Wallnau's witches

I've noticed a tendency amongst some people that is a little bit like what would happen if the sunk-cost fallacy had an unholy bastard child with confirmation bias.  It occurs when someone has put so much of their time, effort, money, and emotional energy into something that when it's proven wrong, they simply can't accept it -- and start casting around for explanations, however ridiculous or far-fetched, to account for it.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who watched Tuesday's presidential candidates' debate that I'm talking about the supporters of Donald Trump.  A friend of mine commented that prior performances by Trump had set the bar so low that all he had to do in order to win the debate was not shit his pants while in front of the camera, and he couldn't even manage that much.  Kamala Harris -- who was a lawyer, and is a skilled orator who knows how to use her opponents' weaknesses against them -- kept baiting Trump over and over, and Trump couldn't help himself.  He took the bait every damn time, with the result that his side of the debate was an incoherent rant about everything from "the kind of numbers I'm talking about, because child care is child care" (direct quote, that) to his having the best rallies in the history of politics to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people's cats and dogs for dinner.

Confronted with their beloved candidate doing what can only be called a complete face-plant in front of millions of viewers, the MAGA types had to figure out how Mr. Stable Genius came across as a barely comprehensible, probably demented nutjob who couldn't stick to the script long enough to answer a single question.  I've already seen one Trump supporter claiming that the only reason Harris did so well is that she was being fed answers through an earpiece.  (Was Trump wearing an earpiece that sucked answers out of his brain?)  Another, following the "Declare victory and go home" strategy, simply said that Trump won the debate and that was that.  But no one has come up with an explanation as creative -- and by "creative," I mean "absolutely batshit crazy" -- as Pastor Lance Wallnau.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will undoubtedly be familiar with Wallnau's name, because he's been something of a frequent flier here.  Amongst his more "creative" ideas in the past:

• the January 6 rioters were there at the Capitol to "pick up trash."
• all of Trump's enemies would be struck down by God in May of 2024.  (It's currently September.  We're still waiting.)
• back in 2020, he declared that God would cure Rush Limbaugh's cancer and save his life.  (Despite this, Limbaugh died in February of 2021.)
• Wallnau "took authority" over Hurricane Maria in 2017, and ordered it in the name of Jesus to miss Puerto Rico.  (It didn't.)
• angels "dusted his face with gold flakes" because he loves Trump so much.
• the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia (resulting in one person's death) were "paid actors" because white supremacists don't exist.

Now, Wallnau is responding to Trump's catastrophically bad performance Tuesday night -- apparently even the good pastor can't stretch the truth enough to pretend Trump was brilliant -- by saying that he flopped because he was under an evil spell cast by the moderators, who are actually witches.  Here's the quote in toto because otherwise you'll think I'm making this up:

When I say "witchcraft" I am talking about what happened tonight. Occult-empowered deception, manipulation and domination.  That’s what ABC pulled off as moderators, and Kamala’s script handlers set up the kill box.  One-sided questions and fact checking sealed the box.  Witchcraft.  It’s not over yet, but something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum because the same public that voted in Obama is voting again and her deception is advancing.

I dunno, Lance, every clip I've heard from Trump's rallies sounds like incoherent babbling, too, so what are you saying?  The "occult-empowered witches" are following him around?

Of course, Wallnau probably would answer that with a resounding "yes, of course they are."  And the more troubling part about this is not that Wallnau is a wacko crank spouting nonsense -- which, after all, is what wacko cranks do -- but that he's listened to, and taken seriously by, thousands of people.

Look, I get how hard it is to admit you were wrong, especially when you've invested a lot of your heart into something or someone.  But this goes beyond conservative versus liberal.  I know a good many people who lean right, and that's just fine; we might disagree on various issues, but those things we can discuss.

But how anyone at this point can look at that incoherent, babbling blowhard and think he's fit to run a country is absolutely beyond comprehension.

Wallnau apparently does, though, to the extent that he's blaming Tuesday night's fiasco on witchcraft.  Couldn't possibly be because he hitched his wagon to someone who was incompetent from the outset, but has since then demonstrated a level of fitness that includes publicly sucking up to dictators like Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, and claiming that he can levy taxes on foreign countries, that there are states where it is legal to "execute babies after birth," and that white people are being denied the COVID vaccine because of their race.  It's so bad that Wikipedia actually has a page called "False or Misleading Statements by Donald Trump," which -- counting only the ones in public record that have been adequately fact-checked -- number in the tens of thousands.  Donnel Stern, writing in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 2019, said, "We expect politicians to stretch the truth.  But Trump is a whole different animal...  He lies as policy, and will say anything to satisfy his supporters or himself."

So.  Yeah.  I'm probably doomed to disappointment in thinking that this might change anyone's mind, but hell, hope springs eternal and all that kinda stuff.  You never know, though.  Maybe Wallnau's witches are on to something.  I could try casting a few spells and seeing if it moves the poll numbers a notch.

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Tearing down the roadblocks

I wonder if you've heard of Marie Tharp.  I hope you have, but suspect you haven't.  Even in scientific circles, her name is not exactly a household word.

It should be.

Back in 1912, a German geologist and climatologist named Alfred Wegener noticed correspondences that seemed too great to be coincidences.  First, there was the thing that just about everyone wonders about in grade school -- the puzzle-piece contours of Europe and Africa with North and South America.  Then there was the fact that the fossil record of those two regions are similar until about two hundred million years ago, and afterward gradually diverge.  And last, he observed that the Appalachian, Pennine, and Scandinavian Mountains are geologically similar and seem to have formed at around the same time.  As you undoubtedly know, Wegener put all that together and proposed that they were all explained by continental drift -- that the land masses were all united at one point, then broke up and drifted apart, splitting what had been a single continent with a contiguous mountain range into widely-separated pieces.

The main reason this wasn't well-received was not only, or even mainly, because of hidebound scientists clinging to old models; it was that Wegener couldn't explain how, or why, it had occurred.  He proposed no mechanism to account for continents "drifting" in what appeared to be solid rock.  So while it's a pity for poor Wegener that he'd landed on the correct answer and got no recognition for it (he died at age fifty in 1930 on an expedition to Greenland, thirty years before plate tectonics was proposed), his theory's poor reception is honestly understandable.

What happened to Marie Tharp in the 1950s is less forgivable.

Tharp was an oceanographer who fell into the profession almost by accident.  She was fascinated with science, but women back then were actively discouraged from pursuing careers in scientific fields; they were frequently given helpful advice like "it's extremely difficult for women to compete as scientists," with few of the (male) advisors and supervisors asking themselves the question of why that was, and more importantly, if maybe, just maybe, it was a problem they should work on fixing.  During World War II, though, when a lot of college-age men were overseas fighting, colleges started actively recruiting -- well, just about anyone, even those from groups that had been previously excluded.  Tharp took a geology class and was fascinated by the subject, so she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, completing a master's degree in petroleum geology in 1944.

After that, though, she ran into the difficulty that geology and related sciences rely on field work, and nearly all of the companies that hired geologists didn't allow women to work in the field.  So Tharp was relegated to analyzing data -- especially mapping data -- that had been collected and brought back by her male colleagues.

Tharp in 1968 [Image is in the Public Domain]

It was when she was working on a project to map the deep parts of the Atlantic she noticed something odd.  For a decade, ships had been crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean using sounding devices to map the topography of the ocean floor, initially as a way of locating downed aircraft and ships.  But as she was creating contour maps, Tharp found that there was a huge mountain range running all the way down the center, from north to south -- and that mountain range had a narrow, deep, v-shaped valley right down the middle.  Then she started plotting the epicenters of submarine earthquakes onto the map, and found they coincided almost perfectly with the ridge and valley.

As soon as she saw this, she knew Wegener had been right.

The rift, she claimed, was where the motive force arose that was forcing the continents apart.  It was seismically active, and (she rightly predicted) should be characterized by newly-formed igneous rock, as the split between the continents widened and lava from the mantle bubbled up and froze on contact with cold seawater.  She told her supervisor, geologist Bruce Heezen, who promptly laughed at her, characterizing her explanation as "girls' talk."

Tharp, fortunately, was not so easily dissuaded.  She kept at it, and after several years had enough data amassed that the evidence was absolutely incontrovertible.  Even Heezen finally gave in.  Those ridges and valleys were eventually found to be a network of rifts encircling the globe like the stitching on a baseball, and her idea that they were responsible for plate tectonics was absolutely spot-on.  But it's significant that of the many papers about the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and plate tectonics that Heezen and others published in the 1960s and 1970s, Tharp's contributions were acknowledged on exactly zero of them.  The person who was credited with discovering the Mid-Atlantic Rift Zone, and proposing its role in continental drift, was...

... you guessed it...

... Bruce Heezen.

She was eventually recognized for her brilliance and hard work, but like a lot of women scientists, didn't receive it until quite late in her career.  She was awarded the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal in 1978, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's Mary Sears Woman Pioneer in Oceanography Award in 1999, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Heritage Award in 2001, five years before her death at the age of 86.

It's certainly easier for women in science now, in part due to indomitable women like Marie Tharp.  But the fact that it's not equally easy for men and women -- which it still very much isn't -- illustrates that we have a long way to go in welcoming women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people into every career avenue.  If you're one of those people who has ridiculed DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) drives in education, business, and industry, then maybe you should be working harder to create a world where we don't need them any more.

Odd how those who are most vocally against DEI seldom have any cogent arguments why they think it's appropriate or fair to set up roadblocks that result in wasting over half of the potential talent, drive, passion, and genius we have at our fingertips.

Most people who are interested in geology have heard of Wegener, and pioneers like Drummond Matthews, Frederick Vine, and Harry Hess.  Far fewer have heard of Marie Tharp, who overcame tremendous personal and professional hurdles to revolutionize our understanding of how the Earth's geological systems work.

Hearing about her struggles won't undo the unfairness and misogyny she dealt with during her entire professional life, but maybe it will assure that this generation of women scientists don't have to endure the same thing.

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A smile without a cat

Every time I hear some new discovery in quantum physics, I think, "Okay, it can't get any weirder than this."

Each time, I turn out to be wrong.

A few of the concepts I thought had blown my mind as much as possible:

• Quantum superposition -- a particle being in two states at once until you observe it, at which point it apparently decides on one of them (the "collapse of the wave function")
• The double-slit experiment -- if you pass light through a closely-spaced pair of slits, it creates a distinct interference pattern -- an alternating series of parallel bright and dark bands.  The same interference pattern occurs if you shoot the photons through one of the slits, one photon at a time.  If you close the other slit, the pattern disappears.  It's as if the photons passing through the left-hand slit "know" if the right-hand slit is open or closed -- or that a photon can, somehow, go through both slits simultaneously and interfere with itself.  Whatever that means.
• Quantum entanglement -- two particles that somehow are "in communication," in the sense that altering one of them instantaneously alters the other, even if it would require superluminal information transfer to do so (what Einstein called "spooky action-at-a-distance")
• The pigeonhole paradox -- you'd think that if you passed three photons through polarizing filters that align their vibration plane either horizontally or vertically, there'd be two of them polarized the same way, right? It's a fundamental idea from set theory; if you have three gloves, it has to be the case that either two are right-handed or two are left-handed.  Not so with photons.  Experiments showed that you can polarize three photons in such a way that no two of them match.

Bizarre, counterintuitive stuff, right there.  How could it get any stranger than that?

Wait till you hear about this one.

In 2021, three physicists, Yakim Aharonov of Tel Aviv University, Sandu Popescu of the University of Bristol, and Eliahu Cohen of Bar Ilan University, said they'd demonstrated something they called a quantum Cheshire Cat.  Apparently under the right conditions, a particle's properties can somehow come unhooked from the particle itself and move independently of it -- a bit like Lewis Carroll's cat disappearing but leaving behind its disembodied grin.

The Cheshire Cat from John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland (1865) [Image is in the Public Domain]

I'll try to explain how it works, but be aware that I'm dancing right along the edge of what I'm able to understand, so if you ask for clarification I'll probably say, "Damned if I know."  But here goes.

Imagine a box containing a particle with a spin of 1/2.  (Put more simply, this means that if you measure the particle's spin along any of the three axes (x, y, and z), you'll find it in an either-or situation -- right or left, up or down, forward or backward.)  The box has a partition down the middle that is fashioned to have a small, but non-zero, probability of the particle passing through.  At the other end of the box is a second partition -- if the particle is spin-up, it passes through; if not, it doesn't and is reflected back into the box.

With me so far?  'Cuz this is where it gets weird.

In quantum terms, the fact that there's a small but non-zero chance of the particle leaking through the first barrier means that in a sense, part of it does leak through; this is a feature of quantum superposition, which boils down to particles being in two places at once (or, more accurately, their positions being fields of probabilities rather than one specific location).  If the part that leaks through is spin-up, it passes through the right-hand partition and out of the box; otherwise it reflects back and interacts with the original particle, causing its spin to flip.

The researchers found that this flip occurs even if measurements show that the particle never left the left-hand side of the box.

So it's like the spin of the particle becomes unhooked from the particle itself, and is free to wander about -- then can come back and alter the original particle.  See why they call it a quantum Cheshire Cat?  Like Carroll's cat's smile, the properties of the particle can somehow come loose.

Whatever a "loose property" actually means.

The researchers have suggested that this bizarre phenomenon might allow counterfactual communication -- communication between two observers without any particle or energy being transferred between them.  In the setup I described, the observer left of the box would know if the observer on the right had turned the spin-dependent barrier on or off by watching to see if the particle in the left half of the box had altered its spin.  More spooky action-at-a-distance, that.

When this idea was proposed in 2021, it sounded so completely bizarre that it couldn't possibly be correct.  And earlier this year, a paper in Nature by Jonte Hance of Hiroshima University et al. seemed to rule out the phenomenon; but now, a second experiment described in the same journal by Armin Danner of Atominstitut Wien et al. appears to show conclusively that it does, in fact, occur.  So it looks like however counterintuitive the quantum Cheshire Cat is -- like the outrageously odd Bell's theorem, we're stuck with it.  It may twist our brain into knots, but it seems to be how reality works.

What I have to keep reminding myself is that none of this weirdness is some kind of abstract idea or speculation of what could be; these findings have been experimentally verified over and over.  Partly because they're so odd and counterintuitive, the theories of quantum physics have been put through rigorous tests, and each time they've passed with flying colors.  If these concepts sound crazy -- well, maybe the universe is crazy.

"What is the most important for us is not a potential application – though that is definitely something to look for – but what it teaches us about nature," said Sandu Popescu, co-author of the 2021 paper that got the smile-without-a-cat idea started.  "Quantum mechanics is very strange, and almost a hundred years after its discovery it continues to puzzle us.  We believe that unveiling even more puzzling phenomena and looking deeper into them is the way to finally understand it."

Indeed.  I keep coming back to the fact that everything you look at -- all the ordinary stuff we interact with on a daily basis -- is made of particles and energy that defy our common sense at every turn.  As the eminent biologist J. B. S. Haldane famously put it, "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine -- it is queerer than we can imagine."

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The monster in the mist

I thought that after writing this blog for twelve years, I'd have run into every cryptid out there. But just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about one I'd never heard of, which is especially interesting given that the thing supposedly lives in Scotland.

I've had something of a fascination with Scotland and all things Scottish for a long time, partly because of the fact that my dad's family is half of Scottish descent (he used to describe his kin as "French enough to like to drink and Scottish enough not to know when to stop").  My grandma, whose Hamilton, Allan, and Lyell ancestry came from Paisley (near Glasgow), knew lots of cheerful Scottish stories and folk songs, 95% of which were about a guy named Johnny who was smitten with a girl named Jenny, but she spurned him, so he stabbed her to death with his wee pen-knife and ended up getting hanged for it.

Big believers in happy endings, the Scots.

Anyhow, none of my grandma's stories were about the "Am Fear Liath Mòr," which roughly translates to "Big Gray Dude," who supposedly lopes about in the Cairngorms, the massive mountain range in the eastern Highlands.  He is described as extremely tall and covered with gray hair, and his presence is said to "create uneasy feelings."  Which seems to me to be putting it mildly.  If I was hiking through some lonely, rock-strewn mountains and came upon a huge hair-covered proto-hominid, my uneasy feelings would include pissing my pants and then having a stroke.  But maybe the Scots are made of sterner stuff than that, and upon seeing the Am Fear Liath Mòr simply report feeling a wee bit unsettled about the whole thing.

A couple of Scottish hikers being made to feel uneasy

The Big Gray Dude has been seen by a number of people, most notably the famous mountain climber J. Norman Collie, who in 1925 had reported the following encounter on the summit of Ben MacDhui, the highest peak in the Cairngorms:

I was returning from the cairn on the summit in the mist when I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps.  For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.  I said to myself, this is all nonsense. I listened and heard it again, but could see nothing in the mist.  As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest.  Whatever you make of it I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben MacDhui and I will not go back there myself I know.

Collie's not the only one who's had an encounter.  Mountain climber Alexander Tewnion says he was on the Coire Etchachan path on Ben MacDhui, and the thing actually "loomed up out of the mist and then charged."  Tewnion fired his revolver at it, but whether he hit it or not he couldn't say.  In any case, it didn't harm him, although it did give him a serious scare.

Periodic sightings still occur today, mostly hikers who catch a glimpse of it or find large footprints that don't seem human.  Many report feelings of "morbidity, menace, and depression" when the Am Fear Liath Mòr is nearby -- one reports suddenly being "overwhelmed by either a feeling of utter panic or a downward turning of my thoughts which made me incredibly depressed."  Scariest of all, one person driving through the Cairngorms toward Aberdeen said that the creature chased their car, keeping up with it on the twisty roads until finally they hit a straight bit and were able to speed up sufficiently to lose it.  After it gave up the chase, they said, "it stood there in the middle of the road watching us as we drove away."

Interestingly, there is a possible scientific explanation of this, that doesn't require believing in some giant humanoid hulking about in the wilds of Scotland.  Most of the sightings have taken place when it's foggy, which immediately made me think about the weird (but completely natural) phenomenon of the Brocken spectre or Brocken bow.  This occurs when filtered sunlight passes through mist from behind an observer, casting the person's (enormously enlarged) shadow on the fogbank in front of them; because the light is passing through spherical droplets of water, sometimes the shadow is also surrounded by a rainbow sheen called heilegenschein, caused by light refraction.  It's an eerie effect, and certainly has scared more than a few people.  (It's named for Brocken Mountain, the highest peak in the Harz Mountains of Germany, where it is sometimes seen.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brocken Inaglory, Solar glory and Spectre of the Brocken from GGB on 07-05-2011, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Of course, it still leaves the massive, non-human footprints and Collie's crunching noises unaccounted for.  So do with that explanation what you will.

Anyhow, that's our cryptozoological inquiry for today.  I've been to Scotland once, but never made it out of Edinburgh -- I hope to go back and visit the ancestral turf some day.  When I do, I'll be sure to get up into the Cairngorms and see if I can catch a glimpse of the Big Gray Dude.  I'll report back on how uneasy I feel afterwards.

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Legally haunted

Have you ever heard of the New York Supreme Court Case, Stambovsky v. Ackley?

I hadn't, until yesterday.

This came up because of a link someone sent me to an article called "There’s A House That’s So Terrifying It Was Legally Declared Haunted By New York State."  And my question, of course, was "what does it mean to be 'legally haunted'?"  If a ghost shows up in a house that is not legally declared to be haunted, do you have the right to call the police and have it arrested?  If so, how could you send a ghost to jail, when according to most people, ghosts can pass through walls, not to mention steel bars?

Be that as it may, the story centered around a house owned by a family named Ackley in Nyack, New York, a town on the Hudson River.  Soon after the Ackleys moved in, they began to have odd experiences, the most alarming of which is that family members reported waking up having their beds violently shaken by an invisible entity.  According to the article, they "learned to live with the spirits," which became easier when one of them apparently figured out that all they had to do to stop the sudden awakenings was to ask the ghosts not to shake their beds during the night.

Which I thought was pretty doggone amenable of the spirits, until I read the next part, wherein a young guest showed up to visit the Ackleys and died immediately of a brain aneurysm [emphasis theirs].  So that's not very nice.  There were also footsteps, slamming doors, and "gifts for the children [left] randomly through the house."  So you can see that with gifts on one end of the spectrum and brain aneurysms on the other, the haunting turned out to be quite a mixed bag.

The Ackley House, courtesy of Google Maps

Anyhow, all of this is your ordinary, garden-variety haunted house story until the Ackleys had enough and decided to sell the house.  The buyers, a family named Stambovsky, purchased it, but it turned out that the Ackleys didn't mention the fact that it was haunted by brain-aneurysm-inducing ghosts.  When they found out the house's reputation, the Stambovskys objected, understandably enough, and sued.  The case went all the way to the New York Supreme Court, where the judge sided with the Stambovskys.  The ruling said:

Where, as here, the seller not only takes unfair advantage of the buyer's ignorance but has created and perpetuated a condition about which he is unlikely to even inquire, enforcement of the contract (in whole or in part) is offensive to the court's sense of equity.  Application of the remedy of rescission, within the bounds of the narrow exception to the doctrine of caveat emptor set forth herein, is entirely appropriate to relieve the unwitting purchaser from the consequences of a most unnatural bargain...  Seller who had undertaken to inform the public at large about the existence of poltergeists on the premises to be sold was estopped to deny existence of poltergeists on the premises, so the house was haunted as a matter of law and seller must inform the purchaser of the haunting.

I wondered about how exactly a purchaser could demonstrate that a house was, in fact, haunted.  After all, that's usually what most failure-to-disclose lawsuits usually turn on; you find that the house you just bought has a leaky roof, and show that the previous owners knew about the leaky roof -- but along the way it's incumbent upon you to demonstrate that the roof does, in fact, leak.  How the hell are you going to do that with a ghost?

But upon reading the ruling more carefully, apparently the decision was based upon the fact that the Ackleys themselves had made public the fact that they thought the house was haunted.  So I guess it's their fault for bragging about their ghosts and then deciding not to tell the purchasers before the contract was signed.

You have to wonder, though, if this might be something that should appear on disclosure statements under "Known Pre-existing Conditions," along with leaks, dry rot, damaged windows, broken appliances, and faulty septic systems.  "Ghosts/poltergeists present" -- yes/no/unknown.  "Ghosts that result in death by aneurysm" -- yes/no/unknown.

The article ends by giving us the address of the house in Nyack, but asking us not to go there.  "Respect the current owner’s privacy by admiring it only from your screen," they tell us.  Which does bring up the interesting point of who bought the house after the Supreme Court allowed the Stambovskys to back out of the purchase, and whether the new owners have had any weird experiences or untimely deaths.  The article on the legal case (linked above) said that in 2015 the house sold for $1.77 million -- which was, they said, $600,000 higher than comparable houses in Nyack.

So maybe the Stambovskys should have stuck with it, ghosts and all.  Apparently disembodied spirits of the dead do nothing to diminish home value.  I know I'd happily sell my house for a cool $1.77 million.  I'd even sign a disclosure agreement admitting that it's haunted, and I don't even believe in ghosts.

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Hype detector

There's a problem with online science directed at laypeople.

I was discussing this with a friend yesterday.  Although he and I both have a decent science background, we're both very much generalists by nature.  We're interested in many different topics, we're each kinda sorta vaguely good at maybe a dozen of them, but we're actual experts in none.  It's not that I think this is an inherently bad thing; having a broad knowledge base is part of why I was a good high school teacher.  I did a decent job teaching biology, but could still field the occasional pop fly into deep right about, say, the ancient history of Norway.

The issue centers around the fact that curious people like myself are attracted to what we don't know, so when we see something unusual and attention-grabbing, we want to click on it.  Couple this tendency with a second issue -- that when sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are monetized, it's based on the number of clicks (or the minutes watched) -- and you have what amounts to an attractive nuisance.

There are some sites that do their level best to present science as accurately and fairly as possible; two excellent examples are Neil deGrasse Tyson's YouTube channel StarTalk and astrophysicist Becky Smethurst's outstanding channel Dr. Becky.  (If you're interested in astronomy, you should subscribe to both of these immediately.)  But intermingled with those are hundreds of others that mix a smidgen of science with a heaping handful of sensationalized hype, designed to get you to say "WTF?" and click the link -- because that's how they get revenue.

I'm not going to give you any links -- they don't deserve it -- but a quick perusal of my "Recommended For You" YouTube videos this morning included the following:

• One claiming that Betelgeuse is ABOUT TO GO SUPERNOVA (capitalization theirs), with a caption of "Life on Earth Will Be Wiped Out?" and a photo of physicist Michio Kaku looking worried.
• "If You See the Sky Turn This Color, Run!" -- turns out it's the "green sky = tornado" thing, and when you strip away all the excess verbiage it boils down to the rather well-known fact that tornadoes are scary and you should avoid being in the middle of one.
• "99% of Humans Die -- Could It Happen Again?"  This one is about the Toba Eruption, the effects of which are far from settled in scientific circles, and the answer to the question is "I guess so, but it's not likely any time soon."
• "Why an Impossible Paradox Inside Black Holes Appears to Break Physics!"  This is about the "information paradox," which is certainly curious, but it (1) obviously isn't impossible because it exists, (2) isn't about the inside of black holes because by definition we don't know what happens in there, and (3) hasn't "broken physics" (although it did demonstrate that our knowledge of black holes is incomplete, which is hardly surprising).
• "Yellowstone Volcano Simulation!" -- heavy on the catastrophizing and AI-generated footage of people being vaporized, light on the science.  As I've pointed out here at Skeptophilia, there is no sign that the Yellowstone Supervolcano is anywhere near an eruption.

And so on and so forth.

The trouble is, science videos and webpages exist on a spectrum, with wonderful sites like Veritasium on one end and outright lunacy like the subject of yesterday's post (about people who have allegedly jumped through time and space and ended up back in the Carboniferous Period) on the other.  It's usually pretty obvious when you find one that's straight-up science; the total wackos are also generally easy to spot.

It's the ones in the middle that are troublesome.  They mix in just enough science to give them the façade of reliability, but stir it into a ton of flashy, sensationalized speculation.  Since minutes watched = dollars earned, these videos generally draw out the message; they're often way longer than the topic warrants, and are characterized by endless repetition.  (I watched one twenty-minute video on Cretaceous dinosaurs that must have said eight times, "a fearsome predator unlike anything we currently have on Earth"!)

It's hard to know what to do about this.  Even people who are intellectually curious and want to learn actual science like to be entertained; and there's nothing wrong with framing scientific content in a way that's engaging to the audience, something that the three outstanding sites I mentioned certainly do.  But the monetized social media model feeds into the practice of using science as clickbait, and therefore encourages content creators to exaggerate (or outright fabricate) the story to make it seem more exciting or edgy or dangerous than it actually is, with the result that people come away less well-informed than they went in.

Which is frustrating, but isn't going to change any time soon.  And I guess this sort of sensationalized garbage is nothing new; all that's changed is the delivery mode.  Growing up, every time I went through a grocery store checkout line I was assaulted by The Weekly World News, which featured headlines about BatBoy and the Lost Continent of Atlantis and Elvis Is Still Alive And Was Spotted In Tokyo, and I came away mostly unscathed.

So the important thing is teaching people how to tease apart the good science from the hype.  But honestly, it always has been.

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The forest primeval

New from the "I Thought I'd Heard Everything" department, we have: a warning that you should look out for a specific kind of tree, because if you see one, you have slipped through a portal in space-time.

The tree is a Lepidodendron, and the good thing about it is at least it's pretty distinctive-looking:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tim Bertelink, Lepidodendron, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So it's unlikely you'd mistake it for anything else.  Here's one account (of many) that have shown up all over social media, especially Reddit and TikTok:

I was on a hike in central Pennsylvania with some friends, and went off from the others to explore.  I grew up not far from there and know the area pretty well, but after about a half-hour things started looking weird.  The area is kind of rocky and hilly, but the path I was on kept heading down, and soon I was in a swampy terrain I'd never seen before.  I spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid and I know the kind of trees that grow there, and I'd never seen ones like this.  Tall and skinny, kind of like a stretched-out pine tree, but the bark was weird, with a pattern like the scales of a fish.  There were other plants, too, but I didn't recognize a single one.  Something about the place "felt wrong," like I'd stumbled into somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.  By this time I was completely freaked out.  I tried to retrace my steps, but the undergrowth was really thick with these strange-looking plants of all kinds.  Eventually I found my way to drier ground, and pretty soon found the path again.  Now all around me I saw maples and oaks and hickories, just ordinary trees, and the weird out-of-place feeling disappeared.  After another fifteen minutes of walking I found my friends again, and everything turned out okay, but to this day I can't let go of the feeling that I had a narrow escape from being lost forever.

The guy said he looked for pics online of "weird skinny trees like pine trees" and eventually found one that was an exact match to what he'd seen.

You guessed it.  The Lepidodendron.

The problem with all this is that the Lepidodendron has been extinct for over 250 million years.

They had their heyday in the Carboniferous Period, and in fact are only (very) distantly related to pines; the extant plants most closely related to the Lepidodendron are club mosses, most commonly found in the understory of deep, undisturbed forests.  And at least the unnamed storyteller got the place and climate right; a lot of rocks in Pennsylvania are of Carboniferous age, and it was in general a hot, humid, rainy period of Earth's history.

The thing is, though, if the people who say they've seen Lepidodendrons actually have wandered through a fold in the space-time continuum and found themselves back in the Carboniferous Period, it wouldn't be apparent only because they'd see strange scaly trees and be calf-deep in mud.  If you were suddenly transported to the mid-Carboniferous, (1) it would be absolutely unambiguous, and (2) you'd be damn lucky to last fifteen minutes.  The temperatures were an average of ten degrees Celsius warmer than they are today, with oxygen levels at around 30% (as compared to today's 21%).  The higher oxygen favored the evolution toward larger size in animals that are limited by the efficiency of their respiratory system -- most notably arthropods.  In those same swamps where you'd find Lepidodendron trees, you'd find the dragonfly Meganeura, with a 75-centimeter wingspan; the 2.6-meter-long millipede Arthropleura; and the 70-centimeter-long scorpion Pulmonoscorpius.  If that's not bad enough, you'd have to avoid being eaten by the three-meter-long, sixty-kilogram predatory reptile Sphenacodon, which came equipped with a long row of big, nasty, pointy teeth.

Sphenacodon ferox skull in the Field Museum of Chicago [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smokeybjb, Sphenacodon ferox 1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So as interesting as it is, the Carboniferous Period is not a place you'd want to go in your time machine.

Anyhow, I got curious about why all of a sudden people are seeing an obscure genus of extinct trees in downtown Harrisburg or wherever, so I did some digging.  After wading through a bunch of accounts of the "YES I SAW ONE OMG I WAS IN ANOTHER DIMENSION AND IT WAS SOOOO SCARY" type, I found out that the whole thing started three years ago when someone posted the following on Reddit:

You should know two things about this, though; (1) the person who posted this originally is an actual paleontologist, and (2) for fuck's sake, he meant it as a joke.  It didn't get much traction beyond a few har-de-hars from people who were fossil enthusiasts until fall of last year, when a TikToker with the handle @jese2063 posted images of spooky trees that look vaguely like Lepidodendrons, with an equally creepy-sounding soundtrack and scary text about how if you see one, you've gone back in time and are in horrific danger.  (It's hard to tell whether he believed it himself; my sense is not, but I have an unfortunate habit of giving people the benefit of the doubt when they don't deserve it.)

In any case, that opened the floodgates.  @jese2063's video got over 4.5 million views, and now there are hundreds of similar claims, many of them from people like the Pennsylvanian hiker who said they'd actually visited the Carboniferous Period and lived to tell the tale.

The problem is, like with @jese2063, it's difficult to discern how many of these are true believers, and how many are simply adding their contributions to a growing Carboniferous creepypasta.  I have nothing against scary fiction -- after all, I've written my fair share of it -- but you have to wonder if some of these people are deadly serious.

I mean, the benefit of the doubt only goes so far.

In any case, that's the latest frightening thing to look out for.  If you're ever in, say, Scotland, and suddenly you find yourself in a hot fern-filled rainforest, now you'll be prepared.  Can't honestly tell you what to do about it, however.  Just enjoy looking around for fifteen minutes until you're eaten by a Sphenacodon or attacked by enormous millipedes, I guess.

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