Bubbles, dimensions, and black holes

One of the weirder claims of modern physics, which I first ran into when I was reading about string theory a few years ago, is that the universe could have more than three spatial dimensions -- but the extra ones are "curled up" and are (extremely) sub-microscopic.

I've heard it explained by an analogy of an ant walking on a string.  There are two ways the ant can go -- back and forth on the string, or around the string.  The "around the string" dimension is curled into a loop, whereas the back-and-forth one has a much greater spatial extent.

Scale that up, if your brain can handle it, to three dimensions of the back-and-forth variety, and as many as nine or ten of the around-the-string variety, and you've got an idea of what the claim is.

The problem is, those extra dimensions have proven to be pretty thoroughly undetectable, which has led critics to quote Wolfgang Pauli's quip, that it's a theory that "is not even wrong," it's unverifiable -- which is synonymous to saying "it isn't science."  But the theorists are still trying like mad to find an indirect method to show the existence of these extra dimensions.

To no avail at the present, although we did have an interesting piece added to the puzzle a while back that I somehow missed the first time 'round.  Astronomers Katie Mack of North Carolina State University and Robert McNees of Loyola University published a paper in arXiv that puts a strict limit on the number of macroscopic dimensions -- and that limit is three.

So sorry, fans of A Wrinkle in Time, there's no such thing as the tesseract.  The number of dimensions is three, and three is the number of dimensions.  Not four.  Nor two, unless thou proceedest on to three. 

Five is right out.

The argument by Mack and McNees -- which, although I have a B.S. in physics, I can't begin to comprehend fully -- boils down to the fact that the universe is still here.  If there were extra macroscopic spatial dimensions (whether or not we were aware of them) it would be possible that two cosmic particles of sufficient energy could collide and generate a miniature black hole, which would then give rise to a universe with different physical laws.  This new universe would expand like a bubble rising in a lake, its boundaries moving at the speed of light, ripping apart everything down to and including atoms as it went.

"If you’re standing nearby when the bubble starts to expand, you don’t see it coming," Mack said.  "If it’s coming at you from below, your feet stop existing before your mind realizes that."

This has been one of the concerns about the Large Hadron Collider, since the LHC's entire purpose is to slam together particles at enormous velocities.  Ruth Gregory of Durham University showed eight years ago that there was a non-zero possibility of generating a black hole that way, which triggered the usual suspects to conjecture that the scientists were trying to destroy the universe.  Why they would do that, when they inhabit said universe, is beyond me.  In fact, since they'd be standing right next to the Collider when it happened, they'd go first, before they even had a chance to cackle maniacally and rub their hands together about the fate of the rest of us.

"The black holes are quite naughty," Gregory said, which is a sentence that is impossible to hear in anything but a British accent.  "They really want to seed vacuum decay.  It’s a very strong process, if it can proceed."

"No structures can exist," Mack added.  "We’d just blink out of existence."

Of course, it hasn't happened, so that's good news.  Although I suppose this wouldn't be a bad way to go, all things considered.  At least it would be over quickly, not to mention being spectacular.  "Here lies Gordon, killed during the formation of a new universe," my epitaph could read, although there wouldn't be anyone around to write it, nor anything to write it on.

Which is kind of disappointing.

Anyhow, what Mack and McNees have shown is that this scenario could only happen if there was a fourth macroscopic dimension, and since it hasn't happened in the universe's 13.8 billion year history, it probably isn't going to.

So don't cancel your meetings this week.  Mack and McNees have shown that any additional spatial dimensions over the usual three must be smaller than 1.6 nanometers, which is about three times the diameter of your average atom; bigger than that, and we would already have become victims of "vacuum decay," as the expanding-bubble idea is called.

A cheering notion, that.  Although I have to say, it's an indication of how bad everything else has gotten that "We're not dead yet" is the best I can do for good news.

That's our news from the world of scientific research -- particle collisions, expanding black holes, and vacuum decay.  Myself, I'm not going to worry about it.  I figure if it happens, I'll be gone so fast I won't have time to be upset at my imminent demise, and afterwards none of my loved ones will be around to care.  Another happy thought is that I'll take Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Andrew Tate along with me, which might almost make destroying the entire universe worth it.

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Color my world

When you think about it, color vision is kind of strange.  Our eyes -- unless you have a genetic or physical inability to do so -- are able to sort out the frequencies of light, and each range in the visible light spectrum looks different to us.  But why do we have the ability to distinguish between, for example, light with a wavelength of 570 nanometers (which looks yellow) and that with a wavelength of 470 nanometers (which looks blue)?  It's a small shift in wavelength, but triggers a completely different response in our eyes and brain -- so it must be important, right?

Color perception in the natural world seems to serve a fairly small number of functions.  There's sexual signaling -- the (often) brighter colors of male birds, for example, is most likely a cue for females signaling fitness (and thus good genes, worthy of producing young with).  It can be a sign that food is ready to eat, such as fruits changing from the blend-with-the-foliage shades of green to something more eye-catching.  It can also be a danger signal, as with the brilliant warning colorations of coral snakes, the foul-tasting bright orange and black monarch butterfly, and Central and South America's dart poison frogs.

So our ability to sense colors, an ability shared with many other mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and some arthropods, seems to have evolved as a way of distinguishing things that need to stand out from the background, for purposes of reproduction or survival.  There's a reason, for example, that stop signs are red; our dim-light vision is poorest in the red region of the spectrum, so when car headlights catch a bright red stop sign at night, it immediately grabs our attention.  (The flipside of this phenomenon is why snow under moonlight looks blue.  It's not that snow preferentially reflects blue light; it's simply that our eyes are better at picking up the blue region of the spectrum in low light levels, so it's almost as if our eyes are subtracting the red frequencies from the white light reflected from snowbanks, resulting in it appearing blue.)

What this means, of course, is that pigment production has to have evolved in tandem with color perception.  There are undoubtedly exceptions, where colorful chemicals have evolved for other purposes, and their hues are accidental byproducts of their molecular structure; but otherwise, the evolution of bright pigments must have coevolved with the ability to perceive them.  The brilliantly-colored organic compounds produced in the petals of many flowers, for example, are generally for the purpose of attracting pollinators, and the reds, oranges, and yellows of ripe fruit attract animals to consume the fruits and then disperse the seeds.

Scarlet passion flower (Passiflora coccinea) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K, Scarlet Passion Flower - Flickr - gailhampshire, CC BY 2.0]

What's curious about this, and why the topic comes up today, are the findings of a study out of the University of Arizona that appeared in the journal Biological Review last week.  It showed that based on genetic studies of distantly-related animal groups, color vision evolved a very long time ago -- on the order of five hundred million years ago, so the middle of the Cambrian Period -- while the first fruits didn't show up for another 150 million years, and the first flowers 150 million years after that.

So the earliest production of functional color (and the ability to perceive it) almost certainly was driven by sexual signaling and warnings.  Then, once animals were able to see in color, it became an evolutionary driver in plants to ride the coattails of that capacity in order to facilitate cross-pollination and seed dispersal.

And once that back-and-forth coevolutionary relationship was in place, it was off to the races.  Give it another couple hundred million years, and we have the rainbow hues of the natural world today.

One thing I still find hard to explain -- from an evolutionary standpoint, at least -- is why we find brightly-colored things beautiful.  Having our attention caught by a bright red apple, or the wild stripes and spots of the venomous lionfish -- sure, those make sense.  But why is it almost universal to find a daffodil or a wild rose beautiful?

Ah, well, maybe it's just one of those accidental things that is a consequence of other, more vital, evolutionarily-derived traits.  Whatever it is, we can certainly still enjoy it, and not let our wondering why it occurs interfere with our appreciation.

But it's still kind of cool that the ability that allows us to have that experience goes back at least five hundred million years.

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A Cambrian holdout

Although you don't tend to hear much about it, the Ordovician Period was a very peculiar time in Earth's history.

From beginning (485 million years ago) to the end (444 million years ago) it experienced one of the biggest global climatic swings the Earth has ever seen.  In the early Ordovician the climate was a sauna -- an intense greenhouse effect caused the highest temperatures the Paleozoic Era would see, and glacial ice all but vanished.  By the end, the center of the supercontinent of Gondwana was near the South Pole, and glaciers covered much of what is now Africa and South America, resulting in a massive extinction that wiped out an estimated sixty percent of life on Earth.

At this point, life was confined to the oceans.  The first terrestrial plants and fungi wouldn't evolve until something like twenty million years after the beginning of the next period, the Silurian, and land animals only followed after that.  So during the Ordovician, the shift in sea level had an enormous impact -- as the period progressed and more and more ocean water became locked up in the form of glacial ice, much of what had been shallow, temperate seas dried up to form cold, barren deserts.  And that was all there was on land -- thousands of square kilometers of rock, sand, and ice, without a single living thing larger than bacteria to be found anywhere.

Somehow, despite the extreme climatic swings that happened during the Ordovician, life in the oceans diversified, and rebounded after the dramatic dieoff at the end.  And along the way, there were some really peculiar life forms.

One of these was discovered not long ago in the Castle Bank Formation in the middle of Wales.  (Ordovician outcrops in Wales are what gave the period its name; the Ordovices were a tribe that lived there around the time of the Roman conquest of Britain.)  The animal was small -- the fossil measures only thirteen millimeters from tip to tail -- but it was one odd-looking critter:

A reconstruction of Mieridduryn bonniae [Image credit: Franz Anthony]

Aficionados of paleontology will no doubt immediately recognize the similarity to Cambrian animals called Opabinia and Anomalocaris; Mieridduryn looks almost like a hybrid of the two.  (If you're a linguistics geek like myself, you might be interested to know that the genus name Mieridduryn comes from Welsh words meaning "bramble snout.")  And it does seem to be a holdover from the Cambrian Explosion fauna, which also produced such weird forms as Hallucigenia (the name means "comes from a hallucination"), which is so bizarre that at first, paleontologists reconstructed it upside down, until some better-preserved fossils made them realize their error.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Qohelet12, Hallucigenia, CC BY-SA 4.0]

By the Ordovician, however, a lot of the stranger (to our eyes, at least) life forms had gone extinct, and the wipeout at the end of the Ordovician finished off the last of them.  At that point, what was left -- arthropods, primitive vertebrates, mollusks, echinoderms, annelids, and so on -- would have begun to look a lot more familiar to us.

But during the mid-Ordovician, when Mieridduryn was snorking about in the mud of shallow, warm oceans, there were still some mighty peculiar animals.  If you hopped a time machine and went back there, you might well think you were on a different planet.  It reminds me of the poem by Irish geologist John Joly, which he was inspired to write while looking at a the fossil of a long-extinct animal, and seems a fitting place to end:

Is nothing left?  Have all things passed thee by?

The stars are not thy stars.  The aged hills

Are changed and bowed beneath the ills

Of ice and rain, of river and sky;

The sea that riseth now in agony

Is not thy sea.  The stormy voice that fills

This gloom with man's remotest sorrow shrills

The memory of thy lost futurity.

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A botanical chameleon

One of the things I love most about science is its capacity to astonish us.

You can be really knowledgeable in a field, and then the natural world slings a curve ball at you and leaves you amazed.  Sometimes these unexpected twists lead to profound leaps in our understanding -- an example is the discovery of the parallel magnetic stripes in igneous rocks along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge leading to the theory of plate tectonics -- but sometimes it's just a fascinating bit of scientific trivia, one of those little things that makes you smile in a bemused sort of way and say, "Science is so cool."

I had a moment like that yesterday.  I taught biology for 32 years and have been interested in plants -- especially tropical plants -- a great deal longer than that.  I have a fine collection of tropical plants, currently jammed into my greenhouse so tightly that I can barely walk through it because the ones who spend the summer on my deck have to be tucked away in a warm place during our frigid winters.  I have bromeliads, cacti, three species of ginger, four different kinds of angel's trumpet (one of which got to be seven feet tall this past summer, and sometimes had twenty giant, peach-colored flowers all blooming at once), a fig tree and a lime tree that produce every year, and two species of eucalyptus.

Among others.

While I wouldn't call myself an expert when it comes to tropical plants, I'm at least Better Than The Average Bear.  So I was startled to run, quite by accident, into an account of a species I had never even heard of -- and even more startled when I found out how truly bizarre and unique this plant is.

It's called the "chameleon vine," and its scientific name is Boquila trifoliolata.  It belongs to a small and rather obscure family of dicots called Lardizabalaceae, which contains forty species found in two places -- southeast Asia and western South America.  (How a group of plants with common ancestry ended up in such widely separated locales is a mystery in and of itself; populations like this are called peripheral isolates and are a perennial puzzle in evolutionary biology.)

Boquila is one of the South American ones, and lives in southern Chile and Argentina.  It's a woody vine whose leaves are composed of three leaflets (thus the plant's species name).  Here's a picture:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Inao, Boquila trifoliata [sic], CC BY-SA 2.0]

It's not really much to look at, and you non-botanical types are probably tapping your fingers and saying, "So what?"  But wait till you hear what this plant can do -- and why it merits its common name of "chameleon vine."

Boquila trifoliolata has an extraordinary ability called mimetic polymorphism.  It's capable of altering its leaf shape to mimic a variety of different (unrelated) plants -- including the ones it most commonly twines up as a support.  We're not talking about small differences, either.  It can be glossy or dull, have different petiole lengths, have different leaflet sizes and shapes, and even change whether or not it has serrations or spines along the edge!

This ability, first described in a paper by botanists Ernesto Gianoli and Fernando Carrasco-Urra in Current Biology in 2014, was first attributed to genetic transfer from the host to the vine, a sort of genetic parasitism.  I'll admit that was the first explanation I thought of -- although how a plant could take up DNA from another species and only express the genes related to leaf morphology left me scratching my head a little.  But Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra were able to rule out this possibility, because Boquila can alter its leaf shape without touching the plant it's mimicking.

All it has to do is be nearby.  So it isn't a parasite at all.  The current guess is that Boquila is picking up volatile organic compounds emitted by the other plant, and those are altering gene expression, but those organic compounds have yet to be identified -- nor has any kind of specific mechanism by which that kind of alteration in phenotype could happen.

Less certain still is how it perceives those specific traits in its neighbors so it knows what genes to express, and how.

Even though we still have no idea how Boquila is managing this neat trick, the why is pretty clear.  If it's hiding amongst the foliage of another plant, herbivores can't single it out for a snack.  Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra found that when Boquila is climbing up a non-living support like a chain-link fence, herbivores actually seek it out for browsing.  But when it's camouflaged within another plant's leaves, it can avoid being seen and identified -- and, they found, browsing of its foliage dropped by as much as fifty percent.

Fascinating, isn't it?  And yet despite study, we haven't been able to figure out how the plant evolved this amazing (and apparently unique in the plant world) ability, nor what kind of information it's gleaning that might say, "Okay, time to change color and grow some spikes!"

So yet another example of how science is really freakin' cool.  It also illustrates how every new discovery opens up new avenues for investigation.  The crazy chameleon plant should make it absolutely clear that if you go into science, you'll never be done learning.

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What will continue

Like many Americans, I spent most of yesterday in a state of shock and incredulity.  I felt, honestly, like I'd been kicked in the gut.  It's not that I thought a Harris presidency was a foregone conclusion; but the margin by which she lost was a horrible wake-up call, and a reminder that racism, sexism, xenophobia, and Christian nationalism are still forces to be reckoned with.

In yesterday's post, I gave voice to my anger that a man like Donald Trump could win a national election not once, but twice.  All of us know exactly who he is, or should.  When the chaos comes, which I am certain it will, no one will have available the excuse of "we didn't know."  Whatever else you can say about him, he's never been stealthy.

The lion's share of the blame, though, goes to the corporate capitalists who bankrolled and supported him -- men like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Rupert Murdoch -- purely out of self-interest.  Also to the media, which scrutinized every damn thing Kamala Harris said and did, and gave Donald Trump carte blanche to babble nonsense and fraternize with racists and right-wing extremists of the worst sort, barely giving any of it a mention.  (Of course, those are not unrelated factors; the media itself is controlled by the very wealthy, who more than anyone else stand to gain from a Trump presidency.)

So yesterday was devoted to processing my own rage.

But today, I'm trying to figure out how I and my family and friends are going to cope with all this.  Just feeling hopeful for the future is a struggle right now.  But when hope is far away, you have to fall back on commitment.  So in today's post I want to focus on what will continue -- what I did last week, when I was still hopeful that sanity would prevail, and will still do now, when I am forced to concede that it did not.

So here's what I'm going to do going forward.

• I will continue to take care of my family and friends, to let them know I'm here when they need me, and to fight like hell for them when I have to.

• I will always be a voice for marginalized communities, especially religious and ethnic minorities, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people, and I vow to protect them physically and materially if it becomes necessary.

• I will continue to write about critical issues like climate change, public health policy, and the environment, regardless of the repercussions.

• I will stand up to bullies who attempt to destroy our rights and freedoms, even if it's at risk of my own bodily harm.

• I will speak truth to power.

• I will keep doing the small things -- tending my garden, making good food for my family and friends, and giving loving homes to our wonderful canine companions.

• I will continue to support artists, writers, and musicians and their commitment to bring some beauty into this poor, struggling world -- and I will continue to create as well.

• Tomorrow, I will be back to writing about cool and interesting stuff here at Skeptophilia, because teaching and learning and curiosity and humor will always be important.

• I will never, ever stop fighting for what is right, what is true, what is compassionate, and what is kind.

Even in my optimistic moments, I suspect we've got some dark times ahead.  Nothing will change my stance that American voters made a huge, huge, mistake on Tuesday, and will all too soon be finding that out.  But despite all that, I'm determined to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to make sure that the people I love are doing the same thing.

Day by day, step by step.  It's all we can do.  That, and to help each other.  So check up on the people you care about.  Frequently.  Don't be afraid to reach out when you need help, or even a hug or a shoulder to cry on; you'll find it.

Whatever happened two days ago, and whatever will happen in the upcoming days and weeks, keep your mind focused on the things that need to continue, and turn your hope into a rock-solid commitment to hold fast to those.

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Freefall

Well, voting day is done, and although the dust has yet to settle, it appears to have gone as badly as it possibly could have.

I'm sick to my stomach right now, and it's going to take me a long time to process this.  The nation I live in, and thought I understood, has apparently chosen to hand the reins of power to an egocentric, megalomanic sociopath who has never cared about a single thing other than his own self-aggrandizement.  He has no morals, no ethics, no conscience, and over half the United States thinks that he's who we want (for a second time) as leader.

To say I'm sick at heart is a vast understatement.  I'm also deeply, deeply mystified at how nothing this man does ever seems to alienate his followers.  How could what he's done not make a difference?  You MAGA types claim to be "values voters," so where are your values?

Very early on, Trump publicly mocked a disabled reporter,  He called women "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals" -- then was asked about this comment at a debate by (very conservative) moderator Megyn Kelly.  He gave a waffling answer, but afterward said about Kelly in an interview with Don Lemon, "She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions.  You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever."  Worse, he -- now infamously -- said in an interview that when you're famous, women will let you do anything, up to including "grabbing them by the pussy."

None of this, apparently, was enough to convince you that this man is amoral.

He's a convicted felon 34 times over, faces numerous other charges that have yet to go to trial, is an adjudicated sex abuser and a multiply-accused rapist, including of under-age girls.  Of course, now he's certain to pardon himself for everything, but the fact remains that these convictions and allegations stand.

And that wasn't enough, either.

He claimed that failing to clap for his speeches was "treason."  He called the press "the enemy of the people" and just last week said that he wouldn't object if his followers "shot through the fake news" -- as well as specifically aiming their guns and firing at Liz Cheney, a Republican who has been a vocal critic of Trump and MAGA.  He said outright he'd be a dictator "from day one," and that his first priority would be exacting revenge against his critics, whom he calls "the enemy within."

We tried to lay out the obvious parallels with pre-World-War-II Nazi propaganda, but you weren't listening.

Speaking of the World Wars, in 2018 on a trip to Europe he refused to go to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery to honor the fallen American soldiers, and he said, "Why should I go to that cemetery?  It's filled with losers."  His contempt for veterans is incontrovertible; he commented on John McCain's service with a dismissive comment of "I like people who weren't captured."  This from someone who was deferred from service because of apparently imaginary bone spurs.

But that didn't do it, either.

He's stated that he's going to hand over economic control of the government to the man who took one of the most successful social media platforms ever created and drove it into the ground and the control of health care to a raving lunatic who wants to end vaccination and remove fluoride from tap water, and his response to the escalating climate crisis is "Drill baby drill, and frack frack frack!"

Those apparently don't alarm you in the least.

It seems like any one of these should have been sufficient, but the fact is, all of this stuff put together didn't make a single damn bit of difference.  He still had fervent support from evangelical Christians despite in an interview being unable to come up with a single Bible verse he liked, and calling the New Testament book "Two Corinthians."  He's a pathological liar, a serial adulterer, a financial cheat, and he and his kids were found guilty of stealing money from a children's cancer charity.  And yet the religious subset of MAGA acted as if he were the Second Coming of Christ, even creating images like this one:

This is the man you've chosen to run our country.

I'm angry, scared, confused, and lord have mercy, I am exhausted to the core of my being.  The voters have handed our country to monsters -- not only Trump, but right-wing extremists like J. D. Vance and the architects of Project 2025.  We are going to see the United States turned into a place where women, minorities, legal immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, atheists, and dissenters are not safe.

You voted for that.  I don't give a flying fuck what your reason was; you MAGA types chose to cast your vote for everything he represents and all the long, long litany of horrible things he's said and done.  And whatever happens next, you own every last bit of it.

I don't know what else to say.  I, and other moderates and liberals, feel like we're in freefall right now.  

I will continue to speak out, to my last breath.  But right now, mostly what I want to do is weep.

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Wandering through Lemuria

Today's post is brought to you by the Department of One Thing Leads to Another.

Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) was a distinguished British biologist with a long and illustrious career.  He was an expert ornithologist, but his knowledge extended to just about every group of living things.  He is considered to have founded the science of biogeography -- linking evolution to the geographical regions where assemblages of species live -- and because of his contributions, he has no fewer than eleven species named after him.

It was while he was studying the biogeography of Africa and India that he noticed something odd.  Madagascar is the home to a group called lemurs -- relatively small-bodied, large-eyed primates that are thought to have branched off from other primate groups on the order of fifty million years ago.  Inquiries by Sclater and others into paleontology found fossils of lemurs and lemur-like primates not only in Madagascar and east Africa, but in India; more curious, though, is that there were no similar fossils anywhere to be found in North Africa or the Middle East.

So how did they get from southern Africa to India, and leave no fossils behind along the way?

Continental Africa to Madagascar is possible; it requires crossing the Mozambique Channel, but that's at least plausible.  But the Indian Ocean?  Seems like a long way for a lemur (or, more accurately, at least two lemurs) to swim, so how could this be explained?

Sclater proposed that the landmasses of India and East Africa were once connected.  Given that this was 1864, and prior to any knowledge of continental drift and plate tectonics, the continents were believed to stay firmly where they were; so the only possibility Sclater could come up with was that there had once been dry land where the western Indian Ocean now is.  A "lost continent," as it were, drowned beneath the sea.

Because he'd come up with the idea based on the distribution of lemur fossils, Sclater called the continent "Lemuria."

Lots of other biologists thought this explanation was pretty nifty, and even the prominent German researcher Ernst Haeckel gave it his imprimatur, adding that maybe this could be a possible location for the origin of the human species.

The problem was, when the first attempts were made at sounding in the western Indian Ocean, it seemed way too deep for Sclater's explanation to be plausible.  It was known that the vagaries of ice ages and other climatic shifts made the sea levels rise and fall, but even Sclater's most ardent supporters began to wonder how Lemuria could have sunk by thousands of meters, leaving no traces whatsoever.  Then, when Alfred Wegener and others began to take the idea of continental drift seriously, it explained the distribution of lemur fossils (and other similar examples that had been discovered in the interim) without positing a lost continent.  India itself had moved, carrying its flora, fauna, and fossil assemblage with it, accounting for the odd biogeography of the lemurs (and the origin of the Himalayas thrown in as an added benefit).

Lemuria had been a good guess, as these things go, but seemed to be another example of Thomas Henry Huxley's quip that the tragedy of science is "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."  So you'd think that'd be that.

You'd be wrong.  Because enter, stage left, one Helena Petrovna von Hahn Blavatsky.

Helena Blavatsky in 1877 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Blavatsky was a very, very odd character.  She was widely traveled, making her way through Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, India, and Tibet, and mostly seemed to use her wanderings to pick up pieces of esoteric lore.  And what she didn't find, she was quite content to make up herself.  She claimed that one of her books, The Secret Doctrine, was based on a mysterious and holy text from Tibet called The Book of Dzyan, which appears to have been a complete fabrication of her own.  This sort of thing notwithstanding, she gained a cult following, eventually founding a movement called Theosophy, which -- with no apparent sense of irony -- has this as its symbol:

Well, Blavatsky loved the idea of Lemuria.  It gave her a place where her Ascended Masters had lived, whose spirits she claimed to still be able to converse with.  Lemuria became, so to speak, the Atlantis of the East; a place that had been the home of a Golden Age of Humanity, eventually destroyed by the wickedness of a few, but from which there were still relic documents scattered around the world that the wise could learn from (and of course which Blavatsky would be happy to tell you all about).

Except for two inconvenient facts: (1) Lemuria never existed, and (2) the documents Blavatsky "translated" were almost all forgeries.

This didn't stop her from claiming that science supported her claims, citing Sclater's scholarly papers as evidence and conveniently not mentioning any of the later ones that had shot down Sclater's hypothesis.

The whole thing gained additional momentum when early twentieth century horror writers like H. P. Lovecraft got on board, mentioning Lemuria as one of the places the Elder Gods had lived.  Lovecraft even mentions The Book of Dzyan in his story "The Diary of Alonzo Typer:"

I learned of The Book of Dzyan, whose first six chapters antedate the Earth, and which was old when the lords of Venus came through space in their ships to civilize our planet.

This, of course, added further fuel to the fire, because although most people knew Lovecraft's stories were fiction, maybe -- just maybe -- the various books he mentioned weren't.  Which explains why you can buy Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon on Amazon, even though Lovecraft himself made up both the "mad Arab" and his "monstrous and abhorred book," something he said outright in a letter to fellow writer Robert Bloch:

By the way—there is no "Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred."  That hellish & forbidden volume is an imaginative conception of mine, which others of the W.T. group have also used as a background of allusion.

But of course... he would say that, wouldn't he?  *slow single-eyebrow raise*

If things haven't gotten eye-rollingly convoluted enough, we have one last person to introduce, which is Tamil scholar and fervent nationalist Devaneya Pavanar.  In the early twentieth century, Pavanar was trying to do two things, one of which was considerably more laudable than the other: (1) develop a comprehensive linguistics of the Tamil language, and (2) establish the Tamils as the culture from which all language, literature, religion, music, art, and science worldwide ultimately sprang.  The current Tamils live mostly in southern India and Sri Lanka, but despite his best efforts, Pavanar found that there was little hard evidence in those regions available to support that latter idea.  So instead of going, "Okay, I guess I musta been wrong, then," he latched onto Sclater's hypothesis, via Blavatsky, and decided that Lemuria was indeed the home of a lost Golden Age of Humanity, but it had been run entirely by the ancestors of today's Tamil people, so that had to be where all the evidence had gone; it was sunk under the waves of the western Indian Ocean.

He said the Tamil name for Lemuria was Kumari Kandam, and claimed that science supported his contention -- like Blavatsky, leaving out the unfortunate footnote that all the science in the intervening years had disproven the whole damn thing.  The brilliant Tamil poet Seshagiri Sastri said that Kumari Kandam was "a mere fiction originated by the prolific imagination of Tamil poets," but that appears to have convinced no one who wasn't already convinced.

And because it fell right in line with Pavanar's extremely popular ethnocentric claims, the idea of Kumari Kandam made its way into science textbooks in Tamil Nadu and parts of Sri Lanka, and in some places is still taught as scientifically-accepted fact, despite the fact that there is exactly zero evidence -- not a single artifact brought up from the western Indian Ocean seafloor, no submerged buildings, no geological evidence of a drowned continent, nothing -- supporting any of it.

All of which makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

So there you are.  What started out as a reasonable (if, ultimately, incorrect) guess by a reputable scientist still lives on today because a flock of woo-woos led by a loony Russian mystic and a Tamil-first extremist grabbed it and ran right off the cliff with it.  Which I guess is yet another indication that you don't need any evidence at all to fall for a claim that supports what you already believed to be true.

Me, I prefer actual science, but some days I appear to be in the minority.

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