SGU Episode 450

Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday February 19th 2014, 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 my friends, how are you?

S: Anything new in your lives?

J I mean you can’t, Steve, you can’t leave the floor open like that cuz I’m gonna talk about my son.

S: What’s he doing this week?

J: His pseudo-talking, the babble thing is happening quite a bit and it’s so adorable. Oh my god it’s epic!

S: Yeah it’s cute when they start to babble in their protolanguage.

J: And he’s so skeptical, it’s ridiculous

B: Ha ha

S: What you should do, Jay, is for the bedtime story, you should read him the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems.

J: I’ll get right on that

R: What a strange thing to suggest one read a baby. Especially considering that book was placed on the index of forbidden books not too long ago. Hmm

E: Not too long ago?

This Day in Skepticism (01:10)
R: Hey, happy publishing of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Day, everybody.
 * February 22, 1632: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Chief_World_Systems

E: Yay

R: On February 22nd 1632, Galileo delivered his manuscript for Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, as it is known to his patron, Medici. And if you’re not aware, this was the book that did in fact get Galileo busted by the authorities for grave suspicion of heresy; which led to his house arrest which he was under until he died. And it was all because he wrote this book that some say is slightly in favor of a heliocentric solar system; as opposed to a system in which the Earth remains at the center of everything and does not move. He couched it as best he could, ya gotta give him credit for that. Instead of just coming out and writing a full reasoned book on why, obviously, the Earth is moving around the sun and not vice versa, he created basically this dialogue between several parties. On one side arguing for the idea that the Earth goes around the sun and on the other side arguing that the sun goes around the Earth. The party that was arguing that the Earth goes around the sun though was pretty obviously the winner in this dialogue.

S: Mhmm

R: He even named the party that believed the Earth was the center of the Universe was called Simplicio.

E: Ha as in simpleton

R: So he says that he named him after another philosopher that was known at the time; but yeah, it didn’t look good. And considering that Simplicio was the loser of the dialogue, it also wasn’t good that Galileo used the Pope’s words in his argument which was then defeated. Because the Pope had been a supporter of Galileo, and after that the Pope thought that people were making fun of him and he got a little peeved about that. Galileo, on his part, claimed that he did not mean to cause any offense to the pope, but it was too late. He went on trial, it did not go well, he was forced to recant his beliefs and yeah placed under house arrest. And the book was banned and also any other publication Galileo put out was also banned at that point. So, yeah, things didn’t go so well for him for simply presenting the scientific argument. S: Mhmm. I actually took a full college course on this book.

R: Did you?

E: Oh!

S: Yeah

B: How awesome

S: It was really fascinating.

B: Did you read it?

S: Of course

E: Did you get a B?

S: Of course

E(?): Of course *laughing*

S: And you know there was other stuff about Galileo but it really focused on this book. So what’s interesting… I gotta give you a couple of little tidbits about it.

R: Yeah

S: Galileo’s main arguments were all correct. I mean he they were mostly…there were two major flaws with the book. He counteracted arguments like if you drop something on the surface of the Earth why does it not fly to the West you know, and he essentially described the whole notion of frame of reference. Like if you were inside of a ship and you drop something it falls straight down, you can’t tell if the ship is moving smoothly like at a uniform rate or if it stopped if it’s stopped in the dock.

B: Shades of Einstein

E: Yeah

S: Yeah absolutely

E: Some foreshadowing

S: And he also deconstructed the competing philosophy showing that ya know there are mountains on the moon ya know, Galileo’s famous discover of the moons of Jupiter proving that there are objects revolving around something other than the Earth. But here are the two very interesting flaws: Galileo correctly argued for why what we observed was consistent with a sun centric solar system, but he wanted there to be evidence for the fact that the Earth moving and he had a theory as to why the Earth’s movement caused the tides, and that was just wrong. That piece of his argument was just incorrect.

R: Which is fine because while he was writing the book, apparently he had called it Dialogue on the Tides.

S: Mhmm

R: So it went to the inquisition first, apparently and they had to grant the title approval. And at that point it was called Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea, but he was asked to remove all mention of the tides. Because apparently if they had allowed the book to be published with that title, it would have looked as though it was an approval of his theory on the tides. So instead it was named, well it just went apparently under the title Dialogue and it was only much later that gathered the name Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Which was given it to by an I think a theologian who was attempting to give it a kind of a very balanced sort of title.

S: The other main criticism is that Galileo did not even discuss Tycho Brahe’s alternate system, which was that all the planets revolve about the sun but Mercury and Venus revolve in small circles about the sun and the outer planets (Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) revolve about the Earth and the sun but the sun goes around the Earth. Do you picture that? So that was as consistent with the observation of the time, as was the Copernican system of the sun at the center and the Earth going around the sun. So at the time Galileo really couldn’t put an argument forward for why the Copernican system should be preferred over the Tychoneon System. He could say that the

B: Ooo I like that

S: That the yeah the Copernican system was a philosophically scientifically possible and that it was equivalent, but that he couldn’t prove the Earth was in fact moving. So Foucault Pendulum, that was the experiment that proved that the Earth was in fact moving. And it required later observations that didn’t come for a hundred years or so

B: More rotation than you know orbital motion

S: Well the one thing, the one difference between the Copernican System and the Tychoneon System, other than the fact that the Earth is moving, was Stellar Parallax. And at the time of Galileo, there was no observation demonstrating Stellar Parallax. So it’s basically the stars, nearby stars moving with respect to the background stars as the Earth goes around the sun. Observations demonstrating Stellar Parallax did not exist until the nineteenth century. So that did confirm the Copernican System and Galileo’s predictions. They weren’t contemporary to Galileo, it’s interesting.

Genovese Myth

 * http://nypost.com/2014/02/16/book-reveals-real-story-behind-the-kitty-genovese-murder/

Pseudoscience Vandalism

 * http://www.livescience.com/43469-great-pyramid-vandalized-by-conspiracy-theorists.html

Subway and Azodicarbonamide

 * http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/eating-yoga-mats/

Petawatt Laser

 * http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176233-petawatt-death-star-laser-prepares-to-investigate-quantum-mechanics-chemistry-and-more

AIDS Denialist Silence Critic

 * http://www.patreon.com/creation?hid=236649

Who's That Noisy

 * Answer to last week: Atoms moving

Science or Fiction
Item #1: Scientists report new evidence that purports to find the missing mass from galaxy clusters – a previous 40% discrepancy between observations and predictions from cosmological models. Item #2: New research finds that people make better decisions when they believe that outcomes are predetermined by fate. Item #3: Archaeologists report on the oldest human footprints found outside of Africa, from a UK site dated to 0.78 to 1 million years ago, pushing back the earliest known humans in northern Europe by at least 350,000 years.

Skeptical Quote of the Week
"'Ignorance is nothing shameful; imposing ignorance is shameful. Most people are not to blame for their own ignorance, but if they wilfully pass it on, they are to blame.' - Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell."