SGU Episode 308

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday June 8th, 2011 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,

B: Hey everybody

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: And Evan Bernstein

E: Yuan Shang Hao. Good evening to all of our listeners in China of which there are...

J: I like your intonation

S: Inflection

B: I'm not sure if it was accurate though but it sounded good

E: Does anyone listen to us in China?

R: Of course, yeah, we have some Chinese listeners

S: But if it's the wrong inflection you say, 'I wanna massage your grandma' you see, so you've gotta be careful

E: You know the thing about saying 'good evening' in Chinese is that I want to say it again in an hour. I don't know what it is

B: O.M.G.

R: Wow

J: That was so bad

B: He was working on that all night

E: Where's my room shot? Oh god. (cymbols)

R: You get a sad trombone (sad trombone)

S: Rebecca you're joining us from London this week

J: I say

R: I am, yes, I'm back in Old Blighty, as no-one calls it

E: Rebecca Poppins

R: Yeah, so once again the listeners are being treated to Rebecca at one thirty in the morning. Awesome.

J: But you're still kind of on US time

R: No, not really

J: But you're not in a bad mood

R: No, not really

J: Well at least you're happy recording the show

R: No

S: Alright. Evan tell us what is absolutely fascinating about this day in skepticism

E: Well on this day that you're listening to the show it was 1854 in which the famous mathematician Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved and he announced this in a lecture titled On the Hypothesis on which Geometry is Based, which is apparently a very famous lecture that he gave. And what he did is he described the old-fashioned, Euclidean two-dimensional plane geometry along with some other examples of old geometry and... well let me put it to you this way. There's an example in which on a piece of paper there lived a bookworm, right, and this bookworm was drawn on the piece of paper so it was drawn in two-dimensional. You take the paper and you fold it up and you crumple it up. Now the worm drawn on the paper has no sense of the cumbling and the distortion of space that's going on around him because he also exists in two dimensions. Right, follow me so far?

S: Right

R: Yeah

B: Gotcha

S: Oh yeah

E: Whereas actually that crumpled paper is in three dimensions. So extend that out, we live in a world of three dimensions, but actually everything going around us exists in, what we believe is four dimensions, the fourth dimensions being time. And this was important not only as an important discovery of his time but it also influenced scientists and physicists such as Einstein who used Riemann's work in his theory of general relativity in which he incorporated time as the fourth dimension.

S: Yeah but when Riemann was talking about higher dimension I think he was talking about higher spatial dimensions, not necessarily with time as the fourth dimension. That was something that Einstein inserted. He was saying that space itself is curved into a physical fourth dimension which we can't perceive because we're on the surface of the paper like the...

E: That's right, we're like the worm. The two-dimensional worm on the paper has no idea it's getting all crumpled and crushed up.

S: But it's interesting. Imagine being the first guy to think of space as not linear, that's it's not Euclidean, that it's curved. That's mind blowing, right?

E: Big deal

B: The way he did that was to... I guess he was the first one to actually think of introducing numbers at every point in space and that was how he came upon the idea of using that method to describe how it was bent. I guess a pretty key insight. I wonder how relativity would have been affected if he hadn't come up with that and whether it would have been delayed significantly.

R: I don't know. For some reason this reminds me a lot of, was it Plato? Plato's cave/wall idea of people who are...

E: Shadows?

R: Yeah, I guess seeing shadows on a cave/wall so they assume that that's all that life is are these two-dimensional shadows, so if you were to explain the three-dimensional world to them it would blow their minds. And of course you can't say that Plato was thinking in terms of, well maybe there was a fourth dimension, a fourth spatial dimension as such, but I mean he was thinking in those sorts of terms, don't you think?

S: Yeah well that... our perception of reality is shaped by the physical reality in which we live

J: Right

S: We may be ignorant of reality in the same way that the cave shadow people are ignorant of their ultimate reality

R: Right and that's not to suggest that Plato had any sort of evidence of a fourth spatial dimension. I just want to put that out there. For conspiracy theorists out there...

S: He was talking more in just general philosophical terms, not that specific manifestation

J: Bob, what about this thing where we have these three dimensions that we can easily perceive and understand. But why do the dimensions end there? In other words, why couldn't there have been a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth dimension that are physical dimensions?

B: There actually might be and some theories actually, string theory and things, actually consider that - have that as an integral part of that. But those dimensions are, it's kind of weird, they're actually wrapped up and compacted in such a small space that they're not visible easily, so higher dimensions can exist in our universe but we just can't really detect them yet, it's not obvious beyond the three spatial dimensions we're aware of now.

E: I've heard that membrane theory relies on 11 dimensions - they can calculate 11 dimensions based on those theories.

B: Yeah

J: How about - I've heard of other theories talking about other dimensions of time. Imagine two dimensions of time, say, four or five dimensions of say space and two of time. What would that be like?

R: Crazy. That would be...

B: Crazy. How many... two watches wherever you go

S: This kind of stuff only makes sense in the context of mathematics. We can't, you know, really think about it physically.

J: You know just because we can think of them mathematically does that mean that they actually exist?

S: No. No, but there is something to the fact that it makes the Math more elegant. It sort of solves problems to bump things up a dimension and think of the reality as a three dimensional manifestation of a four dimensional reality or however many you ultimately get up to. So what does this mean? I mean this is a big question in theoretical physics or science in general, you know, when things start to fit together and become more elegant and have more explanatory power. That's nice, but it's not the same thing as it being actually the case and that's where we get into the debate about whether or not string theory can be a real science because it's not empirical, just theoretical.

Well we have a couple of news items coming up. Phil Plait's going to be coming up in a while to talk about some astronomy news but first we have a couple of other news items. The first one is SGU related. Do you guys know... I know you guys know what's going to happen... I hope you know by now - September 23rd and 24th, this fall, 2011, a very special event will be occurring: we will be holding... we have decided for some crazy reason to do a 24 hour live streaming SGU event.

R: Extravaganza

B: Extreme is right

J: And I want everyone to know from the beginning that I'm totally against it

E: Yes, we are bringing J kicking and screaming to this event

R: Which should only make it more entertaining I think

E: Oh yeah

B: I thought of a name, I just thought of a name for it

S: What?

B: Skeptapalooza

S: Oh come on

R: That's a terrible name

B: Best one I've heard yet

S: Alright, our working title is SGU24 but we're certainly open to suggestions

J: And I get to play Jack Bower then

E: "Where's the bomb?"

S: Does that mean we get to torture you and stop your heart and then get it going again?

J: Jump my heart with a car battery and then I'll be able to do 14 hours of show? (all laugh)

I loved every goddam season of that programme.

R: You know Jay, for some reason when I hear you mention 24 hours it doesn't really bother me that much, but when you mention 14 hours it occurs to me, like, we will have already been recording for ten hours and we'll have 14 to go and now I'm against it too.

S: Well that's like we were flying to Australia and we were on the plane for what seems like forever and we find out we still have ten more hours left on the plane. Yeah it's bad. This won't be quite that bad because it'll be in my house

E: We like doing the heavy lifting, these special events, things that other sane people would never try.

S: So more details will be unfolding over the ensuing months, but save the dates September 23rd at 8pm and for the following 24 hours you'll be able to eat, sleep and breathe the SGU. And it'll be video. And we'll be broadcasting from a very special location.

R: You already said, from your house

S: But it's a special location within my house.

E: Right...

B: And we haven't named it yet, we need a special name

J: Bob, we did name it!

S: It's the skeptilair.

R: (groans) Oh, please make it stop.

E: The skeptiman cave, with Rebecca

R: It's just gonna continue to get worse isn't it.

S: Unfortunately

J: This show will be fused... it'll be infused... with have Star Trek, with Star Wars, it'll have internet, it'll have TVs, it'll have computers, it'll have gadgets, it'll have things that pop and bubble

B: Skulls!

E: And it'll have no bathroom breaks. We'll all have to go down on one leg.

S: We'll all have catheters going to bottles strapped to our thighs

B: And one dead body

E: Oooo...

S: At least one dead body, yes

E: At least one, if not more

J: Yeah, SGU just jumped the shark

(all laugh)

R: Also we'll be introducing a young child onto the show. Our new, six-year-old love child.

(all chuckle nervously)

B: I thought you were referencing Oliver from the Brady Bunch

R: Oliver

B: The punk

R: The kid on married with children

E: You remember the Brady Bunch, Rebecca? No?

R: I've heard of the Brady Bunch

B: (gasp)

E: Heard of the Brady Bunch...

R: Anyway, the point is

J: 'Pork chops and applesauce'

(all laugh)

E: 'Oh, my nose!' (chuckles to self)

R: Are these... Are these Brady Bunch jokes? Is that what we...

J: Mum always said don't paintball in the house

E: That's why they're all zooming over your head

S: Yes

R: Yes. Alright, can we go back to Star Trek?

J: Oh woah.

E: 'He's dead Jim'

B: Never thought I'd hear her say that

S: But worse, can you imagine 24 hours of this?

R: I'm just gonna bring earplugs

(Steve laughs)

R: I'm going to bring a big pair of headphones. So I can just listen to my music.

S: Noise cancellation.

Alright, well, let's go on...

B: Geek cancellation

S: ...To another news item, Rebecca. A psychic gave a very interesting tip to the police

R: That's right, Steve. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies'. That was the headline that Reuters decided to run with. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies, including children, buried in a mass grave in a rural home East of Houston', local media reported.

(All laugh)

R: Ah, it goes on to say, 'It might not have been 30, it was 25 to 30, but preliminary reports did indicate that there were children.' So a really horrific scene there, Tuesday night, that was on June 7. And there was a lot of confusion as these reports were coming in, but it turns out that this amazing find was in fact discovered by a psychic. It came in through a psychic tip, the psychic told the police to go to this specific house in Texas and to search for bodies, the police went there, they didn't find anything so the same caller, the same anonymous psychic caller called back and again stated that there were bodies there it's just that the police were in slightly the wrong spot. So the psychic gave even more exact directions so the police went back and they found... Nothing.

S: Nothing?

Nothing. There was nothing. They found a small amount of blood on the porch of a house nearby and for some reason that turned into 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies including children', which is basically what the psychic had reported. But try as the might, the Texas authorities were actually unable to find any evidence of any bodies. The home-owners, the people who lived in the house on that property were truckers, cross-country truckers, who were out on the road when it happened. When reached for comment they said no, they were not murderers.

J: We don't know nothing about no bodies

B: Exactly

E: 'No bodies' (laughs)

R: But, apparently some slightly deranged person had cut his wrists on their porch a few weeks back.

S: Apparently it was the daughter's fiancée who was AWOL from the army

R: Yes

S: And cut himself deliberately and blood went all over the place and now is in a military psych facility, apparently.

R: Yes. And so, yeah, there was absolutely nothing. There was no sign of any bodies anywhere on the property. There was no reason to suspect that these people killed anyone. It was all thanks to one anonymous quote-unquote 'psychic'. So now after it's finally come out there were, in fact, no bodies, the police are discussing trying to charge the tipster. Although there's no real indication whether or not they'll be able to discover the identity of the caller. But hopefully they can and hopefully this person will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Because this is what we see again and again. You see, when people ask, 'What's the harm? Psychic detectives, they're just adding another, you know, another possibility of finding a body or finding a murderer', well this is the problem. You have somebody that thinks that they're a psychic offering what they think... And they might actually believe this, they may actually think that they're having psychic visions about something and think that they're helping. But what they're only doing, really, is that they're wasting the police's time. Can you imagine how many detectives and how many offices they had to be on this searching this property to find out that there's absolutely nothing? And that...

S: And the FBI get involved.

R: Yeah. Surely they had something better to do.

S: Yeah

E: There were aerial video pictures of the groups - all the cars and all the detectives and the personnel - it was throngs of people at this supposed place. It was a huge waste of resources. Huge.

R: Yeah. And, of course, to me it's still not as bad as the cases you have where there's been a disappearance of someone and there's been a quote-unquote 'psychic' contact the relatives or someone and say that they have evidence of where this person is.

J: (In character) The kid's dead.

R: Exactly, that causes an incredible amount of emotional, psychological damage to these families. In this case, at least the damage was just economic, I suppose. But that's your tax dollars at work. Tracking down the pointless tips from pychics.

S: Now Rebecca, there're a few details to this story that I found very interesting. Of course, I'm basing this... I've read multiple articles on this and they were shuffling around the same basic facts. And that one was the blood on the porch. Another one though, was that when the cops got there they described a quote-unquote 'Overwhelming smell of decomposition'.

R: Oh yeah, yeah I saw that noted as well.

S: Yeah, so... which leant... so now you have the blood and the decomp. which meant 'oh right, this is legit, there's something here', so that's how they justified the massive response. Yeah, initially it was just a couple of guys going to check it out, but these details led to the more... calling in the FBI and getting the bigger response. Plus they also noted that there were some details, some, you know, some geographic details relating to the layout of the house that the psychic got pretty accurately and that that convinced them also that this was a legitimate tip, and not just a lunatic.

R: Right. And of course maybe the psychic just had knowledge of this area, been by or something.

S: Yeah

R: There was also the fact that apparently the property owner's son is a convicted sex offender, though he hasn't lived there for over a year and that the smell, the foul stench that the police identified was found to be coming from piles of rotting garbage.

S: Yeah. They were truckers who were on the road, so they were...

R: Right

S: Yeah

R: There were a lot of little details that when combined with this quote-unquote 'psychic tip' led the police to realise they... you know, needed to do something because these were all adding to a sort-of confirmation bias

S: Yeah, exactly, it's circumstantial evidence, confirmation bias, and you think, 'What's the chance that the police checking out a tip are gonna find blood on the porch?' Well it turns out it's probably not... You know first it asks the wrong question. The question is not, 'What's the chance of finding blood?', it's 'What's the chance of finding something suspcious?'

R: Right

S: And all the different things that could be suspicious. And the fact that somebody bled sometime in the last week or so was not that remarkable. And the quote-unquote 'decomp' was just the truckers on the road left the garbage behind which was rotting and smelling.

R: Yeah

S: So those, kind of, circumstantial things, you know, it's actually pretty likely, but when you're hunting for confirmation of your suspicions it's amazing how many connections you can make even on something apparently random like this. My only other question is, as you say, was this really just a random tip from an alleged psychic or did she have reason to point the police out to this house?

R: Yeah, I mean I, not knowing anything about... anything... (laughs)

S: You know, we don't have the details

R: Yeah, it's hard to say

E: It's unfolding, you know, it's still unfolding

R: I'm hoping that maybe somebody is looking into the guy who slit his wrists on the porch - I mean, it was a woman who called in but it's obviously some bad blood, so to speak, happening around there. So it's not out of the question to imagine that there might be someone who had reason to want to disrupt the people who lived there. That could be a cause.

S: And the police said specifically that somebody was looking into the revenge angle. That this was done to make trouble for the home-owners

R: Yeah

S: Okay. Well we're going to bring in Phil Plait the Bad Astronomy to cover these next few items because they have an Astronomy-theme. So Phil, welcome to Skeptics' Guide.

21:20

P: Hey, thanks for having me on once again

S: It's always great to have you, Phil Plat

P: Kay, thanks

R: Oh, yeah, right, rings a bell

E: Phil Prat, what a good gag

P: You know I don't care if people mispronounce my name so long as they can spell it and can find it online

R: Right, spoken like a true nerd

E: Can we call you Philip

P: No

S: Is your name Philip or is it really legally just Phil?

E: I don't know, I'd have to check my birth certificate. Which I know actually has my middle name misspelled on it but there you go

R: Phil Plait doesn't know his own name

P: Those details are irrelevant

S: So Phil, we were going to talk about this news item about this massive explosion on the sun we just had to talk about with you so won't you talk about it?

P: This is a pretty good story. The sun goes through these cycles, it has a magnetic field like a... like a magnet. And the magnetic field goes through cycles and it gets stronger every few years. It's an 11 year cycle. So it gets stronger then it fades, it gets stronger then it fades and we're sort of on the ramp up of the peak solar activity and we see this manifested on the surface of the sun with sunspots and solar flares and all kinds of cool stuff like that. S: Phil, do we know what causes that cycle?

P: No (laughs). That's the good part.

S: Okay...

P: Well, there's some models that indicate why the sun's solar cycle goes up and down, it has to do with the way that the gas... is actually a plasma, it's an ionised gas inside the sun circulating around and when you move charged particles you generate a magnetic field and so this movement is very complicated and it has to do with the way that this gas is being transported in the solar interior. And what happens is that the magnetic field gets dragged along with the stuff inside the sun, breaks through the sun's surface and that's why we see sunspots and various things, magnetic field effects the gas itself.

S: Is it an oscillation like a cephid variable's an oscillation is that the theory?

P: No, it has more to do with the way gas is flowing through the centre of the sun... well not through the centre, not through the core itself, but at the core the gas is very hot, it radiates that heat away. The gas above that then convects. The hot stuff rises and the cool stuff sinks just like in the Earth's atmosphere or in a boiling pot of water and the problem is that that's not a simple system – the sun is rotating so there're rivers of gas like jet streams that are moving underneath the sun's surface. It's really complicated and the modellers that are trying to figure out how that works. They're not bad, they're doing a decent job but it's really really hard to figure out exactly all the motions that are going on inside, you know, this star that we're living nearby.

S: Right

P: So what happens is as the magnetic field pokes through the surface of the sun it creates sunspots and these magnetic lines, you can think of them as like field lines, get tangled up and there's energy stored in them and if they get too tangled up they can actually sort of erupt – one of them snaps and it sets up a cascade or a lot of them snap and they all release their energy. You can imagine them like a bunch of mousetraps sitting on your floor and you throw a ping pong ball in there and as everything bounces around the mousetraps release all their energy you get a lot of snapping and motion and all kinds of craziness. Well that's what happens. And this can form a solar flare. It's a gigantic explosion on the surface of the sun. And it can be billions of megatons of energy released in just a few minutes. That's what happened on the sun and it wasn't actually that big of a flare as they go, they're different classes and this was a fare-to-middling sized explosion. But what happened, it was pretty unusual, is that there was an enormous fountain of gas that erupted off the surface of the sun and that's not usually associated with these types of events and now NASA has the solar dynamics observatory which is this really phenomenal satellite and it's observing the sun at a lot of different wavelengths. So we have a high resolution, really gorgeous basically video, just images taken every couple of minutes or something like that, and you can string them together to make videos so you can see this flare. The eruptions, fountains of material flowing out from the sun and falling back down. And in different wavelengths it's just unbelievable it looks like, you know, ink flowing through water in one wavelength of light and in another it looks like fiery gas blowing out, it's just spectacular.

R: So Phil, how long until we all die?

P: Ah, for you? Well it depends on your lifestyle habits – is there something you need to tell us?

R: Well, you know now I'm just a bit concerned about crazy things flying out of the sun at me.

P: Well in this case, this particular event wasn't energetic enough to really do much. It did blow out a cloud of particles called coronal mass ejection, and that's gonna kinda sorta nick the Earth. It's not really directed at us. There maybe some aurora associated with this, probably not much. On the other hand, you know, big flares, something that's bigger than this, we saw bigger ones earlier this year in February, they can damage satellites, they can affect the Earth's magnetic field. They can't really cause any specific problems here on Earth directly – you're not going to get irradiated, you're not going to turn into the Incredible Hulk, you're not going to melt, you're not going to turn into chuds or morlocks or anything like that. Sorry.

B: Cannibalistic humanoid undergrounderwallers.

P: I know I know, a couple of you guys would probably love to see that happen.

(All laugh)

P: But it can have effects you know. We have satellites up in space that can be damaged by this. You're basically zapping them with excess current and that can fry their electronics and we depend on a lot of the satellites like GPS, for financial transactions and all kinds of things like that. So corporations take this pretty seriously, they try to make sure their satellites are safeguarded against these kinds of events. Not all of them are. So we have to be careful about this and understand these sorts of events better so that we can build better satellites and protect them. Plus, you know, there're astronauts the International Space Station and they can be in danger of radioactive... well not radioactive, it's radiation, it's different than what we might we might think of as radioactivity, but these bizarre floods of subatomic particles, they can come through the metal and whatnot, and I can't believe I just said whatnot, but the metal and other materials if I want to be a little more scientific. Umm, the space station, they may have to go to a better protected section of the station so that they don't get irradiated.

S: Yeah, or otherwise they might turn into the Fantastic Four

P: I think that's true, yeah

E: Oh god

P: Although I hope they make a better movie with actual astronauts than they would from the comic books.

S: Phil, if this explosion were aimed right at the Earth how bad would it have been?

P: This one wouldn't have been as bad. We get some pretty spectacular... you know you can never say it's completely safe, we might lose a satellite, some of them might get damaged, sometimes satellites like Hubble and a lot of other ones, when they detect that there's excess current or that there's a problem they shut down automatically, they go into what's called 'safemode'. Sometimes, if we have enough advance warning, if there's a big flare, an X-class flare, one of these gigantic ones like we had earlier this year or back in 2003 when the sun was just popping them off like popcorn it was really amazing, if you have enough warning you can shut down sensitive satellites and that's something that a lot of people are looking into. There's a space weather centre actually here in Boulder not far from where I live, and they monitor the sun very careful, they issue warnings all the time in the hope that even just a few minutes warning can be enough to shut down these satellites and potentially save billions or tens of billions of dollars of assets in space. E: Hey Phil just a few years ago we were talking about the lack of activity going on in the sun and how that was very unusual that low amount of activity for a long time, no sunspots for many months in a row. Now that we're seeing... since then the sun has been active with sunspots and all these other things that the sun does. What can we expect? Does the sun make up for lost time in a sense because of that lower activity and is it, like, trying to catch up to an equilibrium right now?

P: Nobody knows. I remember a couple of years ago people were arguing about this, that this long period of solar minimum which we kind of understand why it happened, or at least how it happened, but why the circumstances were set up for it to happen or not aren't terribly well understood, but we do know that it was a record length of time with basically minimal solar activity. And so people were arguing, does this mean that the solar cycle will be also, you know, lower activity? when it reaches its peak will it be a lower than usual peak? Or will this mean that sun is building up energy and it's going to explode? Not literally, but you know, do something equally serious, and nobody really knows, and the thing is you have to be careful, I know you guys talk about anomaly hunting, the sun is going to do stuff like this. In February we had a bunch of X-class flares, there was a low energy M-class flare. It was an unusual event because of that fountain of material that had never been seen before but, you know, who knows if it's actually happened before and we missed it, we just didn't happen to see it, so you can't put too much credit to a single event or even a series of events. We just have to keep, you know, averaging up what's going on and see what's gonna happen. The peak of this cycle should happen in mid- to late-2013 and then into 2014 and it's actually after the peak that we usually see the strongest flares. And we'll just have to see what happens in, you know, 2014/2015 when the sun really starts to pop these guys off.

R: It seems a lot like climate science where we can't really look at it on a day-to-day scale. We have to look at it at... it's such a complex system. You know you have to look at it at a much larger scale. But, you know, I think scientists can understand that but from the perspective of someone who doesn't necessarily know how these things work I think it's easy for the media to, sort of, blow things like this out of proportion. Have you seen anything... any terrible reporting on this in that respect, Phil?

P: Duh. Actually, this particular event I poked around a few websites and it was being reported fairly well, but I can't remember which one it was, you know, I wanna say it was the Daily Mail but that's sort of my go-to garbage tabloid, that basically said we're all gonna die. I can't remember if that's the one I saw or not so I don't wanna cast aspersions on them when it's not deserved because usually it is the Daily Mail. But people... you're right in a lot of the things you said, people don't necessarily understand what's going on when they see this thing they panic. I got some emails from some people who were concerned about this and I had to say, no, you know, this was not that big of a deal. And you're right that we have to look at the long time scale just because a bunch of tornadoes broke out across the Mid West or New England over the past few weeks doesn't mean they were swarming even if we get stronger hurricanes or more hurricanes this season, or a longer hurricane season doesn't mean that global warming is affecting you. You can't look at it that way, you have to take a step back, use longer time scale bins and hope that these trends are enough to see what's going on. ...