SGU Episode 397

This episode needs: transcription, time stamps, formatting, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing!

How to Contribute

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
Links
Download Podcast
SGU Podcast archive
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 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

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