SGU Episode 37

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SGU Episode 37
April 6th 2006
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 36                      SGU 38
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
E: Evan Bernstein
P: Perry DeAngelis
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Introduction

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

Questions and E-mails (24:07)

Frank's Questions (44:32)

S: Let's do... let's go on to the next e-mail. This is from "Frank the Skeptic". Frank has a few questions, which are all good, typical questions, so we wanted to address them. Frank writes,

I discovered your podcast a couple of months ago and have listened to most of them. Thanks for the great shows. They are fabulous.

Well, thank you, Frank. Let me get on—he talks about some other things, but let me go on to his questions. He says,

In the meantime, I'll propose some tidbits to stimulate debate amongst yourselves and give a chance to flex your big brains.

Yes, we always love the chance to flex our big brains.

Big Bang and Conservation (45:00)

Number one: The law of conservation of energy and matter says that energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, but only changes form. Scientists believe the universe began with a Big Bang, which is essentially a theory that states that the universe exploded outward from an infinitesimally point at a specific point in history. If you assume that the universe is not oscillating, a point on which most cosmologists are now in agreement, then you must conclude that the universe was created out of nothing 14 billion years ago. Therefore, current scientific theory is an inconsistent belief set.

Well...

B: Steve, I'll take this one.

S: All right, Bob, you take the first shot. Go ahead.

B: OK. Uh... he is correct that, essentially, it seems that it came from nothing, and it might seem like, well, how is that possible? How does that—doesn't that violate the law of conservation of energy? But... it was created out of nothing—it really seems like it was created out of nothing, but energy conservation remains intact because we're still essentially nothing right now. This is because of two things, and it's kind of interesting that all the positive energy of the universe, like matter and antimatter and photons is exactly balanced by the negative energy of the universe, namely gravity. Therefore, the total net energy of the universe is zero. The universe is the biggest free lunch [imaginable], and that's how you kinda get around that issue is that everything balances out so the net energy of the universe is exactly zero. So there is no problem with conservation of energy.

S: That's right. It's also... point out that when you're talking about cosmology, especially beyond the known universe, both temporally and physically, it's hard to know if the laws that we've come—that we've described in the known universe hold true. We don't know if conservation laws hold true inside a black hole or at the singularity before the Big Bang. In fact, we don't know if it's really even meaningful to say "before the Big Bang". And in fact, some cosmologists have postulated that although the universe is temporally bound, meaning that it is finite in its life span—it did not always exist—that it may not have had a beginning. I'm not going to attempt to give you an explanation of why that is true. If you want to know about that, then read Stephen Hawkings [sic]. But there didn't necessarily have to be a beginning to the universe in time, and therefore a "before the Big Bang".

B: Yeah, that makes sense to me because one problem I have with things happening before the Big Bang—the universe—when the Big Bang happened, it wasn't like a firecracker going off and... an explosion.

S: Right.

B: It's an expansion of space and time. So before the Big Bang, space and time did not exist, so if time didn't exist, how could anything happen?

S: Right. Exactly. So you can't really—it's not a meaningful question.

B: Right. It is; it's meaningless.

S: And saying, "where did the matter and energy of the universe come from?" is not a meaningful question either. We don't have—

B: Well, there's an answer for that.

S: There kind of is, but we really don't—we don't have a language really to even ask or answer that question.

B: Right.

S: You know, is the bottom line.

B: I agree. Yeah... I've read a little bit about this, and there's... one guy was saying that, at astrosociety.org, was saying that all that would be required is just a tiny bit of energy to get the whole thing started, and... but that's...

S: Fluctuation.

B: Yeah, it's quantum fluctuations and things analogous to virtual particles, but it's... I don't know where that would've come from, but it's interesting.

S: But there's no violation of conservation of mass implied in the Big Bang is the bottom line there. I would also point out—this is a total tangent, but creationists have also liked to point out that the scientific model requires that there has been a decrease in the amount of energy in the universe because the universe began as a uniform cloud of hydrogen gas, and now we have people, and doesn't that represent a decrease in total entropy? The laws of thermodynamics say that entropy should be increasing with time. In other words, disorder... actually, "disorder"'s a very bad analogy to entropy; it's actually not correct. But that's sort of the misconception that they make. But the bottom line is, they argue that the increase in complexity of life and, in fact, matter that scientists and cosmologists propose happened violates thermodynamics because it represents a decrease in entropy when entropy should be increasing over time. Well, in fact, the modern cosmological model does represent an increase in entropy. Entropy is increasing over time, even given the evolution of life on Earth and the development of stars and planets, etc. Because when suns burn hydrogen to make helium, and then eventually heavier elements, they are dramatically increasing the entropy of the universe, and the evolution of life on Earth represents only a tiny reversal of that entropy. We're just recovering a little bit of that energy to carry on the processes of life, one of which is evolution. So, it kinda reminded me that it's similar; it's like, entropy is increasing as time goes by, inevitably, and nothing that happens, or that scientists believe happens, or has happened over the last 14 billion years, violates that. So, the laws of the universe are still well in place.

Detecting Altered Photos (50:38)

Question number two: Can experts tell with 100% accuracy if a photo has been digitally altered? Can they tell with 100% accuracy if a photo has been doctored in any way? Everyone thinks they can spot a toupee, but it's only the bad ones they spot; the good ones aren't even noticed. Could you use this argument here?

S: That is a very good bit of logic. If your criteria for saying that something exists—you noticing it, then all you're really seeing are noticeable things. You can't rule out the un-noticeable phenomena with that criteria. But regarding photographs... the short answer is: yeah, pretty much. And the reason is that any technique you can use to alter a photograph, an expert can use that same technique to detect the alteration. As far as I know, and I have not been able to find any documentation that it's possible to alter a photograph significantly without leaving a tell-tale sign behind. You can do, for example, statistical analyses on the subtle shades or colors in a photo, and they should follow the laws of randomness and statistics, and any manipulation that you do to that photograph is going to leave a non-random signature behind, a statistical sort of signature behind. So, if you have the techniques to look at a photograph in that way, basically do a statistical analysis of the pixels, you can detect any manipulation, is the bottom line. But that doesn't apply to filters and things like that; I mean, you're talking about like cropping out a picture and moving it over or actually altering the content of the photo. There are also ways detecting filters and things like that, but that's not as easy, but it's also not—doesn't affect the content of the photo. Just maybe the ways the colors look or how saturated they are or washed out, for example.

Placebo Effect (52:38)

Question number three: Could the placebo effect be evidence of a mind-body connection? From my understanding, a new drug need only to be proven slightly better than the placebo for it to be deemed useful. Given the proven and real effects of the placebo for a wide range of health problems, why don't doctors prescribe them? If New Agers call it spontaneous healing, the power of positive thinking or whatever, and skeptics call it the placebo effect, isn't it just a difference in labeling?

S: Well, that is a very common misconception of the placebo effect. The placebo effect is, in fact, not evidence of any unusual mind-body connection, beyond the obvious, that the mind is the body, right? I mean, the mind is a phenomenon of the biological functioning of the brain. And there is a connection between the brain and other systems in the body. For example, there is a neuroendocrine system. The—psychological stress releases hormones which can have physiological effects on your body, for example. So, beyond physiological connections between the brain and the rest of the body that are well established, there is no sort of spiritual mind-body connection implied by the placebo effect, nor is there any sort of mind-over-matter phenomenon implied by the placebo effect. What the placebo effect actually is is anything other than a physiological response to the intervention. In most cases, it's a pharmacological effect from a drug, for example. It's everything—it's all other effects in a study. And the reason why we design studies that way is that we can take the physiological effect, subtract out all the other effects, i.e. the placebo, and then we can calculate what the effect of the drug itself is, if you basically control for all the other things. But it includes lots of variables; it includes the fact that when someone's in a study, they are paying more attention to their own health. When someone's in a study, they are more compliant with their medications; they're more likely to take their medications as they should, on schedule, 'cause they think that they're under the microscope; there's a physician that's keeping close tabs on them, for example. They're just more mindful of their health. They're also getting more frequent exams by a physician. So, they're not... their health problems are not going to be potentially neglected.

There may be endocrine benefits to a positive outlook; being hopeful, for example. So, there's lots of secondary effects to being in a study, to being observed. There may be secondary effects in terms of the mood and the outlook of the individual. And those all get rolled into the placebo effect. So even without any mind-over-body effect, there is still a sizable placebo effect. The reason why we don't prescribe placebos is because, well first of all, they're unethical to do that because it's deceptive. And second, because that much of an effect is not worth it. You know, you can get—or you should get a placebo effect just from having a positive therapeutic relationship with a patient, and for doing any intervention. Having no actual effect is... not justifiable. You can't justify an intervention without any effect just because there's an intervention. Just because there's a non-specific benefit to the therapeutic relationship itself. So we'll talk about that some more in later podcasts, 'cause the idea of the placebo effect comes up quite a bit when dealing with health-related claims.

E: Could do a whole episode just on just the placebo effect.

S: We could. We could. It's very interesting. Well, that's all the time for e-mail this week. Let's move on to Science or Fiction.

Science or Fiction (56:30)

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is a production of the New England Skeptical Society. For information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theness.com. You can send us questions, comments, and suggestions to podcast@theness.com. 'Theorem' is performed by Kineto and is used with permission.

References