If you’re looking for some spooky listening for your Halloween, then aim your ectoplasmic resonator at astronomer Neil Tyson’s Star Talk radio show, because last night he hunted ghosts… or at least, talked to some folks who know about ghosts. He chats with author Mary Roach, skeptic ghost investigator Joe Nickell, and… me!

Yeah, I’m not really an expert on ghosts — still being alive and all — but I’ve seen a few ghost movies in my time, so we chat about those, and why I don’t personally think dead people are floating around, knocking on walls and hoping some "ghost hunter" will notice us and anxiously whisper, "Did you hear that?"

As always, talking with Neil is a lot of fun, and you’ll enjoy the whole show. You can also download the MP3 directly, too. [UPDATE: you can subscribe to Star Talk using iTunes, as well!]

My interview is broken up into several segments; the first starts around 11:30, the second at 24:50, the third at 36:15, and the fourth at 41:00. But of course you should listen to the whole show; it’s pretty entertaining!

I’ll note we did this interview through Skype, and my voice is a little warbly. Or was I just communicating from the other side??!!

OK, yeah, it was just warbly. But you were scared there for a second, weren’t you?

OK, yeah, no you weren’t. Damn. Being a skeptic on Halloween is hard.

Image credit: me! If you’re curious, that’s my pal Jennifer Ouellette and me from TAM 9, chatting with the disembodied head of Neil. Having him floating around like that was distracting.

You know what really eats me up? People who claim they can talk to the dead, when it is far, far more likely they are simply using psychological tricks (like cold reading) and random guesses, making it seem like they have some supernatural power.

A while back, the James Randi Educational Foundation publicly challenged so-called "psychic" James van Praagh to take their Million Dollar Challenge and prove he can do what he claims. It’s been weeks, and he hasn’t replied. I can’t imagine why, can you? It’s almost as if he’s afraid of being tested in a controlled environment.

The JREF decided to follow up on their challenge to van Praagh, to see if they could make sure he got the message. And this time, they brought some friends…

Man, I would’ve given an arm and a leg to be there for that. But c’mon, do you really think van Praagh will ever respond?

Gnaw.

Before I say anything else in this post, I will start off right away and say that the results I’ll be discussing here have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Because of that, the results need to be taken with a grain of salt. However, due to the nature of the study’s foundation and funders, which I will get to in a moment, the results are most definitely news-worthy.

The study is called the Berkeley Earth Project (BEP), and what they found was stated simply and beautifully in their own two-page summary:

Global warming is real, according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1° C since the mid-1950s.

Wow. Of course, I would change one word in there. Can you guess what it is? The answer is below.

Big deal

Now, we’ve known this for a while. Study after study has shown that the Earth is warming, that the past decade has been the hottest on record, and that the rise in temperature has been about a degree. So what’s the big deal here?

The big deal is that this was an independent team of researchers who conducted the study (including, interestingly, Saul Perlmutter, who just won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, and knows a thing or two about data analysis), and whose funding was overwhelmingly donated by the private sector and not from any government. The study was initiated by Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, who was concerned that government researchers weren’t being as open as possible with their methods. He gathered together a team of scientists, and they used data from 39,000 temperature stations around the world, far more than the previous studies. They have put all their data and methodology online for anyone to investigate.

And if you’re wondering who these private groups were, they’re listed on the BEP website. The largest single donor? Why, it’s the Koch brothers, über-conservatives who have pumped millions of dollars into climate change denial. I find that… interesting.

Anyone claiming that climate scientists are alarmists only trying to protect their grant money will have to think about that one for a while.

You’re getting warmer

So what did the scientists working on BEP find? (more…)

In July 2011, at the JREF’s TAM 9 meeting in Las Vegas, I moderated a panel discussing the future of space exploration. On that panel were some familiar faces: Bill Nye (the Science Guy), astronomers Neil Tyson and Pamela Gay, and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss. All of us have, ah, some experience talking to the public about matters spacey, so I knew it would be a fun panel to moderate.

I had no idea. The video of the panel has been made available by the JREF, so you can see it for yourself! I’ve embedded it below. It’s an hour long, but I think you’ll find it absolutely worth your time to watch all the way through. A lot of people came up to me afterwards and said it was the best panel at the meeting, and one of the best we’ve ever had at TAM! As a participant, modesty forbids me from saying more, but then, who am I to disagree?

It was a rollicking discussion, and very interesting. Neil was in rare form, and I think my favorite moment was when Pamela was making a point, and Neil jumped in to give an opinion… and Pamela held up a finger and "shusshed" him! It was extremely funny, especially when Neil got this, "OK, fine, you got me" expression on his face. After the panel, Neil was signing books, and I got Pamela to sit down next to him and recreate the moment:

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The American Geophysical Union blog has a link up to a very interesting table, and I feel strongly enough about this topic that I want to share it with you. It’s a list of words scientists use when writing or otherwise communicating science, what the scientists mean when they use that word, and most importantly what the public hears.

[Click to enverbumnate.]

I’ll admit, when I read it I laughed. But then my chuckle dried up when I realized just how dead accurate this is. And the smile pretty much left my face when I read that this table is from an article called "Communicating the Science of Climate Change," by Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol, from the October 2011 issue of Physics Today.

Yup. I think they have a pretty good point.

My career at the moment could pretty much be called "Science Communicator". I do it here on this blog, I do it on Blastr and in Discover magazine, and when I give talks. Before that (and I guess it’s an occupation that never really leaves you) I was a professional scientist for many years. My training ran deep: 4 years undergrad, 6-7 in grad school, then a decade or so of research after that. I could toss around the phrase "Don’t over-iterate the Lucy-Richardson deconvolution algorithm or else you’ll amplify the noise and get spurious data spikes" with the best of ‘em.

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A few days ago, three astronomers from Mexico posted a paper online (PDF) claiming that an observation from 1883 indicates a small comet passed within a few thousand kilometers of the Earth’s surface, and perhaps as close as 500km! Had this hit us, we would’ve been hammered by thousands of explosions as powerful as the largest nuclear explosions ever detonated.

The thing is, I’m not buying it. While superficially the interpretation fits the observations, there are way too many problems with it.

Here’s the deal. During the days of August 12 – 13, 1883, a Mexican astronomer named Jose A. y Bonilla reported seeing hundreds of objects passing directly in front of the Sun. They were small, appeared fuzzy, and left behind a misty appearance. In total, Bonilla says he saw 447 such objects!

The authors of this new work claim that what Bonilla may have seen was the remnants of a small comet that had previously fragmented. We’ve seen comets do this, and in fact it’s somewhat common. In 2006, Hubble took the picture shown above of the comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, which had recently disintegrated. So that part isn’t too far-fetched. However, once you make that assumption, things get pretty dicey.

The authors use the observations by Bonilla to estimate the distance and size of the comet fragments. Bonilla observed these objects at an observatory in Zacatecas, Mexico, but they were not seen transiting the Sun by any other observatories anywhere else. This can be used to narrow down their location; it means they must have been close to Earth. Had they been far away then other observatories would have seen them moving across the Sun. It’s like a bird flying by just outside your window; someone looking out a different window wouldn’t have seen it, but a bird a few hundred meters away would be visible to both.

Doing some simple math, the authors calculate the comet fragments were no closer than about 500 km (300 miles) from the Earth’s surface, and no farther than about 65,000 km (40,000 miles).

This right there is enough for me to be extremely skeptical of this idea. When a comet breaks up, it spreads out. Even when intact, the material surrounding a comet can be tens or even hundreds of thousands of kilometers across! Claiming that a comet broke apart, yet managed to constrain its pieces to volume of space less than a few thousand kilometers across strains credulity.

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If you haven’t heard about the experiment that apparently showed that subatomic particles called neutrinos might move faster than light (what we in the know call FTL, to make us look cooler), then I assume this is your first time on the internet. If that’s the case, then you can read my writeup on what happened.

Basically, neutrinos move very very fast, almost at the speed of light. Some scientists created neutrinos at CERN in Geneva, and then measured how long it took them to reach a detector called OPERA, located in Italy. When they did the math, it looked like the neutrinos actually got there by traveling a hair faster than the speed of light! 60 nanoseconds faster, to be accurate.

Was relativity doomed?

Nope. In fact, relativity may very well be what saves the day here.

First, most scientists were skeptical. Even the people running the experiment were skeptical, and were basically asking everyone else for help. They figured they might have made a mistake as well, and couldn’t figure out what had happened. Relativity is an extremely well-tested theory, and doesn’t (easily) allow for FTL. Despite some headlines screaming that Einstein might be wrong, most everyone figured the problem lay elsewhere.

Most everyone zeroed in on the timing of the experiment, which has to be extremely accurate. The entire flight time of a neutrino from Switzerland to Italy is only about 2.4 milliseconds, and the measurement accuracy needs to be to only a few nanoseconds — mind you, a nanosecond is a billionth of a second!

The scientists used a very sophisticated GPS setup to determine the timing, so that has been the focus of a lot of scrutiny as well. And a new paper just posted on the Physics Preprint Archive may have the answer… and it uses relativity.

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