Misremembering the truth

There are two distinct, but similar-sounding, cognitive biases that I've written about many times here at Skeptophilia because they are such tenacious barriers to rational thinking.

The first, confirmation bias, is our tendency to uncritically accept claims when they fit with our preconceived notions.  It's why a lot of conservative viewers of Fox News and liberal viewers of MSNBC sit there watching and nodding enthusiastically without ever stopping and saying, "... wait a moment."

The other, dart-thrower's bias, is more built-in.  It's our tendency to notice outliers (because of their obvious evolutionary significance as danger signals) and ignore, or at least underestimate, the ordinary as background noise.  The name comes from the thought experiment of being in a bar while there's a darts game going on across the room.  You'll tend to notice the game only when there's an unusual throw -- a bullseye, or perhaps impaling the bartender in the forehead -- and not even be aware of it otherwise.

Well, we thought dart-thrower's bias was more built into our cognitive processing system and confirmation bias more "on the surface" -- and the latter therefore more culpable, conscious, and/or controllable.  Now, it appears that confirmation bias might be just as hard-wired into our brains as dart-thrower's bias is.

I recently read a paper that shed some light on this rather troubling finding in Human Communication Research, describing a study conducted by a team led by Jason Coronel of Ohio State University.  In "Investigating the Generation and Spread of Numerical Misinformation: A Combined Eye Movement Monitoring and Social Transmission Approach," Coronel, along with Shannon Poulsen and Matthew D. Sweitzer, did a fascinating series of experiments that showed we not only tend to accept information that agrees with our previous beliefs without question, we honestly misremember information that disagrees -- and we misremember it in such a way that in our memories, it further confirms our beliefs!

The location of memories (from Memory and Intellectual Improvement Applied to Self-Education and Juvenile Instruction, by Orson Squire Fowler, 1850) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What Coronel and his team did was to present 110 volunteers with passages containing true numerical information on social issues (such as support for same-sex marriage and rates of illegal immigration).  In some cases, the passages agreed with what (according to polls) most people believe to be true, such as that the majority of Americans support same-sex marriage.  In other cases, the passages contained information that (while true) is widely thought to be untrue -- such as the fact that illegal immigration across the Mexican border has been dropping for years and in the last five years has been at its lowest rates since the mid-1990s.

Across the board, people tended to recall the information that aligned with the conventional wisdom correctly, and the information that didn't incorrectly.  Further -- and what makes this experiment even more fascinating -- is that when people read the unexpected information, data that contradicted the general opinion, eye-tracking monitors recorded that they hesitated while reading, as if they recognized that something was strange.  In the immigration passage, for example, they read that the rate of immigration had decreased from 12.8 million in 2007 to 11.7 million in 2014, and the readers' eyes bounced back and forth between the two numbers as if their brains were saying, "Wait, am I reading that right?"

So they spent longer on the passage that conflicted with what most people think -- and still tended to remember it incorrectly.  In fact, the majority of people who did remember wrong got the numbers right -- 12.8 million and 11.7 million -- showing that they'd paid attention and didn't just scoff and gloss over it when they hit something they thought was incorrect.  But when questioned afterward, they remembered the numbers backwards, as if the passage had actually supported what they'd believed prior to the experiment!

If that's not bad enough, Coronel's team then ran a second experiment, where the test subjects read the passage, then had to repeat the gist to another person, who then passed it to another, and so on.  (Remember the elementary school game of "Telephone?")  Not only did the data get flipped -- usually in the first transfer -- subsequently, the difference between the two numbers got greater and greater (thus bolstering the false, but popular, opinion even more strongly).  In the case of the immigration statistics, the gap between 2007 and 2014 not only changed direction, but by the end of the game it had widened from 1.1 million to 4.7 million.

This gives you an idea what we're up against in trying to counter disinformation campaigns.  And it also illustrates that I was wrong in one of my preconceived notions; that people falling for confirmation bias are somehow guilty of locking themselves deliberately into an echo chamber.  Apparently, both dart-thrower's bias and confirmation bias are somehow built into the way we process information.  We become so certain we're right that our brain subconsciously rejects any evidence to the contrary.

Why our brains are built this way is a matter of conjecture.  I wonder if perhaps it might be our tribal heritage at work; that conforming to the norm, and therefore remaining a member of the tribe, has a greater survival value than being the maverick who sticks to his/her guns about a true but unpopular belief.  That's pure speculation, of course.  But what it illustrates is that once again, our very brains are working against us in fighting Fake News -- which these days is positively frightening, given how many powerful individuals and groups are, in a cold and calculated fashion, disseminating false information in an attempt to mislead us, frighten us, or anger us, and so maintain their positions of power.

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The enduring puzzle of Hueyatlaco

One of the most frustrating things about science, from the point of view of non-scientists, is that sometimes we have to say "we simply don't know the answer to that yet."

Of course, I'm sure it's frustrating enough to the scientists as well, but at least they should be used to it.  Science is always pushing at the boundaries of what we know, and using evidence and logic to find explanations.  It's inevitable that sometimes even a significant amount of evidence is insufficient to reach a conclusion.  At that point, the only honest thing to say is "we don't know, and may never know."

This drives a lot of people nuts.  The attitude is that because science has proven to be pretty damn good at finding answers, it should have a one hundred percent hit rate.  Meteorologists can't always accurately predict the track or intensity of storms?  Ha, I'd like to have a job where I could be wrong half the time and still get paid!  The promising new cancer drug turns out not to work in vivo?  Don't listen to the medical professionals, they'll say something is good for you today and then say the opposite tomorrow.  This fault is at risk of an imminent earthquake?  Okay, then tell me when, down to the hour and minute, so I can plan ahead.

Otherwise, what good are you scientists, anyhow?

It all comes from a fundamental misapprehension of the scientific process -- that it should provide certainty.  It'd be nice, but the real world usually doesn't cooperate, and sometimes even with their best efforts, the scientists have to admit to being in a situation somewhere between incomplete understanding and complete befuddlement.

I ran into an especially good example of that a couple of days ago because of a dear friend, a history scholar and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who asked me if I'd ever heard of Hueyatlaco and the Steen-McIntyre report.  She sent me a link from the site Ancient Origins called "Controversy at Hueyatlaco: When Did Humans First Inhabit the Americas?" that (despite a subtle bent toward Ancient Astronauts explanations of things) gives the basics of the story -- and it's a pretty peculiar one, even when you don't credit any of the woo-woo trappings.

Now, keep in mind that until two days ago I'd never heard of this, so I still consider my own knowledge shallow and tentative, and I ask forgiveness for any mistakes or misapprehensions I have (and request a quick note if there's something in this post I can correct).  But this is what I've gathered.

Hueyatlaco is an archaeological dig site in the state of Puebla in central Mexico.  In the 1960s, an archaeologist named Cynthia Irwin-Williams was working at the site and uncovered stone tools and the bones of pre-glacial North American mammals (such as the woolly rhinoceros) that showed signs of having been butchered for meat.  Irwin-Williams thought that such an early site deserved close attention, and she sent samples to the USGS for radioisotope dating.

The results were more than a little perplexing.  The date returned by the USGS was on the order of 250,000 years ago.  This predates modern Homo sapiens by a good fifty thousand years, so -- if the date was accurate -- the tools and the animal bones were associated not with modern humans, but with our predecessors, possibly the Neanderthals or Denisovans (neither of which, for the record, has ever been recorded in the Western Hemisphere).  Also perplexing was that this would push back the earliest hominid occupation of North America not just by a little, but by a factor of sixteen!

It's understandable why the scientists found that hard to swallow.  The idea that humans (or their near relatives) had been in the Americas for 230-odd-thousand years longer than we thought they had, and had left no traces whatsoever during that time except at this one site, was difficult to believe.  So the natural conclusion was reached that the dating of the site was somehow askew.

Then repeated attempts kept giving the same age.

Hueyatlaco [Image licensed under the Creative Commons https://www.flickr.com/photos/xhumpty/, Valsequillo dam, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Most archaeologists stuck to their guns, and said the most parsimonious explanation was still that somehow the dating protocol was being applied incorrectly.  The samples were contaminated with older traces, perhaps, which would give a systematic overestimate for the site's age.  Then, to muddy the waters further, there were allegations of a conspiracy to cover up the anomalous data.  The official report from the USGS simply dropped one of the zeroes, reporting the site's age as 25,000, not 250,000, years.  One of the archaeologists who'd been working on the site, Virginia Steen-McIntyre, was pressured to do her dissertation not on the perplexing Hueyatlaco data, but on more conventional research into volcanic ash strata.  Steen-McIntyre decided, however, that she wouldn't be silenced, and came out with a report of her own, taking apart the critics a point at a time -- and included a claim that she was harassed for being unwilling to stay silent.

Other scientists have tried (and failed) to resolve the odd data.  Biostratigrapher Sam Vanlandingham published two papers, in 2001 and 2004, first reconfirming the dating of the strata not to tens, but hundreds of thousands of years ago, and then (most startling of all) confirming this using microfossils of diatoms from contemporaneous sediments at the site -- and demonstrating that some of those diatom species had been extinct for at least eighty thousand years.

The upshot of it all is that we still don't have an answer.  Most archaeologists still doubt the existence of hominids in the Americas prior to the arrival of the ancestors of the Native Americans on the order of (at the most) twenty thousand years ago, and assert that there is not a single grain of evidence that the Neanderthals and Denisovans (or any other hominids, for that matter) ever made it to the Western Hemisphere.  But that leaves us with a puzzle -- multiple studies, cross-checked and confirmed, keep agreeing with the older date as found by Irwin-Williams, Steen-McIntyre, and others.

So if you've been waiting for an answer... well, that's it, folks.  We don't know.  It's one of the most curious archaeological puzzles I've ever run across, and at this point, the words I hear about it most often from reliable sources are "contentious" and "uncertain" and "controversial."  A lot of experts have a lot of opinions about it, but no one has been able to do any of three things -- explain how the dates could be correct when there's no evidence of hominids in the Americas at any time during the following two hundred thousand years, explain how the dates could be incorrect when they've been independently corroborated multiple times, or demonstrate that the entire thing was some kind of elaborate hoax, along the lines of the Piltdown Man.

As frustrating as it is, that's where we have to leave it if we're going to be scrupulously honest about things.  As good skeptics, we have to be willing to hold the question in abeyance, indefinitely if need be, for want of conclusive evidence to settle it.  In science, the answer "We don't know yet" is always the fallback when the data is insufficient to merit a conclusion -- however that offends our deep desire to be a hundred percent sure about everything in the universe.

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Cat tales

Our relationship with our pets has a very long history.

We know more about our connection to dogs; we've been keeping dogs (or vice versa) for at least ten thousand years, based on genetic analysis of bones found in proximity to human settlements -- and often, buried with honor.  How this relationship started is a matter of conjecture:

Wolf: I'm going to attack you, and viciously tear apart and eat your children!  You are no match for my ferocity!

Cave man: We have peanut butter, sofas, and squeaky toys.

Wolf:  ... I'm listening

Domestic cats, on the other hand, have more uncertain origins.  They were known to have been revered in ancient Egypt, and in fact the much-loved protector goddess Bastet is always depicted with a cat's head.  The ancestors of today's house cats are thought to be the Libyan wildcat (Felis lybica), a small felid which is still found in most of Africa, the Middle East, and central and southern Asia.  They were probably encouraged to live alongside humans for their use as mousers, and eventually became companion animals, just as dogs had earlier.

What's certain is that after that relationship formed, wherever humans went, their pets came along.  A very cool series of studies a while back used patterns of cat genetics -- in particular, the prevalence of the polydactyly gene and the gene that controls swirled tabby coat coloration -- to figure out the paths of migration taken by their human owners.  And just this week a fascinating paper appeared in the journal Science looking at how domestic cats first arrived in China, much more recently than you might think.

The first written reference to cats in China comes from the Tang Dynasty, and dates to the middle of the seventh century C.E.  It's a rather horrifying story.  An imperial concubine name Xiao ran afoul of a higher-ranked wife named Wu Zetian (Wu eventually was to become empress outright).  Wu had Xiao condemned to death -- by having her hands and feet chopped off, then to be drowned in a barrel of wine -- and before the sentence was carried out, Xiao said, "In my next life, may I be reborn as a cat, and Wu Zetian as a mouse.  I will then seize her by the throat to extract my revenge!"

Wu wasn't impressed, and had her rival executed anyhow.  History doesn't record any subsequent rebirths as cats and/or mice.

The earliest domestic cat bones found in China are from an archaeological site called Tongwancheng, and date to only around 1000 C.E.  There were earlier feline specimens, but they all seem to be the remains not of modern domestic cats but of the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis), a small south Asian wildcat species (that recently was crossbred with the domestic cat to produce the Bengal breed), and which probably lived alongside humans but was never truly domesticated.

Bengal cat [Image licensed under the Creative Commons User:Lightburst, Paintedcats Red Star standing, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As far as domestic cats, they seem to have arrived in China via the Silk Road.  Bones found in Kazakhstan, dating to the ninth century C.E., have a mitochondrial DNA signature that links both to later Chinese cats and to cats in the Middle East -- suggesting that merchant travel between the two is how cats arrived in east Asia.

Once there, they established a place in Chinese culture as the favorite pet of the wealthy.  Like the earlier study of cat genes and human migration, this one has an odd filigree having to do with how human selection influences evolution.  In Chinese culture, white is a symbol of purity, and white animals are especially revered.  This gave Silk Road merchants an incentive to find and transport white cats -- a practice over a thousand years ago which has left its mark all these centuries later.  This selectivity of importation is probably why today a disproportionate number of modern Chinese cats are white (or have white patches).

So we move, and we take our pets with us, and that changes both them and us.  It's a very old connection, and one many of us cherish deeply.  Think of that next time you cuddle with your kitty or puppy -- you're taking part in a relationship that goes back thousands of years, and was important enough even in those rough times that it drove commerce.  So even before the existence of mail-order places like Chewy, where we can spend inordinate amounts of money pampering our furry friends, our bonds with our pets were still a deeply important part of our lives.

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Hotspot

Today's topic in Skeptophilia isn't controversial so much as it is amazing.  And shows us once again what a weird, endlessly fascinating universe we live in.

First, though, a bit of a science lesson.

A great many processes in the natural world happen because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  The Second Law can be framed in a variety of ways, two of which are: (1) heat always tends to flow from a hotter object to a colder one; and (2) in a closed system, entropy -- disorder -- always increases.  (Why those are two ways of representing the same underlying physical law is subtle, and beyond the scope of this post.)

In any case, the Second Law is the driver behind weather.  Just about all weather happens because of heat energy redistribution -- the Sun warms the ground, which heats the air.  Hot air tends to rise, so it does, drawing in air from the sides and creating a low pressure center (and wind).  As the warm air rises, it cools (heat flowing away from the warmer blob of air), making water vapor condense -- which is why low pressure tends to mean precipitation.  Condensation releases heat energy, which also wants to flow toward where it's cooler, cooling the blob of air further (which is also cooling because it's rising and expanding).  When the air cools enough, it sinks, forming a high pressure center -- and on and on.  (Circular air movement of this type -- what are called convection cells -- can be local or global in reach.  Honestly, a hurricane is just a giant low-pressure convector.  A heat pump, in essence.  Just a fast and powerful one.)

Okay, so that's the general idea, and to any physicists who read this, I'm sorry for the oversimplifications (but if I've made any outright errors, let me know so I can fix them; there's enough nonsense out there based in misunderstandings of the Second Law that the last thing I want is to add to it).  Any time you have uneven heating, there's going to be a flow of heat energy from one place to the other, whether through convection, conduction, or radiation.

But if you think we get some violent effects from this process here on Earth, wait till you hear about KELT-9b.

KELT-9b is an exoplanet about 670 light years from Earth.  But it has some characteristics that would put it at the top of the list of "weirdest planets ever discovered."  Here are a few:

• It's three times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in our Solar System.
• It's moving at a fantastic speed, orbiting its star in only a day and a half.
• It's tidally locked -- the same side of the planet is always facing the star, meaning there's a permanently light side and a permanently dark side.
• It's the hottest exoplanet yet discovered -- the light side has a mean temperature of 4,300 C, which is hotter than some stars.

So the conditions on this planet are pretty extreme.  But as I found out in a paper by Megan Mansfield of the University of Chicago et al. in Astrophysical Journal Letters, even knowing all that didn't stop it from harboring a few more surprises.

Artist's conception of KELT-9b [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Tidally-locked planets are likely to have some of the most extraordinary weather in the universe, again because of effects of the Second Law.  Here on Earth, with a planet that rotates once a day, the land surface has an opportunity to heat up and cool down regularly, giving the heat redistribution effects of the Second Law less to work with.  On KELT-9b, though, the same side of the planet gets cooked constantly, so not only is it really freakin' hot, there's way more of a temperature differential between the light side and the dark side than you'd ever get in our Solar System (even Mercury doesn't have that great a difference).

So there must be a phenomenal amount of convection taking place, with the atmosphere on the light side convecting toward the dark side like no hurricane we've ever seen.  But that's where Mansfield et al. realized something was amiss.  Because to account for the temperature distribution they were seeing on KELT-9b, there would have to be wind...

... moving at 150,000 miles per hour.

That seemed physically impossible, so there had to be some other process moving heat around besides simple convection.  The researchers found out what it is -- the heat energy on the light side is sufficient to tear apart hydrogen molecules.

At Earth temperatures, hydrogen exists as a diatomic molecule (H2).  But at KELT-9b's temperatures, the energy tears the molecules into monoatomic hydrogen, storing that as potential energy that is then rereleased when the atoms come back together on the dark side.  So once again we're talking the Second Law -- heat flowing toward the cooler object -- but the carrier of that heat energy isn't just warm air or warm water, but molecules that have been physically torn to shreds.

So, fascinating as it is, KELT-9b would not be the place for Captain Picard to take his away team.  But observed from a distance, it must be spectacular -- glowing blue-white from its own heat, whirling around its host star so fast its year is one and a half of our days, one side in perpetual darkness.  All of which goes to show how prescient William Shakespeare was when he wrote, "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

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Lenses and rings

"Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve."

This rather mind-blowing statement by groundbreaking American physicist John Archibald Wheeler summarizes, in one sentence, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  The presence of matter warps the fabric of spacetime, and that curvature affects how objects are able to move through it.  In a sense, gravity isn't pulling on you right now; you're simply occupying a position in space where the mass of the Earth curves space so much that you're constrained to moving with it as it rotates on its axis.  The Earth itself traces an elliptical path around the Sun because the Sun's huge mass contorts the space around it; the Earth is following the shortest possible path through a spacetime that is itself curved.

If this is hard for you to picture, you're not alone.  It's easier if you reduce the dimensions by one, and picture a two-dimensional sheet deformed into a third spatial dimension by a heavy weight, like a bowling ball resting on a trampoline.  If you roll a marble toward it, it will follow the curvature of the surface -- not because the bowling ball is somehow attracting the marble, but because the sheet itself curves.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons OpenStax University Physics, CNX UPhysics 13 07 spacecurve, CC BY 4.0]

So what this means is that gravity can affect even something that doesn't have mass -- like light.  Light takes the shortest possible path through the space it crosses, so the common-sense assumption is that this would be a straight line, consistent with the Euclidean geometry we all learned in high school.

The thing is, space isn't Euclidean.  Oh, it's close enough, on small scales and when you're not close to ginormously massive objects; the famed Greek mathematician did pretty well, given what information he had access to.  It's just that there are objects in the universe that are so massive that spacetime curves dramatically -- and light near them no longer travels in a straight line, but follows the curvature of the space it's passing through.  The effect is called gravitational lensing, because the light bends as if it were passing through a curved glass lens.

As you might expect, this distorts your view of whatever the light is coming from.  And the results can be nothing short of bizarre -- such as the image we just got to see this week from the Euclid Space Telescope of an "Einstein ring," where two massive astronomical objects are in perfect alignment with the Earth, so that the light from the farther one is bent as it passes around the nearer, creating a ghostly halo.

The ring is light coming from a single object which is directly behind the central bright galaxy; the mass of the galaxy has warped the space the light is passing through, stretching the background image into a circle [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

"An Einstein ring is an example of strong gravitational lensing," said Conor O'Riordan, of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, who was lead author of the paper analyzing the ring, which was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.  "All strong lenses are special, because they're so rare, and they're incredibly useful scientifically.  This one is particularly special, because it's so close to Earth and the alignment makes it very beautiful."

"Close," of course, is a relative term.  The foreground galaxy, NGC 6505, is 590 million light years away; the background galaxy -- the one whose light has been distorted into a ring -- is 4.42 billion light years away.  But still, the fact that they've lined up so precisely that the lensing effect creates the image of a ring is pretty spectacular.

The coolest thing about this, though, is that it is a visible and tangible demonstration of a principle in physics that is kind of out there by anyone's estimation.  The results of the General Theory of Relativity -- phenomena like time dilation and Lorenz contraction -- are so bizarre that it's easy to say, "Oh, come on, that can't possibly be true."  (Never mind that even a relatively lightweight object like the Earth is massive enough that our GPS satellites have to adjust for relativistic effects -- or within a couple of days, our global positioning data would become so inaccurate as to be useless.)

But in this case, the effect is also strangely beautiful, isn't it?  It's hard to look at the photographs from Euclid and JWST and Hubble and not be overawed by how magnificent the universe is.  And the more we understand it -- like finding a glittering ring that falls right in line with Einstein's predictions -- the more astonishing it becomes.

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All that glitters

If you own anything made of gold, take a look at it now.

I'm looking at my wedding ring, made of three narrow interlocked gold bands.  It's a little scratched up after twenty-two years, but still shines.

Have you ever wondered where gold comes from?  Not just "a gold mine," but before that.  If you know a little bit of physics, it's kind of weird that the periodic table doesn't end at atomic number 26.  The reason is a subtle but fascinating one, and has to do with the binding energy curve.

The vertical axis is a measure of how tightly the atom's nucleus is held together.  More specifically, it's the amount of energy (in millions of electron-volts) that it would take to completely disassemble the nucleus into its component protons and neutrons.  From hydrogen (atomic number = 1) up to iron (atomic number = 26), there is a relatively steady increase in binding energy.  So in that part of the graph, fusion is an energy-releasing process (moves upward on the graph) and fission is an energy-consuming process (moves downward on the graph).  This, in fact, is what powers the Sun; going from hydrogen to helium is a jump of seven million electron-volts per proton or neutron, and that energy release is what produces the light and heat that keeps us all alive.

After iron, though -- specifically after an isotope of iron, Fe-56, with 26 protons and 30 neutrons -- there's a slow downward slope in the graph.  So after iron, the situation is reversed; fusion consumes energy, and fission releases it.  This is why the fission of uranium-235 generates energy, which is how a nuclear power plant works.

It does generate a question, though.  If fusion in stars is energetically favorable, increasing stability and releasing energy, up to but not past iron -- how do the heavier elements form in the first place?  Going from iron to anywhere would require a consumption of energy, meaning those will not be spontaneous reactions.  They need a (powerful) energy driver.  And yet, some higher-atomic-number elements are quite common -- zinc, iodine, and lead come to mind.

Well, it turns out that there are two ways this can happen, and they both require a humongous energy source.  Like, one that makes the core of the Sun look like a wet firecracker.  Those are supernova explosions, and neutron star collisions.  In fact, a while back, two astrophysicists -- Szabolcs Marka of Columbia University and Imre Bartos of the University of Florida -- found evidence that the heavy elements on the Earth were produced in a collision between two neutron stars, on the order of a hundred million years before the Solar System formed.

This is an event of staggering magnitude.  "If you look up at the sky and you see a neutron-star merger a thousand light-years away," Marka said, "it would outshine the entire night sky."

What apparently happens is when two neutron stars -- the ridiculously dense remnants of massive stellar cores -- run into each other, it is such a high-energy event that even thermodynamically unfavorable (energy-consuming) reactions can pick up enough energy from the surroundings to occur.  Then some of the debris blasted away from the collision gets incorporated into forming stars and planets.  And here we are, still with tons of lightweight elements, but a surprisingly high amount of heavier ones, too.

But how do they know it wasn't a nearby supernova?  Those are far more common in the universe than neutron star collisions.  Well, the theoretical yield of heavy elements is known for each, and the composition of the Solar System is far more consistent with a neutron star collision than with a supernova.  And as for the timing, a chunk of the heavy isotopes produced are naturally unstable, so decaying into lighter nuclei is favored (which is why heavy elements are often radioactive; the products of decay are higher on the binding energy curve than the original element was).  Since this happens at a set rate -- most often calculated as a half-life -- radioactive isotopes act like a nuclear stopwatch, analogous to the way radioisotope decay is used to calculate the ages of artifacts, fossils, and rocks.  Backtracking that stopwatch to t = 0 gives an origin of about 4.7 billion years ago, or a hundred million years before the Solar System coalesced.

So next time you look at anything made of heavier elements -- gold or silver or platinum, or (more prosaically) the zinc plating on a galvanized steel pipe -- ponder for a moment that it was formed in a catastrophically huge collision between two neutron stars, an event that released more energy in a few seconds than the Sun will produce over its entire lifetime.  Sometimes the most ordinary things have a truly extraordinary origin -- something that never fails to fascinate me.

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The forbidden words

George Orwell, in his classic book 1984, writes characters who speak a dialect of English called "Newspeak."

The "Minitrue" (Ministry of Truth) controls the public perception of what is true, perceptions that are enforced by the "Thinkpol" (Thought Police).  The Thinkpol are responsible for stopping "thoughtcrime," including "facecrime" -- forbidden thoughts as revealed in your facial expression.  Toward that end, they "rectify" historical accounts (to conform to the government's agenda regarding what happened), eliminating anything that is "malquoted" or "misprinted."  You're trained to the point of accepting the government's views based on "bellyfeel" -- how they affect you emotionally, not whether they're true.

Intercourse between a man and a woman -- preferably without any pleasure -- is "goodsex."  Anything else is a "sexcrime."  The preference of the government is that babies are conceived by "artsem" -- artificial insemination.

Someone who breaks any of these rules -- or worse, contradicts what Big Brother wants you to do or say -- is not only killed, every trace of them is erased.  They become an "Unperson."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Orwell was strikingly prescient.  If you doubt that we're heading down that road, consider the story that appeared in Gizmodo yesterday, that employees at the National Science Foundation and Center for Disease Control have been given a long list by the Trump administration of words they are not allowed to use in official correspondence or publications without review and authorization.

Here's a sampler -- for the complete list, check the link:

• advocacy
• bias
• climate
• cultural heritage
• disability
• discrimination
• diversity
• ethnicity
• evidence-based
• female (no, I'm not making this up)
• gender
• inequality
• LGBTQ
• political
• racial
• science-based
• socioeconomic
• transgender
• women (no, I'm still not making this up)

When I first read this, my initial reaction was, "This can't possibly be true."  The NSF being forbidden from using the words "evidence-based?"  But after some digging about, all I can say is that it appears at the time of this writing to be true.

I'm not sure what to be appalled at most about this.  That we don't want a study identified as "biased," because then we might have to address whose political interests are being served by the bias.  That because of the Trump administration's ongoing war on minorities, we mustn't speak of diversity.  That LGBTQ individuals, whose rights to fair treatment are being threatened with each new executive order, are guilty of "sexcrime;" and we have to pretend transgender people don't even exist.

And "science-based" and "evidence-based?" What the fuck is the NSF supposed to base its policy on, then?  Magic?  The Bible?  Prophecy?

Or just what its "bellyfeel" is?

I've tried not to engage in hyperbole about what this administration is doing, but every new thing I read drives me further toward the conclusion that they have only two motives: consolidating power and seeking revenge against anyone who has stood in their way.  Toward that end, shutting down resistance, eliminating free speech and the free press, rewriting the truth to conform to whatever Trump's cadre says it should be.  Everything contradictory is "oldspeak" that should be "rectified."

The result should be "doubleplusgood," don't you think?  Or maybe we should just stick with "Great Again."

My hope is the fact of this having been made public will give NSF and CDC employees the courage to defy this order.  People have to fight back, tell the 2025 version of the Thinkpol "No way in hell."  We have to spread this story far and wide, because you know the first thing the Trump administration is going to do is claim that this is all "fake news."

"Malquoted" and "misprinted."  Just like the erasure of any reference to the riots and insurrection on January 6.  Just like Trump's insistence that the recent series of horrible airplane crashes had to do with "DEI" and not with the fact that two weeks before the first one, he'd dismissed the head of the FAA and laid off hundreds of air traffic controllers.  Just like the tragic wildfires in California having nothing to do with climate change, but with "failed water policy" by the state's Democratic governor -- and that Trump came in and saved the day by releasing billions of gallons of water from reservoirs that didn't even flow toward Los Angeles, the loss of which will jeopardize agricultural irrigation for months.

Doesn't matter what's actually true.  If it strokes Trump's bloated ego, and allows him to post smug, self-congratulatory, usually misspelled messages on social media, then it's de facto the New Truth.

Of course, forbidden words are not the only hurdle academia is facing in the United States; coupled with all of the funding cuts the NSF, CDC, and NIH are undergoing, it's looking like a war that might not be winnable, at least not in the short term.  If what the administration really wants is to destroy the United States as a leader in scientific and medical research worldwide, they're going about it the right way.  What Trump and Musk and their cronies have done in the last three weeks isn't "rooting out corruption and waste;" it's placing free inquiry into an ideological straitjacket that will set American academia back decades, if it doesn't ruin it completely.

And as far as Orwell goes -- looks like got the details right.  All he missed was the year it happened.

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