SGU Episode 358

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. S: Hello and welcome to the Skepitcs' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday May 23rd 2012 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey everybody.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey guys.

S: Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening.

S: And we have a special guest this week, Joshie Berger. Joshie, welcome back to the Skeptics' Guide.

JB: Shalome.

S: How are you doing my friend?

E: Shalome, baby.

JB: Excellent, I'm so excited, TAM is right around the corner and I just can't wait to be a part of this all.

S: Well we're bringing you on today, first because you're a friend and a fellow skeptic and doing good work out there but also because you're going to, you came to us with an idea about how we could punch up TAM a little bit, add an extra event that seems entirely appropriate so why don't we, well actually we're going to start off with This Day in Skepticism and then we're going to get to that, we're going to talk about your TAM idea. So Evan, Rebecca's not here because she's at a conference in Germany.

E: That's what I hear.

This Day in Skepticism (1:05)

May 26, 1676 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek applied his hobby of making microscopes from his own handmade lenses to observe some water running off a roof during a heavy rainstorm. He finds that it contains, in his words, "very little animalcules."

S: So you're going to do This Day in Skepticism today.

E: That's right. And I'll be doing this by doing this by reading from a diary entry that dates back to 1676 on May the 26th. Here it is. It rained very hard. The rain abating somewhat, I took a clean glass and got rain water that came off the slate roof, fetched it in after the glass had first been swilled out two or three times with the rainwater. I then examined it, and therein discovered some very few little animals, and seeing them, I bethought me whether they may not have been bred in the leaden gutters in any water standing in them. The rain continued the whole day. I took a big porcelain dish and put in my courtyard in the open air upon a wooden tub about a foot and a half high, considering that thus, no earthy particles would be splashed into the dish. With the water first caught, I swilled out the dish and the glass in which I meant to preserve the water, and then flung this water away then collected water anew. Upon examining it I could discover therein no living creatures but merely a lot of irregular earthly particles. And there it was in 1676 on this day Antonie van Leeuwenhoek applied his hobby of making microscopes from his own handmade lenses to observe some water running off the roof and compared it to water he collected from the natural rains.

J: And what did he call those creatures Evan?

B: Animacules?

E: Animalcules.

S: Animalcules. Isn't that a cute little name?

J: Yeah, when I first heard that word, I actually thought that one of Steve's daughters came up with it, I didn't know like it was from history.

E: It is, it's like, it's such of like a Sesame Street sort of phrase, in a modern context, animalcules. It's like geranimals or something.

S: Right.

B: He should have called them nanomals.

S: Nanomals, yeah.

E: Well, you know.

J: Bob, the word nano didn't even exist then.

S: And they weren't nano, they were micro. So micro...

B: Micranomals.

S: Micranamals?

J: I used to... do you guys, do you guys remember the micronaughts?

S: Oh yeah.

J: The kids, they were like kids, uh like you know, like it was for, little boys like those little men and they had vehicles and stuff, awesome shit.

JB: No.

(laughter)

S: Joshie, you didn't play with micronaughts when you were younger?

J: You were playing with the dradle Josie, right?

JB: No no no no, to be really fair, my parents had to sign a paper before I went to Yeshiva that they didn't have a TV but they really did, my parents were like from the bullshitting type of hasedem, and but they had a lock on their TV in their room that we couldn't watch it, but when they would go out, me and my brother figured out how to open the lock actually and then we could constantly call them to find out when they were coming home because we knew that the back of the TV was getting hot and we had to go and put a pack of ice on it when they said they were like 20 minutes away because otherwise my mother would put her hand on it and say, all right who was watching TV so we had to gauge it but I was actually watching the A-Team and like things like that when I was like already 12, 13 years old. Ssh don't tell anyone, I hope this podcast is not like out there.

S: No, no.

B: Can you imagine Joshie at 12 or 13? Oh my god.

S: I imagine he was pretty much the same.

(laughter)

News Items

TAM Poker Tournament (04:15)

• http://www.amazingmeeting.com/TAM2012/

Space X Launch (10:10)

• http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

S: All right well let's move on to some news items. We're going to start with a quick follow-up on Space X, a private firm launching rocket ships into space, Jay tell us about this.

J: So on Tuesday the 22nd of May they finally launched their Falcon 9 and it had the Dragon spacecraft at the top and it's in orbit and next week it's going to be rendez-vousing with the International Space Station. And a very interesting fact here is that Space X is the only company to ever do this, the only other organisations or groups are basically governments that ever pulled this off have been massive economies, I mean the fact that a single company was able to pull this off and it wasn't a government is fantastic, I mean it's showing you now that the cost of technology is coming down and our ability to get space craft into outer space and that cost per pound is actually coming down and I'm just so excited about this. You know when you get multiple companies vying for this kind of business, they're going to be dumping a lot of money, a lot of new technology is going to come out and we're going to see a lot of more space activity guys, the next 20 to 30 years are going to be very interesting.

S: Yeah, so this is actually the third successful Falcon 9 launch in a row and the fifth straight launch success for Space X, but this is the first one where they're launching a payload to the International Space Station, and if all goes well their Dragon capsule will be docking with the station and leaving off supplies and picking up stuff to bring back down to the Earth, and absolutely this I think the beginning of private companies going into space.

J: It's an 1800 person company that produced this, I mean that is phenomenal.

B: I tell ya Jay, if I had the money, I mean I might not go on their first launch with people, but I did some research on this, on this rocket and I was very very impressed with their, that they stress so much the reliability and safety of this thing, it was really very impressive. The company actually studied launch failures between 1980 and 1999 and they determined that 91% of all of these failures really can be pinned to either the engine, the stage separation or to a much lesser degree avionics failures. So they really really focussed on that and they have an amazing design. The architecture of the engine itself is patterned after the Saturn 5 and Saturn 1 rockets that were used for the Apollo program, and they had flawless flight records even though they lost engines on a number of missions, they still had a flawless flight record. And just a couple of things that they instituted were interesting like the hold before release system which I had never heard of. They actually, one engine kicks off and there's nine of them I believe, once the first engine starts and it's not released for flight at all until all of the propulsion and the vehicle's system have been shown to be operating normally. So the thing won't even take off unless everything is going and looking good.

J: Yeah, they are completely dedicated to safety, I keep reading that.

B: Oh my god I have such a high level of confidence for this system. And even other things that they've got triple redundant flight computers and inertial navigation I mean that, I really think this is going to have a long and successful number of missions, I can't wait.

E: How are they going to prepare private citizens to get ready for the experience of space flight and space travel? I mean are they going to have people go to a space camp or something for a week to brush up on what to do, what not to do?

J: Yeah, forget it, there's, in order to even be strapped into that thing, it's going to be months of training. You have to be physically fit, you have to be emotionally fit, and you also have to know what you're doing, they're not just going to send people up there, but I mean but Evan if they're going to send people up on a real, just a trip, just the whole like let me be a visitor of outer space for an hour or several hours or whatever, you still have to, you're still going to need to meet physical requirements. There's just no way they're going to put you in a space capsule and give you, expose you to the amount of Gs that you're going to experience and all that. But I see where you're going, I mean it's an interesting question because I love the question because it asks at what point is it going to be trivial to go into outer space?

B: Quite a while, I think.

E: Yeah, this 2001 sort of picture of how space flight would be, you know like an aeroplane but in outer space, that's it.

S: Yeah it always seemed to me that the gentlest way to get into space would be to essentially have a very fast jet that could get up to as fast as you could go in the atmosphere.

B: A scramjet.

S: And then will transition to the upper atmosphere and then eventually to rockets, so rather than taking off from a stop, straight up you know with a rocket pushing you up, you know the acceleration would be much more gentle, it would be more like just flying in a very very fast jet. But I don't know how technologically feasible essentially having a jet then kick off with rockets and go into orbit, how...

B: Well yeah you would need multiple different types of engines, some air breathing some not and they've done lots of research on air and space planes and things and they just never seem to go the duration. Yeah, it's fiendishly complex to do that.

S: Yeah.

B: But I think it's totally doable, they're making such amazing progress in propulsion these days with rockets and jet engines and I think that space exploration will just accelerate that technological evolution, once you get private companies into it I think you're really going to see amazing advancements.

S: One quick update since we recorded this conversation. In the morning of May 26th the Dragon Capsule not only successfully docked with the International Space Station, astronauts aboard the station were able to open the capsule and begin unloading its supplies.

Studying the Universe (16:04)

• http://phys.org/news/2012-05-older-cosmologically.html

S: Well let's move on. Bob, you're going to tell us about studying the ancient universe.

B: Work by Harvard theorist Avi Loeb seems to indicate that the more the universe evolves, the more information about the early universe is actually lost. Now this was an interesting story, it reminded me that there's lots of interesting, meaningless coincidences in astronomy and cosmology. They kind of make us feel lucky that we're alive at this point in cosmic history. And I just want to give a couple examples, one of them is the evolution of the Earth-Moon-Sun system, that the Moon is tiny compared to the sun it's just a fraction of it, yet its changing orbital distance from the Earth makes it almost perfectly overlap the sun during a solar eclipse, that's obviously just a coincidence yet it seems...

S: Although I had a born-again Christian argue to me that that was evidence for creation. Couldn't be a coincidence that the size of the Moon overlaps the apparent size of the sun.

B: OK. There you go.

E: Eh. It's probably one of the more cogent arguments for creation actually.

B: Yeah, I wonder what's more likely. Of course the dramatic and rare example to that was the recent and very beautiful annular eclipse that was visible over some of North America last week where uh... because the earth, I mean the moon does you know sometimes get closer, sometimes farther away, and it was actually at a relatively close point so the moon did not actually eclipse the entire sun so it was this beautiful ring.

S: It was a far point you mean. The moon was at a far point so it was smaller and did not eclipse the entire sun, right so it was an annular eclipse.

B: So a more dramatic example of this is the increasing expansion of the universe due to dark energy and this is another case where I think that we're kind of at a special point. As galaxies and clusters move beyond the event horizon of the universe, they're actually going to be so red-shifted, the light is going to be so red-shifted that you, future astronomers will never be able to detect them, and of course with the expansion of the universe, they'll be expanding so fast away from us that light will never reach us, so there's actually going to be a lot that, in the deep future, that astronomers will never know about the universe because of that. So again, we're lucky that we live in a time where we can divine many fundamental and interesting things about the universe that we live in. This most current insight is of course yet another example. The idea here is similar to the example that I just gave, that as the universe expands and ages, there's less that we can determine about the state of the early universe. In Loeb's research he describes a situation as two competing processes. So imagine when the universe was young, the cosmic horizon was closer so you see less of the universe, because there's been less time for all that light to get to you that you could actually observe. On the other hand the older the universe is, matter coalesces into gravitationally bound objects and this actually destroys information about the early universe on small scales and that's kind of the crux of the problem here. So the young universe shows less of everything because there's not enough time and the old universe binds up matter, minimising what we can learn about the universe. So what Loeb did was he calculated well what was the ideal time in the history of the universe to study the cosmos? And he determined that it was actually 13 billion years ago, a long time ago. More than 500 million years after the big bag, if there were any astronomers which there probably weren't at that time, that would have been the absolute ideal time. And it's not a coincidence that time is so special because that's when the first stars and galaxies started to form and that's when this information started being lost. So the next question is well are we screwed? I mean is this information forever lost because we're, you know the universe is over 13.7 billion years old and the answer fortunately is no. We can view the early universe by looking at the famous 21cm line of hydrogen. Maybe some of you guys have heard of that. Well I guess you're going to have to picture a hydrogen atom. You have an electron in a classic orbit around a proton. And it's always trying to maintain or reach its lowest energy state, when the electron and the proton are spinning in opposite directions. But sometimes a hydrogen atom can get knocked and they actually spin in the same direction and that's not the lowest energy state and it wants to get back to this low energy state. And when, it could take millions of years for that to happen, but when it does happen it's a very special event because it releases this 21cm line radiation and this radiation is very special because it can go through interstellar clouds of dust and gas that are opaque to visible light so it's like a window into the very very young universe that lets us see some of this information that's lost in our time frame. So again, this is a special time in the history of the universe as well in which we overcome to a certain degree anyway, the disadvantage of living in an older universe and we can determine things like the distribution of matter in the early universe that will unfortunately be lost to future astronomers, so I feel a little sorry for those guys in the future because they will potentially never know a lot about the universe when it was really young. And I'll just end with a really funny quote that Loeb came out with. He said "If we want to learn about the early universe, we'd better look now before it's too late."

S: Yeah.

B: So yeah, I think we've got about a billion years, but yeah, it's just interesting to know that in the future things are going to be very different in terms of what we can divine or ascertain about the early universe.

E: So we need to write it down now is basically what you're saying.

What Is Consciousness (21:23)

• http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/what-is-consciousness-another-reply-to-kastrup/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLRckO0zCJQ&feature=related

Who's That Noisy? (40:09)

Answer to last week: Holocaust Deniers.

S: Well Evan, it's time for Who's That Noisy.

E: Sure is, let me go ahead and play for you last week's Who's That Noisy. Here we go.

First voice: I know that I'm disliked as an historian, I know that I'm hated by some people.

Second voice: (speaking Hebrew or Arabic?)

Third voice: I don't think I can actually make a good decision until I'm allowed to read and hear every point of view, how can we know the truth about every point of view?

E: How can we know the truth about any point of view?

S: Sounds like a denier to me.

E: Yeah, some kind of denier. The first gentleman you heard, his name is David Irving. The second gentleman you heard, his name is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And the third one you heard is David Duke. Do you know what these three Chuckleheads have in common?

S: They're deniers?

B: They're chuckleheads?

E: Besides that? What are they denying exactly?

JB: That they're homosexuals?

E: Holocaust deniers.

S: Holocaust, of course.

B: Ah, yeah.

JB: Ohhh.

S: They denied the Armenian holocaust, right.

E: That's right (laughs). Denial of the Jewish holocaust.

S: Oh, the Jewish holo... yeah that one, OK.

E: Yes, yes. That.

JB: Do you really think they believe that, Steve? Or do you just think they're saying that because I think that there's just no chance that these people believe that, they're way too smart. I could understand somebody that's out there but these guys are actually not idiots.

S: I think that it's a mixture, I think that they probably know that they are bending the truth here and there but I think that they also have some core beliefs like that the holocaust is exaggerated, that it's being used for political purposes and I think they really believe a lot of those core beliefs, but they know that they are being tricky with the facts when they need to be. Most of the time that question comes up, con-artist versus true believer, in my opinion you never really know but I think most of the time the answer is both in some combination.

E: Some combination. Well they're reductionists right? They'll say aah it wasn't really as bad as you thought, it was only you know, several thousand, it wasn't the millions of people.

S: Yeah, they keep trying...

E: Or the techniques used, right? There were not gas chambers you know... they say.

S: Well they were delousing chambers chambers and well yeah, there were delousing chambers but they're also using it to kill people, you know.

J: Yeah, it blows my mind, you know it's one of the most insulting things to deny.

JB: And it's so recent, it's not like you're denying the inquisition or something like that, this is literally something my grandparents were in, I mean it's, that's why I guess I don't get as upset as other people do because to me it's just like OK he's clearly bullshitting, like I think it would hurt me a lot more if I actually thought that intelligent, educated people really didn't believe in it.

S: I hear what you're saying, so what about all of the people, the survivors who give first-hand accounts of being in the concentration camps? You know, well we know all Jews are liers so we can comfortably ignore all their testimony. That's literally what they say often.

E: There you go.

JB: My first thing my grand parents did when they got to Israel is go to a tattoo parlour and put those numbers in their arms.

S: Yeah, right.

E: It was all the fashion at the time. Plenty of correct guesses on this one. William Chagnizi from Montreal, the first correct person to guess, the first person to guess correctly. Well done, William from Montreal.

S: Nicely done. What have you got for this week, Evan?

E: And now for this week, something entirely different, well I'll let you judge.

Well psychiatry has to do with the insane, and we have nothing to do with the insane whatsoever. They are, the insane, uh well they're insane.

S: All right, well that's an interesting one, Evan.

E: Yeah, yeah I think we'll have some correct guesses on that one, that was a fun little one to come across, so info@theskepticsguide.org, sguforums.com is our forum check it out if you haven't already and of course, good luck everyone.

S: Thanks Evan.

Questions and Emails

Speaking to Mediums (43:57)

I love your podcast. I've been listening to it for a couple a months and I'm pleased to say that I am "converted" to Skepticism. Did you know that in Portugal our dead speak English? We have a TV show here called "Depois da Vida", that means "Life after Life". On each week the medium Janet Parker allegedly listens to dead people related to a guest celebrity. The person hosting the show does the translations between the two. Since the medium apparently doesn't speak Portuguese, we may conclude that the dead related to our Portuguese celebrities have to speak English to the medium. She then speaks in English to the host; the host translates it to the guest. Continue with your great work. Regards LuÃs Pratas Lisbon, Portugal.

Swindler's List (50:13)

Hearing Aids

Science or Fiction (61:17)

Item number one. An iridescent blue tarantula. Item number two. A cactus that can "walk" short distances across the desert in search of water. Item number three. A fungus that looks and behaves so much like a sponge it was named Spongiforma squarepantsii. And item number four. A snub-nosed monkey from Myanmar that sneezes every time it rains.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (75:20)

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.

J: Richard Feynman!

Announcements (76:45)