Lonely wanderer

One of the most curious unsolved problems in physics is the three-body problem, which despite its name is not about a ménage-à-trois.  It has to do with calculating the trajectory of orbits of three (or more) objects around a common center of mass, and despite many years of study, the equations it generates seem to have no general solution.

There are specific solutions for objects of a particular mass starting out with a particular set of coordinates and velocities, and lots of them result in highly unstable orbits.  But despite the fact that there are computer models that can predict the movements of three objects in a gravitational dance -- such as the members of a triple-star system -- the overarching mathematical framework has proven intractable.

How, then, can we predict the orbits of the eight planets (and countless dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets) around the Sun to such high precision?  Some of the great names of physics and astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, especially -- used highly accurate data on planetary positions to conclude that the planets in the Solar System go around the Sun in elliptical orbits, all powered by the Universal Law of Gravitation.  The mathematical model they came up with worked to a high degree of accuracy, allowing earthbound astronomers to predict where the planets were in the sky, and also such phenomena as eclipses.

The reason it works, and doesn't fall prey to the three-body problem chaos, is that the Sun is so massive in comparison to the objects orbiting it.  Because the Sun is huge -- it has a thousand times more mass than the largest planet, Jupiter -- its gravitational pull is big enough that it swamps the pull the planets exert on each other.  For most purposes, you can treat each orbit as independent two-body problems; you can (for example) look at the masses, velocities, and distances between the Sun and Saturn and ignore everything else for the time being.  (Interestingly, it's the slight deviation of the orbit of Uranus from the predictions of its position using the two-body solution that led astronomers to deduce that there must be another massive planet out there pulling on it -- and in 1846 Neptune was observed for the first time, right where the deviations suggested it would be.)

I said it was "lucky" that the mass imbalance is so large, but I haven't told you how lucky.  It turns out that all you have to do is add one more object of close to the same size, and you now have the three-body problem, and the resulting orbit becomes unpredictable, chaotic, and -- very likely -- unstable.

It's what I always think about when I hear woo-woos burbling on about Nibiru, a huge extrasolar planet that has been (repeatedly) predicted to come zooming through the Solar System.  We better hope like hell this doesn't happen, and not because there could be collisions.  A huge additional mass coming near the Earth would destabilize the Earth's orbit, and could cause it to change -- very likely making it more elliptical (meaning we'd get fried at perigee and frozen at apogee).  Interestingly, this is one thing that even the writers of Lost in Space got right, at least temporarily.  The planet John Robinson et al. were on had a highly elliptical orbit, leading to wild climatic fluctuations.  The "temporarily" part, though, came about because apparently the writers found it inconvenient to have the Robinson Family deal with the alternating icebox/oven climate, and after a short but dramatic story arc where they were contending with it, it never happened again.

Or maybe the planet just decided to settle down and behave.  I dunno.

An unstable orbit can also have one other, even more dire outcome; it can cause a planet to get ejected from its star system entirely.  This would be seriously bad news if it happened here, because very quickly we'd exit the habitable zone and be frozen solid.  This is likely the origin of rogue planets -- planets that started out orbiting a star, but somehow have lost their gravitational lock, and end up floating in the vast dark of interstellar space.

This does bring up an interesting question, though; if they're out in outer space, but emit no light, how do we know they're there?  Well, they were conjectured for decades, based on the argument above, about orbital instability; but as far as detection goes, that's proven harder.  But now, we have actually detected one, and how we did it is absolutely staggering.

One of the outcomes of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is that the presence of matter warps space.  A common two-dimensional analogy is a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline, deflecting the membrane downward.  If you roll a marble on the trampoline, it'll curve around the bowling ball, not because the bowling ball is magically attracting the marble, but because its presence has changed the shape of the space the marble is moving through.  Scale that up by one dimension, and you've got the idea.

What's cool about this is that because it's the shape of spacetime that has warped, everything passing through that region is affected -- including light.  This is called gravitational lensing, and has been used to infer the positions and masses of black holes, which (duh) are black and therefore hard to see.  But by detecting the distortion of light emitted by objects behind the black hole, we can see its effects.

And now, that's been done with a rogue exoplanet.  Judging by the lensing effect it created, it's about the mass of Saturn, and the conclusion based on its mass and velocity was that it was indeed once part of a planetary system -- and then got ejected, probably because of a close encounter with another massive object, or perhaps because it was part of a multiple star system and was in an unstable orbit from the get-go.

Now, though, it's lost -- a lonely wanderer tracking its way through the vastness of interstellar space.  How many of these rogue planets there are is unknown; as you probably concluded, detection isn't easy, relying on having a powerful telescope aimed in the right direction at the moment the planet passes in front of a distant star.  But given how easy it is to destabilize an orbit, there are likely to be millions.

Which, we have to hope, will all stay the hell away from us.  Nibiru notwithstanding, having a rogue planet pass through the Solar System would make even Donald Trump drop to number two on the List Of The Biggest Current Threats To Humanity.  Fortunately, it's unlikely; space is big.  We'd also likely have a decent amount of warning, because as soon as it got near enough (right around the orbit of Pluto), it'd reflect enough of the Sun's light that it'd become visible to astronomers.

Unfortunately, though, there's probably nothing much we could do about it.  We've just begun to experiment with the possibility of deflecting small asteroids; deflecting an entire planet, especially one the size of Saturn, would be a case where the best strategy would be to stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.

I mean, not to end on a pessimistic note.  Let's all focus on the "unlikely" part.  And continue working on the next biggest threat, which frankly is occupying more of my anxiety at the moment.

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The printer's demon

Two days ago, I finished the draft of my historical novel Nightingale. 

I checked the document to see when I created it -- October 21, 2025.  Ten weeks and 96,600 words later, I've got a complete story, about a man in the thirteenth century who unwittingly becomes involved in treachery and double-dealing between the kings of France and Scotland, ends up cornered into committing an act that leads to chaos, and undertakes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone.

Oh, and there's a ghost and a curse and a guy who may or may not be an angel.

It was an interesting tale to tell, and for sure the fastest I've ever written a whole novel.  I love the main character, Simon de Montbard, because he's complex and multi-layered, and also because he's a very unlikely hero.  I'm actually sad to say goodbye to him.

I'm doubly sad, though, because this propels me into my second-least-favorite part of being a novelist, which is:

Editing.

My first-least-favorite, of course, is marketing.  Most authors dislike it as well, but I have a special loathing for it, because I have a fundamental, reflexive hatred for self-promotion, coming from a childhood where I had beaten into me that Talking About Yourself Is Conceited And That's Bad.  When I was little, any time I mentioned anything I had accomplished, or even was interested in, it was met with "No one wants to hear about that," with the result that even now I come close to being physiologically incapable of bringing up creative stuff I'm doing in conversation.  (It's a little easier to write about it, obvs.  But even the mild level of self-aggrandizement I'm doing here is kind of uncomfortable.  Childhood trauma never quite goes away.)

This is why even doing stuff like posting a link on social media to my website or to one of my books on Amazon makes me immediately afterward run and hide under a blanket.  Probably explaining why my sales figures are so low.  It's hard to sell any books when I self-promote so seldom that it's met with "Oh, I didn't know you'd written a book!" when in fact I've written twenty-four of them.

Well, twenty-five, now.

In any case, now Nightingale goes into the editing stage of things, which is not anxiety-producing so much as it is tedious and a little maddening.  As my friend, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, put it, "Editing is difficult because it's so easy to see what you meant to write and not what you actually did write."  I've had errors slip through multiple readings by multiple people -- not just simple typos or grammatical errors, but the bane of my existence, continuity errors:

Roses are red, Steve's eyes are blue
But you said they were brown back on page 52.

I can't tell you the number of times that I've caught stuff like a character opening a window that she just opened two pages earlier, or going down the stairs to the first floor when she started out in the basement.  I sincerely hope I have caught all of those sorts of things, because nothing yanks a reader out of the world of the story quite as quickly as that "... wait, what?" response when there's a problem with continuity.

However, I did learn something yesterday that should be a comfort to my fellow writers who have been reading this while nodding their heads in sympathy; errors, all the way from typos to major plot snafus, aren't your fault.  They're the fault of a demon named Titivillus who is in charge of making writers fuck things up.  Then when they do, Titivillus keeps track of all the mistakes, and when it comes time for God to judge the writers' souls, he reads out all the errors they've made so the writers will end up in hell.

Apparently people back then honestly thought Titivillus was real.  A fifteenth-century English devotional called Myroure of Oure Ladye has the lines, "I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyvyllus...  I muste eche day ... brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes."

Judging by the spelling, it looks like Titivillus has already racked up a few points just on that passage alone.

A fourteenth-century illustration of Titivillus trying to induce a scribe to screw up his manuscript [Image is in the Public Domain]

I must say, though, the whole thing strikes me as unfair.  If Titivillus is responsible for my errors, they're not really my fault.  Maybe the logic is that I should have concentrated harder, and not listened to him whispering, "What you mean to write is 'The man pulled on his trousers, then slipped on his shit.'"

What amazes me is how tenacious some of these errors can be.  As K. D. pointed out, our brains often see what we think is there and not what actually is there, with the result that we breeze right past goofs that you'd think would stand out like sore thumbs.  It's why all writers need good editors; you're not going to catch everything, no matter how carefully you think you're reading.  (And that's not even counting the fact that I seem to have a genetic condition that renders me incapable of using commas correctly.)

So now I need to go back through my own manuscript looking for faylynges and neglygences in syllables and wordes, before I turn it over to my actual editor, who no doubt will find plenty more.  As hard as the writing process can sometimes be, at least it's creative, whereas editing seems to me to be more like doing the laundry.  It's critical, and you can't get by without doing it, but hardly anyone would call it fun.

The whole thing reminds me of Dorothy Parker's quip.  "If you have a young friend who wants to become a writer, the second best thing you can do for them is to give them a copy of Elements of Style.  The first best, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're still happy."

Be that as it may, I still prefer editing over marketing.  So I'll just end by saying "Please buy my books, there are links to some of them in the sidebar."  Now y'all'll have to excuse me.  I'll be hiding under a blanket.

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All that glitters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes on a supercluster

Today I'm going to focus on outer space, because if I don't I'll be forced to deal with events down here on Earth, and it's a little early to start drinking.

The James Webb Space Telescope just posted information on a structure called the Saraswati Supercluster,  which at a diameter of 650 million light years and a mass of twenty quadrillion times the mass of the Sun, is one of the largest gravitationally-bound structures known.  If you look toward the constellation Pisces, visible in the Northern Hemisphere from August to early January, you're staring right at the Saraswati Supercluster.

Not that you can see it with the naked eye.  Its center is about four billion light years away, meaning not only that it's extremely faint, the light from it has taken about a third of the age of the universe to get here, so it's really red-shifted.  Here's the rather mind-blowing image the JWST team just posted on their site:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pablo Carlos Budassi, Extended universe logarithmic illustration (English annotated), CC BY-SA 4.0]

On this diagram, the Sun and Solar System are at the center, and as you move outward the scale increases exponentially, allowing us to visualize -- or at least imagine -- the astonishing vastness of the universe.  (Saraswati is just slightly to the left of top center on the diagram.)

The name of the supercluster is from a Sanskrit word meaning "ever-flowing stream with many pools," which is appropriate.  It's made of forty-three galaxy clusters -- not galaxies, mind you, but galaxy clusters -- of which the largest, Abell 2631, is thought to be made up of over a thousand galaxies (and something on the order of a hundred trillion stars).

If your mind is not boggling yet, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

Because of its distance and faintness, we haven't known about Saraswati for all that long.  It was discovered in 2017 by a team of Indian astronomers led by Joydeep Bagchi from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, India, and since has been the object of intense study by astrophysicists for two main reasons.  First -- although it's phenomenally massive, its vast diameter makes it remarkable that it hangs together gravitationally.  (Remember that gravitational attraction falls off as the square of the distance; it never goes to zero, but it does get really weak.)  The fact that it does seem to be acting as a single structure could give us valuable information about the role of the elusive dark matter in making large objects stick together over time.

Second, it might provide some insight into solving another mystery, the question of how (or if) dark energy, the strange force that seems to be making the expansion of the universe speed up, is changing over time.  You may recall that just this past August, a pair of papers came out suggesting that the strength of this peculiar phenomenon might be decreasing; that instead of heading toward the rather ghastly prospect of a "Big Rip," where dark energy overpowers every other known force and tears matter apart into a soup of subatomic particles, the expansion might eventually stop or even reverse.  The old "oscillating universe" idea, that the universe goes through an endless series of expansions and collapses -- popularized by such brilliant luminaries of physics as Paul Steinhardt and Roger Penrose -- might have legs after all.  Studying Saraswati might give us more information about how the strength of dark energy has changed in the four-billion-odd years it's taken the light from the supercluster to arrive here.

So next time you look up into a clear night sky, think of what lies beyond the bit you can actually see.  Every individual star visible to the naked eye lives in a (relatively) tiny sphere in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.  The few bits that visible but are farther away -- the smear of light that is all we can discern of the rest of our own galaxy, as well as the few other galaxies we can see without a telescope (like Andromeda and the two Magellanic Clouds) are so distant that individual stars can't be resolved without magnification.  What we think of as the impressive grandeur of the night sky is, basically, like thinking you're a world traveler because you drove around your own neighborhood once or twice.

But I guess I need to come back down to Earth.  Unfortunately.  On the whole, I'm much happier looking up.  It makes the current horror show we're living through at least seem a little less overwhelming, and puts our own place in the universe into perspective.

Maybe if our so-called leaders spent more time stargazing, it might provide them with some much-needed humility.

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The necessity of representation

It's a weird time for queer representation in fiction.

There's some good news, for sure.  The surprise breakout hit Heated Rivalry, a steamy series about two closeted hockey superstars (played by Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams), got stunningly high viewership and ratings, with episode five ("I'll Believe in Anything") becoming the second-highest IMDb-rated television episode ever.  (Beaten only by the Breaking Bad episode "Ozymandias.")  The two leads, and costars François Arnaud and Robbie G. K., have been signed for two more seasons of the show.

Likewise, the extremely popular (and well-received by the critics) series Heartstopper, and the rom-com movie Red, White, and Royal Blue, have much-anticipated sequels coming out in 2026.

At the same time, though, the Stranger Things season five episode "The Bridge," where the character Will Byers came out to his friends as gay, got review-bombed, with 104,000 people weighing in (more than twice the average).  While some reviewers cited poor writing and too many extraneous plot lines -- not new criticisms of the series -- a good many railed against the coming-out scene as "jarring," as well as (I can't even say this word without clenching my jaw) "woke."  And of course, it wouldn't be complete without Elon Musk contributing some additional bigotry by tweeting, "It's completely unnecessary and forced on audiences who just want to watch some basic sci-fi."

Netflix also chose to cancel -- after one season, and high ratings -- the queer-inclusive shows Olympo and Boots, the latter after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called it "woke garbage."

Apparently us queer people simply existing is now "woke."

You hear from the homophobes that they're upset that "you can't turn the television on without seeing queer people."  Well, y'know what?  Given that recent surveys found that around ten percent of people in the United States self-identify as LGBTQ+, you kind of should expect that.  (And keep in mind that's only the people who were willing to admit to it.  Chances are, the number is significantly higher than that, considering the continuing stigma.)  

But you know what else?  If you don't want to watch queer-inclusive shows, there's a simple solution:

Don't.  Watch.  Them.

If you were caught off guard by Will Byers being gay, you weren't paying attention to the eight million clues that had been dropped along the way.  And as for Olympo and Boots, those were advertised as dramas about queer athletes and military men, respectively.  Judging by the ratings, neither of these shows was unpopular, or lacked viewers; they were axed simply because Netflix chose to kiss the asses of rich bigots who complained.

You homophobes honestly don't need to watch those shows and then whine, or (worse) brigade them.  There are plenty of one hundred percent straight television, movies, and books out there for you to enjoy.

And always have been.  One of the weirdest comments you hear about queer representation is that exposure to such content "turns people gay," as if some straight fourteen-year-old boy sees a single gay character on a television show and suddenly gets this dazed look and says, "I know!  I shall run out and kiss a boy right now."  Funny, though, that it doesn't seem to work the other way.  I grew up in the 1970s, and damn near every television show and movie I watched featured only straight people in straight relationships, and I came out queer anyhow.

It's almost like it doesn't matter what you watch.

Nota bene: bear in mind that I'm not talking about age-appropriateness, here.  That's an entirely different conversation.  Heated Rivalry has some scenes that aren't appropriate for people under eighteen, whatever their sexual orientation.  Too many people conflate these two entirely separate issues -- often deliberately, to muddy the waters.

But mere representation?  Yeah, it should be there, in all kinds of media.

We exist, dammit.  I spent four decades feeling invisible because society taught me that I should be ashamed of what I was and who I was.  Don't expect me and others like me to vanish again.

So yeah, we've got a way to go.  There's still way too much "When will there be a Straight Pride Month, hurr hurr hurr" bullshit whenever Pride rolls around.  (My stock answer is "Be glad you don't need one.")  And judging by the combination of accolades and condemnations we've seen just in the last month, our culture's attitudes toward queer people are still in a considerable state of ferment.

Let me end by saying what it means to queer people just to see themselves reflected in the fiction they read, watch, and hear.  We live in a society where a significant portion of our neighbors would like very much to pretend we don't exist, and where a vocal minority want to see us dead.  As for us, we just want to be who we are, openly and without shame or fear.  A friend of mine posted the following a few weeks ago:

As someone who was a queer kid who almost did turn into a dead kid (twice), I can say with some assurance that this strikes at the heart of the entire issue.  My suicide attempts, at ages 17 and 20, were not solely because I was closeted -- there's more to that story than I have the space or the inclination to go into right now -- but if I had honestly understood back then that I wasn't broken or in need of redemption, the effect on me would have been huge.  Just having one trusted mentor say, "I know, and it's okay" could have made all the difference.

Or -- failing that -- seeing consistent, positive LGBTQ+ representation in films, television, and books, reassurance that queer people didn't have to be nothing more than the punchlines of jokes, or (worse) damaged, loveless, hopeless, or dead.

It's one reason I have LGBTQ+ representation in my own books.  Maybe someone reading them will be like I was back then -- afraid, alone, and closeted.  If my writing can console one of those folks, reassure them that they're just fine as they are, maybe even pry open the closet door a little and let some light in -- well, I don't know that I could ask for anything more as an author.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about wondering how the trajectory of my life would have been different had I made different choices -- amongst them, coming out when I was a teenager.  Of course, you can't ever know the answer to that, so all the regrets I sometimes wrestle with are the very definition of fruitless.  But I do know that we can demand a better world now.  For everyone, including the marginalized and stigmatized.

And if that's "woke," I proudly accept the label.

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Lost and found

I'm currently reading Michael Novacek's fascinating book Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, which is about the expeditions led by Novacek into the backcountry of the Mongolian Gobi Desert in search of late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils.

And they found 'em.  In abundance.  The remains that Novacek's team unearthed changed our understanding of the evolution of dinosaurs and early mammals in central Asia -- I've already lost count of the number of new species his group found, and I'm only about a third of the way through the book.

What struck me, though, is the combination of physical and personal hardship that the team members were willing to tolerate to achieve their goals.  The Gobi Desert is, even today, largely untraveled and unmapped; the nomadic groups that live in its arid wastes have to keep moving to survive in a climate that is broiling hot in the summer and viciously cold in the winter, has little in the way of drinkable fresh water, and is thin pasturage for domestic animals even at the best of times.  These scientists launched into the arid badlands in old, Soviet-era trucks that broke down every time someone sneezed hard, with carefully-rationed food, water, and gasoline, and exactly zero margin for error.

The fact that they not only survived, but achieved their scientific goals (and then some), is downright astonishing.  And every other page, I've shaken my head and thought, "I would never have the courage to do something like this.  Not in a million years."

Keep in mind, too, that this is coming from someone who did his share of backcountry camping, mostly in the Cascades and Olympics of Washington State.  Being a teacher has its perks -- June, July, and August being top of the list -- and when I was in my twenties I frequently disappeared into the fir-shrouded forests during the summer for weeks at a time.  So I'm no stranger to sleeping outdoors and hiking with a heavy pack.  (Or at least I was.  Now that I am Of A Certain Age, I'm afraid my appreciation of the creature comforts has done nothing but increase.)

But still: I would never have been brave enough to take off into the wilds of Mongolia the way Novacek et al. did (repeatedly).  Which probably would have scotched any intent I might have had to become a paleontologist.

On the other hand, sometimes -- admittedly, it's probably rare -- great paleontological discoveries can come from merely opening the right drawer in a museum.  The reason the topic comes up (besides my current reading-in-progress) is the chance find by paleontologist Georgios Georgalis of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, who was doing some research in London's Natural History Museum and stumbled across the bones of a very unusual fossil snake that had been overlooked for forty years.

Dubbed Paradoxophidion richardoweni -- "Richard Owen's paradoxical snake" -- it lived in England during the Eocene Epoch, something like 37 million years ago.  At that point, England was a great deal warmer than it is now.  The world was just exiting the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, at eight degrees Celsius higher than today one of the highest global average temperatures ever recorded.  The hot times favored diversification of ectothermic animals -- such as snakes -- in what are now regions with much cooler climates.

"It was my childhood dream to be able to visit the Natural History Museum, let alone do research there," said study lead author Georgalis.  "So, when I saw these very weird vertebrae in the collection and knew that they were something new, it was a fantastic feeling.  It's especially exciting to have described an early diverging caenophidian snake, as there's not that much evidence about how they emerged. Paradoxophidion brings us closer to understanding how this happened."

The snake species, Georgalis said, seems to be related to a group called acrochordids now found only in southeast Asia and Australia -- although more study is needed to be certain.  And it also brought up the tantalizing question of what else might be hiding in museum drawers and cabinets.

"I'm planning to study a variety of snake fossils in the collection, including those originally studied by Richard Owen" Georgalis said.  "These include the remains of the giant aquatic snake Palaeophis, which were first found in England in the nineteenth century.  There are also several bones with differing morphology that haven't been investigated before that I'm interested in looking at.  These might represent new taxa and offer additional clues about snake evolution."

So I guess you don't need to endure sandstorms and blistering heat and terrible food to make significant contributions to the field.

This also highlights the critical importance of museums in the entire scientific enterprise.  I found out yesterday the amazing news that one of our best local museums, the Paleontological Research Institution/Museum of the Earth, has received enough donations to remain open -- funding cuts were looking likely to shutter it permanently.  On the one hand, I'm thrilled that enough people were willing to donate to keep this wonderful place going (and if you're willing, I encourage you to go to their website and do so as well -- even if they met their goal, they can still put every penny to good use).  On the other, though, isn't it sad that we never seem to run out of money for stuff like funding war and paying kickbacks to corporate billionaires, but cutting-edge scientific establishments that are inspirations to thousands basically have to hold a bake sale to stay in business?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matt Wedel, Yale brontosaurus, CC BY 4.0]

In any case, here's another puzzle piece adding to the picture of what the Earth was like tens of millions of years ago, that had been hidden away in a museum cabinet for four decades.  I find the whole thing endlessly fascinating, which probably explains why the topic of paleontology is such a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia. 

But as interested as I am, I still don't think I'd be brave enough to venture into the Gobi Desert to study it.

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High strangeness in Warminster

Just about everyone has heard about the Roswell Incident, the 1947 discovery of military balloon debris near Roswell, New Mexico that gave rise to a million (and counting) conspiracy theories suggesting that the crash site had actually been pieces of a downed spacecraft, complete with the corpses of the alien crew.  But have you heard about the Warminster Thing?

It's a tale that's even weirder than Roswell, because (1) there were multiple witnesses who seem to have had no particular reason to lie, and (2) there's no good rational/non-alien-based explanation that I've ever heard.  This event got its start in December of 1964, near the town of Warminster, in Wiltshire, England.

Here are the basics of the claim.

In the wee hours of Christmas morning, a woman named Mildred Head was awakened by a strange noise coming from above.  It sounded like something was striking and/or dragging across her roof tiles.  "The night came alive with strange sounds lashing at [the] roof," she later reported.  "It sounded like twigs brushing against the tiles and got louder and louder until it reverberated like giant hailstones."  Alarmed, she got out of bed and went to the window, pulled the curtains, and looked outside.  There was no sign of hail (or any other form of precipitation).  But as she stood there, she heard another sound -- a "humming sound that grew louder, then faded to a faint whisper -- a low whistling or wheezing."

Her husband, who was deaf, slept through the entire thing.

At six o'clock that same morning, another woman, Marjorie Bye, was walking to the early Christmas service at Christ Church in Warminster when she also heard odd sounds.  At first it sounded like crackling, and she thought it might be a truck spreading grit on icy spots on the road.  But as she listened, the sound got nearer, passed over her head, and continued in the direction of Ludlow Close.  Like Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye heard a humming noise and a sound like "branches being pulled across gravel."  The night was clear and starlit, and she saw nothing even when the sounds seemed to be at their nearest.

But the incident wasn't over yet.  As she neared the church, she experienced what she later characterized as a "sonic attack."  "Sudden vibrations came overhead... Shockwaves pounded at my head, neck and shoulders. I felt I was being pinned down by invisible fingers of sound."

A similar report came from Warminster's postmaster, the unfortunately-named Roger Rump. He heard "a terrific clatter, as though the roof tiles were being pulled off by some tremendous force.  Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being loudly slammed back into place.  I could hear an odd humming tone.  It was most unusual.  It lasted no more than a minute."

All told, over thirty people in or near Warminster heard the noises, and the accounts all substantially agreed with each other.

Then, in March of the following year, the events started up again -- and intensified.

There were more reports of noises like rushing wind, something scraping against roof tiles, and loud booming sounds.  People reported flocks of birds being found dead.  "There was a great bouncing and bumping noise over our heads," one man reported.  "As though a load of stones was being tipped against the roof and the back wall of the bungalow.  It seemed like a tonne of coal were being emptied from sacks and sent tumbling over all the place."

This time, though, people began seeing things as well.

Patricia Philips, the wife of the vicar of Heytesbury, a village near Warminster, saw a "cigar-shaped object" in the sky that was visible long enough for her husband and all three children to watch it through binoculars.  Two months later, a woman named Kathleen Penton saw "a shining thing going along sideways in the sky.  Porthole-type windows ran the entire length of it.  It glided slowly in front of the downs…it was the size of a whole bedroom wall.  It was very much like a train carriage, only with rounded ends to it.  It did not travel lengthways but was gliding sideways."

By the end of summer, the incidents seemed to taper off, but not before one man -- Gordon Faulkner -- was able to photograph what he claimed was a UFO near Colloway Clump, north of Warminster:

By this time, a journalist named Arthur Shuttlewood had become obsessed with figuring out the answer to the mystery, and interviewed dozens of people who had strange experiences between December 1964 and August 1965.  He ended up with eight notebooks filled with accounts -- and no answers.

So, what's going on here?

There are a few possibilities, but I have to admit there's no particularly good reason to subscribe to any of them.  The first is that the noises were military equipment tests from the Land Warfare Center, a British Army training and development base near Warminster.  The military, of course, denied all knowledge of the source of the noises and (later) sightings, but if they were testing sonic weapons that were classified, there could well be another reason for that.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine why the military would choose Christmas morning to test a sonic weapon near a town where fifteen thousand people live.

A second possibility is that Arthur Shuttlewood, the journalist who brought the whole story to light -- and who popularized it thereafter, eventually writing a book about the incidents -- exaggerated, or (perhaps) even spun from whole cloth, the lion's share of the "personal accounts."  Shuttlewood was never accused outright of falsifying evidence, but his colleagues at The Wiltshire Times said he was not above embellishing reports of local events "for dramatic effect."  It bears mention here that even if Shuttlewood started out fairly reliable, he kind of went off the rails later in life.  He reported telepathic communications, and even telephone calls, from "natives from the planet Aenstria" who were behind the whole thing.  They warned Shuttlewood of various dangers we were facing as a species, but said not to worry, because Christ would return in 1975 and fix everything.

Well, I was fifteen years old in 1975, and what stands out about that particular year is that there was no sign of the Second Coming, and everything is still as unfixed as it ever was.

In any case, Shuttlewood lived until 1996, swearing to the end that what he'd said was nothing less than the unvarnished truth.  (If you want to read Shuttlewood's own account of his interactions with the Aenstrians, you can check it out here.  I'll warn you, though -- don't expect to come away from it with an improved opinion of his veracity.)

So what we have here is another unfortunate case of a curious unexplained incident getting into the hands of someone who was either an obsessed attention seeker or completely unhinged, or both -- similar to what happened with the famous case of the haunting of Borley Rectory.  When this occurs, any evidence we may have had becomes tainted with misrepresentations and dubious additions from people who also want their fifteen minutes of fame, to the point that it becomes difficult to tell what is true, what is due to human suggestibility, and what is an outright fabrication.

Myself, I'm most inclined to credit the first few accounts as being the most credible, and the most in need of an explanation.  Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye, and Roger Rump, all of whom made their reports before the furor started, had no particular reason to make their stories up; in fact, Bye initially didn't want her name attached to it, until so many other people came forward that she figured it was safe.  

The later accounts, though -- and especially the infamous photograph taken by Gordon Faulkner -- are all too likely to be the result of people eager to jump on the bandwagon of what had by then become a nationally-reported incident.  That's not proof, I realize -- "they could be hoaxes" is a long way from "they are hoaxes" -- but at the very least, those later reports should be looked at through a (really) skeptical lens.

The "Warminster Thing" taken as a whole, though -- it's a curious story, but there's honestly not enough hard evidence there to make a certain determination about anything.  We have to leave it in the "unknown, and we probably will never know" category.  Maybe aliens did visit Wiltshire in 1964 and 1965.  Maybe they were even from "the planet Aenstria."  But at the moment, I'm much more confident that the incident -- whatever it was -- had some purely rational, and terrestrial, explanation.

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