Blogs / Bad Astronomy

What do you get when you mix homeopathy with astrology?

This.

I should say that I have to give a kudo to the author for trying to set up a scientific experiment to see what would happen, but the experiment itself is so hopelessly flawed!

In fact it’s so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. The lack of double blinding. The single blinding still being able to influence the testers. The fact that all the testers were believers, and able to influence each other. The starting supposition that a) homeopathy works, and 2) astrology works (when neither does). A lack of clear results predicted so that conclusions (either negative or positive) could be drawn. The very subjective observations. And so on.

It’s clear from the article that the homeopath/astrologer means well, and is actually curious about all this. I wonder if there is any reliable way to take that curiosity, that well-meaning intention, and redirect it toward science? If there is — besides slowly and methodically banging the drum of reason — I’d love to know. A lot of people who believe in things like homeopathy and astrology and all that really are naturally curious, intelligent people, but somewhere down the line they strayed off the narrow path that winds its way through reality, and it would be nice to find a good way to nudge them back in the right direction.

Tip o’ the precessed vial of distilled water to Krelnik.

I am of two minds about Facebook. It has its uses and can be fun, and I know a lot of people use it as their primary means of keeping track of friends, but I find the interface and messaging system clunky, and the constant barrage of app invites makes me stabby.

But the sponsored ads are über irritating (and I don’t mean just the blatantly sexist ones). I saw a Facebook ad today for the upcoming movie "The Fourth Kind", about aliens coming to Earth to um, probe humans (and I mean, seriously? If we finally develop warp drive and travel to other planets, will we get all hot and bothered by the indigenous six-legged slimy malodorous gelatin bags that live there?^*). Here’s the ad:

See the poll? It asks, "Do you believe in alien encounters?", and the answer choices are "Yes, I believe", "I have seen one", and "Not sure".

Um, Facebook/Universal Pictures, how about a more realistic choice, like one that says: After years of seeing UFOlogists collecting nothing but anecdotal evidence without a single shred of actual y’know, tangible evidence, there is no reason to think this is anything but a psychological phenomenon and not a physical one, and should be treated that way.

Or better yet, how about simply:

No.

I usually enjoy movies about aliens, monsters, flying saucers, and the like, but this kind of advertising leaves me cold, and plays into the public’s misconceptions about the UFO phenomenon. So I’ll probably skip this movie and take a nap instead. Someone please wake me up when we have real evidence.

I travel a lot. Talks, meetings, family events… whatever the reason, I know the drive between my house and the airport as well as I know the walk from my office to the freezer where I keep ice cream sandwiches. That is to say, very well indeed.

I used to love flying, but of course the airline companies have crushed all the fun of flying into dust, so it’s more of a burden now. But while I don’t like going to other places, I like being in other places, if you see the difference.

And one of the reasons I love it so is because I love to eat. Love love love to eat. I have a suspicion that my hypernosmia superpower also lends itself to gustatory sensitivity, making eating an especially rich and sensual experience for me.

Or maybe I just love to eat. And I love trying new things when I eat, so travel is a perfect excuse. Sure, I love giving talks and spreading the joy and wonder of science blah blah blah, but I really enjoy going to different places and seeing what the local cuisine is. In St. Louis it’s definitely toasted ravioli. NYC? Pizza. New Orleans? Red beans and rice. Australia? Meat pies (and Minties! Mmmmm, Minties).

So I was excited to get to England for TAM London. I was in the UK last year on my way to visit the LHC, and I ate pretty well, so going back was making my tummy rumbly.

Man. I was right. Somehow, on my last visit, I missed getting bangers and mash. How did that happen? It’s the official Royal Food, like hamburgers here in the States. For those non-anglophiles out there, bangers are sausages, usually fried in pan, and mash is mashed potatoes. I do on occasion partake of sausages at home; we usually grill them. We also usually get a low fat version^*. In England, though, the sausages are full-fat, full-figured cylinders of prolate goodness. The mash, too, was loaded with butter, making them a heavenly, um, mash. That first night in London at the pub I was stuffed myself by the time I was done eating.

Over the next few days I had bangers and mash perhaps five more times, including once in Avebury (a town outside Bristol about which I’ll write at a later date) where they were smothered in a brown onion sauce that took about three years off my life, but made my taste buds almost pass out in ecstasy.

And that brings me to two points about English food. One is that everything in it contains fat. Everything. The sausages, of course. The mash did too; at home we use a bit of butter but not a lot because we like the flavor of the potatoes themselves. But in the UK, it’s a butterrific butterama of buttertude. Even, I swear, the sodas had 15% of the RDA of fat.

Second, veg, what we in America take the time to spell out as "vegetables". Or I should say the lack of them. Finding anything green in our meals was as difficult as finding anything low fat. Veggies just aren’t served in England where we went. Oh, I did get something advertised as broccoli at a pub in London, but it was so overcooked I think it was partially ionized. And it was closer to yellow than green on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Some restaurants said they had salads, but these were generally a leaf or two of greens (arugula, which they charmingly refer to as "rocket") with meat piled on top, including bacon. Many had an accompanying mayonnaise dressing. Some just came with a stick of butter popping out the top, and a complimentary pair of defibrillation paddles.

Not that getting good veg is impossible, of course. Along with Mrs. BA and our friends Brian and Gia, we had a magnificent dinner at the house of friends of Gia’s, Jane and Jonathan. Jane is a fantastic cook (as well as engaging and, like her husband, hilarious), and made some sort of steamed broccoli that was a sight for sore tongues. Of course, she also served an out of this world trifle which counteracted the health benefits of the broccoli nicely… but both were absolutely delicious. I regret nothing.

Which brings me to another small problem of mine: my sweet tooth. We bought biscuits ("cookies") every day: McVitties, Maryland, and five or six other brands. They were all odd to my American taste, and all delicious. I also ate Galaxy chocolate, Welsh chocolate, Belgian chocolate, Cadbury chocolate, and probably other kinds by accident without even knowing it. I’m surprised I didn’t lose a finger in my haste to try every bit of chocolate I could find. Had we stayed any longer in England I suspect I would’ve single-handedly caused a nation-wide shortage of chocolate.

Oh, another thing: we spent a lovely though rainy day in Wales, visiting a ruined castle in Caerphilly (more about that at a later date as well). Afterwards, we wandered the small town adjacent looking for food. We found a great small restaurant, and I got a sub sandwich (or hero or grinder or whatever) that was ham, English mustard, and apple chutney along with a bag of roasted chicken flavor crisps. It was a very scrumptious meal indeed. My two complaints? They don’t have ice in the restaurant. Ever. They just don’t have it. I’ve been told it’s an American thing to want ice with drinks, and to be fair I generally drink my water warm. But Coke? My colonial tastes decree that Coke needs to be cold.

My other complaint is more of an observation. Local food is local food, and what you like is usually what you grew up with, or a variant thereof. And as much as I loved the time I spent in Wales, this sign for a local deli was, um, a bit of a shock:

And no, it’s not because of the use of a word that here in the States is a slur against homosexuals — though that turns out to be a mixture of onions, liver, and bread crumbs that did make me a little queasy to think about (and it apparently is a corruption of the word fegato, Italian for liver)– it’s just that I’m not used to seeing such an eclectic assortment of body parts on a menu. I am quite sure that much of the food I eat would make people from other countries uneasy as well (heated chicken ova placed on yeast-infected ground-up and cooked wheat tips with violently mixed squeezings from a bovine mammary gland — yum!), so if you want to color me provincial, feel free. Given my tastes, I’m sure that if I grew up with that food I’d love it. I bet I could still enjoy gefilte fish… if there was enough horseradish on it.

So anyway, as to the point I think I’ve made, eating in the UK was amazingly delicious, but liable to induce a coronary after a few meals. It’ll be some time before I can work off the extra kilos I put on. And it was worth every single chew, every heavenly swallow, and every single bloated fat cell lining my middle.

And the real issue is, I can still taste some of it in my brain. A part of me still senses the presence of bangers, somewhere to the east, just a nine-hour flight and 6000 kilometers away.

(burp)

Note: I had an error in the original calculation for the Sun’s energy output (I blew it converting from ergs to Joules, if you’re curious). I fixed the error in the text below. I usually like to keep my mistakes open, but striking through the text in this case would make it confusing to read, so instead I simply fixed it and admit my error here. Anyway, the change isn’t a big deal; although the numbers changed, it doesn’t change the fact that the impact was teeny tiny compared to anything else the Moon goes through.

On October 9, a Centaur rocket booster, watched and followed by the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, impacted the Moon at several kilometers per second. Slamming into a crater near the lunar south pole, the hope was that the impacts would excavate water frozen permanently under the surface, eject plumes kilometers high, and give us our best evidence yet of ice on the Moon.

NASA played up the event, saying the plume might be visible from Earth. I didn’t think the flash would be visible from Earth (though the rocket booster impact was seen by LCROSS); from here we can’t see the floor of Cabeus crater where the impacts occurred, but I had hopes about the plume. Unfortunately, none of the fleet of terrestrially moribund telescopes detected the plume. A lot of people (bloggers, web commenters, twitterers) expressed disappointment.

Some people were a little more, um, well… crazy.

Now, that’s not too surprising. First off, most people understandably don’t have a great grasp of the scale of the Earth and Moon, and so may have been expecting a lot more out of this event. Others, also lacking that sense of scale, thought that disaster would befall the Moon. Still others in this group think that humans polluting the Moon is a tragedy.

All of them were and are wrong. Why? Let’s see.

1) Smackdown

First off, let’s talk about the initial flash from the impact. Our view from Earth was blocked, but if it were bright enough it might have illuminated the walls of the crater. Is it realistic to see the flash from a backyard telescope? Before the event I wondered about that, so I calculated about how bright it would be. Since I went to the trouble, I’ll subject you to it too. Plus, the math is fun.

This has to do with energy. When something smacks into something else, the energy in its motion is converted into other types of energy. When you clap your hands, for example, it’s sound. But at very high speeds, a lot of that energy is converted into heat and light. The amount of light you get out depends on lots of things, but mostly on the energy of the moving object, its kinetic energy.

That’s easy to calculate: the kinetic energy of an object is 1/2 x its mass x its velocity squared. The Centaur had a mass of about 2000 kilograms (a little over two standard tons) and was moving at 2.5 km/sec when it hit the Moon. Doing the math, that means it had a kinetic energy of a little over 6 billion Joules, equivalent to the energy release of blowing up about 1.5 tons of TNT.

That sounds like a lot! But that’s the total kinetic energy of the booster, and while it was released upon impact, not all of it turned into light. Some of it went into heating up the ground, some into vaporizing the metal in the rocket, some into displacing the ground — digging a crater and ejecting a plume — and so on.

But let’s be optimistic for a moment, and assume all the energy was converted into visible light. How bright would it have been from Earth?

The easiest way is compare the energy and distance of the impact to the energy and distance of the Sun. We know how bright the Sun is, so by setting up a ratio we can calculate the maximum brightness of the Centaur event.

The distance to the Sun is 150 million km, and it gives off 4 x 10²⁶ Joules every second. The Moon is 400,000 km away, and the Centaur impact had an energy of 6 x 10⁹ Joules. Brightness scales with distance squared, so the ratio of the two brightnesses is

So let’s see… divide that there, multiply by this, carry the two… and we get that the ratio of the brightness of the Centaur impact as seen from Earth is about 2 x 10^-12. In other words, the Sun is 500 billion times brighter! Wow!

But how bright does that make Centaur? Astronomers measure brightness in magnitudes, and I won’t bore you with the details this time, but knowing the brightness of the Sun and the ratio, that means that the Centaur impact — assuming all the energy went into visible light — would have shone at a magnitude of about 3 or 4, visible to the unaided eye but not glaringly obvious.

So it’s not like you’d have to squint and turn away from the glare. Standing on the Earth looking at the Moon, you’d barely have seen it at all, and the brightness of the Moon itself would have washed it out.

And that’s a best case. In reality we know that the energy doesn’t go into a visible flash; most of it is turned into heat. That means infrared energy, the kind that was easily detected by LCROSS when the Centaur booster hit the Moon. But even then the amount of kinetic energy converted to light is very low; I was quoted a figure of about 1/100th of a percent by an expert some years ago. That means that the flash — even in infrared — would have been at a magnitude of about 13 or 14, which is pushing the limits of small telescopes. And the visible flash would have been smaller yet.

That’s why I wasn’t expecting ground-based telescopes to see the flash. I had hopes, but no such luck.

2) The Big Mo

What about momentum? I read a few places where people were concerned that the impact might change the Moon’s orbit.

When you think about it a little, you’ll see this isn’t a concern. The Centaur was a cylindrical hunk of metal 13 meters high and 3 in diameter. The Moon is a ball of solid rock over 3400 kilometers across! So it’s like a flea hitting a freight train. But let’s make sure.

Momentum is simply the mass of an object times its velocity, and any momentum the Centaur had was given to the Moon. Let’s assume the Moon is standing still (that is, has velocity = 0) and then ask how fast the Moon would move after the booster hit it. That’s easy: we set the two momenta equal, divide the momentum of Centaur by that of the Moon, and solve for the Moon’s velocity:

Doing the math, (2000 kg x 2500 m/sec) / 7.4 x 10²² kg = 7 x 10^-17 m/s.

Egads. That means the Moon gained a velocity of 0.00000000000000007 meters per second from the impact. In other words, if you waited, say, 460,000,000 years you’d see the Moon will have moved a meter.

In other other words, a flea hitting a freight train. The concerns over the Moon plummeting to Earth or being blasted out of orbit a la Space:1999 were a tad unfounded.

In fact, the Moon is hit by meteorites all the time, and is probably smacked by something with the same momentum as the Centaur several times per year. Since the Moon is still there, we can safely assume the Centaur impact had essentially zero effect.

3) Extra-terrestrial eco-terrorism

OK, so we couldn’t see the flash, and the Moon remained unmoved after the impact. But what about humans being fined for cosmic littering?

I heard from several people personally who felt that we shouldn’t impact our stuff on the Moon because it’s polluting the surface. Some felt that it was just wrong in a vague way, but couldn’t clearly express why. Others felt it was just a dumb macho stunt.

First, it was not a stunt. High-speed impacts are a legitimate way — really the only one we have right now — to see if water lurks beneath the permanently shadowed floors of polar craters. You can accuse NASA of being macho jerks, but I don’t think that sticks. It’s really just a silly accusation.

As for littering, I think that’s a sense of scale. The Moon has a surface area of 37 million square kilometers, and the Centaur dug a crater about 20 meters across. Saying that has any real impact on the Moon is like arresting someone for mowing their back yard^*

And remember, the Moon is constantly bombarded from space. Roughly a ton of material hits the Moon every day, so the Centaur is a blip on top of that. And I’ll add that the Moon is essentially a giant rock in space, with no forests, no ecosystems, no delicate climate to knock out of whack. As a scientist I don’t want us defacing the Moon any more than necessary; it’s always best to study objects like it in situ. But I also know the Moon is very, very large, our impact doing this very, very small, and the outcome could be scientifically pretty huge.

One point to be made, of course, is that if we do find water, it makes it far more likely we’ll build colonies on the Moon that could do large scale mining and such, and that really will have an impact. That’s true, but again the Moon is a giant barren rock in space. I challenge anyone who worries that we will hurt the Moon somehow to first tell me exactly how what we’re doing is a bad thing (other than a vague discomfort with it), and also to turn around and defend how they live in a house or apartment or wherever. That has a much larger impact on the Earth, where we know things are in a pretty delicate condition. Plus, we live here and depend on the Earth.

Conclusion

I certainly understand why people might be concerned over what we’re doing on and to the Moon, but it’s a concern borne out of not understanding the scale of the Moon and what we’re doing with it. Think of it this way: when you stand outside and gaze at the Moon with your unaided eye, the smallest crater you can see is about 100 kilometers across. That means you could hit the Moon with an asteroid a mile across, and once the smoke cleared the crater would be too small to see without a telescope!

That’s the scale we’re talking about here. In the meantime, there is real science to be done and real challenges to overcome in going to the Moon. In my opinion, these small efforts to understand it are well worth the effort. And I would bet the bank that in 100 years, if we do boldly go and colonize our nearest cosmic neighbor, they will look back at this era fondly, though with a small bit of chagrin as they wonder, "What took us so long?"

Hero journalist Simon Singh has written a fantastic article for The Times Online about his libel case in the UK and libel in general: how it gags journalists and keeps people from learning important information.

If this article makes you angry, good. Do something about it.

Simon Singh is a science journalist being sued by the British Chiropractor Association for saying they "happily promote bogus treatment". The libel laws in the UK are ridiculously draconian, putting all the onus on the person being sued, contrary to the notion of presumed innocent until proven guilty, and also contrary to the libel laws of essentially every other nation on the planet.

A judge looked over the case and said that Simon’s use of the word bogus meant that he was ascribing ill motivations to the BCA, and allowed the case to continue. Simon was initially denied an appeal to this ruling, but then appealed that… and yesterday a court said he does indeed have the right to appeal! This is definitely a victory, but what it means is that Simon can now continue fighting this ridiculous suit and this ridiculous libel law. So there’s a long way to go.

But in a weird twist, the ever-vigilant Jack of Kent saw a press release by the BCA today that ascribed malice to Simon’s motivations for writing the original article. That’s a big deal; if they pursue this line of attack then it may limit Simon’s ability to defend himself. What’s funny is that saying Simon is malicious is itself defamatory, and to me it seems that he could sue them for libel. I don’t think he will, but… Jack of Kent later discovered that the press release was quickly edited, and the words about malice on Simon’s part was removed. However, the ‘net being what it is, the originally-worded press release is still out there.

[UPDATE: Jack has written a follow-up blog post about this, saying that the BCA has defamed Simon, and it appears Jack and I are in agreement. He also mentions that if Simon threatens to countersue the BCA -- which he has every right to do -- it may end the case right then and there. I know Simon well enough to know that he will think carefully about this; he wants to do the right thing in the long run, which is defend himself and show that the libel laws are awful. A happy aftereffect of this would be the global shaming of the BCA, which has been underway for months now; they have the most amusing ability to bend over backwards to make themselves look foolish... an ironic feat for a chiropractic association.]

Interesting. I know Jack is writing more on this, and I’ll update this when he has more.

I was recently involved in a discussion of post-modernism and relativism that started when a commenter on my blog tried to support how astrology can be true and then continued when I posted on Twitter about it. I wrote:

The human condition is relative from human to human and culture to culture. But there are scientific truths outside and independent of us.

I thought my meaning was clear. What might be moral in one culture may not be in another, and in many cases that’s OK. Cultures are different. But in the objective reality of the Universe, such relativism may fall apart. Physical laws have an objective reality; we may interpret them, but they continue to do what they do whether our interpretation is correct or not.

This led to a discussion of the meaning of things, and that I think is the important issue.

A follower on Twitter said:

Gravity may well exist. But if we can’t describe it, it’s hardly objective. And we can’t possible know it’s [sic] meaning.

I think this is completely wrong. It’s objective whether we can describe it or not. Gravity exists. Since the Earth has been orbiting the Sun for 4.55 billion years — a good 4.549 billion years before humans were around — we can be pretty sure gravity is objective.

But it’s the last word he used that got me really scratching my head. "Meaning?" Of gravity? Why should gravity have a meaning? It’s a law of nature, not a piece of art.

You can look for meaning in the Mona Lisa, or a sonnet, or in a child’s smile. You can argue over the meaning with someone else, and you can both disagree and yet both be right. When something is created with artistic intent — or just simply created by the human with or without that intent — it’s open to interpretation.

But the Universe itself as a physical object isn’t like that. You can look for meaning if you’d like, but the Universe is a semi-random collection of energy and matter, and based on all the evidence I have seen was not created with intent. A nebula is beautiful in form and color, but is simply a collection of particles, photons, fields, and motions. It has no meaning outside of your personal interpretation of it. But whether you think it has emotions and is alive or not, it will still do what it does: make stars. Nebulae have been doing this for billions of years before us, and will continue to do so long after we are gone.

You might even ascribe purpose to a nebula: its job is to create stars. But that’s what’s called the Pathetic Fallacy: ascribing human characteristics to inanimate objects. The nebula doesn’t want to do anything. It just does things according to the laws of physics.

You might want to use the same reductionist reasoning on humans too, and say we are nothing more than machines and have no free will, no choice but to obey whatever laws of physics command us. And I cannot discount that, but I suspect we are richer than that. The laws of physics are not binary; they don’t say to us "Behave this way or that." There are huge, perhaps even uncountable numbers of choices that lie before us. It’s not just a matter of cranking all our atomic states and field equations through a black box and determining what we must perforce do; there are probabilities involved, so that our actions may be predictable in a sense but are not fundamentally determined in advance.

That is the difference between us and a nebula. We can choose. And that’s why a post-modernist relativism can work when describing Mozart, but will fail when applied to a black hole. The event horizon of a black hole cares not what we think of it.

Incidentally, saying that the Universe is meaningless doesn’t imply there’s no reason to live. What I am saying is that there is no direction to the Universe, no intent, no internal morals or purpose or meaning. But we still exist. People look for meaning in everything, even when it isn’t there, and it can lead them astray. Don’t ask what a halo around the Sun means, using it as a sign or an omen or a symbol. Look at it, enjoy it, gasp at its beauty and the wonder that such a thing exists. Know that the Universe obeys a set of laws, and that those laws are knowable without meaning.

And finally, don’t ask what I think the meaning or purpose of life is. I think it has neither, but that makes it no less magnificent or joyous to me. I know what I want my life to be like, and I have enough real questions to keep me busy for a thousand lifetimes. I don’t feel the need to look for ones that aren’t there.