The Difference Between Ghosts And Dark Matter

A rather interesting piece that I stumbled upon on the NPR website. The author is trying to explain why, since both ghosts and dark matter can't be "seen", why wouldn't scientists believe in ghosts while a large percentage of physicists believe in the existence of dark matter.

So how do physicists and astronomers get away with claiming the existence of cosmic ghosts (dark matter and dark energy) when they would probably roll their eyes at descriptions of the more terrestrial haunted-house kind?

The answer is data, its prevalence and its stability.

There are literally thousands of studies now of those rotating-too-fast galaxies out there — and they all get the same, quite noticeable result. In other words, data for the existence of dark matter is prevalent. It's not like you see the effect once in a while but then it disappears. The magnitude of the result — meaning its strength — also stays pretty consistent from one study to the next. The same holds true for studies of dark energy.

We need to make something VERY CLEAR here, especially for non-scientists. While we do not know exactly what this dark matter is made of, or we don't know what it is, we have already a very clear set of parameters of its CHARACTERISTICS. Based on what we have already observed and measured, there are QUANTITATIVE properties of these so-called dark matter.

This is important because of two reasons: (i) there are no such definitive behavior, characteristics, and quantitative description of "ghosts", and (ii) these quantitative properties allow us to make measurements and rule out unsuitable candidates that to not fit into what we already know.

This article is similar to the public science event that I attended several years ago in which Dan Hooper of Fermilab/UofC described the science of ghosts. Back then, he too included the possibility on whether ghosts can be made up of dark matter, and based on what we know about dark matter and what people have described what ghosts can do, he concluded that ghosts cannot be made up of dark matter.

So no. Ghosts and Dark Matter are not in the same league.

Zz.

The Physics (Or Lack Thereof) Of Souls

I've tackled the subject of "afterlife" and "life after death" before on here. But Sean Carroll took it a step further and really examined it with respect to what we know of today in terms of the physics. He even brought out the Dirac equation.

If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn't exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren't any soul at all, and then what's the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking -- what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?

What it means is this. If one wants to argue that our current understanding actually SUPPORTS the existence of souls and afterlife, then one MUST reformulate this equation and show exactly the physics and dynamics of such entities the way we understand all other parts of physics. Now this is very important because to CLAIM that current science are consistent with such phenomenon, or even explained it, one must provide such formalism, or else, it is just a handwaving speculation. The latter is something that Deepak Chopra has been doing, which is piggy-backing onto modern physics without providing any valid formalism for it.

But if one claims that souls and afterlife are BEYOND current-day physics, then one has to throw out everything that we know (and know to be valid since we are USING them in our everyday lives) and come up with something new. This will present a very daunting task.

We don't choose theories in a vacuum. We are allowed -- indeed, required -- to ask how claims about how the world works fit in with other things we know about how the world works. I've been talking here like a particle physicist, but there's an analogous line of reasoning that would come from evolutionary biology. Presumably amino acids and proteins don't have souls that persist after death. What about viruses or bacteria? Where upon the chain of evolution from our monocellular ancestors to today did organisms stop being described purely as atoms interacting through gravity and electromagnetism, and develop an immaterial immortal soul?

We simply can't manipulate or change one part of physics, without affecting other parts. If one proposes a new physics, then it is a valid to look at consequences of that physics and see how it affects other parts. And this is where many new theories will have problems because it has to not only predict new things, but also be consistent with others that we have verified. That's why I said it is a daunting task.

Zz.

Publishing A Turd Is Still A Turd

OK, I've made wholesale judgement of something that I haven't read, and something I don't have a very good knowledge of. In other words, I'm doing exactly what I've criticized crackpots for doing. I fully admit it, and I'm fully owning it! So there!

But really, as I've mentioned earlier, you can only counter crackpottery with another crackpottery. And I'm going to judge this with the same level of superficial knowledge as this person is doing by invoking his superficial level of knowledge of quantum mechanics. I think that is a fair deal, no?

This article out of Cornell highlights a series of publication on ESP and other paranormal phenomena. Oh yes, that again! Supposedly, this series of publication is based on new research that somehow shows "convincing" evidence for it. But just in reading this article, are you truly convinced?

In one experiment, Bem asked students to pick one of two curtains as the one they thought contained a picture behind it. Although the students correctly chose the correct curtain 53.1 percent of the time, which appears to not be too different from the expected 50 percent, Bem believes this value is, in fact, statistically significant and unlikely to appear by chance.

A paper published by researchers at the University of Amsterdam suggests that Bem uses incorrect statistical methodology by using one-tailed tests instead of two-tailed tests, which would be more difficult to prove significance for. By re-analyzing Bem’s data using a different set of statistical analysis tools, however, the researchs show that Bem’s data is not statistically significant. Bem believes this claim is “an absolutely ridiculous argument to be making” and that the assumptions used by the University of Amsterdam researchers are “unrealistic.”

Er... yeah! Of course!

But it gets better when physics is invoked.

It is Bem’s belief that there is “nothing in physics that is contradicted” because although ESP might not be in line with Newtonian physics, it is in line with quantum physics.

He added, “The fact that we do not have a mechanism to explain it is a major deterrent. But almost every theory first started out as an unexplainable phenomenon.”

Er... what is it with "quantum physics" that is consistent with this cra... er ... study? Let me guess. He's invoking quantum entanglement? Superposition? The Cat? If he is, he is barking up the wrong tree, very much like Deepak Chopra. And thus, my point about superficial understanding of something. But what is funny is the gall he had to say that " ... almost every theory first started out as an unexplainable phenomenon.. " Since when is this something new to be "first started out"? Claims of ESP and such have been made for decades, even longer! In all of those years, they still can't get out of first base, out of the "discovery" mode. Other legitimate phenomena have gone beyond the discovery/confirmation phase and now have proper theoretical descriptions.

This thing cannot get beyond the fact that they can't differentiate their signal from random noise. The statistical analysis of such a thing is suspect. It is why the effect is not convincing.

Zz.

One Clear Difference Between a "Myth" and "Science"

I initially dismissed this news article because it doesn't report on anything new about homeopathy. But then, a passage in there caught my eye, and I see the same cracpottery tactics that many try to pass when they can't stand on their own body of evidence (mainly because they lack such evidence). When you have no evidence to support you, what do you do? You either piggy-back onto well-verified science (Deepak Chopra's tactics), or you point out "similarities in situation" to science. The latter is what is going on here.

Regardless, proponents say it shouldn’t be discounted simply because it can’t be explained. For years, no one knew how aspirin worked. And scientists still don’t fully understand the mechanism behind a conventional drug such as Ritalin, argued Dr. Tim Fior, director of the Center for Integral Health in Lombard, Ill.

I've described a similar situation before during my report of my attendance at a public talk on "The Science of Spooky", when the person tried to justify Psi research by claiming that we don't know anything about gravity. This was my rebuttal to that claim:

While it is true that at the very fundamental level, we do not know what gravity is, it doesn't mean that we do not understand it or have no clue on what it is. There is a HUGE difference between our understanding of gravity, and our understanding (or lack thereof) of psi. We understand gravity well enough to be able to describe it not just qualitatively, but also QUANTITATIVELY! That's very important, because when you can predict something by putting numbers, it implies that you have understood its behavior very well. However, the most important difference between psi and gravity is the FACT that our knowledge of gravity has continue to GROW. The boundary of our knowledge on gravity, ever since mankind first realize what it is, and ever since Newton and Kepler formulated it, have continued to expand. Einstein's description of gravity via his General Relativity is one prime example of how we know MORE and MORE about gravity, and the fact that we can send space craft to meet up with various celestial bodies and objects is ample proof that we know A LOT about gravity and continue to refine our knowledge of it.

The same can't be said about psi phenomena, and paranormal phenomena in general. After hundreds of years since its purported "discovery" and years and years of study, the field is trying to prove the existence of these phenomena. It is still stuck in first base in trying to show that these things truly are there. All that have been done (and this is certainly the message that I got out of the evening) is that there are now more varied and different ways to try to find it. That's it. After so many years, it is still trying to show that these phenomena truly are there and valid. They still are stuck in the "discovery" phase. This is not even remotely close to resembling what we know about gravity!

So in my rebuttal, replace Psi phenomenon with homeopathy, and replace gravity with "aspirin and conventional medicine", and you have the exact response I would put out here again. It is a tired, old argument, and those who continue to make such arguments never bothered to look BEYOND their claims and the fact that in valid science, there is this series of PROGRESSION. Such progression results in our increasing knowledge of what we are studying. This means we no longer get stuck on the discovery phase for years and years (and some, even for hundreds of years).

It is the same shortsighted argument that crackpot makes. When you criticize their "theories", they will then claim that both Einstein and Galileo also were faced with such skepticism when they produced either "new" ideas. Of course, they neglected a very important fact that Einstein and Galileo were masters of the subject they were working in (i.e. they weren't ignorant of the subject matter). Einstein had to understand classical E&M extremely well to be aware of the problem with its non-covariant nature under Galilean transformation. You can't say the same about the overwhelming majority of crackpots who don't even understand basic physics. Yet, they think they're Einsteins.

So here's a "friendly advice" to crackpots and others trying to promote your pseudoscience. If you can't stand on your OWN body of evidence, don't try to shift the focus onto something else! Just because you found something similar being done in conventional science, doesn't mean the comparison is valid. That tactic doesn't work because it will reveal the ugly shortcoming of what you believe in when we looks closely at the comparison beyond the superficial level.

Zz.

Astrology Is A Science ...... In India

Yes folk. The Bombay High Court has ruled that Astrology is a science and recommended that it is taught in schools and universities.

"So far as prayer related to astrology is concerned, the Supreme Court has already considered the issue and ruled that astrology is science. The court had in 2004 also directed the universities to consider if astrology science can be added to the syllabus. The decision of the apex court is binding on this court," observed the judges.

The judges also took on record an affidavit submitted by the Union government. The Centre had in its affidavit stated that astrology is 4000 years old 'trusted science' and the same does not fall under the preview of The Drugs and Megical Remedies Act (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, 1954.

It will be interesting to know on what basis does such a court has used to rule that it is a science, other than simply based on its "history". If we use that twisted logic, all religions should also be ruled as "science" as well.

Too bad the fact that predictions of major disaster from the last eclipse event didn't count as counter evidence that these things are often glaringly wrong.

Zz.

Dubunk Quackery Using Another Quackery

A long time ago, when I found Warren Siegel's "Are You A Quack" webpage, I had quite a chuckle when I came across this piece of information.

Note: Long ago a professor of mine told me that he got letters from 2 quacks, so he forwarded each's letter to the other. He got back an angry letter from one saying, "Why did you introduce me to this quack?"

This is not an isolated incidence. In my encounter on the web after so many years, I find that, often times, quacks can't stand other quacks, or at least, they don't want to make any effort in trying to argue with other quacks, which is understandable. After all, what VALUE is there in such discussion when a quack generally (i) doesn't understand physics and/or (ii) are set in their ways and won't want to learn why he/she is wrong.

So, in this very same spirit, I thought what would be better than using a pseudoscience to counter the argument or another pseudoscience. The pseudoscience that I want to argue against here is "ghosts" or other supernatural beings that go bump in the night. Y'know, the ones you see on either the Travel Channel where they seem to encounter some unknown "forces", "energy", or other beings almost every week, without even a bat of an eye that these things are not verified by science.

So how does one counter the validity of such ghosts? Well, we should pull out "The Secret" and apply the Law of Attraction. The fundamental idea of this Law of attraction is a bastardization of quantum mechanics. Here, it appears that you and your thoughts can somehow affect what goes on around you. Your thoughts can change your world and thus, you are in control of what is happening. This, of course, comes from the bastardization of the act of measurement in quantum mechanics, where these people are erroneously apply the fact that a measurement causes the "collapse" of a wavefunction, and how we measure things can affect the outcome.

So my argument against ghosts is that, when put in a "scary" situation, where you go into a building that you have been told to be haunted, or have supernatural occurrences, then you inevitably, according to The Law of Attraction, are "thinking of thoughts" about ghosts and other goblins. So essentially, your thoughts are the ones bringing these entities into your perception. They would not have been there if you didn't know any better, or didn't know about it. So these ghosts are not real. They are only your imagination, and they are shared by people who are there as well. I bet you, if you bring James Randi to one of these ghosts sightings, he will have a different take on what is going on.

So according to The Secret, you are the one who caused the ghosts that you experienced. How about them apples?

Zz.

Science Fights Back Against A Homeopath Fight-Back

I read this blog entry, and I find the same fight that I've been waging against physics quacks. And since this is a truly wonderful argument against a pseudoscience, I am more than happy to give this blog entry ample air time on here.

This is a response to a response. The author had thoroughly argued against a peer-reviewed paper that purportedly claimed to have seen a positive impact of homeopathy. Both the author, and another, have severely criticized the paper for several shortcomings. But it appears that these criticisms irked a writer at a homeopathy website (surprise!). What you can read is not only a rebuttal, but also a very pointed attack against pseudoscience in general.

The issue that keeps coming back is the fact that many people cannot tell the difference between anecdotal evidence and scientific evidence. They also cannot reason why an anecdotal evidence is insufficient to claim validity of something. To me, that is the fundamental reason why we are having this discussion, and on why pseudoscience flourishes.

It would be interesting to see if this paper will get a ton of rebuttals in the coming months.

Zz.

God of Quantum Flapdoodle

I like that name "quantum flapdoodle". Supposedly, it was coined by Murray Gell-Mann to describe "..stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience.." In this article, Michael Shermer continues to rebutt Deepak Chopra and his quantum flapdoodle.

Chopra believes that the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) can be linked to certain mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness). This supposition is based on the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light in scientific circles.

Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Penrose and Hameroff conjecture that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons. This, in turn, triggers the neurons to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave-function collapse can only come about when an atom is “observed” (that is, affected in any way by something else), “mind” may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms to molecules to neurons . . . and so on.

In reality, the gap between quantum effects and the world of ordinary events is too large to bridge. In his 1995 book The Unconscious Quantum, the University of Colorado particle physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described in terms of quantum mechanics, its typical mass m, speed v, and distance d must be on the order of Planck’s constant h. “If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically,” that is, according to the physical laws discovered by Newton. Stenger computed the mass of neural transmitter molecules and their speed across the distance of a synapse, and he concluded that both are about three orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. It is important to note one very common practice with physicists, and scientists/engineers in general. When one makes off-the-cuff supposition, one can make quick back-of-the-envelope calculations to figure out not if something is possible, but if something can be ruled out immediately simply based on what we know. So such a thing that Vic Stenger did in calculating the mass and speed of a neural transmitter may not be accurate, but it is of the order-of-magnitude value that clearly shows that quantum effects are just not significant. This is part of science. This is something people like Chopra can't do and have no skill to do. They typically make handwaving argument with no quantitative analysis to back what they say. Yet, they claim to base their speculation on science/physics.

One would think that, since they're making things up as they go along, that they could make their own reality and use that, rather than piggybacking onto something they clearly do not understand.

Zz.

Chopra Versus Shermer at CalTech and on Nightline - Follow-up

If you didn't read the earlier entry on the debate between Deepak Chopra and Michael Shermer at CalTech, you might want to catch up first.

One of my argument against Chopra is that he's using merely a superficial understanding of QM and applying it to where it doesn't belong or hasn't been shown to be valid. In fact, in that earlier article, he even agreed to get a lesson in QM by a theorist in the audience. Unfortunately, even with his admission that he doesn't know QM, it doesn't stop him from continuing with his ignorant "use" of it.

It appears that he has blog a rebuttal to that debate. And sadly, it continues to propagate the same faulty understanding of QM. His usage of the HUP is, to put it mildly, is very pedestrian.

It would be consistent with common sense if these particles, and the subatomic particles that they can be broken down into, were solid and stable in spacetime. But they aren't. Thanks to two breakthrough ideas -- the Uncertainty Principle and the Observer Effect -- nothing in Nature can be seen as solid and fixed in spacetime. The Uncertainty Principle says, in its simplest terms, that you cannot know the position of a particle and its momentum at the same time. The observer effect says that particles are only a superposition of possibility waves until a non-material observer causes them to collapse from one state, a wave, into another, a particle.

Already I can see readers glazing over, but these are important points for the existence of God and also for our existence. All solid objects exist, in essence, as invisible waves that extend infinitely in all directions. When an observer enters the picture, the wave collapses into a point, and that point is a spacetime event -- or a particle -- that you can measure. So it turns out that looking at a virtual electron (waves) causes it to appear as an actual electron (particle).

This, of course, isn't correct, because the HUP doesn't say anything about the accuracy of one single measurement of the position and one single measurement of the momentum. This is a common misconception of the HUP.

But the amusement doesn't stop there. He then tried to argue that quantum effects can be extended to "large" scale.

On the side of materialism, Shermer and many others say no. Quantum behavior, or as Shermer calls it "Quantum weirdness," is confined to the microscopic world. It doesn't leak into the macroscopic world of rocks, trees, clouds -- and the moon. But there are three weaknesses in this argument:

1. Recent discoveries have produced quantum weirdness on the macroscopic level. See this article about "supersizing" quantum mechanics

2. Quantum physics is behind all kinds of technologies used in the big everyday world: transistors, superconductors, experiments with superfluids. There are even cutting-edge experiments with time travel and teleportation, very Star Trek, although so far the results are on the level of light beams, not Scottie and Captain Kirk.

3. Most crucial of all, if you don't allow quantum phenomenon to interact with the big world, you run into a huge problem with physics itself. Quantum physics is the basis of our macroscopic physical world, so there has to be an interaction, even if that interaction is not fully understood.

Let's tackle this one at a time, shall we?

1. Look at the amazing set of conditions that a system HAS TO BE PUT UNDER for the quantum effects to show up. It has to be cooled down to ridiculously low temperatures, it is completely isolated from the environment, etc.. etc. In other words, it is NOT EASY to observe quantum effects in progressively larger and larger systems! Why? Because thermal noises and interactions with the environment can easily destroy the coherence of the quantum effects! He cited the news reports of such a thing, but he did not understand the physics, nor the experiment, on how we were able to observe such a thing. It is another clear example of my claim that he and his minions only know QM superficially, but still have no qualms and "using" it without any fundamental understanding.

2. This is right, QM is the physics behind devices, etc. However, these devices rely macroscopic behavior of the system. We measure not "electrons" directly, but current, let's say, which is a macroscopic measurement. In fact, one can safely say that the physical quantities that we measure, such as position, momentum, energy, etc, are ALL classical properties, because they require the system to interact not only with a macroscopic device, but also because we measure a LARGE NUMBER of them. Those devices do not make use of ONE particle, but rather a huge number of them. Any student who has done any amount of basic QM in school can see that when we average out a large number of system, the system approaches the familiar classical behavior (ref: harmonic oscillator). So while the microscopic description of the behavior of the system is quantum mechanical, the physical behavior of the devices above is purely classical (you don't see your semiconductor in your computer appearing in several locations simultaneously, do you?)

3. If the interaction of QM with the macroscopic world is not fully understood, then why in heck is a Deepak Chopra already using it? The problem here is that we KNOW that the classical world is different than the quantum world. You NEVER see a soccer ball appearing in different locations simultaneously. You NEVER see the macroscopic effect of quantum entanglement. So we KNOW these two are different. How different they are, and how QM can merge into such differences is the question that continues to be studied. It means that anyone making use of QM into a realm where we still don't fully understand is making an utterly speculative proposition.

It is ironic that he's using QM to support his crackpottery without even giving one second of consideration that QM has plenty of experimental evidence, while he has none. Again, it comes back to what I was saying earlier, than lacking direct experimental evidence to support his view, he simply piggy-back onto a well-established physics and say, hey, if it works there, it should work here as well, and left it at that without providing any evidence. This is what happens when one understands QM superficially without any clear view of the basic formalism of QM. As I've mentioned earlier, when they only see the philosophical implication of it and see all these "strangeness" appearing out of nowhere, they seem to think that anything goes and things can be invented freely.

I sometime wish that they leave our physics alone and invent their own silly theory of the world to back up their claims.

Zz.

Abusing Albert Einstein

I'm glad that there are writers like Tom Chivers of the UK's Telegraph. There need to be someone who points out the stupidity in things like what he's highlighting in this article. In it, he's pointing to the recent book on the supposed "scientific case" for ESP where the authors used Einstein's quotes and possibly his physics to justify ESP.

But when a genuine hero of science has his consoling words to a bereaved woman twisted to make it sound like he believes what in a family newspaper I can only describe as “claptrap”, I think we should object. Make up your own nonsense, Ms Hennacy Powell, and stop dancing on the grave of a great man.

As with Deepak Chopra, it is amazing how people who do not understand physics can somehow bastardize parts of it to justify a pseudoscience. For some odd reason, they can't generate their own validity, because the lack proper empirical evidence. So instead, they latch onto established physics as "justification" that what they believe is valid because physics says it's possible. This of course, is completely bogus. The Standard Model says that the Higgs should be there. Now even when the Standard Model has been successful so many times, we still just simply don't take its word for it, and we still want to be able to detect these Higgs bosons. That's why we have the LHC. We simply don't accept it via "induction". There must be convincing empirical evidence that the Higgs is there.

Now why these people who piggy-back onto various aspects of physics cannot see this, I have no idea. I suppose if you only cherry-pick various superficial ideas in physics, you miss all the important details. And they hope that the rest of the public will miss them as well. More often than not, the public does!

Zz.

Chopra Versus Shermer at CalTech and on Nightline

Oh, what I would give to be in the audience for this one...

Nightline filmed a two and half hour debate between True/Slant blogger (Skeptic publisher) Michael Shermer and Huffpo blogger (best selling author) Deepak Chopra titled "Does God Have a Future?" at Cal Tech yesterday. An edited version will air on March 23rd with the entire conversation to be available online on the same date.

It is interesting that when a theorist offered to teach Chopra about quantum mechanics, he accepted. This is rather strange because it clearly indicated that he is admitting that he doesn't know much about QM, but he's been "using it" in promoting his quackery all this time! What's wrong with this picture?

This is what many of the pseudoscientists do, i.e. bastardize QM without understanding what it is. All they "understood" are those they got out of pop-science books or articles. If that is all what QM is, then we should be able to make constructive devices out of such books and articles only. Well try it if you can. There are people who can't tell the difference between learning physics, and learning ABOUT physics. There IS a distinct difference between the two...

Now we'll just have to wait for not only the Nightline show, but also the whole thing to appear online....

Zz.

Astronomy is NOT Astrology

A rather amusing, if not sad, commentary on science illiteracy. This article highlights one recent confusion about Brian May, who finally got his Ph.D. degree in Astronomy, but some news report confused that with Astrology and calling him a "noted astrologer".

I have to confess on my paper's behalf, though, that Carlton Books aren't the only ones to have confused astrology and astronomy in recent weeks. Back in May, no less an authority than The Times itself ran a story about Sir Bernard Lovell, that described him as an "eminent astrologer".

A scientist being confused as a pseudoscience is like a liberal democrat being confused as being a conservative, right-wing republican! :)

As a physicist, I've often been referred to as "physician". I suppose it isn't as bad as being called an astrologer.

Zz.

Solar Eclipse Occured - No Natural Disaster Happened

So where was the "... snuffing out its life-giving light and causing food to become inedible and water undrinkable..." part during the solar eclipse yesterday? I had a bag of popcorn and settled in in front of the TV ready to watch CNN for any sign of such calamity.

So is someone going to go after these quacks and point out to them how awfully wrong those things are?

Zz.

Solar Eclipse Pits Superstition Against Science

I read this news report on astrologers in India predicting mayhem and chaos happening due to the upcoming solar eclipse, and I could have sworn that we are back in the Dark Ages where natural phenomena somehow are supernatural events due to deliberate acts of God/s or the devil.

In Hindu mythology, the two demons Rahu and Ketu are said to "swallow" the sun during eclipses, snuffing out its life-giving light and causing food to become inedible and water undrinkable.

Pregnant women are advised to stay indoors to prevent their babies developing birth defects, while prayers, fasting and ritual bathing, particularly in holy rivers, are encouraged.

The problem with this is that, when something like this is mentioned, then any incident of any kind, whether big or small, will be used to justify the accuracy of such a prediction. This is because when you make a prediction that is VAGUE enough, something that science can't get away with to be considered to be valid, then you have enough of a wiggle room to fit anything in it. You are also inviting some crazy nut to actually commit something on that day simply to fulfill the prophecy.

Still, I want to see evidence that food becomes inedible and water undrinkable during the eclipse. If this is false, then someone needs to being these astrologers to task for the lies. But, that's not going to happen, is it?

Zz.

A Bashing of New Age Pseudoscience

This is one review of a book that I agree with. The writer at the Guardian reviewed and and properly bashed Deepak Chopra's mumbo jumbo book "The Spontaneous Fulfillment Of Desire". In doing so, he highlighted a simple aspect of something that many people seems to forget.

Copper-bottomed psychological science, however, tells us we are predisposed to find meaning in random occurrences. It's partly confirmation bias: you never remember the times you find a gift from a friend, then don't get a phone call. We're also bad at judging the likelihood of "miraculous" events. The mathematician JE Littlewood enshrined this, tongue-in-cheek, as "Littlewood's law": if you assume we're active and alert for eight hours a day, and that we have experiences (taking a sip of coffee, having a thought about someone) at the rate of one per second, then astonishing things - events with a one-in-a-million frequency - will happen to us, on average, once every 35 days.

There is very little one can do with crackpots like Chopra. They are certainly free to sell their brand of new age spirituality. However, when they invoke valid science, and especially physics, to justify and give weight to their arguments, then that's when the gloves are off. This is especially true when they bastardize the various physics principles. People who buy into it should be told that, very much like that "What the *@$^%&%$#$ Do We Know" movie, physicists do not endorse such bastardization nor is it based on verified ideology. If people still want to buy into such pseudoscience even knowing that, then they deserve what they get!

Zz.

Is There Evidence for God in the Often Strange Things That Happen in World Around Us?

This is a very good and concise article that address this question very succinctly. The author tackles several often-mentioned phrases and claims of "god" or a miracle whenever something unexplained happened.

I often wonder if, when people say something like that, that they completely forgot about history, or are totally ignorant of the progress in knowledge. There are many things that were attributed to "acts of god", such as eclipses, earthquakes, volcano eruption, etc. Now, no one (other than Pat Robertson maybe who still attributes these natural events as "punishments" from god) would seriously claim such a thing.

Zz.

Science and Astrology: the Proof in Astrophysics?

PUHLEEEZE!!

This article shows exactly why astrologers have no clue on how things are accepted to be valid in science. This person is trying to grasp as the flimsiest straw based simply on one, ONE, hypothetical musings on a "theoretical astrophysicist". I'll let you read the rest of the article, which really provides ZERO evidence to accept the validity of astrology. But what gets my goat is what was said at the end of the article:

Thus far, the few scientific studies that support astrology have shown significant correlations, but correlations are measurable observed links between one happening and another....they don't reveal predictable outcomes. So, perhaps astrology will never be confirmed by the majority of scientists, but even Seymour points out that scientific thought...both ancient and modern...is fallible due to preconceptions and that astrology is dismissed without study by the average scientist.

But what about not accepting something FIRST before valid and convincing evidence are presented? It is NOT the job of science to prove that you are wrong, it is the job of whoever is trying to show that something is valid to find convincing evidence. Every single scientific discovery and new ideas have to go through that process. Einstein had many doubters to all of his idea when presented. Quantum mechanics had a lot of challenges against it. It is when these ideas are backed by overwhelming body of evidence (as in empirical evidence), only THEN are they accepted to be a scientific idea and considered to be valid. Not before then.

Yet, so many people, including this "astrologer" have already accepted astrology to be valid, despite the lack of any valid evidence. Astrology is dismissed because of that. And considering that such a belief has been around for hundreds of year and it still can't get beyond the phase of trying to prove its existence, it has been understandably categorized as crackpottery. A valid phenomenon never languishes in the land of "is it true, or is it not true" for that long. Our understanding of every single valid phenomenon improves with time, from the moment of discovery to making even more careful measurement of its various properties. We know more about the top quark mass now when compared to when it was first discovered at the Tevatron. We know more about the behavior and puzzling properties of high-Tc cuprate superconductors, even though we still don't quite fully have a valid theory for it. All of these phenomena have gone way past the "discovery" phase and into more detailed studies. One cannot say that about "astrology", that is still stuck at first base.

It is crackpottery.

Zz.

The "Voodoo Science" of Brain Imaging

This certainly came out of nowhere. Since I am not an expert is this area (I know quite a bit about NMR/MRI, but not how it is applied in brain imaging), I will only cite the webpage and, I'm sure, we'll hear more about this in the coming months when many authors get to send in their rebuttals. Still, the paper cited is really rips apart many social science studies on human interaction/responses and the corresponding correlations with brain activities as mapped via fMRI.

The new paper (to be published in Perspectives on Psychological Science but available here) is called “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience,” which gives you a pretty good idea of its argument. Basically, the authors noticed that a lot of papers in social neuroscience that use brain imaging were reporting correlations between brain activity and social/emotional behavior or thoughts that looked too good to be true or, even, mathematically possible (kind of like the years of steady investment returns that Bernie Madoff reported). So the scientists, led by Edward Vul of MIT and Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego, picked 54 such studies, many of them published in prominent journals such as Science and Nature, and wrote to the authors, basically asking how they managed to get such impressive correlations.

More than half admitted using a statistical strategy that, write Vul and his colleagues, “grossly inflates correlations, while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams.” Other statistical snafus, they say, “likely created entirely spurious correlations in some cases,” and they call on social neuroscientists who use fMRI to reanalyze their raw data “to correct the scientific record.”

This could almost be as embarrassing for Social Science as the Alan Sokal hoax in "Social Text"!

Zz.

The Placebo Effect

More results from studies involving the placebo effect. This time, there may be a genetic marker that causes someone to be more susceptible to the placebo effect than others.

This all boils down to how we accept something to be "real" or valid. This is an important aspect in science, and especially in the field of medicine.

To get a drug to market, pharmaceutical companies have to show that it works better than a placebo.

I think that is a very important statement, and something that the "alternative medicine" community seems to want to ignore. This is what we call careful, scientific study. If you claim that B causes A, then there must be a clear connection between A and B, and that A can only be caused by B in a controlled manner. In other words, A can not have been caused also by C, or D, etc. In alternative medicine, the effect is VERY small, and small enough that it can't discount not only the placebo effect, but also random chance.

Zz.

The Science of Spooky - Follow-Up

I mentioned yesterday about the Illinois Science Council event on the Science of Spooky. I actually went to the event to hear the talk by Julia Mossbridge and Dan Hooper.

Before I write something on it, let me first of all declare (if you haven't been following this blog for a considerable period of time already), that I'm extremely skeptical of paranormal phenomena. So that should give you already the frame of mind that I was in when I attended this event. I don't pretend to have an "open mind", whatever that means. I did intend to listen to the presentation and analyze what I heard based on what I know.

Julia Mossbridge started the evening by describing various Psi research and presenting various 'evidence', based on a number of studies, of these Psi phenomena. I wasn't convinced. Many of these are extremely small effects, and these data were never shown with the statistical spread. So most of these masked the "degree of confidence" that one has on the results. But more on my annoyance about this later.

Dan Hooper then presented a very entertaining analysis of the properties of ghosts. I hope that the audience caught on something very important that could have easily been missed. Dan started out by describing ALL that we know about the properties of ghosts (i.e. it can appear out of nowhere, and it can go through walls, tables, etc.). Then using those observations, try to construct the nature of ghost. In other words, now that we now what it can do, can we figure out what is made of? This is extremely important because this is how science works, especially after an experimental discovery. Now that we know a number of things that it can do, can we formulate a theoretical description of what it is from First Principle? So what he did was demonstrate one way on how science works. To me, this demonstration of the methodology is as important as what he was describing. I just hope the audience realized that.

Anyway, back to these ghosts. He talked about all the various forces that we know of today (electromagnetic, strong, weak, and gravity), and none of them, it seems, can be used to describe ghosts, since all of these forces interact with matter, and since ghosts can pass through matter easily without interacting, then they can't be made up of these forces. So then he tries to look at other types of explanation, and he offered 3:

1. neutrino. In fact, neutrino has sometime been referred to as "ghost particles". Can ghosts be made up of neutrino? Nope. First of all, neutrino can't be localized. Since it barely have any mass, it moves extremely close to the speed of light. So to have it somewhere long enough for human to see would be impossible. Furthermore, neutrinos do have weak and gravitational interaction. So at some point, ghosts can only be detected this way, not by human visual observation. So that rules out neutrinos.

2. Dark matter. Can ghosts be made up of dark matter? This again suffers from the same issue as neutrino, where it requires the dark matter particle to actually be localized long enough, and be observed via EM interaction, which can't be done with dark matter.

3. Extra dimensions. Can it be that whatever particle that makes up ghosts actually live out in the extra dimensional space beyond our 3 spatial dimensions? Dan argued that there has to be something that turns itself on and off with these ghosts particles that will allow it to appear and then disappear from our 3D universe. That is a mechanism that is very hard to explain and be convincing.

In the end, he claimed that Physics cannot explain ghosts, which isn't a surprise to everyone who attended.

What was interesting was the Q&A session that follows. There were of course, a lot of entertaining questions and answers, but I was kicking myself (and I still am) about the response that Julia gave to a question on whether there was any explanation to what causes the Psi phenomena. Her response was that there's no explanation for gravity either!

Now, at that point, I was ready to say something, but since she was still going on with her answer, and other people also chimed in with other related questions, I didn't try to force myself into the middle of it and then at the end, simply let it go. DRAT! Now I'm regretting not responding to that type of response. So I will now vent my response here.

While it is true that at the very fundamental level, we do not know what gravity is, it doesn't mean that we do not understand it or have no clue on what it is. There is a HUGE difference between our understanding of gravity, and our understanding (or lack thereof) of psi. We understand gravity well enough to be able to describe it not just qualitatively, but also QUANTITATIVELY! That's very important, because when you can predict something by putting numbers, it implies that you have understood its behavior very well. However, the most important difference between psi and gravity is the FACT that our knowledge of gravity has continue to GROW. The boundary of our knowledge on gravity, ever since mankind first realize what it is, and ever since Newton and Kepler formulated it, have continued to expand. Einstein's description of gravity via his General Relativity is one prime example of how we know MORE and MORE about gravity, and the fact that we can send space craft to meet up with various celestial bodies and objects is ample proof that we know A LOT about gravity and continue to refine our knowledge of it.

The same can't be said about psi phenomena, and paranormal phenomena in general. After hundreds of years since its purported "discovery" and years and years of study, the field is trying to prove the existence of these phenomena. It is still stuck in first base in trying to show that these things truly are there. All that have been done (and this is certainly the message that I got out of the evening) is that there are now more varied and different ways to try to find it. That's it. After so many years, it is still trying to show that these phenomena truly are there and valid. They still are stuck in the "discovery" phase. This is not even remotely close to resembling what we know about gravity!

One can start to understand why it prompted physicists such as Bob Park to label the whole enterprise as "voodoo science" in his book.

So I regretted not being able to say that as a response. I'm glad that I can get my frustration out by writing it on here, but it is not the same. Still, I had an enjoyable evening, and I hope the Illinois Science Council does more of these things in my neighborhood more often.

Edit: My friend Ben over at Peculiar Velocity has written his version of this fun event.

Zz.