illuminating science

So, my thesis is due in 16 days, and hence I’m not really posting like I should be here. But this story was too good to pass up - a paper that has supposedly shown that the supernatural, at least as it’s shown in the movies, just doesn’t add up. There are some amusing arguments, but to my mind most of them have been done before, and what’s worse, I don’t really think they hold water - if anything, they probably undermine attempts to scientifically explain these things.

For instance, they’ve “shown” that vampires can’t exist, based on the argument that they would soon overtake humans in numbers. They base this claim on the idea that when a vampire sucks your blood, which they need to to survive, you then become a vampire in need of similar sustenance. So, if there was one vampire initally, after the next feeding there would be 2. Next feeding, there would be 4, then 8, then 16 and so forth. Very quickly, this sequence becomes massive (e.g., after feeding once a month for three years you would have over 30 billion vampires, if the human population could support that!) and vampires would rule the world. They don’t, hence vampires don’t exist. But anyone who’s watched the definitive Interview with a Vampire would know that simply sucking someone’s blood doesn’t turn them into a vampire - they have to be left just alive, then suck your blood in return (duh!). So while this is a nice argument, it doesn’t really hold water (or blood, even though blood is thicker than water).

They also attempt to explain the “sudden chills” associated with supernatural encounters, by presenting a discussion about the various mechanisms of heat transfer. But after a couple of pages of this, they finally boil it down to this: old “haunted” mansions usually have drafts which result in cool spots, and people tend to exagerate these experiences, either deliberately or by a selective recall. Both of these explanations are pretty well known, I would have thought!

What about the actual ghosts, then? How can they walk through walls - or if they can, then how can they walk? The authors argue that walking requires one to exert a force on the floor - this is why walking on ice is tricky, because there’s hardly any friction to start you moving. But if the ghosts can push on the floor, then why don’t they “push” on walls? Alternatively, if they don’t feel the walls, how can they still walk? It’s a cute argument, and might be good grounds for making fun of a science fiction show (Stargate poked fun at itself for this little number: says a character who can walk through walls: “If I’m out of phase with reality, why don’t I fall through the floor?”) but it’s hardly going to convince a believer - the ghosts, if they do exist, are no longer on our plane of existence, and they’re not bound by our laws. Who says what they have to do? Sure it’s a cop out, but I don’t think this argument disproves the existence of ghosts. (I don’t believe in them, for what it’s worth, but if they do exist I’m sure there’s a good, all encompassing theory to explain them - which will probably be a damn site more complicated than this!)

Finally, they present a real example of a “zombi”, although not in the sense of the waking dead that infects everyone it eats. I’ve heard this story before, and while it’s a nice inclusion, it’s nothing new.

Bottom line is I don’t think these “arguments” against the supernatural really carry any weight, and most have already been done before. Sure, they’re mainly focussed on movie depictions, but all they’ve shown that their assumptions must be false - I could easily construct some new supernatural laws to explain everything. Instead, with all the media attention it’s getting, we’re probably going to see occultists everywhere developing counter arguments and using this as a concrete example of how scientists don’t know everything. It’s fairly obvious that this is a light hearted piece, possibly more meant to assist in undergraduate teaching than anything else, but the media aren’t going to present it this way.

Speaker more broadly, while we need good people debunking hoaxes or specific phenomena, I see little point in debunking general “myths” in this fashion. There’s lots of other things, even “real” paranormal research, which perhaps better deserve our attention. And as for inspiring critical thinking, I think shows like Myth Busters do a much better job than this article.

That’s Joel “Spooky” Gilmore, signing off. (cue theme music)

This week, Austalia celebrates National Science Week, with a variety of activities, talks, workshops and more designed to encourage an interest and awareness of science. With another PhD student from UQ I’ve been invited down to Canberra to do science shows and workshops with students in one of the suburbs here.

Last night, we gave a public lecture - two in fact, one each in a double billing. My talk was on “A Journey into a Black Hole”, which describes the life of a star and how some lucky (?!) stars make that transition into the ominous sounding “black hole”, and then describes what we might experience if we were to travel into a black hole. Could we travel to other universes? What is the event horizon? It’s always great fun to give, and always inspires some interesting questions from the audience.

Jenny Riesz then gave a talk on climate change, titled “Our fragile Earth”. She describes the current (overwhelming) evidence for human-induced climate change, particularly global warming, and paints a rather terrifying picture of the future if we fail to act now. Simple things like using new energy efficient light bulbs, choosing low power usage whitegoods, and driving a petrol efficient car can all make a big difference. The audience were all suitable impressed, and hopefully a grass roots movement can really make a difference.

All in all, a good evening. Today, we’re doing shows at the local shopping centre - hopefully we get a bit of an audience!

Well, it’s getting official - yesterday, I submitted my “Notice to Sumit” for my PhD! That means I (theoretically) expect to submit in 30 days - September 14th. Holy mackerel! I’ve still got a massive amount of work to do, but it should be doable. I hope.

It’s very exciting to think that in a month I’ll be finished!

Today, I’m off to Canberra to run science shows for Science week, which should be awesome. I’ll post some details when I get time - now, time to pack!

You may have heard some of the controversy surrounding Pluto recently. As the smallest of the traditional nine planets, some astronomers had been quietly grumbling that the chunk of rock didn’t deserve the esteemed title of “planet”. It’s actually just one of many small, rocky bodies that orbit the outer edge of our solar system, but they were all found to be smaller than Pluto and so the debate was generally ignored. Then (gasp!) astronomers last year found another rocky body at roughly the same distance as Pluto that was larger. Now, the debate was at the forefront - if Pluto was a planet, shouldn’t this new body, nicknamed Xena, also be? Are there now 10 planets? Or perhaps just 8? What defines a planet? And as our telescopes improve are we going to find more and more planets?!

Well, a panel appointed by the International Astronomical Union last week recommended that Pluto should keep its planetary status, and indeed future planets could be added to the official solar system list. They also suggested that there be three categories of planets: terrestrial (solid planets with atmosphere, like Earth and Mars), gas giants (like Jupiter and Saturn) and then “dwarf planets” which would include Pluto and possibly the newly found Xena.

The proposal still has to be voted on next week by a huge meeting of the Astronomical Union, and it’s not clear whether they’ll approve - Pluto is kind of unpopular at the moment!

One thing that was interesting was there was a science writer on the panel, Dava Sobel (who’s visiting Brisbane soon, incidentally) who I guess was giving a sort of “popular opinion” view. But her comments were pretty odd…

“People love Pluto, children identify with its smallness,” she writes. “Adults relate to its inadequacy, its marginal existence as a misfit.” Sobel has several solar system models in her house. Asked if she had torn Pluto off any of them, she said “No, Pluto is definitely there.”

Still, I guess this is one case where emotional or psychological issues really should play a role - it would be pretty traumatic to have to rewrite all our textbooks, posters and who knows what else!

I’ve been chatting to a friend recently who’s a Christian and it seems moderately militant about it. (E.g., when talking about the subject I said in what I hoped was a very non-confronting way, “Well, I’m basically agnostic myself” to which he respond “Oh, not game enough to make a decision, hey?” Hmmm.) The other night a group of us were having a discussion about horoscopes, and I described the various Forer effect experiments that have been done which suggests that astrology is a pretty weak science. I don’t buy it myself, either aesthetically or scientifically, but it’s fun so who cares.

Anyway, we eventually got onto talking about the scientific method. In particular, I professed that I don’t believe in the supernatural. Not that I refuse to believe in telepathy, the afterlife, etc, but simply that I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for all that within science. Maybe it’s more complicated that we’re ever going to be able to comprehend, but if we were smart enough I’m dead certain there’s a rational explanation for everything. If ghosts really are out there, then we simply need a way to explain what they are, why they’re here, etc - eventually, it’s a new theory that will be incorporated into scientific knowledge and hopefully supported by experiments, etc. Julian May’s fantastic Intervention / Galactic Mileu does a beautiful job of how scientists would respond to the development of mental powers.

After professing my trust in the scientifc method above anything else, my Christian friend then said, “What about all the time that science has been proved wrong?” Interesting question! I would counter that I think there are very few examples where science has been blatantly wrong; more often, science has just been incomplete, and most of those times it has been wrong have been because there were, until then, no experiments/observations that could distinguish between fact and fiction, and so, who cares?

Let’s take a couple of examples: The Earth is flat. We now know that’s untrue. But locally, the Earth appears flat. If you’re out in the desert, or better yet the ocean, for at least 20 or 30 kilometres in any direction, the sand/water appears flat, probably even as far as the eye can see. Therefore, if we’re not going too far, it’s fine to assume that the Earth is flat. Only when a ship (camel?) appears slowly over the horizon do we realise there’s something more going on, and we need to think a bit harder. Of course, there were drawbacks - exploration was probably hampered by fear of dragons, and if we’d known you could saild both ways around the world and still get to the same place we’d probably have done better too. So as science and understanding advanced, society advanced, but our theory was expanded (”The Earth isn’t flat, but it’s a very large sphere so that it appears flat locally”) rather than being completely disregarded.

The more stereotypical example is Newton’s laws of motion. Einstein showed that these laws only really apply at “low” speeds - less than half the speed of light, say. In fact, strictly, they’re always wrong, but until you’re going at like 100,000km/hr they’re only out by 0.00000001%, say. (I made up those numbers - feel free to do some better calculations. It’s actually a good exercise!) Therefore, our theory now reads, “Special relativity is the most general law of motion, but at “typical” speeds, the old theories work just fine, and we can prove why.” Now add general relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. Each additional theory just expands the previous to cover more scenarios.

Examples of science being completely wrong would include the aether, geocentrism (the sun goes around the Earth?)…Any suggestions for others? But again, it was only when we started to make better observations that those things were proved wrong - the theories were consistent with all our observations (limited!), and when they weren’t we made new theories. Of course, Galileo was probably less impressed how the Church responded…

Anyway, the point of all this was that I think the scientific method had consistently proved itself throughout history, and has done more to advance society than simply having blind faith in religion or the supernatural - most of all, a scientist would never say something is beyond science, and that’s why we’ve accomplished so much. I’m certain it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and our theories are nowhere like complete, and maybe we’re even on the wrong track with some stuff. Whether or not science can explain why we’re here, I leave as an open question (i.e., a topic of another post!)

Since this is a long post, which I’ve been working on for a while, I’m going to leave it here, and come back to the original religion/science question next time! I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts on these ideas, though, dear reader!

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m pretty into swing dancing, having been a teacher with a Brisbane school (Swing Dance Brisbane) for about a year and half. Recently, I’ve been going along to some beginner classes again with friends who are just learning, and I came across an interesting example of paradox come to life.

A really important part of swing dancing is lead and follow - the leads, er, lead a move and the follows should be able to follow it (duh!) without knowing it was coming. The problem is in class, you typically do short routines that makes it easier for both the leads and follows, but you risk losing this spontaneity. So, the teachers told the leads (typically the men) to lead four “basics”. On one of those basics, we were to lead a particular variation we were learning, but the teacher said, “We’re not going to tell you which one to lead it on, because we want it to be a surprise for the lady.”

Uh oh! There’s a problem - if I leave it until the last basic of the four to lead my move, my follow will know it’s coming. Therefore, we both know the move can’t come on the fourth basic. But now, I can’t lead on the third basic either - because my follow knows it can’t come on the fourth, if I don’t lead it on the 1st or 2nd, it would have to come on the 3rd and so they’d know it was coming. Since it has to be a surprise, I can’t lead it on the 3rd basic either. Think about it - it’s true!

By the same logic, I can’t lead it on the 2nd, or even the 1st basic. In short, by this reasoning I can never lead the variation, because it could never be surprise. My follow clearly* came to the same conclusion, and smugly knew she didn’t have to worry about trying to follow a tricky move.

So when I actually lead my variation on the second basic, she was very surprised indeed!

(*) I made that bit up. I was the only mathematician in the room

This is an example of the unexpected hanging paradox. The simplest form of the paradox would be for the teacher to say “I want you to lead one basic, then lead that tricky move on the second basic and make it a surprise.” The follow would realise that since she knew the move was coming, it couldn’t be a surprise, and hence I wouldn’t lead it. Then, when I lead it, it would be a complete surprise - since she didn’t think it was possible! Thus everything the teacher asked for came true. Woohoo!

I confess I don’t really understand the resolution to the paradox (which originally was about a guy going to be hung unexpectedly , but I think it boils down to your initial assumptions being imprecise in some way - how do you mathematically define “unexpected”?

Either way, yet again there’s mathematics in movement!