Fact blindness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you blind?" said Tirian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Nonsense from the sky

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

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

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

Cover page of A Book from the Sky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, respectively:

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

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

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

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

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

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The pressure cooker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Copy-and-paste

I'm really interested in research on aging, and I'd like to think that it's not solely because I'm Of A Certain Age myself.  The whole fact of our undergoing age-related system degradation is fascinating -- more so when you realize that other vertebrates age at dramatically different rates.  Mice and rats age out after about a year and a half to two years; dogs (sadly) rarely make it past fifteen (much less in some breeds); and the Galapagos Tortoise can still be hale and hearty at two hundred years of age.

A lot of research has gone into why different organisms age at such different speeds, and (more importantly) how to control it.  The ultimate goal, selfish though it may sound, is extending the healthy human life span.  Imagine if we reached our healthy adult physiology at (say) age twenty-five or so, and then went into stasis with respect to aging for two hundred or three hundred years -- or more?

Heady stuff.  For me, the attraction is not so much avoiding death (although that's nice, too).  I was just chatting with a friend yesterday about the fact that one of my biggest fears is being dependent on others for my care.  The idea of my body and/or mind degrading to the point that I can no longer care for my own needs is profoundly terrifying to me.  And when you add to the normal age-related degradation the specter of diseases such as Alzheimer's and ALS -- well, all I can say is that I agree with my dad, who said that compared with that fate, "I'd rather get run over by a truck."

Leaving that aside, though, a particularly interesting piece of research that has bearing on this field was published last week in the journal Science Advances.  But to understand it, you have to know a little bit about a peculiarity of genetics first.

Several decades ago, a geneticist named Barbara McClintock was working with patterns of seed color inheritance in "Indian corn."  In this variety, one cob can bear seeds with dozens of different colors and patterns.  After much study, she concluded that her data could only be explained by there being "transposable elements" -- genetic sequences that were either clipped out and moved, or else copied and moved -- functions similar to the "cut-and-paste" and "copy-and-paste" commands on your computer. McClintock wrote a paper about it...

... and was immediately ignored.  For one thing, she was a woman in science, and back when she was doing her research -- in the 1960s and 1970s -- that was sufficient reason to discount it.  Her colleagues derisively nicknamed her theory "jumping genes" and laughed it into oblivion.

Except that McClintock wouldn't let it go.  She was convinced she was right, and kept doggedly pursuing more data, data that would render her conclusion incontrovertible.  She found it -- and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1983, at the age of 81.

Barbara McClintock in her laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smithsonian Institution/Science Service; Restored by Adam Cuerden, Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) shown in her laboratory in 1947]

McClintock's "transposable elements" (now called "transposons") have since been found in every vertebrate studied.  They are used to provide additional copies of essential genes, so that if one copy succumbs to a mutation, there's an extra working copy that can take over.  They're also used in gene switching.  Move a gene near an on-switch called a promoter, and it turns on; move it away, and it turns off.

The problem is, like any natural process, it can go awry.  The copy-and-paste function especially seems to have that tendency.  When it malfunctions, it acts like a runaway copy-and-paste would in your word processing software.  Imagine the havoc that would ensue if you had an important document, and the computer went haywire and inserted one phrase over and over again in random points in the text.

This should give you an idea of why it's so important to keep this process under control.

You have a way of taking care of these "rogue transposons" (as they're called).  One such mechanism is methylation, which is a chemical means of tangling up and permanently shutting down genes.  But the paper just released suggests that aging is (at least in part) due to the rogue transposition of one particular sequence getting ahead of methylation, leaving a particular chunk of DNA scattered again and again across the genome.

The current research, out of New York University, looked at a transposon called Long Interspersed Nuclear Element 1 (LINE-1) that has become especially good at this copy-and-paste trick, to the extent that the human genome contains five hundred thousand copies of it -- a full twenty percent of our genetic material.  The researchers found that LINE-1 can only accomplish this self-insertion when a molecule called ORF1p is present in sufficient quantities to assemble into clumps called condensates.  Find a way to block ORF1p, and LINE-1 is effectively disabled -- potentially slowing down age-related genetic malfunction.

Of course, even in the best-case scenario, it's unlikely that tweaking one molecule will affect overall aging in any kind of dramatic way.  Even so, the whole thing is tremendously interesting.  On the other hand, I have to say that the idea that we are getting to the point that we can tinker around with fundamental processes like aging is a little frightening.  It opens up practical and ethical issues we've never had to consider before.  How this would affect human population growth?  Who would have access to such genetic modifications if they proved effective and safe?  You can bet the rich would have first dibs (and the last thing we need is Rupert Murdoch living to two hundred years old.)  

Even such things as how we approach the idea of careers and retirement would require significant rethinking.  Imagine if you reached the age of sixty and could expect another fifty or more years of active health.  More staggering still is if the effect on humans was greater -- and the upper bound of human life span was increased to two hundred or three hundred years.  It seems like science fiction, but with the research that is currently happening, it's not outside of the realm of possibility.

Who would want to retire at sixty if you still had the physiology and mental acuity of a twenty-five year old?  At the same point, who would want to stay in the same job for another hundred years or more? 

The whole thing would require a drastic reorganization of our society, a far more pervasive set of changes than any scientific discovery has yet caused.  And lest you think that I'm exaggerating the likelihood of such an eventuality; remember how much progress has happened in biological science in the last century.  Only a hundred years ago, children in industrialized countries were still dying by the thousands of diphtheria and measles.  There were dozens of structures in cells, and a good many organs in humans, about whose function we knew essentially nothing.  We knew that DNA existed, but had no idea that it was the genetic material, much less how it worked.

Makes you wonder what our understanding will be in another hundred years, doesn't it?

And maybe some of the people reading this right now will be around to see it.

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Reversing the arrow

In my short story "Retrograde," the main character, Eli, meets a woman who makes the bizarre claim that she experiences time running backwards.

She's not like Benjamin Button, who ages in reverse; she experiences everything in reverse.  But from our perspective, nothing seems amiss.  From hers, though... she remembers future events and not past ones:

Hannah gave him a long, steady look.  "All I can say is that we see the same things.  For me, the film runs backwards, that’s all.  Other than that, there’s no difference.  There’s nothing I can do to change the way things unfold, same as with you."

"That’s why you were crying when I came in.  Because of something that for you, had already happened?  What was it?"

She shook her head.  "I shouldn’t answer that, Eli."

"It’s me, isn’t it?  For me, I was just meeting you for the first time.  For you, it was the last time you’d ever see me."  I winced, and rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand.  "Jesus, I’m starting to believe you.  But that’s it, right?"

Hannah didn’t answer for a moment.  "The thing is—you know, you start looking at things as inevitable.  Like you’re in some sort of film.  The actors seem to have freedom.  They seem to have will, but in reality the whole thing is scrolling by and what’s going to happen is only what’s already written in the script.  You could, if you wanted to, start at the end and run the film backwards.  Same stuff, different direction.  No real difference except for the arrow of time."

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity shows that space and time are inextricably linked -- spacetime -- but doesn't answer the perplexing question of why we can move in any direction through space, but only one direction through time.  You can alter the rate of time's passage, at least relative to some other reference frame, by changing your velocity; but unlike what the characters in "Retrograde" experience, the arrow always points the same way.  

This becomes odder still when you consider that in just about all physical processes, there is no inherent arrow of time.  Look at a video clip of a pool ball bouncing off the side bumper, then run it backwards -- it'd be damn hard to tell which was the actual, forward-running clip.

Hard -- but not impossible.  The one physical law that has an inherent arrow of time is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  If the clip was long enough, or your measurement devices sensitive enough, you could tell which was the forward clip because in that one, the pool ball would be slowing down from dissipation of its kinetic energy in the form of friction with the table surface.  Likewise, water doesn't unspill, glasses unbreak, snowbanks un-avalanche, reassembling in pristine smoothness on the mountainside.  But why this impels a universal forward-moving arrow of time -- and more personally, why it makes us remember the past and not the future -- is still an unanswered question.

"The arrow of time is only an illusion," Einstein quipped, "but it is a remarkably persistent one."

Two recent papers have shed some light on this strange conundrum.  In the first, a team led by Andrea Rocco of Surrey University looked how the equations of the Second Law work on the quantum level, and found something intriguing; introducing the Second Law into the quantum model generated two arrows of time, one pointing into the past and one pointing into the future.  But no matter which time path is taken, entropy still increases as you go down it.

"You’d still see the milk spilling on the table, but your clock would go the other way around," Rocco said.  "In this way, entropy still increases, but it increases toward the past instead of the future.  The milk doesn’t flow back into the glass, which the Second Law of Thermodynamics forbids, but it flows out of the glass in the direction of the past.  Regardless of whether time’s arrow shoots toward the future or past from a given moment, entropy will still dissipate in that given direction."

In the second, from Lorenzo Gavassino of Vanderbilt University et al., the researchers were investigating the mathematics of "closed time-like loops" -- i.e., time travel into the past, followed by a return to your starting point.  And what they found was that once again, the Second Law gets in the way of anything wibbly-wobbly.

Gavassino's model shows that on a closed time-like loop, entropy must peak somewhere along the loop -- so along some part of the loop, entropy has to decrease to return it to where it was when the voyage began.  The equations then imply that one of two things must be true.  Either:

1. Time travel into the past is fundamentally impossible, because it would require entropy to backpedal; or
2. If overall entropy can decrease somewhere along the path, it would undo everything that had happened along the entropy-increasing part of the loop, including your own memories.  So you could time travel, but you wouldn't remember anything about it (including that it had ever happened).

"Any memory that is collected along the closed time-like curve," Gavassino said, "will be erased before the end of the loop."

So that's no fun at all.  Lieutenant Commander Geordi LaForge would like to have a word with you, Dr. Gavassino.

Anyhow, that's today's excursion into one of the weirdest parts of physics.  Looks like the Second Law of Thermodynamics is still strictly enforced in all jurisdictions.  Time might be able to run backwards, but you'd never know because (1) entropy will still increase in that direction, and (2) any loop you might take will result in your remembering nothing about the trip.  So I guess we're still stuck with clocks running forwards -- and having to wait to find out what's going to happen in the future at a rate of one minute per minute.

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Payback

Karma is an interesting idea.

It's originally a concept from Hinduism and Buddhism, and claims that good or bad deeds accrue on what amounts to a Life Ledger, and not only will result in positive or negative payback later in this life, but will affect the quality of rebirth you're granted in subsequent lives (in one's saṃsāra, to use the Sanskrit term).  The word karma itself is from Sanskrit, and combines the meaning of "action or deed" with that of "intent."

Here in the West, the idea's been swiped and (usually) disconnected from anything having to do with reincarnation.  It's come to mean "payback," usually of an unexpected sort.  How many times have you heard someone say, "Karma will catch up with him sooner or later"?  Even the Bible has the evocative line, "Who sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind." 

It's an appealing idea, at least for those of us who would like there to be some fairness in the world.  Too often, dishonest, cheating, lying assholes (*koff koff koff Donald Trump koff koff *) get away scot-free, and deserving, hard-working people can't catch a break to save their lives.  Believing that there is going to be some kind of cosmic balancing of the accounts would be mighty reassuring.

A Nepali prayer wheel [Image is in the Public Domain]

Interesting, though, that people's attitudes toward karma vary dramatically depending on whose karma we're talking about.  A study that came out this week in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, by Cindel White, Atlee Lauder, and Mina Aryaie, found that regardless of religious belief (or non-belief), people tend to associate good karma with themselves, and bad karma with other people.

Asked to come up with a karmic experience about themselves, 69% of participants described some good deed that was unexpectedly rewarded; when it was about other people, a full 82% of participants recounted a bad deed that resulted in the evildoer receiving their just deserts.  And this trend held no matter where the participants were from.

"We found very similar patterns across multiple cultural contexts, including Western samples, where we know people often think about themselves in exaggeratedly positive ways, and samples from Asian countries where people are more likely to be self-critical," said Cindel White of York University, who was lead author on the study.  "The positive bias in karmic self-perceptions is a bit weaker in the Indian and Singaporean samples compared with U.S. samples, but across all countries, participants were much more likely to say that other people face karmic punishments while they receive karmic rewards."

Curious finding, if not exactly unexpected.  We all tend to have undeserved confidence in our own rightness.  As journalist Kathryn Schulz points out, when we are forced to confront our own fallibility, we'll all admit we can make mistakes -- but it's always purely in a theoretical sense.  Sitting here, right now, it's impossible to think of a single thing that we're wrong about, meaning that there's a tacit assumption we all have that "okay, I'm fallible, I guess, but at the moment I'm one hundred percent right about everything."

Now, sure, the facile objection is that if you knew you were wrong about something, you'd forthwith cease to hold that particular belief.  But it's not an easy trap to get out of.  Schulz says:

So why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right?  One reason, actually, has to do with the feeling of being wrong.  So let me ask you guys something...  How does it feel -- emotionally -- how does it feel to be wrong?  Dreadful.  Thumbs down.  Embarrassing...  Thank you, these are great answers, but they're answers to a different question.  You guys are answering the question: How does it feel to realize you're wrong?  Realizing you're wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things, right?  I mean, it can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny...  But just being wrong doesn't feel like anything.

I'll give you an analogy.  Do you remember that Looney Tunes cartoon where there's this pathetic coyote who's always chasing and never catching a roadrunner?  In pretty much every episode of this cartoon, there's a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine -- he's a bird, he can fly.  But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him.  And what's funny -- at least if you're six years old -- is that the coyote's totally fine too.  He just keeps running -- right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he's in mid-air.  That's when he falls.  When we're wrong about something -- not when we realize it, but before that -- we're like that coyote after he's gone off the cliff and before he looks down.  You know, we're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we feel like we're on solid ground.  So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago.  It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.

The White et al. karma study is further evidence that we have a dangerous blind spot with regard to our own capacity for getting it wrong.  Not only do we have the sense that it's other people who make errors, it's also other people who do bad stuff, who should be on the receiving end of the Cosmic Morality Squad's efforts to keep things in balance.  As for us?  We should finally get our Just Reward for being the good people we've been all along, right?

Of course right.

Like I said, it's an certainly appealing concept, because all too often there appears to be no justice at all in this world.  But we have to be careful about how we evaluate our fellow humans, because just about everyone is a confusing amalgam of good and bad, pure motives and not-so-pure ones, sometimes varying on a minute-by-minute time scale.  And that includes ourselves.  Remember the wise words of J. R. R. Tolkien, spoken through the character Gandalf.  Frodo has just snapped out that Gollum deserved to die for what he'd done, and Gandalf responds, "Deserves it!  I daresay he does.  Many that live deserve death.  And some that die deserve life.  Can you give it to them?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.  For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

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The ideologue

I told myself that I wasn't going to do another political post so soon after Tuesday's, but dammit, my good intentions got blasted to smithereens by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (53427511876) (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Let me open by stating my bias up front.  My considered opinion, as a 32-year veteran science teacher with fifteen years of experience writing on science-related topics, is that RFK is a certifiable lunatic.  He combines the worst of the alt-med nonsense -- the kinds of things promoted by Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams and Vani "Food Babe" Hari -- with outlandish and debunked conspiracy theories, then dishes it all up as if it was peer-reviewed science.  Here are the three stories that destroyed my resolve to stay away from politics for at least a few days:

• In a town hall moderated by "Dr. Phil," he was asked by an audience member what he was planning on doing about "chemtrails."  You probably know that "chemtrails" are a completely discredited conspiracy theory claiming that The Bad Guys are putting stuff into jet fuel -- the "stuff" varies from heavy metals to radioactive isotopes to pathogens like anthrax -- so that when the exhaust is released into the upper atmosphere, it settles down on all of us and poisons us.  Notwithstanding that this has to be the absolute stupidest idea for a poison-delivery method I've ever heard of, it's been studied (I can only imagine the eye-rolling done by the scientists assigned to the research), and... nothing.  Contrails are almost entirely water vapor, with small amounts of soot from incomplete burning of jet fuel.  That's it.  But did RFK say that?  Of course not.  He's all in on chemtrails.  "It’s done, we think, by DARPA [the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency]," he said.  "And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel -- so those materials are put in jet fuel.  I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it.  We’re bringing on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable."

• An article in Ars Technica provides evidence -- in the form of RFK's own words -- that he doubts the basis of the medical science of infectious disease, the "Germ Theory of Disease."  Which claims that many diseases are (1) caused by pathogenic viruses, bacteria, fungi, or protists, and are therefore (2) communicable.  You'd think this'd be beyond question by this point, right?  Wrong.  RFK believes that any disease involving a pathogen is caused by having a weakened immune system -- i.e., all pathogens are opportunistic.  Get enough clean water, food, air, and sunlight, and you'll never get sick.  This is the basis of his anti-vaxx stance; if you live right, you shouldn't need 'em.  If this was a rational stance -- which it is not -- I'd ask him why, then, did childhood death rates go down so dramatically during the 1950s and 1960s, when mandatory vaccination programs against diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and polio were instituted?  Did all the kids suddenly start eating right, or something?

• He stated outright that it was reasonable that religious people would shun the MMR vaccine, because it contains "aborted fetus debris."  Needless to say, this is untrue.  Vaccines against viral diseases are cultured in cell lines grown in labs, not in aborted fetuses.  If this were true, it'd be kind of funny that some of the most anti-abortion people around -- the leaders of the Catholic Church -- have no problem with vaccines, and in fact, strongly recommend that children get all of the critical childhood vaccines on the schedule recommended by most doctors.

Look, it's not that I'm against the idea that we need good food and clean air and water.  I'm also well aware that Big Pharma has a lot to answer for in how it produces, vets, and prices drugs.  But going from there to something I saw posted on social media a couple of days ago -- a 32-point-font banner saying, "BIG PHARMA HAS NEVER CURED A SINGLE ILLNESS!" is blatant idiocy.  To give just one example, a friend of mine, who was diagnosed with leukemia at age eighteen and is now a happy and healthy young woman in her late twenties, would not be alive today without the chemotherapy developed and produced by "Big Pharma."  

But under RFK, cancer research -- and also research into Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Parkinson's, and most recently, Ebola fever -- has been defunded in favor of spurious projects to "stop chemtrails" and "look into the connection between vaccines and autism."  (tl;dr: There isn't one.)

In short, RFK is a dangerous ideologue who shouldn't be allowed within hailing distance of our national health policy.  His continued occupation of the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services is going to result in irreparable damage to the American health care system.

But a man like him is never going to step down, because he can't conceive of the possibility that he could be wrong.  An attitude which, of course, is endemic in our government right now.

I wonder how many people will have to die before anyone will step in and fire him?

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