SGU Episode 397
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| SGU Episode 397 |
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| 23rd February 2013 |
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| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| 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. |
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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)
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)
S: All right, Jay, tell us about the latest victim of spontaneous human combustion.
J: Local police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, have recently investigated a fire in a home and guess what crazy how they haven't ruled out the fire could have been none other than spontaneous human combustion. So, for those of you who don't know what this is, it's the burning of a body without an external source of fire. That's the claim, that there is no actual external source of fire. There's a lot of history here, a lot of cases. I think there's 300 reported cases, or 200 actually, reported cases, in the last 300 years. That's right. There's a lot to read about spontaneous human combustion on line, but the bottom line is this: there is no proof that is any kind of internal chemical reaction happening in the human body. There's also no proof that there's anything supernatural going on. So in this case, the incident in Oklahoma, the investigators of the fire said that there wasn't evidence of an accelerant, which is gasoline or some type of fuel. They say that no other fire damage was found in the house, which is actually not that uncommon when somebody is the actual source of the fire. Sheriff Lockhart said they found the nearly completely charred remains of a man in the kitchen. He said, and I'm quoting, "The body was burned and it was incinerated. This is a case that I've never seen before. This is very bizarre. We're thinking someone poured something on him, but there was no fire source. I'm not saying this is what it is, but I haven't ruled it out." Meaning he hasn't ruled out spontaneous human combustion. There was no damage to the furniture or the upholstery surrounding him. The police officer also said that the body appeared to have burned for up to ten hours. The local authorities said that the victim, 65-year-old Danny VanZant, had a history of heavy drinking and smoking.
R: That's interesting. Probably doesn't have anything to do with the fact that he died exactly the way we've seen other people die with those same issues E: Do none of these investigators know how to use Google? I mean in about five seconds they could figure out that there's a possible alternative explanation to spontaneous human combustion.
J: And why's the sheriff investigating this? Why not the fire chief? Like someone with some type of education in fire sciences.
R: Well, I think Evan is onto something there. I would say that the answer is "No." They do not know how to use Google. In the past we've talked about studies that show that people are surprisingly bad at Googling for things so I would imagine in a case like this he wouldn't Google for the exact details of the case, he would Google "spontaneous human combustion." Because that's the thing that he's
E: And come up with all the crap.
R: Exactly. Yeah.
J: So the sheriff continued to say that his body was burned in an inconsistent way from an accidental fire such as from a cigarette dropping. Which, I'm really not sure that that's the case, right? Like, we're talking about someone who doesn't have an education in fire science. So let me hit you guys with some science. Let's just go down to the baseline here.
B: Hit me!
E: Ow.
J: What do we need for combustion to happen? You need at least three things. You need a source of ignition, like heat, some kind of heat, you know, it could be another fire source or whatever, right?
E: Cigarette. Anything.
J: Yeah.
B: Oxygen!
J: Oxygen and fuel. In these cases where the police or family members are finding somebody burned, and the rest of the house isn't burned, how can that possibly be? What's actually taking place? Is there any science that we could talk about right now that could make it so somebody can burn, their actual flesh would burn but the surrounding house wouldn't. Seems very counterintuitive, I know. But there are actually a few different things at play here. One is, there's something called the wick effect where somebody's fat tissue in their body could liquefy from heat and then that fat could actually work just like a candle where that is the actual fuel source. And for somebody that's unconscious, say, from, oh, I don't know, overdrinking, they can burn. They can actually die from this. There have been cases, a very famous picture of spontaneous human combustion. There was a charred body and you see it's charred all the down to the legs, and it stops pretty much there, around the knees, if I'm remembering correctly. Very important point to add in here: the lady tripped, and her head went into the fireplace. Now it's also possible with someone that's taking in a lot of alcohol, literally you have alcohol in the fluids in your body. That is flammable. And a dehydrated person, in this case Mr. VanZant, didn't even have running water in his house. So, he's drinking something. And the way they described the house, he was filthy, everything in the house was dirty, and everything. It was a pretty grotesque picture. I'm just sure that this guy was not a peak performance.
S: Well, the other thing that researchers have found is that if you have a closed room, and let's say somebody who falls asleep, they're on medication, they're drinking alcohol, so they're unconscious, their cigarette drops on them, it starts to burn, you've got the inside-out wick effect going on; that the burning will eat up the oxygen in the room. So the oxygen will drop to very low levels; too low for there to be big flames. So that's why the room doesn't go up in flames. But the body
E: continues to burn, yeah.
S: can slowly burn and consume the body, just leaving the extremities, the feet and you know, and the head or whatever, without causing a lot of flame damage to surrounding furniture or to the room. And that perfectly explains cases like this. That has been demonstrated experimentally. It's only unknown to people who have never investigated, who don't know what they're talking about. So this is an absolutely typical case of not spontaneous combustion. It may not be that common for all of those variables to be there at the same time, but there are a couple hundred or so cases that are documented in which this is what happened. So it's not surprising at all, actually.
R: I think we're going to continue to hear the spontaneous combustion b.s. until it happens to a Russian standing right in front of his car. (laughter)
E: A dog, right? Or a cat. Animals . . . only humans ever seem to combust.
S: There's no spontaneous cow combustion. (laughter)
E: No. No.
R: I'm sorry I laugh, but . . . as a vegetarian I shouldn't laugh at that visual, but it's quite funny.
Cosmos Unstable (24:05)
S: But, don't worry, Jay, because before too long, the entire universe is going to collapse.
E: I knew it.
S: So you don't have to worry about spontaneous human combustion.
B: No, it's not.
S: Well, hang on. So, it turns out that it's possible our universe may be inherently unstable. And that all it has to do with the damn Higgs boson.
R: I knew that little guy was gonna cause trouble.
E: I blame you, Bob.
B: Don't use Higgs in vain.
S: So, the current estimate of the mass of the Higgs, Bob?
B: Is it twenty . . .
S: One hundred and twenty-six giga-electron volts. Puts it right into that range that when the physicists, you know, the theoretical physicists, do all the calculations about the ground state of the universe and all that, it turns out that that's right in the zone that if the Higgs has that weight, the ground state of the universe, the vacuum of the universe, is unstable. It's called vacuum instability. And this means that the universe has a half-life. That at some point in time, the universe will spontaneously collapse to a lower energy vacuum state, which will essentially start a new universe, in a way, and if you imagine what everyone describes this as is everything, like a wave of destruction utterly annihilating everything in its path that moves through the universe at the speed of light.
B: I hate when that happens.
S: Now I don't know where this would start; there's no such thing as the center of the universe. But, I guess it would, maybe it would start in multiple places at once, I don't know. But just imagine this wave of annihilation moving at the speed of light through the universe as it collapses to a more stable state. Now, the interesting thing is, various physical properties will make our universe stable. Other arrangements of those physical properties, again, like the mass of the Higgs being one; the mass of the top quark apparently is another one that's related to this; would make the universe unstable, and in between there is this narrow band that is called "meta-stable" which essentially means that the universe is unstable, but it will take longer than the age of the universe for it to collapse. For this to happen. So it's not technically stable, but you don't have to worry about it 'cause it would take so long to collapse, the universe is longer than that. Anyway, the age of the universe would be longer than that.
R: I mean you probably don't have to worry about it anyway. (laughter) We're still talking about quite a long time.
S: Yeah, it would be billions of years from now, in any case.
B: Yeah, but Steve, the interesting thing that I remember reading about this was that 124 to 126 gev, that's right on the border, that's a special number, for this thing to happen.
S: Yeah, that's what I'm saying, it puts us right in that narrow meta-stable band. It seems like another massive coincidence about the laws of the universe that happens to put it in this special state, this meta-stability. Now, of course, the LHC is shutting down for two years for upgrades and maintenance. They have to do this. But when it comes back online in 2015 it'll be able to get up to higher energies, and it will take a couple of years to gather data and analyze data to refine the mass of the Higgs. So we won't know for four or five years or so if the current estimate of the mass of the Higgs is accurate. If the mass is higher, then we may get back into the stable zone. And of course there are other things that could also re-establish the stability of the universe. Again, like whatever the mass of the top quark turns out to be. But also apparently that there may be solutions to this in super-symmetry and in string theory. So, I know that the super-symmetry proponents are loving this, because they say "Oh we can solve this problem with super-symmetry." And the other thing that I read where multiple people, multiple physicists were saying "Well, this is also only true if the standard model is accurate throughout the entire range of possible energy states." And that, it's possible that the standard model doesn't hold up, and that it breaks down at higher energies, you know, and that some deeper model actually holds true, and
E: So does that inoculate us from this catastrophe?
S: Yes. Yes. Yeah, so this instability will go away if the standard model does not hold up throughout the entire range of energies. So there's lots of other unknowns here. So I wouldn't panic just yet that this is going to happen.
E: Phew. Don't panic.
S: It is interesting that the values that we have now puts us in this little narrow band of meta-stability.
B: Yeah, that's a little scary.
S: And you wonder, you know the laws of the universe seems to conspire to, you know this is all the anthropic principle, right? So, if gravity were a little bit different, we wouldn't be here. If any of a hundred properties of the universe were a little bit different, we wouldn't have the stability necessary for us to evolve.
J: You think that if humanity survives for, what did you say, eight billion years? And they're at the end, like the end is coming, do you think that our technology could be so advanced that we could make it through?
S: Oh, you can't even think about that. I mean, it doesn't seem likely. I mean, who could, change the laws of physics? I mean, it doesn't seem likely.
E: We can't confirm that it hasn't started.
B: I don't know, Steve. Eight billion years of research? We could do a lot of stuff.
S: So that's what I'm saying, you can't even think about it.
B: If we're still around you certainly won't be able to call them human, that's for damn sure.
E: What if it's started already and it's already seven billion years somewhere into its . . .
S: Yeah, it could be just so far away that it won't get to us for awhile.
B: Well, the thing is, if it's approaching you at the speed of light, you won't know it until it's right on your, in your face.
E: That's kind of the point. So can we ever really know?
J: It's like the nothing from that movie, what was that one, Atreyu, remember that?
S: Oh, yeah. The Neverending Story of the Nothing, yeah.
R: Oh, right. That was terrifying.
S: Also, that was a Dr. Who episode, or series of episodes, where the universe was just going away. The lights were blinking out, and the nothing was taking over everything.
E: There you go, Jay.
S: So we need Dr. Who to fix it. He's got to throw his Tardis into the sun and it's gotta explode in something and that will
R: Don't be ridiculous, that's not, that won't fix anything. I wonder if the alternate universe already exists, though. Not that it would necessarily be already coming at us and existing in our universe. But does it already exist elsewhere, and then it pops into our universe, or is what they're saying that it would spring into being for the first time within our universe.
S: So, what some physicists are saying is that this could lead to a cyclical universe and that maybe when this happens it's actually the quote, unquote, big bang that leads to the next cycle.
B: Oh, yeah.
R: Right.
S: And that has a half-life of whatever, twenty, thirty billion years. And then at some point it happens again, and you get another big bang and another universe. This keeps happening over and over again. And some people think that that's a real probability. That that's the way the laws of physics may work.
R: That'd be all right.
S: Yeah.
E: I'm okay with that scenario.
B: I could deal with that.
R: See? So don't we all fell better now?
E: I'm good for twenty or thirty billion.
S: Yeah.
J: Yeah, I wouldn't mind taking a billion years to contemplate this issue. (laughter)
Bigfoot DNA Published (31:51)
S: All right, Evan. So we talked, a couple of months ago I think, about the analysis of alleged Bigfoot DNA, but at the time the results were not published. But I hear that they were finally published in a journal.
E: Yup, finally published in a
R: Wow.
E: In a journal.
R: What journal would do such a thing?
E: Well, is it Nature, is it Science, I mean, you know, so many reputable . . . is it The New England Journal of Medicine? Not quite. Well, Steve, you're right. We talked a few months ago about Dr. Melba Ketchum, and she's the Texas veterinarian who claims to have acquired a lot of Bigfoot DNA. And for five years she and her colleagues have been testing the DNA. And they came to the conclusion that yes, in fact, they came up, this is authentic Bigfoot DNA. Let's see, it is the, it's a human relative that arose approximately 15,000 years ago, this is their claim. A hybrid cross of modern homo sapiens with an unknown primate species. Right? So, they claim that of their samples that the mitochondrial DNA is human, that would be the female half. And the nuclear DNA is an unknown hominid related to homo sapiens. Some big boy in the woods, right? And that's the claim. So, like you were saying, Steve, they took this idea, put it into a paper, shopped it around to a lot of different places asking journals all over the place to please, please publish this. They felt the science was perhaps sketchy at best, and outright nonsense at worst. Nobody would publish it, so what do you do? Right? What's the old adage, if you can't get someone to publish your paper then create your own journal and publish it there.
S: That's an old adage? (laughter)
E: That's what my old grandpappy would tell me.
B: Okay.
E: Enter DeNovo Scientific Journal.
S: Is that a new scientific journal?
E: It is, it's so fresh (laughter)
S; De novo
E: Novo meaning new. Yes.
S: Will you explain the joke there, Evan. (laughter)
R: That's my favorite part. (laughter)
E: Ketchum herself, here is what she said:
Rather than spend another five years just trying to find a journal to publish and hoping that decent open-minded reviewers would be chosen, we acquired the rights to another journal, this journal, and renamed it so that we would not lose the passing peer reviews that are expected by the public and scientific community.
Uh huh.
S: Right. So she made a new journal solely for the purpose of publishing her own paper, put out Volume 1, Issue 1 with a single paper in it her own.
R: Called it open access and then charged people (laughter) . . . her article.
E: If that's not scientific transparency, I don't know what is.
S: Good job. That's good work, boys.
E: Here's what Todd Disotell, a human origins expert at New York University, said about this:
DeNovo is clearly a fake vanity journal with lots of shutter stock pictures, misspellings, and it was created on February 4, 2013. I've only read the abstract and conclusion of the paper and neither makes any sense.
R: It is remarkable how many typos are on that website. For it being so small.
S: It's a hack job. So let me, very quickly, let me review the DNA evidence, because I was recently asked about previous articles that I had written about the Starchild Project. Do you guys remember that? The alleged alien-human hybrid?
B: Oh, yeah.
E: Lloyd Pye.
S: Lloyd Pye. He's still pushing this. What's remarkable is that the exact same thing happened in both cases. In one case studying alleged Bigfoot DNA and the other an alien-human hybrid DNA. What both cases found is that mitochondrial DNA was a hundred percent human. Now mitochondrial DNA is smaller and more stable. So it's easier to get a thorough analysis of that DNA, a sequence of it. So the sequences that they can get were a hundred percent human. The nuclear DNA, which is bigger and less stable, they both found some human DNA plus some anomalies, which could potentially be contaminants.
B: Therefore, Bigfoot exists! (laughter)
S: Yeah, and in one case they interpreted it as an alien and in another case they interpreted it as Bigfoot. But both of the results are the exact same thing. Everything that we know about is a hundred percent human, but there's probably just some sloppy technique or whatever on old nuclear DNA that's degraded, and they came up with some anomalies, and in both cases they concluded hybrid. Unbelievable. Coincidence?
E: Science! (laughter) Coincidence? I think not.
Intellectually Lazy (36:37)
S: In fact, one might even call it intellectually lazy.
R: Oh, ho. Yeah. Hey, it's funny you should mention that, Steve, because I just read an interesting article based on a study that just came out. In the
B: Wait, are you doing your own segue?
R: Yeah, 'cause I'm better at it than Steve, so I finally decided to take
B: Awesome, okay.
R: Take matter into my own hands.
B: Sorry to interrupt.
R: In the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, which is not a b.s. journal that was created last week. (laughter)
B: Really.
R: to publish one study. It does sound kind of b.s.-y, doesn't it?
E: Yeah.
R: "Psychonomic." True story. I had a guy on Twitter, he got in touch with me because he was writing an article debunking skeptics, and he asked me for my credentials.
J: Debunking skeptics?
R: Yeah. (laughter) Yeah. He wanted to
S: There's a few of 'em out there, yeah.
E: How'd that turn out?
R: He wanted to prove that no skeptics, like the skeptics who were in the public spotlight, didn't have scientific training. And so he asked me what my scientific credentials were, and I had a Ph.D. in theoretical biology. I named a diploma mill, and I'm still waiting for him to write his article, but I cannot wait.
B: Theoretical biology, nice.
R: Yeah, it's a good . . . I was really proud when I came up with that. Okay, so anyway. The Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, real journal talking about real psychology. It was quite interesting. What these researchers found was that we are all intellectually lazy. But, we know we're intellectually lazy. And we feel a little guilty about it, maybe. So what they did was, they took a couple hundred people, and they gave them the bat and ball problem. Which, I'm sure everyone at this point has, everybody on this podcast has probably heard already. I think we've talked about it before. It's a simple word problem that goes like this: A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? So, many people who have not heard this problem before will intuitively say that the ball costs ten cents. But if you think about it for a minute, then you'll realize that the correct answer is that the ball costs five cents. And the bat is one dollar more, a dollar five, adds up to a dollar ten. So, it's something that requires just a slight amount of effort to think through and solve. So the researchers gave all their subjects that problem, and they also gave them a second problem, which was an easier, a simpler version, of that problem. And this one goes: a magazine and a banana together cost $2.90. The magazine costs $2.00. How much does the banana cost? That's just a simple case of subtraction. The banana costs ninety cents. Easy. They gave these tests to all of these university students. 248 French university students. And among them, 21 percent managed to solve the bat and ball problem correctly. And the simpler problem 98 percent of participants solved correctly. So so far kind of obvious. The slightly harder problem was slightly harder to solve. So fewer people solved it.
S: Let me just add one little wrinkle, though. It's not just that it's harder, it's designed in a way to encourage you to substitute a simpler operation for the more complex operation, and that's what people do. They substitute the subtraction for the more difficult operation you have to do to get the right answer.
R: Good point, yeah.
S: It's a subtle difference. But that's actually, that's the intellectual lazy part here, is substituting the easier calculation. Even though you know it's not really the right one.
R: Right. The second problem that they came up with, the control problem, the easy problem, is meant to mimic what your brain is doing when you get the first problem wrong. You're doing a simple subtraction. So, here's where it gets interesting, though. The researchers asked people to give an idea of how confident they were that they were correct on each question. And what they found was that people seemed to know that they were being intellectually lazy because they were answering that they were less confident of the standard bat-and-ball problem than they were for the control simple version. So the researchers were interpreting this as saying that we are not oblivious to the fact that we are cutting corners, that we're being intellectually lazy. So, that's the new part of this. Not that we are intellectually lazy, I think everybody already figured that. But that we know when we're being intellectually lazy. Which is kind of interesting.
E: I was a bit surprised reading this. I would have thought they might have realized this sooner than, well, sooner than recently.
S: I was not surprised by this because if you read Thomas Gilovich's book, How We Know What Isn't So, he makes a big point of that, that when we do take mental shortcuts or when we're being biased in our reasoning, we generally know it. We generally are being totally transparent and we even know that we're being transparent. In other words, you may say something that's safe, that's face-saving, but not honest and other people can see right through you and we assume "doesn't that person know how obvious he's being, how transparent he's being?" It turns out people do know how transparent they're being, but it's still the pathway of least resistance to say the face-saving thing. So this kind of goes along with that. We know we're taking mental shortcuts but we do it anyway. So we actually have more insight than may naively seem to be the case.
R: But apparently there are plenty of people out there, psychologists, who did still think that we were happy fools, I think is the phrase that they used. That we were just sort of dumbly being dumb. And not realizing it. So this goes against that.
E: Think there's an evolutionary advantage in there somewhere?
S: I think it's just conflicts between different parts of the brain. The social part of the brain and the more rational part of the brain, and the social part seems to win out a lot of the time. We do what is the social pathway of least resistance, even when we know we're doing something wrong or taking shortcuts. And this is different, this is not social, this is just, sometimes we do the simpler thing 'cause it's easier, even when we know we're taking shortcuts and it doesn't make us confident in our results.
R: I found it interesting that in this article they refer to it as being intellectually miserly. Which suggests that we're saving something by not thinking a problem through completely, whether that's time or brain power, somehow . . . they don't go into. But, I mean, I guess there are some advantages to taking shortcuts sometimes.
S: What's interesting is that a lot of the time we're operating at pretty much the extent of our raw brain power, even though we may not realize it.
E: We're only using ten percent of it. (laughter)
J: You mean, Steve, this is as good as it's gonna get for me?
S: No, no, not at all. But, what I'm saying is, you may not realize how much of your brain's raw resources you're using in just everyday mental activity. That's why things like talking on the phone when driving reduces your performance. There's a phenomenon called interference. It may seem like you have all this extra brain power, you're not really working very hard, but your brain actually is working very hard. It's deciding what information to pay attention to; it's allocating resources; it's doing all kinds of stuff in the background, even when you're not consciously, necessarily, working on a hard problem. And so it makes sense that we would have all these mental shortcuts that try to be miserly; that try to get things done quickly without having to use up a lot of our brain resources, because we need those brain resources to run away from tigers or whatever, you know.
R: And of course this feeds into the study we talked about last week, the invisible gorilla test that was done on the radiologists.
S; Exactly.
R: Same sort of deal.
J: So this is as good as it's gonna get for me.
R: Well, for you, probably yes.
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?
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Special Report: Retro Futurism (50:43)
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
Announcements
NECSS 2013 (1:15:28)
References
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