A circle of light

The Ordovician Period was a strange time in Earth's (pre)history.

It lasted a little over forty million years, from about 485 million years ago to 444 million years ago.  Coming out of the Cambrian Period, there was incredible diversity in marine life, especially invertebrates like arthropods, mollusks, and brachiopods; and at the beginning it was very hot -- not far off from the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which had a global average temperature almost ten degrees higher than it is today.  But over the next forty million years, the climate went into a slow slide, ending with what is called the "Hirnantian Icehouse," a period of widespread continental glaciation.  The climate shift triggered a mass extinction, one of the "Big Five," and an estimated eighty percent of marine species went extinct.

But unlike the later Permian-Triassic and Cretaceous Extinctions, this one wasn't at all sudden -- suggesting that the causes of the other two mentioned, a massive volcanic eruption and an asteroid strike respectively, might not have been responsible.

So what triggered the climatic shift and die-off?

One thing was simply plate movement; by the end of the Ordovician, Gondwana (what is now Africa, South America, Antarctica, and Australia) were near the South Pole, which led to the formation of glaciers.  But it's hard to see how that by itself would have had such an enormous effect on life worldwide.

A paper this week in Earth and Planetary Science Letters proposes a curious solution, hinging on a peculiar observation; there was a meteorite barrage around 466 million years ago, during the middle of the Ordovician.  Extant rocks of that age show dozens of impact craters.  But... those craters are almost entirely limited to regions that were within thirty degrees of the equator at the time.

The researchers estimate that the likelihood of that occurring by chance is equivalent to flipping a coin 21 times and getting tails every time.  But if they were connected, there's the problem that the extinction didn't occur right after the barrage; there was an almost twenty million year gap between the impact array and the icehouse/extinction.  It's apparent that the strikes didn't directly trigger the extinction.

What the researchers propose is a near strike by a large asteroid -- one that, had it hit square on (as the Chicxulub Meteorite would do almost exactly four hundred million years later) would have been in the planet-killer category.  But it did pass inside the Roche limit, the distance a smaller object can pass a planet at which the gravity holding the passing asteroid together is exceeded by the tidal forces trying to tear it apart.

So rather than going into orbit, or crashing into the Earth in one piece, the asteroid got shredded.  The larger chunks went into decaying trajectories and ultimately impacted Earth near their orbital planes (parallel to the Earth's equator -- resulting in the odd distribution of craters), and the rest got spun out into...

... a ring system.

[Image credit: Oliver Hull]

The researchers think the rings shaded the Earth from enough of the Sun's warmth and light that it precipitated a slow decline into an ice age, and coupled with the movement of a big section of the Earth's crust down to near the South Pole, a worldwide icehouse.  But because it was a gradual drop in temperature, the hit on biodiversity didn't happen all at once -- although by the end, it certainly was big enough to rank amongst the largest mass extinctions ever.

But -- a ring system.  Can you imagine what that'd have looked like?

Of course, it's not like taking a time machine back to the late Ordovician would be all that hot an idea, and I mean that both literally and figuratively.  Notwithstanding how gawdawful cold it'd have been, there would also be the problem of finding food.  Plants had yet to colonize the land -- that wouldn't happen until the next geological period, the Silurian -- so the continents were basically one barren expanse of rock, dirt, and sand. 

But still.  Standing there in that empty landscape, and you look up, and arching over your head, spanning the entire dome of the sky, are these broad rings, a circular belt shining in reflected light.

We used to think rings were uncommon; for a long time, Saturn was the only planet known to have them.  But better telescopes and (especially) flybys have found ring systems around all four of the gas giants.  Now, if the current paper bears up under scrutiny, we might add Earth to the list.  Eventually, the Earth's ring system scattered and decayed away -- gravitational interactions between multiple objects of similar sizes are inherently unstable -- allowing the Earth to warm again, leading into the swampy, hot Silurian and Carboniferous Periods.

But for a while, we had what must have been an awe-inspiring adornment.

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Time marches on

I was observing to a friend a couple of days ago how fast this year is going by.  It seems like only a week or two ago that we were all complaining about adjusting to writing 2024 on our checks, and here it is September, with the Autumnal Equinox less than a week away.

Thus far it's been a wild, and rapid, ride.  We've had the hottest year on record, and that's with some stiff competition from the past twenty years.  War is still raging in Ukraine and Gaza.  Donald Trump is still shrieking about evil immigrants eating pets, which for some unexplained reason does not result in his handlers squirting horse tranquilizers down his throat with a turkey baster.

So pretty much the status quo, weird though it may be.

But if you think time's rushing by as-is, it's nothing compared a proposal to revamp our calendar.  According to a video by the Munich-based filmmakers that call themselves "Kurzgesagt" (German for "in brief"), we shouldn't be in the year 2024, we should be in 12,024.

The reason for this proposal is that marking our calendar based upon the beginning of Christianity is a fairly arbitrary zero year, given how many people in the world aren't Christian.  Plus, having a great swatch of history marked by the backwards-running "B.C." scale is confusing and unnecessary.  So Philipp Dettmer and his friends at Kurzgesagt have suggested a new scale, and one that conveniently would only require the addition of a "1" at the beginning of our current year.

So what happened 12,024 years ago that's so special?  Dettmer says this is when the first known permanent stone building was built in the hills of southern Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, marking the point at which we began to "build a new world on top of the old one."  At that point, we set in motion the massive terraforming operation that has characterized humanity ever since.

This would mean that we would do away with the old "B.C." and "A.D." designations; all years on the calendar after that point (and thus all of recorded history) would run forward and would be "H.E."  (Human Era).

Roman calendar from the 1st century B.C.E., or the 99th century H.E., whichever you prefer (Image is in the Public Domain]

Okay, there are a few problems with this.

First of all, the temple that Dettmer et al. are referencing -- Göbekli Tepe, near the town of Şanlıurfa -- was not built 12,024 years ago, it was founded around 11,150 years ago, which is a 900-odd year discrepancy.  This is according to the oldest radiocarbon dates we have from the site, so it seems like a good estimate.  So if you really do want to measure the years based on the founding of this temple, you'd have to do more than simply adding a "1" to the beginning of the current calendar year, you'd have to add 9,126, which is not nearly as convenient.

Second, I wonder if they've considered the level of conniption that would be thrown by the Religious Right if this was seriously proposed.  These, after all, are the same people who founded the War on Christmas trope, which claims (among other things) that Starbucks changing its winter cup design every year is the moral equivalent of strafing the Three Wise Men while they're on their way to Bethlehem.  These are also the same people who regularly send me hate mail when I use "B.C.E." and "C.E." ("Before Common Era" and "Common Era") instead of B.C. and A.D.  (One memorable one said, "You're so much in love with your lord and master Satan you can't even bear to write Christ's name in an abbreviation.  You're despicable."  Which became a lot funnier when the final sentence made me think of reading the entire thing in a Daffy Duck voice, so I did.  You should try it.)

Hell, we're the culture that couldn't even agree to switching over to using metric units.  Nope, gotta stick with feet, inches, pounds, ounces, hundredweights, and furlongs per fortnight.  'Murika!  Fuck yeah!

Then there's a third issue, which is that it's not like we don't have commemoration of other deities in other parts of our timekeeping system, such as the days (Tiw, Woden, Thor, and Freyja) and months (Januarius, Februarius, Mars, Maia, Juno).  The difference is that pretty much no one worships any of these gods any more, which in Thor's case is kind of a shame because he was a serious badass, and if you count his movie appearances, drop-dead sexy as well.

Of course, it's not like calendar-keeping ever was a particularly exact science.  Our current zero year (well, 1 C.E., as there's no Year Zero in the contemporary calendar) is supposed to be based on the birth of Jesus, but the problem is, the most recent scholarship on the topic -- calculated from known dates of Roman emperors' reigns and the lives of biblical figures such as Herod -- has concluded that Jesus was born in 4 B.C.E.  He also wasn't born on December 25, but probably some time in the spring, given that "the shepherds were tending their lambs in the fields."  The settlement on December 25 as the date for the celebration of Jesus's birth probably started some time mid-fourth century, and a lot of folks think that the date was chosen because it coincided with the part of the year when the Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a solstice festival associated with meals, get-togethers, and gift-giving (sound familiar?).  The idea was that if you sanctified the date by putting a Christian spin on the celebration, you could let the former pagans still have their party but pretend it was something holier.  The church fathers figured with luck, the recent converts would eventually forget about the pagan part and focus only on the holy part, which 1,700 years later still hasn't happened, given Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and Black Friday specials at Walmart.

Now, my point is not that any of the above stuff is exact, either; the spring 4 B.C.E. date for Jesus's birth still rests on a lot of guesswork.  It's more that our calendar-keeping isn't based on anything real as it is.  It's hard enough to keep up with the inevitable vagaries that are engendered by the fact that the Earth's rotation and revolution cycles don't line up especially well, which is why we have leap days every four years.  In fact, when that change was made, it was because in the sixteenth century, the powers-that-be were beginning to notice that the solstices and equinoxes, and more importantly from their point of view the holy days, were coming unglued from the dates they were supposed to occur on.  So this prompted the reformation of the calendar called the Gregorian calendar, which fixed the beginning of the year at January 1 (before, the date that marked the beginning of a new year varied from December 25 to March 25, depending on whom you asked), and added an extra day in February every four years to keep it from happening again.  The adoption of the Gregorian calendar caused the loss of 13 days (February 1 was immediately followed by February 14).  And even it wasn't adopted smoothly and universally -- the Republic of Venice adopted the new calendar in 1582; Great Britain waited until 1750; and Russia and Serbia didn't cave in until 1918.

You can just imagine the hell this played with people's international engagement calendars.  (Actually, the author Umberto Eco used this very idea as one of the many plot twists in his novel Foucault's Pendulum, which might well be the most brilliantly intricate novel ever written.)

So trying to make a major-scale, simultaneous, worldwide change to time-keeping would be too much for us, I think.

Me, I think if we're really going to have a meaningful calendar, we should start with the real milestone, which is the Big Bang.  Now that's a real Zero Year.  And it makes the fact that we've only got three and a half months left in 13,800,002,024 A.B.B. seems like not such a big deal after all.

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Bell ringer

Sometimes we dodge a bullet.

In September of 2023, seismologists all over the world recorded an odd periodic signal that lasted about nine days.  It was strongest in Europe and eastern North America, but was recorded in places far distant.  The first pulses of the signal had the highest amplitude, and it gradually faded in intensity afterward; the effect was very much like the sound waves generated by a struck bell, which begin loud and eventually diminish into silence once the metal stops vibrating.

It took a while for the geologists to figure out what caused the signal, and when they did, it caused a few gasps -- and then sighs of relief.

The climate-change-induced warmup in the polar regions has caused a huge loss of ice mass in Greenland and Antarctica, and the main associated hazard we've been warned about is sea level rise.  But the September 2023 event highlights another potential problem.  The source of the seismic signal was the collapse of a 1.2-kilometer-high mountain peak into remote Dickson Fjord in Greenland, triggered by the thinning of an ice wall that had held back the rock and debris.  When the estimate 25 million cubic meter landslide hit the water, it triggered a tsunami over a hundred meters high that proceeded to slosh back and forth across the fjord about once every ninety seconds, creating a vibration in the Earth's crust that was picked up on seismometers thousands of kilometers away.

Dickson Fjord, Greenland [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bjoertvedt, Dicksonfjorden IMG 8800, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The reason I call this "dodging a bullet" is twofold.  First, Dickson Fjord is far away from human settlements; the only damage was to an at-the-time-unoccupied patrol station on Ella Ø, an island seventy or so kilometers away, where the tsunami height was about four meters.  Second, Dickson Fjord is narrow, with a lot of twists and turns, so most of the energy of the tsunami was expended by the sloshing of water back and forth across the inlet; little of the energy made it out of the mouth of the fjord into the north Atlantic.

The analysis of the seismograph data, and their cause, were the subject of a paper in Science this week.

"When I first saw the seismic signal, I was completely baffled," said Stephen Hicks, geologist at University College London, who co-authored the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Even though we know seismometers can record a variety of sources happening on Earth's surface, never before has such a long-lasting, globally-traveling seismic wave, containing only a single frequency of oscillation, been recorded.  This inspired me to co-lead a large team of scientists to figure out the puzzle.  Our study of this event amazingly highlights the intricate interconnections between climate change in the atmosphere, destabilization of glacier ice in the cryosphere, movements of water bodies in the hydrosphere, and Earth's solid crust in the lithosphere.  This is the first time that water sloshing has been recorded as vibrations through the Earth's crust, traveling the world over and lasting several days."

It's sobering to think of what would have happened had the landslide occurred in a cliff facing the open ocean, and not in a narrow, remote fjord.  Without anything to damp the oscillations and act as a shock absorber to dissipate the energy of the landslide, the displaced water would have created an unimpeded tsunami that might have wrought havoc on populated coastlines.

We lucked out.

Addressing climate change should be a priority not only for the obvious reasons -- mitigating extremes of weather, slowing down sea level rise, and minimizing the impacts on biodiversity and agriculture.  But the warming Earth increases our risks of other, more sudden and unexpected, hazards, ones that are impossible to predict and therefore way harder to protect ourselves against.  Decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels isn't going to be an easy fix, but in the long run, the dangers of accelerating climate change far outweigh the problems created by our efforts to slow it down.

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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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