Gravitational Waves: They Found Them, For Real

Somewhere in (or out of) the Multiverse, the shade of Albert Einstein is smiling.

From The Guardian:

Gravitational waves: breakthrough discovery after a century of expectation
Scientists announce discovery of clear gravitational wave signal, ripples in spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein

Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.

“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), at a press conference in Washington.

The announcement is the climax of a century of speculation, 50 years of trial and error, and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laserbeam and mirror.

...

The waves were discovered in the wake (literally, I suppose) of the collision two black holes a very long distance from us. The signal received from the LIGO matched the mathematical model of the event to a very high degree of probability; in other words, what they observed is for real.

So what difference does this discovery make? Remember: until ~378,000 years after the Big Bang (hence 378,000 light years from that event), space was opaque to electromagnetic radiation, e.g., light and radio waves. So no matter how good a conventional light or radio telescope scientists manage to create, they cannot see closer than that to the Big Bang. But gravitational waves are not similarly stopped. And a lot of awesome and interesting stuff happened in that era; scientists would surely learn a lot about how our universe formed (and presumably about how other universes form, if there's really a multiverse). That alone has me excited.

Here are some other worthwhile articles (not in chronological order; sorry):

Science News: Gravitational waves explained
The Guardian: Gravitational waves: breakthrough discovery announced - as it happened
Sciencealert: IT'S OFFICIAL: Gravitational waves have been detected, Einstein was right

AAAS Science Magazine: Best. Email. List. Evah? They've Convinced Me!

Pluto - Geysers?
(see link below)

You can view the individual emails as web pages; if you do so, they're nearly as full of colorful pics as the magazine itself. (IOW, it's very high-quality advertising... and it may well succeed in selling to me at some point.) The pages appear to be persistent, or else they are regenerated when you return to the links later on, and the content is so overwhelming in quantity that I bookmark most items for later reading.

As an example, here are a few items I found interesting among probably a couple hundred others in recently received list messages; the articles are aimed less at scientists than at educated, fascinated nonscientist readers (you have to learn to tolerate the headline writers):

• 'Old-age protein' may cause memory loss
• Strange new subatomic particles discovered at atom smasher
• Yes, there really are buckyballs in space
• Pluto is alive—but where is the heat coming from?
• Potential geysers spotted on Pluto

(H/T NTodd, not for any particular item but for making me aware of the list itself and the online mag behind it.)

Monday Medley

• Why Conservatives Still Won't Admit That Charleston Was A Racist Crime
  

  Aurin Squire at TPM lists several prominent GOPers (e.g., Jeb Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Gov. Nikki Haley, a WSJ columnist [anonymous and invisible if you don't have a subscription], etc.) who use words like "I don't know [why it happened]," "unimaginable," "we don't know the motivation," "senseless tragedy," etc., and responds to these protestations of incomprehension:
  

  Given the history of the South, along the rise of both active shooters and gun access, we can't call what happened Wednesday night a “senseless tragedy.” In fact, the Charleston church shooting is full of savage sense. Thanks to complicity at best, and outright racist at worst, the “inconceivable” is still feasible. The fear tactics that were once localized in the dark backwoods of our political landscape now reach every phone and laptop. ...

  We DO know the motivation, the act is NOT inconceivable, we CAN imagine, and Repub's will find there's no use in pretending we don't or can't.
  
  
• Sixth greatest extinction event in the history of our planet is underway
  

  (Be sure to click through to the underlying paper and at least read the abstract, in which the authors justify this statement: "These estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.")

  Yes, it IS happening, as demonstrated under fairly strict criteria. Yes, humans ARE causing it. Will H. sapiens survive it? The abstract doesn't explicitly say, but you may live to find out!
  
  
• Supreme Courts rejects appeal of decision overturning NC's mandatory ultrasound abortion law
  

  (At last, some good news, however limited: because the Supreme Court rejected an appeal of this lower court's decision, women who reside in North Carolina cannot be forced by state law to obtain an ultrasound (an unnecessary, expensive and possibly inaccessible procedure) as a precondition for obtaining an abortion.)

  Now if they can only find a clinic that has not closed and get transportation to it...
  

And now two that hardly require any explanation, considering the nature of many of today's police forces:

• Florida police murder black computer engineer as he listens to music; attempted cover-up exposed
  
  
• Police crush, kill man begging for his life, screaming he was suffocating until his ears turned blue
  
  

"Monday, Monday..."

Deepwater Horizon — Five Years Later

Oiled pelican - Deepwater Horizon

Here's a podcast by Susanne Bard featuring Science Editor-in-Chief Marcia McNutt and other Science staff assessing many aspects of the current state of the Gulf, the coast and their ecosystems five years after the worst oil spill in US history (at least). The 'cast is about 34 minutes long and there's very little fluff... I learned as much in those minutes as I have in the same period spent reading one or another article on the disaster over the last few years. I may have to revise my earlier opinion of the information density of podcasts!

(Thanks to NTodd for alerting me to the availability of much of the Science web site via free registration. You'll probably have to register to hear this podcast.)

Methane-Based Life On Saturn's Moon Titan? Possible, Says Team Of Researchers

Saturn's moon Titan

I'll begin with quotes from two articles in two separate publications, because this seems a subtle "discovery" (if that's even the right word) that requires some pondering.

First, from Safar Haddad at Perfect Science, we have an article titled Life not dependent on Water could exist on Saturn’s Moon Titan:

Researchers have recently presented a template for life that could exist in harsh, cold conditions of Titan, the giant moon of Saturn. Titan has a great possibility of harboring methane-based, oxygen-free cells. What the researchers have suggested from their new theory is that absence of water in seas of Titan does not undermine the chances of life existence.

A cell membrane has been theorized by the scientists, claiming it to consist of smaller organic nitrogen compounds. The cell membrane has the potential of functioning in liquid methane temperatures of 292 degrees beneath zero, said the researchers. The details of the theorized cell membrane have been published in Science Advances.

...

And from Muhammad Ashan at SMN Weekly, an article titled Methane-based Life Possible on Saturn’s Moon ‘Titan’:

In a new study researchers have modeled an oxygen-free form of life that can sustain on methane gas and also can reproduce in [a] way being done on earth. That type of life may exist on the methane lakes [that] exist on Saturn’s moon Titan.

“We didn’t come in with any preconceptions about what should be in a membrane and what shouldn’t. We just worked with the compounds that, we knew were there and asked, ‘If this was your palette, what can you make out of that’,” said lead researcher Paulette Clancy.

“We’re not biologists, and we’re not astronomers, but we had the right tools. Perhaps it helped, because we didn’t come in with any preconceptions about what should be in a membrane and what shouldn’t. We just worked with the compounds that we knew were there and asked, ‘If this was your palette, what can you make out of that,’” said Clancy in a statement.

...

Next, let's make it clear what the team did NOT do. They did NOT...

• send a spacecraft to Titan;
• discover living organisms there, say, birds which they named, say, "the shy wrens of Titan";
• do actual experiments, on Earth, with chemicals known to be present on Titan.

What they did do is use best available information about methane-based compounds present on Titan to construct a mathematical/chemical model of interactions among those compounds which might result in the formation and operation of a cell membrane, similar (if possible) to CHON-based cells on Earth. Maybe what they formally modeled is "life"; maybe not... but that's not the question they set out to answer. Theirs is perhaps a first step toward that much larger question: are all the components present on Titan to construct a methane-based cell, and what might be the processes of its chemical operation?

I'll take their question, unmodified, without any quibbles: it sounds like a good question to me, and an affirmative answer would go a long way toward suggesting that somewhere in our universe (not the whole multiverse; just what we've got here), if not on Titan then elsewhere, cells that could act "alive" could exist. I'm not betting on Yes or No, but I'm surely intending to keep track of what they find out.

(Oh, how we need Leonard Nimoy now, to write the poetry...)

The Antikythera Mechanism — Again

Antikythera Mechanism, fragment A, "front"

All of you are surely familiar by now with the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek device for computing a variety of astronomical and calendar-related events, fragments of which were discovered in a shipwreck from Roman times about one to two centuries BCE, fragments found in modern times by sponge divers in 1901. For at least a century, scholars, scientists, mathematicians and inventors have X-rayed the device, speculated on its function and age, built physical conjectural models of the device (including a bit of whimsy made of Legos, to go with your Lego harpsichord I suppose), and built mathematical models of its operation.

By now the device is mostly understood, and the results are astonishing. If you have ever read anything about Archimedes (d. 212 BCE, killed as he worked, run through by a Roman soldier), you have some idea of the genius afoot in Greece in the era in which the Antikythera mechanism was built.

Thanks to ellroon, we have an article by George Dvorsky at io9 and in turn a NYT article by John Markoff, and finally a suite of YouTube videos, starting here with one about the Lego Antikythera model, followed immediately by a longish show (Nova??) about the device itself. The two videos (there are more, but I stopped after two) are well worth watching.

Enjoy!

Miscellany

The Courts:

• How 5 SCOTUS Judges Are F*cking Americans Out Of Fair Elections - Here's The Latest Ruling
• Court throws out GOP's Virginia House gerrymander

Revolt against the US Chamber of Commerce:

• The revolt against the U.S. Chamber's stunning betrayal of Main Street America

The Republican Scotts:

• Scott Walker says $7.25 an hour is a living wage 
• Scott Brown gets a little too personal on women's health

Science:

• US scientists find evidence for group selection of spider colonies in the wild

Ancient Art:

• Indonesian Cave Paintings Rewrite History of Human Creativity

(Sorry I'm absent so much lately. Real life intervenes...)

‘Dreadnoughtus’, Possibly Most Massive Dinosaur Ever Discovered, Was Vegetarian

Malcolm Ritter at AP via TPM tells us about the gigantic critter discovered in 2005 in Argentina's Patagonia, of which Ritter says, "The four-legged beast, with a long neck and powerful 29-foot tail, stretched about 85 feet long and weighed about 65 tons. That's more than seven times the weight of even a plus-size male African elephant."

And yes, it was a plant-eater. Sometimes people chide me for not controlling my weight better, because "after all, [I'm] a vegetarian... it should be easy." Right. Please see "Dreadnoughtus" for an example of a sprout-eater that was not light at all.

(See pic on AP article. It's a great pic of the reconstruction, which is considerably advanced at this point, but I'm not reproducing a photo from AP on the day it was published... that's just asking for trouble.)

Was Einstein Wrong About ‘Spooky Action At A Distance’?

Recent experiments in "quantum entanglement" suggest it is real, and entangled particles subsequently separated can share changes to their quantum spin properties instantaneously... not at merely the speed of light. Einstein was so challenged by the idea that he referred to the phenomenon as "spooky action at a distance." Recent experiments haven't rendered it less spooky, but they have supported the reality of such entanglement... it's spooky, but it's real.

This article is written with a sledgehammer, but it has lots of links to sources that may be slightly more comprehensible. And if quantum entanglement turns out to be real, and if scientists' current interpretation of its behavior turns out to be correct, it could change a lot of things we thought we understood about the physics of our universe.

As I said, you might not want to bet your paycheck on the contents of the article, but do check out a few of the links.

Enjoy History Of Science? Here's A Book For You

Forbes, Nancy; Mahon, Basil. Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics. New York: Prometheus Books, 2014.

---

You think the subject is old stuff. You think you know the subject pretty well. You studied the subject in physics class 1966-1968 and most of the seminal research took place in the 19^th century.

You spot this book on the "New Books" shelf at the library. You yawn. You shrug and check it out anyway.

Then you read it and you're blown away...

Seriously: this is popular science writing at its best.

You Say You Want No Evolution, Well, You Know...

Drawing: Capt. James Cook voyage 1768-1771
(scientific, pre-Darwinian)

... you're too late to change that world. An old friend of mine from middle school through college, a fundamentalist Christian who home-schooled his kids, nonetheless taught them that facts cannot be debated. No doubt he and I differed on what establishes an assertion as a "fact." But a Missouri legislator has decided to test that concept in the most aggressive way possible: he has proposed a law that would

... require the school district or charter school to notify the parent or legal guardian of each student enrolled in the district of:

(1) The basic content of the district's or school's evolution instruction to be provided to the student; and

(2) The parent's right to remove the student from any part of the district's or school's evolution instruction.

The late lamented Stephen Jay Gould once presented a touring lecture appearing (among many other places) at Rice University in Houston. The title of the lecture began "The Fact of Evolution..." and concluded something like "as Explained in Darwin's Theory," or something similar. The distinction is absolutely critical to the understanding of science education: some things are facts established beyond a reasonable doubt by physical evidence and/or experiment, on the one hand, and on the other, some things are theories created by human minds, explanations of facts consistent with all known established facts.

For example, "evolution," in the sense of "descent with modification" is such a fact: the fossil record proves to any observer with an unbiased mind that later life forms derived from earlier ones. By contrast, "Darwin's theory of evolution," a very specific explanation of the mechanisms by which the established physical fact of descent with modification took place, is a theory. Theories are debatable; indeed, in a scientific context, theories can even be replaced with better theories more consistent with known facts, including new facts learned over time. Facts, on the other hand, in general are not subject to wholesale replacement.

Occasionally, as with the onset of quantum physics, facts previously established are found to be in error to a degree or in a manner that requires a re-evaluation of their particulars. But the whole of physics did not collapse with the first evidence for quantum mechanics, nor was Newton's work literally replaced by Einstein's, Bohr's etc. Some ID creationists are quick to shout "A-HA! Newton was never right in the first place! No eternal truths there!" Perhaps not, but Newton's work was good enough for humankind to navigate from the Earth to the Moon and back, to place satellites in geosynchronous orbit, etc., even if it took Einstein's work to insert the relativistic corrections to make your GPS work properly.

Such deliberate misconstructions might be merely silly, and one might legitimately simply mock people who insist on them. But in today's America, some of those people have in mind to establish their "higher [religious] truths" in our system of public education, by statutory law. Such people must be stopped.

In America, people are free to establish their own religions according to their own beliefs, however nutsy those beliefs may be. People may even form their own schools within the context of their religion, and teach their own kids all sorts of unsupported or even contrafactual things. But religion is not science, ever, even in the best of cases, and the First Amendment to our Constitution assures us that our government may not establish a religion, and that is exactly what the introduction of religion-based "science" contrary to best available present-day scientific thinking into government-sponsored schools amounts to.

Enough is enough. If the courts will not put a stop to this willful distortion of our kids' science education, the show is over, and we might as well strike the set and close the theater.

Be Worried, Not Happy—John Gribbin's The Reason Why

With all respect to Bobby McFerrin, a parody of his excellent work...

Here's a parody I stole;
You might want to sing it whole—
Be worried... ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Not happy... ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
...

Or, more to the point, don't allow your happiness to depend on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life in our Galaxy.

The dependably excellent popular science writer John Gribbin, in his slender but densely written 2011 book The Reason Why: The Miracle of Life on Earth, advises you not to take hope from the Drake Equation or your favorite Star Trek episodes or anything else, but rather to ask, with the late great Enrico Fermi, if there is intelligent life elsewhere than Earth, "Where is everybody?" ... and then answer yourself, "there's no one out there."

Gribbin assembles more than a dozen powerful arguments why our life on Earth depends on conditions specific to Earth, Earth's oddities as a planet, other oddities of the Sun and the Solar System, Earth's history, the hazards afflicting all objects in space, and our specific human makeup, conditions so particular that the likelihood of their existing elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy is effectively zero. Let me quote you Gribbin's conclusion and thus spare you two hundred pages of dense prose in fine print:

... The reasons why we are here form a chain so improbable that the chance of any other technological civilization existing in the Milky Way Galaxy at the present time is vanishingly small. We are alone, and we had better get used to the idea.

So there. Take that, you romanticizing fool!

In fairness, the late great Stephen Jay Gould came to a similar conclusion for different reasons. And Gribbin's arguments are pretty compelling, and encompass a lot of facts about Earth and humankind, including many (especially about Earth) that you may never have thought about, at least not in this context.

Is being alone in the Galaxy a tragedy? I think not. There's plenty of interesting material to last us our civilization's lifetime. Will it be a tragedy if humankind brings an end to its civilization before its likely termination by nature? That's another matter...

Astronomers Determine Color Of Planet Outside Our Solar System

Via TPM:

LONDON (AP) — Astronomers have for the first time managed to determine the color of a planet outside the solar system, a blue gas giant some 63 light years away.

...

NASA - Kornmesser

So... will it be named "Flatt" or "Scruggs"? Well, what would YOU name the first detected "blue gas giant" outside our solar system? Actually, it has been designated "HD 189733B" but we can hope for something more poetic yet to be announced...

Stephen Hawking Derided For 'Hypocrisy' For Boycotting Israeli Conference While Using 'Israeli' Technology

Harriet Sherwood in The Guardian:

Stephen Hawking's decision to boycott an Israeli conference in protest at the state's 46-year occupation of Palestine was derided as hypocritical by some, who pointed out that the celebrated scientist and author uses Israeli technology in the computer equipment that allows him to function.

Hawking, 71, has suffered from motor neurone disease for the past 50 years, and relies on a computer-based system to communicate.

According to Shurat HaDin, an Israel law centre which represents victims of terrorism, the equipment has been provided by the hi-tech firm, Intel, since 1997.

...

Give. Me. A. F**king. Break!

I am frequently critical of some oil-producing countries in the Middle East, e.g., Saudi Arabia and Iraq, for their society's policies on women's rights. But no one has yet vilified me for continuing to drive my car. (Full disclosure: at the moment, I am physically unable to drive my car. But I would drive it if I could, thereby undoubtedly burning Saudi oil.)

And labeling Intel an "Israeli" firm is stretching the notion of corporate nationality past the breaking point. Intel is a multinational firm headquartered in the US. It happens to have an Israeli branch.

To the people in Israel who are critical of Hawking for using Intel technology, I offer the following advice:

• Unplug your own Intel-based PC from the Internet and the power grid. After all, you'd be using "Israeli" technology. Even if your PC has a chip from another company, you are using a technology originated by an "Israeli" company. Yes, I'm telling you to give up your computers. How does that feel? And yet, I am asking far less of you than you are asking of Hawking.
• Take your gun (I believe it is a fair assumption that every Israeli owns a gun), shoot yourself in both feet, then in both hands, rendering yourself permanently disabled, but still not quite as disabled as Hawking without his electronics. Welcome to crippledom... it's great fun, isn't it?
• While you're at it, stop attending Hollywood movies, because many Hollywood stars are openly critical of Israel on human rights grounds. Let's face it: you're slamming Hawking because he is a star, and you can leverage his stardom to obtain publicity for yourselves. Can you see how some people might see that as hypocrisy on your part?

From what I've read, Hawking, a celebrity as few scientists have ever been, can be an annoying person to deal with, sometimes even in professional contexts. But people do not deserve to be told they should not use the technology that allows them to interact with other people day to day. Telling Hawking to unplug his electronic prostheses is exactly equivalent to telling me that I must live my life without my artificial limb. And that's real hypocrisy.

US No Longer #1 In Science Since The Year 2000

Let's see, what else happened in that year? A religious nut-job from Texas won stole the presidency, instituted a surely unconstitutional Office of Faith-Based Programs (aside: at first I misunderstood, thinking Bush had appointed Tammy Faye Bakker to a new Office of Face-Paste Programs), and de-emphasized science to the point that serious young science students began thinking of careers elsewhere in the world. Note this is the judgment of the students, not of a commercial publication trying to sell newspapers or magazines, who often saturate their top 10 lists of colleges in the physical sciences with American universities. And it is the judgment of talented American students, who must at least consider moving elsewhere, and non-American students, who are less likely to come here for their education than they were a couple of decades ago.

How much of this is GeeDubya Bush's fault? It's hard to tell. As far as I can see, a GOP tradition of dismissing higher education in science began approximately in Ronald Reagan's presidency, and has worsened in every Republican administration since then. In many fields, the best students know not to come here. And America was once so secure in that #1 spot! It seems a crying shame to have let it slip away.

Large Hadron Collider, CERN, Tunnel Interior, Switzerland and France

But slip away it has. Prof. Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist on the Rutgers faculty, is currently happy to be on loan to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). currently the world's most powerful particle accelerator, built... sorry, Americans; not in America... built by CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, headquartered in Geneva), in a tunnel spanning parts of Switzerland and France. A comparable American project, the Superconducting Super Collider, was envisioned and debated, but fell victim to political greed when it lost the support of every Senator whose state was not its proposed location. Strassler, who blogs at "Of Particular Significance" (it's on the blogroll), has this to say, pointing to the words of Bruce Alberts, Editor-in-Chief of the major journal Science as a basis for Strassler's own thoughts:

A mere twenty years ago, this nation was clearly the best place in the world to do scientific research. Since 2000 the decline has been precipitous, and though the U.S. still surely ranks in the top ten, few would say it clearly is the best anymore. In general, the country remains a relatively great place to live and work. But any excellent young scientist from abroad has to think carefully about coming to or staying in the U.S. for a career, because there might not be enough money to support even first-rate research. Similarly, any young U.S. scientist, no matter how devoted to this country and no matter how skilled, may face the tough choice of either going abroad or abandoning his or her career. (It’s not just young people either, as I can personally attest.)

Whereas before the year 2000 it was easy for U.S. universities to attract the best in the world to teach and do research at their institutions, and to train the next generation of American scientists, the brain drain since that time has been awful. (I see this up close, as more and more often I fail to hire talented individuals specifically because they see a better scientific and personal future outside the United States.) And it is getting worse. All of this affects our economy’s future, our society’s health, and even our ability to defend ourselves, especially since some of the most active spending on science is being done by countries that are hostile or potentially hostile to the free world.

It’s easy to blame this on the recession. “Oh, these are bad times and we all have to share the pain.” That’s true, but this problem started long before 2008. The system became threadbare during the Bush administration, and now, in the ensuing recession and political chaos, it’s at risk of falling apart.

...

So there you have it, from a respected theoretical physicist, one who himself had to move to Switzerland to pursue his high-powered career (pun intended): America once had it, but America lost it, its system of scientific research collapsing in a heap during the Bush administration. One man's opinion, you say? I'm afraid a lot of other physicists concur. America has plenty to spend maintaining a war machine well-suited to fighting the nuclear war we never had (thank goodness), but we can't afford to support first-rate scientific research. This scarcity of research funds (for any research not of military consequence) has unfortunate implications: most American scientists, even eminent figures in their fields, inevitably spend large portions of their workdays not on science but on spinning the research they wish to do, to Congress of course, but also to the public; to hear them tell their story, every forthcoming breakthrough is new, radical, of overarching significance, etc.

It's a helluva way to run a nation's science programs.

Ockham? Fockham!

Franciscan monk William of Ockham (c.1287-1347) said something scarcely resembling "in explanations, do not multiply assumptions beyond need." According to Jacques Vallee, writing at BoingBoing, Ockham stated it this way:

Nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.

Some of us immediately envision Emily Litella saying, "Oh. Well. That's very different. Never mind!" Scientific explanations simply cannot compete with sacred scripture in authority or simplicity. So unless you're willing to toss out the science with the bathwater... razor away the skin with the beard? ... you may not want to cite Ockham as your authority in simplifying an explanation.

Please go read Vallee's post. It is elegantly laid out, and has nice medieval illustrations including a larger image of the above portrait allegedly of Ockham.

(H/T ellroon, by proximity to another BoingBoing post she linked.)

‘Spooky Action At A Distance’

Google it, or better yet, just go to the wiki. That was Einstein's derogatory (dismissive) phrase for what is now usually called quantum entanglement. But the phenomenon is real, has been experimentally demonstrated and is as controversial as ever when physicists talk about possible mechanisms. I've been reading about it in a rather old book (1995, "old" by physics standards) by John Gribbin titled Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality, billed as a successor to his relatively famous In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, but advanced beyond the span of years between the books. Kittens is filling in some gaps in my eternally spotty understanding of quantum mechanics, and it may be the perfect book for the purpose.

Quantum entanglement aside, I've always wanted to form a band and name it Spooky Action at a Distance, but someone has already used the name for an album title. Another great idea meets the reality that Someone Else Thought of it First...

Adjacent Headlines

From TPMLiveWire, two headlines, adjacent at the moment:

• Boehner Declines To Name Specific Entitlement Cuts He Seeks In Deal
• Boehner: I’m ‘Willing To Move Forward In Good Faith’

Aw, c'mon, John, which is it?

Meanwhile, speaking of Jo[h]ns, Jon Stewart offers a segment on the "fiscal cliff," which he calls CLIFFPOCALYPSEMAGEDDONACAUST. His basic premise: “Let me put it another way. There’s an asteroid headed towards the Earth. We made it and fired it at ourselves, because otherwise we would never have done the hard work required to protect ourselves from asteroids.” John and Mary Gribbin, in Fire on Earth, couldn't have put it better, though I don't think that by "Fire on Earth" they meant that one of us would actually, like, you know, point a loaded asteroid and fire on Earth...

Mars And Mercury

Mars Curiosity Rover, despite recent rumors, has not yet found any organic molecules on Mars, while on the positive side, NASA's MESSENGER Mercury mission, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, has found "three independent lines of evidence" that Mercury's perpetually shadowed polar craters contain large amounts of water ice.

H/T TPM for both news items.

Krugman, Rubio And The Age Of The Earth

Paul Krugman points out that Marco Rubio's evasiveness when asked how old the Earth is is more than just a gesture to appeal to religious fundamentalists in the GOP's base: it is a direct, full-fledged abnegation of science in pursuit of the truth... and an indirect rejection of the economic prosperity that can only be based on Americans' widespread knowledge of the sciences. Krugman is right; indeed, he could scarcely be more right. Conservative biblio-babble notwithstanding, in these days, without science, the American economy... any human economy... is nothing.

The Earth? It is 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old. Some Bible-bangers... Rubio, perhaps? will tell you figures in the vicinity of 6000 to 7500 years; others give longer spans from 12000 to 20000 years. A mere 6000 years? I had a great‑grandmother who was older than that... [/snark]

The point is this: science is not necessarily always right, but it is always rooted in physical reality as best researchers can determine that reality. Religion may occasionally be factually right, but it is always mythology, with no obligation to factual accuracy. As mythology, it may have some moral instructive value (or not); but as myth rather than fact, it is a poor basis for formulating public policy... let alone teaching science.