SGU Episode 150
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| SGU Episode 150 |
|---|
| June 4th 2008 |
 |
| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Guest |
WI: Walter Isaacson |
| Quote of the Week |
A popular feel for scientific endeavors should, if possible, be restored given the needs of the twenty-first century. This does not mean that every literature major should take a watered-down physics course or that a corporate lawyer should stay abreast of quantum mechanics. Rather, it means that an appreciation for the methods of science is a useful asset for a responsible citizenry. What science teaches us, very significantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein's life. |
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| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| 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, June 4th, 2008, and this is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this evening are Bob Novella...
B: Hey, everybody.
S: Rebecca Watson...
R: Hi, everyone.
S: And Evan Bernstein.
E: Hello, everyone. On this day in 1783, the Montgolfier brothers publicly displayed their hot air balloon.
S: Is that right?
B: Oh, so that's why Google changed their image to a balloon.
E: That's right. Very good, Bob; I noticed that too.
B: I thought that might be it. Excellent.
E: And that's what... made me bring that up tonight. So.
R: So the hot air balloon was more important than women gaining the right to vote... in America.
E: Women can vote?
S: (laughs) Well, also, what happened 40 years ago today?
E: Ooh... 40 years ago.
S: Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
R: Oh, yeah.
E: Right.
B: Wow.
S: This is a momentous day.
E: What a day.
B: How about 50 years ago today?
(laughter)
R: You made something up?
S: I don't know.
B: My buddy at work was born.
S: (laughs)
R: Wow!
S: How did I miss that?
B: Today was his 50th birthday.
E: Why isn't that in Wikipedia?
R: Happy birthday, random dude we don't know.
B: Doug. His name is Doug.
S: But all of those historical events will pale in comparison to today, which is the SGU 150th episode.
E: 1-5-0.
B: No way! Whoa.
R: Oh. All right.
B: Cool.
E: Where are the balloons? I thought we were releasing balloons or something. Oh well.
S: Something; doves or whatever. We have an excellent interview coming up later in the show with Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein. But first, some news items.
News Items
New Alien Video (1:50)
- www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/may/30/alien-commission-causes-commotion/
- br.youtube.com/watch?v=4h_ZR5F0PFg
- Stan Romanek: www.stanromanek.com/03)%20Picture%20&%20Video%20Timeline%20Page_website/
S: The big skeptical news from the past week is a new alien video. And...
R: Oooh.
E: Ha!
S: You could see this coming a mile away. A gentleman by the name of Jeff Peckman, who is trying to put forward this proposal for an extraterrestrial affairs commission in his hometown of Denver, Colorado. He thinks that we need to set up a commission to deal with the inevitable interaction we're going to have with aliens when they make themselves known to us. Well he announced last week that—last Friday—he was going to be showing to the press what he claims is an authentic video of a alien, an extraterrestrial. Now... (chuckles) we weren't expecting much and we didn't get much. Actually, the video itself, although it was shown to the press, was not made public.
R: Right; we got a still from it, though, which—
S: Yeah.
R: I mean, that's enough to convince me. Definitely an alien.
S: So there's a still photo; it's... so, here's the story. And Jeff Peckman is not the originator of this video; he got it from Stan Romanek. Stan Romanek—go to stanromanek.com and you can read all about this guy—he claims to have the most scientifically documented on-going extraterrestrial contact in history, which is a claim to fame that Billy Meier, the Swiss farmer, claims for himself. So these guys could duel it out and say who has the most documented on-going alien encounter. But go to the website; obviously the guy's a crank. I mean, he's got the same lame, blurry, worthless photos. You know, if you've been having... ten years, hundreds of encounters with aliens, that's the best you could come up with? The same lame, blurry photos that anyone could come up with? Completely unconvincing. And you have to be suspicious of someone who's having repeated rare, random encounters with aliens. Or I guess, I suppose he thinks that they're so interested in him individually that they just keep coming back. So he claims that he thought that there was somebody sneaking and peeping around his house, so he set up an infrared camera at his bedroom window to catch the peeper. And lo and behold, he captured an alien peeping in through his bedroom window in infrared. Now, there's multiple problems with that. And as Rebecca said, all we have from that is a still, which is kind of a low-res picture of his bedroom window with, you know, a blurry typical gray alien-type of head poking up, looking through the window.
R: Yeah, it's pretty pathetic.
B: It doesn't look like an infrared picture to me.
S: Well, I mean, I think... it's not clear based upon that still whether it's infrared or not. And I think it's been enhanced, and actually, there's an enhanced enhanced version of it so you can see the alien better. But you know, it's just a pixelly, kind of blurry, pretty generic alien head.
R: What I find funny is that there's some skeptics who... they created a video that was meant to show the press that "hey, we can do it, too".
E: Yeah, I saw that.
R: Is that really necessary at this point? I mean, isn't it like, come on. It's some kook with a video of an alien peeking through his bedroom window. Do we really need to go to the trouble to put together a video debunking this?
S: Yeah, but it was interesting, because Peckman specifically claimed that this would've taken a Hollywood studio tens of thousands of dollars to produce. And so people said, "really? OK. Here, I did it for a hundred bucks in an hour." Yeah, or in a couple of hours. And then everyone started doing it; it starts proliferating; now on YouTube there's multiple versions of the fake video that look just as good as—
B: Probably better.
S: Yeah, probably even better than what the video probably looks like based upon that still.
E: I seem to recall the same thing happening with the alien autopsy video from the '90s.
S: Exactly.
E: —is that people came out and said, "look, we can do it and we can do it even better".
R: The one that ended up on Fox?
S: Yeah. Right. So, that took away that claim, that this would be hard to fake and expensive and difficult/
R: I guess I'm just depressed that anybody is giving this any credence. Like, "hey, everybody, I have proof aliens exist. I'm only going to show it to my cat, but you'll just have to take my word for it. Now spread the word."
E: Not just giving this credence, Rebecca; this was front-page news splashed all over the Internet. It really was—
R: Yeah, it's really pathetic.
E: It was top, top story.
S: Now, my sense is that—I mean, I think Stan Romanek is a delusional believer. That's my impression from reading his website. I mean, it could be just a hoaxer, too. But, and you know, being a hoaxer and a believer's not mutually incompatible; he may be doing this so that people will believe him. You know, the so-called pious fraud. Peckman... this guy's interesting history, too. He owns a company that sells the Metatron Personal Harmonizer, which read this website. I mean, this is really just techno-babble gobbledygook about aligning the electromagnetic waves from your computer and your electrical devices to... whatever, to make you harmonize with the universe. It really is—
B: You had me at Metatron, dude.
S: Yeah. It's something out of Transformers. Who was that, Megatron? He went to the Maharishi University of Management; he ran for the Senate under the Natural Law Party, which is the party of the Maharishi. So he has a long history of being a kook, basically. Peckman. What he said on one of his interviews was that... "well, I don't want to get all caught up in whether or not this video is real or anything. And in and of itself, the video is not that convincing. But if you put it in the context of all the other evidence for extraterrestrials" and then he sort of runs down the same, lame list of stuff that's been around for years. So he's really using this, I think, as a publicity stunt to sell the rest of the UFO evidence. But I think he may suspect that there's something fishy about it. So he doesn't want to pin his hopes on this video. 'Cause if this video gets shown definitely to be a fraud, he doesn't want to say... well, that's like the only piece of evidence that he was pinning his hopes on. He just wants it to be the foot in the door for all the other crappy evidence that he has.
E: Right. To pin your hope on a video as evidence for anything is hardly evidence at all.
B: So it's like a bait and switch... in a sense.
S: Yeah. It's lame. It's all a publicity stunt.
E: Well, it worked. That part of it worked.
S: Yeah. It's true; it did work as a publicity stunt, and Stan Romanek—
E: Sure did.
B: Oh, yeah.
R: We're reporting it.
S: —has a documentary coming out, where the video will be shown. So this is a teaser. This is a teaser for this guy's documentary. For Peckman's extraterrestrial affairs commission. That's what this is. It's all crap.
B: Coming attractions.
E: Well, he got on Larry King to talk about it, so.
S: Yep, yep. Let's move on, 'cause we've wasted enough time on this.
B: Oh, yeah.
Solar Power from Space (8:53)
- Universe Today: Harvesting Solar Power from Space
S: The next news item has to do with harvesting sunlight from outer space.
R: That's the best place to get it; it's everywhere!
B: Pretty much. I've been waiting for this for a long time.
E: Well here it is.
B: For years, I've been saying, just put the stupid thing in space or on the moon and we'll be good. But it seems that this whole idea has been reinvigorated and reinvestigated. It's been around, like I said, since the '70s but it's always been seen as prohibitively expensive. NASA actually did an assessment in the '70s trying to figure out what this thing would cost and they came up with a number like around one trillion dollars.
S: Yeah.
S/E: It's expensive.
B: How much is that in 2008 money? I mean, that's a lot of money, but it might not even be fair to compare it because lots of costs have come down. I'm not sure what it would cost today, but surprisingly, India and China are the ones that are really pushing this, which kind of makes sense if you think about it, 'cause their energy needs are just exploding, so much that they've gotta really look at all their options. Even though the price tag definitely will be hefty—maybe not a trillion but tons of money...
Dr. Evil from Austin Powers: (dramatically) One hundred billion dollars
The arguments being made, and it makes sense to me, that you could use this to bolster your economy for decades through energy trading. So you foot the bill for this, which would be a lot, but then you could sell off the energy in various ways and make tons of money for quite amount of time. The energy—I mean, one obvious way to get it down would be to beam the energy down, and obviously people are thinking, "oh, wow, what's going to happen if you walk into the beam or a plane or a bird flies through it" but actually, if you use low-energy microwaves, you could—birds could fly right through it and it really wouldn't be a problem.
E: Well, what kind of loss do you experience in a transfer like that?
B: Actually, when you go from DC to microwave, from what I've read, it's very efficient. Surprisingly efficient. There is some loss, obviously, but—
S: There has to be.
B: —not as much as you would think. Other problems people have come up with are debris. Oh, what's going to happen if this gets hit with all the debris that's up there, especially all the debris that us and China have been causing. But actually, this would be in geosynchronous orbit, where there is essentially almost no real debris up when you get really that high. The debris problem really is in low-Earth orbit and not that really high geosynchronous orbit, so that really wouldn't be much of a problem.
S: But the repair would be difficult, especially in the high orbit. Repair and maintenance of this.
B: Well, yeah, it would be a big problem, because you can't—the Shuttle's not going to be going up there. And another big problem that I see is that this technology is changing so fast—
S: Yeah, I agree.
B: —by the time you get it up there, it's like, well, we got something that's 20 times more efficient. So you're going to have to—we'll be taking a hit in terms of the efficiency, 'cause very quickly it would change.
S: It seems like a great idea eventually—
B: Right.
S: My sense is it may be a little bit premature to start such a project right now. But you know, somebody like NASA needs to do the real hard calculations. One thing I thought was interesting... This is from the Pentagon's National Security Space Office 2007 report, trying to give an example of how impressive the potential of this would be, said that "a single kilometer-wide band of geosynchronous Earth orbit experiences enough solar flux in one year to nearly equal the amount of energy contained within all known recoverable conventional oil reserves on Earth today."
B: That really puts it into perspective right there.
S: Yeah... I agree that sounds impressive, but then I was thinking, "wow, a one-kilometer-wide band all the way around the Earth in synchronous orbit" and I calculated that out—if I did the calculation correct, that's 1.6 billion miles of kilometer-wide solar panels.
E: That's a lot.
B: I wasn't interpreting it as a contiguous band completely around.
S: That's what—I was trying to figure that out too, but that's what I think he's saying: a band of geosynchronous Earth orbit.
B: I interpret it as a kilometer wide, and...
S: But then how long? You have to say how long. I think it's all the way around the Earth. In which case, it's not that impressive. 'Cause that's—
B: No, then it's not.
S: —1.6 billion miles of solar panels. That's not that impressive.
E: Would a solar flare screw this thing up and like totally trash it?
S: Oh yeah. I mean, solar flares are nasty. Especially up high, totally outside of the magnetic field of the Earth—
B: Magnetosphere.
S: —wouldn't be any protection.
E: Would you want your multi-trillion dollar investment up there floating and being exposed to—
R: Yeah, but what are the chances of a solar flare actually smacking it?
S: It'll happen on a regular basis.
B: Well, how—Steve, I don't think it'll be as bad as you think; I mean, how are geosynchronous satellites handling them now?
S: Yeah, I mean, so it would have to be taken into consideration; it would have to be built to tolerances so that—
B: Right. Absolutely.
S: —the electronics wouldn't get fried every time there's a solar flare.
B: Right, and you could also determine when one is coming and shut down key electronics. They shut down satellites a lot for stuff like this and they might be able to do the same thing for this kind of technology.
S: Right. Well, interesting; I think this is something that we will see eventually, but I don't think it's going to be anything any time in the near future.
Green Our Vaccines Rally in DC (14:07)
- Respectful Insolence: An Open Letter to Congress on Immunization Policy
- http://www.safevaccines.org/press-080527.htm (link broken)
- Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey and "Green Our Vaccines"
- ABC News: Celeb Couple to Lead 'Green Vaccine' Rally
S: A quick follow-up on the whole vaccine-autism controversy: Another thing that's happening is a march on Washington, DC for "Green our Vaccines", which is a movement... this is an event that's being promoted by a lot of the anti-vaccinationist sites, the ones that believe that there is a link between vaccines and autism. There isn't; I have to say that every time we bring up this topic. This is being promoted primarily by Jenny McCarthy—
R: And her boyfriend now, Jim Carrey.
E: The Mask
S: They were interviewed on "Good Morning America" this morning, and it was sickening, you know, because the interview just too softball; didn't really challenge them on the anti-scientific nonsense that they're spouting—threw out a couple of, like, disclaimers; like really quick disclaimers, then it cuts to the nice piano music showing Jenny McCarthy with her son, Evan, who had autism, apparently and showing how wonderful their life is now that she discovered all this pseudo-scientific crap that she's putting forward. So, again, it was almost like a propaganda piece for this with just a little token skeptical disclaimers thrown in there by the interviewers; just terrible. These campaigns are successful because that's the kind of press they get; the whole "Green our Vaccines" slogan is a pretty punchy slogan; I think that's probably gonna work for them. They're trying to make this point that they're not anti-vaccine, but it just doesn't sell. If you really look at what they're saying, they're saying, "oh no, we're not anti-vaccine; we just want our vaccines to be safer. We're pro- safe vaccine." But then when you really dig down on their rhetoric, it's like, no, they're really cutting off vaccines at every pass. When you really get down to it, it's all about the vaccines. It's about just being anti-vaccinationist.
McCarthy reiterated some of the real howlers that she has been called on for months. So it shows that she's either not reading the material; she's not reading criticism of her position or she doesn't care. She said, for example, that vaccines have ether in them and antifreeze. So this is like the latest strategy now of the anti-vaccinationists. Now that the mercury gambit has totally failed— you know, five years ago, it was quote-unquote "it's the mercury, stupid", right? They were saying mercury, mercury, mercury, mercury. Well, five years of scientific research has shown it's not the mercury. So now they're saying, well OK, it's all the other toxins in vaccines. Again, it was just to let you know it's the vaccines that's getting them. So, antifreeze—there's no antifreeze in vaccines; that's absurd.
R: Where does that even come from? Like, where do you even get that?
S: Yeah, it's not even clear where the antifreeze claim comes from. Essentially what's happening is that these baboons are reading the chemical ingredients that go into the manufacture and the final product of vaccines and they don't understand the chemistry. So they're just pulling out scary-sounding or scary-looking chemical names but they have no concept of what they're talking about. There's no ethylene or diethylene glycol, which is what antifreeze is, in vaccines. They're probably just mis-identifying chemicals that are used as constituents of other things, right? So it's like saying, "there's chlorine in salt". Yeah, 'cause it's sodium chloride. It's exactly like that. It's that lame. You know, when you combine one chemical with another, you get a different chemical, with different chemical properties, right? Yeah, chlorine is a terrible poison; sodium chloride is salt. It's that naive. She also says there's ether in vaccines. Ether. There's no ether in vaccines. Ether isn't soluble anyway. But what there is is something called Triton X-100, which in older versions was replaced by a compound called Tween-ether, but that's a brand name. But these are not ether; these are just—the chemical names maybe contain the word "ether" as part of the long chemical name. But there's no ether in vaccines either. So those are demonstrably factually wrong; it's just complete chemical scientific ignorance combined with ideology.
Here's my favorite one, though. So on the "Good Morning America", she specifically reiterated antifreeze and ether, which is nonsense. But my favorite one from the placards that are being used in the march and from this movement is that it contains hydrochloric acid, which says "can destroy tissue upon direct contact". Now... (chuckles) this is how ridiculous this is.
B: Wow.
S: The pH of vaccines is titrated so that it's perfectly neutral, right? So pH is a measure of how acidic versus basic something is. A pH of 7 means that it's neutral; it's not reactive at all, in terms of pH. If you have something that's basic, you can add an acid to it in order to bring the pH to neutral.
B: You mean alkaline; alkaline's the same as basic?
S: Yeah. Yes. Yes. That's correct.
B: I wasn't familiar...
S: It's acid and base. Or alkaline is another word for basic. So if... what they're doing is they're using hydrochloric acid to titrate the pH so that it's neutral; so that it's not alkaline or acidic.
B: Wow.
S: But it has—quote-unquote "has hydrochloric acid in it" is, like, to misunderstand high-school chemistry, you know?
E: It really is remarkable to what extent they'll go to scare people.
S: Yeah. Right.
E: I mean, that's clearly all this is.
S: It's absolute ignorant scare tactics. Demonstrably so.
E: And Steve, if they think that scientists or whomever is putting something deliberately sort of harmful in these things, I mean, you have to have sort of this total cynicism of science and doctors and everything. I mean, it comes down to almost a... not just a disbelief in the medicine they practice; almost like an anger towards them; a hatred to a certain degree.
S: Well, it gets to a full-blown conspiracy theory.
R: Yeah, it's the whole Big Pharma idea, like there's this conglomeration of...
S: The FDA, the CDC, pediatricians, the government, Big Pharma; they're all in on it.
E: Chemtrails.
S: Yeah. Chemtrails, yeah. Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s big on that; about the whole conspiracy angle of this. So anyway, they had their little march today, and it's getting them the press that they're looking for, unfortunately.
E: Steve, just a follow-up to this, Steve, is that... where are the scientists, the doctors, the people who work for these news outlets and these people who are covering the Jenny McCarthys and her ilk. Where are these people with the balance and they bring on the scientists instead to correct these total falsehoods and misperceptions.
S: Yeah, there isn't a lot of balance in the mainstream media for this event, because you've got Jenny McCarthy—
R: Jim Carrey; you have kids with diseases that are hot right now. I mean, there's basically no way to nicely come out and say that they're wrong, and I think because of that, the news media just sort of goes along with it.
S: Right.
R: Like, "look at this cute little kid with autism; don't you feel sorry for him; are you to tell him he's wrong?" You know, you can't.
E: But the news—my point is, the news organizations know that there is a whole another side to this that is vehemently against it, and they choose to largely ignore that side.
S: Well, they're not doing their homework and they're getting hoodwinked.
R: Yeah, I don't know that they do know. Like, they should know.
E: Oh, my God.
R: Like, they should know, but I think your calling them "news organizations" is doing them quite a bit of—that's quite the compliment—
S: Well, I mean, they are; "Good Morning America" is a news show; I mean, you know.
R: It's really not. It's—
E: I know what you're saying, Rebecca—
B: It's "infotainment".
R: —but it's not a news show; they don't do any...
E: But you're telling me nobody at ABC somewhere is saying, "this is... we've gotta get the other side on this"...
R: There might be. There might be a few people, but you know, when it comes to what actually gets on air, it's being put on by a bunch of people who are concerned about ratings and not truth. That's what it all boils down to; it's numbers and not facts.
S: And they're selling this as a fight against autism. That's the bait and switch, too. Then you're going to think, "oh, there's a bunch of parents getting together to help fight autism; how wonderful." Not that this is a cover for the antivaccinationist kooks, you know, who are trying to drum up all the scare tactics about toxins in vaccines. But there has been a professional backlash; so there is an open letter by a number of—by physicians and scientists and organizations against this rally and against the antivaccinationists pointing out all of their scientific errors and all of the recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases that is being created by this antivaccinationist movement. So there is a backlash, professionally.
R: Yeah, and you know, and the listeners of this show can contribute, if you're interested in letting the producers of "Good Morning America" know that this isn't news and that that's not what you want to hear, then please by all means, send them letters, because they do read them; they do listen. And if a significant portion of their audience is saying, "we don't want to tune in to this crap until you put on a real scientist to talk about the topic", then maybe you'll start to see change, because that's going to affect their bottom line.
New Zealand CAM Follow up (24:10)
S: One more quick follow-up: last week we reported on a commission that was set up in New Zealand to investigate complementary and alternate medicine. It turns out that that news item was actually out of date, which I didn't realize at the time when I was gathering the information on it, that that commission, the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Complementary and Alternative Health, has actually already completed and delivered its findings to the government of New Zealand. But I do have a follow-up on some of the results of that. A lot of this is provided by listener Ben, who is from New Zealand. For example, they recommended that health care education and training should be encouraged to include elements of CAM, complementary and alternate medicine. Not a surprise. Research should be undertaken to establish best practice for the integration of approved CAM modalities with bio-medicine. Again, not a surprise. It's pretty much pandering to the political correctness of anti-scientific medicine. Anyway, wanted to bring you up to date on that item from last week.
Questions and E-mails (25:16)
Cold Fusion
S: Let's go on to some questions and e-mails. The first one comes from Sam Spreull in Brighton, UK, and he writes:
I just stumbled upon an article online that seems to ridicule the idea of cold fusion as supposedly described in this article
And he gives a link.
along with the likes of perpetual motion machines. I understand why a perpetual motion machine can't theoretically be possible. Could you please explain if cold fusion is as unlikely to be possible.
B: I went to the link that Sam references in his e-mail. Thanks for the question, Sam. It's about a emeritus physics professor, Yoshiaki Arata at Osaka University, and he's claiming that he's got a new experiment that he ran for the press that is causing excess heat that cannot be explained, and to his mind, only cold fusion can explain it. Conventional chemical reactions can't do it. For those of you unsure about fusion, it's the source that powers the stars; the sun and stars essentially combine hydrogen into helium, producing energy. The sun every second is converting 600 million tons of hydrogen into 596 million tons of helium. The 4 million tons extra is converted into the energy that's radiated away from the sun, actually propping up the sun, preventing it from collapsing in on itself and of course, allowing life to exist on the Earth.
S: Good old "E equals mc squared".
B: Right. This type of energy production is so efficient that it's been compared to a car traveling 7,000 miles on one gallon of gas. So obviously, huge, huge potential there. And which, of course, has driven our hot fusion research for many decades now. It would be... God, we spent forty years, millions of man-hours trying to recreate, on the Earth, the pressures and the hellish temperatures required to fuse hydrogen into helium.
S: Without having a hydrogen bomb, which we can do.
B: Right, right. Controlled—OK, controlled fusion reaction.
S: Yeah, that's the key; we could do it; we could blow things up. But I mean, a controlled, sustained fusion, hot fusion; we don't know how to do that.
B: Yeah. And then running your house on those nukes would be kinda tough. How would you direct it? But the problem, of course, for the past forty years has been that it's always seemed just a few decades away. They are making progress, but it just seems just beyond our reach. Now enter cold fusion, which by contrast, is said to produce abundant clean, clean energy that hot fusion could provide, but at room temperature, which would do away with the need for the temperatures and pressures that the hot fusion would require. Now, the huge radioactive elephant in the room now, of course, is from 1989; the experiments that Pons and Fleishman conducted in '89 which they used as their announcement to the world that they've produced nuclear fusion, cold fusion, in a glass jar at room temperature. Steve, I don't know if you remember those days, but—
S: Oh, yeah.
B: —for a while there, I was so excited about Mr. Fusion in the back of my car.
S: It was very short-lived, though, Bob, right?
B: It was; it was very short-lived.
S: For a day, we were like, "Is this really true?" and then no.
B: Right. Those nasty skeptics started mouthing off about things like "lack of reproducibility", "theoretical feasibility"; nasty stuff like that—
E: Bunch of wet blankets.
B: —and then Nature magazine ran an editorial claiming that they believe that cold fusion was unfounded. And then one of the big nails in the coffin was the U.S. Department of Energy, the DOE, issued a report claims that the experiments did not provide convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from cold fusion.
S: What this did do is give a huge boon to the quote-unquote "free energy" movement. Again, the small, fringe movement of people who think that cold fusion is not only possible, but the technology exists. But "Big Oil" and the government are hiding it from the world.
B: Yeah, conspiracy. All that stuff. Cold-fusion scientist and retired Los Alamos chemist Edmund Storms said the following regarding this. He said, "conventional science requires you to play by certain rules. First, thou shall not announce thy results via a press conference. Second, thou shall not exaggerate the results. Third, thou shall tell other scientists precisely what thou did." They broke all those rules.
S: Yeah.
B: So what's the bottom line here? What are the biggest problems with cold fusion? As I see it, from the research I've done, the lack of consistent and reproducible results is really big. That's something that just has not really happened.
S: One thing that, again, helps put this in perspective is that what these experiments—these cold fusion experiments are based upon, is the measurement of this little bit extra heat that they can't fully explain. And they say, "see that extra heat? That's cold fusion."
E: Sounds like a "God of the gaps" kind of argument.
S: Yeah, and it's ultimately an argument of exclusion, that you know, we've excluded all other sources of heat. So, it's really easy to make a mistake, especially if you're dealing with a very small amount of heat. If you've just failed to do your math right, or you've failed to account for some exogenous heat, which usually what turns out to be the case. Just that tiny mistake and there you go; that explains away your experiment. It's kind of a set-up, you know, for these false-positive premature announcements, you know?
B: The good thing related to that, though, Steve, is that... all right, say these scientists are claiming a certain level of excess heat. If you're claiming fusion, then therefore, there should be certain quantities of certain nuclear by-products. Depending on the type of fusion you're claiming, whether it's deuterium or proton-proton, or deuterium-proton, there's different types of—way that hydrogen can fuse into helium. You would expect—you would actually require something like neutrons or gamma rays or helium or neutrinos. These things should exist, and the problem is with all of these experiments is that either they do not exist; there are no by-products like this, or they exist in quantities that are orders of magnitude smaller than what they should be, given the heat that is being claimed. So this is a huge problem. Some people would then say to me, "well how do you explain even small quantities of, say, helium?" And the small quantities can be explained for lots of these things. Like, there's helium in the atmosphere.
S: It's funny; it kind of reminds me of ESP research—
B: Yes.
S: —because they're looking at these small sort of residual effects that they can't fully explain and saying that that's evidence for whatever it is that they're looking for.
B: It's similar. And then my final point here is why some of the biggest problem is no theoretical support for cold fusion. Like ESP, there's really nothing to hang their hat on, in terms of science; you know, proven science. If you don't have the temperature and pressure, you're not squeezing these protons together to overcome the electrical repulsion; that's why the heat and pressures are needed, to overcome this Coulomb barrier, as it's called. So one of the ways they think it's happening is by quantum tunneling. Quantum tunneling is one of those magical, you know, effects in the quantum realm where subatomic particles can actually penetrate that they have no right penetrating, like a person walking through a wall. But because of quantum tunneling, this effect, you can have particles going through barriers. So they're proposing that, through quantum tunneling, you've got, say, a proton, going—quantum tunneling through this barrier, this Coulomb barrier and overcoming the electrical repulsion and getting close enough to the other proton to fuse so that the strong force can take over. The problem is, though, is that the rate of quantum tunneling you've have to have is about 40 or 50 orders of magnitude higher than what it should be.
S: Yeah. That's a non-trivial problem.
B: And there's some other theoretical reasons. Some of them are pretty technical...
S: So there's major theoretical problems with cold fusion; it's not just a technological barrier that hasn't been broken. But it's not quite as bad as perpetual motion machines. We can prove that perpetual motion is impossible based upon pretty well established laws of the universe. Cold fusion—it's just that there's no theoretical—we don't know, theoretically, how it could be possible. There's lots of reasons to think that it may not be possible, but there isn't the same kind of proof that it's impossible that there is with perpetual motion machines.
B: Right; perpetual motion is basically going against the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and you don't want to mess with thermodynamics. And that just makes it very, very blatant, and I think much more of an affront to science than even cold fusion, which is kinda nasty, but I would not put it on the level of perpetual motion. Not yet, anyway.
S: Right. Well, let's go on to our interview.
Interview with Walter Isaacson (34:39)
- Author of Einstein: His Life and Universe
S: Joining us now is Walter Isaacson. Walter, welcome to the Skeptics' Guide.
WI: Thank you. It's wonderful to be with you.
S: Walter is the CEO of the Aspen Institute; he has been the chairman of CNN and the Managing Editor of Time magazine. He's the author of several biographies, including Benjamin Franklin and Kissinger. But he is here to speak with us tonight about his biography of Einstein, His Life and Universe. So Walter, first, why don't you just tell us how you decided to write a biography of Albert Einstein.
WI: Well, couple of reasons. First of all, I had done Benjamin Franklin. And one of the things I was surprised to learn about Franklin is that he was a great scientist. We sometimes think of him as a doddering old dude flying a kite in the rain, but those electricity experiments were wonderful experiments and they were to science in that period what Newton's theory of gravity had been for a generation before. Now realize that our founders were very, very aware of science and that we sometimes don't feel that we have to be scientists—we have understand scientists unless we're scientists. We get intimidated by science. So I wanted to pick somebody who would re-introduce those of us who aren't scientists to the magic and the beauty of science. And also we had selected him as Time's Person of the Century and when I was writing the cover story explaining why we selected him as Time's Person of the Century, I realized there'd be a whole lot of his personal papers coming out in 2006, and it'd be fun to write a biography based on them.
S: And Einstein was perhaps the perfect choice to re-romanticize, if you will, science, because he was the first and maybe the only real scientist superstar. I mean, how did that happen; how did he become such a superstar of science?
WI: Well, partly it was just his halo of hair and his glittering eyes and his wonderful personality. Secondly, he totally revolutionized science, but in a way that the normal person could try to understand. For example, the notion that gravity is the bending and curving of space, or that time slows down when you're moving real fast, or that energy and mass are related by that very elegant equation "E equals mc squared". So when he was finally proven right after everyone was so skeptical about his theories, it came because they measured the stars behind the Sun during a solar eclipse and saw that he was right, that the gravitational field of the Sun had curved the universe and shifted where the stars appeared to be, and he'd become suddenly the world's greatest super-celebrity, up there with Charlie Chaplin and Charles Lindbergh.
S: So you think it was partly the sudden confirmation of theories, which up to that point had been controversial. Now the world suddenly accepted a complete change in our concept of how the universe is built.
WI: Total change. It wasn't sort of Newton's theory of gravity revised. Newton had said that gravity was the attraction between two objects at a distance. It was a totally new theory, that gravity is simply when objects curve the fabric of space. And when he was suddenly proven right, and there he is, sort of that amazing-looking guy with those piercing eyes and the wild halo of hair. And he enjoyed fame; he shows up at the opening of City Lights with Charlie Chaplin; he gives great interviews to the press. So he was one of the first people in that new age of celebrity that came with the birth of newsreels and movies and radio and sort of tabloid newspapers.
S: And in your book, you mentioned a couple of other sort of social forces at the time that conspired to make him the celebrity that he was. How much do you think the fact that this was the end of World War I and the world was looking for a celebrity, a trans-national celebrity, to maybe get past the trauma of World War I? How much of a role do you think that played?
WI: That's a great question. I do think that at the end of this most horrible of all wars—we had never seen a war like this—people were looking not only for a celebrity, but here you have a German Jewish pacifist scientist, and his theory is proven correct by an astronomer who measures the stars during the eclipse of 1919, and it's a pacifist Quaker British astronomer. And so you have two people from the two different sides of the war in World War I, who are proving that our universe is different. So I think there was that yearning for just something new to come along.
S: And you also mentioned as another sort of social context for the theory of relativity was that the Classical world, in general, was sort of crumbling and relativism was sort of taking hold at this time.
WI: You look at the years between 1905, when Einstein comes up with his theory of Special relativity, which is that time slows down depending on you're moving real fast compared to somebody else, and then his General theory of relativity, which is the curving of space. That period you see a whole burst of modernism somewhat connected to the idea of relativity. You see Picasso, Kandinsky and all these people changing art. You see Stravinsky changing music; you see Joyce and Proust changing literature, and they're all doing it by changing the notion of the classical bonds and changing the notion that time is absolute or space is absolute. And so it's an amazing burst of creativity, somewhat connected to this whole idea of relativism.
Science or Fiction (1:06:24)
Question #1: New study shows that we pick our friends based largely on similarity of physical appearance. Question #2: Playing golf prolongs life expectancy by an average of 5 years. Question #3: New research shows that when it comes to collective traumatic events, like terrorists attacks, it is psychologically healthy to keep feelings inside rather than discussing them with others.
Quote of the Week (1:16:04)
'A popular feel for scientific endeavors should, if possible, be restored given the needs of the twenty-first century. This does not mean that every literature major should take a watered-down physics course or that a corporate lawyer should stay abreast of quantum mechanics. Rather, it means that an appreciation for the methods of science is a useful asset for a responsible citizenry. What science teaches us, very significantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein's life.'- Walter Isaacson
S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation and skepchick.org. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. For questions, suggestions, and other feedback, please use the "Contact Us" form on the website, or send an email to info@theskepticsguide.org. If you enjoyed this episode, then please help us spread the word by voting for us on Digg, or leaving us a review on iTunes. You can find links to these sites and others through our homepage. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto, and is used with permission.
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