they heard a "motorized buzzing sound" from the machinery being used to expel the gas.  Another individual found a white cloth on her front porch, sniffed it, and immediately became violently ill.

Only twice -- Fred Goble on September 6, and Bertha Burch on September 13 -- did victims report seeing anyone suspicious.  Neither one got a good look at the prowler's face, although Burch reported that she thought the person she'd seen was "a woman dressed as a man."

The police didn't have a lot to go on.  The symptoms reported by victims were similar to those you'd get from inhaling organic solvents like chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, or trichloroethylene, but analysis of the hard evidence (like the cloth) showed no traces of any toxic chemicals.  After the last report on the 13th, the attacks -- whatever they were -- stopped.  All of the victims made complete recoveries, and the "Mad Gasser of Mattoon" went down as yet another unexplained mystery in the annals of Fortean phenomena.

So, what actually happened here?

Hysteria needs a trigger; the experiences of the first three victims, the Raefs and the unnamed neighbor, were probably real enough, whatever their cause.  One person who has researched the incident extensively, Scott Maruna (in fact, he wrote a book about it called The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria), believes that at least some of the attacks were perpetrated by a Mattoon resident named Farley Llewellyn, an alcoholic, chronically angry recluse who was known to dabble in chemistry, and in fact once blew a hole in one wall of his house in a laboratory explosion.

The problem is, no one has ever been able to prove Llewellyn was involved.  Every town has its oddballs, and (after all) being a peculiar, introverted science-nerd type is hardly a crime.

Fortunately for me.

Most of the people who've looked into the case believe that the majority of the reports were the result of mass hysteria induced by the rather terrifying headlines, possibly compounded by episodes of sleep paralysis.  (Which can be a pretty damn scary experience in and of itself, even without a crazy anesthetist running around.)

The bottom line, though, is that we'll probably never know for sure.  Once you've had an experience like that -- hooking into some powerful emotions -- it permanently alters what you remember.  At that point, trying to tease out what you actually did experience from what you feared and/or had heard about from other sources becomes next to impossible.  

And even in less alarming situations, our memories are remarkably plastic, and therefore unreliable.  It's always a good idea to keep this in mind -- just because something is in our heads doesn't mean it's true and accurate.

Or as Robert Fulghum put it, "Don't believe everything you think."

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The conservation conundrum

A major underpinning of our understanding of physics has to do with symmetry and conservation laws.

Both have to do with order, balance, and the concept that you can't get something for nothing.  A lot of the most basic research in theoretical physics is driven by the assumption that despite the seeming complexity and chaos in the universe, at its heart is a deep simplicity, harmony, and beauty. 

The mathematical expression of this concept reaches its pinnacle in the laws of conservation.

You undoubtedly ran into conservation laws in your high school science classes.  The law of the conservation of matter and energy (you can move matter and energy around and change its form, but the total amount stays the same).  Conservation of charge (the total charge present at the beginning of a reaction is equal to the total charge present at the end; this one is one of the fundamental rules governing chemistry).  Conservation of momentum, conservation of spin, conservation of parity.

All of these are fairly well understood, and physicists use them constantly to make predictions about how interactions in the real world will occur.  Add to them the mathematical models of quantum physics, and you have what might well be the single most precise system ever devised by human minds.  The predictions of this system match the actual experimental measurements to a staggering accuracy of ten decimal places.  (This is analogous to your taking a tape measure to figure out the length of a two-by-four, and your answer being correct to the nearest billionth of a meter.)

So far, so good.  But there's only one problem with this.

Symmetry and conservation laws provide no explanation of how there's something instead of nothing.

We know that photons (zero charge, zero mass) can produce pairs of particles -- one matter, one antimatter, which (by definition) have opposite charges.  These particles usually crash back together and mutually annihilate within a fraction of a second, resulting in a photon with the same energy as the original one had, as per the relevant conservation laws.  Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe (such as it was) was filled with extremely high energy photons, so this pair production was going at a furious rate, with such a roiling sea of particles flying about that some of them survived being annihilated.  This, it's thought, is the origin of the matter we see around us, the matter we and everything else are made of.

But what we know about symmetry and conservation suggests that there should have been exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter created, so very quickly, there shouldn't have been anything left but photons.  Instead, we see an imbalance -- an asymmetry -- favoring matter.  Fortunately for us, of course.

So there was some matter left over after everything calmed down.  But why?

One possibility is that when we look out at the distant stars and galaxies, some of them are actually antimatter.  On the surface, it seems like there'd be no way to tell; except for the fact that every particle that makes it up would have the opposite properties (i.e. protons would have a negative charge, electrons a positive charge, and so on), antimatter would have identical properties to matter.  (In fact, experimentally-produced antihydrogen was shown in 2016 to have the same energy levels, and therefore exactly the same spectrum, as ordinary hydrogen.)  From a distance, therefore, it should look exactly like matter does.

So could there be antimatter planets, stars, and galaxies out there?  Maybe even with Evil Major Don West With A Beard?

The answer is almost certainly no.  The reason is that if there was a galaxy out there made of antimatter, then between it and the nearest ordinary matter galaxy, there'd be a boundary where the antimatter thrown off by the antimatter galaxy would be constantly running into the matter thrown off by the ordinary galaxy.  So we'd see a sheet dividing the two, radiating x-rays and gamma rays, where the matter and antimatter were colliding and mutually annihilating.  Nothing of the sort has ever been observed, so the conclusion is that what we see out in space, out to the farthest quasars, is all made of matter.

This, though, leaves us with the conundrum of how this happened.  What generated the asymmetry between matter and antimatter during the Big Bang?

One possibility, physicists thought, could be that the particles of matter themselves are asymmetrical.  If the shape or charge distribution of (say) an electron has a slight asymmetry, this would point to there being a hitherto-unknown asymmetry in the laws of physics that might favor matter over antimatter.  This conjecture is, in fact, why the topic comes up today; a paper last week in Science described an experiment at the University of Colorado - Boulder to measure an electron's dipole moment, the offset of charges within an electron.  Lots of molecules have a nonzero dipole moment; it's water's high dipole moment that results in water molecules having a positive end and a negative end, so they stick together like little magnets.  A lot of water's odd properties come from the fact that it's highly polar, including why it hurts like a sonofabitch when you do a belly flop off a diving board -- you're using your body to break simultaneously all of those linked molecules.

What the team did was to create a strong magnetic field around an extremely pure collection of hafnium fluoride molecules.  If electrons did have a nonzero dipole moment -- i.e., they were slightly egg-shaped -- the magnetic field would cause them to pivot so they were aligned with the field, and the resulting torque on the molecules would be measurable.

They found that to the limit of their considerable measuring ability, electrons are perfectly spherical and have an exactly zero dipole moment.

"I don’t think Guinness tracks this, but if they did, we’d have a new world record," said Tanya Roussy, who led the study.  "The new measurement is so precise that, if an electron were the size of Earth, any asymmetry in its shape would have to be on a scale smaller than an atom."

That's what I call accuracy.

On the other hand, it means we're back to the drawing board with respect to why there's something instead of nothing, which as a scientific question, is kind of a big deal.  At the moment, there don't seem to be any other particularly good candidates out there for an explanation, which is an uncomfortable position to be in.  Either there's something major we're missing in the laws of physics -- which, as I said, otherwise give stunningly accurate predictions of real-world experimental results -- or we're left with the even less satisfying answer of "it just happened that way."

But that's the wonderful thing about science, isn't it?  Scientists never write the last word on a subject and assume nothing will ever change thereafter.  There will always be new information, new perspectives, and new models, refining what we know and gradually aligning better and better with this weird, chaotic universe we live in.

So I'm not writing off the physicists yet.  They have a damn good track record of solving what appear to be intractable problems -- my guess is that sooner or later, they'll figure out the answer to this one.

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Do not cross

Back in 1859, renowned British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote a paper about a peculiar phenomenon, which has since been called Wallace's Line in his honor.  He had noted that west of a wavering line that runs basically from northeast to southwest across Indonesia, the flora and fauna is much more similar to what you find in India and tropical southeast Asia; east of that line, it resembles what you find in Australia and Papua-New Guinea.

Map from Wallace's original paper [Image is in the Public Domain]

The change is striking enough that it didn't take a naturalist of Wallace's caliber to notice it.  Italian explorer Antonia Pigafetta mentioned it in his journals way back in 1521, and various others considered it a curiosity worth noting.  None, though, did the thorough job of studying it that Wallace did, so naming it after him is justified.

However -- even Wallace had no idea why, or how, it had happened.

Ordinarily, faunal and floral assemblages change gradually, unless there's a major geographical barrier.  I saw an example of the latter first-hand when I was in Ecuador -- there's a completely different set of birds as you cross from the west slope to the east slope of the Andes Mountains.  (Some did make the leap, but by and large, you run into a whole different group of species from one side to the other.)

Here, though, there's no obvious barrier.  In fact, if you'll look closely at the map, you'll see that Wallace's Line goes right between the islands of Bali (on the west) and Lombok (on the east) -- a distance of only 35 kilometers, easily narrow enough for birds to cross, not to mention other species swimming or rafting their way from one island to the other.  Even so, the species on Bali are distinctly Asian, and the ones on Lombok distinctly Australian.

On one side, kangaroos and koalas, cockatoos and birds of paradise and cassowaries; on the other, bears and tigers, trogons and drongos and minivets and babblers.

How did this happen -- and more perplexingly, what's kept the line intact?

The explanation for the first part of this question had to wait until the discovery of plate tectonics in the 1950s.  The Australian region and Asia have very different species because they are on different tectonic plates that used to be a great deal farther away from each other; in fact, until 85 million years ago, Australia was connected to Antarctica (something we know not only from our understanding of plate movement, but because prior to that Australia and Antarctica have similar fossils, which began to diverge at that point as Australia moved north and Antarctica moved south).  Australia has been gradually approaching Asia ever since, with its unique assemblage of species riding in like some latter-day Noah's Ark.

What, though, is keeping them from mixing?  The reason the topic comes up today is because of a paper last week in Science that has proposed a neat explanation; the problem is the climate.

Researchers at ETH-Zürich led by evolutionary biologist Loïc Pellissier noted that there were exceptions to the boundary of Wallace's line, but the species that crossed it almost always went one way -- from the Asian region into the Australian region.  Some species of Australian snakes, for example, have their nearest relatives in Asia, as do the wonderful Australian flying foxes.  But there are virtually no examples of species that went the other way.

What was preventing organisms from island-hopping their way from Australia to Asia was Asia's much wetter climate -- if you go from west to east across Indonesia and into Australia, the average rainfall by and large goes steadily downward.  The contention is that it's easier for organisms from a rainy climate to adapt to gradually drying out than it is for extremely dry-adapted organisms to deal with the already high biodiversity (and thus much higher competition with species already well suited to the conditions) found in more rainy regions.

You have to wonder what will happen when Australia and Asia finally collide -- something that is, in a sense, already happening, but will result in a complete fusion of the two continents in two hundred million years or so.  This will result in a situation a little like the collision of India with Asia eighty million years ago, which raised the Himalaya Mountains.  (In fact, that collision is ongoing; as India pushes north, like a giant plow, the Himalayas are continuing to rise.  Which is why you find marine fossils at the top of Mount Everest -- the Himalayas aren't volcanic, they're marine and continental debris scooped together and piled up by the motion of India.)

The collision of Australia and Asia will, of course, eradicate Wallace's Line (although the mountain range it will create could still provide a barrier for species mixing, just as the Andes do in Ecuador and Peru).  Of course, two hundred million years is a very long time -- about three times as long as it's been since the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs -- so who knows what species will have evolved in the interim?

Or if we'll have any distant descendants of our own around to see it?

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Flight into nowhere

Ever heard of Pan Am Flight 914?

The story goes that on July 2, 1955, Flight 914 -- a Boeing 727 -- took off on a routine run from New York to Miami, with 57 passengers on board.  Everything was going normally until the airplane got close to its destination.  As it was making its initial descent into Miami Airport, the aircraft suddenly disappeared from radar.

There was a massive search effort.  At the time of its disappearance, it was over the Atlantic Ocean -- actually near one corner of the infamous Bermuda Triangle -- so ships, planes, and helicopters were deployed to look for wreckage and (hopefully) survivors.

No trace of the airplane or the people on it were found.

But on March 9, 1985 -- a bit less than thirty years after it took off -- a Boeing 727, coming seemingly out of nowhere, landed in Caracas, Venezuela.  From its tail numbers, it was the missing plane.  Witnesses to its landing reported seeing astonished faces plastered to the windows, apparently aghast at where they were.  But before anyone could deplane, the pilot maneuvered the plane back onto the runway and took off.

This time, apparently for good.  No one has seen the plane, any of the crew, or the 57 passengers since.

[Image courtesy of photographer Peter Duijnmayer and the Creative Commons]

Flight 914 has become a popular staple of the "unsolved mysteries" crowd, and has featured in various books and television shows of the type you see on the This Hasn't Been About History For A Long Time Channel.  Explanations, if you can dignify them with that name, include time slips and/or portals, alien abduction, and the government secretly kidnapping the people on the flight and putting them into suspended animation for thirty years, for some unspecified but undoubtedly nefarious purpose.

There's just one problem with all of this.

None of it actually happened.

Pan Am Flight 914 is a hoax, but one that for some reason refuses to die.  You'll run into various iterations of the claim (the one I linked in the first line of this post is only one of hundreds of examples), all of which have the same basic story but differ in the details -- the number of passengers, the dates of departure and arrival, and so on.  (One site I saw claimed that the flight didn't land until 1992.)  But if you take all of those variations on the tale of the disappearing airplane, and track them backwards, you find out that the whole thing started with...

... The Weekly World News.

I should have known.  There's a rule of thumb analogous to "All roads lead to Rome," which is "All idiotic hoaxes lead to The Weekly World News."  For those of you Of A Certain Age, you will undoubtedly remember this tabloid as the one in the grocery store checkout line that had headlines like, "Cher Gives Birth To Bigfoot's Baby."  They also are the ones that created the recurring character of Bat Boy:

This spawned literally dozens of stories in The Weekly World News, my favorite of which was that a time traveler had come back from the future and told people that Bat Boy eventually becomes president.  The best part is that they call him "President Boy."

Me, I'm in favor.  Given some of the potential choices we've got in 2024, Bat Boy couldn't do much worse.

Bat Boy has also been the basis for countless pieces of fan fiction and a PS 5 game, was the inspiration for the monster in the truly terrifying X Files episode "Patience," and is the main character -- I shit you not -- in a Broadway musical.

But I digress.

The fact that Pan Am Flight 914 came from the same source as Bat Boy, the underwater crystal pyramids of Atlantis, and a coverup involving a mass burial of aliens in Uganda should immediately call the claim into question, but for some reason, it doesn't.  Woo-woo websites, books, and television shows still feature the flight as one of the best-documented examples of a mysterious disappearance, even though Pan Am itself has confirmed that Flight 914 never happened and the whole thing was made up.

Of course, that's what they would say.  *suspicious single eyebrow-raise*

What amazes me is that even though a minimal amount of snooping around online would be enough to convince you that the whole story is a fabrication, the websites claiming it's true far outnumber the ones debunking it.  Further illustrating the accuracy of the quote -- of uncertain origin, but often misattributed to Mark Twain -- that "a lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots."

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The passport

When I was a kid, the high point of school was when we got the monthly Scholastic Book Club listings.

The opportunity to pick out a handful of books to buy -- at that point, back in the early 1970s, they cost an astonishing one or two dollars each -- turned me into the proverbial kid in the candy store.  I dutifully filled out my order form, submitted it and my money to the teacher -- and a few weeks later, there'd be a delivery of a box full of books to dole out to the students.

Pure magic.

It was in a SBC sale, when I was maybe twelve, that I got a copy of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

Afterwards, my world would never be the same again.

I completely lost myself in the adventures of Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace, along with their guides, the cheerful, shapeshifting Mrs. Whatsit, the classics-quoting Mrs. Who, and the mysterious and slightly intimidating Mrs. Which.  It was a glimpse into a universe the likes of which I'd never experienced before.

I was launched into a love of magical realism that is still with me today, fifty years later.  Along the way I discovered such masters as Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Guy de Maupassant, George MacDonald, and C. S. Lewis -- and later, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Christopher Moore, and Haruki Murakami.  What I learned from them informed my imagination and writing style, inspiring my own career as an author.

My latest -- coming out September 1!

I'm not alone in the sense that reading fiction was a lifeline when I was a child.

Research out of the University of Cambridge, published this week in the journal Psychological Medicine, has found that young people who are encouraged to read for pleasure score better on cognitive tests and have overall better mental health during their teenage years than children who don't.  The study looked at over ten thousand children, and the results were unequivocal.

"Reading isn’t just a pleasurable experience," said study co-author Barbara Sahakian.  "It’s widely accepted that it inspires thinking and creativity, increases empathy and reduces stress.  But on top of this, we found significant evidence that it’s linked to important developmental factors in children, improving their cognition, mental health, and brain structure, which are cornerstones for future learning and well-being."

I can also say that in my case, it was a welcome escape from a home situation that was -- to put it mildly -- non-ideal.  Knowing I could leave behind the unpleasantness I was immersed in daily, and tesser to the stars with Meg Murry and her friends, was a gateway to a world where I could forget my troubles, at least for a little while.

I shudder to think what my mental health would have been like if I hadn't had that magic door to escape through.

It's why I think equal emphasis should be given in schools to reading for comprehension and analysis, and reading for pure enjoyment.  Too much focus on the former, and the risk is convincing students that reading is a boring chore.  Yes, there's value in sharpening skills, and getting kids to think more deeply about what they read; but what we ideally want is getting them hooked -- and that only happens if they have an opportunity to explore what they want to read, whatever the genre or subject matter.

"We encourage parents to do their best to awaken the joy of reading in their children at an early age," said study co-author Jianfeng Feng.  "Done right, this will not only give them pleasure and enjoyment, but will also help their development and encourage long-term reading habits, which may also prove beneficial into adult life."

For some of them -- like myself -- it is not just beneficial, it was vital.  I still remember the thrill of getting my books from SBC, and even today I experience that same feeling when I walk into a bookstore or used book sale.  And it's what turned me into an author, now with twenty-two published books to my name.  My hope is that those books will be an inspiration to others -- perhaps providing them with a passport to other places and times, allowing them for a little while to glimpse the magic of worlds and characters beyond their own everyday experience.

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Stretching time

You know, I'm beginning to think that every time I want to write a piece about cosmology or physics, I should just write "Einstein wins again" and call it good.

One of my favorite science vloggers, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, gives a wry nod to this every time Einstein's name comes up in her videos -- which is frequently -- giving a little sigh and a shake of the head, and saying "Yeah, that guy again."

Maybe we should just stop arguing with him.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I did a post about a possible paradigm shift in cosmology that could account for the mysterious "dark energy," a property of spacetime that is causing the apparent runaway expansion of the universe.  While acknowledging that finding solid evidence for the contention is currently beyond our technical capabilities, I pointed out that it simultaneously does away with two of the most perplexing and persistent mysteries of physics -- dark energy, and the mismatch between the theoretical and experimentally-determined values of the cosmological constant.  (Calling it a "mismatch" is as ridiculous an understatement as you could get; the difference is about 120 degrees of magnitude, meaning the two values are off by a factor of 1 followed by 120 zeroes).

But this week a new study out of the University of Sydney has shown that another of Einstein's relativistic predictions about an expanding universe has been experimentally verified, so maybe -- to paraphrase Mark Twain -- rumors of the death of dark energy were great exaggerations.  A bizarre feature of the Theory of Relativity is time dilation, the fact that from the perspective of a stationary observer, the clock for a moving individual would appear to run more slowly.  This gives rise to the counterintuitive twin paradox, which I first ran into on Carl Sagan's Cosmos when I was in college.  If one of a pair of twins were to take off on a spaceship and travel for a year near the speed of light, then return to his starting point, he'd find that his twin would have aged greatly, while he only aged by a year.  To the traveler, his clocks seemed to run normally; but his stay-at-home brother would have experienced time running much faster.

As an aside -- this is the idea behind my favorite song by Queen, the poignant and heartbreaking "'39," the lyrics for which were penned by the band's lead guitarist, astrophysicist Brian May.  Give it a listen, and -- if you're like me -- have tissues handy.

In any case, the recent research looks at a weird feature of the effects of relativity on time.  The prediction is that the expansion of the universe should affect all the dimensions of spacetime -- and therefore, in the early universe, time should (from our perspective) seem to have been running more slowly.

And that's exactly what they found.  (Recall that when you're looking outward in space, you're looking backward in time.)  The trick was finding a "standard clock" -- some phenomenon whose rate is steady, predictable, and well-understood.  They used the fluctuations in emissions from quasars -- extremely distant, massive, and luminous proto-galaxies -- and found that, exactly as relativity predicts, the farther away they are (i.e. the further back in time you're looking), the more slowly these "standard clocks" are running.  The most distant ones are experiencing a flow of time that (from our perspective) is five times slower than our clocks run now.

"[E]arlier studies led people to question whether quasars are truly cosmological objects, or even if the idea of expanding space is correct," said study co-author Geraint Lewis.  "With these new data and analysis, however, we’ve been able to find the elusive tick of the quasars and they behave just as Einstein’s relativity predicts."

The bizarre thing, though, is the "from our perspective" part; just like the traveling twin, anyone back then would have thought their clocks were running just fine.  It's only when you compare different reference frames that things start getting odd.  So it's not that "our clocks are right and theirs were slow;" both of us, from our own vantage points, think time is running as usual.  Neither reference frame is right or wrong.  The passage of time is relative to your velocity with respect to another frame.

Apparently it's also relative to what the fabric of spacetime around you is doing.

I'm not well-versed enough in the intricacies of physics to know if this really is a death blow to the paradigm-shifting proposal of a flat, static universe I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, but at least to my layperson's understanding, it sure seems like it would be problematic.  So as far as the nature of dark energy and the problem of the cosmological constant mismatch, it's back to the drawing board.

Einstein wins again.

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