SGU Episode 312

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SGU Episode 312
5th Jul 2011
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 1                      SGU 300
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
JR: James Randi
Quote of the Week
Death is an engineering problem.
Bart Kosko
Links
Download Podcast
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Forum Discussion

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 Tuesday July 5th, 2011 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: Yo

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Good evening, eh?

B: Oh, boy, did you run out of languages already?

E: Don't accuse me of that, Bob, we had to get to Canadian at some point.

S: You hoser!

B: Oh, boy.

R: French Canadians are furious right now.

J: Did you fall out of bed ten minutes ago? What's up?

S: Redeem yourself, Evan. Tell us what's special about today.

This Day in Skepticism (0:56)

E: Alright, so July 9, and the year was 1595.

S: One of my favorite years, top five.

E: Top five, top five, boys. Johannes Kepler, who we've spoken about many times on this show. Well, it says he published his Mysterium Cosmigraphicum, which, translated is Mystery of the Cosmos. Now, I looked this up a little bit further, and I have more references referencing that this was the actual date he made the discovery, or he had the epiphany, as it were, as he was teaching his class, rather than actually the work getting published. The work got published a year later. So I'm going with that he came up with the epiphany; the idea. And the idea is, well, I mean, Kepler said it best in his official title of this book, which is Forerunner of the Cosmological Essays, Which Contain the Secret of the Universe; on the Marvelous Proportion of the Celestial Spheres, and on the True and Particular Causes of the Number, Magnitude, and Periodic Motions of the Heavens; Established By Means of the Five Regular Geometric Solids

S: Right.

J: I'm sorry, I missed that. Can you say that again?

E: Available on Kindle and other e-books, I'm sure.

S: What's cool is that at this point in his career, Kepler was essentially the equivalent of a crank. He had an idea that was little more than mental masturbation / pattern recognition, and then elaborated on it significantly. It was this beautiful elegant geometrical mathematical pattern pareidolia, but it had absolutely nothing to do with reality. Of course if he never got past that; if he never got past his beautiful idea, we wouldn't know his name today, or he would be a footnote somewhere, but he basically would have been a crank. But that's not what happened.

J: Well, when did Kepler's laws come out? Was it soon after this? I forget.

E: It was after he collaborated with Tycho Brahe.

J: Yeah, that was a fruitful collaboration.

R: (unintelligible)

E: And not long after Brahe died -- and this was about 25 years later -- Kepler's book, Epitome -- The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy in 1615, so 20 years later. And that's where his three laws of planetary motion were contained, in which he came to the mathematical proofs about how planets revolve around the sun in elipses, not in perfect circles or any other perfect geometry having to do with it. It was still a mystery though as to why planets orbit in elipses. And as Carl Sagan reminds us in his brilliant series Cosmos, these are not only the laws that our planet and our solar system obey, but it's universal. Everywhere in the universe, this occurs.

S: Well, he didn't know about gravity.

B: That's kind of a key thing to be missing.

S: That had to wait for Newton.

J: How could he not know about gravity though?

S: Well, you take it for granted, but he didn't —

J: Quantified, you know, mathematical gravitation

S: Yeah, but even conceptually, he didn't even know that all matter attracted all other matter to itself by some force.

B: Right, yeah, it's even worse (unintelligible) mathematics.

S: Yeah, they were thinking about it in ways that are bizarre to our modern concept of things. I don't know what the actual state of thinking was in Kepler's time, but if you go back to like Aristotle, they were thinking that oh, the universe things have a natural tendency to move toward the center of the universe, you know, which is the center of the Earth. Like they were thinking in those kind of terms. Not anything equivalent to what we think of as gravity.

J: Over the weekend, while we were celebrating Bob's birthday and the 4th of July -- Happy Birthday, Bob -- I was talking about gravity and I said "If there's anything magical out there, it's gravity". Like, think about it, we started trippin' out about how weird gravity is, I mean, we really don't understand it. As we all know gravity is -- what -- it's like a bowling ball on a big trampoline; it leaves like a dimple in space-time, whatever. What the Hell does that mean?

R: That's not even a good way to look at it, right? It's become far too pervasive, and it's apparently so over-simplified that it's giving people a false image of what gravity actually is. But, however, I have a better image to give people.

S: It's one of those things that's hard to say we know what it is or we don't know what it is. We know a lot about gravity. We have models of what it is mathematically, in terms of space-time, etc. I mean, that's the whole General Relativity thing. But why is it the way it is, that we don't know. There's a deeper level question there, that we have not penetrated yet. Probably, at the heart of that is quantum gravity, right there, which is a problem we have yet to solve. At least we know where to look, sort of. If we're gonna say what aspect of physics strikes us as magic, I definitely think that quantum mechanics has to get the prize there. Right?

B: Yeah, absolutely. But Jay's point is well taken, though. This "spooky action at a distance" type thing that applies to various things: gravity, magnetism. And there's also quantum mechanics, of course, entaglement, and all that stuff, but yeah.

S: Right. But aren't all forces "spooky action at a distance"? It's just that the gravity, the distance is really big. Right?

B: That's right.

R: Yeah.

S: Nuclear forces are just way short. They're short, but they're still acting at a distance.

J: Yeah, it's also a little too convenient, isn't it. It holds us to the Earth, I mean, really?

B: Anthropic Principle.

J: Oh, yeah.

B: It goes without saying.

S: That's right. If the universe weren't exactly the way it is now...

B: It would be different!

R: Three oddballs.

S: Speaking of which, Bob, tell us about astronomers' attempts to reclassify galaxies.

References