The tide is high

The list of confirmed exoplanets now exceeds six thousand.  Considering the fact that the three main ways they're detected -- direct measure of stellar wobbles, transit photometry, and Doppler spectroscopy -- all require either that the host star be close, that the planets be massive, or that the planetary orbit be aligned just right from our perspective, or all three, it's almost certain that there are vast numbers of exoplanets going undetected.

All of which bodes well for those of us who would love for there to be extraterrestrial life out there somewhere.

On the other hand, of the exoplanets we've found, a great many of them are inhospitable to say the least, and some of them are downright bizarre.  Here are a few of the weirder ones:

• TrES-2b, which holds the record as the least-reflective planet yet discovered. It's darker than a charcoal briquet.  This led some people to conclude that it's made of dark matter, something I dealt with here at Skeptophilia a while back.  (tl:dr -- it's not.)
• CoRoT-7b, one of the hottest exoplanets known.  Its composition and size are thought to be fairly Earth-like, but it orbits its star so closely that it has a twenty-day orbital period and surface temperatures around 3000 C.  This means that it is likely to be completely liquid, and experience rain made of molten iron and magnesium.
• PSR J1719−1438, a planet orbiting a pulsar (the collapsed, rapidly rotating core of a giant star), and therefore somehow survived its host star going supernova.  It has one of the fastest rates of revolution of any orbiting object known, circling in only 2.17 hours.
• V1400 Centauri, a planet with rings that are two hundred times wider than the rings of Saturn.  In fact, they dwarf the planet itself -- the whole thing looks a bit like a pea in the middle of a dinner plate.
• BD+05 4868 Ab, in the constellation of Pegasus.  Only 140 light years away, this exoplanet is orbiting so close to its parent star -- twenty times closer than Mercury is to the Sun -- that its year is only 30.5 hours long.  This proximity roasts the surface, melting and then vaporizing the rock it's made of.  That material is then blasted off the surface by the stellar wind, so the planet is literally evaporating, leaving a long, comet-like trail in its wake.

Today, though, we're going to look at some recent research about a planet that should be near the top of the "Weirdest Exoplanets Known" list.  It's 55 Cancri Ae, the innermost of four (possibly six; two additional ones are suspected but unconfirmed) planets around the star 55 Cancri A, a K-type orange star a little over forty light years away.  55 Cancri Ae orbits its host star twice as close as Mercury does the Sun, making a complete ellipse around it in only a bit under three days.  This means that like CoRoT-7b and BD+05 4868 Ab, it's crazy hot.

This is where some new research comes in.  A presentation at an exoplanet conference in Groningen, Netherlands last week considered a puzzling feature of 55 Cancri Ae -- a measure of its heat output shows odd, non-cyclic fluctuations that don't seem to be in sync with its orbital period (or anything else).  The fluctuations aren't small; some of them have approached a 1,000 C difference from peak to trough.  They were first detected ten years ago, and physicists have been at a loss to account for the mechanism responsible.

But now, we might have an explanation -- and it's a doozy.  Models developed by exoplanet astrophysicist Mohammed Farhat of the University of California - Berkeley found that the anomalous temperature surges could be explained as moving hotspots.

Which sounds pretty tame until you read Farhat's description of what this means.  We're talking about a planet close in to a star not much smaller than the Sun, being whirled around at dizzying speeds.  This means it's experiencing enormous tidal forces.  The planet itself is so hot it's probably liquid down to its core.  Result: tidal waves of lava several hundred meters high, moving at the speed of a human sprinter.

The presentation definitely got the attendees' attention.  "This is right in the sweet spot of something that is interesting, novel, and potentially testable," said planetary astronomer Laura Kreidberg, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.  "I had this naïve idea that lava flows were too slow-moving to have an observable impact, but this new work is pointing otherwise."

The whole thing reminds me of the planet Excalbia from Star Trek, from the episode "The Savage Curtain," which was completely covered by churning seas of lava -- except for the spot made hospitable by some superpowerful aliens so Captain Kirk could have a battle involving Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, and various other historical and not-so-historical figures to find out whether good was actually stronger than evil.

Put that way, I know the plot sounds pretty fucking ridiculous, but don't yell at me.  I didn't write the script.

In any case, I doubt even the Excalbians would find 55 Cancri Ae hospitable.  But it is fascinating.  It pushes the definition of what we even consider a planet to be -- a sloshing blob of liquid rock with lava waves taller than a skyscraper.  Makes me thankful for the calm, temperate climes of Earth.

The universe is a scary place, sometimes.

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Dream a little dream of me

One of the more terrifying concepts to arise out of physics is the idea of the Boltzmann brain.

The Boltzmann brain was first postulated by, and is named after, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who also discovered the mathematical laws governing entropy.  He was one of several scientists who contributed to the idea of the "heat death of the universe" -- that because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, eventually the universe will reach a state of zero free energy and maximum entropy.  After that -- quantum fluctuations and random motion aside (more on that in a moment) -- the universe will be a thin, more-or-less uniform, cold fog of particles, in which nothing else will happen.  Forever.

Boltzmann committed suicide at age 62.  I'm almost sure his research had nothing to do with it.

In any case, the Boltzmann brain idea came up when he was pondering the state of the universe following the heat death, which (by current models) isn't going to happen for another 10^100 years, so don't fret if you have unused vacation time.  The question that puzzled Boltzmann most was what got the universe into a low-entropy state to begin with; after all, if you see a ball rolling down a hill, its behavior isn't at all strange, but it leaves unanswered the question of how the ball got to the top of the hill in the first place.  He came to the conclusion that random movement of the particles in the fog could, given long enough, create low entropy regions just by chance.  In fact, given the infinitely long time he postulated the heat death stage would last, any possible configuration of particles would show up eventually.

Interestingly, in the hundred-plus years since Boltzmann came up with all this, scientists are still trying to work out all the implications of this.  A 2004 paper by Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen looked at the question of how long it would take for a random, uniform, maximum-entropy universe to spontaneously generate a second Big Bang -- and thus a new, low-entropy universe -- through quantum fluctuations and quantum tunneling, and came up with a figure of 10^10^10^56 years.

Boltzmann, though, was more interested in smaller stuff.  He asked an unsettling question: was it possible, through random movement of particles, for them to come together in such a way as to form an exact copy of himself, with all of his thoughts and memories and so on?

His conclusion: once again, given enough time, it's not just possible, it's inevitable.  In fact, calculations have shown that we should expect such "Boltzmann brains" to outnumber all other sentient beings by a vast margin.

[Nota bene: keep in mind that Boltzmann died prior to the discovery of quantum physics; as Carroll and Chen discussed, adding in quantum effects actually increases the likelihood of these kinds of weird, accidental rearrangements.]

Now comes the kicker.  Suppose you yourself aren't an "ordinary" observer, but a "Boltzmann brain" -- a disembodied, and presumably temporary, sentient arrangement of particles, that happened to have the correct configuration to contain all the thoughts, perceptions, and memories you currently have.  Would there be any way for you to know?

The answer is almost certainly "no."  "I am confident that I am not a Boltzmann brain," physicist Brian Greene said.  "However, we want our theories to similarly concur that we are not Boltzmann brains, but so far it has proved surprisingly difficult for them to do so."

It bears mention that there could be some caveats here that might save us from this rather terrifying possibility.  Current studies of dark energy and the cosmological constant have a significant bearing on the ultimate fate of the universe.  If, as some recent research suggests, the strength of dark energy is decreasing over time, we might be in a universe destined not for heat death, but for a collapse that could reset the entropy content -- and, possibly, a subsequent rebirth.  But that is still very much uncertain, and the majority of physicists are still of the opinion that the expansion is going to continue indefinitely.

Boltzmann Brain World, here we come.

The topic comes up because scientists are still debating the implications of this -- and many of them trying to rule out the Boltzmann brain concept because it's so damned unsettling.  Just last week, there was a paper in the journal Entropy by David Wolpert, Carlo Rovelli, and Jordan Scharnhorst, called "Disentangling Boltzmann Brains, the Time-Asymmetry of Memory, and the Second Law," which considered the fact that just about all physical laws are time-reversible, yet our memories seem not to be.  This is, however, exactly what we would expect if we were Boltzmann brains, because if that were true, memory itself would just be an illusion, a present-moment effect caused by the random configuration of particles that give the ephemeral sense of a past.  Here's the passage from the paper that rocked me back on my heels:

Reasonable as the arguments just presented might be, in the abstract, how, concretely, can they hold?  How could we have all of our human memories concerning the past be fallacious?  How could entropy increase into our past rather than decrease, as required by the time-symmetric nature of all derivations of the Second Law that are consistent with the microscopic laws of physics?  How could it be that our memories are wrong? 

Such flaws in our memory would require some exquisite fine-tuning, that all the neurons in our brains happen to be in the state corresponding to particular memories, when in fact nothing of the sort is true.  Amazingly though, standard arguments of statistical physics tell us that it is almost infinitely more likely for this to be the case, rather than for entropy to continue to decrease into our past, as demanded by the Second Law.

I read this three times and I shuddered every time.

Thanks bunches, Boltzmann.  I'm sure I'll sleep just fine tonight.  If I actually exist, that is.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

So it can't be rigorously ruled out that we're disembodied brains in an entropic sea, dreaming a little dream of being people.  In this formulation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, in fact, time-reversible; entropy increases both into the past and into the future, even if our illusory memories make it seem like that isn't true.  We arose from random fluctuations, and flutter about for a while thinking we're real, then after a few moments subside back into the fog again.

And on that wonderful note, I'll leave you.  If you need me, I'll be hiding under my blankie, hugging my teddy bear.

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Gravitational blink

To end the week on an appropriately surreal note: no, the Earth will not "lose its gravity" for seven seconds on August 12.

I found out about this rumor, currently making the rounds on social media, from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  The whole thing apparently started with a video posted on Instagram by user @mr_danya_of; the video was subsequently removed, but not before it was reshared thousands of times, downloaded, and posted all over the place.  The claim is that there were gravitational waves emitted from two different black holes equidistant from the Earth, and that they are 180 degrees out of phase with each other, so where they intersect -- here, evidently -- they'll undergo destructive interference.  The result is that it will "cancel Earth's gravity" for the seven seconds it takes them to pass by us, and we all need to, I dunno, make sure everything is tied down securely or something, because otherwise it's going to cause huge amounts of death and destruction.

Whoo.  Okay.  Where do I start?

First of all, the information was alleged to come from NASA (of course), from something called "Project Anchor."  Which doesn't exist.  Of course, over at NASA they would say that, wouldn't they?  So let's move on to a few other, harder-to-argue-with objections.

Second, according to the General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, whereof nothing travels faster, remember?  So if there were gravitational waves headed toward us from a black hole (let alone two of them), we wouldn't have any way of knowing about it ahead of time.  Now, you might be thinking, what about the gravitational waves that have been detected by the interferometer array LIGO?  Well, there, we knew there were two neutron stars that had been orbiting each other and were about to merge, so all we had to do was watch until it happened.  (Okay, I'm making it sound simple; in practice it was a lot more complicated than this, but the point is we did have some advance warning in that case.)  Here, we just supposedly have black holes out there emitting gravitational waves for some undisclosed reason, and we've somehow found out about this eight months ahead of their arrival, which Einstein says is impossible, and on the whole I'm inclined to side with Einstein over "mr_danya_of."

Third, what was immediately obvious is that whoever is taking this seriously has no idea how destructive interference actually works.  Simply put, destructive interference occurs where two waves in the same medium intersect in such a way that the crest of one wave overlaps the trough of the other.  At that point, their amplitudes will cancel.  Here, supposedly these two gravitational waves are exactly 180 degrees out of phase, so they'd cancel completely wherever they intersect.

But if that happened, what we'd see is... nothing.  If the two waves did completely cancel, the result at that point would be an amplitude of zero.  In other words, they'd be undetectable.  This would not somehow "erase Earth's gravity."

Fourth, the Earth's diameter is about 0.04 light seconds, so if a gravitational wave or two passed across us, that's how long the effect would last.  How this person came up with seven seconds as a plausible time duration for something traveling at the speed of light, I have no idea.

Fifth, the gravitational field of the Earth at a given distance is dependent on only one thing: its mass.  As long as the Earth's mass doesn't change, the strength of the field won't, either, regardless how it's jostled by gravitational waves (or anything else).

Sixth, what the actual fuck?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons AllenMcC., GravityPotential, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I mean, it's a good thing the Earth's gravity isn't going to disappear, even for seven seconds.  If you, unlike the people posting this story, passed high school physics, you may recall that the reason we're all happily glued to the Earth's surface is the pull of gravity -- and without it, Newton's First Law (an object experiencing no unbalanced forces continues at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant velocity) takes over.  We're all right now moving at a good clip -- at the Equator, about 1,670 kilometers an hour -- but our tendency to fly off is counterbalanced by the centripetal (center-pointing) pull of gravity.  If gravity suddenly disappeared, we'd continue moving at our original speed, but tangent to the circle we're currently traveling in.  The Earth, presumably unperturbed, would continue to rotate out from underneath us, and when the gravity switched back on seven seconds later, we (and everything else not moored) would come crashing back down.

I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation for my own latitude, just shy of halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, and found that in seven seconds unsecured objects traveling tangent to the Earth's surface would end up about twenty centimeters up in the air.  Falling back to Earth from that height would be a bit of a jolt, and no doubt the sudden change in stress would damage some buildings, but it's far from the carnage mr_danya_of and others are claiming.

But to reassure you that you have no cause for concern, even in that regard... no, NASA isn't "94.7% certain" that the Earth's gravity is going to blink for seven seconds on August 12.  There is no such thing as Project Anchor.  Gravitational waves, and in fact waves in general, do not work this way.  We have far more important things to worry about right now, such as trying to figure out what country FIFA Peace Prize Winner Donald Trump is going to declare war on next.

If you see anyone posting hysterical nonsense about how NASA Admits We're All Gonna Die In August, you should definitely inform them that this is complete horseshit, and suggest that maybe at least reading the Wikipedia pages about the relevant physics concepts might be a good idea before publicly humiliating themselves by pretending they understand science.

So anyway, there you have it.  To the friend who sent me the link, thanks just bunches for further reducing my already-abysmal assessment of humanity's overall intelligence.  Me, I'm going to go back to fretting about real stuff.  Not that this is productive either, mind you.  But at least it's better than making shit up so you have additional imaginary stuff to fret about.

Even I am not that neurotic.

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The parasitic model

A couple of years ago, I posted a frustrated screed about the potential for AI-generated slop to supplant actual creativity.  My anger at the whole thing is based on the fact that I put a great deal of time, effort, and passion into my writing -- not only here, but in my fiction.  The idea that someone could use large language model software and a few well-chosen prompts to produce an eighty-thousand-word-long novel in a matter of minutes, while it takes me months (sometimes years) of steady hard work to create and refine something of equal length -- well, it's maddening.

Still, I've at least been encouraged by the fact that there are folks taking a stand about this, and not only writers like myself, but people in the publishing industry.  Software has been written to detect AI-generated prose, and while it's not flawless, it does at least an adequate job.  My friend J. Scott Coatsworth, an excellent writer in his own right, for several years ran a queer-themed flash fiction contest, and was dismayed and disheartened by the fact that during its last run, he used AI-detection software to check the submissions -- and disqualified ten of them (out of something like two hundred) on that basis.  

While this isn't a very high percentage, what strikes me here is how low the incentive was to cheat.  There was no cash prize; the winners got into an anthology and received a free copy of it, which was lovely, but hardly a bag full of gold.  And, most astonishingly, the maximum word count was three hundred words.  Now, mind you, I'm not saying it's easy to write a good story that short; but for fuck's sake, it's less than a page.

How lazy can you get?

AI is being sneakily inserted into everything.  Those of you with email through Google have probably noticed that now if there's a back-and-forth chain of emails, you get an AI "summary of the conversation" whether you want it or not.  (There might be a way to opt out, which I'll look into if I get much more pissed off by it.)  Just a couple of days ago, I was part of three-person electronic exchange with two people I work with, and was completely weirded out when I saw at the top of the thread, "You sympathized with (person 1) for being sick, and both you and (person 2) said it was no problem, that you'd both cover for her and make sure her work got done in her absence, and to get well soon."

Thanks, Google AI, but I don't need my sympathies summarized.  Nor anything else I've emailed people about.  This is way too close to a stranger reading my private correspondence for my comfort.

Not that anything is private on the internet.

The problem has extended into other realms of writing, too.  Wikipedia has become so infested with AI-written articles -- with their attendant problem of "hallucinations," which is tech-speak for "fabricated bullshit" -- that the people running it put together WikiProject AI Cleanup, a program used to detect AI/LLM-generated articles based on common patterns in the writing style.

There's the often-cited issue with AI's fondness for em-dashes, but there are lots of other giveaways, too.  AI-generated prose often uses fulsome adjectives like "breathtaking" and "foundational" and "pivotal."  It's also fond of participial phrases at the end of sentences -- "... symbolizing the region's commitment to innovation."

Syntactic analysis of a simple sentence as done by a large language model [Image licensed under the Creative Commons DancingPhilosopher, Multiple attention heads, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But now, a tech entrepreneur named Siqi Chen has created an open-source plug-in for Anthropic's "Claude Code AI Assistant" that used the WikiProject's list of red flags as a starting point -- so that Claude Code can learn to write less like AI and more like a real person, and slip past the AI detectors.

Chen named his plug-in "The Humanizer."

What really torques me is how breezy Chen is about the whole thing.  "It’s really handy that Wikipedia went and collated a detailed list of 'signs of AI writing,'" Chen wrote on X.  "So much so that you can just tell your LLM to … not do that."

Maybe Chen and his ilk wouldn't be so fucking flippant about it if he were one us writers struggling to get our quarterly royalty checks out of the double digits.  AI is trained on human-created writing -- without a dime's worth of compensation for the actual authors, and tech companies fighting tooth and nail to make sure they can continue to rip us off for free -- as well as AI-generated slop taking a share of the space in the already-narrow publishing market.  

Funny how these issues of morality and intellectual property rights never bother the techbros as long as their own bank accounts are fat and happy.  It's a parasitic model for business, and people like Chen are no more likely to put the brakes on than a tick is likely to ask a dog for permission to bite.

The whole thing has become an arms race.  Good-faith publishers and consumers of written work try to figure out how to detect AI-generated prose, so the techbros respond by springboarding off that to find newer and better ways to evade detection.  We find new ways to shut it off, they find new places to insert it into our lives.  Here in the United States, the situation is only going to get worse; the current regime has a "deregulate everything" approach, because we all know how well corporations self-limit out of ethical considerations.

*brief pause to stop rolling my eyes*

So I'll end this post the way I've ended damn near every post I've done on AI.  Until there are regulations in place to protect the intellectual property of creative people, and to protect consumers from potentially dangerous "hallucinated" content, stop using AI.  Yes, I know it can create pretty pictures that are fun to post on social media.  Yes, I know you can use it to generate cool artwork to hang on your wall -- or for the cover of your book.  Yes, I know it makes writing stuff quicker and easier.  But at the moment, the damage far outweighs the benefits, and as we've seen over and over, tech companies are not going to address the concerns unless they have no choice.

The only option is for consumers to strangle it at its source.

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On the loosh

There's a general rule-of-thumb that if you are trying to get people to believe some outlandish idea, you do not increase your chances of success by altering it to make it even more outlandish.  If, for example, your particular shtick is that the Earth is a flat disk, you will not sound more plausible by adding that it was put in motion by the god Frisbeus, and during the End Times the Devil will alter its orbit so it gets stuck up on the Celestial Roof.

This goes double if you give your idea a silly name.  Frisbeeterianism, for example.

This is a rule-of-thumb that the UFO/UAP crowd seem not to have taken to heart, given an article I've now been sent three times by well-meaning loyal readers of Skeptophilia, to the effect that the rumor now circulating amongst "whistleblowers" is that the aliens are using the Earth as a "misery farm," getting things set up so as to generate maximum despair, because they feed off negative emotional energy.

Called "loosh."

Apparently loosh has been around for a while, originating in 1985 with a dude named Robert Monroe who was seriously into out-of-body experiences.  Monroe, however, envisioned loosh as nice stuff; the "essence of universal love."  This kind of energy (using the latter term in its non-scientific sense), Monroe said, is nourishing to the soul, and therefore our benevolent alien overlords want us to produce as much as possible, then share the stuff around.

It bears keeping in mind, however, that Monroe also wrote a book about visiting "The Park," which is the Reception Center for heaven, where spirits go immediately after death to recuperate for a while.  How Monroe got there without dying first is an open question, so we're kind of in deep water right off the bat.

In any case, loosh got picked up by conspiracy theorist David Icke, and that's where things took a darker turn.  Because, after all, you can't have a good conspiracy theory based on a plot to make everyone really nice to each other, whether aliens are involved or not.  Icke claimed that Monroe had misinterpreted loosh; it's not the essence of love, it's actually a negative spiritual energy generated when people are miserable.  In Icke's view, the Earth is a prison planet, and our alien masters want us to be upset, because then they have more food to eat, or something.

I have to admit that as a model, this works surprisingly well.  The last ten years have been not only a non-stop shitshow, but off-the-register weird.  It would explain a lot if there are superpowerful aliens who are just fucking with us.  I mean, the other option is that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are some kind of naturally-occurring phenomenon, and I don't know about you, but for me that stretches credibility to the snapping point.

But one thing I'll give the alien overlords: if there really is a plot to make every smart person on Earth extremely depressed, so far it's working brilliantly.

In any case, apparently there are now UFO Truthers out there who not only want the government to 'fess up about alien spacecraft sightings, but also to admit that the government is in league with the aliens to keep us all trapped in the Slough of Despond.  In some versions, the elected officials themselves are alien shapeshifters (in the case of Stephen Miller, the shape honestly hasn't shifted much).  In other versions, they're just collaborators who are hoping the aliens will keep them in power so the feast can continue.

What's vaguely unsettling about all this -- I mean, besides the fact that there are people who take it seriously -- is that this is strangely close to the plot of my novel, Eyes Like Midnight.

In this novel, the Earth is being invaded by the Black-eyed Children, who are evil aliens that can take the form of human children (although they can't manage the eyes for some reason, which come out a solid, glossy black).  The Children kidnap humans because they feed on cognitive energy -- so for them, the eight-billion-odd people on the planet are basically an all-you-can-eat buffet.  There's even been infiltration of the government with humans who are under mind control, and who are acting as collaborators to allow the Children to take over (and thwarting the heroic few who are fighting back).

It's a really good story, and you all should buy it right now.  But let me just emphasize one thing about Eyes Like Midnight:

It is a work of fiction.

Like, I made the story up from beginning to end.  It's based on an urban legend that's been around for a while, but that, too, is fiction.

Given all that, I'm inclined to think that "Earth as misery-producing prison planet" is as well.

Or, who knows?  Maybe I'm one of the collaborators myself, and by writing this I'm just trying to sow doubt in your mind.  Maybe the whole fifteen-year history of this blog has, all along, been one elaborate exercise in misdirection.  Each time I post here, I cackle maniacally and wiggle my fingertips in a menacing fashion, just delighted at how many people I'm bamboozling with all this nonsense about "science" and "skepticism" and "rationality."

When the reality is that the Earth is actually shaped like a donut.  With sprinkles.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I think I need to go lie down for a while.  You can only exude so much loosh before you start feeling a little light-headed.

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Remembrance of things past

Almost all of us implicitly trust our own memories.

Experiment after experiment, however, has shown that this trust is misplaced.  Even if you leave out people with obvious memory deficits -- victims of dementia, for example -- the rest of us give far too much credence to our brain's version of the past.  In truth, what we remember is a conglomerate of what actually did happen, what we were told happened, what we imagine happened based upon the emotions associated with the event, and pure (if inadvertent) fabrication.  And the scariest part is that absent hard evidence (a video, for example), there's no way to tell which parts are what.

It all feels true.

If you don't believe this, consider what happened to cognitive researcher Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California - Irvine, whose experiments establishing the unreliability of memory are described in neuroscientist David Eagleman's wonderful book The Brain: The Story of You:

We're all susceptible to this memory manipulation -- even Loftus herself.  As it turned out, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother had drowned in a swimming pool.  Years later, a conversation with a relative brought out an extraordinary fact: that Elizabeth had been the one to find her mother's body in the pool.  That news came as a shock to her; she hadn't known that, and in fact didn't believe it.  But, she describes, "I went home from that birthday and I started to think: maybe I did.  I started to think about other things that I did remember -- like when the firemen came, they gave me oxygen.  Maybe I needed the oxygen because I was so upset I found the body?"  Soon, she could visualize her mother in the swimming pool.

But then, her relative called to say he had made a mistake.  It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who had found the body.  It had been Elizabeth's aunt.  And that's how Loftus had the experience what it was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed and deeply felt.

So it's not like false memories seem vague or tentative.  They're so vivid you can't tell them from real ones.

Which brings us to the strange story of an arcade video game called "Polybius."

In the early 1980s, a rumor began to circulate that there was an arcade game that combined some very frightening effects.  Its visuals and sounds were dark, surreal, and suggestive.  Children who played the game sometimes had seizures or hallucinations, and afterwards experienced periods of amnesia and night terrors.  Worse, there was something about it that was strangely addictive.  People who played it more than two or three times were likely to become obsessed by it, and keep coming back over and over.  Some, they said, finally could think of nothing else and went incurably mad.  Some committed suicide.

Some simply... vanished.

The FBI launched an investigation, removing Polybius from arcades wherever they could find it.  The "Men in Black" got involved, and there were reports of mysterious strangers showing up and demanding that arcade owners provide lists of the names (or at least initials) of high scorers in the game.  Those unfortunates were rounded up for psychological testing -- and some of them never returned, either.

There are webpages and subreddits devoted to people's memories of Polybius, their experiences of playing it, and scary things that happened subsequently.  There's just one problem with all this, and you've guessed it:

Polybius never existed.  Despite many, many people searching, there has never been a single Polybius cabinet found, nor even a photograph from the time period showing one.  Oh, sure, we have mock-ups people made long after the fact:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons DocAtRS, Polybius Arcade 1 cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But hard evidence of the real deal?  Zero.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.

So what happened here?

Part of it, of course, was a deliberate hoax; an "urban legend."  Part of it was confabulation of memory with a real event, when an arcade in Portland, Oregon removed a game that had triggered a couple of kids to have a seizure.  There was also an incident in 1981 where the FBI raided arcades that had converted game stations into illegal gambling machines.  There was a 1980 New York Times article citing research (later largely called into question) that playing violent video games predisposes kids to commit violence themselves.  And in 1982, there was a widely-reported incident that a teenager had died while playing the game Berzerk in a Calumet City, Illinois arcade -- the story was true, but his heart failure was caused by a physical defect, and had nothing to do with playing the game.

Put all that together, and there are still people now -- forty-some-odd years later -- who are certain they remember Polybius, and what it was like to play it.

It's another example of the "Mandela Effect," isn't it?  This phenomenon got its name from certain people's memories that Nelson Mandela died in jail -- when in fact, the reality is that he survived, eventually became president of South Africa, and died peacefully in his home in Johannesburg in 2013.  Other examples are that the "Berenstain Bears" -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as Be Nice To Your Siblings Even When You Feel Like Punching The Shit Out Of Them and Your Parents Are Always Right About Everything and Pay Attention In School Or Else You Are Bad -- were originally the Berenstein Bears (with an "e," not an "a"), that the Fruit of the Loom logo originally had a cornucopia (not just a bunch of fruit), and (I shit you not) that Sri Lanka and New Zealand "should be" in different places.

Almost no one who experiences the Mandela Effect, though, laughs it off and says, "Wow, memory sure is unreliable, isn't it?"  Those memories feel completely real, just as real as memories of stuff you know occurred, that you have incontrovertible hard evidence for.  The idea that you could be so certain of something that never happened is profoundly disconcerting, to the extent that people have looked for some explanation, any explanation, for how their memories ended up with information that is demonstrably false.  Some have even cited the "Many-Worlds" Model of quantum mechanics, and posited that there really is a timeline where Mandela died in prison, the cartoon bears were the "Berenstein Bears," Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia in its logo, and Sri Lanka and New Zealand were somewhere other than where they now are.  It's just that we've side-slipped into a parallel universe, bringing along our memories of the one where we started -- where all those things were dramatically different.

That's how certain people are that their memories are flawless.  They'd rather believe that the entire universe bifurcated than that they're simply remembering wrong. 

How many times have you been in an argument with a friend, relative, or significant other, and one of you has said, "I know what happened!  I was there!", often with a self-righteous tone that how dare anyone question that they might be recalling things incorrectly?  Well, the truth is that none of us are remembering things correctly; what remains in our mind is a partial record, colored by emotions and second-hand contamination and imagination, blended so well there's no way to tease apart the accurate parts from the inaccurate.  What our memories for sure are not is a factual, blow-by-blow account, a mental video of the past that misses nothing and mistakes nothing.

I know this is kind of a terrifying thing.  Our memories are a huge part of our sense of self; if you want a brilliant (fictional) example of the chaos that happens when our memories become unmoored from reality, watch the fantastic movie Memento, in which the main character (played to perfection by Guy Pearce) has anterograde amnesia, a cognitive disorder where he can't form any new short-term memories.  To compensate for this, he takes Polaroid photographs of stuff he thinks is important, and if it's really important he tattoos it onto his skin.  But then the problem is, how does he know the contents of the photos and tattoos are true?  He has no touchstone for what truth about the past actually is.

Although Pearce's character has an extreme form of this problem, in reality, all of us have the same issue.  Those neural firings in the memory centers of our brain are all we have left of the past -- that, and certain fragmentary records, objects, and writings.  

So, how accurate is our view of the past?

No way to tell.  Better than zero, but certainly far less than one hundred percent.

And there's not even any need for a cursed arcade game to screw around with your perception.  We're built like this -- like it or not.

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The gates of heaven and hell

Like many people my age, I recall vividly when Carl Sagan's series Cosmos first aired.  I was in my late teens, and I and my friends eagerly gathered each week to discuss the details of the latest episode. 

There was a lot to talk about.  The exquisite choices for accompanying music, the stunning visuals (which have held up amazingly well, despite being almost fifty years old), and most of all, the mind-bending science.  But one episode took a darker turn, and to this day I recall the impact it had on me.

It was called "Heaven and Hell," and focused on the contrast between the Earth (heaven) and neighboring Venus (hell).  It opens, though, with a sequence about something that happened in June 1908 -- the "Tunguska event," in which either a fragment of a comet or a small asteroid hit the Earth near the Tungus River in Siberia, flattening trees radially outward for miles around and creating a shock wave that registered on seismographs in London.  Back then, there were no bombs capable of such an enormous blast, so no one doubted that it was an amazingly powerful, but natural, event.

However, by 1980, when Cosmos aired, nuclear proliferation was a dark cloud that hung over the entire world.  Sagan had the following to say:

There was no warning until [the Tunguska impactor] plunged into the atmosphere.  If such an explosion happened today, it might be thought, in the panic of the moment, to be produced by a nuclear weapon.  Such a cometary impact and fireball simulates all the effects of a fifteen-megaton nuclear burst, including the mushroom cloud, with one exception: there would be no radiation.  So could a rare but natural event, the impact of a comet with Earth, trigger a nuclear war?

It's a strange scenario: a small comet hits the Earth, as millions have during Earth's history, and the response of our civilization is promptly to self-destruct.

That kind of unthinking, irrational reactiveness seems to be hardwired into our brains.

It is horrifying to think about, but the awful truth is that when something terrible happens, something over which we have no control, the immediate impulse many have is to look around for someone to blame -- and then to strike back.  Consider, for example, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, an 8.0-magnitude megathrust quake that struck the southeastern coast of the island of Honshu.  It killed an estimated 105,000 people, most of them due to tsunamis and the enormous fires that broke out following the initial quake.  (Even so, it doesn't make the top ten list of the deadliest earthquakes on record.)  Half of Tokyo and nearly all of Yokohama were destroyed, and over two million people were left homeless.

Ruins of the Nihonbashi District of Tokyo following the earthquake [Image is in the Public Domain]

The astonishing thing about the Kantō Earthquake, though, is what happened afterward.

The dust had hardly settled, the last fires put out, when rumors began to circulate that looters, especially ethnic Korean and Chinese residents, had taken advantage of the chaos to rob survivors and pillage the wreckage of homes and businesses.  Nationalist, pro-Japanese fervor soared.  With the tacit approval of the government, military, and police, vigilantes launched attacks on majority Korean and Chinese neighborhoods in what was framed as retaliation.

In what is now known as the Kantō Massacre, an estimated six thousand more people were killed, including some ethnic Japanese victims who either tried to defend their Korean and Chinese neighbors, or who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Ultimately, seven hundred people were arrested for the murders, but the majority of them received light sentences or were acquitted.

We can look at this through the lens of a hundred years of time, but those same impulses are still with us.  When something goes wrong in our own lives -- either something pervasive like economic hardship, job insecurity, or medical problems, or something sudden and acute like a natural disaster -- we look around for someone to blame.  We're not doing well?  Must be the immigrants, the brown-skinned people, the people who belong to another religion (or no religion at all), the LGBTQ+ people, the poor people on the dole.  The real social issues that caused the problem (or in the case of natural disasters, worsened their impact) -- staggering wealth inequity, corrupt and authoritarian governments that line the pockets of the ultra-rich, loud-mouthed "influencers" who manipulate their listeners by inflaming hatred, intolerance, and bigotry -- seldom get much attention.

It's easier to target a scapegoat than it is to effect real change.

So it doesn't take a comet impact to make humanity do its damndest to self-destruct.  All it takes is a crisis.

We're in precarious times now, when the powers-that-be are pulling out all the stops to keep our focus away from the actual issues.  I've been scared and discouraged by a lot of what has happened in the last six months, but at the same time heartened by the steadfastness and bold courage of a great many who have refused to be cowed.  I hope we can continue to speak up for what is right, and that the darkness many of us see ahead turns out to be only a passing shadow, a door into brighter, more peaceful times.

Still, I want to end with one more quote from Sagan, which it would be good for all of us to keep in mind as a cautionary note.  "The gates of heaven and hell are adjacent... and unmarked."

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