SGU Episode 397

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SGU Episode 397
23rd February 2013
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 396                      SGU 398
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
Winston Churchill
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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, February 20, 2013 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: Gott kvold, everyone.

J: I'm very cold, thank you.

S: What language is that, Evan?

E: Icelandic.

J: Did you say "golf cold"?

E: No, not "golf" cold. Goff cold.

J: Yeah, golf cold.

E: Goth cold. That's how you would bastardize it in American.

R: No, Goth, like what teenagers dress up as.

S: Somebody should develop a slang based upon that language, just like in A Clockwork Orange, they had the slang based upon Russian. Like, "horror show." So that would be Goth cold.

This Day in Skepticism (0:57)

• February 23, 1927 - German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg writes a letter to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in which he describes his uncertainty principle for the first time.

R: Hey, speaking of Goths.

B: (laughing) Good luck.

R: This is a good one. You're gonna like this. Speaking of Goths, today, February 23, 1927, the German physicist Heisenberg first described the uncertainty principle in a letter he wrote to Wolfgang Pauli.

S: Are you certain about that?

R: Ah, well. I do know it was on that date, but I'm not sure how quickly he wrote it.

J: That letter started with "Hey, Pauli. I found something. I'm not too sure about it, but I need your help."

B: (laughing) Oh, god.

R: Any more? Any more?

B: No.

E: Uhhhhhhhh.

R: Good.

B: I would never sully his memory, making a lame joke like that.

R: Well, the classic one is that he's in his car, he's pulled over by the cop. The cop says "Do you know how fast you were going?" and Heisenberg says "No, but I do know exactly where I am." Which, of course, refers to the uncertainty principle. For those who don't know, it's the idea that the more precisely we can figure out a particle's position, the less precisely we can know its velocity.

B: Yeah, position and momentum. But also, that's a specific case. It more generally applies to lots of different paired variables. They're called conjugate variables. There's lots of different things you could apply it to besides position and momentum, but, yeah, that's one of my favorite principles.

R: I didn't know you had a favorite principle, but I like that. (Bob laughs)

S: It's right up there with the Pauli exclusion principles of Wolfgang Pauli.

B: It blows away the Pauli exclusion principle.

(garbled)

S: That two identical fermions may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. That's pretty .. .

B: Nah.

S: Come on.

B: Compared to the uncertainty principle? Or the indeterminacy principle.

S: Did you know that Wolfgang Pauli, in his later years, started to write about evolution and consciousness, and he opposed the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the time? And, to this day, creationists quote him as a Nobel-winning physicist who was way ahead of his time in recognizing

E: Oh, that's great.

S: that evolution was bunk?

R: Oh, Wolfgang.

B: Wow.

(garbled comments)

B: All the more reason to denigrate his principle over

S: The thing is he was looking at

E; That's the point, Bob. (Bob laughs)

S: He was looking at it from the point of view of a physicist and saying have you actually . . . first of all, he didn't like the fact that biologists were using the term "random" colloquially rather than mathematically and rigorously. Okay. And he said, have you done the calculations to prove that random mutations can result in the diversity that we see today in, or are you not worried about how much time there was for evolution to take place. And he said . . . I guess he was advocating the alternate notion that there's some directed mutations. That it's not all, the mutations are not random. But subsequent research has definitely demonstrated that mutations occur without reference to their usability or their phenotypic effects.

E: Yeah.

S: So, essentially, random.

B: Yeah, but did he understand selective pressure?

S: Yeah, that wasn't the basis of his objection.

B: Okay.

S: And remember, this is all pre-molecular genetics. So you can't fault him for knowledge that didn't exist at the time.

B: I can.

R: No, Bob can fault him. (laughter)

S: But still, it's an example of a brilliant scientist venturing out of his field of expertise and he just didn't understand all the nitty-gritty details of evolution or biology at the time. He tried to look at biology, look at evolution, through the lens of a mathematician, and it led him astray.

E: That's a shame.

B: He should have made a time machine using his Pauli exclusion principle and then maybe he would have understood.

E: Wow. Wow. Bob, why don't you just dig up the corpse and start slapping it a bit?

J: Whenever you hear a scientist make a huge gaff like this it's because they're typically talking outside of their field of expertise, and that's the problem. 'Cause you're like he's a scientist and this guy should know what he's talking about. And that's typically not the case.

S: Um hm.

E: He should know enough to defer to the experts on such matters.

S: Yeah. It's like Lord Kelvin tried to prove that the earth was young, as a physicist, when the geologists knew it was old. And he thought he knew better than the geologists. But he didn't.

R: I think cases like that are a really good example even for skeptics to remember the importance of not relying on arguments from authority and to always go back to what the person's actually saying as opposed to what they're degrees are.

S: Right.

B: Yeah, but Steve, didn't Kelvin hedge his bets a little bit by saying that unless there's some unknown process in the earth that causes things to heat up and he was unaware of radioactive decay. If he did know it he might have, he would have probably thought twice about it. Like, oh, okay.

S: Yeah. That's right.

News Items

Russian Meteor (5:59)

• Dashboard cams capture Russian meteor

S: So, Bob, tell us about this Russian meteor hubbub.

B: Well, guys, Friday, February 15th, I think should be forever known as Asteroid Day. I actually said "Holy crap!" out loud in a crowded cafeteria line at work when I read the line "Hundreds injured by Russian meteorite." It's like "Holy Crap!" So I'm watching the video, I'm buying my food, ignoring the people, the person making my, trying to charge me for my breakfast. And like I'm reading, looking at this video, just my mind is completely blown. And not only was that arguably a once-in-a-century meteor, but we also had a crazy fly-by by the other bigger asteroid that same day, so close that it was in the orbit of satellites. So that's why I think it should be called Asteroid Day. Pretty amazing day.

E: And the two are not related, no relation . . .

(garbled comments)

J: Well, kinda. I mean it's with all this global warming and everything. (laughter)

B: Whoa – non sequitur.

S: No, that was, a CNN news anchor asked Bill Nye if these meteorites had anything to do with global warming. And Bill Nye was a little

B: Aghast, I hope.

S: A little aghast, yeah.

R: His bow tie spun around. (laughter)

B: Nice visual.

J: It's the first time Bill Nye said on TV "Are you shitting me?" (laughter)

B: All right, back to me. (laughter) The first thing I want to say about this is I love the story

E: About Pauli?

B: for many reasons.

E: Yeah.

B: One reason being that no psychics predicted it. Hello? McFly. Don't you think one damn psychic would predict this if psychics were real. That's all I gotta say about that.

E: It's not gonna stop them from claiming it, though. Someone's gonna look back into their freakin' notes, you know, on their website or whatever, from two years ago.

B: Oh, come on.

R: Yeah, I'm pretty sure Nostradamus had something to say about this.

E: That was me.

B: So during the morning commute in Chelyabinsk, Russia in Siberia, this utterly amazing meteor appeared in the sky, flared up into a ball rivaling the sun, and exploded, producing a shock wave that broke windows, it damaged buildings, injuring close to 1,500 people.

S: Wow.

B: If you haven't seen the video, I have to ask: why? And how is that even possible? Okay?

R: Oh, I could answer that actually. There were very many people in Germany who couldn't watch the video because, like the big video that was going around, one of the most popular ones, had a radio playing in the background, and the local . . . Germany's version of those guys who run around suing everybody for downloading MP3's a couple years ago?

B: Yeah.

R: Their version was demanding money for every time it was played, every time the video was played

B: Oh, my god.

R: so it had to be blocked in Germany. So, that's their excuse. It's a pretty good excuse.

B: All right, so, filtered like that, okay, that's the one excuse I've hard that makes any sense at all.

S: But there were hundreds of videos of this thing.

E: Yeah, hundreds.

R: There were, yeah.

B: Yeah, there might have been hundreds, but there's really one main video. The one, the best kick-ass video. That's the one I see over and over and over.

R: The one of the driver

B: Oh, yeah. So I haven't seen many more than that one. Except the blast of light that you see, that totally

E: Like the shock waves, yeah. The windows all being blown out.

B: There's really only a few. So I don't know where all those other ones are, but

J: I like the one where you could hear it. There was a guy sitting out on his deck, and he didn't really see anything but you hear the phenomenal noise of that crash. Wow. It was really scary just to hear it off of the, I guess this guy was using a small video camera. Hey, I got a question. Why was that guy videotaping himself driving on the highway?

B: The first thing I thought was all right, everyone's got a smart phone with a video recorder on it. All right, some guy just had it at the ready, ready to go. But it turns out that a lot of people in Russia have these car cams, these dashboard cameras because nobody trusts the cops. Because if you get into an accident, chances are that you are gonna be totally screwed because the cops are totally on the take, and this stuff. Plus, apparently, lots of government officials have, they can pretty much do anything they want on the road and they get away with it, so unless you have video evidence, you're gonna get totally nailed in court. So everybody's got these dashboard cameras.

R: You're half right.

B: Half?

R: See, well, yeah, I have to say this because I've, for quite awhile now, I've been a huge fan of a series of videos that you can find on YouTube of insurance scams. And one of the main reasons why Russians and also there are a few other countries, that it's taken off and the reason why they put them in there—go look at these videos—like failed insurance scam videos. They show people just running out into the street to try to get hit by cars in order to sue them or to threaten to sue and get money. It's really hilarious. I mean, it's awful, in a lot of ways, but the bad ones, the failed ones, are hilarious. So anyway.

B: Okay. I have heard of that angle. Not in relation to these dashboard cams, but I would say I was 70% right. But that is a good point. This thing was pretty much a whopper. I'm surprised how much the estimates changed, though, in terms of its size and weight. But they're saying now it's probably 50, 55 feet long and weighed not, what were they saying initially?

E: Ten thousand tons?

B: No, no. Initially they were saying that a thousand tons or something, but now, ten thousand tons. Imagine something like that, ten thousand tons, entering the atmosphere at supersonic speed, and this thing was cruising. Eighteen kilometers a second, 40,000 miles an hour.

E: That's mach 61! Mach 61.

R: I can't imagine that many tons, so could you phrase this in terms of how many elephants it would be. Or something along those lines. (laughter)

B: Umm. I really can't. Ten thousand, so twenty thousand pounds?

S: That would be ten thousand one-tonned elephants.

R: Thank you.

B: Wow. (garbled simultaneous comments) Do they weigh a ton? I don't even know what the hell they weigh.

E: Hey, wait. African elephants? (laughter)

R: Laden or unladen? (laughter)

E: I don't know that.

S: Seriously, an adult African elephant weighs up to like 10-15,000 pounds. So about five to seven tons. Or four to five thousand kilograms, or metric tons.

B: So, you've got this thing cruising in at 40,000 miles an hour. The kinetic energy alone would knock Galactus on his ass. So, but, even at that speed, though, the atmosphere totally

E: Is that from He-Man or something?

S: Don't embarrass yourself, Evan. (laughter)

B: Even at that speed though, the atmosphere totally made that asteroid its bitch. According to Phil Plait anyway, the atmosphere could slow it down in just a few seconds from many times the speed of sound to sub-sonic. I mean that's just amazing deceleration. So of course the kinetic energy has to go somewhere, so it went into heat. So this thing just got really hot really fast. Scientists estimate that it exploded with the force of, I've heard 300 to 500 kilotons of TNT. Half a megaton, that's pretty huge. That's 30 times bigger than the bomb at Hiroshima. And the shock wave that it produced, that blasted all the damage that was on the ground. Broken windows and damaged buildings, all the injuries were essentially from falling glass, I believe. The pressure wave at ground level, typically you'd see, if it was five times above normal air pressure at sea level, you'd see some ground damage. But this was so widespread that they think that it might have been ten to twenty times that. I wonder what that would feel like if you were close enough to really feel that pressure wave? What would that feel like?

J: Not good, I'm sure. Most of the meteor probably got vaporized, but if any of it survived, it would be really valuable. You ever look up how much meteors weigh and how much they cost and all that stuff? Like these things actually go for quite a bit of money on eBay.

B: These will be, yes, they're already on eBay and I don't trust any of them, but they have found some, and yeah, if you have a piece of that . . . The problem I think would be how do you prove? Where's your certificate of authenticity? How do you possibly prove that this actually came from that meteor? I don't know how you would do it, but you would certainly find people that would want to buy it.

S: You and Jay both said "meteor" but you really should say "meteorite."

B: Hey, a couple of miscellaneous things. They're actually not sure if it was an asteroid or a comet. That's kind of, it's kind of, a lot of people are leaning towards asteroid. It's kind of similar to the Tunguska in 1908. There's some controversy over whether that was an asteroid. The main reason for this I think is there's so little out there that they're thinking maybe it was just a dirty ice ball with some rock in it and other things. And of course there are some conspiracies that have risen up around this. Of course. I found one good one from Russian Nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky. He said "It's not meteors falling, it's a new weapon being tested by the Americans." He then referred to warmongers in the United States being responsible for that. So, yes, this weapon was indistinguishable from a ten thousand ton rock or ball of ice entering the atmosphere at supersonic speed. Yeah, we could do that. And a lot of people are saying, why didn't we spot this thing? Why didn't we see it? And there's a lot of reasons for that. Basically, it's just too damn small. And it came out of the daytime sky. Yeah, I think we should start trying to detect things like this, 'cause if it was twice as big and came directly down into the atmosphere instead of at an angle; one of the reasons why it exploded in the air was because it went through so much of the atmosphere. If it came more straight down, then you would have seen, a lot of that city could have been destroyed. Could have been really nasty. So

S: A couple other tidbits I found interesting. This was the biggest meteor since Tunguska.

B: Yup. Yup. That we know of.

S: That we know of. Yeah, 'cause some could have hit the ocean or something and nobody ever knew about it. But, this, and both over Siberia, just by coincidence.

R: That's not really just a coincidence. It's a huge '(garbled)

S: It is. It's huge. But still, the same region of the earth. The other thing is, do you know what percentage of the earth is covered by urban areas?

R: One.

E: Less than one?

B: Hmm.

S: Three percent.

B: Oh, I was gonna say three.

S: So that's

R: But you didn't.

S: So that essentially amounts to the probability of one of these hitting an urban area. Imagine if this hit Chicago.

B: But not only that. The big fear with that is that we'll mis-identify it as a nuclear strike. And then start World War III just because of a stupid meteor.

E: I don't think so, 'cause we can detect incoming nuclear devices. We couldn't detect, the Russians couldn't detect this thing flying through the atmosphere.

S: Also, there wouldn't be any radiation. Right?

B: I don't know, you see a city going up in smoke, and you just press the damn button. It doesn't take long to launch one of those guys.

R: Yeah, but where are you launching it to?

S: (laughing) Yeah, who are you attacking?

R: Surely in the time it takes you to figure out who did it, you'd figure out that it was from space.

Spontaneous Human Combustion (17:25)

• Spontaneous combustion theory in man's death

Cosmos Unstable (24:05)

• Cosmos may be 'inherently unstable'

Bigfoot DNA Published (31:51)

• 'Bigfoot DNA' study seeks Yeti rights

Intellectually Lazy (36:37)

• We know when we’re being lazy thinkers

Who's That Noisy? (45:32)

• Puzzle: There are three switches downstairs. Each corresponds to one of the three light bulbs in the attic. You can not see the lights in the attic from where the switches are located. You can turn the switches on and off and leave them in any position. How would you identify which switch corresponds to which light bulb, if you are only allowed one trip upstairs?

Special Report: Retro Futurism (50:43)

• Walter Cronkite Demonstrates the Home of the Future in 1967

Science or Fiction (59:06)

Item number one. Researchers have demonstrated that the teeth of toothed whales are not related to other mammalian teeth but have a distinct embryological derivation. Item number two. A new study finds that a magnetic bracelet-like device was effective in reducing esophageal reflux. And item number three. New research finds that bilingual children have greater working memory and executive function than their monolingual counterparts.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:14:53)

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

Winston Churchill

References