Ask the Dreadlocked Science Geek

[dreadgeek]

So a couple of people have expressed a wish for an "Ask Aj" thread where they could post their scientific questions. Now, I may not always have an answer for you off the top of my head but I will always try to get you the *best* available answer even if that means having to do a little bit of research.

So if you have a question about some subject that has to do with science OR if someone has said something to you that seems like it just doesn't quite add up and you suspect there may be a glaring logical fallacy OR if you have a question about skepticism ask away!

Cheers
Aj

[IrishGrrl]

ok yes..yes I do.

So, about ghosts.

What do you make of EVP's?

Objects moving on thier own? (I have seen this myself in my own house so I know it's not a prank)

Aparitions?

What do you think about the "scientific" meters used to show "proof"?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by IrishGrrl

ok yes..yes I do.

So, about ghosts.

What do you make of EVP's?

Objects moving on thier own? (I have seen this myself in my own house so I know it's not a prank)

Aparitions?

What do you think about the "scientific" meters used to show "proof"?

So, Electronic Voice Phenomena. I have yet to see an example of EVP that cannot be more economically explained by our brains seeking patterns. Remember that your brain is a pattern-seeking machine. I think that EVP is an example of one of two common brain phenomena:

A) Apophenia--which is seeing meaningful patterns in what is actually random noise

B) Pareidolia--which is really just a special case of apophenia but largely visual.

A good and common example of paraeidolia is seeing shapes in clouds. Is the cloud *actually* shaped like, say, an elephant? No, but our brains perceive it to be.

So why would our brains work that way? Well, our brains evolved to discern meaningful patterns out of a random world. However, the world isn't *completely* random and our brains are nowhere near perfect at what they do. Our brains are prone to two common errors:

1) False positive (seeing a pattern when there is none)
2) False negative (not seeing a pattern when there is one)

Of the two, false positives are the less harmful. To understand why, imagine you are one of our Pleistocene ancestors on the African savannah. You are in the tall grass and you hear a rustling. Is that sound a lion or is it the wind? Well, if it's the wind but you respond as if it is a lion and, say, run for the nearest tree you're out some calories but you'll live long enough to eat and thus gain those back. If, on the other hand, you think it's just the wind and it's actually a lion by the time you realize your error, you're well on your way to being lunch. Needless to say, being eaten drops your reproductive fitness to zero. So our brains have evolved in such a way that they are prone to both Type 1 and Type 2 errors. Since type 1 errors generally don't cost the person making them their life, our brains have not evolved beyond them. Type 2 errors can be more deadly but not necessarily so often as to actually have selective pressure on them.

EVP is a type 1 error--seeing a pattern or subscribing meaning to random noise. Most EVP aren't actually voices it's *literally* noise in the sense that the signal carries no information but we *think* it does.

Objects moving on their own I would have to know the specifics of the event. I can think of any number of reasons one might perceive an object to be moving on its own and without specifics, I just don't have enough information.

Apparitions are interesting. There's a frequency of infrasound that appears to have a very interesting effect on the human brain. While we can't *hear* it, the vibrations cause a physiological reactions that the brain interprets as fear. Our brains then backfill something in to explain why we are afraid. This might explain 'haunted' houses. Old houses as they creak and settle with the change of temperatures from day to night produce infrasound vibrations which are too low for us to hear but would produce a fear reaction.

As far as the scientific meters, again I'd want to know what it is they are supposed to be measuring. Here's the thing, most times people will mention a 'field' of energy and that's what these meters are supposed to measure. The problem with this is that the meters either fluctuate in a random manner or the strength of the meter appears to bear no relationship to the distance from the source. This is a problem.

EVERY field we have encountered so far is subject to what is called the inverse square law. The simplest formulation of it is this:

The strength of a field diminishes as an inverse of the square of the distance. What that means is that the farther away from the source of a field you go, the weaker the field gets. This happens VERY quickly. So if you start at the source of the field and move away from it then when you are, say, 2 feet from the source the field is *four times* as weak. When you are four feet from the source the field is *16 times* as weak. As far as we know (and we know quite a bit about fields) this holds for all forms of fields--this means that all four forces (electromagnetism, gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces) plus sound all obey this rule. This is a big problem for these measuring instruments. The signal should fall off as a square of the distance but no matter where the Ghost Hunters are in the house the signal is always random. That simply can't be.

I have to leave the office, I'll return to this question when I get home.

Cheers
Aj

[Linus]

Ok, Science Geek, answer this one from a oft-flying traveler:

Why does it feel, at times, like the plane "stops" or "slows" down in mid-air? It's the weirdest feeling but I've been on flights and about half-way there I get this sensation like we're slowing down (like a car in rush hour) and then we continue on our merry way.

[amiyesiam]

Dear Apple owner and Linus too!!

I have somehow managed to set my mouse to have to right click and hit open rather than being able to just click (or double click) on something and have it open. Any clue how to fix this? I have tried and failed.

sincerely
I know there is a simple (&(*(* answer for this

[Linus]

Originally Posted by amiyesiam

Dear Apple owner and Linus too!!

I have somehow managed to set my mouse to have to right click and hit open rather than being able to just click (or double click) on something and have it open. Any clue how to fix this? I have tried and failed.

sincerely
I know there is a simple (&(*(* answer for this

Go to System Preferences --> Mouse. Adjust there. Alternatively, if this is a third party mouse, try to re-install the driver.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Linus

Ok, Science Geek, answer this one from a oft-flying traveler:

Why does it feel, at times, like the plane "stops" or "slows" down in mid-air? It's the weirdest feeling but I've been on flights and about half-way there I get this sensation like we're slowing down (like a car in rush hour) and then we continue on our merry way.

Okay, this is a really interesting one with two different answers. The reason for the feeling of slowing down is most likely that the pilot deployed the flaps but the feeling of stopping is something else altogether.

Without anything to use as contrast, you cannot tell the difference between constant velocity motion and being at rest. The key here is *constant* velocity. If you change direction then your velocity isn't constant and it doesn't matter what direction that change of direction happens in (up or down, forward or backward, left or right or any combination). This is why, if you are in a car you almost always feel like you are moving because the road surface causes the car to have an up or down motion.

If you're at 30,000 and its at night or over fairly uniform clouds and if the plane is in an area where the atmosphere is being pretty calm you wouldn't have many cues that you are moving for just a moment. Then you hit an air pocket and the plane bounces a few feet--that's all it would take--and suddenly you're aware that you're in motion.

Don't believe me? Right now, you are moving at 17,500 m/h (28,163 k/h) as is everything else on the surface of the Earth. We don't feel like it because the Earth's rotational speed is constant and there is nothing to create drag or turbulence to disturb the smoothness of the ride. The only way we would ever feel it is if the planet suddenly came to a stop. Then everything on the planet not anchored into deep rock would suddenly be moving VERY fast as all of that angular momentum was transferred to us.

*Perfectly* constant velocity motion is not achievable in-atmosphere because of friction but in a vacuum you could certainly achieve it. So why do you have these moments in an airplane? It's because the stall speed of an airliner at cruising altitude is in a very narrow band. How narrow? The difference between level flight and a stall can be as narrow as 20 mph either way at cruising altitude. So at cruising altitude, the pilots try maintain a very stable speed. The motion you detect is from the air current buffeting the plane. If the upper atmosphere were perfectly still and the aircraft maintained an absolutely constant speed, you would not be able to tell that you were in motion at all.


Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by June

Dear Geektastic -

If we are moving at 17,500MPH, how come when I jump up in the air, I don't end up down the block?

Bewildered,
June

Because the Earth isn't *accelerating*. Remember that the Earth's rotation is constant velocity motion so we don't feel it and are perfectly justified in claiming that, at this moment, we are at rest. When you jump into the air while your vertical velocity, relative to the center of the Earth. temporarily exceeds 10 m/square second (temporarily overcoming the force of gravity) your horizontal velocity is 0. Since neither you nor the Earth are accelerating relative to each other, you land in exactly the same place as you started from. From your reference plane (the surface of the Earth) there is no force moving you horizontally and since a body at rest wil stay at rest until acted upon by another force, you jump up (which has a force acting on you vertically) and land in the same place (since no force is pushing you horizontally).


The situation would change if you were accelerating. To see this, let's do a little thought experiment.

You are on a plane, the plane is accelerating. You toss a ball up in the air, the ball will, in fact, land a bit behind you because the aircraft is moving relative to the motion of the ball. If, however, the aircraft is moving at a constant velocity then the ball will land at your feet.

Essentially, this is Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in a nutshell. If you are at constant velocity (what in technical jargon is known as the inertial frame) then you are justified in saying that you are at rest, no matter HOW fast you may be traveling. As long as whatever it is that you are traveling on maintains the same speed and direction, you can treat your environment as being at rest. It is only if you are accelerating that you will be aware of movement. One interesting side-effect of this is that gravity and acceleration turn out to be the same thing. Right now there is 1g of gravity pulling you toward the center of the Earth. We would be completely justified in describing us as falling toward the center of the Earth at 10 meters per square second. The reason we aren't all in the core of the Earth is that the electromagnetic force is MUCH more powerful than the gravitational force and the repulsion of effect of all the electrons in your body trying to keep away from all the electrons in your chair and in the floor is what keeps us from falling through the Earth. But right now, from a physical point of view, you are accelerating toward the center of the Earth. There's just something that prevents you from continuing the fall. If you were in a completely sealed box and were accelerating at 10 meters per sq sec. there is no experiment you could perform that would NOT lead you to conclude that you were not on Earth at 1 g.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by June

Dear Knower of Ephemera,

This is a Paranormal Question that bugs me a lot:

So, we've been around in our present form about 75,000 years, right? Now granted, in the early days, procreating was harder and there weren't so many of us (Humans). But lets say that since we began as a species, there have been (Conservatively) 50,000,000,000,000 people that have passed away, wouldn't the planet now effectively be overrun with spirits and ghosts to the point where we just couldn't turn around without seeing one?

So, firstly, let's take that number down by an order of magnitude. 50 billion is a more reasonable figure than 50 trillion. However, fifty billion people is still a LOT of people to have passed through this veil of tears. One would think that if ghosts did exist (and I see no reason to accept the proposition that they do) you would barely be able to walk down the street without running into one.

The movies always portray this phenomenon as something that only happens in dark secluded homes and institutions in great disrepair.

Do you think they are trying to lull us into some kind of false sense of security with the moral "Stay out of dark secluded homes and institutions in great disrepair or something bad will happen"?

I think that this fear of ghosts is the confluence of a couple of evolutionary hangovers (as I like to term them) meeting and recombining. The first is our fear of the dark. Compared with a lot of things that were evolving alongside our Primate ancestors we have really poor night vision. Certainly compared to the big cats that were also resident in Africa a few million years ago, we were at a very big disadvantage at night. Imagine two individuals, one of whom is afraid to venture outside of the relative safety of the cave at night and another who isn't. The fearless one is more likely to become a pleasant little late-night meal for some big cat that likes it chimpanzee meat on-the-hoof, as it were. If you are eaten before you can breed, you lose the evolutionary game. So there would be *some* selective pressure to fear the night and, until very recently, lots of good reason to do so. The other thing is our overactive agency detectors.

This is going to take a bit of explaining. By agency I mean ascribing intention to others actions. Let's say that you, I and another person are sitting on your couch. I get up and go to the kitchen and open your fridge. You hear me rummaging around and pulling out a bottle. The other person asks "hey, what is she doing" you are going to use your intuitive psychology to say "Aj is probably thirsty and is getting a beer". You assume (most of the time correctly) that when someone takes an action there is some goal or consequence that they are pursuing. We do this intuitively. In fact our brains can't *help* but do this. The flip-side of this is that we ascribe agency even when agency isn't present.

"Why does it rain."

There have been lots of explanations for the rains, thunder and lightning. Most of them have been *spectacularly* wrong because people ascribed some agent to be behind the scenes causing the rain. So rain was the tears of the gods or was a blessing or curse from the gods. Thunder and lightning were caused by the actions of the sky gods. And our dreams? Why do we see our dearly departed loved ones in our dreams? Because they are spirits who have come back from 'the other side' to impart something to us.

That's all you need for a belief in ghosts to be booted up--a brain that detects agency and patterns enthusiastically, a brain that is capable of dreaming, and one that seeks causal explanations for events that happen in the world.

We have a fear of dark and foreboding places because, until fairly recently, dark and foreboding places either meant caves (someplace that wolves, lions or other apex predators might be hiding), forest primeval or jungle where danger in the form of aforementioned predators could be lurking anywhere. It was absolutely adaptive to have a sense of trepidation about those kinds of places.

One thing we have to keep in mind is that our brains did not evolve to deal with the modern technological world. There's nothing in our brains that *prevent us from dealing with it but this is not a natural environment for our brains. No matter how much education you have, no matter where you are from, what you believe, you are carrying around on your shoulders a brain that is, for all practical purposes, unchanged since about 50K years ago. We're stuck with these formerly adaptive features because the vast majority of them simply do not have the power to reduce reproductive fitness in a modern context.

Cheers
Aj

I'm not sure if answered your question or not, June. If I didn't let me know.

[Linus]

To tag to June's question I was just reading this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert..._b_810936.html

Since humans are known to contain "energy" (about 20 watts) and since energy cannot be destroyed or created but altered, then when we die where does that 20 watts go?

Robert Lanza, M.D.

Scientist, Theoretician
Posted: January 20, 2011 08:55 AM




Five Reasons You Won't Die



We've been taught we're just a collection of cells, and that we die when our bodies wear out. End of story. I've written textbooks showing how cells can be engineered into virtually all the tissues and organs of the human body. But a long list of scientific experiments suggests our belief in death is based on a false premise, that the world exists independent of us − the great observer.

Here are five reasons you won't die.



Reason One. You're not an object, you're a special being. According to biocentrism, nothing could exist without consciousness. Remember you can't see through the bone surrounding your brain. Space and time aren't objects, but rather the tools our mind uses to weave everything together.
"It will remain remarkable," said Eugene Wigner, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality."


Consider the uncertainty principle, one of the most famous and important aspects of quantum mechanics. Experiments confirm it's built into the fabric of reality, but it only makes sense from a biocentric perspective. If there's really a world out there with particles just bouncing around, then we should be able to measure all their properties. But we can't. Why should it matter to a particle what you decide to measure? Consider the double-slit experiment: if one "watches" a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through slits on a barrier, it behaves like a particle and creates solid-looking hits behind the individual slits on the final barrier that measures the impacts. Like a tiny bullet, it logically passes through one or the other hole. But if the scientists do not observe the trajectory of the particle, then it exhibits the behavior of waves that allow it pass through both holes at the same time. Why does our observation change what happens? Answer: Because reality is a process that requires our consciousness.


The two-slit experiment is an example of quantum effects, but experiments involving Buckyballs and KHCO3 crystals show that observer-dependent behavior extends into the world of ordinary human-scale objects. In fact, researchers recently showed (Nature 2009) that pairs of ions could be coaxed to entangle so their physical properties remained bound together even when separated by large distances, as if there was no space or time between them. Why? Because space and time aren't hard, cold objects. They're merely tools of our understanding.


Death doesn't exist in a timeless, spaceless world. After the death of his old friend, Albert Einstein said "Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us...know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." In truth, your mind transcends space and time.



Reason Two. Conservation of energy is a fundamental axiom of science. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can't be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. Although bodies self-destruct, the "me'' feeling is just a 20-watt cloud of energy in your head. But this energy doesn't go away at death. A few years ago scientists showed they could retroactively change something that happened in the past. Particles had to "decide" how to behave when they passed a fork in an apparatus. Later on, the experimenter could flip a switch. The results showed that what the observer decided at that point determined how the particle behaved at the fork in the past.



Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply powering a projector. Whether you flip a switch in an experiment on or off, it's still the same battery responsible for the projection. Like in the two-slit experiment, you collapse physical reality. At death, this energy doesn't just dissipate into the environment as the old mechanical worldview suggests. It has no reality independent of you. As Einstein's esteemed colleague John Wheeler stated "No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." Each person creates their own sphere of reality - we carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which energy just dissipates.
Reason Three. Although we generally reject parallel universes as fiction, there's more than a morsel of scientific truth to this genre. A well-known aspect of quantum physics is that observations can't be predicted absolutely. Instead, there's a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation is the 'many-worlds' interpretation, which states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the 'multiverse'). There are an infinite number of universes (including our universe), which together comprise all of physical reality. Everything that can possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death doesn't exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Like flipping the switch in the experiment above, you're the agent who experiences them.


Reason Four. You will live on through your children, friends, and all who you touch during your life, not only as part of them, but through the histories you collapse with every action you take. "According to quantum physics," said theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, "the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities." There's more uncertainty in bio-physical systems than anyone ever imagined. Reality isn't fully determined until we actually investigate (like in the Schrödinger's cat experiment). There are whole areas of history you determine during your life. When you interact with someone, you collapse more and more reality (that is, the spatio-temporal events that define your consciousness). When you're gone, your presence will continue like a ghost puppeteer in the universes of those you know.



Reason Five. It's not an accident that you happen to have the fortune of being alive now on the top of all infinity. Although it could be a one-in-a-jillion chance, perhaps it's not just dumb luck, but rather must be that way. While you'll eventually exit this reality, you, the observer, will forever continue to collapse more and more 'nows.' Your consciousness will always be in the present -- balanced between the infinite past and the indefinite future -- moving intermittently between realities along the edge of time, having new adventures and meeting new (and rejoining old) friends.


"Biocentrism" (BenBella Books) lays out Lanza's theory of everything.

I highlighted the relevant part in red.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Linus

To tag to June's question I was just reading this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert..._b_810936.html

Since humans are known to contain "energy" (about 20 watts) and since energy cannot be destroyed or created but altered, then when we die where does that 20 watts go?

[/I]

Reason Two. Conservation of energy is a fundamental axiom of science. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can't be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. Although bodies self-destruct, the "me'' feeling is just a 20-watt cloud of energy in your head. But this energy doesn't go away at death. A few years ago scientists showed they could retroactively change something that happened in the past. Particles had to "decide" how to behave when they passed a fork in an apparatus. Later on, the experimenter could flip a switch. The results showed that what the observer decided at that point determined how the particle behaved at the fork in the past.

I highlighted the relevant part in red.

Actually Lanza gets the First Law of Thermodynamics almost *precisely* wrong. Yes, the common simplification of the law is that energy cannot be created or destroyed but that's not *precisely* what is meant and you cannot derive Lanza's conclusion from the actual, formal definition of the law.

So what does the law state? In any system where work is performed the total amount of energy of the system (work performed plus loss from inefficiencies) is conserved. What this means is that you cannot get more energy OUT of a system than you put IN to a system. The problem with Lanza's explanation is that he doesn't say that, for instance, physicists are talking about a closed (isolated) system. The total energy amount of the Universe, for example, is actually fixed. Whatever that quantity is, the Universe is a closed system (no energy can be introduced from outside), but the Earth, for example, is not a closed system. Energy is being introduced to the system all the time by way of sunlight.

The second problem is that the 20 watts he mentions can be accounted for WITHOUT it having to go to some mysterious place. The 20 watts or so that your brain uses stops (becomes potential energy) when all of your metabolic processes cease. So then various microbes and worms come along and decompose (eat) your mortal remains. They transfer all of the energy stored in your cells to *their* cells (that is what eating does, it is simply a way of taking the energy from one living thing and making it useful to another living thing). This actually satisfies the requirement that energy is conserved. The energy does not exit the Universe (because it can't be destroyed*) but neither does this energy continue to persist in some kind of coherent state. The 20 watts of energy that Dr. Lanza is invoking is a product of your neuronal activity. Once the substrate that generates that activity no longer functions, the total energy of the system that is described by your body starts to go to its most natural (i.e. disordered) state with a consequent loss of energy.

Dr. Lanza pulls one of these tricks that is always like nails on chalkboard. In the service of his ideology, he invokes some commonly recognized but not well understood (by laypeople, I mean) principle in physics and then offers what seems like a plausible explanation but is actually glossing over the issue. He then claims that this or that physics principle proves that his particular idea/ideology/belief is backed up by science.

Cheers
Aj

[betenoire]

From one Atheist to another (unless I'm remembering wrong and you're not one, in which case I apologise but still want you to answer cuz I think this is wicked fun):

How does one explain "manifestations of the Holy Spirit" (ie - "slain in the spirit" "speaking in tongues" etc) without the existence of God?

I was raised in a charismatic evangelical church (Pentecostal) so that stuff was an every day occurrence around me (well, Wednesdays and Sundays since those were the days that I went to church) and I don't for a minute believe that anybody was consciously faking anything. We're talking about people who on the basic level were sincere and well-meaning and convinced.

So how does it happen? Is it like a group-think thing (which I guess is more about psychology than about science, although I guess psychology is a kind of science, and now I'm confusing myself) or a "mind over matter" thing (like if you believe something hard enough the brain can do all sorts of neat things) or a really emotionally exited neurons firing around thing, or kinda like hypnotism?

[Venus007]

Dear Hot Dr Sciences,

What exactly is the deal with quantum foam and do you think it is real?

Bonus question NASA scientists reciently discovered that lightening storms create small bits of antimatter, why doesn't this cause anhilation as I thought that if matter and antimatter got together it would be a cataclysm because of the enormous energy produced.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/12/...ng-antimatter/

[MsDemeanor]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

If you are at constant velocity (what in technical jargon is known as the inertial frame) then you are justified in saying that you are at rest, no matter HOW fast you may be traveling.

Would it therefore be true that if I am accused of sitting on my ass doing nothing, it appropriate to counter that I am actually moving, and that the movement is not obvious to the observer only because said movement is at a constant velocity?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by betenoire

From one Atheist to another (unless I'm remembering wrong and you're not one, in which case I apologise but still want you to answer cuz I think this is wicked fun):

How does one explain "manifestations of the Holy Spirit" (ie - "slain in the spirit" "speaking in tongues" etc) without the existence of God?

I was raised in a charismatic evangelical church (Pentecostal) so that stuff was an every day occurrence around me (well, Wednesdays and Sundays since those were the days that I went to church) and I don't for a minute believe that anybody was consciously faking anything. We're talking about people who on the basic level were sincere and well-meaning and convinced.

So how does it happen? Is it like a group-think thing (which I guess is more about psychology than about science, although I guess psychology is a kind of science, and now I'm confusing myself) or a "mind over matter" thing (like if you believe something hard enough the brain can do all sorts of neat things) or a really emotionally exited neurons firing around thing, or kinda like hypnotism?

You remembered correctly, I'm also a non-theist. Although I wasn't raised in a Pentecostal church, I was raised in both the AME (African Methodist Episcopalian) and Southern Baptist traditions. In the early 1980s until I came out in the early 90s I was a Pentecostal. The issue of speaking in tongues is interesting. And perhaps in describing what I think was going on for me, it will shed some light on why I am so committed to the idea that there is *some* kind of reality and that this reality is naturalistic. It's not because I don't *want* to believe that there's something else, it's because I do.

I do not think I was consciously fooling myself. I don't think that people are consciously fooling themselves. In 1980, when I had my first experience of speaking in tongues, I truly felt born-again. I was part of God's family and my having the gift of tongues was a sign of that. No matter how bad my home life was, no matter how mercilessly my fellow students picked on me, it didn't matter because my reward was in heaven and I was filled with the Holy Spirit. I believed it with every fiber of my being and if there was any doubt in me, I knew that was just the Enemy trying to turn me away from the Light. At the time, I knew that for a fact. I was more certain of that than I was that the Sun would come up tomorrow. God could decide, at any point, that the Sun wouldn't come up tomorrow but God was constant and could be relied on.

I'm sure the language sounds familiar. There are times that I miss believing so hard that I knew and I knew *why* I knew. I knew because it was self-evidently true. I couldn't make these things up, could I? I wasn't making them up. I really did believe these things to be true.

It was in the process of deprogramming myself and walking myself back from a world where there really were demons (yes, I believed in demons) that I had to find something to hold on to, some way to orient myself. I decided that this would be the physical world. The physical world is what every one of us inhabits. You can believe what you wish, you can believe that this is all the Matrix but at the end of the day, if you walk up to the top of a tall building and step off of it, everyone here knows what is going to happen and using a pretty simple equation, we can describe the arc of the last few very exciting moments of your life. You can, in fact, actually count on that and no ideology or religious belief changes that. The most dedicated devotee of The Secret or the most fervent follower of Jesus is notgoing to step off of a building. This is what I call the point of least common agreement. You and I may be atheists, someone else reading this may be a Christian or a Jew or Tibetan Buddhist or Dianic Wiccan but we *all* agree on what happens when you step off a building. We may not even agree on *why* it happens, but we all agree that it happens. At base, that is reliable enough for us to treat it as reality. That became my life raft and with it I came back to the shores of the real world.

It was because I was able, so easily, to make myself believe that my being queer as a three-dollar bill was a result of a demon that I had to start small. It took me a good ten years, into my early thirties, before I felt like I had some kind of grip on the real world. I no longer look over my shoulder or wake up in the middle of the night worried "what if you're wrong and the Rapture is going to happen this next minute".

In the process, I came across the idea of the mind as a belief engine. I read that and it seemed elegant--in the sense that it was a relatively simple idea with deep explanatory power. What follows is based upon that simple and powerful idea.

I think what is happening is, in part, social phenomena. We want to belong. No matter how individualistic we like to think of ourselves, in the end we really want to belong to a group. In the church I attended one of the rites of passage, if you will, was being possessed by the Holy Spirit. I think that we *convince* ourselves something is happening when it isn't. One cannot help but notice that speaking-in-tongues never actually yields an actual human language. The sounds are what people might *think* as ancient (read Biblical) languages but they're all wrong. It's largely just random sounds more akin to the babble of a baby than even a rudimentary pidgin or creole language.

The human brain is an extraordinarily powerful organ and, for better or worse, it is stuck within itself. By this I mean that we can only use our minds to understand our minds.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Venus007

Dear Hot Dr Sciences,

What exactly is the deal with quantum foam and do you think it is real?

Bonus question NASA scientists reciently discovered that lightening storms create small bits of antimatter, why doesn't this cause anhilation as I thought that if matter and antimatter got together it would be a cataclysm because of the enormous energy produced.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/12/...ng-antimatter/

I'll take these separately. I'll talk about quantum foam first because, ironically, it's actually the easier of the two subjects.

Prior to the first third of the 20th century, both space and time were thought to be separate entities and to be smooth, inert and constant. Starting with relativity theory and continuing with quantum theory, the picture changed dramatically. Firstly, Einstein demonstrated that space and time were neither smooth, inert or constant. Matter, for instance, curves space-time. In fact the best operational definition of gravity, so far, is the warping of space-time by the presence of matter. Quantum theory demonstrated that ALL our intuitions about the way the Universe 'really is' break down at the sub-atomic level. Cause and effect, for instance, are not quite so straightforward at the subatomic level. Particles--actually virtual particles--pop into existence and then just as quickly pop out of existence. These virtual particles are highly energetic.

The idea behind quantum foam is this. At the finest possible resolution (known as the Planck length which is ~1.612*10^-35) the structure of space-time is not smooth and continuous but is actually like foam with virtual particles popping into existence and then being annihilated. I wouldn't go so far as to say that quantum foam exists---in the sense that it has an independent existence but it is more of a concept to explain the energetic turbulance of space-time at the smallest scale.

There is one big problem, however. The issue is that mass (or energy) warps space-time (which, you'll recall, is what gravity is) and at present there is not a working theory of quantum gravity. All the other forces are carried by a particle (called a messenger particle) and there is a hypothesized particle called the graviton which would be the messenger particle for gravity. Except, we haven't observed it. The issue is that gravity is weak, REALLY weak. I know it doesn't seem like that every time you fall but consider this...when you walk, with each step, you are overcoming the force of gravity to lift your foot. Every time you pick something up, you are overcoming the force of gravity. You can even overcome the force of gravity to pick up a piece of paper using only a comb and static electricity. So the search for the graviton is the search for the most weakly interacting particle of them all! Until the graviton is found, there's no way to account for the warping of space-time that would be the 'froth', if you will, of the quantum foam.

As far as the anti-matter is concerned, it's not that ANY anti-matter would cause massive annihilation it's that sufficient quantities of it would. A small number of anti-protons encountering protons would annihilate one another and release a lot of gamma radiation. A large number of anti-protons would create a far larger release of energy with more destructive power. Fortunately, antimatter is very rare at this stage of the universe.

This was not always the case, in the very early Universe (before things had cooled down enough for atoms to form) there were almost, but not quite, equal amounts of matter and antimatter. LOTS of collisions took place in a massively energetic holocaust of explosions. The matter we see in the Universe now is the result of there being a slight bias in favor of matter so when all was said and done there was still some matter while all of the antimatter had been destroyed. This was actually good for the Universe because had this not happened the Universe would have had much more density than it does and so the formation of stars would have been much less likely.

Cheers
Aj

[Daywalker]

Dear AJ,


Is it possible that the very Matter that surrounds
us...is our creator and we are indeed it's Organisms?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by June

Dear Anti-Matter Specialist,

Some people worry about losing their jobs, but one of the things I worry about the most is the Sun going out. "They" say it will be a few billion years before that happens, but how do they really know? Isn't it entirely possible that it could break into a zillion flaming pieces hurtling outward at any time? What exactly is holding it together, and what do they base the "Billions" theory on?

Is it *possible* that the Sun could break up? Yes, but it would take a truly extraordinary set of circumstances for that to happen. Anything that would cause that (and I can think of only two off the top of my head--a black hole or another very massive star wandering into the neighborhood) would also make life on Earth very interesting and intense--for a very short period of time.

So how do we know that the Sun has a few billion (5 or 6) years left? Largely because of the mass of the Sun. To understand how this relates, we have to digress and talk about stars generally.

A star is simply a ball of plasma (matter in a very energized state) held together by gravity. The energy is provided by the fusing of hydrogen into helium. At the heart of a star, there is a wrestling match--gravity wants to collapse all of the mass of the star into the smallest possible space while heat wants to expand the star. Stars on what astronomers call the 'main sequence' are happily fusing hydrogen into helium. However, in ANY process there is is loss due to inefficiency. So as the star burns it begins to lose mass. Remember that mass is what is creating the gravity so as the star loses mass, pressure begins to win.

Because our Sun is a very ordinary star (it is a G-type dwarf star, the second or third most common type star in the universe) we have a lot of observational data from different stars like ours at different stages of life. Given a particular burn rate (and we know the burn rate of the star by the spectral lines--the light we see from the Sun is only part of the EMF spectrum being put out by it) we can determine at what rate the Sun is losing mass.

The end-game for a star is determined by its mass. For an ordinary dwarf star like ours, the end-game looks like this:

Around 5 or 6 billion years the Sun will have lost enough mass that pressure will, temporarily, have the upper hand. The outer shell of the Sun will then expand out to 1 AU (Astronomical unit which is 93 million miles). This is inconveniently the orbit that Earth occupies. It will then be a red giant star. Over the course of another billion years or so, it will burn off the rest of the helium and slowly collapse back into a white dwarf. This will basically be only the core of the Sun and will be about the size of Earth (although MUCH more massive than Earth is). Over the next few billion years, it will cool down through a brown-dwarf phase until it is a black-dwarf.

Within a reasonable margin of error (say 1% either way) we're pretty certain when the Sun will begin its end-game because of its present mass and heat.

Just because it is SO cool, I'll take you through the end-game of a much more massive star than ours.

REALLY massive stars (like Betelgeuse) have a much more interesting life cycle. They still stay on the main sequence H --> He but once they reach the Helium stage (where that's the only fuel that is left) it will begin fusing Helium into Carbon. This transformation keeps happening until the core becomes Iron. At that point, there's no place else to go. No natural force and fuse Iron into a heavier element and gravity gets the upper hand. The core collapses into itself and the resulting energy release is called a supernova. The star *literally* blows itself apart. If the star has sufficient mass, after the cataclysm of the supernova a black hole or a neutron star will result. A black hole results if the remaining core has sufficient mass to continue collapsing. Otherwise all that is left is a superdense core of neutrons known as a neutron star. These completely exotic objects are some of the strangest things in a very strange universe. They are so dense that a single teaspoon of the stuff would weigh as much as the Earth!

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Daywalker

Dear AJ,


Is it possible that the very Matter that surrounds
us...is our creator and we are indeed it's Organisms?

Well, it depends upon what you mean. You, me, everyone in fact most *interesting* features of the Universe are made from the remains of supernova. As a very massive star goes through its end-game it makes all of the heavier elements on the periodic table (everything heavier than Helium). So all of the carbon in your body was once in a supermassive star that exploded. All of the oxygen you are breathing came from the same kind of source. So in a very limited and technical sense yes, all of the matter that we are made of and that sustains us is our creator. We are its creation. Billions of years ago some star burned its fuel, fell into the run-away iron-cycle end-game and then exploded. In the fullness of time that material became the Earth and the other planets.

To the degree I am at all deistic, it is that the Universe is the creator. Now, I don't think that the Universe notices we are here other than in the limited sense that living organisms interact with one another. In as much as you are part of the Universe and I am part of the Universe and we are aware that the other exists, the Universe is aware of our existence. In as much as I love my wife and my wife loves me, the Universe cares about my continued existence. But outside of those interpersonal interactions, I don't think the Universe is intelligent or aware of our existence. Supernovae happen not so that there can be life, it's simply a by-product. Earth isn't here so that there *can* be life, life exists because Earth happens to have a range of environments and is stable enough for life to have a chance to get going.

Cheers
Aj

[Daywalker]

Thank you AJ...it was just one of those profound thoughts that spawned
through my attic a few weeks ago. You know, there is so much
(religious) conflict within the Human Species on who Our
Creator is/was...and I thought...wow, what if you're
all wrong and the very Matter that
surrounds us...is our Creator.