SGU Episode 340

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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, January 18, 2012, 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: Good evening. Bob, it's good to have you back.

B: (hesitantly) It's kinda nice to be back.

S: Kinda nice.

R: How was Disney World?

B: Disney, the Magic Kingdom was awesome. I've gone so many times, I'm never tired of it. Three times, Pirates of the Caribbean, and we hit Haunted Mansion twice.

E: Bob, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, they now wave to you instead of you waving to them.

J: Yeah, right?

B: Yeah, they like me.

E: Hey, Bob!

R: (drawn out) Bob!

J: (in a deep voice) Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me!

B: (laughing) Jay.

J: I love that.

This Day in Skepticism (0:00:55)

S: Well, welcome back. Rebecca, tell us about this day in skepticism.

R: I would love to, Steve. I was originally going to talk about how on January 21^st, 1799 Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccination was introduced. However, we talk about that all the time.

J or S: (0:01:13) (In an Indian accent) All de time.

R: So, all the time.

E: Ach, it's so . . . ach.

R: So, instead, I thought I would go with, on January 20, 1885, LaMarcus Adna Thompson patented the first roller coaster. Now, he never claimed to have invented the roller coaster, but he was definitely instrumental in creating and popularizing them all over the U.S. and Europe. This first roller coaster that he patented was the switchback railway at Coney Island, which had already become a big tourist destination by 1885. And on the switchback railway, tourists would climb a tower and then sit down sideways in the car that carried them 600 feet to another tower. And then the car was switched over to a return track and sent back. Which, okay, isn't the most exciting ride in the world, but for 1885 you have no idea. It was crazy. The design he created was most likely based on a railway in what is now known as Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, known back then as Mauch Chunk. So it was called the Mauch Chunk switchback railway. You can see why they switched it to Jim Thorpe. Mauch Chunk. But the switchback railway there was a nine-mile gravity railroad that was built in 1827 to carry coal from the mines to the chutes. And it was so scenic and fun to ride that it soon became a tourist attraction, and it got to the point where it would carry coal in the mornings and passengers in the afternoon. So, Thompson most likely used that as the template to create the first roller coaster.

S: Interesting.

R: And, you guys might be reminded of the Katoomba Scenic Railway

S: Um hmm.

E: Oh, yeah.

R: Which, yeah, we all rode when we were in Australia, back in 2010. That was also . . .

J: Yeah, that was the thing where I was terrified, remember?

E: Yes, you were.

R: It was pretty scary. And that too was originally built to move coal, so the same sort of thing. That one was built sometime between 1878 and 1900, and it, too, was also turned into a tourist attraction. And, yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's called the world's steepest railway. Although at the time I rode it, I suggested that it could have been called the world's most boring roller coaster, I had no idea that those sort of railways were actually the forerunners of roller coasters. So, yeah, January 20, 1885, the first roller coaster was patented. Thompson later went on to patent a bunch more things, particularly a roller coaster that featured tunnels and scenery, which he called the scenic railway. The next time you ride a roller coaster, you should thank LeMarcus Adna Thompson.

S: I'll do that.

J: I'm never riding that thing again, by the way.

B: Oh, Jay.

R: That was so fun, come on.

J: Yeah, but I sat in front and when they brought us back up the mountain,

E: That was worse than going down.

J: And I was in the front, it was like you're being pulled backwards on a roller coaster and it was like being dangled from a string and them slowly like inching me up the mountain and I was, I can't even think about it, it's ridiculous.

News Items

Ajita Kamal (0:04:14)

S: All right. We have a bit of sad news at the beginning of the show. I don't know if you guys ever met Ajita Kamal? He started an Indian podcast called Nirmukta, or Nirmookta. Yeah, I was on that, he recorded me at NECSS two years ago. I met him. Very nice guy. Very enthusiastic.

R: Oh, he was at NECSS?

S: He was at NECSS, yeah.

R: Oh, I didn't realize that. Maybe I did meet him.

S: And, so, unfortunately, he died recently.

B: Oh, god, how?

S: A young guy. He was born 1978. So he like, in his 30s.

B: What happened, Steve?

S: We don't know. So, he sort of fell off the radar for a few days. Nobody knew what was going on or where he was. And then the word came down that, they actually had to search for him, and they said that they recovered his body somewhere near his residence. There was a formal investigation, but no further details have been made publicly available. So that's all we know; is that he essentially was missing for a short time and then they found his body. So it clearly was . . .

B: Whoa.

S: Well, it doesn't sound like it was natural causes. You know, it sounds like something untoward happened. Very, very tragic, very unfortunate. So, I just wanted to mention that and give our sympathies to his fans in India. And, you know, it's just sad to lose a young enthusiastic skeptic.

R: Yeah.

NECSS 2012 (0:05:40)

S: Well, let's go on to some positive news, some happy news. Jay, NECSS 2012. Give us the skinny.

J: So, guys, NECSS two thousand twelve.

R: I think it's happening in twenty-twelve, if I'm not mistaken.

S: It's happening in twenty-twelve, not . . .

E: Two aught one two.

J: NECSS two thousand twelve. Twenty-twelve. So, yeah, this is our fourth conference on science and skepticism. That's what NECSS stands for, did you know that, Evan?

E: I did, yes. Yes. Our fourth conference that we are co-hosting.

J: It's actually the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism. So we're having that April 21^st to 22^nd, that's Saturday and Sunday, and if you come early, if you come Friday we have a few events that are happening on Friday as well. And you should just go to the website. It's NECSS.org and we have all the information there. You can register on the site, you can see a list of the speakers, and you know we have an ever-growing list. We have a lot of panels happening this year. We have two live podcasts. We have the SGU live recording, and we have a Rationally Speaking live recording, which is always good. Once again we're running the NECSS Student Sponsorship Program. So if you're interested in being sponsored to come to NECSS this year for free, just go to the website, take a look at the parameters that you have to meet. You have to write a short summary. You have to be of a certain age, and a few other things. You have to be able to sing really well. Just come, take a look. Really love to see your applications . .

S: And if you're interested in sponsoring a student, go to the website, too. This year we have James Randi coming back, always a pleasure. Seth Shostak, PZ Myers, who's always an enthusiastic speaker. Kevin Slavin, John Bohannan, Joe Nickell, Brian Wecht, Jamy Ian Swiss is MC'ing again, Julia Galef will be there. She is one of the hosts of Rationally Speaking, along with Massimo Pigliucci,

J: (shouting in background) George Hrab!

S: George Hrab is returning.

J: Geo!

S: Andrew McAllister, Michael Rogers, Ethan Brown, and of course, the entire crew of the Skeptics' Guide will be there to do a live show, to meet our listeners. We'll have a table there. We'll maybe be doing some other special events. We'll be available the whole weekend. And we certainly make a huge effort at these live events to be as accessible as possible, so we hope to see a lot of our listeners there. Go to NECSS.org. Also, if you are a member of the New York City Skeptics or the New England Skeptical Society, essentially if you have donated $25 or more to the NESS or SGU in the last year, then contact the relevant organization for your discount code. You actually get a discount for NECSS. And seriously, at the venue where we're at, we have sold out every time we were there, so if you don't want to miss out on getting a ticket, I would go early and register.

R: Good thinkin'.

E: Fantabulous!

Photographing Black Holes (0:08:28)

S: All right, let's move on. Bob, you're going to tell us how to take a picture of a black hole.

B: Yes, I am.

R: Lo-o-n-n-g exposure.

S: You might think that's an oxymoron, taking a picture of a black hole.

B: Yeah, it doesn't make sense if you know a little bit about black holes, but according to some recent news scientists may soon have a direct image, as Steve said, of the black hole in the center of our galaxy. They're going to be using a virtual telescope as big as the Earth, and they may have, for the first time, a picture of the shadow of a black hole. That's actually something I never heard about, the shadow of a black hole. And I'll get into that later. Scientists are meeting this week, actually, to discuss this project. It has probably one of the coolest names for a telescope project: The Event Horizon Telescope. Obviously, building a real telescope as big as the Earth would be just a tad expensive and time-consuming. It's called a virtual telescope because it uses a common process called interferometry to combine the individual images of many telescopes into one big image. The cool thing is if you have enough telescopes, the resulting image is comparable to the image of one gi-normous telescope as big as the distance that separates all of them. The farther apart that they are, the bigger the actual telescope you'd be replicating. Now, in the case of the Event Horizon Project, they're using fifty radio telescopes around the world that when combined will give us an image as if we had, as I said, one radio telescope as big as the Earth itself. Now it'll be far and away the most detailed picture of the center of our galaxy and the super-massive black hole that's ever been taken. This is no small feat considering that the four million solar mass, super massive black hole is 26,000 light years away, and I think that's approximately 153 quintillion miles, that's really, really far away, even though relatively speaking it's close, it's still a whole bunch of miles. And the black hole itself is about as big as Mercury's orbit. The orbit of Mercury is kinda big, but it's so far away that resolving this thing is kind of like seeing a grapefruit on the moon. As Steve said, you may think, but black holes devour everything, even light. They're by definition invisible. That's true, but we can see the immediate vicinity around it. Dimitrios Psaltis, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Physics at University of Arizona, recently said, "We expect to see the swirling of matter going into the black hole in real time. What we're really hoping to see is how the black hole is fed." Now, it's even better than that, though,

S: Yeah, that makes sense.

B: Yeah, the glowing matter around a black hole should clearly delineate its shadow. Now this shadow is actually the silhouette of its event horizon, which is the boundary in space-time around the hole that once you cross there's no coming back, even if you're traveling at the speed of light. You know, what might we see with such a view? Some scientists have speculated that we could, we might be able to see real-time flaring events occurring near the black hole. We might see actual rotation of the super-massive black hole. We could also examine very closely the accretion disk dynamics. The accretion disk is the disk of matter that is swirling around and around like going down a drain into the black hole. As it gets closer to the black hole, it heats up and emits the radiation that allows us to see this thing. And we also might be able to see extreme relativistic effects that's predicted to be acting on the volume of space around the black hole, which actually has a name. Do any of you know the name of the black hole?

R: Joey.

?: (11:45) Thomas.

B: No, it's Sagittarius A. I didn't know that. So this leads us to Einstein and the test of relativity.

S: Doesn't it always?

B: (laughing) Yeah.

E: Appropriate.

B: This theory predicts that the shadow should be perfectly circular. If it's not, then Einstein's got some 'splaining to do. And we may find that GR, I'm sorry, we may find that general relativity needs some modification. But really though, is there any doubt that this billionth test of his theory will succeed? It would be kinda cool if we found some special case where general relativity fails and maybe get some new physics out of it, but I'm really not holding my breath. But still, there's so much that we can get out of this, I really can't wait to see that first snapshot of a black hole and its event horizon.

J: Bob, do you know how black holes are created?

B: Yeah.

J: That's where God divided by zero.

B: (laughing) Yeah, 'cause you try to do some serious physics inside, you know, within the singularity and yeah, you start dividing by zero and things kinda get wacky. But, just, Jay, do you know how black holes are created?

J: Yeah, I know. I know. (laughter)

S: I just choose not to say right now.

J: Yeah, I choose not to say, but I do know.

E: Yeah, it's something to do with the . . .

B: I'm sure you do know, but did you know that, there's two ways that I'm aware of, to create 'em. One of course is the collapse of giant stars, after a supernova. But also black holes were created after the Big Bang. And the cool thing about that is that the black holes that were created were probably less massive than the minimum required for a star to create a black hole. So you could, so I'm sure the black, the big bang created these black holes with relatively very little mass and chances are they've already evaporated away. 'Cause through Hawking radiation and stuff black holes evap, slowly, very slowly, evaporate over time. And over, you know, many, many billions or trillions of years eventually they'll all evaporate. But some of these, some of those from the big bang I'm sure were so tiny that they've already evaporated.

S: Another way to make a black hole doesn't have to be the remnant of a super-massive star. It could be two smaller remnants that combine together.

B: Yeah, that's true.

S: And then get over the threshold

B: Yeah, two colliding neutron stars. I mean, still they're the by-products of super-massive stars, but, true, there's another mechanism.

S: Or it could be you have, like a neutron star that has a companion star and it sucks off enough matter from the companion star to, again, get over that mass threshold and become a black hole.

B: Yeah, it get, what is it, getting past neutron degeneracy.

SOPA/PIPA(0:14:17)

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