Mainstream Media vs Fringe

 

Unlike some people who write on fortean topics, I don't see the mainstream media as an arch-villain. I used "vs" in the title of this post to mean "as contrasted with", rather than "fighting to the death against". Anyway, you can't get much more mainstream than the Observer and the Guardian, which are among Britain's most prestigious Sunday and daily newspapers respectively (particularly, I suspect, among more thoughtful and well-educated readers).

So I was enormously pleased when the Observer printed a two-page feature about space telescopes by me in last weekend's edition (as shown in the picture above), and then the same article was also posted for a much larger audience on the Guardian website under the title Cosmic Time Machines. That's undoubtedly the high point of my writing career to date, easily beating my appearance in BBC Science Focus magazine which I showed off about a few months ago.

But I'm equally proud of the fact that I've had 21 articles published in Fortean Times, not to mention 47 book reviews and a few other mentions. And I've contributed to several other "fringe" media in the past, including Edge Science magazine and the Mysterious Universe website.

I don't really see a distinction, or even any serious conflict, between the two. If you're passionately interested in unravelling the world's mysteries, why focus on UFOs, psychic powers and Bigfoot and ignore exoplanets, quantum gravity and AI (or vice versa)? Fortunately there are at least a couple of regular Fortean Times contributors who also write for the mainstream media, but they're very much in the minority. There are plenty of well-known writers on anomalous phenomena who seemingly show zero interest in a topic if it's perceived as being too "mainstream", which I find very sad.

Anyway, I don't want to turn this post into a rant. My main purpose was just to show off about my appearance in the Observer and the Guardian - which, as I said, marks the high point of my writing career to date. Hopefully that doesn't mean it's going to be all downhill from here!

Googling Retro-Forteana

Bing Image Creator (prompt = "black hole dinosaur Large Hadron Collider")

 What do the following have in common: "supermassive black holes", "Large Hadron Collider", "big bang theory"? If you said they're all fashionable science topics that large numbers of people might search for on Google, then that's the answer I wanted. If you type any of those phrases into Google, then among the top 5 or so results you'll see one from the Space.com website which (if you click on it) includes my name as one of the co-authors. I only spotted this recently, and while it hardly amounts to "fame" (since no one ever notices the author's name in situations like this, except the author themselves), it did start me thinking.

Google is where this blog gets most of its visitors from, after an initially flurry from my RSS and social media followers (all six of them). The result can be anything from under 50 views (as with a couple of my most recent posts) to over 5,000 (in the case of my luckiest half dozen posts). Years ago I set up Google Search Console to keep track of the blog's search performance, and then promptly forgot all about it. But I just had another look at it, and tried typing some of its suggested search terms into Google to see how they fare (just to clarify my methodology: I used a desktop rather than mobile browser, in incognito mode so it didn't know who I was, and I'm only counting hits from Google's main list, not the differently formatted items such as sponsored links, images, Reddit, Quora etc).

Suffice to say the blog doesn't score well on anything a normal person is likely to search for! Of course, it comes top for "retro-forteana", but only because it's a name I made up myself. Of the terms suggested by Google Search Console, it only makes the top 5 for "esoteric mathematics", "dinosaurs in the 16th century" and "spooky action at a distance in German" - all of somewhat specialized interest, to say the least.

At the opposite extreme, the three examples from Space.com I gave earlier really are the kind of thing the general public might search for. Those particular articles were joint productions with other writers, but there are a few other (admittedly less search-worthy) topics where the Space.com result is all my own work, such as "What is a parsec?" and "Blue stars".

"Blue stars", in fact, is the first search term I found where my article comes right at the top of Google's results. But if you want something more fortean, try "Beginner's Guide to Time Travel". As a search term it's a little contrived, but it has the benefit (from my point of view) that Google's first non-sponsored result is my article of that title on Space.com's sister site LiveScience.

As well as this blog, I've got a website andrew-may.com which I'm also monitoring on Google Search Console. The only remotely popular search terms it does well on are "Astounding Science Fiction" (a pulp magazine of the 1940s and 50s, for which my site places around third in a Google search) and "Heart Sutra in Japanese" (a chanted text used in Zen Buddhism, for which Google puts me just inside the top 10).

If you expand the second of those to "Heart Sutra in Japanese with English subtitles", then Google puts me right at the top - not with the website this time, but a video I uploaded to YouTube just a few months ago. Despite its good search performance, this hasn't had many views yet - but give it time! A much older video of mine, "Dirac on Einstein" (which also comes top in a Google search) is now up to 127k views - the one and only time I've seen a six-figure number in any of my online statistics!

One final thing, which I wouldn't have mentioned (honest!) if I hadn't just spotted it in the Google Search Console data. But another term my website scores highly on is "Andrew May astrophysicist". I'm not sure which is more surprising  - that my website comes out at number 1 ahead of LinkedIn, Space.com, LiveScience, Twitter, Amazon, Icon Books and BBC Science Focus - or that all those other sites are referring to me as well, not someone else of the same name!

Bing Image Creator (prompt = "science fiction Heart Sutra astrophysics")

Astronomical debunking

ESA’s Gaia spacecraft was in the news a few weeks ago, when it produced a detailed map of the Galaxy (pictured above). But images like these don’t really reflect Gaia’s main mission, which is to measure accurate positions and velocities for millions of individual stars. That’s something I was interested in 30 years ago, and in fact I co-wrote a paper on the subject in 1986. Tucked away in an appendix to that paper is my one and only all-out attempt at scientific “debunking”. It probably isn’t of much interest to anyone but me – but then I thought last week’s post (about a popular video game) would have mass appeal, and it only got 81 views. So I really don’t care any more. I’m going to indulge myself.

The paper in question was co-written with James Binney, who was my boss at the time, and quite an authority on galactic dynamics (he co-authored the standard textbook on the subject, and I think he’s now involved in the Gaia project itself). After I’d dug out a hard copy of May & Binney (1986), and carefully scanned it into my computer, I discovered that all my astronomical papers are freely available online. There’s one about Black Holes from The Astrophysical Journal, and seven others from Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Among the latter, there’s one called “Solar-neighbourhood observations and the structure of the Galaxy” – and that’s the one I’m talking about here.

The title may sound odd, because the “solar neighbourhood” is usually taken to be about a thousand parsecs across, while the Galaxy as a whole is fifty times that size. But it’s only in the solar neighbourhood that we can measure the velocities of other stars with any accuracy. You have to extrapolate from these measurements to work out what’s happening elsewhere in the Galaxy. That’s helped by the fact that the oldest stars in the solar neighbourhood – sometimes called “halo stars” or “Population II” – tend to move on wide-ranging orbits that take them all over the place.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, an American astronomer named Olin Eggen claimed that some of the halo stars in the solar neighbourhood were moving on very similar orbits, even though they were physically separate from each other – not gravitationally bound in a tight cluster. That’s known to occur with some young stars in the Galactic disc – they’re called “moving groups”, made up of stars formed in the same gas cloud which haven’t had time to disperse – but the idea of equivalent moving groups of halo stars is something else altogether. It’s not “bad astronomy” in the Velikovsky league, but it’s the kind of brash, attention-grabbing claim that really needs to be examined closely. And that’s what we did in Appendix B of our paper (at this distance of time, I can’t remember if it was my idea or James’s – probably his, though in either case it would have been me who did all the calculations).

Like I said at the start, we ended up debunking the whole idea, using a mixture of statistics and dynamical calculations. You can see the whole appendix in the scan at the bottom of this post. I have no idea if anyone actually read this part of the paper, or paid any attention to it (according to Google Scholar, the paper has only collected 41 citations in the last 30 years). I don’t know what the current thinking about “halo moving groups” is, either. My guess is that (with the Galaxy being a more complex place than it used to be) they’re not as a-priori impossible as we thought – although I’d still put money on the specific halo groups “found” by Eggen being nothing more than wishful thinking.

I just had a quick look at Wikipedia’s article about Olin Eggen. It says “He first introduced the now-accepted notion of moving groups of stars” ... but I imagine that refers to Population I groups, not Population II. I did pick up another interesting snippet from that article, though. It says “After his death he was found to have been in possession of highly significant historical files and documents that had apparently gone missing for decades from the Royal Greenwich Observatory”.

No comment.

Astronomical computers (old ones)

Most people think of astronomy as a very modern science, because of its association with things like space travel, UFOs and science fiction. But it’s really one of the oldest sciences, especially when it comes to quantitative calculations and mathematical modelling. That’s because astronomical objects generally move in a very regular and predictable way. It’s tempting to say “like clockwork”, but that’s putting things back to front. A clock is basically a simple analog computer that models the apparent motion of the Sun across the sky – a fact that was much more explicit in the early “astronomical” clocks that can be found in some old churches (such as this one from Paul Jackson’s blog).

I was reminded of this on a visit to Greenwich last week. It’s the home of the old Royal Observatory (pictured above, with the large red “time ball” clearly visible). By the time it was built, in the 17th century, mechanical clocks were well established. But in earlier times, people had to resort to things like sun-dials. But what if you wanted to know the time in the middle of the night? A short distance from the Royal Observatory, in the National Maritime Museum, I saw a display which explained how you could do just that using an ingenious mediaeval gadget called an astrolabe.

You can see a selection of astrolabes in the picture below. They’re shiny, highly desirable pieces of technology, and I’m sure no fashion-conscious geek would have been seen without one back in the Middle Ages. Like a lot of sexy modern tech, they do something that’s basically very simple in a ridiculously complex (but satisfyingly elegant) way. All you really need to do is measure the elevation angle of a known star. You could do this using a simple sextant made from a protractor, a plumb bob and a drinking straw (Mark Watney makes one in exactly this way in the novel version of The Martian). Then, assuming you know today’s date, you can consult a set of printed look-up tables to interpolate the exact time. All an astrolabe does is remove the need for paper and pencil – you just twiddle its various knobs and dials (it has five moving parts in all), and it automatically tells you the time. But who wouldn’t prefer dial-twiddling to looking things up in a book? If this was 1492 I’d want an astrolabe ... and I bet you would too.

An astrolabe, like a clock, is essentially an astronomical computer. Nowadays we tend to think of computers in terms of information processing, but the word originally comes from the Latin computare, meaning “to calculate”. And in the old days, one of the few things that was amenable to mathematical calculation was astronomy. The famous Antikythera mechanism, which is over 2000 years old, is described by the (never knowingly hyperbolic) Wikipedia as “an ancient analogue computer ... used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses”.

Today it goes without saying that a computer is a machine, and to describe someone as a “human computer” is a pejorative – suggesting they are machine-like and soulless. But the earliest use of the word computer was to refer to a person who carries out calculations. During the 19th and early 20th century, “computer” was actually a job title in some astronomical institutions. That’s a fact I discovered a couple of years ago when I watched Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. One of the episodes, Sisters of the Sun, described the work of the “Harvard Computers” – who as the episode title suggests, were all women. Apparently Greenwich was more egalitarian, employing computers of both sexes – as the following information board in the observatory museum indicates (although the one pictured is female).

The Somerset Space Walk

The Somerset Space Walk is a 1/530,000,000-scale model of the Solar System, spread out along the 22.5 km length of the Bridgwater-to-Taunton canal. At the half-way point, the Sun is represented by a sphere approximately 2.6 metres in diameter, and as you walk along the towpath in either direction you come to models of each of the planets to the same scale. For example, Mercury is a stainless steel ball just 9 mm in diameter, around 110 metres from the Sun (Mercury’s orbit is elliptical – this distance represents the semi-major axis).

The main canal-side car park is located close to the northern (i.e. Bridgwater-side) model of Mars. I walked from there past Earth, Venus and Mercury to the Sun, and then past another Mercury, Venus and Earth to the Taunton-side Mars. That involves a total distance of just 860 metres. I then walked on another kilometre to Jupiter, before returning to the car and driving into Taunton, where I “finished” the trail at Pluto, 11.3 km from the Sun (the model dates from 1997, when Pluto was still counted as one of the planets). My photos above show the six planets I visited on the Taunton side of the Sun.

The model really does put “astronomical scales” into perspective. The picture below shows the relatively huge model of the Sun, with the hundred-times-smaller model of the Earth in the inset. The latter is a stainless steel sphere approximately 25 mm in diameter. On that scale, the International Space Station would be a mere 0.75 mm above the surface of the sphere. The Moon, which is the furthest anyone has travelled, would be just a metre away. The nearest star outside the Solar System, Alpha Centauri, would be about 77,000 km away – almost six times the diameter of the real Earth!

During the Second World War, the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal formed part of the “Taunton Stop Line”, another stretch of which I wrote about on Paul Jackson’s blog several years ago (see also Paul’s own post about the GHQ Line, which served a similar function further East). In the short distance I walked last week, I saw no fewer than three gun emplacements, all to different designs:

Anything can happen in the next 30 seconds

I just received my contributor’s copies of 30-second Physics and 30-second Newton – pictured above with 30-second Quantum Theory from 2014. All three books are edited by Brian Clegg and include contributions from some really top class science writers (as well as me). As I said when the quantum book came out, I really like the format of these books. The covers may look dull, but the interiors are packed with information and visually stunning images.

There’s a whole series of 30-second books, including subjects like Opera, Shakespeare, Religion, Mythology and Architecture as well as the sciency ones. They’re based on the “elevator pitch” theory that anything that’s worth knowing can be summarized in 30 seconds. That doesn’t mean the books can be read in 30 seconds, but they’re organized in double-page spreads and the idea is that each DPS can be absorbed in 30 seconds (although when I tried it with a stopwatch, it came out closer to 90 seconds).

The publisher’s website includes a few example spreads from each book. To give you a flavour, I’ve put a copy of one of these (my entry on “Comets” from 30-second Newton) at the bottom of this post. Note however that it’s a deliberately degraded low resolution image – to read it properly you really need to buy the book!

Speaking of which, here are a couple of Amazon links for you:

• Browse "Brian Clegg 30-second" at Amazon.com
• Browse "Brian Clegg 30-second" at Amazon.co.uk

Isaac Newton and me

The studious-looking geek in the above photo is me, at the age of 21 in 1979, posing in front of a portrait of Isaac Newton. The picture was taken in Trinity College, Cambridge, at the top of I staircase where I had a room during my third year at university. I staircase is about 200 feet along the east front of Great Court from E staircase, where Newton himself lived for many years (although I staircase, which is a 20th century utilitarian monstrosity, wasn’t there in his time).

Along with Einstein, Newton was one of the scientific heroes of my teenage years. I read a biography of him in 1973 (as I’ve mentioned before, I kept a list of all the books I read) and visited his birthplace in Lincolnshire a year or two after that. So I was pleased to end up at Newton’s college, Trinity, even though I had no say in the matter. The school I went to (a comprehensive in the West Midlands, before you ask) had a tradition of trying to get its best science student into that particular college each year. All I needed to do was get three grade As at A-level (I got four, just to be on the safe side).

After I graduated (the day that photo was taken – I didn’t always dress like that) I went to Manchester University to do a PhD on the computer simulation of galaxy dynamics. That may sound very modern and state-of-the-art, but the only science involved was 100% Newtonian. In three years I never had to use a single equation that isn’t present, either explicitly or implicitly, in the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica that Newton wrote in 1687. So I owe Newton my doctorate, too!

Just over a year ago the History Press (which published my first book, Bloody British History: Somerset) started a new series of short biographies called Pocket Giants. I was intrigued by this idea (as I’ve said before, I like short books) so I contacted the series editor, Tony Morris, to see if there was anything I could do for him. After batting a few ideas around, we eventually zeroed in – perhaps not surprisingly – on Isaac Newton. Tony was as enthusiastic about the project as I was, and with his encouragement and constructive input the proposal was accepted by the History Press, the contract signed and the book written in the space of a few months last year.

Despite being a lifelong fan of Newton, I still learned a lot about him while I was researching and writing the book. Perhaps the oddest thing about him – which is more widely known today than it was in the 1970s – is that he spent less time on the scientific work for which he’s remembered than on pursuing non-scientific interests like alchemy, Hermeticism, theology and ancient history. There’s a common tendency to view the scientific and non-scientific (or even anti-scientific, by modern standards) activities as separate and non-overlapping. Scientists see the non-scientific work as an irrelevance and embarrassment that ought to be ignored and forgotten, while mystics and New Agers see the scientific work as the irrelevance – a kind of smoke-screen of acceptability designed to hide Newton’s real achievements.

I came to the conclusion that both these views miss the point. Everything Newton did stemmed from the same world-view – the idea that the universe was designed, by God, according to a simple code that could be rediscovered if it was searched for carefully enough. Newton looked for the code in the Bible and other ancient writings, and in the work of alchemists and Hermeticists. But he also looked for mathematical relationships that applied to the material world – something that seemed just as mystical and improbable to his contemporaries. But Newton’s “applied mathematics” worked – and worked so well that it’s become synonymous with mainstream science. Both scientists and New Agers have forgotten, or can’t see, what a profoundly mystical notion it is.

This was the point I tried to make in a blog post I wrote last week for the History Press. My original title was “Isaac Newton and the Key to the Universe”, which I thought was quite clever, but they wanted to tie it in with the series so they changed it to Why was Isaac Newton such a giant? (It was meant as a rhetorical question, but one clever lady on Twitter replied “Because he stood on the shoulders of giants”).

Needless to say, all these ideas are explored in more detail in the book itself, together with lots of other fascinating facts about Newton (such as how he perpetrated a UFO hoax as a teenager, predicted the end of the world and became “17th-Century London’s Dirty Harry”). You can order your copy from any good bookseller or from Amazon.

Three difficult things that are easier than Mars One

Mars One, the reality TV initiative aimed at setting up a Martian colony twelve years from now, has been in the news again. Much of this recent publicity has been extremely negative, with scathing criticisms from various members of the scientific and aerospace establishments. For a project that needs a strong public image to secure investment, this kind of negativity is extremely damaging. In fact it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the project ends up collapsing, its supporters will no doubt blame the negativity of the skeptics, while the skeptics themselves will gleefully say “I told you so”.

Personally I never like being negative about other people’s bright ideas, but in the case of Mars One it’s hard not to be. The flaw lies not so much in their proposed solution, as in the problem they’ve chosen to solve. Getting humans to Mars is still beyond the capabilities of much more experienced organizations, such as NASA, Roscosmos and ESA, who have had far longer to think about it (the illustration above is from a study NASA did in 1964, over 50 years ago).

Rather than rehashing all the arguments for and against, I thought it would be fun to list three things that have never been done, but any one of which would still be a lot easier than setting up a human colony on Mars. Each of my three projects involves solving just a small subset of the problems facing Mars One, instead of having to solve all those problems simultaneously (and others as well).

1. Set up a human colony on the floor of the ocean. This is just as inhospitable to human life as the surface of Mars, so you need to address all the same problems of a safe, self-contained living environment. But the destination is a lot closer, so it’s easier to get material down there. We also know for a fact that there’s enough water, oxygen and food nutrients to sustain the colonists indefinitely (with suitable processing) – something that has to be taken on faith in the case of Mars One. The deep-sea environment is more interesting than Mars, too, teeming with unfamiliar life-forms that would make much better TV than the virtually dead world of Mars. Finally, a trip to the ocean floor doesn’t have to be a one-way one, so the colonists wouldn’t be doomed to die if and when the TV show was cancelled.
    
2. Establish a permanent base on the Moon. Technologically, this is easy – it’s basically the same as building the ISS, but a quarter of a million miles away instead of in low earth orbit. A quarter of a million miles may sound a long way, but the journey is more than a thousand times shorter than the Hohmann transfer orbit to Mars. On top of that, there are several opportunities to launch lunar missions every month, whereas Mars missions are limited to brief launch windows every two years. Even more importantly, the low lunar surface gravity means that getting people back to Earth is nothing like as difficult as it is from Mars. So rather than having to set up a permanent colony, you can rotate crews the same way they do with the ISS. In terms of reality TV this is great news, because it means you could run monthly competitions where the prize is a trip to the Moon. Lots of people willingly pay large sums of money each week to play the lottery, and I’ll bet many of them would do the same for a chance to visit the Moon (and appear on TV into the bargain).
    
3. Send low-budget robot probes to Mars with a better than 95% success rate. That’s the kind of reliability that would be needed for crewed missions, but it’s only ever been achieved for top-of-the-range spacecraft like the Curiosity Rover – not the sort of budget hardware that a private venture like Mars One will have to use. As a general rule, Mars missions have a depressing tendency to fail – the overall success rate is just 47%. Unlike the previous two items, I’m not suggesting this one would make a good reality TV show. Quite the opposite, in fact – it’s all about rocket science, which is virtually guaranteed to have viewers switching to another channel. But that’s an important point in itself. While there’s plenty of human interest involved in setting up a Martian colony, there’s a lot of boring science and engineering too – and it’s the science and engineering that’s going to end up eating up all the money. It would be a lot smarter, in my opinion, to pick something like the ocean floor or lunar project, which offers the same level of human interest with far fewer technical challenges.

The First UFO Hoaxers?

According to a quote I came across a few days ago, Sir Isaac Newton “caused one of the earliest recorded UFO scares by flying a kite at night with a paper lantern attached to it”. That’s really one of the archetypal UFO hoaxes (although people nowadays would probably use a balloon rather than a kite)... but Newton was doing it way back in the 17th century!

And he wasn’t the only one. Athanasius Kircher was a German scholar who was born about 40 years before Newton. According to the same source as the previous quote “he launched little hot air balloons with Flee the Wrath of God written underneath”. So Kircher was another 17th century UFO hoaxer!

Of course, it’s unlikely that Kircher and Newton wanted people to think the Earth was being visited by extraterrestrials, since the idea barely existed in the 17th century. But there’s no doubt they were trying to alarm people by perpetrating a deception. There’s a tendency to think of hoaxing as a modern phenomenon, so that any unusual object seen in the sky in past centuries must have been the real thing. But why couldn’t it have been some joker flying a balloon or a kite?

The book those quotes come from is The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince (technically the Newton quote is itself a quote from another book by John Gribbin). The quotes don’t have much to do with the main theme of the book, though, which is the significant role (usually glossed over by historians of science) played by the Hermetic tradition during the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.

I find this period of history fascinating, because of the dramatic changes that were taking place in the prevailing worldview. One thing that interests me in particular (since my original specialism was stellar dynamics) is the way the universe suddenly grew from very small (with the Solar System embedded in a hollow sphere of fixed stars) to very large (with the stars spread throughout infinite space).

Contrary to popular opinion, the change didn’t come with Copernicus. He put the Sun instead of the Earth at the centre of the Solar System, but he still believed there was a rigid sphere of fixed stars – just tiny points of light – somewhere beyond the orbit of Saturn. It’s a huge leap from that to the idea of an infinite universe, in which the stars are of equal importance to the Sun, possibly with their own planets orbiting around them. In an earlier post (The man who invented aliens) I attributed this idea to Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600). According to Picknett and Prince, however, the same idea seems to have occurred to other people independently. One of them was an English near-contemporary of Bruno’s named Thomas Digges (1546 – 1595).

You may never have heard of Thomas Digges, but you’ve probably heard of a young man who lodged with him for a time in Bishopsgate – William Shakespeare. The latter worked at the same theatre, The Globe, as Digges’s son. So Shakespeare almost certainly heard the revolutionary new theory of “infinite space” direct from the horse’s mouth. One phrase Digges used in refuting the old worldview was to say the universe was not enclosed within the stellar sphere “as in a nutshell”.

“Hang on a second,” you say. “In a Nutshell is a well-known cliché. I thought Shakespeare was the only Elizabethan with a license to coin clichés. Didn’t Shakespeare say something about In a Nutshell?”

Well yes, he did. It comes from Act 2 Scene 2 of Hamlet: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

Probably the first reference to “infinite space” in English literature!

Thought-forms and Wormholes, 17th century style

I recently came across a couple of interesting old book illustrations. The first (above) appears to show four men mentally projecting the image of a dragon, a bit like a Tibetan tulpa or thought-form. Or maybe it’s a real dragon, and they’re fighting it off with Cyclops-like eye-beams.

Actually the picture comes from an optics textbook by Johann Zahn called Telescopium, which was published in 1685. The dragon appears in Figure XXIII near the end of the book. The text is in Latin, but as far as I can make out it’s an illustration of the light rays running from an extended object AB to observers C, D, E and F. Why object AB happens to be a flying dragon, I’ve no idea.

The second picture (below) appears to show some kind of huge vortex or wormhole opening up in the sky. That’s the kind of thing I always wish would happen, but it never does (except in movies). Actually the picture is an illustration from a book called Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, by Bernard de Fontenelle. It was first published in French in 1686, the year after Zahn’s book, although this picture may be from a later edition (the clothes look 18th century to me).

The picture is meant to be a symbolic depiction of a man telling a woman all about the structure of the Solar System. If you look carefully, you can see that the circles depict the six planets that were known at that time, as well as the Earth’s moon and some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. According to the Wikipedia article on Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, it was one of the first ever popular science books (i.e. not written in Latin). It explains the heliocentric theory of the Solar System, which was still quite a novelty at the time, and “muses on the possibility of extraterrestrial life”.

A few months ago I started a Tumblr picture blog called Amazing Visions, which I post to when I think about it (mostly reblogs of other people’s posts, to be honest). When I’ve published this post I’m going to post the two pictures to Tumblr as well. I haven’t got many followers, so do check it out if you’re into Tumblr.

Fortean Crossword

Apparently the crossword puzzle marks its centenary this month. A few years ago I put together a Fortean-themed crossword which I thought would be worth repeating here. You can either print it out or do it in your head... or just ignore the grid and treat the questions as a trivia quiz.

Answers next week – together with an exegesis of all the Fortean connections.

ACROSS

1. Author of Chariots of the Gods [5, 3, 7]
9. First of the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation [7]
10. “Their weapons were no match for the Bossonian -------“ (Robert E. Howard) [7]
11. "Voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to -----" (Charles Fort) [5]
12. Yggdrasil, for example [3]
13. The world ends without this, according to T.S. Eliot [1, 4]
14. Site of the Crucifixion [7]
16. "I had long hoped for a personal ------- with a man from a flying saucer" (George Adamski) [7]
18. The queen of the fairies, according to Shakespeare [7]
21. Sayings of Jesus that are not found in the Gospels [7]
23. Max -----, German surrealist [5]
25. --- Geller, Israeli-born psychic [3]
26. "Thus ----- Zarathustra", by Friedrich Nietzsche [5]
27. Lenape people living in New Jersey when the Europeans arrived [7]
28. "------- Tales" (1974), featuring Paloma Picasso as Countess Erzsébet Báthory [7]
29. Britain's best-known cryptid [4, 4, 7]

DOWN

1. The building pictured below [6, 9]
2. Eldest son of Abraham, according to the Book of Genesis [7]
3. Herman -----, author of Siddhartha [5]
4.The James ------- is inscribed "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" [7]
5. The ------- Sibyl, prophetess of Apollo [7]
6. Professional assassin in feudal Japan [5]
7. An esoteric branch of Judaism [7]
8. A type of hippie found in 1980s Britain [3, 3, 9]
15. --- Greenslit Pudeator, hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692 [3]
17. "Alles Vergangliche ist --- ein Gleichnis" (Everything transient is only a symbol - Goethe) [3]
19. "The Serpent Power: Secrets of ------- and Shaktic Yoga" by Arthur Avalon [7]
20. Thomas -------, author of Summa Theologica [7]
21. Belief that all living and non-living things have a spiritual essence [7]
22. Generic term for Indian languages related to Sanskrit [7]
24. The largest moon of Saturn [5]
26. ----- Magus, a sorcerer mentioned in the Book of Acts [5]

Laplace's Demon

This time last year I did a post about Maxwell’s Demon, which featured in a TV documentary by the physicist and science popularizer Jim Al-Khalili. The same subject is discussed in his excellent book Paradox, together with another distantly related demon attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace (the photo shows a statue of Laplace that I saw at the Palace of Versailles).

The name of Laplace isn’t as well-known to non-physicists as that of Maxwell, although his role in the history of science was just as important. In much the same way that Maxwell consolidated everything that was known about electromagnetism in his famous set of equations, Laplace consolidated Newtonian dynamics in an elegant new formulation that is much easier to work with than Newton’s own rather clunky equations.

If people have heard of Laplace at all, it’s because he supposedly told Napoleon “I had no need of that hypothesis” when asked a question about God. As with many well-known scientific soundbites (cf. Spooky Action at a Distance and Not Even Wrong), this doesn’t mean what it appears to mean. Laplace wasn’t saying he had scientific proof of the nonexistence of God, simply that it wasn’t necessary to invoke divine intervention, as Newton had done, in order to explain the long-term stability of the Solar System.

This brings us to the subject of Laplace’s Demon. Laplace believed the entire workings of the universe were determined by mathematical equations, and that neither random chance nor divine intervention had any role to play. Hence “an intelligence that, at a given instant, knows all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the entities that compose it, if moreover it was sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis... nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.”

This is an awesome concept if you think about it. The term “demon” was applied retrospectively, by analogy with Maxwell’s demon, but Laplace himself used the more neutral term “intelligence”. In modern terms, he might have been thinking about a supercomputer. But was he right? Is it possible to compute the entire course of future events simply by making a complete set of measurements at a single instant in time?

Two centuries of scientific progress haven’t changed Laplace’s basic premise – the physical universe still seems to conform to immutable laws that can be expressed in the form of mathematical equations. We don’t know all the equations, but we know more of them than Laplace did. Saying that a mathematical equation is rigorously obeyed, however, isn’t the same as saying you can predict its observable consequences. In fields like statistical mechanics and quantum physics, all the important equations are stochastic – they deal in probabilities. The equations allow you to calculate the probability of an event to whatever precision you want, but they don’t tell you if the event will actually occur or not – that’s down to random chance.

In fact, as Jim Al-Khalili points out in his book, you don’t even have to invoke post-Laplacian physics to see the fallacy of Laplace’s Demon – only post-Laplacian number-crunching. The equations Laplace worked with are nonlinear differential equations, which are notoriously difficult to solve. In the days before computers, people had to stick to a small subset of easy solutions, and that’s what Laplace did. But we now know there are always some regions of phase space where the solutions are effectively stochastic – the tiniest change in initial conditions leads to a completely different phase trajectory. This result isn’t limited to complex systems – it’s true even for the classic three-body problem (e.g. Earth – Moon – Sun) that Newton and Laplace worked on.

For my own attempt to calculate the evolution of the Galaxy (using Laplace’s equation) see A Virtual Spaceship.

The Scarab and the Stars

Earlier this year a scientific paper was published with the eyecatching title “Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation”, which was widely reported in the mainstream media. The research has now been awarded one of the 2013 Ig Nobel Prizes – the “Joint Prize in Biology and Astronomy”.

Actually the result isn’t as outrageous as it sounds. The problem is that people focus on the symbolic associations of words, rather than the underlying thing a word is being used to describe. So a really basic image-processing task, because of the way it’s described, suddenly takes on cosmic or mystical significance. The mystical dimension is enhanced by the fact that the dung beetle, under its alternative name of Scarab, was a sacred symbol in ancient Egypt that has now become a favourite of New Agers.

Stars also have a New Age connection, via astrology. This is one of the reasons – alongside associations with UFOs and science fiction – that any mention of “the stars” is likely to provoke a giggle reflex in the general public. But this is because people are focusing on the layers of associations superimposed on words, rather than what words actually mean. Living in the modern world, we have a complex mental model of what a star is. But from a purely empirical perspective, the stars are just points of light in the sky.

Needless to say, a scarab beetle doesn’t carry along any intellectual baggage regarding the scientific and cultural associations of the stars. It just knows it can see them, because they’re there (in this respect, the beetle is closer to reality than most humans, who read all about outer space on the internet but rarely look up at the night sky). From the beetle’s point of view, there is survival value in being able to travel in a straight line. By trial and error over countless generations, it’s developed a way of doing this which involves looking up at the sky.

When humans navigate by the sun (during the daytime) or the stars (at night) they need to do some complex calculations, for a couple of reasons: (a) because they want to travel in a specific direction relative to the Earth’s surface, and (b) because journeys generally last several hours, during which time the positions of objects in the sky change. The beetle isn’t bothered by either of these considerations. It just sets off in a random direction, and wants to continue in that direction irrespective of the ups and downs of the terrain. And it only needs to travel a few metres, so objects in the sky aren’t going to move much.

The beetle doesn’t need a high resolution image of the sky – in fact quite the opposite. All it has to do is form a general impression of where the brightest part of the sky is, and then make sure this bright patch stays on the same relative bearing (“check sky – move forward – check sky – if bright patch has shifted counterclockwise turn slightly to the left – else if bright patch has shifted clockwise turn slightly to the right – repeat until destination is reached”).

But why does the beetle use the Milky Way? It’s a spiral galaxy consisting of a hundred billion stars, held together by gravity and dark matter. Isn’t that a rather sophisticated concept for an insect? Well no – the “concept” modern humans choose to attach to it is irrelevant. The Milky Way is just a distinctive feature in the night sky (in the clear skies of Egypt, where scarab beetles live). Having a low resolution imaging sensor, the beetle just looks for the brightest feature in its field of view. During the daytime, it uses the sun. At night, if there’s a moon, it uses the moon. If there isn’t a moon, it uses the Milky Way.

Modified Newtonian Dynamics

I mentioned Mordehai Milgrom’s theory of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) in my post about The Astrophysics of Gravity Modification last year. I have a nostalgic interest in this subject because at the time it originated, in 1983, I was doing research on the dynamics of galaxies – and that’s what MOND is all about. In those days the subject of galaxy dynamics suffered from a massive “elephant in the room” problem... and the elephant is still there now. The basic observations – rotation curves and velocity dispersion profiles – don’t match the predictions of Newtonian dynamics. The standard solution, in 1983 and today, is to postulate some form of invisible “dark matter” to explain the discrepancy. MOND is an alternative, and less popular, theory that proposes a modified version of Newtonian dynamics that does away with the need for dark matter.

For the last 30 years, there have been two competing theories – MOND and dark matter – that explain the observations equally well. Most physicists have sided with dark matter simply because it’s a less radical departure from the standard paradigm than MOND would be. But just a few days ago I came across a new paper by Milgrom’s team which appears to scores a major point in favour of MOND. The paper shows that there is good agreement between velocity dispersion measurements of recently discovered satellites of the Andromeda galaxy (pictured here, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and MOND predictions that were made before the measurements were carried out. In other words, the MOND theory was able to predict the outcome of the observations before they were made – something any self-respecting scientific theory ought to be able to do... but the dark matter theory can’t. All you can do with dark matter is to infer, after a set of observations have been made, the distribution of dark matter that would be needed in order to produce the observed results.

There are two aspects to theoretical physics: the equations, and the interpretation of those equations. Often the validity of the equations is demonstrated long before there is any kind of consensus as to their interpretation (quantum mechanics is a case in point). So even if the MOND equations do predict the observations, they can still be interpreted in different ways. It may be that the Newtonian form of gravity has to be modified for very weak fields (possibly as a consequence of quantum effects)... but on the other hand it may be that MOND is just telling us something about the density distribution of dark matter.

I’m not one of those people who desperately wants mainstream science to be proved wrong and fringe theories to turn out to be correct. In fact in most cases, my money is on mainstream science. But if there’s one area where I think it might end up with egg on its face, it’s in the MOND versus dark matter arena. One of the frequent criticisms scientists have of pseudoscience is that, unlike “real” science, it has no predictive power. But here is one case where the fringe theory appears to have more predictive power than the mainstream one!

Unusual Atmospheric Phenomena

This picture was taken in 2008 by my cousin Ewa Babarowski, from the balcony of her apartment in Montreal. She sent it off to Astronomy magazine, saying “As the Sun set one evening, I observed a sword-like column of light pointing straight up from the horizon. What was it?” This appeared in the December 2008 issue, with the reply that “What you saw is called a Sun pillar. This vertical shaft of light extends upward from the Sun. It's usually observed at sunrise or sunset. Sun pillars form when sunlight reflects off the surfaces of falling ice crystals...”

Sun pillars are also mentioned in the first book I reviewed for Fortean Times, back in the January 2012 issue – Fireballs, Skyquakes and Hums by Anthony Milne. I found the book’s technical explanations rather erratic, which is why I only gave it a rating of 7 out of 10, but it’s a useful source of data on unusual aerial phenomena – or at least, it is for those of us who don’t think an unusual aerial phenomenon has to be an extraterrestrial space vehicle in order for it to be interesting.

Of course, you can never underestimate the devout UFO believer’s ability to see extraterrestrial space vehicles in any unusual aerial phenomena... even ones that don’t look anything like space vehicles. I was surprised, though I probably shouldn’t have been, to see in the Wikipedia article about sun pillars that “light pillars have also been known to produce false UFO reports”.

Another naturally occurring phenomenon that really does look quite UFO-like is the saucer-shaped lenticular cloud. Ewa sent me a rather impressive example of one of those too. She took this photograph during a hiking trip in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in July 2011:

A couple of months earlier, a smaller (and therefore even more UFO-like) lenticular cloud appeared over Weymouth Bay. This photograph of it was kindly supplied by my Weymouth-based friend Peter Harriman:

That picture is dated 16 May 2011. Ten days earlier, on 6 May 2011, Weymouth experienced an even stranger-looking cloud – an Arcus Roll Cloud. This was unusual enough that it even made the local newspaper (the Dorset Echo): “Concerned residents in Portland and Weymouth thought they were being hit by a tornado during a dramatic thunderstorm...” Here is one of Peter’s own photographs of the roll cloud, taken from almost the same vantage point as the lenticular cloud above (although with a wider field of view):

Many thanks to Ewa and Peter for allowing me to use their photographs. I hope neither of them imagines that appearing on this blog will bring them internet fame, though – last week’s post only got 63 views!

The Astrophysics of Gravity Modification

The concept of “gravity modification” is commonly associated with cranks – whether it’s backyard inventors with their antigravity machines or, as in last week’s post (Space, Gravity and the Flying Saucer) ufologists and their space drives. But the subject has another, much less well-known, side to it.

To most people, gravity is simply the force that pulls things down towards the surface of the Earth. That’s the kind of gravity the cranks are talking about – the force their antigravity devices and space drives are meant to counter. But there is a lot more to gravity than that. Not only does it pull objects towards the Earth (and other planets), but it keeps the planets in their orbits around the Sun. It’s also—according to textbook astrophysics—the force that holds stars together in a galaxy, and galaxies together in clusters of galaxies. But that’s where the problems start.

Observations have consistently shown that the stars and gas at the outer edges of galaxies are moving too fast. If the only force acting on them was the gravity produced by visible matter, the force wouldn’t be strong enough to hold them in their orbits: they would be flung out into intergalactic space. The fact that they aren’t is awkward to say the least. The textbook response is to say that a galaxy contains large quantities of invisible “dark matter”—much more than can be seen with optical, radio and infrared telescopes. No-one knows what the dark matter consists of, or where it came from, but it’s the easiest way to make the observed facts fit the theory.

There is another alternative, of course. Instead of trying to fiddle the observations to fit the theory, you could change the theory to fit the observations. Obvious as this may seem to many people, it’s something scientists are extremely reluctant to do – although a few of them have been brave enough to try.

Way back in the early 1980s, I spent a couple of years working at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands. One of the staff members who was there at the time has since become something of a celebrity (see Seth Shostak on SETI, 1983). Another was a theoretician named Robert H. Sanders, who was one of the first people to speculate that the high speeds observed in the outer parts of galaxies might be explained by a modification to the standard theory of gravity.

In 1984 Bob Sanders published a paper with the intriguing title of “Anti-Gravity and Galaxy Rotation Curves” (Astronomy and Astrophysics, volume 136, page L21). In it, he suggested that the anomalous observations could be explained if the formula for the gravitational field was modified by the addition of what is known as a “Yukawa potential” (more on which later). I remember discussing the paper with Bob at the time, and it was clear that he viewed it more as an interesting intellectual exercise rather than a serious scientific proposal. However, there were other professional astrophysicists at the time who took gravity modification more seriously. Specifically, a group led by Mordehai Milgrom at the prestigious Weizmann Institute in Israel came up with a theory of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) – which is respectable enough to have its own Wikipedia page.

When you look at the universe on scales larger than galaxies—in other words clusters and superclusters of galaxies—things get even worse for the standard theory of gravity. Not only is dark matter needed in even greater quantities, but also a completely new and equally ad hoc concept: dark energy. Gothically sexy as this might sound, it’s really just another contrived way of making the facts fit the theory. The alternative approach—adjusting the theory to fit the facts—is once again a minority activity. But some people are bold enough to try – Baojui Li of the University of Durham is one of them. There was an article by him in the August issue of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Astronomy and Geophysics magazine (pictured above), and I was interested to see that his theory once again involves the introduction of a Yukawa-like term. This creates a situation where the force measured in regions of relatively high density (such as the solar system) is a close match to Newtonian gravity, while the force in low density extragalactic regions is completely different—and able to match the observations without the need for all that sci-fi stuff like dark matter and dark energy.

Inventing the Fourth Dimension

Ever since the latter part of the 19th century, the fourth dimension has been invoked in esoteric literature as an explanation for otherwise inexplicable phenomena such as ghosts and spirits (the picture on the left is taken from a book published in 1928 called Theosophy and the Fourth Dimension, by Alexander Horne). During the same period, mainstream scientists and mathematicians have embodied the fourth dimension (and other higher spatial dimensions) in various theories of cosmology and fundamental physics. As a general rule (despite what New Agers would like you to believe) there is very little common ground between the esoteric and scientific theories. But I’ve just discovered that the two “traditions” can arguably be traced back to a common origin in the 1870s.

There is a fascinating article in the latest issue of Astronomy and Geophysics (the monthly magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society) about a little-known 19th century astrophysicist named Karl Zöllner. If you look him up on Wikipedia you could be forgiven for thinking he was just a minor player on the fringes of science, who was only interested in things like optical illusions and spiritualism. But in fact he was a prolific mainstream scientist, who did innovative work in the fields of astrophotometry, instrument design, electrodynamics, solar physics and the theory of comets. He was the first person to consider that the three-dimensional space that we live in is not “flat” Euclidean space, but is curved on a cosmological scale. The idea of non-Euclidean geometry had been around as an abstract concept since earlier in the 19th century, but Zöllner—in 1872—was the first person to suggest the Universe itself was non-Euclidean. He was led to this conclusion as the simplest explanation of a well-known but puzzling astronomical observation known as Olbers’ Paradox.

What does “curved space” mean? The easiest way to visualize it is by analogy with a curved two-dimensional surface, such as that of a sphere. A normal two-dimensional surface is a flat sheet, which is Euclidean because the angles of any triangle drawn on it always add up to 180°. On the other hand, the apparently two-dimensional surface of a sphere is non-Euclidean because the angles of a triangle add up to more than 180°. This is because the sphere exists in a higher dimensional space—three dimensions—which is Euclidean. By analogy, Zöllner imagined that the universe was a four-dimensional Euclidean hypersphere that gives the illusion of being a curved, non-Euclidean three dimensional space because we cannot directly perceive the fourth spatial dimension that he believed to exist.

In 1877, a few years after Zöllner proposed his theory of curved space, he met William Crookes—a British chemist who had recently become interested in the scientific study of spiritualism. Zöllner quickly became convinced of the reality of “spirits”, but rather than believing them to be the souls of dead people he theorized that they were visitors from the fourth spatial dimension. He expounded this theory in an 1878 book entitled Transcendental Physics, which aimed to encompass both the physical and spiritual worlds with a single theory of four-dimensional space.

Unfortunately for Zöllner, the psychic medium he chose to carry out his spiritualist experiments with was a man named Henry Slade, who was subsequently exposed as a fraud who was adept at sleight-of-hand tricks. In one of Zöllner’s experiments (pictured on the right), Slade’s “spirits” allegedly tied knots in a string that was sealed at both ends. Zöllner interpreted this as evidence that the spirits could move freely in a fourth spatial dimension.

Although Zöllner’s theories of the fourth dimension are almost forgotten today, they preceded the work of Charles Howard Hinton: Pioneer of the Fourth Dimension (mentioned recently in my post on Esoteric Mathematics) by several years. And as I said at the beginning, they can be seen as the ancestor of all subsequent New Age theories about “extradimensional entities”, as well as mainstream cosmological theories involving higher spatial dimensions.

Theoretical Crankology

The biggest problem with being interested in anomalous phenomena is that people assume you’re a crank. There’s good reason for this, since many of the most vocal proponents of the subject really are cranks. But just what is a crank, and how do you tell the difference between a crank and a serious researcher? For a long time I thought this was one of those grey, subjective questions that it’s impossible to answer, but it’s just occurred to me that there might be an objective, black-and-white criterion after all. It all comes down to what a person finds interesting, and what they find boring. Anomalies don’t exist in isolation, but they can only really be understood in a wider context (for example, cryptozoology in the context of mainstream zoology, ancient aliens in the context of ancient history, etc). My theory is that serious researchers will be as interested in the broader context as they are in the anomalies, while cranks are bored to tears by the context -- which to them is just an irrelevant waste of time.

To be honest, I didn’t really come up with this idea myself, but I got it from a recent blog post by Nick Redfern. He was talking about some of the more annoying traits of ufologists, and one of these was the fact they never “turn off the ufologist switch”. Well, I think serious ufologists do, but the cranks certainly don’t.

There are plenty of really interesting things to see in the sky besides UFOs. A ufologist who wants to be taken seriously ought to be a half-way decent plane spotter and a half-way decent amateur astronomer -- at least to the point of knowing where to look for Venus, Mars and Jupiter on a particular night. Many of them do, of course... but not the cranks. I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks planes and planets and re-entering space junk are simply “boring” things that debunkers use to explain away UFO sightings.

There’s a similar situation in cryptozoology. One of the reasons I have so much time for Jon Downes and his colleagues at the CFZ is that they’re as happy talking about insects and spiders and amphibians as they are about monsters. These are real creatures, which may be rare or outside their natural habitats -- but they’re not cryptids by any definition. Yet it’s only by understanding the behaviour and ecology of known species that you can have a hope of understanding the unknown ones. In a recent article, Jon described himself as a “naturalist, cryptozoologist and journalist”, in that order: he put naturalist before cryptozoologist. Now, that’s my kind of anomalist -- and there’s nothing remotely cranky about it. A crank is someone who thinks there are only two species of creature in the woods: (a) Bigfoot, and (b) everything else, which is simply a distraction and a waste of time.

I often get accused of being a skeptic, but that’s not true (well, I suppose it’s true from the point of view of the sort of cranks I’m talking about, but it’s not true from any rational point of view). I’m interested in physics (in fact I’m reasonably well qualified in it) and I’m convinced there are major discoveries waiting to be made in areas like gravitational control and inertialess propulsion. But I’ve got no time for the countless internet cranks who claim to have proved Einstein wrong, yet can’t even get the units on each side of an algebraic equation to agree -- let alone understand the finer points of tensor calculus.

I’m also a believer in ancient aliens. Well, perhaps not ancient aliens, but certainly an advanced level of technology (or paranormal equivalent thereof) in certain ancient civilizations. But that comes from a wider interest in ancient history -- trying to understand it in its own context, identifying where there are apparent anomalies, and looking for an explanation of the anomalies. That’s quite different from a crank’s approach, which is the other way around altogether -- starting with the assumption that extraterrestrial visitation is an indisputable fact, then looking for evidence of it and dismissing everything else as an irrelevant waste of time.

[For anyone who is wondering, the photograph above—which die-hard ufologists will find utterly uninteresting—shows the re-entry and breakup of an ATV unmanned resupply craft. Perfectly explicable, therefore only of interest to non-cranks!]

Galileo wasn’t always right...

Present-day fringe theorists often cite the case of Galileo (1564–1642) as proof that they’re right and the authorities are wrong. It’s true that Galileo was constantly in conflict with the intellectual establishment of his time, and that history has proved him to be on the winning side on all the big issues. The Earth really does move around the Sun, and heavy objects really do fall at the same rate as light ones. But is Galileo really such a good role model? Unlike the armchair scientists and internet cranks of today, Galileo didn’t always get it right.

To start with, it’s worth dispelling a couple of tenacious myths about Galileo. The first myth is that he set out to disprove the Bible. In fact, it’s clear from his Selected Writings that he had no problems at all with the Bible: “Holy Scripture can never lie or be in error... nonetheless some of its interpreters or expositors can.” All of Galileo’s arguments are aimed not at the Bible but at the Greek philosopher Aristotle—who was held by the Church to be second only to the Bible in authority.

Galileo used the Biblical story of Joshua, where God caused the Sun to stand still in order to lengthen the day, as evidence that the Aristotelian earth-centred model is wrong, and the Copernican sun-centred model is correct: “This passage of scripture clearly demonstrates the impossibility of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world system, and on the contrary fits perfectly well with the system of Copernicus.” Galileo argues (correctly) that making the Sun stand still in the Aristotelian view would actually shorten the day, not lengthen it (since the length of the day is set by the Primum Mobile, and the Sun moves backwards relative to this). What you actually need to do is freeze up the whole Solar System. Galileo had observed the Sun to rotate on its own axis, and believed (wrongly) that this rotation was the source of all the motion in the Solar System—hence he argued it was this rotation that God halted in the story of Joshua.

Another myth-conception is that the Church prohibited Galileo from writing about the Sun-centred theory, and that his ‘crime’ was to defy this prohibition. Actually, the Church encouraged him to write about the theory... as long as he ended up debunking it, or at least showing that the truth couldn’t be proved one way or the other. What he was prohibited from doing was offering any concrete proof that Copernicus was right and Aristotle was wrong. But that’s what he did, and that’s what got him into trouble.

The hilarious thing (and now I’m finally getting to the point of the article) is that Galileo’s proof was rubbish. At the time, no-one knew what caused sea tides—Galileo’s fellow Copernican Kepler believed they were due to the influence of the Moon, but Galileo dismissed this as mystical mumbo-jumbo (“Of all the great men who have speculated on this marvellous effect of nature, the one who most astonishes me is Kepler... he had grasped the motions attributed to the Earth, and yet he still listened and assented to the notion of the Moon’s influence on the water, and occult properties, and similar childish ideas.”) Galileo was convinced the tides were a direct result of the Earth's motion, in the same way water sloshes around in a vase when you move it. But Galileo was wrong about this... and he was wrong about the Moon having nothing to do with the tides!

You might think that, having upset the Irish nation last week by suggesting that St Patrick was British, I’ve now lurched on Boris Johnson style to insult the Italians—by pointing out the single occasion on which Galileo made a mistake. But it’s worse than that... he made another mistake as well! Galileo believed that orbits had to be perfectly circular (again, this was a disagreement with Kepler). This created a problem in the case of comets, which are on manifestly non-circular orbits. Galileo’s solution was to dismiss comets as not really existing at all—merely an illusion caused by the Sun reflecting off the upper layers of the atmosphere!

Angels in Machines

Most of the planets and moons in the Solar System are named after characters from Greek mythology. The moons of Uranus are an exception, with most of the names swiped from Shakespeare’s plays. But two of the moons, Umbriel and Belinda, aren’t Shakespearean characters. They sound like they might be, but actually they come from a narrative poem by Alexander Pope. It’s called The Rape of the Lock, and it’s the daftest poem in the English language.

The phrase “The Rape of the Lock” may bring a bizarre image to mind, but you’d be wrong. It’s not a lock in the sense of a keyhole, but a lock of hair. Pope was writing in the genteel and sophisticated 18th century, when young women were obsessed with following all the latest fashions in clothes and hairstyles (times have changed since then, obviously). In those days, to go up behind a woman and snip off a lock of her hair was a crime of the utmost seriousness -- and if the victim was at all important (or thought she was), then it would very likely start a war. Well no, it wouldn’t... but Pope was a satirist, so he was allowed to exaggerate. The Rape of the Lock is a heroic tragedy modelled on Greek epics like the story of the Trojan War.

Belinda is the heroine of the story. When she discovers that a lock of her hair has been cut off, she goes into what can best be described as a hissy fit. Or that’s how it might be described today -- in Pope’s time, it was called a “fit of spleen”. Unknown to the people around her, Belinda has a whole host of invisible sprites who look after her every need. Umbriel is one of them. When she has her hissy fit, he heads off on an undercover mission to the Cave of Spleen (in the internal logic of the poem, this all makes perfect sense). The cave turns out to be a pretty cool place: “Now glaring Fiends, and Snakes on rolling Spires, Pale Spectres, gaping Tombs, and Purple Fires: Now Lakes of liquid Gold, Elysian Scenes, And Crystal Domes, and Angels in Machines.”

I’ve no idea what “Angels in Machines” means, but it sounds distinctly surreal. The surreal aspect of the poem was picked up by Aubrey Beardsley in his illustration The Cave of Spleen from 1896 (detail below):

So what happened to the lock of hair? It rose up into the sky and became a new star which could be seen through telescopes (“Galileo’s eyes”). Maybe that’s where they got the idea for the moons of Uranus!