Music and the mind

In September, I started taking piano lessons.

I've played the piano off and on for years (more off than on, I'm afraid), but was entirely self-taught.  To say my formal music background is thin is an understatement; I had a lousy experience with elementary school band, said "to hell with it," and that was the end of my music education in public schools.  However, I was (and am) deeply in love with music, so I picked up the flute at age sixteen, and taught myself how to play it.  I took four years of lessons with a wonderful flutist and teacher named Margaret Vitus when I was in my twenties, but until last fall those accounted for the sum total of my instruction in music of any sort.

My experience as a student -- both with Margaret forty-odd years ago, and with J. P. (my piano teacher) now -- has been interesting from a number of standpoints.  In both cases I profited greatly by having someone tell me what bad habits are holding me back, and (more importantly) what I can do to remediate them.  But my spotty background has resulted in some unique challenges.  On the upside, I have an extraordinary ear and memory for melodies and rhythms, to the point that my wife calls it my "superpower."  I once heard a piece of Serbian music in a Balkan dance class when I was in my twenties, and heard it again thirty years later, and immediately knew it was the same tune even though I hadn't heard it or played it during that time.  

The downside, though, is that my lack of formal training means there are great gaping holes in my knowledge.  I'm currently working on a charming and whimsical piece by Claude Debussy, "Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum," which like much of Debussy's music twists around our sense of keys and harmonies. 

"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Every day, practice, practice, practice."

So J. P. -- for whom music is about as natural as breathing -- will look at some passage, and say something that sounds like, "Oh, that's a B-flat Minor Seven Demented chord."  Once I analyze what he told me using paper, pencil, and a slide rule, after three or four hours of study I can usually say, "Oh, okay, I guess I get it," but it definitely isn't anything close to intuitively obvious.  Like, ever.  So I'm still at the point of having to read each note slowly and painstakingly, and although I think the piece is lovely (well, when someone else plays it), I don't have any real comprehension of its structure.

If you're curious, here's how it's supposed to sound:

Fortunately, J. P. is an extraordinary teacher and gets my struggles, and is working to help me fill in the gaps in my knowledge.  It's slow going, but I guess that's no different from anyone learning a musical instrument.

The reason this comes up today is a study by a team from the University of L'Aquila and the University of Teramo that discovered an interesting correlation; people who have studied music seriously have better working memory -- the ability to retrieve and load information into their "attentional stream."  Stronger and faster working memory is positively associated with a greater capacity for divergent thinking, and thus the facilitation of creativity.

The authors write:

Musical practices have recently attracted the attention of research focusing on their creative properties and the creative potential of musicians.  Indeed, a typical cliché of musicians is that they are considered predominantly artistic individuals, meaning that they are creative and original.  Practicing music is certainly an intense and multisensory experience that requires the acquisition and maintenance of a range of cognitive and motor skills throughout a musician’s life.  Indeed, music practice increases a wide range of cognitive abilities, such as visuospatial reasoning, processing speed, and [working memory], from the early stages of life.  For this reason, musicians are considered an excellent human model for the study of behavioral, cognitive, and brain effects in the acquisition, practice, maintenance, and integration of sensory, cognitive, and motor skills...

[E]xperience in the music field enhances [divergent thinking] in terms of fluency, flexibility, and originality.  Strengthening the associative modes of processing, which facilitate the retrieval of information from long-term memory, and improving the working memory competences, which facilitate the online recombination of information, might explain the relationship between musical practice and [divergent thinking].

All of which bolsters something I've been saying for years; we need to be actively supporting art and music in schools.  Sadly, school boards much more often have the opposite mentality -- the esteemed "STEM" subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) are emphasized and thus funded, and the arts (sometimes derisively called "extras") are on the chopping block when money gets tight.

Which, of course, is all the time.  But wouldn't it be nice if the educational powers-that-be actually read the research, and acknowledged that music and art are every bit as important as STEM?

In any case, it's good to know that my struggling to learn piano might provide some other benefits besides making Debussy turn over in his grave.  Hell, at age 63, I'm thrilled to have any boosts to my cognition I can get.  And even if I'll never be able to play "Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum" like Lang Lang does, maybe the skills I learn from my piano lessons will spill over into other creative realms.  

After all, as Maya Angelou said, "You can't use up creativity.  The more you use, the more you have."

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Cutting off the circulation

Around 12,900 years ago, the world was warming up after the last major ice age.  Climatologists call it the "Late Glacial Interstadial," a natural warm-up due to the combined effects of the slow, gradual alterations in the Earth's orbit and precession cycle.  But then...

... something happened, and within only a few decades, the Northern Hemisphere -- especially what are now North America and western Europe -- were plunged back into the deep freeze.

The episode is called the "Younger Dryas" event, because the way scientists figured out it had happened was finding traces of pollen in ice cores from a plant, Dryas octopetala, which is only found in cold, dry, windswept habitats.  Areas that had been progressing toward boreal forest, or even temperate hardwood forest, suddenly reverted to tundra.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Steinsplitter, Weiße Silberwurz (Dryas octopetala) 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

There are a number of curious features of the Younger Dryas event.  First, its speed -- climate shifts ordinarily take place on the scale of centuries or millennia, not decades.  Second, the fact that its effects were huge (the average temperature in Greenland dropped by something on the order of 7 C), but were limited in range; in fact, the Southern Hemisphere appears to have continued warming.  And third, after the initial plunge, the system righted itself over the next twelve hundred years -- by 11,700 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was back on its warming track, and caught up with the rest of the world.

What could have caused such a strange, sudden, and catastrophic event is still a matter of some debate, but the leading candidate is that something halted the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, sometimes nicknamed "the Atlantic conveyor."  This is the massive ocean current of which the Gulf Stream is only a small part, and which is powered by warm water evaporating and cooling as it moves north, finally becoming cold and salty (and thus dense) enough to sink, somewhere south of Iceland.  This draws more warm water up from near the equator.  But as the Earth was warming during the Interstadial, the ice in the north was melting, eventually making the water in the North Atlantic too fresh to sink, and thus halting the entire circulation.  Some researchers think the process was sent into overdrive by the collapse of an ice dam holding back a massive freshwater lake called Lake Agassiz (encompassing what are now all five Great Lakes and the surrounding region), causing it to drain down the Saint Lawrence Seaway and into the North Atlantic, stopping the AMOC dead in its tracks.  (This point is still being debated.)

What's certain is that the AMOC stopped, suddenly, and took over a thousand years to get started again, plunging the Northern Hemisphere back into an ice age.

Why does this come up today?

Because a new study out of the University of Utrecht has found that our out-of-control fossil fuel use, and consequent boosting of the global temperature and melting of polar ice, is hurtling the AMOC toward the same situation it faced 12,900 years ago.  One of the consequences of anthropogenic global warming might be sending eastern Canada, the northeastern United States, and western Europe into the freezer.

One of the most alarming findings of the study is that climatologists have been systematically overestimating the stability of the AMOC.  It's an easy mistake to make; the current is absolutely enormous, amounting to a hundred million cubic meters of water per second, which is nearly a hundred times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world.  The idea of anything perturbing something that massive is a little hard to imagine.

But that's what happened during the Younger Dryas, and it happened fast.  The new study suggests that if the AMOC does collapse, within twenty years the temperature of Great Britain, Scandinavia, and the rest of northern Europe could see winter temperatures ten to thirty degrees Celsius colder than they are now, which would completely alter the ecosystems of the region (including agriculture).  It would also change precipitation patterns drastically, and in ways we are currently unable to predict.

If you're not already alarmed enough, here's how climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf put it, writing for the site RealClimate:

Given the impacts, the risk of an AMOC collapse is something to be avoided at all cost.  As I’ve said before: the issue is not whether we’re sure this is going to happen.  The issue is that we need to rule this out at 99.9 % probability.  Once we have a definite warning signal it will be too late to do anything about it, given the inertia in the system...  We will continue to ignore this risk at our peril.

The problem is that last bit -- we don't have a very good history of addressing problems ahead of time.  We're much more prone to waiting until things are really awful, at which point they're harder (if not impossible) to fix.  We've let the corporate interests and short-term expediency drive policy for too long; it's increasingly looking like we're close to hitting the now-or-never point.

We need to start electing candidates who take this whole thing seriously.  It is the most important issue of our time.  I try not to be a one-issue voter, but if someone's answer to "What do you intend to do to remediate climate change" is "Nothing" -- or, worse, "Climate change is't real" -- they've lost my vote.

And they should lose yours, too.  For the good of the planet.

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The Nephilim visit Miami

If you needed further evidence that whoever is controlling the simulation we're all trapped in has gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us, today we have: giant shadow aliens visiting a mall in Miami.

The event in question took place over a month ago, so I have to apologize for being a half a measure behind the rest of the orchestra, here.  On the other hand, since then the story has taken on a life of its own, and has grown way beyond the original claim, which was bizarre enough.  Apparently on January 1, some rowdy teens started a large brawl at Bayside Marketplace, so the police were called in.  This isn't anything unusual for Miami, so you'd think it'd have passed for business as usual, but then someone -- no one seems quite sure who -- got on social media and claimed that the police weren't there to handle some teenage brawlers, but to deal with "eight to ten foot tall shadow aliens."

This would be eye-opening even by south Florida standards.  Oddly enough, despite the fact that everybody and his dog now has a phone capable of taking high-quality photographs, no one seems to have snapped a pic of these aliens.  So of course, very quickly people realized that it was just a stupid rumor, there were no aliens, and everyone calmed down and went home, chuckling about how silly they'd all been.

Ha-ha, just kidding!  Of course that's not what happened.  What happened is that the rumor exploded that the police had prevented people from photographing the aliens, even resorting to confiscating and/or destroying people's phones.  Or that the aliens were "interdimensional space beings" who could not be photographed.  Possibly both.  The Miami Police Department issued a statement that it had "just been an altercation between about fifty juveniles," adding, "There were no aliens, UFOs, or ETs.  No airports were closed, and there were no power outages," and followed it up with the facepalm emoji.

Which accomplished exactly nothing.  Because why would the police be denying it if it weren't true?

Inescapable logic, that.

After that, there were only two things left to figure out; why were the police suppressing information about the aliens?  And who exactly were these tall, shadowy beings that mysteriously could not be photographed? 

I think we can all agree that given the evidence, there's only one possible conclusion: we are seeing the return of the Nephilim, as hath been foretold in the Bible, and the police are under orders from the Illuminati to make sure that no one finds out.

You may think I'm making this up, but this claim went off on social media like some hundred-megaton stupidity bomb.  "Let's talk about these creatures that supposedly are UFOs," said one TikToker.  "If you're a Christian you should already know.  These UFOs are fallen angels.  Remember, the devil's main goal is to make sure you don't believe he is real, and that Jesus is also not real.  This is just a warning that time is running out, and you better get close to Jesus."  One guy calling himself "the Apostle Preston," who on the video appeared to be tuning into God via an earpiece, said, "I hear you, Lord.  Tell the people there will be sightings of giants.  Giants that have been in hiding.  There will be sightings of them.  He said, 'But tell my people also not to fear.  Because what's going to happen is that when these giants are sighted, there will be great fear among men, and many of you will forget who your God is.'  This is why you need to be in a place of preparation."  A TikToker called -- I swear I'm not making this up -- "endtimelady" did a long video about how the aliens in Miami are actually Nephilim but they're also demons, and they're going to come out and terrorize us.  Oh, and we should be careful to control our thoughts, because they're telepathic.  "This is going to get more and more common," she said.  "Because we're in the End Times."

I guess if your handle is "endtimelady" you gotta bring that up somehow.

My favorite, though, is the guy who kept saying, "Why is nobody talking about this?" when, in fact, every lunatic on social media seems to be doing nothing but talking about this.

It's been a month and a half since the incident took place, and it's showing no signs of slowing down.  You'd think that questions like, "Where have the giant aliens been hiding since January 1?" and "If the powers-that-be are so desperate to prevent anyone from finding out about this, how are there videos and posts by the tens of thousands all over the internet, and no one's doing anything about it?" would come to people's minds.  Not to mention, "Why am I paying any attention to the crazed ramblings of people who obviously have a pound and a half of Malt-O-Meal where the rest of us have a brain?"

But this is social media, where everything's made up, and logic and evidence don't matter.

Anyhow.  You might want to keep an eye out for giant shadowy aliens.  Seems like they'd be hard to miss, but you never know.  I'm going to place my three dogs on High Red Alert Mode, usually reserved for Extreme Danger Situations like the arrival of the UPS guy.  So we'll all be watching for new developments.  If "endtimelady" is right and these are the End Times, I'd actually be thrilled, because I live in rural upstate New York and it's kind of boring around here.  The arrival of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons and the Beast With Seven Heads And Ten Crowns would be a welcome relief from the monotony.

On the other hand, if my initial take is correct and none of it is real and it is the result of superintelligent beings messing around with the computer simulation we're in, y'all just need to stop.  In the last few years the weirdness dial has already been turned up to eleven, and I think that's about all we can cope with, down here.  So y'all just sober up and simmer down, okay?

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Thin places

My first trip overseas, back in 1995, was an ambitious one; I did a month-long solo hike across England, starting on the shore of the Irish Sea in Blackpool and ending on a hill overlooking the North Sea in Whitby.  I decided to have a theme for the trip -- a practice I have continued to this day -- and the theme I chose was monasteries.

A great many of the abbeys in England were destroyed during the "Dissolution of the Monasteries," when King Henry VIII decided the church was getting way too rich and powerful and decided to see what he could do to remedy that.  Between 1536 and 1541, over eight hundred monasteries, abbeys, and convents were closed and their property sold off, the abbots, priests, and nuns turned out or arrested outright, the majestic buildings left to sink slowly into ruin.

Along the path I took, which largely coincides with the North York Moors Trail, there were a number of these relics, and I made a point of seeing as many as I could.  They were impressive, beautiful, tragic places, monuments not only to spirituality but to greed (on both sides of the struggle).

Unsurprisingly, the spiritual side of it didn't have a great impact on me, except for my sympathy for the religious men and women who had dedicated themselves to the contemplative life and then had those lives turned upside down by the conflict.  But it all seemed relegated in the distant past, unable to touch my modern experience except as a historical footnote.

Until I got to Rievaulx Abbey, near the town of Helmsley.

My hike into Rievaulx was on a gorgeous day -- one of the few I had during a four-week period that was cold and rainy even by English standards.  That day the weather was mild and sunny, with only a few white clouds in an azure sky. I crested a low line of hills, and looked down into the little valley in which the ruins of the abbey sit, and was dumbstruck.

It was not solely because of the spot's beauty, although beautiful it certainly is.  The place gave me chills, as if I was looking at something that wasn't quite of this world -- a reaction I had never experienced before and haven't experienced since.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons WyrdLight.com, RievaulxAbbey-wyrdlight-24588, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Now, twenty-five years ago, I was every bit as much of a skeptic as I am now, but I couldn't shake the feeling the entire time I wandered around the abbey grounds.  I dropped my pack and shucked my shoes by the side of a little tumbling river that runs through the valley, cooling my sore feet, and kept thinking about the men and women who had lived here -- and whose presence I could still, inexplicably, feel around me.

During my visit, I struck up a conversation with a friendly middle-aged couple, who ended up inviting me to have mid-afternoon tea with them.  I mentioned my odd sensations to them, and the woman immediately smiled.  "Oh, yes," she said.  "Lots of people feel that way about Rievaulx.  One gets the impression not that the place is sacred because it's the site of an abbey, but that the abbey was built there because the place was already sacred."

I have never been able to explain what I felt during that visit, other than my rational side's certainty that the beauty of the day and the history of the place simply got the better of me.  But I keep coming back to the fact that I never had those sensations in any of the other religious sites I saw on that trip -- which included gorgeous, history-laden places such as York Cathedral, Fountains Abbey, Kirkham Priory, and Grey Friars Tower.  There was something different about Rievaulx, but what that something is, I've never put my finger on.

The Scots call spots like Rievaulx "thin places."  We walk side-by-side with the spirit world, the legends go, separated by an invisible veil, but in some places the veil is thin and we get a glimpse, or sometimes just a feeling, that there's something more there than meets the eye.  Places like that aren't haunted in the conventional sense, but true believers will tell you that you can't go there and come away unscathed.

I won't say that my visit to Rievaulx convinced me of some kind of ineffable otherworld; after all here I am, over two decades later, still talking about rationalism and skepticism and for the most part casting a wry eye at claims of the paranormal.  But something happened to me in that little valley, whether I was picking up on a thin spot in the veil or it was simply the product of my senses acting on my often-overwrought imagination.

And while I don't agree with his basic assumptions, the whole experience makes the quote from the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade have a strange resonance for me: "Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane...  In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural profane world."

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Tales of a Death Star

One of the most promising areas of study for astrobiologists -- scientists who are interested in the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe -- is the potential for life on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.  We're beginning to develop the technology to detect biosignatures -- chemical traces of living things in the atmospheres of moons or exoplanets -- but it's a hell of a lot easier to find those in our own Solar System than it is around the barely-visible specks of light that are all we can see of most exoplanetary systems.

Despite their distance from the Sun, due to tidal heating there are several of these moons that are thought to have liquid water beneath a frozen crust.  Four commonly-discussed possibilities are Europa (Jupiter), Enceladus and Titan (Saturn) and Triton (Neptune); the case is nearly certain for Europa and Enceladus, where fly-bys have detected liquid water geysers erupting from surface cracks in the ice sheet.

What could be down there, I wonder?  Single-celled life is the most likely, but with no further information... well, anything's possible.  We only have a sample size of one regarding how life forms and evolves, so trying to predict what it would look like somewhere else is going to be speculation at best.

The conventional wisdom has been that the smaller moons are unlikely places to look for life; being smaller, they lose heat faster, so any heat gains they get from the Sun and from tidal compression are far offset by heat loss from their small thermal mass. 

That assessment will have to be revised, apparently.  A new study -- out this week in Nature -- found that Saturn's moon Mimas, best known for having a huge crater that makes it look like the Death Star from Star Wars, has an ocean of liquid water underneath a crust of ice and frozen methane.  It's only four hundred kilometers in diameter, over eight times smaller than our own Moon.

A photograph of Mimas from the 2010 pass by the probe Cassini [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The frozen crust of Mimas is thought to be so thick (something on the order of twenty to thirty kilometers) that it precludes the cracks that cause the geysers on Enceladus and Europa.  So the liquid water inside is trapped -- but the effects of tidal heating from the enormous planet it orbits are apparently enough to keep it well above freezing, and therefore very likely to enable the convection currents which overturn nutrients in our own oceans and are essential for the maintenance of ecosystems.  

Based on what we know about the formation of moons and their stability in orbit around their host planet, Mimas is estimated to be quite young, something on the order of between five and fifteen million years old.  This seems like a very short time even to evolve simple single-celled organisms, but as I said before -- it's not like we have a bunch of test cases from which to draw inferences.

"Mimas was probably the most unlikely place to look for a global ocean — and liquid water more generally," said study co-author Valéry Lainey, of the Paris Observatory.  "So that looks like a potential habitable world.  But nobody knows how much time is needed for life to arise."

I'm always fascinated when we find this sort of thing, because it seems like every time we get new information affecting the terms of the Drake Equation, the estimates are revised upward.  At first, we didn't know if planet formation was at all likely, or if the Solar System was a fluke; now it seems like exoplanets are kind of everywhere we look, and most stars have planetary systems.  Most stars that have been studied have at least one planet in the habitable zone, and the size of the habitable zone is way bigger than we used to think.  Forming the biochemistry of life turns out to be simple; like exoplanets, complex organic molecules turn out to be all over the place.  And so on.

So could Mimas host life?  Entirely possible.  "Not life as we know it, Jim" -- but life nonetheless.  I still think that Europa and Enceladus are more likely (remember the end of the movie 2010?  "All of these worlds are yours except Europa, attempt no landing there") but life could well be common, not just out in the galaxy but right here in our own Solar System.

And maybe I'll live to see confirmation of it.  What a monumental overturning of our self-importance that would be.  It'd be a total game changer.  Proving once and for all that life is abundant in the cosmos... and that we are not alone.

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The strange story of the Priory of Sion

I'm often astonished at the lengths people will go to to perpetrate hoaxes.

What can possibly motivate them?  Is it just about getting their fifteen minutes of fame?  Or the superior feeling of being able to laugh at the suckers who fall for their shtick?  Or the fun of creating a wild story -- something that, as a novelist, I can certainly understand?

It was some combination of all of those that motivated the main characters in my all-time favorite novel, Umberto Eco's twisty, labyrinthine masterpiece Foucault's Pendulum.  We meet three cynical, bored book editors who work for Manutius Press, a publishing company that specializes in esoteric woo.  None of the three believe a word of what they publish; it's a job, pure and simple.  But then they realize that having done this for years, the three of them can come up with a better book than any of the writers they publish.  Skip the middle-man, out-woo the woo-practitioners.  So using their extensive knowledge of history and esoterica, they cook up the be-all-end-all conspiracy theory, involving the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, Nostradamus, the Roman Catholic Church, the Bogomils, the Crusaders, and the final resting place of the Holy Grail.  Their book leaves the reader hanging, though -- implying that part of the mystery was too catastrophically powerful and dangerous to reveal in print.

But their plan backfires spectacularly, because the book catches the attention of a (very serious) secret society, who believe it's all true -- and they kidnap one of the editors and threaten to kill him if the three don't reveal the rest of their secret.

Which doesn't exist, remember?  Because they made it all up?

But, of course, the more they protest, the more convinced the secret society is that they are hiding something.  Why else would they be arguing so vehemently?

I was immediately reminded of Foucault's Pendulum when I stumbled across the (true) story of Pierre Plantard (18 March 1920 - 3 February 2000), a French artist who is best known for perpetrating one of the most byzantine hoaxes I've ever heard of.  It's called "The Priory of Sion," and what strikes me is the lengths to which he went to create it, and the number of apparently intelligent people he suckered into believing.  Like the creation of the jaded editors in Eco's novel, the whole thing kind of turned into a juggernaut -- although there's no indication anyone ever threatened to kill Plantard to force him to reveal more of his secrets.

In fact, calling them "secrets" is kind of inaccurate, given that he pretty much never talked about anything else.

Plantard himself seems to have been a rather unsavory character.  During World War II he established himself as an ultranationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Masonic agitator.  In fact, he offered to help out Philippe Pétain, the leader of the collaborationist Vichy Régime, but apparently his views were too out there even for Pétain, and he was refused.  So Plantard decided to strike off on his own and founded the Alpha Galates, an "order of knighthood" with sacred rites and the whole shebang, but despite his best efforts, according to Paris Police Prefect Claude Charlot who investigated it, it "only ever had four regular members."

But hey, if at first you don't succeed...

After the war ended, Plantard decided to give it another shot, and this time, it took off beyond his wildest dreams.

The gist is that Godfrey de Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade, had created a secret society called "the Priory of Sion" in 1099 as he stood atop Mount Zion in Palestine, which was dedicated to making certain that the bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty would be installed on all the thrones of Europe.  The reason, you see, is that the Merovingians weren't (as you may have learned in history class) the leaders of the Franks, a confederation of Germanic tribes from northern Europe.

Oh, no.  They are actually the direct descendants of Jesus Christ and his wife, Mary Magdalene.

Yes, I know, there's no mention in the Bible of Jesus being married, much less to Mary Magdalene.  Just play along, okay?

Plantard tells us that clues include some paintings by seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin, whose mythological studies Plantard interpreted as representing such themes as the reincarnation of the assassinated Merovingian king Dagobert II, who in Plantard's scheme was a "holy martyr" who had been killed by the Bad Guys because (1) he knew too much, and (2) he was Jesus's descendant and the Bad Guys couldn't have that.

Et in Arcadia Ego by Nicolas Poussin (1630), one of the paintings that supposedly has hidden messages about the Priory of Sion [Image is in the Public Domain]

Since then, the Big Secrets had been perpetuated through a lineage of Grand Masters, which includes some famous names, such as Nicolas Flamel, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Claude Debussy. 

Well, the problem with Plantard's scheme is that there's no hard evidence for it, because he made the entire thing up.  But hey, that's no problem!

Because you can always make that up as well.

Working with two guys named Philippe de Chérisey and Noël Corbu, Plantard created fake documents -- medieval-looking parchments that had information supporting the whole scheme.  He then planted them all over, in churches and in libraries specializing in ancient texts -- including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.  But he and his collaborators weren't content to just sit back and wait for them to be discovered, so he enlisted the help of author Gérard de Sède to write a book about the forged manuscripts, alleging that a Catholic priest in the late nineteenth century, Bérenger Saunière, had found them while supervising the renovation of his church at Rennes-le-Château, but had recognized how dangerous they were and hid them again.  

The book became a bestseller.

At this point, it becomes hard to sort out who actually fell for the hoax, who simply thought it was entertaining fiction, and who had nothing to do with it but was accused of being an initiate and so got tangled up in it unfairly.  The whole thing even ensnared a couple of close associates of President François Mitterand and Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy.  Even after Plantard's death in 2000 at the age of 79, the claim lived on -- in fiction such as Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and in (supposedly) non-fictional form in books like The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guardians of Christ's Sacred Bloodline, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, and "documentaries" like Bloodline.

It is, in fact, the conspiracy theory that refuses to die.

But to go back to my original point: the whole thing was made up.  We know this for a fact.  The documentary evidence was forged; the story of those manuscripts being found in a church by a Catholic priest in 1891 was a lie invented by a novelist Plantard had hired to help him.

So how does this still have momentum?  I guess the answer is that you can't convince people who don't want to know the truth.  That, at least, is the conclusion Eco had his character Casaubon come to at the end of Foucault's Pendulum:

I left Paris this morning.  I left too many clues.  They've had time to guess where I am.  In a little while, They will be here.  I would have liked to write down everything I thought today.  But if They were to read it, They would only derive another dark theory and spend another eternity trying to decipher the ancient message hidden behind my words.  It's impossible, They would say; he can't only have been making fun of us.  No.  Perhaps, without his realizing it, Being was sending us a message through its oblivion.

It makes no difference whether I write or not.  They will look for other meanings, even in my silence.  That's how They are.  Blind to revelation.

But try telling Them that.  They of little faith.

So I might as well stay here, wait, and look at the hill.

It's so beautiful.

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Wings over Skye

I know it seems like I keep ringing the changes on this topic over and over, but... it never fails to astonish me how much the Earth has changed over geologic history.

Part of my fascination, I think, comes from the fact that this knowledge is so at odds with how it feels to be an actual inhabitant of the planet.  When you look around, it seems like things are pretty static.  Oh, there are changes -- volcanoes and earthquakes come to mind -- but however catastrophic those can be for local residents, the fact remains that they are, on a planetary scale, tiny effects.  To see the big shifts requires a much longer time axis, but if you have the perspective of one...

... wow.

Take, for example, the discovery of new species of pterosaur in one of the last places I can picture a pterosaur flying -- the Isle of Skye, Scotland.  Now a cool, windswept, rocky island chain with few trees and lots of grass and heather, the Hebrides (and the rest of the British Isles) were, during the Jurassic Period, a lush subtropical land only separated from what would become North America and Greenland by a shallow strait of ocean.

The configuration of the continents at the mid-Jurassic [Image credit: Ron Blakey, NAU Geology]

And flying over the forests of Jurassic Scotland were some of the coolest prehistoric beasts ever, the pterosaurs.

Dubbed Ceoptera evansae -- the genus name means "mist flyer," from the Gaelic word ceò, mist, which also gives the Isle of Skye its Gaelic name of Eilean a'Cheò, "misty island" -- the newly-discovered fossil was found in the Kilmaluag Formation and dated to about 167 million years of age.  Ceoptera was a smallish pterosaur, measuring about sixty centimeters from beak to tail tip:

[Image credit: Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone et al., Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology]

The era when Ceoptera was flying over the Isle of Skye was a point of great diversification amongst the pterosaurs, a process which would accelerate during the rest of the Jurassic and into the Cretaceous, ultimately resulting in species from fifty-centimeter-long Sordes pilosus to the six-meter-wingspan Quetzalcoatlus northropi.  Eventually, however, the entire taxon would be wiped out in the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of sixty-six million years ago.

"The time period that Ceoptera is from is one of the most important periods of pterosaur evolution, and is also one in which we have some of the fewest specimens, indicating its significance," said Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone of the University of Bristol, who led the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "To find that there were more bones embedded within the rock, some of which were integral in identifying what kind of pterosaur Ceoptera is, made this an even better find than initially thought.  It brings us one step closer to understanding where and when the more advanced pterosaurs evolved."

For me, the coolest part is trying to picture what the world looked like back then.  Even with our knowledge of plate tectonics and the fossils we have available for study, we still have only the shadowiest image of the Jurassic world.  Consider what doesn't fossilize -- colors, sounds, smells, behavior.  We can make some guesses about what those were like based upon modern organisms, but guesses they will always be, and many of them significantly off the mark.  (If you want a good laugh some time, look into "prehistoric animals that were reconstructed wrong" and find out how wildly inaccurate even the experts can be.  Fortunately, science self-corrects, and the fact that we now know they were wrong comes from better fossils and more sophisticated analysis -- but even so, we still have a vague and incomplete picture of what things were really like back then.  Oh, for a time machine...)

So that's our flight of fancy for today.  Prehistoric wings over the Isle of Skye.  Makes you wonder what things will look like in another 160 million years or so.  We'll have a whole new set of "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful," to use Darwin's trenchant words -- ones we could not even begin to predict.

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