SGU Episode 99

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SGU Episode 99
June 13th 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 98                      SGU 100
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
'Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism'
David Suzuki (Canadian environmentalist, scientist and broadcaster b.1936)
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

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 13^th, 2007, and this is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Rebecca Watson...

R: Hello everyone.

S: Perry DeAngelis.

P: Hey.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Yeah, the Yankees suck.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Hi, everyone. In 1983, Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the solar system.

B: In 83?

E: Yeah, 1983.

B: Wait, how?

E: Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the solar system.

B: Well, how do you define the solar system?

S: Yeah, how do you define the solar system?

B: That's too long ago. Maybe it passed Pluto-

S: It passed Pluto, I think.

B: -it was farthest away, but when you start talking about like the heliopause and the effect that the solar wind-

E: No, it has not passed the heliopause, according to this, or the Oort cloud, O-O-R-T cloud. But leaving the solar system, you know-

J: It's past Pluto, right?

E: Way past Pluto. It is 7.5 billion miles away, I think, as of 2006.

News Items

New Gallup Poll on Creationism in the US (1:22)

• www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/6/8/105636.shtml?s=us
  

S: The first news item that caught my eye was a new Gallup poll just out on belief in evolution and creationism in the United States. This is a telephone survey that was done, performed at the beginning of June. And surprise, surprise, two-thirds of Americans state that they believe in creationism.

P: This is a Gallup poll.

S: Gallup poll. And only about a third in evolutionists. So there was a two-to-one margin of creationism.

R: I'm wondering, do you know what exactly the questions were that they-

S: So here's the, this is a slightly more recent Gallup poll that's, I think, probably derived from the same data. But this is, Gallup just published this on June 11th under the title, Majority of Republicans Doubt Theory of Evolution. So I think they were just pulling political affiliation out of the same data. And here's the question. Evolution, that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. And then you could answer, definitely true, probably true, probably false, definitely false, no opinion. So on that, so they give a number here of 18% for definitely true, 35% for probably true. That would be 53%. Then the other question was creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. There was 39% definitely true, again, as opposed to 18% definitely true for evolution, 27% probably true. So a total of 66% compared to 53% for revolution.

E: There you go, two-thirds.

R: Okay. Yeah, that's pretty, pretty terrible, actually.

S: But then here's another question. But here's the, in the same poll they had, they asked the question a different way, where they had people, a forced choice between these four options. Man developed with God guiding. Man developed but God had no part in the process. God created man in his present form. So man developed with God guiding was 38% in the May 2007 poll. Man developed but God had no part in the process, 14%.

E: Ouch.

S: And God created man in present form, 43%, with four having no opinion.

E: So God had a hand in it, apparently 81% of people believe that God had some or all of a hand in creating man.

R: That's not surprising, though. I mean, what's the percentage of people who believe in God in the United States?

S: Yeah, so it's probably about the same. And only 14% saying it was purely a natural process, right.

P: If you're going to believe in God, you've got to give him something to do.

R: Yeah, exactly.

E: That's true.

Attack on Academic Freedom at the UCL (4:04)

• www.theness.com/neurologicablog/default.asp?Display=119
  

S: The next news item is an item that has to do with academic freedom, which is a topic that we've talked about before. There is a science blogger, David Kulkuhan, who writes the Improbable Science blog in the United Kingdom. And he is a professor of pharmacology at the University College London. And he's a great guy who writes a good science blog that is very skeptical. It is very critical of herbalism and homeopathy and pseudoscience and alternative nonsense. And he's very uncompromising, but also very professional in how he deals with these issues. Recently he wrote a blog entry where he basically said that claims that a specific herb, red clover, cleanses the blood, that the notion that it quote unquote cleanses the blood is a scientifically meaningless statement and that it's basically, and this is the word he used, gobbledygook. He said that statement is gobbledygook.

R: It's a technical term.

S: He also implied that an herbalist by the name of Ann Walker, who was making these claims, had undisclosed conflicts of interest relating to her work as an herbalist. Now, Ann Walker's husband, as well as the marketing director for the University of Reading where Walker is a lecturer, wrote a complaint to the provost of University College London UCL and basically threatened the university with a lawsuit because the Improbable Science blog is hosted on the pharmacology section of the UCL website. The university was hosting the website. As a result of that, the university told Kulkuhan to remove the blog from the university website, which he did. There was also this other issue, which is really not a non-issue, where he had used a graphic from this New Vitality website and he basically copied a picture of red clover with their claim underneath it and they claimed that that was copyright infringement, which is I think that would fall under fair use, but fine, he took their picture off and put a different picture up, but that was basically a non-issue. So, this is an issue because this happens quite a bit and I think that skeptics in particular are vulnerable to this kind of thing where we're very critical, often very uncompromisingly so, of charlatans or of just bad science, of claims that are not justified by the evidence, especially in the realm of healthcare, it's very important to be able to say that these claims are not justified by the evidence and to also examine the integrity of the people who are making those claims and profiting from them. And yet they are, the other side, are very good at using the threat of lawsuit as a tactic of intimidation in order to silence the skeptics or to silence their critics. Uri Geller is infamous for doing that. People that we know, like James Randi, has been subjected to that. Sylvia Brown did that to Robert Lancaster, as we heard from him when we interviewed him.

R: Most recently, Uri Geller pressured YouTube to remove a lot of clips that people had posted of him screwing up. And he did it under the context of a copyright violation. He's currently being sued over it, which I believe they're still, I don't think they've gone to court yet, but it's looking pretty good for the side of rationality.

S: You know, often we win these lawsuits, and in all the ones that I'm talking about, no one ever successfully sued us because their claims are baseless. But the point is to be intimidating and to have sort of this chilling effect over the criticism.

R: Well, what Uri Geller did was he claimed to have the copyright on videos that he did not have the copyright on, and he didn't even take anyone to court. He just sent letters to YouTube pressuring them to remove the accounts of the people who had uploaded the videos. So the nice thing about what's happening now is that those people are fighting back and suing him for falsely claiming that he had the copyright.

S: But the bottom line is that this could take lots of time, money, and effort to defend yourself. And the skeptics may be perfectly willing to go through that. But in this case the university was very cautious about that, and of course their lawyers tell them, oh put as much distance as you can. Also in the United Kingdom, it's worth mentioning that the laws there are very favorable towards the plaintiffs in a libel or slander suit, and in fact it puts the defendant on the defense. The burden of proof is on them to prove that their statements were true. The burden of proof is not on the plaintiff to prove that the statements that were made were false, which is the way the laws are in the United States. So it's really easy to intimidate people and silence your critics by making these frivolous lawsuits. And this lawsuit, this threat rather, was completely frivolous. I mean, they're basically saying that the term gobbledygook was libel. I mean, that's ridiculous. So in any case the initial response was, well show me how anything I said was wrong, and I'll happily change it. And they could not challenge him on the science of anything he was saying. And that's the point. When they can't challenge us on the facts, on logic, on evidence, then they just try to use intimidating bullying tactics, basically. So it's understandable that the university would have been very skittish in this whole maneuver. I was disappointed when they decided to do this and not stand a little bit more courageously behind Dr. Kulkuhan. But just today, in fact, they did come to a decision where they've made some alterations to the website. And I guess the lawyers were finally happy with some wording. And they're going to put it back onto the UCL website, which is a good thing. But the reason why this is this may seem like a small issue, but really it isn't, because it's very significant to what degree claims are affiliated with institutions of academia. You know, academic institutions really are, it's in many ways, the gatekeepers of legitimate scholarship. They also certainly lend credibility to scholarship, or they could withhold that from claims or endeavors or disciplines. So we've been very dismayed on this show, certainly over the last 10 or 20 years, about the degree to which nonsense has infiltrated academia under the guise of whatever, multiculturalism or open-mindedness or other ways of thought or whatever. But really it's just bad science getting into universities and masquerading as real science. And if at the same time those few scientists who are courageous enough to say, hey, that's nonsense and it shouldn't be legitimized, if they're going to be silenced by these really easy frivolous intimidation lawsuits, then that could be an extremely bad trend. So it was good to see that a lot of science bloggers jumped on this issue, came to his defense, wrote letters to the provost, myself included, and I blogged about it this week so you could read about it, and that very quickly a reasonable decision was made. But I think we have to be vigilant about this kind of thing and really jump on it when it happens.

J: Absolutely.

Mercury/Autism Controversy Goes to Court (11:44)

• www.theness.com/neurologicablog/default.asp?Display=117
  

S: Another item, which is also sort of the intersection of science and legality, I've spoken on this show before about the false controversy, really, that Mercury in general, and specifically the Mercury in childhood vaccines, causes autism. Now this is a topic about which I have written extensively and researched it extensively, doing literature research, not my area of scientific research. And the bottom line is there is absolutely no link between Mercury and autism, or vaccines and autism. The notion was very dubious to begin with. It was not 100% implausible, but it had a low plausibility. The evidence was either very preliminary or it was very shoddy. And over the last 20 years, it's been studied extensively and pretty convincingly shown that there is no link between Mercury and autism or vaccines and autism. Just to get up to date on this story, so around 2002, a preservative called thimerosal, which does contain ethylmercury, which is the lesser sort of toxic version of Mercury, in small amounts that is below toxic levels, that is in safe amounts, was in some childhood vaccines. And that was part of the reason for a lot of this grassroots hysteria about Mercury in vaccines causing autism. To be on the safe side, thimerosal was removed from all childhood vaccines. That was done by 2002. There were still some vaccines still on shelves that contained thimerosal. They weren't recalled. It's just that no new vaccines with thimerosal were made. But surveys showed that that represented a very small amount of stocks that were in place. So there was maybe just a small amount of thimerosal still getting out there. So basically now it's five years later. And at the time, the believers in Mercury causing autism, which are very intimately tied with the anti-vaccination crowd, they were saying that we're going to see a significant drop in the autism numbers after we remove thimerosal. And in fact, I interviewed, researching a paper, I interviewed David Kirby, who wrote the book Evidence of Harm, about promoting the notion of thimerosal causing autism. I asked him, what's going to happen now that thimerosal is out of vaccines? We both agreed that this would be the ultimate test of this hypothesis. If autism rates plummeted back down to pre-1995 levels, before the childhood vaccine schedule had increased, that would have been a pretty compelling argument in favor of a causation. And if it didn't, that pretty much would have been the final nail in the coffin. Well, it's five years later, and the rate of autism diagnoses continues to rise. It's actually probably not a true increase in incidence. It's probably just an artifact of the definition in surveillance. So it's not even really a true epidemic, so it's kind of a side issue, but it's probably not really a true epidemic. And in any case, now Kirby and the other anti-vaccine people are backpedaling on that claim, so they're not holding to the agreement as to what the evidence would mean and how to interpret it, which is, again, a huge red flag for intellectual dishonesty.

E: Moving goalposts.

S: Yeah. It's like, yeah, autism rates will drop. They didn't. Oh, well, let me invent other reasons why it didn't. So now they're furiously engaging in post-hoc rationalization, like Kirby said in a debate that, well, crematoriums release mercury into the atmosphere, and there's increased cremation. So that's exactly compensating for the drop in thimerosal from vaccines.

E: That's lame.

S: Utter nonsense. I mean, yeah, it's lame. It really is incredible. But that's where they are now. So it's now they're backing off thimerosal because that ship has sailed.

J: Just anything to keep their pseudoscience alive, right?

S: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So it's post-hoc. So it's called a post-hoc rationalization. You're inventing a reason after the fact to explain whatever it is, the lack of evidence or the lack of a correlation.

P: Post-hoc rationalization or bullshit.

S: Right, right. And more colloquial parlance. But now this is coming up again now because about 4,800 families have sued the federal government of the United States for compensation from a special fund. There is a fund that's set aside to compensate people who are genuinely harmed by vaccines. Vaccines aren't risk-free. They're a public health measure. So the notion is it's only fair that if we really encourage people to take vaccines because they benefit other people, not just themselves, for those people who do get the bad reaction or whatever, we'll have a compensation fund. But now people are claiming basically compensation for their child's autism, claiming that it was caused by vaccines or thimerosal. And 4,800 families have filed the claim. The first nine cases are now going before a special hearing that was established to review this. And that's going to be happening all June. We'll probably get a decision by the end of June. And it brings up another issue, which is the role of science in the courtroom, which unfortunately in this country, it's possible for juries or for judges to rule against the scientific evidence based upon legal grounds. Yeah, well, I mean, O.J. Simpson was a different issue. That was entirely—this is basically the threshold for ruling based upon an apparent correlation is that it needs to be—the probability needs to be, quote-unquote, 50% and a feather. So anything more than 50%, you could say that's enough, that there may have been harm, and we're going to compensate people for that harm, even though—although I don't think it's 50% and a feather. I think it's less than 2%, that there's any correlation. I think it's been reduced down to single digits and very, very low. But still, they could make a legal case, even though there isn't a scientific case to make. And at this point, we're basically dependent upon the judges to not be overly swayed by the sob stories, to really understand and listen to the scientific evidence, kind of in the same way that we were dependent upon Judge Jones in the Dover Intelligent Design Trial to understand the scientific evidence and make the right decision. So it still may go okay, but it really—it's hard to say at this point. It really can go either way. Now, if the judges rule that these families should be compensated for their child's autism, that will open the floodgates. Again, there's 4,800 families lined up behind them. And the speculation is that this could destroy the vaccine industry. You know, who's going to want to—what pharmaceutical company is going to want to produce vaccines when you could be held to liability, even in the absence of scientific evidence? I mean, it basically makes it impossible to sell vaccines.

E: Steve, is this why we've run into flu vaccination shortages in past years, in recent years?

S: That is part of it, yes. This sort of reluctance for companies to produce vaccines because it's high risk.

R: I would have thought that the problem with flu vaccines is that they're basically useless because the flu adapts so quickly.

S: They're not useless. That limits their utility. It means maybe you're capturing 50 to 60 percent of the viruses. You're basically treating last year's flu with the vaccine. But it's not at zero.

R: I'm saying useless, but in a practical sense for anybody but the elderly or...

J: Yeah.

P: Well, let's hope in these first nine cases for the wisdom of Dover.

S: Yes. That's what we have to hope for.

Mr. Wizard Dies at 89 (19:59)

• www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/06/12/obit.mr.wizard.ap/index.html
  

S: One last news item. This one is a bit of a sad news item. Television's Mr. Wizard, Don Herbert, has died at the age of 89.

R: Very sad. I loved Mr. Wizard when I was a kid.

S: He was great. He really was. He died of bone cancer, apparently, or complications from bone cancer. But he is Mr. Wizard was one of the original, really the original science popularizer in the mass media.

R: I've heard from so many scientists who say that he's the guy that got them interested in science.

S: Yeah.

R: He's the reason why we have scientists out there doing science.

J: I think he had a huge impact. I think he touched a lot of different people and he sparked a generation of people that are interested in science. Absolutely.

P: I mean, 1951 to 64, I mean, that's going back.

S: The Skeptic's Guide is very much a continuation of the tradition of Mr. Wizard. I mean, it's trying to package science in a way that is accessible and interesting to a mass audience and get people interested in what's really cool about science. I'm sure you guys have seen some of the shows. I haven't seen all of them, obviously, but I have seen quite a few of them. They actually are really good. I mean, the science teaching that is taking place in his shows is excellent quality and holds up. Of course, the production and the style is, of course, very dated and kind of fun, actually, in a campy way.

R: Well, there wasn't just the show from the 50s, you know. He did more in the 80s, I think. I'm not sure the exact dates.

P: A little bit of a bounce back.

J: Yeah, you're right, Rebecca. He did. He had like a continuation of the show as an older person.

R: Yeah, those are the ones that they showed us as kids.

S: So let's dedicate this episode of the podcast to Mr. Wizard, the original science popularizer.

E: 99.

S: Number 99 goes to Mr. Wizard.

J: Here's to you, Mr. Wizard. Thank you very much.

E: Here's a tip of your pointy hat to you.

R: I've poured some of my 40 on the floor.

J: He would have been very cool on your calendar, though.

R: Yeah, yeah. I would have liked that. He's a sexy man for 89.

S: So we have an interview coming up in just a bit with Phil Plait, the bad astronomer. But first-

B: Oh, I can't wait for that.

S: Let's do a few of your emails.

Questions and E-mails

Rods (22:20)

Steve,

I would love for skeptics guide to cover 'rods'. Some people believe they are a flying creature as yet unknown to most of science. A Los Angeles news program can be viewed here:

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4569858645044577004&q=rods&hl=en

Of course the immediate idea is that these are artifacts of video cameras. I was frustrated that the crew didn't just film the phenomenon with two cameras and sync the footage. From that you could pretty quickly and imply determine if the event was in the camera or in the world. If it's in the world, you could determine size and speed from triangulating the two signals if you just recorded how far the cameras were from each other. It doesn't take much to really narrow down this kind of thing, and it's frustrating to see people
miss easy opportunities.

Anyway, if you guys could discuss it, that could be a fun topic.

As always, you do great podcasts.

Regards,
Matt Dick


Wikipedia rods entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(cryptozoology)
Debunking site reproducing 'rod' pictures: www.opendb.com/sol/bugs.htm

S: The first email comes from Matt Dick, and he writes, I would love for Skeptic's Guide to cover rods, end quote. Some people believe they are a flying creature as yet unknown to most of science. A Los Angeles news program can be viewed here. He gives a link, of course, which we'll reproduce. Of course, the immediate idea is that these are artifacts of video cameras. I was frustrated that the crew didn't just film the phenomenon with two cameras and sync the footage. From that, you could pretty quickly determine if the event was in the camera or in the world. If it's in the world, you could determine size and speed from triangulating the two signals if you just recorded how far the cameras were from each other. It doesn't take much to really narrow down this kind of thing, and it's frustrating to see people miss easy opportunities. Anyway, if you guys could discuss it, it would be a fun topic. As always, love the podcast. Well, thanks, Matt.

R: I'm not sure if we talked about it before, but I know I blogged about rods months, well, I guess it was like a year ago when they first were really hitting the big time on the internet. There's a whole wacky kind of cult around them.

B: Yeah, but Rebecca, were they ghost rods or were they these flying rods that these videos are showing?

R: Flying rods.

B: Yeah, I hadn't seen them before. These were new to me anyway.

R: That's because you don't read my blog, and don't think that I didn't notice that.

S: Yeah, Bob's right. There is a phenomenon called rods, which ghost hunters use, and that's just streaks of light on photographs. This is more of a video phenomenon, where on video, they capture what looks like these from several inches to maybe a foot or so long, rod-shaped image with blurry, fluttering motion along the sides, as if it were a flying creature shaped like a pencil with long, thin wings on either side, running along the body.

R: If you ever see something silvery kind of flicker off to the side of your vision, and you look and it's gone, that was probably a flying rod.

S: Now, the claims made for them are, as Rebecca says, they're wacky. It's like a little cult, if you will, or it's just woven into the fabric of ufology, of belief in all things weird. We've been looking at a lot of sites that are promoting the notion of rods, and people write some really funny, wacky stuff. But the bottom line is that no creature has ever been captured that is a rod. These alleged creatures have never been captured. There is no photograph of one not flying through the air.

E: Right. They don't die and fall on the ground, apparently.

S: No corpses have ever been found, which of course, then you read the reasons why no corpses have ever been found. Well, maybe they disintegrate before they hit the ground.

E: Explaining an unknown with an unknown.

S: Yeah. There we go.

P: It could be. You think there's any chance these are Bigfoot craft?

S: Well, some people think that they are aliens. Others that they are merely unusual creatures. But the truth, while interesting, is more mundane and more plausible. In fact, these are just insects. And what is being seen on the video is a time-lapse blur of a winged insect flying through the visual frame, because the video is not fast enough to capture them in stop motion. So you see about a one or so second blur of the insect on the image. And in fact, this has been reproduced. This is not theoretical. People have taken video of insects. Here's the insect on the tree, on the branch, and here it is flying away. And the image that it produces is identical. It is exactly what is being presented as these quote-unquote rods. So it's really QED. This is the blur motion. And if you just imagine a moth or a butterfly or a dragonfly or something flapping its wings up and down, and the path that would follow over a second or two of time-lapse, that's exactly the kind of image that is being presented as these rods. And of course, the rod itself is just the elongation of the insect as it's time-lapsed over a second. That's it. It's a photographic or video artifact, like most of these things. When things only appear on film, whether it's video or still, they don't appear outside. It's a purely film phenomenon. It does not exist outside of the pictures or video of them. And it's probably not real.

B: This is a little different, though. This isn't a normal photographic artifact. I mean, I like Matt's idea of using two cameras, because that would indeed pick out a lot of the artifacts that cameras pick up, like ghost globules and cords and things. But actually, if you had two cameras on one of these insects or one of these things, both cameras would pick it up. And you might be able to determine the distance and speed, but they'd still both be there. But this is just one of those things that's a real thing. It's really something outside the camera. It's just an artifact of not the processing of the film, but actually the film's speed itself.

P: You think the people who are filming these things don't know they're insects?

S: Yeah. I think some of them do not know. I think they're just, they don't know how to think scientifically.

R: Yeah, it's the same as when they photograph dust mites and call them orbs.

S: Right.

R: They want to believe, so they do.

S: Sure, certainly there's a desire to believe, but also you just read the way they're reasoning and you realize they don't have the slightest clue about how to think scientifically. Like saying things like, there's no bodies, maybe they disintegrate before they hit the ground. That's evidence that they're aliens. No, it's not. They're evidence that they don't exist. So they don't understand, they're not going through a process. Also, they skip the most basic process of science, which is if you have a hypothesis, think of a way to test it and then test it. And then that's what none of them do. What would test it? What would distinguish between a blurred insect and a new type of creature? Well, how about finding the new type of creature? Something. Give me some kind of tangible physical evidence that it exists. A photograph of one not moving, a corpse. Put up nets, catch them. In fact, that was done in a laboratory where on the laboratory monitor, a science lab, and they had video monitoring overnight. And then when they were reviewing the video, they saw what looked like what was being presented as rods. So they set up nets. And guess what? They caught insects in the nets, making the blurry rod-like images.

E: Wait a minute. So the rods turned into insects?

P: They're transmutating. Proof that they're aliens.

E: Another wonderful phenomenon that we can't explain.

S: That's actually evidence that is not any different than the way they're rationalizing this thing. Oh, they transform themselves into insects when they get captured.

P: And that's why we can't find big feet either, because they're the size of insects.

Zero Point Energy (29:14)

I was watching a show on the Science channel on cable, and they seemed to give some support to John Hutchinson & zero point energy, Jim Ventura and lifter research and anti gravity, Joseph Newman energy machine, Thomas Townsend Brown and anti gravity. Surprised they were taken quite seriously on a science channel. I don't know much about them, any science behind their claims?

Thanks
Frank Auer
USA


Credulous ZPE theories: www.soulsofdistortion.nl/SODA_chapter4.html

Hutchinson article: www.sciencepunk.com/v5/2006/10/john-hutchison/

Thomas Townsend Brown:
www.antigravitytechnology.net/thomas_townsend_brown.html

Skeptical article on Joseph Newman
www.phact.org/e/skeptic/newman.htm

S: The next email comes from Frank Auer from the USA. And he writes, I was watching a show on the Science Channel on cable, and they seemed to give some support to John Hutchinson and Zero Point Energy, Jim Ventura and LFTR Research and Antigravity, Joseph Newman's Energy Machine, Thomas Towson Brown and Antigravity. Surprised they were taken quite seriously on a science channel. I don't know much about them. Any science behind their claims? Thanks, Frank. The short answer is no. There isn't a lick of science behind any of them. It's all nonsense. But I'm sure Bob is now going to tell us in excruciating detail exactly why it's nonsense.

B: Yeah, just no evidence. That's about it.

P: Very good, Bob.

J: Howdy, Bob.

B: No, all right. Let me guess.

J: Nice work, Bob.

S: That was almost a Perry-esque response. We're getting more of a Bob response.

B: Zero Point Energy comes up every now and then. I'd like to give a little primer on that. I find it very interesting. Perry, just plug your ears for like two minutes and you'll be okay.

P: Go ahead.

B: Zero Point Energy, in the context of these free energy guys, in the context of these free energy claims, is vacuum energy, what they call vacuum energy. This might seem like an oxymoron. How could energy be associated with a vacuum, which is the epitome of nothingness? In fact, scientists have known for years that vacuum energy, that a vacuum is not just empty space. Particles and antiparticles are constantly being created and mutually annihilating each other. This stems from one of my favorite principles. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or the Indeterminacy Principle, which basically says, Perry, you're familiar with this. This basically says that you cannot know, with arbitrary accuracy, certain pairs of variables dealing with energy and space-time. The classic–

P: I watched Star Trek.

B: Good. Attaboy. The classic examples are position and momentum of a particle. The more you measure one, the less accurately you can measure the other. This is not based on a limitation of technology or how smart we are. It's just a fundamental limit on what can be determined in principle about nature.

S: Yeah, which is interesting because even though I understand why that has to be true and I understand what the principle is, it is totally counterintuitive and I can't understand why nature is constructed in such a way that that has to be the case.

B: You found that counterintuitive?

S: Yeah. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

B: Not really.

S: But how does this tie back to zero-point energy?

B: Okay. Let me get back to that. So this Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to the fields that permeate a vacuum. If these fields are zero and the rate of change would also be zero, so then you would know precisely both of these conjugate variables, they call them, and that would violate the Uncertainty Principle. So therefore, there's a certain amount of minimum energy that's always there. Now this zero-point energy, there's no doubt, nobody really doubts that this stuff exists. There's lots of different lines of evidence showing that it exists. One is called the Lamb shift, which is a frequency shift in light as it's emitted by atoms. And another is the Casimir effect. You might have heard of the Casimir effect. Now imagine two parallel metal plates that are extremely close together, but they're not touching. If you do this experiment properly, the metal plates are pushed together. Now this is explained by the Casimir effect, which is an attraction due to these quantum fluctuations. And when you've got a small gap between these two plates, only very small fluctuations can fit in between the plates. The bigger fluctuations, the greater amount of zero-point energy is outside the plates. So as I said, there's no doubt that this energy exists, but just because it exists doesn't mean that it has useful energy that we could extract.

S: Yeah, so the question is, how much energy is there and can we tap into it?

B: Right.

S: And are these people in fact tapping into zero-point energy?

B: Right. A lot of the free energy proponents claim that zero-point energy is a near-infinite source of energy. Now physicists aren't quite sure exactly how much zero-point energy there is out there, but many of these free energy guys make claims such as the energy in a cup of coffee could boil the Earth's oceans if we just knew how to extract it. Now if you look at some of the experiments that have been done, physicist Steve Lamoureux, physicist at Los Alamos, he's done experiments with the Casimir effect, and he was only able to extract 10 to the minus 15 joules from that process. It's been estimated that the Casimir plates would need to be kilometers long just to generate a kilogram of force, so that doesn't bode well for a near-infinite energy source out there.

S: Right.

B: And the final argument, that the vacuum energy out there is minimal, is purely observational. If the energy of the vacuum was as gargantuan as a lot of these people claim, the gravitational force from that huge amount of energy would bend space to such a degree that you wouldn't be able to see a straight line for more than a few kilometers. So it doesn't look good.

P: Is this what Dennis Lee advocates?

S: Basically, I mean, Dennis Lee, I don't know how technical he gets, but most of the promoters of free energy or what we call the over-unity machines, machines that produce more energy than they consume, usually make hand-waving reference to zero-point energy. So Dennis Lee's in that camp, but I'm not sure how much he talks about zero-point. Now just to get to some of these people that Frank specifically asked us about, the first one was John Hutchinson, who is specifically, he's very much like Dennis Lee. He claims that he has machines that can tap into zero-point energy and produce limitless energy, but the guy's a crank, basically.

P: Is he also seeking funding like Dennis Lee is?

S: Yes.

B: I went to his website. He's offering tons of videos for tons of money. It's really ridiculous.

S: Actually, most of his claims, you have to pay money for videos and stuff.

B: This guy's really a Neil Adams wannabe. I've got a couple of quotes here that really made me laugh. He said, I attribute my discoveries due to a lack of conventional science education.

R: If there's anything worse than being Neil Adams, it's being a Neil Adams wannabe.

P: That's the same thing. We attribute his discoveries to his lack of science education.

B: He said similar stuff like, my lack of doing and recording experiments in the proper way has frustrated scientists. Why would they get frustrated? Just because you're not doing experiments right. Then he said, I believe that communication between himself and the scientists will occur naturally when a bond of intuition takes place between myself and a scientist pursuing my findings. That's all that's missing. Once you have that bond of intuition, then of course, they'll see the light.

E: More gobbledygook.

B: Unbelievable.

S: Intuition. Right. Never mind the fact that he can't even replicate his own experiments. They only seem to work when he's filming them alone. He can't reproduce them in front of people. He can't reproduce them for other people's cameras. No one else has been able to follow his instructions and reproduce his experiments. He fails a real basic, basic quality control mechanism in science. Again, really the only plausible explanation is that his ideas are nonsense and they're not true. The same is true basically with all the other guys on this list. They have their own flavor of things. Jim Ventura, Joseph Newman, Thomas Brown. They're all Neil Adams-esque. They're all Dennis Lee types who are asking for a lot of money, who are making a lot of claims, who have a million and one excuses why their experiments never work. This guy Thomas Brown has been building anti-gravity machines for 50 years and yet he's never been able to actually show one flying or demonstrating anti-gravity. But they're just on the verge. Just on the verge. As soon as all of this suppression by the evil government and all this negativity from other scientists lifts, they'll be able to prove to the world that all of their ideas are correct. Well, let's go on to our interview with Phil Plait.

Interview with Phil Plait (37:27)

• Phil Plait is the Bad Astronomer
  
  www.badastronomy.com/
  
  Article on Expanding Universe
  news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/06/070604-universe.html
  

S: We are joined now by Phil Plait, the bad astronomer. Phil, welcome back to the Skeptic's Guide.

PP: Hey, SGUers. Or is it S-G-T-T-U-ers?

S: S-G-U is the official.

PP: Okay. Hey. Thanks for having me back.

S: So this is your, I believe this is your third time on our show.

PP: Which convinces me that you don't actually listen to the podcast, or else you wouldn't invite me back.

S: But I think that officially makes you a regular guest on the Skeptic's Guide.

PP: Wow. That's an honor. And you can hear the sincerity.

R: You've had probably more appearances on the podcast than anybody else, right? Steve? Is anybody else a three-peter?

S: No, I think we've had a number of two, but no people on. You're the first person to be on for the third time, I believe.

PP: This hasn't aired yet.

P: Phil's a three-peter. That's very impressive, Phil.

PP: I didn't know I had it in me, actually.

P: I didn't know you had them on you.

S: So, Phil, you've had a bit of a career change recently. Why don't you tell us about that?

PP: It's true. I went to a cosmetology college, and now I'm a beautician. Actually, I'm jobless. I decided to quit my job and move east. East? East, yes. From California to Colorado. I was at Sonoma State University in Northern California doing educational work based on a bunch of NASA satellites. That was a pretty cool job, and it was a lot of fun. It had its ups and downs. But I want to do more. I want to do more writing. I want to do more media stuff. I've been trying to get a second book contract for a long time. My first book is still out there, Bad Astronomy. I just got my royalty statements, and it's not as strong as it used to be. But it's been out there for five years. It's been time to write a second book for a long time. I've been pitching it for years. Nobody bit. And then finally, a little bit of a shakeup, and I was able to get a publisher to buy my idea. And then they said, we're going to want this by October. And I thought, I can't write a book by October and have a full-time job. And they said, well then, don't you have a decision to make? Yeah.

S: So you made it.

PP: It was not an easy decision, but it was an inevitable one. So I quit my job. And that was interesting, watching that paycheck dwindle to zero and then buy a new house. It's really smart to move and buy a new house when you don't have a salary anymore. But as long as the book comes out when they say it will come out, we won't have to resort to eating belly button lint and stuff we find under the sofa cushions. So it should be OK. Not that that means you people shouldn't be buying the book when it comes out.

B: So what's the book about?

PP: Oh, about 12 chapters. Thank you very much. I'm here every Tuesday and Thursday.

R: And that's the quality entertainment we've brought you three times.

PP: The book is called Death from the Skies. And it's about many different ways that astronomical events can, if not wipe out life on Earth, at least give us a really sucky day. I wasn't sure how it was going to be to write it, because it's depressing. A lot of these things, it's like, oh, I've whacked us with an asteroid. Oh, a supernova's blown up next to us. Oh, it's a collapse of the quantum vacuum. And every one of these is like, eh. And so I'm trying to make it entertaining. It's hard enough getting the facts in straight. You write 8,000 words of a chapter, and then it's like, oh, yeah, now I have to add the funny. And so I have to go back and jokes and make it. I really don't want to scare the crap out of my readers. I want it to be realistic.

P: Are you finding it difficult to lighten up the apocalypse?

PP: Pretty much. You'd think it would be easy. It's like, oh, all those people I don't like are going to get vaporized. Excellent. Oh, but no more chocolate chip cookies in my life. Oh, bummer.

J: So did you write it out as if you were telling a story, explaining the event blow by blow?

PP: In fact, the structure I'm using for the book is that each chapter starts with a little story, about a page, page and a half, just discussing the events as if they're really happening. And then the rest of the chapter is dreary scientific blather about what just happened.

R: Oh, way to sell it. Dreary scientific blather, huh?

PP: Well my dreary scientific blather is so much better than everyone else's.

R: Exactly. I've never heard you write anything that could be described as dreary.

J: Phil, which one is most likely to happen? Is the asteroid the most likely disaster?

PP: It's the most likely, for sure, in that it's inevitable. And of everything I could think of, and God, I made a long list of things, and going from the percentage of this happening is 100, down to really ridiculous, wacky, fringe scientific ideas, that one in a gazillion chance of happening. And the funny thing about asteroid impacts is that if we do nothing, there is a 100% chance that this will happen given enough time. Now, what kind of time frame are we talking about? Well, the Earth is hit by 20 to 40 tons of meteoric material every day. So at any given second, there's something burning up in our atmosphere. But the bigger stuff, statistically speaking, there's more of an interval between them. And so you get a Tunguska-like event, this 100 meter wide chunk of rock or something that blew up over the Siberian desert in 1908. That happens about every 100 years. So, if you're living in Russia right now, you've got a year, pack your bags. And that's one of the things I want to point out in the book, is the difference between a statistical interval and the actual interval. You know, when somebody says, well, it's 100 years between these events. No, it's not. You know, over 100,000 years, we've had 100 of these events, so they happen on average once every 1,000 years. But in fact, you might have a 10,000 year gap and then two in a row, or whatever. And you've got to be careful here about statistics. What really irks me is that you watch these TV shows about the end of the world and they constantly harp on all this destruction and all this stuff that goes on and how we're overdue. You know, we're overdue for the Yellowstone supervolcano to blow up and we're overdue for the La Palma volcano to collapse in the Atlantic Ocean. We're not overdue. We're just overdue statistically speaking. It may never happen again. And so we're not overdue for a giant asteroid impact. I want people to understand that statistically speaking, it's a dead certainty. But in fact, it's the only of all of these things that we can prevent. And if we have enough lead time, if we actually get out there with our telescopes and look for these things, it's 100% preventable. 100%.

P: Do you hold with the big space rock wiping out the dinos?

PP: Well, yeah. Something roughly 10 kilometers across smacked into the earth 63, 65 million years ago. That much is absolutely certain. The Cretaceous tertiary boundary in the rock is very clear. It's almost as if written in English it says an asteroid hit at this time. The elements of iridium and I think osmium and a few other heavy elements that you do not find in the earth's crust are many times overabundant in this layer and they're very common in asteroids. So nobody doubts an asteroid hit at that time. The question is did it wipe out the dinosaurs? And I don't think that is as certain.

S: So I'm not sure I agree with that. Again, this is not my area of expertise, but my understanding is that the more careful fossil counting and whatnot has pretty much supported the single stroke theory that the asteroid wiped them out. Actually, we interviewed a geologist last fall about this very specific issue and he said the data is absolutely clear. There is a sharp line with the impact and dinosaurs up to that point and no dinosaurs afterward.

PP: I'm willing to accept that, of course. That's not my expertise either. I've just seen the shows on Discovery where they talk about the existence of some types of plants and some types of bacteria after the asteroid impact that you wouldn't expect to see there if the damage had been as serious.

S: I've seen those shows too and my impression is they're out of date. They were out of date by the time they got on TV because the scientists I was talking to had newer data which invalidated the points.

PP: Well, I'll tell you. I watch a lot of astronomy programs on TV and I have yet to see one where I didn't just want to throw something at the television. I just recently saw one about the end of the earth and it was full of astronomical errors and graphics which were very misleading and simple. They were looking to weave together a narrative after interviewing some astronomers and the narrative they wove together made it seem like something that has been known for a long time was actually discovered after somebody thought about this other issue. It was all a mess. I thought, oh my God, I wish they had talked to me first before putting this stuff on the air because it was garbage.

S: Not that it would have mattered because sometimes they have their timeline and they just are quote mining.

PP: That's right.

S: They don't really let the scientists write the piece.

PP: Oddly enough, my phone is the hook from people from production companies asking me to vet their scripts.

P: We feel the same way, Phil. We feel the same way.

R: What happened recently with the New Scientist article that came out about water on Mars? Didn't you address this in your blog, Phil? Another example of poor scientific journalism.

PP: This was a funny story because there were a series of mistakes that had to be made. One is that there is a guy who does research on Mars and he has a tendency to make claims which are maybe a little bit on the fringe. If you notice the especially careful way that I am phrasing this, you can probably read into this what I am really thinking about some of his claims.

J: What did he say? Like he invented the question mark or something? What's going on?

PP: Any scientist will make a lot of claims which don't pan out. That's fine. But when you are making outrageous claims and they don't pan out, at some point you have to say, maybe it's me. But this guy has a history of doing this sort of thing. He comes out. He examines a picture coming from one of the Mars rovers as it was sitting in a crater. And he said, this picture shows what looks like puddles of water on Mars. Now, that's interesting. You can look at pictures and interpret them in a lot of different ways. When I looked at the picture carefully, I can see patterns and ripples in it which makes it look to me like it's very fine powder and not water. But I'm not an expert, so I didn't have any real comment on this. But it's sort of a big claim. We know there was water on Mars in the past. There's clear evidence of large bodies of water. There's evidence of massive floods on Mars. There's evidence that is extremely interesting of current subsurface water on Mars that may be frozen and leaks out a little bit. That came out last year where they showed on the sides of craters it looks like there's been recent flow. Mars has very little atmosphere. Even in the temperatures Mars is at, water will very quickly boil away, so it doesn't last long. And so we do have a lot of evidence of water on Mars. That's fine. But not ponding water, not current standing puddles of water. So this is a huge claim. Interestingly, it was made at a conference. It was not submitted to any number of planetary journals. It was submitted to an engineering journal, the IEEE journal, which is not what you would expect a planetary scientist to do. They would submit it to Icarus or one of these other planetary journals. So already the pedigree of this is a little iffy. New Scientist, which is a pretty good science magazine. I like reading it. They have a lot of good public level science stuff in it. The magazine itself tends to skirt on the edge of science, which is good. I like that because they bring stuff out that other people wouldn't necessarily do. And so the public gets to see it. And they're usually very careful about this sort of thing. And they say this is fringe. This is the evidence is iffy. They're good about that. But every now and again when you walk that close to the line, there are times you walk too far over it. And so what happened was a guy wrote an article about this. They put up a false color picture of Mars where the water is, I should say the water in quotes, is colored blue, bright blue. The headline said something like researchers find puddles on Mars. Puddles in quotation marks, but come on, right? And then it says he's claiming he found puddling water on Mars. Now, as a journalist what you do is you find other people to comment on this. And they got one guy to say, well, probably not because water should boil away. And then they go back to the original researcher. And he says, no, if it's briny enough, if it's salty enough, it won't. And so this article really makes it seem like this guy has found puddles on Mars, right? Well, then you go to Unmanned Space Flight, this forum, these people who talk about this. And there are a lot of scientists and people who know a lot about what's going on. And somebody said, well if this is ponding on Mars, if it's puddled water, wouldn't you expect that it would be on a flat surface? You know, when you go outside and you see puddles, it's always on a flat surface. It turns out that this picture was a small part of a much larger picture. And when you look at the much larger picture, you realize you are looking at a cliff. You know, not just a slope, but a cliff. And it's not vertical, but it's called Burns Cliff. And it's actually an extremely steep slope. And you look at that and you go, oh, well, obviously this isn't water. If it is, then there's going to be water skiing on Mars if water can actually puddle at a slant.

R: Yeah, I mean, that's even more amazing. He didn't discover water, but he discovered water that defies gravity.

PP: Well, it's Martian gravity. It's lower gravity.

J: From that evidence, the guy is correct. So where's the disconnect?

PP: Well, he's certainly wrong. And to make such a fundamental error, for a planetary scientist to not say, maybe I should look at the bigger picture here and see what the location is. He even said in the article, in the New Scientist article, it says that the edges of these puddles are horizontal, which looks like it in the picture, in the small picture, but they never looked to see where the rover was pointed, what the angle the camera was tilted at. All this information, which is in the telemetry of the rover, you can get this information. It's like taking a picture of something in the sky and saying this is an alien flying saucer. And then somebody looks at it and says yeah, it's an alien flying saucer that says United Airlines on the side of it. He didn't do even the most basic research that you should do when you're taking a picture and examining it. And then New Scientist ran with it and really only got a really perfunctory critique of it from a scientist. If they'd gone to almost anybody else, they would have said, look, this is garbage, this is on a slope, and they didn't. And then when they retracted the article, which good for them, they retracted the article and said, no, in the bigger picture it didn't work, and the researcher actually said, I made a mistake, which is good. But even in the bigger picture, they said, we tried to contact people, but they didn't get back to us quickly enough. And it's like, well, the guy announced this at a conference in March, and this was on the web. It wasn't even in their print magazine. What's the hurry? Keep making phone calls. Make sure you get this right. So they screwed up. And this kind of thing worries me, because if that had been something bigger, a bigger claim, or if it had leaked out into the web or something like that, then real scientists and real journalists would have a hell of a time keeping this thing from being yet another NASA cover-up.

S: Right, then it becomes a big conspiracy.

PP: Exactly. And it's really, really tough to unscramble an egg when something like that comes out.

J: Hey, Phil, have you heard about the paper coming out called The Return of the Static Universe and the End of Cosmology?

PP: Yes, I've heard of it. I have not read the actual paper yet. There was an article in the New York Times, which I read, and a press release about it. I think there was a press release about it that I read as well. It's an interesting idea.

J: Well, can you just sum it up real quick and then give us your comments on that?

PP: Yeah, there are two. Sum it up real quick. Yeah, I just took, like, what, 20 minutes to talk about puddles on Mars that don't exist. The idea is that the universe is expanding. And this is fairly solid. We know this pretty well. We've known it for about 100 years. What has recently been discovered is that this expansion is accelerating. This information is only about 10 years old. Most astronomers now agree that this expansion of the universe is getting faster every day. What this means is that at some point in the future, objects are going to be moving away from us so quickly that we will no longer see them. Right now, when you look out in the universe, there is a certain distance that you can see, and you cannot see any farther. The farther away you look, the faster things are moving away from you. That is sort of a situation you get when you have a uniformly expanding object. Farther away, things are moving faster. At some point, they're moving so quickly that they're basically red-shifted to infinity. All of the information is just lost, is how you can think of that. But if the expansion is accelerating, that distance is actually getting closer to us. As objects recede from us faster, objects that are only receding from us right now at a certain speed, sometime in the future will be receding from us fast enough that we don't see anything from them anymore. What you can think of is it's like looking over the horizon. You can only look as far as the horizon. That horizon is getting closer and closer to us, and things are falling past it. Right now, there is some quasar that is 10 billion light-years away or something like that, and we can see it. But in another few billion years, it will have accelerated to the point where we will not see it anymore. And so that line in the sky, it's actually an area in the sky, is getting closer and closer. And eventually, it will be so close that it's going to basically just encompass the nearby galaxies. We will only be able to see things like the Andromeda Galaxy and some of these other nearby galaxies, although actually, by then, the Andromeda Galaxy and our own Milky Way will have merged into one giant galaxy. But all these other nearby galaxies, we'll see them, but there won't be anything past them. And so an astronomer looking out at the universe with a telescope would have a lot less information to go on than we do right now. In a way, we live in a special time. We can see distant objects. We can see the leftover radiation from the Big Bang, this microwave background all over the sky. That basically tells us what the history of the universe is. But billions of years from now, that will have faded away, and the knowledge you can get by observing the skies will be severely limited.

S: This is Lawrence Krauss who wrote this, right?

PP: Right.

S: He put the time frame at 10 billion years before this happened.

PP: That's right, and that shocked me. That was a much, much sooner deadline than I was expecting.

S: Phil, let's change pace a little bit. One of the things you do, one of the fun things you do on your website, Bad Astronomy, is critique the astronomy accuracy in movies. And I noticed that you have done that to a preview for an upcoming movie, a remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But the preview has a little sequence at the beginning of it, which you've already picked apart. Can you tell us about that?

PP: Yeah, this is a movie crying out to be made into a sequel. Oh, wait! It already has been twice. Twice! This is the third sequel. It was done in 78, I think, with Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy. It's a pretty decent sequel, if you can get past the fact that it was made in the 70s and Donald Sutherland has curly hair and Leonard Nimoy is wearing horrifying 70s outfits. It's a really grim movie. The trailer is on YouTube. You can find it on my blog. If you go to my blog and search for, I don't know, Nicole Kidman, you'll find it. It opens with the space shuttle heading towards the Earth. You see the Earth in the background. The shuttle is headed right at it like an airplane with its rockets thrusting. There are actually a lot of mistakes in this. One is that the implied distance of the shuttle to the Earth is way too big. The shuttle doesn't get more than about 300 or 400 miles from the Earth. It just does not have the fuel to get up any higher. This looked like it was thousands of miles away, so that's wrong right away. Okay, that's a nitpick. Even I'll admit that. It was firing its main thrusters. Those main thrusters don't fire without the external tank hooked up to the engine. It actually doesn't. To the external tank, that big orange tank. Once that's gone, it only uses the OMS, the orbital maneuvering system, which is a different system, I think. I'm not positive about this. I think that's right. Then they show the shuttle heading towards the Earth. If it's coming towards the Earth, it's actually doing it ass-backwards. You actually take the engines and fire them into the direction of flight because that slows the orbiter so that it can descend into the Earth's atmosphere. Those were all just kind of dumb mistakes. Movies do that kind of thing. Then what they show, and I didn't mention this in the blog, but they show the shuttle breaking up and disintegrating. Then they show a bunch of people on the ground with the parts lying around. You see these people with southern accents saying, oh, we're not supposed to pick this stuff up because it's contaminated. This all really harkens back to Columbia disintegration over Texas and Louisiana. I don't know if it's too soon. It's not so much that. It's just, I don't know. I don't know if you really want to be making a movie and talking about that kind of stuff. Although they were making World Trade Center movies within an hour after that stuff happened.

P: It's pretty tasteless.

S: So thanks for being our first regular guest for coming on, allowing us to lure you.

PP: Well, I'll continue to eat my bran and raisins. Thank you. You got that? Excellent.

J: We love you, Phil. Thanks, man.

S: All right, Phil. Phil, good luck with your book. Good luck with your new career.

PP: If I believed in luck, I would appreciate that sentiment. Thank you.

R: Thank you, Phil.

PP: I am so snarky. I'm trying not to be a four-peter here.

R: Well done.

PP: No, I do appreciate that. Thank you.

S: Take care.

Science or Fiction (1:00:21)

Question #1: A newly published study shows that spontaneously recovered memories of childhood abuse are almost as accurate as continuous memories. Question #2: Among the many new species recently discovered in the deep Antarctic ocean is a shrimp species the size of dolphin. Question #3: Physicians report a case of a man who bled green blood during a surgical procedure.

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts. Two are genuine and one is fictitious. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics and the listeners to tell me which one is fake. I'm sure you guys are all ready.

E: Let's see.

S: Item number one, a newly published study shows that spontaneously recovered memories of childhood abuse are almost as accurate as continuous memories, so memories that were never forgotten. Item number two, among the many new species recently discovered in the deep Antarctic Ocean is a shrimp species the size of a dolphin. Item number three, physicians report a case of a man who bled green blood during a surgical procedure. Rebecca, go first.

R: So you're saying that recovered memories are just as accurate as ongoing memories. That's what that first bit was about?

S: Spontaneously recovered memories are almost as accurate as continuous memories.

R: That's kind of tricky, but I'm going to say that it is false. I believe that recovered memories tend to not be accurate. So I'll go with that one.

S: Okay. All right. Evan?

E: Wow. Spontaneously recovered memories of childhood abuse are almost as accurate as continuous memories. That's a tough one to swallow, which almost makes me not want to pick it. I think it might be the curveball, but I'm going to pick it. I will say that that is fiction.

S: Okay. Jay?

J: Goddamn. This is a hard one. I don't know. Now, what's this thing about the shrimp?

E: Shrimp gumbo? Shrimp?

J: They found shrimp the size of a dolphin.

S: Right. In the deep Antarctic Ocean.

R: Now, that's a jumbo shrimp.

S: That's a giant shrimp.

J: Now, how deep are you talking here?

E: Deep. I mean, at least 12 furlongs.

J: You're way down there.

P: There's no depth in the question.

R: 20,000 feet at least.

E: 20,000 feet. You beat me by a microsecond.

J: I'm going to go with the shrimp. The size of a dolphin? I think we would have known that by now. I thought the thing...

S: Right.

J: See, the reason why I say that is I thought that they found out that the deeper they go, the smaller the fish are. Isn't that true?

S: I don't know.

P: Moving on.

S: All right. Parry you go.

P: Okay. So, the third one, yeah, sure. I get my blood drawn all the time. I talk to those phlebotomi, and they say people bleed all kinds of weird crap, so that one sounds reasonable. The first one, I go with Rebecca there. I mean, this is McMartin all over again. I don't believe in those recovered memories very much. So the shrimp. I was in an article, ordered a shrimp cocktail, brought the waiters back. I'm going to go with that one. I think dolphin-sized shrimp is poo-poo caca.

S: You think that one's fiction?

P: I do.

S: Okay. Bob?

B: You know, the green blood. I mean, the guy could have been a Vulcan. You never know. They're hard to tell from humans.

P: It's true.

S: It's true.

P: As if he had a hat on.

B: Right.

S: Cover his pointy ears.

B: All right. Okay. The study that shows – all right, now, Steve. Spontaneously recovered memories of childhood abuse are about as accurate as continuous memories of children or adults. Continuous memories.

S: This is memories of childhood abuse.

B: Okay. Well, I think memories are fallible overall no matter where the hell they come from. I think that – I agree with Evan. That's a curveball as well. Normally, I would say, wait a second. So, I'm going to say the dolphin-sized shrimp is fiction.

S: So, Evan and Rebecca, you think that the recovered memories is fake and Bob, Perry, and Jay think that the giant shrimp is fake, which means that you all agree that physicians report a case of a man who bled green blood is true. Now, some of you – Perry and Bob made it sound like you thought that this was not that unusual, but it is unusual because physicians reported it as a case and a case report by definition is because it was unusual.

P: I didn't say it wasn't unusual, Steve. I said it was believable.

J: Steve, how green was his blood? I remember reading this, by the way, but how green was the blood?

S: It was green. It was a dark green.

R: Would you say it was a forest green, a teal, turquoise, olive, lime?

S: Dark, like green to green and almost like going into black.

J: Like Vulcan. The guys at Vulcan.

S: It was interesting enough that there wasn't an immediate explanation for that. I mean people do not typically bleed green. Anyway, this one is science and in the report, they speculate as to the likely reason for this. The gentleman was taking a drug called sumatriptan. Sumatriptan is a treatment for migraines. It contains sulfur and if you take enough of it, the sulfur in the sumatriptan can combine with the blood to cause sulfahemoglobinemia because it binds with the hemoglobin. If you get enough of that in your blood, it could make it look green.

P: That sounds bad.

S: So there you go. And then normally that could happen but the blood cells turn over so it wouldn't build up. He must have been taking a lot of it. It can't happen to enough of a degree that you actually have to treat it with a blood transfusion.

E: Oof.

J: Okay, so we got that one right.

S: So you guys all got that one right. I didn't sucker anybody with the green Vulcan blood. Now, Bob, Jay, and Perry, you think that spontaneously recovered memories of childhood abuse are as accurate as continuous memories. You guys all thought that one was true and Rebecca and Evan thought that one was fake.

J: Yeah.

S: And that one is science.

E: Wow.

S: That one is true. This was a little tricky. The tricky thing in that one is the spontaneously recovered memories because there was a third category of memories recovered in therapy. Spontaneously recovered memories. So this is what the researchers did is they reviewed cases of memories of traumatic childhood abuse and they compared those who believed that they always had the memories. So they're reporting, yes, I had this abuse. There was never a period of time where I forgot that I had the abuse. These are results that are published in the July issue of Psychological Science, by the way. And then they compared that to people who said that they spontaneously recovered the memories. Just one day the memories were there. They came back. And they compared that to the third group of people who recovered the memories as part of therapy. And then they investigated each claim to see if they could corroborate it. Was it reported shortly after the event? Were there others who reported abuse by the same person? Was there doctor's visits or physical confirmation? And then they found that for those who spontaneously recovered the memory, that was corroborated 37% of the time. For continuous memories, it was 45% of the time. So those are very similar. So it was almost as much.

R: That's not that similar. Come on.

S: Come on. 37, 45, almost.

P: Similar-ish.

R: Similar-ish?

S: What do you think was the rate for memories recovered in therapy?

P: 75%.

S: It was 0%.

P: Oh.

S: Zero. So it does actually confirm the false memory syndrome notion that false memories can be manufactured as part of a therapy session, which is designed to elicit—

P: I guess I misunderstood then because that's what I thought it confirmed, obviously. That's why I said McMartin earlier.

S: Yeah. So you got it right for the wrong reason.

P: Right.

S: Okay. Good work, Perry. All right. So in therapy, none of the cases were corroborated. So it still supports the notion that therapy can manufacture false memories. But it was interesting, though. It still was interesting that the spontaneously recovered memories were validated 37% of the time. That's still a lot higher than I thought it would have been. And also, for people who had continuous memories, I thought 45% was low. So that means that 55% of the time, people who report that they have continuous memories of a childhood abuse can't be corroborated. It doesn't mean it's false 55% of the time. There's a separate question of what's the meaning of corroboration. But of course, there's no other gold standard to compare it to. So corroboration is all we have. But even if you think that there are a certain number of cases that can't be corroborated, even though they really happened, I thought 45% was low. But again, as Bob said, all memories are fallible, regardless of the context. So I guess it's not that surprising. But all things considered, it was a very interesting study. Which means that number two, among the many new species recently discovered in the deep Antarctic Ocean, is a shrimp species the size of a dolphin. That one is fiction. But as usual, that is based upon real news item. In fact, researchers have published findings of some investigations they've been doing in the deep Antarctic Ocean where they have found—

P: Shrimp the size of porpoises.

S: Many new species. They have found 585 new species of crustaceans, like shrimp. Hundreds of new worms have been discovered. And it's actually a much greater variety of life than they expected to find down there because normally we think of there being fewer species in the deep, deep oceans and more species evolve and exist and live in the shallower parts of the ocean. So they were surprised by the number of species and the diversity down there. Interestingly, they found some species that were identical to species that are found in the Arctic. Which means that they fairly recently and probably fairly quickly migrated all the way, like these small, slow-swimming animals, all the way from the Antarctic to the Arctic, which is very interesting. But no shrimp the size of dolphins were discovered. They did find, however, a carnivorous sponge. Have you guys—anyone hear about that one?

J: I think I remember reading about that, yeah.

E: Carnivorous sponge with teeth.

R: Sounds a little creepy.

S: SpongeBob on steroids. Now, I did find what is the biggest shrimp, just because I knew that would come up. So how big do you guys think is the biggest shrimp ever discovered?

J: 4 foot 1.

R: Is that how tall Tom Cruise is?

S: The largest shrimp I could find documented on the Internet is 40 centimeters. So that's pretty big. Nowhere near as big as a dolphin, but it's pretty big. 40 centimeters.

P: That's big.

S: So, Bob, Jay, Perry, congratulations. Perry, you backed into that one, but congratulations anyway.

P: Excuse me? I believe I was quite clear about it, I guess. Thank you.

S: Good work. So that brings us to our skeptical puzzle.

Skeptical Puzzle (1:12:17)

This Week's Puzzle

Franklin D. Roosevelt
Mark Twain
Herbert Hoover
J. Paul Getty
Napoleon Bonaparte
Rudolph Giuliani

What un-skeptical trait do all of these famous people have in common?


Last Week's Puzzle

Name the former world leader that used to laugh at UFO believers, but later became a believer himself when he himself witnessed one.

Answer: Former US President Jimmy Carter
Winner: Talus

S: Evan, can you tell us what last week's puzzle was, please?

E: Here we go. Name the former world leader that used to laugh at UFO believers, but later became a believer himself when he himself witnessed one. And the correct answer is former President Jimmy Carter.

S: Jimmy Carter.

E: Of the USA.

S: Give us the story about him being a UFO-

E: Before he actually became president, in 1969, in October, he had a sighting outside of the Georgia State Representative House, I believe it was, and he had no idea what it was. A ball of light changing colors, as he described it, back and forth, blue, then orange, then red, and so forth, and apparently it zipped away. And up to that point, he had said he used to laugh at people who believe in UFOs, but I guess from that moment on, he himself became a believer in UFOs as perhaps extraterrestrial craft, I'm not quite sure. But he went even further a few years later to fill out a report for a pro-UFO group in which he officially documented his reported sighting that took place back in 1969. So as to get it on record. So there you are.

S: Excellent. Did anyone win?

E: Yes, absolutely. The winner is, and was, and still is, Talus from the Message Board. T-A-L-U-S. He was the first one to guess Jimmy Carter correctly. So congratulations to Talus.

S: Congratulations.

J: Good work.

E: Well done.

S: And Evan, can you read us this week's puzzle?

E: Yes. This week's puzzle is as follows. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Herbert Hoover, J. Paul Getty, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Rudolf Giuliani. What unskeptical trait do all of these famous people have in common? Good luck, everyone.

S: Very interesting. Good work, Evan.

E: Thank you.

Quote of the Week (1:14:28)

'Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism'- David Suzuki (Canadian environmentalist, scientist and broadcaster b.1936)

S: And that brings us to the skeptical quote of the week.

P: I happen to have one of those. And that quote is as follows. "Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach, skepticism." And that was by David Suzuki, 1936 to present, a Canadian environmentalist, scientist, and broadcaster of some note.

S: Excellent quote, Perry.

P: Thank you.

S: Thank you.

E: Canadian Suzuki's.

P: By the way, where our podcast steps in.

S: That's right.

Announcements (1:15:07)

S: Just a couple of announcements before we go. Again, I just want to remind everybody that the Skeptics Guide Uncut number two is available from our website. Number one and number two, we're going to try to keep coming out with those every month or so. These are uncut versions of some of our longer interviews. We have a lot of extra material that doesn't make it into our weekly podcast. And we are making these available to our listeners for a modest fee, $1.99 a download, to help support the Skeptics Guide as well as get some extra material. Also, we have an update on our summer event. As we announced last week, we are going to be having a Skeptics Guide, New England Skeptical Society, the Skepchick 100th episode summer skeptical blowout. And that will be happening on August 11th.

R: That's a good name.

S: That is a good name. It's very short.

R: I would have added spectacular in there somewhere, but come on.

S: Okay. Well, that's just you. And the update is it's going to be taking place in New York City. So that will hopefully help all of you plan. We actually do have a venue which we have almost booked. And I don't want to say it until we've actually signed on the dotted line. But we're definitely going to have it in New York. By next week, we should have the venue and all the attendant details. So listen for further episodes for more details. And also, of course, check the Skeptics Guide website for all the final details on that.

E: I'm referring to the event as 8-11.

S: 8-11. That's right. So it happens to be Jay's birthday, but that's okay. And Jay, you wanted to plug a video from one of our listeners?

J: Well, not just one of our listeners. Mike that runs the sgufans.net website took a really cool video of the latest shuttle launch. And you can hear him in the background commenting on how cool and nice it is. I'm sure he's going to have it on his site. But I thought it would be cool if we just put the link in the notes page so everyone can get quick access to it.

S: His site meaning the Skeptics Guide fansite. S-G-U fansite. Yes, right. Okay. Yeah, I'll take a look at that. Sounds interesting. Well, thank you all once again. Always a pleasure.

J: Thanks, Steve.

E: Thanks, Steve and all.

R: Thanks you Steve.

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org'. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.

References