Marching into the uncanny valley

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

That quote from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park kept going through my head as I read about the latest in robotics from Columbia University -- a robot that can recognize a human facial expression, then mimic it so fast that it looks like it's responding to emotion the way a real human would.

One of the major technical problems with trying to get robots to emulate human emotions is that up until now, they hadn't been able to respond quickly enough to make it look natural.  A delayed smile, for example, comes across as forced; on a mechanical face it drops right into the uncanny valley, the phenomenon noted by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 as an expression or gesture that is close to being human, but not quite close enough.  Take, for example, "Sophia," the interactive robot invented back in 2016 that was able to mimic human expressions, but for most people generated an "Oh, hell no" response rather than the warm-and-trusting-confidant response which the roboticists were presumably shooting for.  The timing of her expressions and comments was subtly off, and the result was that very few of us would have trusted Sophia with the kitchen knives when our backs were turned.

This new creation, though -- a robot called "Emo" -- is able to pick up on human microexpressions that signal a smile or a frown or whatnot is coming, and respond in kind so fast that it looks like true empathy.  They trained it using hours of videos of people interacting, until finally the software controlling its face was able to detect the tiny muscle movements that preceded a change in facial expressions, allowing it to emulate the emotional response it was watching.

Researcher Yuhang Hu interacting with Emo  [Image credit: Creative Machines Lab, Columbia University]

"I think predicting human facial expressions accurately is a revolution in HRI [human-robot interaction]," Hu said.  "Traditionally, robots have not been designed to consider humans' expressions during interactions. Now, the robot can integrate human facial expressions as feedback.  When a robot makes co-expressions with people in real-time, it not only improves the interaction quality but also helps in building trust between humans and robots.  In the future, when interacting with a robot, it will observe and interpret your facial expressions, just like a real person."

Hod Lipson, professor of robotics and artificial intelligence research at Columbia, at least gave a quick nod toward the potential issues with this, but very quickly lapsed into superlatives about how wonderful it would be.  "Although this capability heralds a plethora of positive applications, ranging from home assistants to educational aids, it is incumbent upon developers and users to exercise prudence and ethical considerations," Lipson said.  "But it’s also very exciting -- by advancing robots that can interpret and mimic human expressions accurately, we're moving closer to a future where robots can seamlessly integrate into our daily lives, offering companionship, assistance, and even empathy.  Imagine a world where interacting with a robot feels as natural and comfortable as talking to a friend."

Yeah, I'm imagining it, but not with the pleased smile Lipson probably wants.  I suspect I'm not alone in thinking, "What in the hell are we doing?"  We're already at the point where generative AI is not only flooding the arts -- resulting in actual creative human beings finding it hard to make a living -- but deepfake AI photographs, audio, and video are becoming so close to the real thing that you simply can't trust what you see or hear anymore.  We evolved to recognize when something in our environment was dangerously off; many psychologists think the universality of the uncanny valley phenomenon is because our brains long ago evolved the ability to detect a subtle "wrongness" in someone's expression as a warning signal.

But what happens when the fake becomes so good, so millimeter-and-millisecond accurate, that our detection systems stop working?

I don't tend to be an alarmist, but the potential for misusing this technology is, to put not too fine a point on it, fucking enormous.  We don't need another proxy for human connection; we need more opportunities for actual human connection.  We don't need another way for corporations with their own agendas (almost always revolving around making more money) to manipulate us using machines that can trick us into thinking we're talking with a human.

And for cryin' in the sink, we don't need more ways in which we can be lied to.

I'm usually very much rah-rah about scientific advances, and it's always seemed to me an impossibly thorny ethical conundrum to determine whether there are things humans simply shouldn't investigate.  Who sets those limits, and based upon what rules?  Here, though, we're accelerating the capacity for the unscrupulous to take advantage -- not just of the gullible, anymore, but everyone -- because we're rapidly getting to the point that even the smart humans won't be able to tell the difference between what's real and what's not.

And that's a flat-out dangerous situation.

So a qualified congratulations to Hu and Lipson and their team.  What they've done is, honestly, pretty amazing.  But that said, they need to stop, and so do the AI techbros who are saying "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" and inundating the internet with generative AI everything. 

And for the love of all that's good and holy, all of us internet users need to STOP SHARING AI IMAGES.  Completely.  Not only is it often passing off a faked image as real -- worse, the software is trained using art and photography without permission from, compensation to, or even the knowledge of the actual human artists and photographers.  I.e. -- it's stolen.  I don't care how "beautiful" or "cute" or "precious" you think it is.  If you don't know the source of an image, and can't be bothered to find out, don't share it.  It's that simple.

We need to put the brakes on, hard, at least until we have lawmakers consider -- in a sober and intelligent fashion -- how to evaluate the potential dangers, and set some guidelines for how this technology can be fairly and safely used.

Otherwise, we're marching right into the valley of the shadow of uncanniness, absurdly confident we'll be fine despite all the warning signs.

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Mysterious mountains

It's amazing how far human knowledge has come in only a hundred years.

Consider the following about the year 1924:

• This is the year we would figure out that there are other galaxies beyond the Milky Way; before this, astronomers thought the Milky Way was all there was.  They called the galaxies they knew about (such as Andromeda and the Whirlpool Galaxy) "nebulae" (Latin for "clouds") and thought they were blobs of dust within our own galaxy.  This marks the moment we realized how big the universe actually is.
• In 1924, the quantum nature of reality was still unknown; the first major papers by Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Born would come out next year.
• It'd be another four years before the first antibiotic -- penicillin -- was discovered.
• It'd be five years before Edwin Hubble announced his discovery of red shift, which showed the universe is expanding and led to the Big Bang model of cosmology.
• We'd have another seventeen years before we'd see the first electron micrograph of a virus; before that, it was known they caused disease, but no one knew what they were or had ever seen one.
• It'd be another twenty years before DNA was shown to be the genetic material, and a good twenty years after that when Franklin, Watson, and Crick figured out its structure and the basics of how it works.
• The first papers outlining the mechanics of plate tectonics were still forty years in the future; at this point, the only one who championed the idea that the continents moved was German geologist and climatologist Alfred Wegener, who was pretty much laughed out of the field because of it (and ultimately died in 1930 on an expedition to Greenland).

It's the last one that's germane to our topic today, which is a largely-unexplained (and massive) feature of North Africa that goes to show that however far we've come, there are still plenty of things left for the scientists to explain.  It's called the Tibesti Massif, and largely lies in the far north of the country of Chad, with a bit spilling over the southern border of Libya.

It's a strange, remote, and forbidding landscape:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Michael Kerling]

What's peculiar about it -- besides the fact that it looks like the "desert planet" set from Lost in Space -- is that its terrain was largely created by volcanism, despite the fact that it lies smack in the center of one of those "stable continental cratons" I talked about in my previous post.  It's got a very peculiar geology -- the basement rock is Precambrian granite, over which there's a layer of Paleozoic sandstone, but above that is a layer of basalt which is in some places three hundred meters thick.  Basalt is one of those mafic rocks I mentioned; iron-rich, silica-poor, and ordinarily associated with seafloor rift zones like Iceland and deep-mantle hotspots like Hawaii.  But over that are felsic rocks like dacite, rhyolite, and ignimbrite, which are usually found in explosive, subduction zone volcanoes like the ones in the Caribbean, Japan, and Indonesia.

What's odd about all this is that there's no mechanism known that would generate all these kinds of rocks from the same system.  The current guess is that there was a mantle hotspot that started in the late Oligocene Epoch, on the order of twenty-five million years ago, that has gradually weakened and incorporated lower-density continental rocks as the upwelling slowed, but the truth is, nobody really knows.

It's still active, too.  The Tibesti Massif is home to hot springs, mud pools, and fumaroles, some of which contain water at 80 C or above.

So we've got a volcanic region in the southern Sahara where, by conventional wisdom, there shouldn't be one, with a geology that thus far has defied explanation.  Some geologists have tried to connect it to the Cameroon Line or the East African Rift Zone, but the truth is, Africa is a much bigger place than most people think it is, and it's a very long way away from either one.  (It's about three thousand kilometers from the northernmost active volcanoes in both Cameroon and Ethiopia to the southern edge of the Tibesti Massif; that's roughly the distance between New York City and Denver, Colorado.  So connecting Tibesti to either the Cameroon Line or the East African Rift is a bit like trying to explain the geology of Long Island using processes happening in the Rocky Mountains.)

And the problem is, figuring out this geological conundrum isn't going to be easy.  It's one of the most remote and difficult-to-access places on Earth, hampered not only by the fact that there are virtually no roads but the one-two punch of extreme poverty and political instability in the country of Chad.  So even getting a scientific team in to take a look at the place is damn near impossible.  The geologists studying the region have resorted to -- I swear I'm not making this up -- using comparisons to research on the geology of volcanoes on Mars, because even that is easier than getting a team into northern Chad.

The idea that we have a spot on the Earth still so deeply mysterious, despite everything we've learned, is both astonishing and thrilling.  Here we sit, in 2024, as arrogantly confident we have a bead on the totality of knowledge as the people did back in 1924, despite the fact that history has always shown such confidence in our understanding is unfounded.  The reality is humbling, and far more exciting.  As Carl Sagan put it, "Somewhere, something amazing is waiting to be known."

I wonder what the next hundred years will bring, and if the people in 2124 will look back at us with that same sense of "how could they not have known that?"

Onward -- into the great unknown!

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The rocks drawn down

Imagine yourself standing on the shoreline, somewhere on the Earth, three billion years ago.

If you're picturing swamps and tree ferns and dinosaurs, you're way off.  The first trees wouldn't appear for another 2.6 billion years or so; the first dinosaurs we know about were 150 million years after that.  Three billion years ago there probably weren't even any eukaryotes -- organisms with complex cells containing organelles and nuclei, such as ours, as well as those of plants, fungi, and protists -- anywhere on Earth.  It's likely there wasn't much oxygen in the atmosphere, either.  This is before the "Great Oxidation Event," when photosynthesizing cyanobacteria reached a population sufficient to dump huge quantities of oxygen into the atmosphere, dooming most of Earth's living things (but simultaneously setting the stage for the rise of aerobic organisms such as ourselves).

So an accurate picture of what you'd experience: land that is nothing but an enormous expanse of bare rock and sand, devoid of a single living thing; murky water containing a soup of organic compounds, generated by the reducing atmosphere and frequent lightning storms; and unbreathable air mostly made of nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and ammonia.

I can just hear Mr. Spock saying, "The planet appears to be entirely inhospitable to life, Captain."

It's hard to imagine that our lush, verdant, temperate world evolved from that, but it did.  Consider, too, that the continents weren't even remotely in the same positions as they are now.  Where I sit writing this, in upstate New York, I'd have been about at the same latitude as I am now -- maybe a little bit farther south, about thirty degrees north.  But that's by far the exception.  See where you'd be on this map between about 2.5 and 1.5 billion years ago, when all of Earth's land masses were fused into a supercontinent named Columbia.  [Nota bene: this is not Pangaea.  This is two supercontinents before Pangaea.]

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alexandre DeZotti, Paleoglobe NO 1590 mya-vector-colors, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This was, in fact, not long after the continents formed.  We have continents because there are two basic kinds of rocks in the Earth's crust: felsic rocks, which are rich in silica, low in iron, and relatively lightweight; and mafic rocks, which are the opposite.  Most of the continental land masses are made up of felsic rocks (like granite and rhyolite), so they float in the denser rock of the mostly-mafic upper mantle.  (It's hard to imagine something as gigantic and heavy as a continental rock mass floating, but that's what it does.)  About three billion years ago was when there was sufficient separation of felsic and mafic chunks of crust that we started to see continental cratons form, and these blocks have been so stable thereafter that they're basically the same land masses we have today (albeit much cut apart and rearranged).

The reason this comes up is the discovery of evidence of what might have been one of the Earth's earliest megaquakes.  It occurred in what is now South Africa, part of the Kalahari Craton (as you can see from the map above, it'd have been in the northeast corner of the Columbia Supercontinent, at about the current latitude of Oslo, Norway).

The Barberton Greenstone Belt is one of the oldest relatively undisturbed chunks of rock in the world, and the current study, which was published two weeks ago in the journal Geology, suggests that it shows evidence of an overturned layer of chert that formed from a humongous underwater landslide of the type we see with megathrust earthquakes.  This, the researchers say, is the smoking gun that plate tectonics was already up and running three billion years ago -- that the reshuffling of continental blocks still going on today started not long after the blocks themselves formed.

The Barberton Greenstone Belt, about 350 kilometers east of Pretoria, South Africa [Image credit: Simon Lamb, Victoria University]

We think of the Earth as unchanging, don't we?  "Solid as a rock" is close to a cliché.  And yet, as we've seen, everything shifts, melts, moves; life comes and goes, evolves and falls to extinction; even the continents beneath our feet break up and recombine.  It's been going on for billions of years, and will continue for billions more.  The whole thing puts me in mind of Percy Shelley's evocative poem "Mont Blanc," which seems a fitting place to end:

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destin’d path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shatter’d stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaim’d.  The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost.  The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,
And their place is not known.  Below, vast caves
Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,
Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

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Earth angel

To round out the week in an appropriately surreal fashion, today we consider one of the most pressing issues facing mankind, to wit:

Is the Earth being controlled by mentally deficient Nordic alien angels?

Angel Playing a Flageolet, by Edward Burne-Jones (1878) [Image is in the Public Domain]

That is the contention of the author of the site Montalk.net, the link for which was sent to me by a frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, and that introduces the concept thusly:

There is far more to this world than taught in our schools, shown in the media, or proclaimed by the church and state.  Most of mankind lives in a hypnotic trance, taking to be reality what is instead a twisted simulacrum of reality, a collective dream in which values are inverted, lies are taken as truth, and tyranny is accepted as security.  They enjoy their ignorance and cling tightly to the misery that gives them identity.

Yup, that's me, clinging to my miserable ignorance, over here.  But what should I believe, then?  We find out a bit under "Key Concepts," which starts out innocuously enough -- some stuff about the nature of God, spirit, souls, and so on, not too very different than you might find on a number of religious or quasi-religious sites.  But then we hit the concept "Evolution," there's the sense of an impending train wreck:

Evolution

• physical evolution is due to natural selection, random mutation, conscious selection, and conscious mutation
• human evolution is mostly artificial; either DNA mutates to conform to alien soul frequency, or else DNA is artificially altered through advanced genetic engineering by certain alien factions
• because body must match soul, the death of a species means loss of compatible bodies for purposes of reincarnation. Thus physical life seeks physical survival and propagation of genes.
• the purpose of physical evolution is to accommodate and serve spiritual evolution

If I could evolve consciously, I'd evolve wings.  Great big feathery wings from my shoulder blades.  I know it'd make it hard to put on a shirt, but that's a downside I'd be willing to accept.  I don't like wearing a shirt anyhow, and I'd happily give them up in order to be able to fly.  I mean, how absolutely badass was this guy?

Speaking of wings and flying, we really get into deep water when he starts talking about angels.  Because according to the website, angels are real -- again, not thus far so very different from what a lot of people believe.  But wait until you hear what he thinks angels are.  (Do NOT attempt to drink anything while reading this.  I will not be responsible for ruined computer screens or keyboards.  You HAVE been warned.)

Mankind is unwittingly caught in a war between hidden superhuman factions who select, train, equip their human agents to participate in that war...  There is warring among these beings, indicating they are not all unified.  At the very minimum they are polarized into opposing sides, if not split into numerous independent factions.  Some factions have a strong fascist orientation.

The Nordic aliens are genetically compatible with us, and some of their females have engaged human males for sexual encounters and even long term relationships.  Through interbreeding their genes can enter our gene pool and vice versa.  Therefore some human individuals and bloodlines would have more of their DNA than others, and their angelic alien DNA would likely show under analysis to be basically human, albeit rare and unusual.

So, we could tell that a human had angelic alien DNA because if we analyzed his DNA, we'd find it was... human?

Alrighty then.

We then hear about what these beings are not: these misidentifications include hoaxes (don't be silly), "metaphysical entities," members of the Galactic Federation, and Super Nazis.  So thank heaven for that, at least.

We also get to read lots of stories about alien abductions, many of which include some serious bow-chicka-bow-wow with blond-haired Nordic aliens aboard their spaceships, and which presumably allowed the lucky abductee to claim membership in the Light-Year-High Club.  But then we hear the bad news, which is that the aliens who have visited us, and who have apparently engaged in a great deal of cosmic whoopee with humans, are actually mentally challenged:

The members of the Nordic alien civilization are not all homogenous in standing or understanding.  Composition ranges from a two-tier system of “lower retarded ones” and “higher advanced ones” to caste-like systems with many tiers similar to the Indian caste system.

The retarded members of their kind are the ones who interact with the most advanced of humans.  Why?  Maybe because of their evolutionary closeness, and also because such an interaction could be mutually beneficial.  Despite their seeming superhuman qualities, those aliens who interact most with select humans may, in fact, be the most flawed of their race.

The problem... is that their most flawed ones are not only the creators and users of demiurgic technology, but they are also most involved in human affairs.  This means we suffer their errors, which are graver in consequence than any mistake we could commit, just as our errors are more severe than those possible by animals.  The consequences of these errors and grave transgressions have cascaded back and forth throughout the timeline.  They are now converging toward a nexus point representing the potential for a cataclysmic shift.  Alien factions who were responsible for initiating these consequences are likely the same ones who are now involved in the final outcome.  A thread of continuity exists between the most ancient and modern of human-alien encounters.  The alien disinformation campaign is an effort by one set of such factions to prepare mankind for enthusiastic acceptance of their overt control.

Well, hell.  This is even worse than the Illuminati-run-the-government thing, or the Evil-Reptilian-Alien thing, or even the jet-contrails-contain-mind-altering-drugs thing.  We're being controlled by mentally deficient aliens, who can screw things up even worse than plain old humans could?  All because they've come to Earth looking for some hot human/Nordic alien action?

I don't know about you, but I don't like this at all.

There is more on the website, of course, including stuff about the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the North Pole, Adam and Eve, alchemy, dimensional portals, the ether, the Pyramids, zombie computers, and snakes.  I encourage you to peruse it.  I would have read more myself, but it seems a little early in the day to start drinking, and I just don't think I could have managed it without a glass of scotch.

So, anyway, there you have it.  As if we didn't have enough to worry about, now we find out that the rulers of the world are blond-haired moronic alien angels, and (worse still) that some of us are descended from them.  I'm guessing I'm not, though.  I am blond, but I've got my family tree pretty well mapped out, and I haven't run into any records that show my great-great-great grandma getting knocked up by the Archangel Derpiel.  That's okay with me, honestly.  If I don't get wings out of the bargain, then fuck it.

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Leaps of faith

Sometimes my searching for topics for Skeptophilia leads me down some very peculiar rabbit holes.  Like yesterday, when (while looking for something else) I stumbled upon a link to a Wikipedia page called "Levitation of saints."  So of course I couldn't resist having a look at that.

And... wow.

Apparently there's a long tradition in Christianity that holy people can fly, or at least float.  I was raised in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, and as befits such an upbringing, I read the Bible and other religious texts regularly, but I had no idea about this.  Some of the stories don't come from the Bible directly but from hagiography (writings by and/or about saints), which understandably lead some people to take them with a substantial grain of salt (me, I take it all with a substantial grain of salt, but I suspect you already knew that).

In any case, apparently there were a good many saintly types who, if they didn't exactly fly, engaged in falling with style.  Here's an eighteenth-century engraving of a guy named Joseph of Cupertino, for example:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Is it just me, or does he look kind of freaked out by this?  From his expression it seems like he was out one day for a nice quiet walk through the Italian countryside, and suddenly WHOAAAA HOLY FUCK WHAT'S HAPPENING he got picked up bodily and hoisted aloft.  Joseph (who was, by the way, a real guy, and lived from 1603 to 1663) was a mystic and seer whom the local Franciscans didn't particularly like.  They thought he was a bit of an uneducated rube; one of the more literate church leaders of the time said Joseph was "remarkably unclever."  They finally admitted him to their order, albeit somewhat reluctantly.  It's clear they were kind of embarrassed by the whole claims-of-flying thing, but couldn't find a good reason to turn him away, so he joined up and spent the rest of his life as a Franciscan monk.

Skeptic Joe Nickell, after checking out contemporaneous writings describing Joseph of Cupertino's airborne acrobatics, was predictably unimpressed:

Joseph's most dramatic aerial traverses were launched by a leap—not by a simple slow rising while merely standing or kneeling—but, moreover, I find that they appear to have continued as just the sudden arcing trajectories that would be expected from bounding.  They were never circuitous or spiraling flights like a bird's.  Invariably, Joseph's propulsions began with a shout or scream, suggesting that he was not caused to leap by some force but chose to.

So I guess the only miracle here was his impressive hang time.  If the whole monk thing hadn't worked out for him, maybe he should have tried out for the local track-and-field team.

You'd have thought that the Franciscans would have been more accepting of Joseph of Cupertino's leaps of faith, though, because the founder of their order -- Saint Francis of Assisi -- supposedly did the same thing.  While praying, Francis sometimes was suspended in the air at a height of "three, or even four, cubits" (a meter and a half, give or take).  A century later, Saint Catherine of Siena also floated around the place while praying, and a priest reported that when he gave her Holy Communion, the host flew from his hand straight upward onto Catherine's tongue, an image I find bizarre and strangely hilarious.

Sort of a sanctified version of the chefs at the hibachi grill tossing cooked shrimp for customers to try to catch in their mouths.

So there's a long tradition of floating saints, apparently.  The problem was, there was another group of people who were thought by the religious authorities to be able to fly, and that was witches.  So how do you tell good flying from bad flying?  Even back in biblical days this was a problem, if you believe the story in the Acts of Peter (one of the books of the biblical apocrypha).  There was this guy named Simon Magus, who was impressing the hell out of everyone in the Roman Forum by levitating, and told the crowds that he was a god.  Well, the Apostle Peter was having none of that, so he prayed for God to put an end to it, and Simon suddenly fell to the ground and broke both his legs.  The crowds (who were evidently a bit on the fickle side) immediately stoned Simon Magus to death.

Which hardly seems fair.  I mean, the guy had been flying, right?  It was hardly Simon's fault that Peter the Killjoy got involved and spoiled the show.

In any case, the religious powers-that-be never seemed particularly comfortable with people levitating.  By the sixteenth century, the Inquisition kind of decided it was all bad, and discouraged flying for everyone.

Because forbidding something that no one can actually do is pretty much a sure bet.

In any case, these days none of the hyperreligous types are claiming they can levitate.  Which I think is kind of a shame.  Hey, if Joseph of Cupertino, Francis of Assisi, and Catherine of Siena could do it, you'd think Franklin Graham, Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, and Jerry Falwell, Jr. should be able to.

At least I'd like to see them try, wouldn't you?

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The origins of the story

I'm always interested in looking into where tales of the paranormal get started.  We've seen a number of examples here at Skeptophilia, each with its own peculiar provenance.  There are ones that have the feel of Scary Tales Told Around A Campfire, and which probably have little connection to reality other than the setting, like the legend of 50 Berkeley Square and the famous tumbling coffins of Barbados.  Others come from works of fiction that were misinterpreted (or misrepresented) as fact, and afterward took on a life of their own, such as the tragic tale of Christopher Round.  There are stories for which the basic facts are clearly true, but which picked up paranormal overtones by virtue of being unexplained, such as the odd phenomenon of the Devonshire footprints.  Last, and most common, there are ones for which the main players are definitely real people with a decent amount of credibility, and who seem to have had no particular reason to lie other than perhaps relishing getting a chuckle from scaring the absolute shit out of their friends, such as the weirdly open-ended tale of Nurse Black (still my all-time favorite "true ghost story"), the story of the haunting of Hinton Ampner, Lord Dufferin's terrifying premonition, and the much-retold legend of the screaming skulls of Calgarth.

More interesting to me, though, are ones where the story itself has no obvious point of origin.  One of these for which I've spent an inordinate amount of time digging, and come up absolutely empty-handed, I know about because of the book Haunted Houses, by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, which I've owned (courtesy of the beloved Scholastic Book Club) since shortly after it was published in 1972.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Harald Hoyer from Schwerin, Germany, The Haunted House Das Geisterhaus (5360049608), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Hurwood gave the story the rather lurid name "The Mystery House of Horror," and it was one of a handful in the collection that completely freaked me out when I read it as a highly imaginative, impressionable twelve-year-old who was absolutely convinced that if I left even the slightest gap in the curtains of my bedroom at night, someone or *gulp* something would watch me through the window while I slept.  You'd think monsters would have better stuff to do at night than to squint at a sleeping kid, but you never know, with monsters.

Right?

Of course right.

In any case, "The Mystery House of Horror" is about a manor house in Kensington, England that had a sinister reputation.  No one, we're told, has any information about when it was built or by whom, which right away seems a little strange for a culture so absolutely obsessed with keeping track of the minute doings of the landed gentry.  All Hurwood tells us is that the unnamed original owner was a "man of ill repute" who hanged himself in the house rather than waiting for the law do it first, and after that, the house and the gardens that surrounded it were definitely a Very Bad Place.

It was rented for a time by a family with the last name of Trent, but that tenancy came to an abrupt end when something tried to smother Mrs. Trent in her sleep with a pillow.  Her husband leapt to her aid, and found himself in a wrestling match with something strong, slimy, invisible, and giving off a horrible stench.  For some reason, even after this incident they stayed on a few more weeks.  This is more than I'd have done -- if that happened to me, all you'd see is a comical, Looney Tunes-style blur as I ran away screaming, my feet not even touching the ground.  But during those weeks, Mr. and Mrs. Trent were plagued by something slamming doors, and occasionally violently shaking their beds at night.

Eventually, though, they had enough, and left.

The next tenant was a Mrs. Cattling, who moved in with eight small dogs, four dachshunds and four Pomeranians.  The dogs obviously hated the place right from the get-go (a common trope in paranormal stories is dogs being more sensitive to hauntings than humans are), and one night their fear was realized as something attacked them, killing one of the Pomeranians.  What happened next is, to me, the scariest part of the entire story:

She was about to pick up the limp little form when something made her whirl around.  To her horror she saw one of the pillows on the bed lift itself up and stand on end.  Frozen to the spot, she watched as it compressed itself into the shape of some hideously unfamiliar beast with a long muzzle, sharp teeth, and monstrously evil gleaming eyes.  For a moment she stared at it in morbidly rapt fascination, like a bird at a snake about to devour it.  Then, summoning all her strength, she rushed to the bed, seized the pillow and flung it to the floor, jumping on it with both feet and screaming, "You killed my dog!  You killed my dog!"

Quite the badass, that Mrs. Cattling.  The tale is reminiscent of the absolutely terrifying short story "O, Whistle and I'll Come for You, My Lad," by M. R. James, in which a malevolent and invisible spirit creates a body for itself out of whatever happens to be around -- a bedspread, curtains, clothing hanging on a line.  *shudder*

After Mrs. Cattling (and her surviving dogs) left, the house went through various other tenants, none of whom stayed long.  One saw a "gaunt, cadaverous figure" standing by the end of the bed.  Another saw a man in "peculiar old-fashioned dress" tinkering with the gas mantle.  She assumed her husband had called a repairman, but the husband hadn't done any such thing, and when the woman returned to the kitchen she found it filling up with a dangerous level of natural gas -- the result, we're led to believe, of one of the house's resident ghosts trying to do away with its living tenants.

Even when it was unoccupied, strange things happened.  A pair of young lovers looking for a quiet place to have a nice snog found their way into the house's garden one evening, but before they could get down to the business at hand the young man noticed that despite the house being empty, there was an eerie golden light in one of the upstairs windows.  As they watched, it changed to a "ghastly bluish-green," and a "tomblike chill" descended over them.  But finally we have people showing some degree of common sense -- the couple hauled ass out of the place and vowed never to come near it again.

Understandably, the house got such a bad reputation that no one would rent it. "Some time between World War I and World War II," we're told, it was torn down, and "when the last scraps of debris were hauled away, the residents of the neighborhood breathed a collective sigh of relief."

So it's a very creepy story, and going back through it to write this post I had a couple of moments where I had an honest shiver.  (Fortunately, as I write this, it's a bright sunny morning, my dogs are all safely asleep on their own personal sofa, and there are no peculiar-looking repairmen working on the gas line.  The latter is largely because we don't have a gas line, but still.)

But where did the story come from?

I've done a significant amount of research trying to find anything but Hurwood's account, and had zero success.  You'd think that a house with this kind of story behind it would merit mention somewhere, but if there is, I haven't been able to find it.  All of the references I've come across ultimately lead back to Hurwood himself.

So as compelling as the story is, I think the answer is that it came from Hurwood's own imagination.

I kind of get the draw, you know?  As a novelist, I want my own imaginary creations to get as much notice as they can, and if I were writing a True Tales of the Supernatural sort of collection, it'd be mighty tempting to throw one of my own stories in there just for fun.  And I suspect that's what Hurwood did.  The Mystery House of Horror, I'm afraid, never existed.

I might be wrong, of course.  If one of my readers knows the provenance of this story (other than Hurwood's anthology), please let me know in the comments.  Maybe there was a haunted house in Kensington, and that'd be worth knowing about.

Although I'd be just as happy if invisible, slimy, smelly creatures didn't exist.  Even if all they did was watch me through gaps in the curtains at night.

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The asymmetrical universe

I'm currently reading the 2006 book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, by the brilliant theoretical physicist Lisa Randall.  As you might imagine from the title, it's a provocative and mind-blowing read.  And although it's written for laypeople, with most of the abstruse mathematics removed -- theoretical physics is, honestly, 99% math -- I must admit that a good chunk of it is going so far over my head that it doesn't even ruffle my hair.

The rest, though, is way cool.

The heart of the book is the consideration of superstring theory as a model for the way the universe is built.  The idea -- at least at the level I understand it -- is that the fundamental building block of matter and energy is the string, a one-dimensional structure that can either be open-ended or a closed loop, and the various manifestations we see (particles, for instance) are the different vibrational modes of those strings.  But deeply embedded in this model is the idea that the universe has fundamental symmetries, which unify seemingly disparate forces and allow you to make predictions about what exists but is as yet undiscovered based upon what might be necessary to complete the symmetry of the theory.

This search for underlying patterns in what we see around us drives a lot of theoretical physics.  And certainly there are times the approach pays off.  It was that mode of inquiry that allowed Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg to come up with electroweak theory, which showed that at high enough energy the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces act as a single force.  (It was later experimentally confirmed, and the three won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for the discovery.)  Carrying this approach to its extreme are people like Garrett Lisi, whose eight-dimensional model of particle physics (based upon a mathematical structure called a Lie group) tries to unify everything we know from experimental results into a symmetrical whole based upon it seeming to fit into a pattern that is "too beautiful not to be true."

The superstring model, too, makes predictions of particles and forces, largely based upon arguments of symmetry and symmetry breaking.  Each of the particles in the Standard Model should, the math tells us, have a "supersymmetric partner" -- each known fermion paired with a boson with the same charge and similar interactions, but a higher mass, and vice versa.

Experimental confirmation, of course, is the hill on which scientific theories live or die, and what the theorists need is hard evidence that these predicted particles exist.  Randall's book is peppered with optimistic statements such as the following:

In a few years, CERN will be the nexus of some of the most exciting physics results.  The Large Hadron Collider, which will be able to reach seven times the present energy of the Tevatron, will be located there, and any discoveries made at the LHC will almost inevitably be something qualitatively new.  Experiments at the LHC will seek -- and very likely find -- the as yet unknown physics that underlies the Standard Model.

Randall's book was published in 2006; the LHC came online in 2008.

And in the sixteen years since then, not a single particle has been found confirming superstring theory -- no superpartners, no Kaluza-Klein particles, nothing.  It did find the Higgs boson, which was a coup, but that was already predicted by the Standard Model, and didn't explain anything about the fundamental messiness of particle physics; why particles have the masses they do, forces have the strength they do, and (most vexing) why the extremely weak gravitational force seems to be irreconcilable with the other three.

This understandably bothers the absolute hell out of a lot of particle physicists.  It just seems like the most fundamental theory of everything should be a lot more elegant than it is, and that there should be some underlying beautiful mathematical logic to it all.  Instead, we have a model that works, but has a lot of what seem like arbitrary parameters.

But the fact is, every one of the efforts to get the Standard Model to fit into a more beautiful and elegant theoretical framework has failed.  Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in a brilliant but stinging takedown of the current approach that you really should watch in its entirety, puts it this way: "If you follow news about particle physics, then you know that it comes in three types.  It's either that they haven't found that thing they were looking for, or they've come up with something new to look for which they'll later report not having found, or it's something so boring you don't even finish reading the headline."  Her opinion is that the entire driving force behind it -- research to try to find a theory based on beautiful mathematics -- is misguided.  Maybe the actual universe simply is messy.  Maybe a lot of the parameters of physics, such as particle masses and the values of constants, truly are arbitrary (i.e., they don't arise from any deeper theoretical reason; they simply are what they're measured to be, and that's that).  In her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, she describes how this century-long quest to unify physics with some ultra-elegant model has generated very close to nothing in the way of results, and maybe we should accept that the untidy Standard Model is just the way things are.

Because there's one thing that's undeniable: the Standard Model works.  Just to give one recent example, a paper last year in Physical Review Letters described a set of experiments showing that a test of the Standard Model passed with a precision that beggars belief -- in this case, a measurement of the electron's magnetic moment that agreed with the predicted value to within 0.1 billionths of a percent.

This puts the Standard Model in the category of being one of the most thoroughly-tested and stunningly accurate models not only in all of physics, but in all of science.  As mind-blowingly bizarre as quantum mechanics is, there's no doubt that it has passed enough tests that in just about any other field, the experimenters and the theoreticians would be high-fiving each other and heading off to the pub for a celebratory pint of beer.  Instead, they keep at it, because so many of them feel that despite the unqualified successes of the Standard Model, there's something deeply unsatisfactory about it.  Hossenfelder explains that this is a completely wrong-headed approach; that real discoveries in the field were made when there was some necessary modification of the model that needed to be made, not just because you think the model isn't pretty enough:

If you look at past predictions in the foundations of physics which turned out to be correct, and which did not simply confirm an existing theory, you find it was those that made a necessary change to the theory.  The Higgs boson, for example, is necessary to make the Standard Model work.  Antiparticles, predicted by Dirac, are necessary to make quantum mechanics compatible with special relativity.  Neutrinos were necessary to explain observation [of beta radioactive decay].  Three generations of quarks were necessary to explain C-P violation.  And so on...  A good strategy is to focus on those changes that resolve an inconsistency with data, or an internal inconsistency.

And the truth is, when the model you already have is predicting with an accuracy of 0.1 billionths of a percent, there just aren't a lot of inconsistencies there to resolve.

I have to admit that I get the particle physicists' yearning for something deeper.  John Keats's famous line, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty; that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know" has a real resonance for me.  But at the same time, it's hard to argue Hossenfelder's logic.

Maybe the cosmos really is kind of a mess, with lots of arbitrary parameters and empirically-determined constants.  We may not like it, but as I've observed before, the universe is under no obligation to be structured in such a way as to make us comfortable.  Or, as my grandma put it -- more simply, but no less accurately -- "I've found that wishin' don't make it so."

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