The second Sun

I know the universe can be a weird place sometimes, but... let's follow Carl Sagan's dictum of looking for a normal and natural explanation for things before jumping to a paranormal or supernatural one, mmmkay?

The reason this comes up is because of a discussion I saw online about the strange phenomenon of a "double Sun" -- when there appears to be a split view of the Sun (or, sometimes, a smaller "second Sun" near the main one).  The first clue that this is a completely natural (albeit odd-looking) occurrence is that it always happens when (1) the sky is hazy, and (2) when the Sun is near the horizon.  It turns out to be caused by the Sun's light refracting off particles of ice or smoke in the upper atmosphere, creating an ephemeral double image.

It is, in fact, simply an optical illusion.

A "double Sun" caused by wildfire smoke, seen from Jervis Bay National Park, New South Wales, Australia [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Doug McLean, Bushfire smoke induced Double Sun, CC BY-SA 4.0]

One of the commenters, evidently a science type, gave a measured and reasonable response explaining light refraction, and that resulted in everyone basically going, "Oh, that's cool!  An interesting atmospheric phenomenon!  Thank you for the scientific explanation!"

Ha!  I'm lying.  Of course that's not how people responded.  He was immediately shouted down by about a hundred other folks, who had "explanations" like the following.  Spelling and grammar are exactly as written, because you can only add [sic] so many times:

• It’s just more proof that the Earth is flat.  We’ve been viewing a computer CGI simulation since the late 1800s, and it has just been a matter of time before we start seeing glitches in the man’s software.

• Is it nibiru?  I've read planet x?  Is it a sun like star or what?  I'm so confused.

• It has been photographed before, from Seattle to Wisconsin.  NASA has known about the approach of Nibiru, the Destroyer, Planet X or the countless other names it is known by, including Wormwoof, which it is known by in the bible.  It is an entire star system travelling on an elliptical orbit towards our earth.  It has its own Sun (which you are seeing) and several planets that travel with it.  All the people want to know why can’t you see it.  The answer is because it’s a dead brown star that can only be seen in the infra red spectrum.  The only 2 places that have a black light telescope is in Antarctica and the Vatican.  Go figure.

• If you don’t mind, I will actually give you a serious reply, depending on what you believe in depending on what you think is possible and aside from that, depending on what frequency you operate at you’re able to see in those things, I’ve heard a lot from people who are a lot smarter than me that by 2027 the two suns will be completely visible as well as open contact.  I don’t care if I’m labeled crazy I don’t channel.

• Idk what any of this can or will mean for us here, but boys and girls I don't think the comet in our orbit, that they say should remain visible to the naked eye, but only while facing due West, and get this....only during, or immediately after the sunset will it appear near the Sun, I don't think that's what they are telling us it is.  Is this the reason all these billionaires have been building massive underground bunkers suddenly this past year?

• Trump the Antichrist is here and two suns is the beginning of the end.  In many apocalyptic and religious interpretations, the imagery of “two suns crossing in the sky” is often associated with the arrival of the Antichrist, signifying a significant and ominous event that marks the beginning of the end times, often interpreted as a sign of a false messiah or a powerful evil force emerging into the world, e.g. Trump and Musk.

• There is a second sun behind our sun but we can never see it because it stays behind the sun.  It’s gravitational balanced by the tiny black hole on the other side of our moon that we can’t see either.  Every 276 years in June the moon’s black hole and the second son have a tilting wobble and the second sun becomes visible for a few minutes in a small viewing zone across the northern hemisphere.  Behind the second sun there are a few more things that we can’t see, like second Jupiter.

A few thoughts about all that.

• What the actual fuck?

• Okay, I can see Trump as the Antichrist, given that he embodies all Seven Deadly Sins in one individual.  But somehow I don't think even his level of evil can make two Suns appear in the sky.

• If it's only visible for a few minutes every 276 years, it was pretty lucky the dude got a snapshot of it, wasn't it?

• So, Nibiru is en vogue again, eh?  Last I heard of Nibiru was about ten years ago, and I figured it had become passé, replaced by far more believable claims like targeted weather modification and 5G mind control and Jewish space lasers.

• If I've never seen a "second Sun," it's because I'm "operating on the wrong frequency?"  I didn't know humans were like radios, and came equipped with a frequency dial.  That's pretty awesome.  Maybe if mine is set right I can tune into the BBC.

• Only Antarctica and the Vatican have "black light telescopes"?  I'm trying to come up with some kind of clever response to this, but... nope, I got nothin'.

• If I ever get another pit bull, I'm gonna name him "Wormwoof."

• At the risk of repeating myself, what the actual fuck?

What astounds me about all of this is how many people seem to gravitate toward this sort of nonsense instead of looking first for a rational explanation.  It's not like the science in this case is hard to understand, or even hard to find; the website of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory posted a perfectly good explanation that shows up on the first page of a Google search for "double Sun."

But loony claims like Nibiru and dead brown stars and second Jupiters and simulation glitches are, apparently, more attractive.  Is it because it makes the universe seem weirder and cooler?  Or is it the appeal of "seeing through a coverup" by scientists or the government or whatnot?

It's always seemed to me that the scientific explanations of what we observe are plenty cool enough, and some of them -- like quantum physics -- plenty weird enough.  Why do so many people need to add extra layers of wackiness onto things?

I'll end with another quote from Carl Sagan, which I think sums things up nicely: "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

****************************************

Djinn and paradox

In the very peculiar Doctor Who episode "Joy to the World," the character of Joy Almondo is being controlled by a device inside a briefcase that -- if activated -- will release as much energy as a supernova, destroying the Earth (and the rest of the Solar System).  But just at the nick of time, a future version of the Doctor (from exactly one year later) arrives and gives the current Doctor the override code, saving the day.

The question comes up, though, of how the future Doctor knew what the code was.  The current Doctor, after all, hadn't known it until he was told.  He reasons that during that year, he must have learned the code from somewhere or someone -- but the year passes without anyone contacting him about the briefcase and its contents.  Right before the year ends (at which point he has to jump back to complete the loop) he realizes that his surmise wasn't true.  Because, of course, he already knew the code.  He'd learned it from his other self.  So armed with that knowledge, he jumps back and saves the day.

Well, he saves the moment, at least.  As it turns out, their troubles are just beginning, but that's a discussion for another time.

A similar trope occurred in the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time, but with an actual physical object rather than just a piece of information.  Playwright Richard Collier (played by Christopher Reeve) is at a party celebrating the debut of his most recent play, and is approached by an elderly woman who hands him an ornate pocket watch and says, in a desperate voice, "Come back to me."  Collier soon goes back in time by six decades, finds her as a young woman, and they fall desperately in love -- and he gives her the pocket watch.  Ultimately, he's pulled back into the present, and his girlfriend grows old without him, but right before she dies she finds him and gives him back the watch, closing the loop.

All of this makes for a fun twist; such temporal paradoxes are common fare in fiction, after all.  And the whole thing seems to make sense until you ask the question of, respectively (1) where did the override code originally come from? and (2) who made the pocket watch?

Because when you think about it -- and don't think too hard, because these kinds of things are a little boggling -- neither one has any origin.  They're self-creating and self-destroying, looped like the famous Ouroboros of ancient myth, the snake swallowing its own tail. 

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The pocket watch is especially mystifying, because after all, it's an actual object.  If Collier brought it back with him into the past, then it didn't exist prior to the moment he arrived in 1920, nor after the moment he left in 1980 -- which seems to violate the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy.

Physicists Andrei Lossev and Igor Novikov called such originless entities "djinn particles," because (like the djinn, or "genies," of Arabian mythology) they seem to appear out of nowhere.  Lossev and Novikov realized that although "closed timelike curves" are, theoretically at least, allowed by the Theory of General Relativity, they all too easily engender paradoxes.  So they proposed something they call the self-consistency principle -- that time travel into the past is possible if and only if it does not generate a paradox.

So let's say you wanted to do something to change history.  Say, for example, that you wanted to go back in time and give Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales some medication to save his life from the fever that otherwise killed him at age fifteen.  This would have made him king of England seven years later instead of his younger brother, who would have become the infamous King Henry VIII, thus dramatically changing the course of history.  In the process, of course, it also generates a paradox; because if Henry VIII never became king, you would have no motivation to go back into the past and prevent him from becoming king, right?  Your own memories would be consistent with the timeline of history that led to your present moment.  Thus, you wouldn't go back in time and save Arthur's life.  But this would mean Arthur would die at fifteen, Henry VIII becomes king instead, and... well, you see the difficulty.

Lossev and Novikov's self-consistency principle fixes this problem.  It tells us that your attempt to save Prince Arthur must have failed -- because we know that didn't happen.  If you did go back in time, you were simply incorporated into whatever actually did happen.

Timeline of history saved.  Nothing changed.  Ergo, no paradox.

You'd think that physicists would kind of go "whew, dodged that bullet," but interestingly, most of them look at the self-consistency principle as a bandaid, an unwarranted and artificial constraint that doesn't arise from the models themselves.  Joseph Polchinski came up with another paradoxical situation -- a billiard ball fired into a wormhole at exactly the right angle that when it comes out of the other end, it runs into (and deflects) itself, preventing it from entering the wormhole in the first place -- and analysis by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne found there's nothing inherent in the models that prevents this sort of thing.

Some have argued that the ease with which time travel into the past engenders paradox is an indication that it's simply an impossibility; eventually, they say, we'll find that there's something in the models that rules out reversing the clock entirely.  In fact, in 2009, Stephen Hawking famously hosted a time-travelers' party at Cambridge University, complete with fancy food, champagne, and balloons -- but only sent out invitations the following day.  He waited several hours, and no one showed up.

That, he said, was that.  Because what time traveler could resist a party?

But there's still a lingering issue, because it seems like if it really is impossible, there should be some way to prove it rigorously, and thus far, that hasn't happened.  Last week we looked at the recent paper by Gavassino et al. that implied a partial loophole from the Second Law of Thermodynamics -- if you could travel into the past, entropy would run backwards during part of the loop and erase your memory of what had happened -- but it still leaves the question of djinn particles and self-deflecting billiard balls unsolved.

Seems like we're stuck with closed timelike curves, paradoxes notwithstanding.

Me, I think my mind is blown sufficiently for one day.  Time to go play with my puppy, who only worries about paradoxes like "when is breakfast?" and the baffling question of why he is not currently getting a belly rub.  All in all, probably a less stressful approach to life.

****************************************

Mystery, certainty, and heresy

I've been writing here at Skeptophilia for fourteen years, so I guess it's to be expected that some of my opinions have changed over that time.

I think the biggest shift has been in my attitude toward religion.  When I first started this blog, I was much more openly derisive about religion in general.  My anger is understandable, I suppose; I was raised in a rigid and staunchly religious household, and the attitude of "God as micromanager" pervaded everything.  It brings to mind the line from C. S. Lewis's intriguing, if odd, book The Pilgrim's Regress: "...half the rules seemed to forbid things he'd never heard of, and the other half forbade things he was doing every day and could not imagine not doing; and the number of rules was so enormous that he felt he could never remember them all."

But the perspective of another fourteen years, coupled with exploring a great many ideas (both religious and non-religious) during that time, has altered my perspective some.  I'm still unlikely ever to become religious myself, but I now see the question as a great deal more complex than the black-and-white attitude I had back then.  My attitude now is more that everyone comes to understand this weird, fascinating, and chaotic universe in their own way and time, and who am I to criticize how someone else squares that circle?  As long as religious people accord me the same right to my own beliefs and conscience as they have, and they don't use their doctrine to sledgehammer in legislation favoring their views, I've got no quarrel.

The reason this comes up is, of course, because of the election of a new Pope, Leo XIV, to lead the Roman Catholic Church.  I watched the scene unfold two days ago, and I have to admit it was kind of exciting, even though I'm no longer Catholic myself.  The new Pope seems like a good guy.  He's already pissed off MAGA types -- the white smoke had barely dissipated from over St. Peter's before the ever-entertaining Laura Loomer shrieked "WOKE MARXIST POPE" on Twitter -- so I figure he must be doing something right.  I guess in Loomer's opinion we can't have a Pope who feeds the poor or treats migrants as human beings or helps the oppressed.

Or, you know, any of those other things that were commanded by Jesus.

The fact remains, though, that even though I have more respect and tolerance for religion than I once did, I still largely don't understand it.  After Pope Leo's election, I got online to look at other Popes who had chosen the name "Leo," and following that thread all the way back to the beginning sent me down a rabbit hole of ecclesiastical history that highlighted how weird some of the battles fought in the church have been.

The first Pope Leo ruled back in the fifth century, and his twenty-one year reign was a long and arduous fight against heresy.  Not, you understand, people doing bad stuff; but people believing wrongly, at least in Leo's opinion.

Pope Leo I (ca. 1670) by Francisco Herrera [Image is in the Public Domain]

The whole thing boils down to the bizarre argument called "Christology," which is doctrine over the nature of Jesus.  Leo's take on this was that Jesus was the "hypostatic union" of two natures, God-nature and human nature, in one person, "with neither confusion or division."  But this pronouncement immediately resulted in a bunch of other people saying, "Nuh-uh!"  You had the:

• Monophysites, who said that Jesus only had one nature (divine);
• Dyophysites, who said that okay, Jesus had two natures, but they were separate from each other;
• Monarchians, who said that God is one indivisible being, so Jesus wasn't a distinct individual at all;
• Docetists, who said that Jesus's human appearance was only a guise, without any true reality;
• Arianists, who said that Jesus was divine in origin but was inferior to God the Father;
• Adoptionists, who said that Jesus only became the Son of God at his baptism; and
• probably a dozen or so others I'm forgetting about.

So Leo called together the Council of Chalcedon and the result was that most of these were declared heretical.  This gave the church leaders license to persecute the heretics, which they did, with great enthusiasm.  But what occurs to me is the question, "How did they know any of this?"  They were all working off the same set of documents -- the New Testament, plus (in some cases) some of the Apocrypha -- but despite that, all of them came to different conclusions.  Conclusions that they were so certain of they were completely confident about using them to justify the persecution of people who believed differently (or, in the case of the heretics themselves, that they believed so strongly they were willing to be imprisoned or executed rather than changing their minds).

Myself, I find it hard to imagine much of anything that I'm that sure of.  I try my hardest to base my beliefs on the evidence and logic insofar as I understand them at the time, but all bets are off if new data comes to light.  That's why although I consider myself a de facto atheist, I'm hesitant to say "there is no God."  The furthest I'll go is that from what I know of the universe, and what I've experienced, it seems to me that there's no deity in charge of things. 

But if God appeared to me to point out the error of my ways, I'd kind of be forced to reconsider, you know?  It's like the character of Bertha Scott -- based very much on my beloved grandmother -- said, in my novella Periphery:

"Until something like this happens, you can always talk yourself out of something."  Bertha chuckled.  "It’s like my daddy said about the story of Moses and the burning bush.  I remember he once said after Mass that if he was Moses, he’d’a just pissed himself and run for the hills.  Mama was scandalized, him talking that way, but I understood.  Kids do, you know.  Kids always understand this kind of thing...  You see, something talks to you out of a flaming bush, you can think it’s God, you can lay down and cry, you can run away, but the one thing you can’t do is continue to act like nothing’s happened."

So while my own views are, in some sense, up for grabs, my default is to stick with what I know from science.  And the fifth century wrangling by the first Pope Leo over the exact nature of Jesus strikes me as bizarre.  As former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin put it, "Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything."

Be that as it may, I wish all the best to this century's Pope Leo.  Like I said, he looks like a great choice, and a lot of my Catholic friends seem happy with him.  As far as my own mystification about a lot of the details of religion, it's hardly the only thing about my fellow humans I have a hard time understanding.  But like I said earlier, as long as religious people don't use their own certainty to try to force me into belief, I'm all about the principle of live and let live.

****************************************

The mystery of "Somerton Man"

It's understandable, I suppose, that I get really torqued by the misuse of the word skeptic to mean "doubter" or "disbeliever."

Skeptics respect evidence, facts, logic, and the scientific method; their litmus test is, "Is this supported by what we know to be true?"  They rid themselves of biases -- insofar as is possible -- and start from a position of clear-eyed curiosity, proceeding from there to wherever the data leads.

So please stop calling people like RFK Jr. "vaccine skeptics" and ones like Lee Zeldin "climate skeptics."  They are science deniers, pure and simple, ignoring mountains of hard data in favor of their own ideological stances.

The trouble with being a skeptic, though, is that it can leave us in the position of saying "we don't know, and may never know."  When the information we have is insufficient to reach a conclusion, we have to hold making up our minds in abeyance, indefinitely if need be.  This can be intensely frustrating.  Humans want answers, and sometimes those answers are simply not forthcoming.  At that point, being pressed to respond to the question, "But what do you think the answer is?" is completely pointless.

If we're respecting the skeptical process, we don't think anything.  We don't know, and that's that, at least until more evidence comes to light.

We've seen a few examples of this here at Skeptophilia -- the strange disappearance of Frederick Valentich, the nineteenth-century footprints in the snow in Devonshire, the origin of the mysterious Kaspar Hauser, and the famous Dyatlov Pass incident, to name several.  Today, though, I'd like to tell you about a different one, just as peculiar and intriguing, and no less mystifying -- the odd case of "Somerton Man."

The bare bones of the case go something like this.

On 1 December 1948, the dead body of a man was found on Somerton Beach, south of Adelaide, Australia.  He was well-dressed, in a suit and tie, and propped against a seawall; several passersby thought he might have gotten drunk and passed out or fallen asleep there, and walked right past him, before someone thought to check for a pulse.  Police were called, and here's where things get even weirder; he had no identification, all the tags had been cut from his clothing, and in his pocket was a torn slip of paper with the printed words "Tamám shud" -- Farsi for "it is finished."  The only other things in his pocket were a comb, a box of matches, a cigarette packet, and an unused train ticket and bus ticket.

The man was quite ordinary; about 180 centimeters tall, maybe in his forties, with reddish-blond hair and gray eyes.  His autopsy showed signs of internal bleeding and inflammation of the spleen and liver, perhaps consistent with poisoning, but toxicology tests were unable to recover any specific toxin responsible.

Photographs of the dead man's face published in newspapers resulted in no identifications.

But a month later, officials at the Adelaide railway station were going through items that had been left behind or unclaimed, and turned over to police a brown suitcase (also with its label removed) that had been checked in on November 30.  It proved to contain a red dressing gown, a pair of slippers, a pair of trousers with sand in the cuffs, and various small personal items.  Most interestingly, it also contained a card of orange waxed thread that matched thread used to repair the pocket of the trousers the man was wearing when he died.  A laundry bag in the suitcase had a tag saying "T. Keane."  But a search found that no one named Keane had been reported missing in Australia -- nor in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Ireland.

The case took a significantly bizarre turn when a man the authorities named as "Ronald Francis" -- police policy in Australia in the 1940s often protected witnesses in infamous cases by using pseudonyms, and his actual identity has never been made public -- responded to an inquiry about the odd piece of paper with "Tamám shud" printed on it.  He came forward with a copy of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat that had part of the last page torn out (and indeed, the book ends with those words).  The torn scrap matched the missing piece in the book perfectly.  But Francis's statement gets even stranger than that.  The book wasn't his, he said; he'd found it tossed in the back seat of his open-topped convertible, only a day or two after the body was found on Somerton Beach, and hadn't thought to look through it until he saw an article in the local newspaper that mentioned the torn slip with the Farsi words.  Weirdest of all, on the back of the book were some faint indentations, as if someone had used it to support a piece of paper they were writing on.  Here is an enhanced image of the indentations:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It certainly looks like a code -- but short passages are notoriously difficult to decrypt, and this one has resisted all attempts at decipherment.

Also scribbled in the book was a telephone number, which turned out to belong to a nurse named Jessica Ellen Thomson who lived only four hundred meters north of where the body was found.  She claimed not to have any idea who the man was -- but the police investigator in charge of the inquiry later said when she looked at a photograph of the corpse, she had seemed "completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance that she was about to faint."  She said she had once owned a copy of the Rubaiyat but had given it to a friend, Alf Boxall, during the war.  The police pursued a hypothesis that the dead man was Boxall, but that came to naught when Boxall was found alive and well in Sydney, and still had his copy of the Rubaiyat -- with Thomson's name handwritten on the inside front cover -- and an intact last page.

Jessica Thomson died in 2007, and her daughter Kate gave an interview in 2013 in which she stated outright that she thought her mother had lied -- she had known the man's identity, Kate said, and was covering something up, but what that might be she wasn't sure because her mother had never wanted to talk about the case.  She also stated that her mother had known Russian but never explained to her how or why she'd learned it, and expressed a surmise that her mother and the dead man might have been spies for the Soviets.  But inquiries into that angle, too, ended up turning up nothing of note.

On the 14th of June, 1949, Somerton Man -- still unidentified -- was buried at the government's expense in Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery.  

About the only progress in the case came in 2022, with a tentative (and distant) genetic match of hairs from the dead man to members of a Webb family of Melbourne.  One member of the family, Carl Webb, born in 1905, was a shady character, described as "moody, violent, and threatening."  He had a history of mental illness (including suicide attempts), and had vanished for parts unknown in 1947.  Interestingly, Webb had a sister named Freda who married a man named John Keane -- recall the tag on the laundry bag saying "T. Keane" -- but Webb had never gone by the name, to anyone's recollection, and no members of John Keane's family were unaccounted for (or seemed to have anything at all to do with the case).

So it certainly seems like Webb could be a possibility.  But this leaves the connection to the code, the slip of paper, and Jessica Thomson still unexplained -- as well as how and why he died.

In the end, we're left with a mystery.  Almost eighty years ago, a well-dressed dead body showed up on an Australian beach, and to this day we have no easy solution to explain what happened to him.  The only person who may have had more information was Thomson, and she died eighteen years ago without ever divulging to anyone what, if anything, she knew about the mysterious man.

Frustrating, isn't it?  There's a deep drive in us to know the answers, and sometimes, they stay tantalizingly out of our reach.  But as skeptics, we have to be willing to state "I don't know," and let things lie.  It may be that some time in the future, more information about the mysterious life and death of "Somerton Man" will be unearthed, but until then -- he is, and will remain, a complete cipher.

****************************************

Fact blindness

[Spoiler alert!  This post contains spoilers for the most recent Doctor Who episode, "Lucky Day."  If you're planning on watching it and would prefer not to know about the episode's plot, watch it first -- but don't forget to come back and read this.]

In his book The Magician's Nephew, C. S. Lewis writes the trenchant line, "The trouble with trying to make yourself stupider than you actually are is that you usually succeed."

In one sentence, this sums up the problem I have with cynics.  Cynicism is often glorified, and considered a sign of intelligence -- cynics, so the argument goes, have "seen through" the stuff that has the rest of us hoodwinked.  It's a spectrum, they say, with gullibility (really dumb) on one end and cynicism (by analogy, really smart) on the other.

In reality, of course, cynicism is no better than gullibility.  I wouldn't go so far as to call either one "dumb" -- there are a lot of reasons people fall into both traps -- but they're both equally lazy.  It's just as bad to disbelieve and dismiss everything without thought as it is to believe and accept everything without thought.

The difficulty is that skepticism -- careful consideration of the facts before either believing or disbelieving a claim -- is hard work, so both gullibility and cynicism can easily become habits.  In my experience, though, cynicism is the more dangerous, because in this culture it's become attractive.  It's considered edgy, clever, tough, a sign of intelligence, of being a hard-edged maverick who isn't going to get taken advantage of.  How often do you hear people say things like "the media is one hundred percent lies" and "all government officials are corrupt" and even "I hate all people," as if these were stances to be proud of?

I called them "traps" earlier, because once you have landed in that jaundiced place of not trusting anything or anyone, it's damn hard to get out of.  After that, even being presented with facts may not help; as the old saw goes, "You can't logic your way out of a position you didn't logic your way into."  Which brings us to the most recent episode of Doctor Who -- the deeply disturbing "Lucky Day."

The episode revolves around the character of Conrad Clark (played to the hilt by Jonah Hauer-King), a podcast host who has become obsessed with the Doctor and with UNIT, the agency tasked with managing the ongoing alien incursions on Earth.  Conrad's laser focus on UNIT, it turns out -- in a twist I did not see coming -- isn't because he is supportive of what they do, but because he disbelieves it.

To Conrad, it's all lies.  There are no aliens, no spaceships, no extraterrestrial technology, and most critically, no threat.  It's all been made up to siphon off tax money to enrich the ones who are in on the con.  And he is willing to do anything -- betray the kindness and trust of Ruby, who was the Doctor's confidant; threaten UNIT members who stand in his way; even attempt to murder his friend and helper Jordan who allowed him to infiltrate UNIT headquarters -- in order to prove all that to the world.

It's a sharp-edged indictment of today's click-hungry podcasters and talk show celebrities, like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, and Tucker Carlson, who promote conspiracies with little apparent regard for whom it harms -- and how hard it can be to tell if they themselves are True Believers or are just cold, calculating, and in it for the fame and money.  (And it's wryly funny that in the story, it's the people who disbelieve in aliens who are the delusional conspiracy theorists.)

The part that struck me the most was at the climax of the story, when Conrad has forced his way into UNIT's Command Central, and has UNIT's redoubtable leader, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, held at gunpoint.  Kate releases an alien monster not only to prove to Conrad she and the others have been telling the truth all along, but to force his hand -- to make him "fish or cut bait," as my dad used to say -- and finally, finally, when the monster has Conrad pinned to the floor and is about to bite his face off, he admits he was wrong.  Ruby tases the monster (and, to Conrad's reluctant "thank you," tells him to go to hell -- go Ruby!).

But then, as he stands up and dusts himself off, he looks down at the monster and sneeringly says, "Well, at least your props and costumes are getting better."  And the monster suddenly lurches up and bites his arm off.

That's the problem, isn't it?  Once you've decided to form your beliefs irrespective of facts and logic, no facts or logic can ever make you budge from that position.

The world is a strange, chaotic place, filled with a vast range of good and bad, truth and lies, hard facts and fantasy, and everything in between.  If we want to truly understand just about anything we can't start out from a standpoint either of gullible belief or cynical disbelief.  Yes, teasing apart what's real from what's not can be exhausting, especially in human affairs, where motives of greed, power, and bigotry can so often twist matters into knots.  But if, as I hope, your intent is to arrive at the truth and not at some satisfying falsehood that lines up with what you already believed, it's really the only option.

I'm reminded of another passage from Lewis, this one from the end of his novel The Last Battle.  In it, the main characters and a group of Dwarves, led by one Diggle, have been taken captive and held in a dark, filthy stable.  All around them, the world is coming to an end; the stable finally collapses to reveal that they've all been transported to a paradisiacal land, and that the dire danger is, miraculously, over.  But the Dwarves, who had decided that everyone -- both the Good Guys and the Bad Guys -- were lying to them, still can't believe it, to the extent that they're certain they're still imprisoned:

"Are you blind?" said Tirian.

"Ain't we all blind in the dark?" said Diggle.

"But it isn't dark!" said Lucy.  "Can't you see?  Look up!  Look round!  Can't you see the sky and the tree and the flowers?  Can't you see me?"

"How in the name of all humbug can I see what ain't there?  And how can I see you any more than you can see me in this pitch darkness?"

Further attempts to prove it to them meet with zero success.  They've become so cynical even the evidence of their own eyes and ears doesn't help.  At that point, they are -- literally, in the context of the story -- fact blind.  Finally Diggle snarls:

"How can you go on talking all that rot?  Your wonderful Lion didn't come and help you, did he?  Thought not.  And now -- even now -- when you've been beaten and shoved into this black hole, just the same as the rest of us, you're still at your old game.  Starting a new lie.  Trying to make us believe we're none of us shut up, and it ain't dark, and heaven knows what."

Ultimately Lucy and Tirian and the others have to give up; nothing they can say or do has any effect.  Aslan (the lion referenced in the above passage) sums it up as follows:

"They will not let us help them.  They have chosen cunning instead of understanding.  Their prison is only in their own minds, yet, they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they can not be taken out."

****************************************

Nonsense from the sky

I was recently chatting with a friend about how little it takes to get woo-woos all stirred up -- and how impossible it is to get them to simmer down afterward -- and that got me thinking about A Book from the Sky.

If you've never heard about this strange publication, you're not alone; it never got a great deal of attention outside of China (except for one other subset of humanity, q.v.).  It's the creation of award-winning Chinese artist Xu Bing, who has made a name for himself pushing convention and working paradox and surreality into his creations.

A Book from the Sky (天書; Tiānshū) looks, to someone like myself who knows no Chinese, like nothing more than page after page of artistically-laid-out Chinese calligraphy:

Cover page of A Book from the Sky

The first clue you might have that something is amiss is that the characters for the book title -- 天書 -- don't appear on the title page.  In fact, they appear nowhere in the book.

In another fact, none of the characters in the book are actual Chinese characters.  Chinese scholars have gone through the whole thing painstakingly and found only two that are close to real Chinese characters, and one of those is only attested in a supposed ninth-century document that might itself be a forgery.  (Whether the inclusion of that character was deliberate, or is merely an accidental resemblance, isn't certain, but I suspect the latter.)

Now, let's be clear about one thing right from the get-go.  Xu himself states up front that A Book from the Sky is nonsense.  Here's his description, from his own website:

Produced over the course of four years, this four-volume treatise features thousands of meaningless characters resembling Chinese.  Each character was meticulously designed by the artist in a Song-style font that was standardized by artisans in the Ming dynasty.  In this immersive installation, the artist hand-carved over four thousand moveable type printing blocks.  The painstaking production process and the format of the work, arrayed like ancient Chinese classics, were such that the audience could not believe that these exquisite texts were completely illegible.  The work simultaneously entices and denies the viewer’s desire to read the work...

[T]he false characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” provoking doubt in established systems of knowledge.  Many early viewers would spend considerable time scrutinizing the texts, fixedly searching for genuine characters amidst the illegible ones.

The aftermath of the release of A Book from the Sky reminds me of an incident from my freshman lit class in college.  The professor, a well-meaning but very old-school gentleman named Dr. Fields, had us read Robert Frost's famous "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."  Afterward, he read us a quote from an interview with Frost in which the poet was asked about symbolism in the poem.  Frost responded, basically, "There isn't any.  It's about a man stopping by woods on a snowy evening.  That's all."  But then Dr. Fields, wearing his most patronizing smile, said, "Of course, we know that a poet of Frost's caliber would not have a poem with no symbolic literary elements, so we will proceed to analyze the symbolism therein."

So the woo-woos have decided that "an artist of Xu's caliber would not have a 604-page book with no meaning at all," and have been trying since its release all the way back in 1991 to figure out what it "actually means."

Here are a few of the weirder claims I've seen:

• it's written in the script that was used in Atlantis and/or Lemuria, which is why we can't decipher it, because there aren't many Atlanteans or Lemurians around these days.
• the document was communicated to Xu in a series of dreams generated by telepathic aliens who are trying to pass along to humanity their superior wisdom.
• it's eeeeeeevil, and if we did translate it, it would release demons, and boy then we'd be sorry.
• it's somehow connected to other examples of asemic writing (writing that looks like it should be meaningful but isn't), like the Voynich Manuscript and Codex Seraphinianus, and maybe one of them holds the key to deciphering the others.

Okay, respectively:

• neither Atlantis nor Lemuria existed.  I keep hoping this particular nonsense will go away, but somehow it never does.
• if this is superior wisdom from telepathic ultra-powerful aliens, you'd think they'd communicate in a language humans actually could read.  Like, oh, I dunno, maybe Chinese, which Xu, being Chinese and all, just happens to be fluent in.
• at this point, I'm thinking releasing demons wouldn't be any worse than what we're currently dealing with, so as far as that goes, let 'er rip.  Bring on the demons.
• of course it's connected to other asemic writing, because... hang on to your hats, here... by definition none of it has meaning.  If it was decipherable, it wouldn't be asemic writing.  It would just be plain old writing.

For cryin' in the sink, y'all need to put more effort into your crazy claims.  Because these ones suck.

Me, I think A Book from the Sky is exactly what its creator claims it is -- a beautiful but meaningless art piece intended to poke fun at the art establishment and people who need to find meaning in everything.  As the famous line about Freudian symbolism goes, "Sometimes a banana is just a banana."

But that's never going to satisfy the woo-woos, because they (1) can't resist a mystery, and (2) never admit they were wrong about anything.  So I'm sure they'll keep plugging away at it, trying to figure out what Xu's work "actually means."

Oh, well.  As long as it amuses them.  And if it keeps them busy, they'll have less time to send spit-flecked emails to me about what a sheeple I am, so that's all good.

****************************************

The pressure cooker

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I have a peculiar fascination for things that are huge and powerful and can kill you.

I'm not entirely sure where this obsession comes from, but it's what's driven me to write here about such upbeat topics as giant predatory dinosaurs, tornadoes, hurricanes, massive earthquakes, supernovas, gamma-ray bursters, and the cheerful concept of "false vacuum decay" (which wouldn't just destroy the Earth, but the entire universe).  I'm guessing part of it is my generally anxiety-ridden attitude toward everything; after all, just because we don't think there's a Wolf-Rayet star nearby that's ready to explode and fry the Solar System doesn't mean there isn't one.  I know that worrying about all of that stuff isn't going to (1) make it any less likely that it'll happen, or (2) make a damn bit of difference to my survival if it does, but even so I don't seem to be able to just relax and focus on more positive things, such as the fact that with the sea-level rise predicted from climate change, it looks like here in upstate New York I may finally own ocean-front property.

It's also why I keep regular tabs on the known volcanoes on the Earth -- on some level, I'm always waiting for the next major eruption.  One of the potentially most dangerous volcanoes on Earth is in Italy, and I'm not talking about Vesuvius; I'm referring to the Campi Flegrei ("burning fields," from the Greek φλέγω, "to burn"), which isn't far away from the more famous mountain and seems to be powered by the same magma chamber complex that obliterated Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae in 79 C.E.  Both Vesuvius and the Campi Flegrei are highly active, and near the top of the list of "world's most dangerous volcanoes."

The problem is, the three million residents of Naples live right smack in between the two, only twenty-odd kilometers away from Vesuvius (to the east) and Campi Flegrei (to the west).  (For reference, Pompeii was nine kilometers from the summit of Vesuvius.)

The Campi Flegrei, looking west from Naples [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Baku, VedutaEremo2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The problem is that volcanoes like these two don't erupt like the familiar fountains of lava you see from Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii, and the recent eruption on La Palma in the Canary Islands and the one near Grindavík in Iceland.  The most typical eruption from volcanoes like Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei are pyroclastic flows -- surely one of the most terrifying phenomena on Earth -- a superheated mass of steam and ash that rush downhill at speeds of up to a hundred kilometers an hour, flash-frying everything in its wake.  That the Campi Flegrei volcanoes are capable of such massive events is witnessed by the surrounding rock formation called the "Neapolitan Yellow Tuff."  A "welded tuff" is a layer of volcanic ash that was so hot when it stopped moving that it was still partially molten, and fused together into a solid porous rock.

A video of a pyroclastic flow from Mount Unzen in Japan in 1991

The Neapolitan Yellow Tuff isn't very recent; it came from an eruption about 39,000 years ago.  But there are signs the Campi Flegrei are heating up again, which is seriously bad news not only for Naples but for the town of Pozzuoli, which was built right inside the main caldera.  The residents of Pozzuoli have had to get used to regular rises and falls of the ground, some by as much as an alarming two meters.  In fact, between 1982 and 1984, there was so much uplift -- followed by magnitude-4 earthquakes and thousands of microquakes -- that the harbor became too shallow for most ships to dock, and the entire population of forty thousand was evacuated until things seemed to simmer down.

In fact, the reason the topic comes up is a study out of Stanford University and the University of Naples that appeared this week in the journal Science Advances, that found this terrifying swell-and-subside isn't due primarily to magmatic movement, as was feared -- it's the bubbling of superheated groundwater.  The study looked at the composition of the "caprock," the rock layer on top of the formation, and found that when mixed with hot water it forms something like a natural fibrous cement.  This then plugs up cracks and prevents groundwater from escaping.

The whole thing is like living on the lid of a giant pressure cooker.

Of course, unlike (I hope) your pressure cooker, the rock doesn't have the tensile strength to manage the pressure fluctuations, so ultimately it breaks somewhere, triggering an earthquake and steam eruptions, after which the caprock settles back down for a while until the cracks all reseal and the pressure starts to rebuild.

This is all pretty scary, but it does point scientists in a direction of how to mitigate its potential for harm.  "I call it a perfect storm of geology -- you have all the ingredients to have the storm: the burner of the system -- the molten magma, the fuel in the geothermal reservoir, and the lid," said Tiziana Vanorio, who co-authored the study.  "We can't act on the burner but we do have the power to manage the fuel.  By restoring water channels, monitoring groundwater, and managing reservoir pressure, we can shift Earth sciences toward a more proactive approach -- like preventive health care -- to detect risks early and prevent unrest before it unfolds.  That's how science serves society."

Which is all very well, but I still wouldn't want to live there.  I visited Italy last year and loved it, but the area around Naples -- that'd be a big nope for me.  When we were in Sicily, itself no stranger to seismic unrest, one of our tour guides said, "We might be taking a risk living here, I suppose.  But those people up in Naples -- they're crazy."

That anyone would build a town on top of an active volcano is explained mostly by the fact that humans have short memories.  And also, the richness of volcanic soils is generally good for agriculture.  Once Pompeii was re-discovered in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with extremely eerie casts of the bodies of people and animals who got hit by the pyroclastic flow, you'd think people would join our Sicilian tour guide in saying, "no fucking way am I living anywhere near that mountain."  But... no.  If you'll look at a world map, you might come to the conclusion that siting big cities near places prone to various natural disasters was some kind of species-wide game of chicken or something.

Not a game I want to play.  Such phenomena make me feel very, very tiny.  I'm very thankful that I live in a relatively peaceful, catastrophe-free part of the world.  Our biggest concern around here is snow, and even that's rarely a big deal; we don't get anything like the killer blizzards that bury the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain states every year.  Given my generally neurotic outlook on life, I can't imagine what I'd be like if I did live somewhere that had serious natural disasters.

Never leave my underground bunker, is probably pretty close to the mark.

****************************************