Anomaly analysis

I try to be tolerant of people's foibles, but one thing that annoys the absolute hell out of me is when someone is obviously ignorant of the basic facts of a subject, and yet expects everyone to treat their opinion about it as if it had merit.

It's why "the Big Bang means nothing exploded and made everything" (cosmology) and "why are there still monkeys?" (evolutionary biology) both make me see red almost instantaneously.  Fer cryin' in the sink, if you're going to talk about something, at least take the five minutes it requires to read the fucking Wikipedia page on the topic first.  Yes, I suppose you're "entitled to your opinion" regardless, but I'm in no way required to treat such idiocy as if it were Stephen Hawking levels of brilliance.

I mean, I have a lot of faults, but one thing I try to avoid is pontificating on subjects about which I am ignorant.  I have a pretty good idea of the limits of my own knowledge, and I am unhesitating in saying, "Sorry, I don't know enough to comment about that."

It's really not that hard to say.  Try it, you'll see.

What brings this whole infuriating subject up is all the people who weighed in on something that is honestly a very cool piece of research, which came out in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last week.  A team led by geophysicist Charlotte Gaugné-Gouranton, of Paris City University, used satellite data to analyze a peculiar shift in the Earth's gravitational field that affected a huge region of the eastern Atlantic Ocean.

The team is uncertain what caused the anomaly, which lasted for about two years and then subsided back into its original state.  "By analyzing time series of GRACE [Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment]-derived gravity gradients, we have identified an anomalous large-scale gravity gradient signal in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, maximum at the beginning of 2007, which cannot be fully explained by surface water sources nor core fluid flows," the researchers wrote.  "This leads us to suggest that at least part of this signal could reflect rapid mass redistributions deep in the mantle."

The team suspects it might have been caused by a sudden phase transition in a common mantle mineral called bridgmanite (Mg,Fe(SiO3)), which could cause mass redistribution because of changes in density, similar to what happens when water freezes into ice.  But further research is needed to confirm this explanation.

Well, in a classic case of people adding 1 + 1 and getting 73.8, we immediately had dozens of self-styled experts adding "anomaly" to "gravity" and multiplying by "cannot be fully explained" and getting... well, take a look for yourself:

• "Advanced technology of alien manufacture is capable of 'shielding' from gravity and is the means of FTL propulsion that's been observed over and over.  This 'blink' means it's finally been captured by scientific equipment.  Countdown until the government denials start."
• "Disruptions like this are to be expected during the End Times.  Hell is on the move."
• "The scientists know more than they're letting on.  I wouldn't live along the East Coast of the United States if you paid me.  Connections to La Palma?"  [Nota bene: La Palma is one of the Canary Islands, home to a volcano that has been erupting intermittently since 2021, and was the subject of a rather hysterical BBC documentary in 2000 about how the island could split in half and cause a megatsunami -- something geologists have determined is extremely unlikely]
• "When those windows open and close again, it is a sign of the Celestial Ascension.  We should expect more of the same very soon."
• "I'm surprised they let this study get published.  Something that can change the Universal Law of Gravity, and they're shrugging it off as an 'anomaly'?  But now that the secret is out, why hasn't this been headline news worldwide?"
• "The LHC [Large Hadron Collider] went online in 2008.  Not a coincidence.  It's only a theory, but they said that the LHC could create mini black holes, and this may be proof."
• "Movement within the Hollow Earth.  But movement of what?  Stay tuned, folks, this is big."

*brief pause to stop banging my head against my desk while whimpering softly*

Okay, let's all just hang on a moment.  First of all, this anomaly was vast in size, but tiny in magnitude.  The fluctuation was small enough that it was undetectable on the Earth's surface (the scientists' own words) and was only caught by highly sensitive sensors on satellites that had been specifically designed to detect minute shifts in the Earth's gravitational field.  Second, it wasn't a "blink" -- it lasted for over two years.  Third, it peaked back in 2007, so whatever it was ended seventeen years ago, and in that time we have seen no Atlantic megatsunamis, aliens, Celestial Ascensions, or hellmouths opening.  Fourth, a shift in the gravitational field just means "something with mass moved," not a "change in the Universal Law of Gravitation."  Fifth, if the LHC had created a dangerous mini black hole, you'd think the physicists right there in Switzerland would have been the first to know, not some geologists working out in the Atlantic.  Sixth, you can't give an idea legitimacy simply by adding the phrase "it's only a theory;" if a claim was stupid before, it's still stupid after you say that.  In fact, it might be even stupider.

Seventh, and most importantly: for fuck's sake, people.

Captain Picard has absolutely had it with this kind of nonsense.

It's not that we laypeople -- and I very much include myself in that term -- can't get carried away by the hype sometimes.  In fact, when I first read about the La Palma thing a few years ago, I was honestly kind of freaked out by it; devastating landslide-induced megatsunamis have happened before (in fact, long-term followers of Skeptophilia might recall that I've written about two of them here -- the Storegga Slide and the Agadir Canyon Avalanche).  But then I did what everyone should do when they're confronted with a claim outside of their area of expertise; I did a little digging to find out what the scientists themselves had to say on the topic, and I found out that just about all geologists agree that while La Palma is clearly seismically active, it's unlikely to fracture and create an ocean-wide megatsunami.

At that point, I just kind of went, "whew," and resumed business as usual.  I did not then go on to claim that the scientists were wrong, the island was too going to fracture, and aliens from the Hollow Earth were going to use their anti-gravity faster-than-light propulsion to come out and usher in either the End Times or the Celestial Ascension, depending on which version you went for earlier.

Look, it's not that there's anything specifically dangerous about thinking there's an alien base under the eastern Atlantic.  It's more that such fuzzy irrationality very quickly becomes a habit.  Once you're accustomed to demanding respect for a claim that upon examination turns out to be "this crazy, fact-free idea I just now pulled out of my ass," you begin to apply the same demand for your uninformed opinions on medicine, the economy, and politics.

Which in one sentence explains why the United States is currently a slow-motion train wreck.

It all goes back to what Isaac Asimov said in 1980, doesn't it?  Seems like a good place to end:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

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The legend of the lost sister

The difficult thing about any sort of historical research is that sometimes, the evidence you're looking for doesn't even exist.

In my own field of historical linguistics, for example, we're trying to determine what languages are related to each other (creating, as it were, a family tree for languages), figuring out word roots, identifying words borrowed from other languages, and reconstructing the ancestral language -- based only on the languages we now have access to.  There are times when there simply isn't enough information available to solve the particular puzzle you're working on.

The further back in time you go, the shakier the ground gets.  You'll see in etymological dictionaries claims like "the Proto-Indo-European word for 'settlement' or 'town' was *-weyk," but that's an inference; there aren't many Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days to verify if this is correct.  It's not just a guess, though.  It was reconstructed from the suffixes -wich and -wick you see in a lot of English place names (Norwich, Warwick), the Latin word vicus (meaning "a village in a rural area"), the Welsh gwig and Cornish guic (which mean approximately the same as the Latin does), the Greek word οἶκος (house), the Sanskrit viś and Old Church Slavonic vĭsĭ (both meaning "settlement"), and so on.  Using patterns of sound change, we can take current languages (or at least ones we have written records for) and backpedal to make an inference about what the speakers of PIE four thousand years ago might have said.

Still, it is only an inference, and the inherent unverifiability of it sometimes leaves practitioners of "hard science" scoffing and quoting Wolfgang Pauli, that such claims "aren't even wrong."  I think that's unduly harsh (but of course, given that this is basically what my master's thesis was about, it's no surprise I get a little defensive).  Even so, I think we have to be careful how hard to push a claim based on slim evidence.

That was my immediate thought when I read an article by Jay Norris, of Western Sydney University, in The Conversation.  It was about the mythology associated with my favorite naked-eye astronomical feature -- the Pleiades.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rawastrodata, The Pleiades (M45), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Norris and another astronomer, Barnaby Norris (not sure if they're related, or if it's a coincidence), have authored a paper that appeared in a book in 2022 called Advancing Cultural Astronomy which looks at a strange thing: in cultures all over the world, the Pleiades are associated with a collection of seven individuals.  They're the Seven Sisters in Greece, and also in many indigenous Australian cultures, for example.  And Norris and Norris realized two things that were very odd; first, that even on a clear night, you can only see six stars with the naked eye, not seven; and in both the Greek and Australian myth, the story involves a "lost sister" -- one of the seven who, for some reason or another, disappeared or is hidden.

So they started looking in other traditions, and found that all over the world, in cultures as unrelated as Indonesian, many Native American groups, many African cultures, the Scandinavians, and the Celts, there was the same tradition of associating the Pleiades with the number seven, and with one of the group who was lost.

They then went to the astronomical data.  They found that the stars in the Pleiades are moving relative to each other, and that a hundred thousand years ago there would have been seven stars visible to the naked eye in the cluster, but in the interim two of them moved so close together (from our perspective, at least) that they appear to be a single star unless you have a telescope.  That, they say, is the "lost sister," and is why cultures all over the world have a tradition that the group used to have seven members, but now only has six.

And this, they said, was evidence that the myth of the Pleiades is one of the oldest stories humans have told.  At least fifty thousand years old -- when the indigenous Australians migrated across a grassy valley that (when the sea level rose) became the Bay of Carpentaria -- and perhaps as much as a hundred thousand years old, when the common ancestors of all humans were still living in Africa and (presumably) shared a single cultural tradition.

It's a fascinating claim.  I have to admit that the commonalities of the myths surrounding the Pleiades in cultures all over the world are a little hard to explain otherwise.  Still, I can't say I'm a hundred percent sold.  I know from my work in reconstructive linguistics that chance similarities are weirdly common, and can lead to some seriously specious conclusions.  (Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall my rather brutal takedown a few years ago of a guy named L. M. Leteane, who used cherry-picked chance similarities between words to support his loony claim that the Pascuanese -- or Easter Islanders -- were originally from Egypt, as were the Olmecs of Central America, and both languages were descended from Bantu.)

So as far as the claim that the story of the Seven Sisters is over fifty thousand years old, count me as interested but unconvinced.  I think it's possible; it's certainly intriguing.  But to me, it's too hard to eliminate the simpler possibility, that the "loss" of one of the stars in the Pleiades was noted by many ancient cultures -- separately, and much more recently -- and became incorporated into their legends, rather than all the legends of the Pleiades and the lost sister coming from a single, very ancient ancestral story.

But it'll give you something to think about, when you see the Pleiades on the next clear night.  Whatever the origins of the myths surrounding it, it's awe-inspiring to think about our distant ancestors looking up at the same beautiful cluster of stars on a chilly, clear winter's night, and wondering what it really was -- same as we're doing today using the tools of science.

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Jumping on the bandwagon

There's a peculiar twist on confirmation bias -- which is the tendency to accept without question poor or faulty evidence in favor of a claim we already believed in -- that is just as insidious.  I call it the bandwagon effect.  The gist is that once a sensational or outlandish claim has been made, there'll be a veritable tsunami of people offering up their own version of "yeah, I saw it, too!", often supported by factual evidence that (to borrow a line from the inimitable Dorothy Parker) "to call it wafer-thin is a grievous insult to wafer-makers."

The best example of this I've ever seen is the "Rendlesham Forest Incident," which has sometimes been called "Britain's Roswell."  It occurred in December of 1980 in a forested area between Woodbridge and Orford, Suffolk, England, and UFO aficionados are still discussing it lo unto this very day.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Simon Leatherdale, Supposed UFO landing site - Rendlesham Forest - geograph.org.uk - 263104, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Here are the facts of the case.

On 26 December 1980, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, working as part of an American unit stationed at the Royal Air Force Base at Woodbridge, saw lights descending into Rendlesham Forest.  He took some of his men to investigate the site where it appeared to land, and upon arrival saw "a glowing orb that was metallic in appearance with colored lights" that moved through the trees as they approached it.  Simultaneously, some animals on a nearby farm "went into a frenzy."  One of the servicemen who was with Halt called it "a craft of unknown origin."

Police were called in at around four A.M., and they found some burned and broken tree branches, and three small indentations in approximately an equilateral triangle.  They also found an increased radiation level, on the order of 0.03 milliroentgen per hour (for reference, that's a little more than the total from a typical dental x-ray, spread over an hour's time).

Halt revisited the site in the early hours of 28 December, and reported that he'd seen three point sources of light, two to the south and one to the north, that hovered about ten degrees above the horizon.  The brightest of these, he said, "beamed down a stream of light from time to time."

The incident was reported in the news -- and then the bandwagon effect kicked in.

There were several reports of domestic animals acting oddly, and one witness said he heard "a sound like a woman screaming."  Multiple people reported that they, too, had seen lights in the sky that night, and one person said what he'd seen "was so bright it could have been a lighthouse."  The USAF and RAF people at Woodbridge had their hands full over the next few weeks trying to figure out which of these accounts were true (if, perhaps, misinterpreted) and which were made up by folks who were simply trying to get in on the fun.

In the end, there was no further evidence uncovered.  So for something touted as "Britain's Roswell," we're left with... not much.

But what about Halt's testimony?

It seems likely that Halt himself was caught up on the bandwagon.  He did undoubtedly see something -- probably a meteor -- and after that, each subsequent piece of "evidence" simply added to his conviction that he'd witnessed something otherworldly.  The colored lights Halt and his men saw were probably the flashing warning lights of a distant police car; in fact, a U.S. security policeman working at Woodbridge, Kevin Conde, later confessed that he'd contributed his own bit to the confusion by driving through the forest in a police vehicle with modified lights. The indentations in the ground were found to be scrapes dug by rabbits.  The agitated domestic animals were simply because that happens when you have a lot of frightened people running around through farm pastures at night with flashlights.  The "hovering point sources of light" Halt saw when he revisited the site were almost certainly stars; the position of the brightest one he reported, in fact, corresponds to the location of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

As far as the flashing light "so bright it could have been a lighthouse" -- that's because it was a lighthouse.  Specifically Orfordness Lighthouse, which is only about eight kilometers away and is easily visible from any high ground in the forest.

Brian Dunning, writing about the incident in Skeptoid in 2009, states:

Colonel Halt's thoroughness was commendable, but even he can be mistaken.  Without exception, everything he reported on his audiotape and in his written memo has a perfectly rational and unremarkable explanation...  All that remains is the tale that the men were debriefed and ordered never to mention the event, and warned that "bullets are cheap."  Well, as we've seen on television, the men all talk quite freely about it, and even Colonel Halt says that to this day nobody has ever debriefed him.  So this appears to be just another dramatic invention for television, perhaps from one of the men who have expanded their stories over the years.  When you examine each piece of evidence separately on its own merit, you avoid the trap of pattern matching and finding correlations where none exist.  The meteors had nothing to do with the lighthouse or the rabbit diggings, but when you hear all three stories told together, it's easy to conclude (as did the airmen) that the light overhead became an alien spacecraft in the forest.  Always remember: Separate pieces of poor evidence don't aggregate together into a single piece of good evidence.

Which is it exactly.  But unfortunately, human nature is such that once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to stop -- and there are all too many people who are eager to contribute their own little push to keep it accelerating.

As I've said many times before, no one would be happier than me if we got unequivocal evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, at least until one of them decides to vaporize me with their laser pistol.  But unfortunately, Rendlesham just isn't doing it for me.  I tend to be very much in Neil deGrasse Tyson's camp when he says that as good skeptics, we need something more than "you saw it."  "Next time you're abducted," he said, "grab something from the spaceship and bring it back.  Then we can talk.  Because anything of extraterrestrial manufacture, that has crossed interstellar space, is gonna be interesting."

But until then, we'll just have to keep waiting.  And always, guard as well as we can against the inevitable biases that all humans are prone to.  Because sometimes -- unfortunately -- a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.

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The puppetmasters

Well, Tuesday came and went, and no one got Raptured.

Not that I was expecting to go myself.  If anything, it was more likely the ground would open up and swallow me, kind of like what happened in Numbers chapter 16, wherein three guys named Korah, Dathan, and Abiram told Moses they were sick and tired of wandering around in the desert, and where was the Land of Milk and Honey they'd been promised, and anyway, who the hell put Moses in charge?  So there was an earthquake or something and the ground swallowed up not only the three loudmouthed dudes but their wives and kids and friends and domestic animals, which seems like overkill.  Literally.  Not surprising, really, because the God of the Old Testament was pretty free with the "Smite" function.  By one estimate I saw, according to the Bible God killed over two million people to Satan's ten, so I'm thinking maybe we got the whole good vs. evil thing backwards.

In any case, even that didn't happen on Tuesday, because here I am, unswallowed, as well as my wife and three dogs.  I haven't heard from my sons in a couple of days, but I'm assuming they're okay, too.  So all in all, it was an uneventful Tuesday.

The batting-zero stats of Rapture predictions from the past didn't stop people from completely falling for it yet again.  One woman sold all her belongings because she was convinced she wouldn't need them any more.  Another gave away her house -- like, signed over the deed and everything -- and at the time of the article (immediately pre-Rapture) was looking for someone to give her car to.  Another one donated her life savings, quit her job, and confessed to her husband that she was having an affair with a member of her church so she could "get right with God" before the Rapture happened -- and now is devastated because she's broke, jobless, and her husband is divorcing her.

It's hard to work up a lot of sympathy for these people, but at the same time, I have to place some of the blame on the people who brainwashed them.  No one gets to this advanced stage of gullibility unaided, you know?  Somewhere along the line, they were convinced to cede their own understanding to others -- and after that happens, you are putty in the hands of the delusional, power-hungry, and unscrupulous.

Which brings us to Peter Thiel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter Thiel by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0]

You probably know that Thiel is a wildly rich venture capitalist, the founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and was the first outside investor in Facebook.  His current net worth is over twenty billion dollars, but the current wealth inequity in the world is such that even so, he's still not in the top one hundred richest people.  But the fact remains that he's crazy wealthy, and has used that wealth to influence politics.

It will come as no shock that he's a big supporter of Donald Trump.  But what you might not know is that he is also a religious loony.

I'm not saying that just because Thiel is religious and I'm not.  I have lots of friends who belong to religions of various sorts, and we by and large respect each other and each other's beliefs.  Thiel, on the other hand, is in a different category altogether.  To give one example, just last week he gave a talk as part of his "ACTS 17 Collective" ("ACTS" stands for "Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society"), wherein he said that we can't regulate AI development and use because that's what Satan wants us to do -- "the Devil promises peace and safety by strangling technological progress with regulation."  Limiting AI, Thiel said, would "hasten the coming of the Antichrist."

Oh, and he's also said that environmental activist Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist.  Which is a little odd, because as far as I can tell she's already here, and has been for a while, and thus far hasn't done anything particularly Antichrist-ish.  But maybe there's some apocalyptic logic here that I'm not seeing.

Thiel is absolutely obsessed with one passage from the Bible, from 2 Thessalonians chapter 2:

Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction.  He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things?  And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time.  For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.  And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.  The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works.  He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing.  They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.

So what is that mysterious force that "holds back" the evil one, what St. Paul called the "κατέχων"?

Well, Thiel is, of course.  He and the techo-nirvana he is trying to create.  "[When the] Antichrist system collapses into Armageddon," religious commentator Michael Christensen writes, "only the few survive.  A techno-libertarian, [Thiel] entertains a kind of secular rapture: off-grid bunkers, floating cities or even planetary colonies.  In his apocalyptic vision, these survivalist escape hatches offer a way out of both collapse and tyranny—but only for the wealthy and well-prepared."

What's kind of terrifying about all this is how influential people like Thiel are.  His ACTS 17 Collective gatherings play to sold-out audiences.  His message, and that of others like him, then filters down to people like Pastor Joshua Mhlakela (the one who got the whole Rapture-Is-On-Tuesday thing started), and they then pass along their "repent or else!" fear-mongering to their followers.  It's why my lack of sympathy for the folks who bankrupted themselves because they figured they'd be Sitting At The Feet Of Jesus by Wednesday morning is tempered by, "... but was it really their fault?"  Sure, they should have learned some critical thinking skills, and been taught to sift fact from fiction.

But they weren't, for whatever reason.  And afterward, they were immersed in scary apocalyptic terror-talk day in, day out.  Who can blame them for eventually swallowing it whole?

It's easy for me, outside the system, to say the people who fell for Mhlakela's nonsense are just a bunch of fools.  But the truth is more nuanced than that, and a hell of a lot scarier.  Because brainwashing doesn't happen in a vacuum.

The puppetmasters behind it are almost always the powerful and rich -- who all too often not only get away with it, but profit mightily from it.  A terrified, brainwashed populace is easier to manipulate and extort.

Which exactly where people like Peter Thiel want us.

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The constancy of constants

One of the most enduring mysteries of physics is why the fundamental constants have the values they do.

I remember first thinking about this when I was a freshman in college, and we were looking at the Special Theory of Relativity in my intro-to-physics class.  The speed of light in a vacuum -- the ultimate speed limit, whatever Star Trek would have you believe -- is 299,792,458 meters per second.

What occurred to me was why it was exactly that number and not something else.  What if the speed of light was, say, twenty miles per hour?  Automobile travel would be a different game, and we'd have serious relativistic effects even riding a bicycle.  (Races would be an interesting affair; faster runners' clocks would move more slowly than slower runners' would, so by the end of the race, it'd be hard to get anyone to agree on what everyone's time was.)

All of which was delightfully silly stuff but didn't really get at the original question, which is why the speed of light has the value it does.  And it's not just the speed of light; in Martin Rees's wonderful book Just Six Numbers, he looks at how a handful of fundamental constants -- the gravitational flatness of the universe, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the ratio between the strength of the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force, the number of spatial dimensions, the ratio between the rest mass energy of matter and the gravitational field energy, and the cosmological constant -- have combined to produce the universe around us.  Alter any of these, even by a little bit, and you have a universe that would be profoundly hostile to life, if not to stable matter in general.

This has led some of the more religious-minded folks to what is called the Strong Anthropic Principle, sometimes called the "fine-tuning argument" -- that the universe has been fine-tuned for life, presumably by a Higher Power tweaking the dials on those constants to make them juuuuuuust right for us.  Which runs into two unfortunate counterarguments: (1) the vast majority of the universe is completely hostile to life regardless, including much of our home planet; and (2) the fact that we live in a universe where the important constants have those particular values isn't that surprising, because if they didn't, we wouldn't be around to remark upon it.

The latter is something known as the Weak Anthropic Principle, a stance that doesn't tell you much except for the unremarkable fact that the only kind of universe we could live in is one that has the conditions in which we could live.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What I find intriguing is that none of these universal constants is derivable -- none come out of calculations based upon known physical laws... yet.  It might be that some of them are derivable and we just haven't figured out how.  Thus far, though, they seem completely arbitrary (except, as noted, that they have to have the values that they do in order for us to be here to consider the question).

A subtler question, and one that (unlike the fine-tuning argument) is actually testable, is whether those constants are the same everywhere in the universe, and whether they're constant over time.  Because if not -- if they vary either in time or space -- that strongly implies that they're not arbitrary, but derive from some underlying characteristic of matter, energy, and space/time that we have yet to uncover, and therefore in altered conditions could have a different value.  So a lot of time is being spent to determine whether any of these constants might be not so constant after all.

We at least have results for one of them, one that is not on Rees's List of Six but is nonetheless pretty damn important; the fine-structure constant, usually written as the Greek letter alpha.  The fine-structure constant is a measure of the strength of interaction between electrons and photons, and is equal to 1/137 (it's a dimensionless number, so it doesn't matter what units you use).

The fine-structure constant is one of the numbers whose value is instrumental in the formation of atoms, so (like Rees's numbers) if it were much different, the universe would be a very different place.  It's one that can be studied at a distance, because one outcome of the fine-structure constant having the value it does is that it creates the spread between the spectral lines of hydrogen.

So a team of physicists looked at the spectrum of hydrogen emitted in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole -- a place where the fabric of space/time is highly contorted because of the enormous gravitational field.  In a paper in Physical Review Letters, we find out that the fine-structure constant in that extremely different and hostile region of space is...

... 1/137.

The authors write:

Searching for space-time variations of the constants of Nature is a promising way to search for new physics beyond General Relativity and the standard model motivated by unification theories and models of dark matter and dark energy.  We propose a new way to search for a variation of the fine-structure constant using measurements of late-type evolved giant stars from the S-star cluster orbiting the supermassive black hole in our Galactic Center.  A measurement of the difference between distinct absorption lines (with different sensitivity to the fine structure constant) from a star leads to a direct estimate of a variation of the fine structure constant between the star’s location and Earth.  Using spectroscopic measurements of 5 stars, we obtain a constraint on the relative variation of the fine structure constant below 10^−5.

So the variation between the fine-structure constant and the fine-structure constant near a humongous black hole is less than a factor of 0.00001.

Note that this still doesn't tell us anything about why the fundamental constants have the values they do, all it does is suggest pretty strongly that they are constant regardless of the conditions pertaining in the region of space where they're measured.  So I guess we're still in the same boat as physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who said, "When I die, the first question I'm going to ask the Devil is, 'What is the meaning of the fine-structure constant?'"

The universe is a strange and mysterious place, and we're only beginning to figure out how it all works.  I mean, think about it; while I don't want to denigrate the scientific accomplishments of our forebears, we've really only begun to parse how the fundamental laws of nature work in the last 150 years.  It's an exciting time -- even if we don't yet have answers to a lot of the most basic questions in physics, at least we're figuring out which questions to ask.

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Jenny's ancestry

I went into historical linguistics because of my fascination with origins.

It's manifested in other realms of study.  My primary interest in biology, a subject I taught for over three decades, is evolutionary genetics; I'm endlessly interested in the family tree of life, and its connections to species migration, adaptation, paleontology, and extinction.  More personally, I've been a devoted genealogist since I was a teenager, and although my hoped-for noble lineage never showed up (my ancestry is virtually all French, Scottish, and English peasants, rogues, ne'er-do-wells, and petty criminals), I still periodically add to my database of ancestors and cousins of varying degrees, which now contains over 150,000 names.

It's why when I find a curious origin story, it just makes my little nerdy heart happy.  Like when I discovered something strange about a rather terrifying legend from northern England -- the tale of Jenny Greenteeth.

Jenny Greenteeth is a story that seems to be most common in Lancashire, Cumbria, and the western parts of Yorkshire, and is about a "river hag" -- a female water spirit that specializes in grabbing people, especially children, who have strayed too close to the water, and drowning them.  She shares a lot in common with the Slavic Rusalka and French Melusine, which makes me wonder why people kept dreaming up stories about strange women lying in ponds.  (Certainly it's no basis for a system of government.)

Well, like just about everything, the legend of Jenny Greenteeth didn't come out of nowhere; even folk tales have their origin stories.  (I've written here about the absolutely charming piece of research by anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani, wherein he developed a cladistic tree for the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood.")  And Jenny Greenteeth has a bit of a surprise in store, because her name isn't because her teeth, or anything else about her, are green.

The hint comes from the fact that in some areas of Cumbria, she's still called "Ginny Grendith" -- and the last bit has nothing to do with teeth, either.  That the story evolved that way is like a folkloric version of convergent evolution; once people noticed the chance similarity between her original name and "green teeth," her last name morphed in that direction, probably because it gave her alleged appearance an extra little frisson of nastiness.  

So where does "Greenteeth" come from?  It turns out the name -- and its alternative form, Grendith -- are cousins to that of another creature from the English bestiary, the grindylow.  Like Jenny, the grindylow was a water-dweller, a small humanoid with scaly skin, big nasty pointy teeth, and long arms ending in broad hands with grasping fingers.  They, too, were said to be fond of drowning children.

It's a wonder any surviving kids in northern England who lived near water didn't become permanently phobic.

What's fascinating, though, is that the story doesn't stop there, because grindylow itself has even deeper roots.  The name is thought to have evolved from yet another mythological monster, this one much more famous: Grendel.

Grendel by J. R. Skelton (1908) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Grendel, of course, was the Big Bad in the pre-Norman English epic Beowulf, who was eventually killed by the titular hero.  In a translation by none other than J. R. R. Tolkien, Grendel is described as follows:

... the other, miscreated thing,
in man's form trod the ways of exile,
albeit he was greater than any other human thing.
Him in days of old the dwellers on earth named Grendel.

Grendel was called a sceadugenga -- a "shadow walker," a creature who came out at night.  He was a denizen of boundaries, not quite human and not quite beast, and frequented places that also were on the edge; the spaces between inhabited areas and the wilds, between lowlands and highlands... and between land and water.  He was said to be a "swamp-dweller," living in fens, and that may have been how his later descendants, the grindylow and Jenny Greenteeth, became associated with ponds and marshes.

I've always felt sorry for Grendel.  He did some bad stuff, but he was kind of just built that way.  He didn't ask to be put together from spare parts.  It's why I named a dog I had a while back Grendel.  He was a bit funny-looking too, but he always meant well.

Maybe it's just that I always root for the underdog.

Where the name Grendel came from isn't certain.  Some linguists believe it comes from gren ("grin") + dæle ("divided"), i.e. baring his teeth.  Old English gryndal meant "fierce," but whether that came from the name Grendel or the other way 'round is unknown.  Same thing for the Old Norse grindill, meaning "storm wind."  The Beowulf story has its roots in old Germanic mythology, and there's no doubt it has ties to Scandinavia, but that one may be an accidental false cognate.  Grendel could also come from the Old English grenedæl, "green lowland" -- so there might be a connection to the color green, after all.

In any case, it's an interesting, if unsettling, legend, which a curious history.  I have a pond in my back yard in which I regularly swim, and thus far I haven't been grabbed by a creepy woman with green teeth.  I'll keep my eye out, though.  You can't be too careful about these sorts of things.

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The polymath

Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi once made the pithy observation that "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought."

I think that's really what sets apart the scientists from the rest of us -- that ability to go from "wow, that's weird!" to "... and here's how I think it works."  But there's another piece, too, that has unfortunately been lost over time through the sad fact of increasing specialization within the sciences.

And that's the ability to be conversant in a great many different disciplines, and the capacity for drawing connections between them.

Another accurate observation -- this one, I haven't been able to find an attestation for -- is that "Researchers these days are learning more and more about less and less, until finally they're going to know everything about nothing."  One of my mentors, science educator Roger Olstad, called this "focusing on one cubic millimeter of the universe," and said that generalists make better teachers, because they can draw on information from lots of disparate fields in order to make sense of their subject for students.  Fortunately for me; I'm an inveterate dabbler.  I'd have been a lousy candidate for a doctoral program, because I don't seem to be able to keep my mind locked on one thing for five minutes, much less the five years or more you have to focus in order to research and write a dissertation.

What's kind of sad, though, is that it hasn't always been this way.  Before the twentieth century, scientists were almost all polymaths; it behooves us all to remember that the word science itself comes from the Latin scientia, which simply means "knowledge."  Consider, for example, the following advances, all made in the latter half of the seventeenth century.  Do you know who was responsible for each?

• Made the first accurate measurements of motion of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, allowing the astronomer Giovanni Cassini to calculate the planet's rotational period
• Deduced the law of elasticity -- that for springs (or other elastic objects), the linear extension is directly proportional to the force exerted
• Made the first-ever drawing of a microorganism (the fungus Mucor)
• Figured out that the optimum shape for a weight-bearing dome is exactly the same as the curve of a hanging chain, only upside-down (the inverted catenary), revolutionizing architecture
• Was the first to note that venous and arterial blood differ in appearance, pressure, and composition
• Determined that the force of gravitation is an inverse-square law
• Figured out (through microscopic analysis) that petrified wood retains the cellular structure of the living wood it came from
• Studied waves in two-dimensional plates, and was the first to observe their nodal patterns (now called Chladni figures after an eighteenth-century physicist who did an extensive analysis of them)
• Built the first balance-spring pocketwatch
• Coined the term cell after seeing the microscopic holes in thin slices of cork, and likening them to the monks' quarters (celluli) in a monastery
• Concluded, from studying lunar craters, that the Moon must have its own gravity
• Was the first to analyze schlieren, the streaks caused when two transparent fluids with different indices of refraction mix (such as heat shimmer over a hot roadway, or when you stir simple syrup into water)
• Speculated that there was a specific component of air that allowed for respiration in animals -- and that both respiration and combustion gradually removed whatever that component was
• Developed the first clockwork drive for telescopes, allowing them to compensate for the Earth's rotation and track the movement of astronomical objects 

You're probably on to me by now, and figured out that these advances in diverse fields weren't made by different people.  They were all made by one man.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

His name was Robert Hooke.  He was born on the Isle of Wight in 1635 to an Anglican priest and his wife, and because of frail health wasn't given much in the way of formal education.  But his mechanical aptitude was evident from a really young age.  He was especially fascinated with clocks, and after studying the workings of a brass pendulum clock in his father's study, he went off and built himself one out of wood.

It worked.

He got the rudiments of drawing from a short-lived apprenticeship with painter Peter Lely, but once again his health interfered; according to an 1898 biography, "the smell of the Oil Colours did not agree with his Constitution, increasing his Head-ache to which he was ever too much subject."  So he went on to more generalized study, first at the Westminster School and then at the University of Oxford, from which he graduated in 1662.

Three years later, he'd accomplished so much he was appointed Curator for Life to the newly-founded Royal Society of London.

It's hard to exaggerate Hooke's contribution to Enlightenment science.  He was interested in everything.  And damn good at pretty much all of it.  The misses he had -- not beating Newton to the Universal Law of Gravitation, for example -- were more because he stopped pursuing a line of inquiry too soon, usually because he went on to some other pressing interest.

Hooke got a reputation for being prickly -- one biographer called him "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful" -- for his determination to get credit for his many discoveries.  This picture of Hooke as having a sour, grasping personality comes mainly from his conflict with two people; Christiaan Huygens (another remarkable polymath, who tangled with Hooke over who had the right to the patent for the balance-spring pocketwatch), and none other than Isaac Newton.

Newton was not a man to piss off.  Not only was he brilliant in his own right, he was apparently "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful."  He and Hooke started out at least on speaking terms, and exchanged some information with each other, but it very rapidly devolved into a vicious rivalry.  Newton, for his part, never did acknowledge that Hooke had any role in the development of the Universal Law of Gravitation.  In a 1680 letter, Newton wrote, "yet am I not beholden to [Hooke] for any light into that business but only for the diversion he gave me from my other studies to think on these things & for his dogmaticalness in writing as if he had found the motion in the Ellipses, which inclined me to try it ..."

There's an allegation -- disputed by some historians -- that when Newton was appointed president of the Royal Society at Hooke's death in 1703, Newton had all of Hooke's portraits destroyed.  The one surviving painting supposedly of Hooke is almost certainly not him, but of Flemish chemist Jan Baptiste van Helmont.  In fact, all we have left of Hooke's likeness for certain is an unflattering description of him from his friend John Aubrey: "He is but of midling stature, something crooked, pale-faced, and his face but little below, but his head is lardge, his eie full and popping, and not quick; a grey eie.  He has a delicate head of haire, browne, and of an excellent moist curle.  He is and ever was temperate and moderate in dyet."

His odd posture and appearance -- as well as his ongoing health problems -- are now thought to be due to the degenerative spine disease Scheuermann's kyphosis, which eventually led to his death at the age of 67.  But what he accomplished despite his physical handicaps is somewhere beyond remarkable.

Now, imagine if Hooke's career had begun in a typical Ph.D. program where he was told, "focus on one thing only."

Don't misunderstand me; I'm grateful for experts.  The current anti-expert bias in what passes for a government in my country is nothing short of idiotic.  It amounts to, "I'm going to discount this person who has spent her/his entire adult life studying this topic, in favor of some crank with a website."  But there's also room for the generalists -- people who aren't afraid to delve into whatever takes their fancy, and bring that breadth of experience to whatever they undertake.

People like the extraordinary polymath Robert Hooke.

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