Puff piece

A couple of posts ago I mentioned how there have been discoveries of exoplanetary systems that have challenged our understanding of how planets form -- including planets with wildly misaligned orbits and the phenomenon of "hot Jupiters," gas giants close enough to their parent stars that you'd expect (based on what we understand of the physics) they would have their lightweight, hydrogen-rich atmospheres blown clean away.

Yesterday I ran into some new research showing that the latter phenomenon -- low-density atmospheres being oddly resistant to annihilation -- is a problem with another kind of exoplanet, which are called (I shit you not) "super puff planets."  They are not, I hasten to point out, where these characters come from:

Although admittedly, those three do look like aliens to me.  I mean, what's with the ginormous eyes, and the fact that they appear not to have noses or fingers?  And apparently they can fly, although I only know this by inference from the still-shots, as I have never watched the show (and have no intention of doing so).  A few years ago I was maneuvered by a friend into watching a forty-five second clip from My Little Pony, and that did enough psychological damage that I'm wary of walking into the same danger again.

But I digress.

"Super puff planets" aren't fiction at all; they are planets with an extraordinarily low density.  The lowest-density planet in our own Solar System is Saturn, which at an average of 0.69 g/cm^3 is light enough that it would float in water (if you could find a pool big enough).  But super puff planets beat Saturn by a mile; they have an average density of 0.05 g/cm^3, which is about the same as cotton candy.

The open question, of course, is not only how they don't get blown apart by the light, heat, and stellar wind from their parent stars, but what allows them to form in the first place.  Planets are held together because they're massive enough that their gravitational energy overcomes other forces (like electrostatic repulsion) that might act to fragment them.  This is why planets are all roughly spherical; it's the equilibrium shape for something that is gravitationally bound -- and the heavier they are (like the neutron stars that were the subject of my post a couple of days ago), the rounder they are.  Small bodies, like the asteroids and some of the smaller moons of the planets in our Solar System, can be some other shape; massive bodies are pulled into spheres.

So how super puff planets (1) form, and (2) don't get immediately torn to shreds, is still unknown.  Which makes it even wilder that a paper this week in The Astronomical Journal describes a system, Kepler 51, that has three -- perhaps four -- of these cotton-candy planets.

"Super puff planets are very unusual in that they have very low mass and low density," said Jessica Libby-Roberts, Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State, and co-first author of the paper.  "The three previously known planets that orbit the star, Kepler-51, are about the size of Saturn but only a few times the mass of Earth...  We think they have tiny cores and huge atmospheres of hydrogen of helium, but how these strange planets formed and how their atmospheres haven't been blown away by the intense radiation of their young star has remained a mystery.  We planned to use JWST to study one of these planets to help answer these questions, but now we have to explain a fourth low-mass planet in the system!"

Explanations, thus far, have proven elusive.  Right now, super puffs and hot Jupiters are both mysteries, planets that somehow form and maintain a thick atmosphere when by everything we know of astrophysics, they should be more like airless, rocky, superheated Mercury.  It does raise one hopeful thought, however; one of the "Goldilocks zone" qualifications for planetary habitability is that the planet in question needs to resist having its atmosphere blown away by the stellar wind of the parent star.  M-type red dwarf stars, for example, by far the most common stars in the galaxy (they make up an estimated seventy percent of the stars in the Milky Way), have been thought by some to be ruled out as habitable systems on that basis.  First, being low-temperature, any planets warm enough to have liquid water would have to be in close orbits; and second, those close orbits would make the planet a target for stellar storms, potentially destroying any atmosphere the planet had.

This may need to be rethought.  Atmospheres, as it turn out, may be a great deal more durable than we'd reckoned.

So there's yet another odd and unexplained phenomenon from the skies.  Planets as light as cotton candy.  Shakespeare knew whereof he spoke when he wrote, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

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Disinformation and disorder

I've dealt with a lot of weird ideas over the thirteen years I've been blogging here at Skeptophilia.

Some of them are so far out there as to be risible.  A few of those that come to mind:

• the "phantom time hypothesis" -- that almost three hundred years' worth of history didn't happen, and was a later invention developed through collusion between the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church
• "vortex-based mathematics," which claims (1) that spacetime is shaped like a donut, (2) infinity has an "epicenter," and (3) pi is a whole number
• the planet Nibiru, which is supposed to either usher in the apocalypse or else cause us all to ascend to a higher plane of existence, but which runs into the snag that it apparently doesn't exist
• a claim that by virtue of being blessed by a priest, holy water has a different chemical structure and a different set of physical properties from ordinary water
• gemstones can somehow affect your health through "frequencies"

In this same category, of course, are some things that a lot of people fervently believe, such as homeopathy, divination, and the Flat Earth.

These, honestly, don't bother me all that much, except for the fact that the health-related ones can cause sick people to bypass appropriate medical care in favor of what amounts to snake oil.  But on an intellectual level, they're easily analyzed, and equally easily dismissed.  Once you know some science, you kind of go, "Okay, that makes no sense," and that's that.

It's harder by far to deal with the ones that mix in just enough science that to a layperson, they sound like they could be plausible.  After all, science is hard; I have a B.S. in physics, and most academic papers in the field go whizzing over my head so fast they don't even ruffle my hair.  The problem, therefore, is how to tell if a person is taking (real, but difficult) science, misinterpreting or misrepresenting it, but then presenting it in such an articulate fashion that even to intelligent laypeople, it seems legitimate.

One of the first times I ran into this was the infamous video What the Bleep Do We Know?, from 2004, which is one of the best-known examples of quantum mysticism.  It takes some real, observable effects -- strange stuff like entanglement and indeterminacy and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the role of the observer in the collapse of the wave function -- and weaves in all sorts of unscientific hand-waving about how "the science says" our minds create the universe, thoughts can influence the behavior of matter, and that the matter/energy equivalence formula means that "all being is energy."  Those parts aren't correct, of course; but the film's makers do it incredibly skillfully, describing the scientific bits more or less accurately, and interviewing actual scientists then editing their segments to make it sound like they're in support of the fundamentally pseudoscientific message of the film's makers.  (It's worth noting that it was the brainchild of none other than J. Z. Knight, whose Ramtha cult has become notorious for its homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and racism.)

I ran into a (much) more recent example of this when I picked up a copy of Howard Bloom's book The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates at our local Friends of the Library used book sale.  At first glance, it looked right down my alley -- a synthesis of modern cosmology, philosophy, and religion.  And certainly the first few pages and the back cover promised great things, with endorsements from everyone from Barbara Ehrenreich to Robert Sapolsky to Edgar Mitchell.

I hadn't gotten very far into it, however, before I started to wonder.  The writing is frenetic, jumping from one topic to another seemingly willy-nilly, sprinkled with rapid-fire witticisms that in context sound like the result of way too many espressos.  But I was willing to discount that as a matter of stylistic preference, until I started running one after another into weird claims of profound insights that turn out, on examination, to be simply sleight-of hand.  We're told, for example, that we should believe his "heresy" that "A is not equal to A," and when he explains it, it turns out that this only works if you define the first A differently from the second one.  Likewise that "one plus one doesn't equal two" -- only if you're talking about the fact that joining two things together can result in the production of something different (such as a proton and an electron coming together to form a neutral hydrogen atom).

So his supposedly earthshattering "heresies" turn out to be something that, if you know a little science, would induce you to shrug your shoulders and say, "So?"

But what finally pissed me off enough that I felt like I needed to address it here was his claim that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is wrong, which he said was a heresy so terrible we should "prepare to be burned at the stake" by the scientific establishment for believing him.  Here's a direct quote:

... the Second Law of Thermodynamics [is] a law that's holy, sacred, and revered.  What is the Second Law?  All things tend toward disorder.  All things fall apart.  All things tend toward the random scramble of formlessness and meaninglessness called entropy.

He then goes into a page-long description of what happens when you put a sugar cube into a glass of water, and ends with:

The molecules of sugar in your glass went from a highly ordered state to a random whizzle [sic] of glucose and fructose molecules evenly distributed throughout your glass.  And that, says the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is the fate of everything in the universe.  A fate so inevitable that the cosmos will end in an extreme of lethargy, a catastrophe called "heat death."  The cosmos will come apart in a random whoozle [sic] just like the sugar cube did.  The notion of heat death is a belief so widespread that it was enunciated by Lord Kelvin in 1851 and has hung around like a catechism.

Then he tells us what the problem is:

But is the Second Law of Thermodynamics true?  Do all things tend to disorder?  Is the universe in a steady state of decline?  Is it moving step by step toward randomness?  Are form and structure steadily stumbling down the stairway of form into the chaos of a wispy gas?...  No.  In fact, the very opposite is true.  The universe is steadily climbing up.  It is steadily becoming more form-filled and more structure-rich.  How could that possibly be true?  Everyone knows that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is gospel.  Including everybody who is anybody in the world of physics, chemistry, and even complexity theory.

*brief pause to scream obscenities*  

*another brief pause to reassure my puppy that he's not the one I'm mad at*

No one, scientist or otherwise, is going to burn Bloom at the stake for this, because what he's claiming is simply wrong.  This is a complete mischaracterization of what the Second Law says.  Whether Bloom knows that, and is deliberately misrepresenting it, or simply doesn't understand it himself, I'm not sure.  What the Second Law says, at least in one formulation, is that in a closed system, the overall entropy always increases -- and the critical italicized bit is the part he conveniently leaves out.  Of course order can be increased, but it's always at the cost of (1) expending energy, and (2) increasing entropy more somewhere else.  A simple example is the development of a human from a single fertilized egg cell, which represents a significant increase in complexity and decrease in entropy.  But the only way that's accomplished is by giving the developing human a continuous source of energy and building blocks (i.e., food), and cellular processes tearing those food molecules to shreds, increasing their entropy.  And what the Second Law says is that the entropy increase experienced by the food molecules is bigger than the entropy decrease experienced by the developing human.  (I wrote a longer explanation of this principle a while back, if you're interested in more information.)

Let's just put it this way.  If what Bloom is saying -- that the Second Law is wrong -- was true, he'd be in line for a Nobel Prize.  There has never, ever been an exception found to the Second Law, despite centuries of testing, and the frustrated desires of perpetual-motion-machine-inventors the world over.

A model of a perpetual motion machine -- which, for the record, doesn't work [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tiia Monto, Deutsches Museum 6, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So Bloom got it badly wrong.  He's hardly the first person to do so.  Why, then, does this grind my gears so badly?

It's that apparently no one on his editorial team, and none of the dozens of people who endorsed his book, thought even to read the fucking Wikipedia page about this fundamental law of physics Bloom is saying is incorrect.  And he certainly sounds convincing; his writing is like a sort-of-scientific-or-something Gish gallop, hurling so many arguments at us all at once that it's all readers can do to withstand the barrage and stay on our feet.

For me, though, it immediately made me discount anything else he has to say.  If his understanding of a basic scientific law that I've known about since freshman physics, and taught every year to my AP Biology students, is that flawed, how can I trust what he says on other topics about which I might not have as much background knowledge?

And that, to me, is the danger.  It's easy to point out the obvious nonsense like space donuts and gemstone frequencies -- but far harder to recognize pseudoscience that is twisted together with actual science so intricately that you can't see where one ends and the other begins.  Especially if -- as is the case with The God Problem -- it's couched in folksy, jargon-free anecdote that sounds completely reasonable.

I guess the only real solution is to learn enough science to be able to recognize this kind of thing when you see it.  And that takes time and hard work.  But it's absolutely critical, especially in our current political situation here in the United States, where there are people who are deliberately spinning falsehoods for their own malign purposes about such critical issues as health care, gender and sexuality, and the climate.

So it's hard work we all need to be doing.  Otherwise we fall prey to persuasive nonsense -- and are at the mercy of whatever the author of it is trying to sell.

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The interstellar lighthouse

It's funny the questions you don't think to ask.  You find out something, accept it without any objections, and only later -- sometimes much later -- you stop and go, "Okay, hang on a moment."

That happened to me just yesterday, about a topic most of us don't ponder much, and that's the peculiar astronomical object called a neutron star.  It was on my mind not by random chance -- even I don't just sit around and say, "Hmm, how about those neutron stars, anyway?" -- but because of some interesting research (about which I'll tell you in a bit).

I first learned about these odd beasts when I took a class called Introduction to Astronomy at the University of Louisiana.  The professor, Dr. Whitmire, explained them basically as follows.

Stars are stable when there's a balance between two forces -- the outward pressure from the heat generated in the core, and the inward pull because of the gravity exerted by the star's mass.  During most of a star's life, those two are in equilibrium, but when the core exhausts its fuel, the first force diminishes and the star begins to collapse.  With small stars like the Sun, the collapse continues until the mutual repulsion of the atoms' electrons becomes a sufficient force to halt it from shrinking further.  This generates a white dwarf.

In a star between 10 and 29 times the mass of the Sun, however, the mutual electric repulsion isn't strong enough to stop the collapse.  The matter of the star continues to fall inward until it's only about ten kilometers across -- a star shrunk to the diameter of a small city.  This causes some pretty strange conditions.  The matter in the star becomes unimaginably dense; a teaspoon of it would have about the same mass as a mountain.  The pressure forces the electrons into the nuclei of the atoms, crushing out all the space, so that what you have is a giant electrically-neutral ball -- effectively, an enormous atomic nucleus made of an unimaginably huge number of neutrons.

The first neutron star ever discovered, at the center of the Crab Nebula [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The immense gravitational pull means that the surface of a neutron star is the smoothest surface known; any irregularities would be flattened out of existence.  (It's worth mentioning that even the Earth is way smoother than most people realize.  The distance between the top of Mount Everest and the bottom of the Marianas Trench is less, as compared to its size, than the topographic relief in a typical scratch on a billiard ball.)

So far, so good.  But it was the next thing Dr. Whitmire told us that should have made me pull up short, and didn't until now -- over forty years later.  He said that as a neutron star forms, the inward collapse makes its rotational speed increase, just like a spinning figure skater as she pulls in her arms.  Because of the Conservation of Angular Momentum, this bumps up the rotation of a neutron star to something on the order of making a complete rotation thirty times per second.  A point on the surface of a typical neutron star is moving at a linear speed of about one-third of the speed of light.

Further, because neutron stars have a phenomenally large magnetic field, this creates two magnetic "funnels" on opposite sides of the star that spew out jets of electromagnetic radiation.  And if these jets aren't aligned with the star's spin axis, they whirl around like the beams of a lighthouse.  A neutron star that does this, and appears to flash on and off like a strobe light, is called a pulsar.

This was the point when the red flags should have started waving, especially since I majored in physics and had taken a class called "Electromagnetism."  One of the first things we learned is that Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell discovered that magnetic fields are generated when charged particles move.  So how can a neutron star -- composed of electrically-neutral particles -- have any magnetic field at all, much less one so huge?  (The magnetic field of a typical neutron star is on the order of ten million Tesla; by comparison, one of the largest magnetic fields ever generated in the laboratory is a paltry sixteen Tesla, but was still enough to levitate a frog.)

The answer is a matter of conjecture.  One possibility is that even though a neutron star is neutral overall, there is some separation of charges within the star's interior, so the whirling of the star still creates a magnetic field.  Another possibility is that since neutrons themselves are composed of three quarks, and those quarks are charged, neutrons still have a magnetic moment, and the alignment of these magnetic moments coupled with the star's rotation is sufficient to give it an overall enormous magnetic field.  (If you want to read more about the answer to this curious question, the site Medium did a nice overview of it a while back.)

So it turns out that neutron stars aren't the simple things they appeared to be at first.  Not that this is much of a surprise; a recurring theme here at Skeptophilia is that nature always seems to turn out to be more complicated than we expected.  What brought this up in the first place was yet another anomalous observation about neutron stars, described in a series of papers I ran across in Astrophysical Journal Letters.  The conventional wisdom was that a neutron star's magnetic field would be oriented along an axis (which, as noted above, may not coincide perfectly with the star's spin axis).  This means that it would behave a bit like an ordinary magnet, with a north pole and a south pole on geometrically opposite sides.

That's what astronomers thought, until they found a pulsar with the euphonious name J0030+0451, 1,100 light years away in the constellation of Pisces.  Using the x-ray jets from the pulsar -- which should be aligned with its magnetic field -- they mapped the field itself, and found something extremely strange.

Instead of two jets, aligned with the poles of the magnetic field, J0030+0451 has three -- and they're all in the southern hemisphere.  One is (unsurprisingly) at the southern magnetic pole, but the other two are elongated crescents at about sixty degrees south latitude.

To say this is surprising is an understatement, and the astronomers are still struggling to explain it.

"From its perch on the space station, NICER [the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer] is revolutionizing our understanding of pulsars," said Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.  "Pulsars were discovered more than fifty years ago as beacons of stars that have collapsed into dense cores, behaving unlike anything we see on Earth."

It appears that we still have a way to go to fully explain how they work.  But that's how it is with the entire universe, you know?  No matter where we look, we're confronted by mysteries.  Fortunately, we have a tool that has proven over and over to be the best way of finding answers -- the collection of protocols we call the scientific method.  I have no doubt that the astrophysicists will eventually explain the odd magnetic properties of pulsars.  But the way things go, all that'll do is open up more fascinating questions -- which is why I've said many times that if you're interested in science, you'll never run out of things to learn.

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Easy as A, B, C

There's an unfortunate but natural tendency for us to assume that because something is done a particular way in the culture we were raised in, that obviously, everyone else must do it the same way.

It's one of the (many) reasons I think travel is absolutely critical.  Not only do you find out that people elsewhere get along just fine doing things differently, it also makes you realize that in the most fundamental ways -- desire for peace, safety, food and shelter, love, and acceptance -- we all have much more in common than you'd think.  As Mark Twain put it, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

One feature of culture that is so familiar that most of the time, we don't even think about it, is how we write.  The Latin alphabet, with a one-sound-one-character correspondence, is only one way of turning spoken language into writing.  Turns out, there are lots of options:

• Pictographic scripts -- where one symbol represents an idea, not a sound.  One example is the Nsibidi script, used by the Igbo people of Nigeria.

• Logographic scripts -- where one symbol represents a morpheme (a meaningful component of a word; the word unconventionally, for example, has four morphemes -- un-, convention, -al, and -ly).  Examples include early Egyptian hieroglyphics (later hieroglyphs included phonetic/alphabetic symbols as well), the Cuneiform script of Sumer, the characters used in Chinese languages, and the Japanese kanji.

• Syllabaries -- where one symbol represents a single syllable (whether or not the syllable by itself has any independent meaning).  Examples include the Japanese hiragana script, Cherokee, and Linear B -- the mysterious Bronze-Age script from Crete that was a complete mystery until finally deciphered by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in the mid-twentieth century.

• Abjads -- where one symbol represents one sound, but vowels are left out unless they are the first sound in the word.  Examples include Arabic and Hebrew.

• Abugidas -- where each symbol represents a consonant, and the vowels are indicated by diacritical marks (so, a bit like a syllabary melded with an abjad).   Examples include Thai, Tibetan, Bengali, Burmese, Malayalam, and lots of others.

• Alphabets -- one symbol = one sound for both vowels and consonants, such as our own Latin alphabet, as well as Cyrillic, Greek, Mongolian, and many others.

To make things more complicated, scripts (like every other feature of language) evolve over time, and sometimes can shift from one category to another.  There's decent evidence that our own alphabet evolved from a pictographic script.  Here are three examples of pathways letters seem to have taken:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rozemarijn van L, Proto-sinaitic-phoenician-latin-alphabet-2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason the topic comes up is the discovery at Tell Um-el Marra, Syria of incised clay cylinders that date to 2400 B.C.E. and may be the earliest known example of an alphabetic script -- meaning one of the last four in the list, which equate one symbol with one sound or sound cluster (rather than with an idea, morpheme, or entire word).  If the discovery and its interpretation bear up under scrutiny, it would precede the previous record holder, Proto-Sinaitic, by five hundred years.

"Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite," said Glenn Schwartz, of Johns Hopkins University, who led the research.  "Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.  And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now...  Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 B.C.E.  But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story than we thought."

When you think about it, alphabetic scripts are a brilliant, but odd, innovation.  Drawing a picture, or even a symbol, of an entire concept as a way of keeping track of it -- the head of a cow on a vessel containing milk, for example -- isn't really that much of a stretch.  But who came up with letting symbols represent sounds?  It's a totally different way of representing language.  Not merely the symbols themselves altering, and perhaps becoming simpler or more stylized, but completely divorcing the symbol from the meaning.

No one, for example, links the letter "m" to water any more.  It's simply a symbol-sound correspondence, and nothing more; the symbol itself has become more or less arbitrary.  The level of meaning has been lifted to clusters of symbols.

It's so familiar that we take it for granted, but honestly, it's quite a breathtaking invention.

Scholars are uncertain what the writing on the clay cylinders says; they've yet to be translated, so it may be that this assessment will have to be revisited.  Also uncertain is how it's related to other scripts that developed later in the region, which were largely thought to be derived from Egyptian writing systems.

If this discovery survives peer review, it may be that the whole history of symbolic written language will have to be re-examined.

But that's all part of linguistics itself.  Languages evolve, as does our understanding of them.  Nothing in linguistics is static.  The argument over whether it should be -- the infamous descriptivism vs. prescriptivism fight -- is to me akin to denying the reality of biological evolution.  Our word usages, definitions, and spellings have changed, whether you like it or not; so have the scripts themselves.  Meaning, somehow, still somehow survives, despite the dire consequences the prescriptivists warn about.

It's why the recent tendency for People Of A Certain Age to bemoan the loss of cursive writing instruction in American public schools is honestly (1) kind of funny, and (2) swimming upstream against a powerful current.  Writing systems have been evolving since the beginning, with complicated, difficult to learn, difficult to reproduce, ambiguous, or highly variable systems being altered or eliminated outright.  It's a tough sell, though, amongst people who have been trained all their lives to use that script; witness the fact that Japanese still uses three systems, more or less at the same time -- the logographic kanji and the syllabic hiragana and katakana.  It will be interesting to see how long that lasts, now that Japan has become a highly technological society.  My guess is at some point, they'll phase out the cumbersome (although admittedly beautiful) kanji, which require understanding over two thousand symbols to be considered literate.  The Japanese have figured out how to represent kanji on computers, but the syllabic scripts are so much simpler that I suspect they'll eventually win.

I doubt it'll be any time soon, though.  The Japanese are justly proud of their long written tradition, and making a major change in it will likely be met with as much resistance as English spelling reform has been.

In any case, it's fascinating to see how many different solutions humans have found for turning spoken language into written language, and how those scripts have changed over time (and continue to change).  All features of the amazing diversity of humanity, and a further reminder that "we do it this way" isn't the be-all-end-all of culture.

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The strange story of Omm Sety

Dorothy Louise Eady was born on the 16th of January in 1904 in a suburb of London, the only child of a tailor and his wife.  She seemed to be a perfectly ordinary little girl until she was three years old, when she took a tumble down a set of stairs and developed a highly peculiar set of symptoms that was to change the trajectory of her life.

She developed foreign accent syndrome -- a real, although rare, condition where stroke or head trauma causes an individual's speech patterns to change, giving their voice a superficially "foreign" accent.  (Significantly, they don't suddenly gain proficiency in another language, despite what's sometimes claimed.)  Weirder still, when she started school, she began demonstrating a knowledge of ancient Egypt that is, at the very least, unusual for a child her age.  She got in trouble for comparing Christianity to the Egyptian pantheon, and was finally expelled when she flat-out refused to sing a hymn about the Exodus calling on God to "curse the swart Egyptians."  She frequented a local Roman Catholic church, until a chat with the priest revealed that she was doing so because the pomp and pageantry of the Catholic mass "reminded her of the old religion," at which point the priest suggested she probably should entertain her reminiscences elsewhere.

These setbacks didn't discourage her in the least.  A visit to the British Museum as a teenager sent her into raptures; when she saw a photograph of the temple of the Pharaoh Seti I, she said, "There is my home!  But where are the trees?  Where are the gardens?"

Interestingly, most people seemed to tolerate her odd claims, and in fact she studied Egyptian history and hieroglyphics under E. A. Wallis Budge, one of the foremost Egyptologists of the early twentieth century.  Eventually -- perhaps inevitably -- she moved to Egypt, describing it as "coming home."  During this entire period she was plagued by dreams, sleepwalking, and nightmares, including a vision of an entity that called itself "Hor-Ra" and claimed to be the spirit of Seti I.  This spirit proceeded to narrate to her a tale, which Eady wrote down in hieroglyphics, telling of her previous life.

Eady, Hor-Ra said, had once been a priestess of humble origins named Bentreshyt, who had fallen in love with Seti.  Despite her vow of chastity, she had sex with Seti and got pregnant.  Knowing that once her transgression was found out, it was likely she'd be executed -- and in the process, disgrace the pharaoh -- she chose to commit suicide.

Alongside her claims of having been reincarnated, however, Eady did real, honest-to-goodness archaeological and historical work, assisting such brilliant scholars as Selim Hassan and Ahmed Fakhry, earning their respect and also the respect of her friends and neighbors.  She was celebrated for her tolerance, keeping to her own practice of rituals celebrating Ra and Horus and Osiris and the rest, but also fasting during Ramadan and celebrating Christmas and Easter with the Christians.

Whatever you think of her story, Dorothy is kind of hard to dislike, frankly.

Dorothy Eady, ca. 1928 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Some pieces of her story do, oddly enough, seem to have some verifiable basis in fact.  She pointed out a spot near the Temple of Seti where she said there'd been a garden in which she'd first met the pharaoh, and later excavation revealed the foundations of a garden that matched her descriptions.  She was brought into a newly-opened room in the temple in complete darkness, and asked to describe the paintings on the walls -- which she did accurately enough to freak out the people present.

Eady -- by then usually known by her adopted name of Omm Sety -- died on the 21st of April, 1981 in Abydos, never wavering from her claims that she was a reincarnated Egyptian priestess.  So what are we to make of her story?

One thing that strikes me is that although her persistence in devoting herself to Egyptian studies was certainly uncommon for a woman of her time, she does not seem to have been in it for fame, money, or self-aggrandizement.  She was unassuming personally, and had no particular interest in making more in the way of income than she needed to be reasonably comfortable.  In fact, Jonathan Cott, in his book about Eady's life called The Search for Omm Sety, quotes William Simpson, professor of Egyptology at Yale, as saying that "a great many people in Egypt took advantage of her because she more or less traded her knowledge of ancient Egypt by writing or helping people out by doing drafting for them for a pittance."

And it also seems certain that she really believed what she was saying.  Unlike a lot of people who make similar claims, she doesn't have the look of a con artist.  Even Carl Sagan, surely a skeptic's skeptic if there ever was one, was impressed, saying she was "a lively, intelligent, dedicated woman who made real contributions to Egyptology.  This is true whether her belief in reincarnation is fact or fantasy...  However, we must keep in mind that there is no independent record, other than her own accounts, to verify what she claimed."

This, of course, is the sticking point; Sagan is certainly not saying he believes she was reincarnated, just that it can't be rigorously ruled out.  And, more importantly, that there may be no way to prove it one way or the other.  Certainly her knowledge seems uncanny, but it's important to remember that during the 1920s and 1930s there was a significant Egyptomania happening, especially following the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922.  Stories and photographs were circulating everywhere, and it'd be hard for an unbiased evaluator to tease apart what Eady learned through her studies or other media, and what she might allegedly be recalling through strange supernatural pathways.

As you would no doubt expect, the people who already believed in reincarnation use this as one of their favorite examples, while the doubters still doubt, attributing Eady's obsession with Egypt not to a buried memory of a past life but to a blend of genuine curiosity and scholarship with delusions brought on by an early head injury.  For myself, I might be convinced if her odd claim to knowledge had included understanding the Egyptian language prior to being taught it, or some other piece of verifiable information there's no way she could have obtained by ordinary means.  I have to admit, describing the paintings in a newly-excavated room in the dark comes close; but given that others had seen the paintings, and also the commonalities that exist between a lot of examples of New Kingdom-era art, it doesn't quite get there, evidence-wise.  She could have been told what the paintings looked like, or they may just have been shrewd guesses based on her extensive knowledge of Egyptian art and artifacts.

And it does strike me that this is yet another example of James Randi's objection to stories of reincarnation; that everyone in their previous life seems to have been a high priest or priestess or prince or princess or whatnot, and nobody -- as would seem, simply by the statistics of the situation, to be far more likely -- was a dirt-poor peasant in China or India, or someone who died as a child of diphtheria or measles or smallpox.

The fact remains, though, that Eady's case is an odd one.  It doesn't convince me, but it does leave me scratching my head a little. 

However, I'm not so fond of the idea of reincarnation in any case, so maybe it's for the best.  Life is no cakewalk, and especially given that you aren't given any choice who you're reincarnated as, I'd just as soon not press "reset" and start the whole thing over.  If I had to choose an afterlife, I'd go with Valhalla.  Sitting around the table quaffing mead (can you just drink mead?  Or do you have to quaff it?), having mock sword-fights with your friends, and generally raising hell just for the fun of it.

Certainly better than harps, hymns, and halos, which seems to be the only other thing on offer.

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Out of line

Astrophysicists have a fairly clear idea about how planetary systems form.

The whole thing starts with a nebula -- a cloud of interstellar gas and dust,  mostly made of hydrogen and helium -- that begins to contract under the influence of gravity.  Assuming it's large enough, that compaction raises its temperature; and because almost always, the cloud as a whole had some angular momentum to start with (i.e. it had a net spin around the nebula's center of mass, even if a small one) its rotational rate increases as the collapse proceeds.  That increase in spin rate flattens the cloud out -- think of a whirling blob of pizza dough in the hands of someone who knows how to make the perfect pizza crust -- resulting in a concentrated mass in the center (the future star) and a "protoplanetary disk."

The disk is never perfectly uniform, so the higher gravitational pull of the denser parts draws in more material, making them denser still -- a classic example of positive feedback.  Those lumpy bits form the planets, ultimately gaining sufficient mass to gravitationally clear the regions around their orbits.  When the star becomes dense and hot enough to initiate fusion, the light and heat blow away lighter elements (hydrogen and helium), leaving the inner regions enriched in heavier elements like carbon, silicon, magnesium, nickel, aluminum, and iron.

This model explains two things; why the planets in the Solar System all have relatively circular orbits that are aligned with each other and with the spin plane of the Sun, and why the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are dense and rocky, while the outer ones (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) are gas giants.

But.

When we get too confident, nature has this awkward way of saying, "You think you understand everything?  Ha.  A lot you know."  Back in the 1990s people looking for exoplanets started finding what are now nicknamed "hot Jupiters," which are gas giants locked in a tight orbit around their host stars.  Hot Jupiters seem to be pretty common; on the other hand, it may just be that they're simple to spot.  Given their size and mass, they are going to be easier to pick up both by the transit method (the dip in a star's brightness as its planet crosses in front of it) and the wobble method (stars having a slight back-and-forth "wobble" as the star and its planet orbit their common center of gravity; this effect is more pronounced for larger exoplanets and ones with closer orbits).  

So how does a gas giant form, and remain stable, so near to its host star?  Wouldn't the light and heat of the star blow away the lightweight gases, as they seem to have done in our own Solar System?

The answer is "we're not sure."

Another spanner in the works comes from planets that are misaligned -- that have rotational axes or orbital planes skewed with respect to the rotational plane of the star.  There are two examples in our own Solar System; Venus (which actually rotates backwards as compared to the other planets; its day is longer than its year) and Uranus (which lies on its side -- its rotational axis is tilted 82 degrees with respect to its orbital plane).

Neither of these has been explained, either.

But weirdest of all is when a planet's orbital plane is out of alignment with both the star's rotation and the orbits of other planets in the system.  This, in fact, is why the topic comes up; a paper this week in the journal Astrophysics presents some strange new data on the system AU Microscopii, suggesting that the planet AU Microscopii c has its orbital plane tilted by 67 degrees with respect to everything else in the system.  So as the other two planets, and the star itself, are all moving in a nicely aligned fashion, AU Microscopii c is describing these wild loops above and below the system's orbital plane.

You might be wondering how they figured out the orientation of the rotational axis of the star, since most stars look like points of light even in large telescopes.  And this part is really cool.  It's called the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect.  As a star rotates, from our perspective half of the star's disk is heading toward us while the other half is heading away.  So the light from the part that's coming toward us gets slightly blue-shifted, and the light from the other half is simultaneously red-shifted.  Now, imagine a large planet crossing in front of the star, orbiting in the same direction as the star is rotating.  First the blue-shifted part of the light will be partially blocked, then the red-shifted part, resulting in a spectrum alteration that will look like this:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Amitchell125, Animation of the Rossiter-Mclaughlin (RM) effect, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So we know the rotational plane of the star from the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, and the orbital planes of the planets from the direction of the star's wobble.

And they don't line up.  At all.

This completely confounds our models of how planetary systems form.  Did a close pass by another heavy object yank one of the planets out of alignment?  Or an actual collision with something?  (That's one guess about why Uranus's axis is tilted.)  The answer is still "we don't know."  What seems certain is that the configuration is gravitationally unstable.  AU Microscopii is thought to be a young star, on the order of 24 million years old; the Solar System is over five hundred times older than that.  As I described in a post a couple of years ago, long-term stability usually requires some kind of orbital resonance, where the gravitational pull of planets acts to reinforce their trajectories, keeping them all locked in a tight celestial dance.  So it seems like the weird loop-the-loop described by AU Microscopii c is unlikely to last long.

But it's also an orbit that, based on what we know, shouldn't have happened in the first place.  So maybe it's not a good idea to place bets on what it's going to do in the future.

In any case, it's yet another example of how far we have to go in our understanding of the universe we live in.  That's okay, of course; it'd be boring if we had it all figured out.  Science is like some benevolent version of the Hydra from Greek mythology; for every one question we answer, we create nine more.

I think the scientists are going to be busy for a very long time to come.

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Ignoring Cassandra

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), sometimes nicknamed "the Atlantic Conveyor," is an enormous oceanic current that not only encircles the entire Atlantic Ocean, it links up with other circulation patterns in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

It's called a "thermohaline" circulation because it's driven by two things; temperature and salinity.  Cold water is denser than warm water; salty water is denser than fresher water.  Alterations in these factors determine where the water goes, setting up convection (the movement of a fluid because of gradients in density).  Specifically, as the warm Gulf Stream (the red line along the eastern coast of North America on the above map) moves northward, it cools down and evaporates.  Those both act to increase its density, to the point that just south of Iceland, it sinks.

That sinking mechanism is what drives the entire thing.  Slow that down, and the whole system fails.

Which is exactly what is happening.  A paper last week in Nature found that the AMOC has diminished dramatically because of anthropogenic climate change; the warming oceans, along with fresh meltwater from Greenland, has made large parts of the north loop of the circulation too buoyant to sink.  Since 1950, the flow rate has gone down by 0.46 sverdrups.  Before you say, "Well, that doesn't sound like very much," allow me to point out that one sverdrup is a million cubic meters a second.  The combined flow of all the rivers in the world is only about 1.2 sverdrups.

So 0.46 is huge.

Current models indicate that this change is going to have enormous effects on local climates.  Western and northern Europe are likely to get colder; the surface loop of the AMOC is why Iceland, Scotland, and Scandinavia are way warmer than you'd expect given their latitudes.  The southeastern United States and eastern South America will probably become much warmer; the heat energy doesn't just go away because it's not being transported northward and dissipated.  Rainfall patterns, and storm paths and intensity, will certainly change, but how is unknown.

The truth is, we don't know enough to predict exactly what the outcome will be, at least not with any certainty.  We're perturbing a complex global system with about as much caution as a toddler playing in the mud.  But what seems certain is that we have now entered the "Find Out" phase of "Fuck Around and Find Out."

What kills me is we've been warning about this for decades.  British science historian James Burke's prescient documentary After the Warming described the collapse of the AMOC as an outcome of anthropogenic climate change all the way back in 1991.  But instead of listening to the scientists, and brilliant advocates like Burke who bring science to the public notice, more people were swayed by idiots like former Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who brought a snowball onto the floor of the United States Senate and basically said, "Hey, it's snowing, so climate change isn't real, hurr hurr hurr durr."

Of course, listening to Inhofe and his ilk is easy.  If you believe him, you don't have to make any changes to your lifestyle.  And we haven't gotten any further in the intervening decades; President-elect Trump has nominated Lee Zeldin for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior, both thoroughgoing climate change deniers who are deep in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.  (And please, for the love of all that's holy, stop calling them "climate skeptics."  A skeptic respects the evidence.  These people reject a body of evidence that's as high as Mount Everest in the name of profit and short-term expediency.)

Politicians Discussing Global Warming by Isaac Cordal (2011)

I read a serious analysis of Donald Trump's win claiming that one factor was that Americans have a "suspicion of expertise."  That is something that will never, ever make sense to me.  How is it reasonable to say, essentially, "These people know more than I do, so I don't believe them"?  The result is that we now have one of the most powerful countries in the world being run by a cabal of people who are united by two things -- (1) devotion to Donald Trump, and (2) a complete lack of qualifications.  So this distrust of evidence, science, and rationality is only going to get worse -- and will become the motive force in driving policy.

The problem is, though, if you ignore the truth, sooner or later it catches up with you.  And from the recent paper, it appears it's going to be sooner.  Sea level rise is already threatening coastal communities, and there are island nations that will simply cease to exist if if gets much worse.  Extreme weather events are likely to become commonplace.  We're sure to see alterations in climate that will affect agriculture, and in some places, habitability.

As usual, the people creating the problem aren't the ones who are going to get hurt by it -- at least not at first.  But this is an issue that will, ultimately, affect us all.

And lord have mercy, I am tired.  Tired of shouting warnings, tired of citing study after study, tired of arguing from the standpoint of facts and evidence with people determined not to listen to any of it.  I'm not even an actual scientist, just a retired science teacher and blogger, and I feel like I've been sounding the call about this stuff forever; I can't imagine how the actual researchers feel.  It makes me sympathize with Cassandra, from Greek mythology -- who was blessed with the ability to see the future, but cursed to have no one believe her.

I wish I had some sort of hopeful message to end on, but I don't.  I'm not naturally a pessimist, but given the fact that the country I live in just voted in an anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-academic administration whose motto seems to be "Corporate Profit Über Alles," I don't think we're going to make any progress here for the next four years.  By then, how much more damage will have been done?

As journalist Sheri Fink put it: "Soon after a disaster passes, we tend to turn our eyes away and focus our resources on the day-to-day, rather than on preparing for the rare, but foreseeable and potentially catastrophic disaster.  It's another form of triage, how much we invest in preparing for that, a very important question for public policy.  But... we are such a short-sighted species."

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