Fake Physics and Dubious Statistics

 

 With April Fools' Day last week, it brought to mind a book I wrote a few years ago called Fake Physics. Around a third of the books I've written weren't actually my idea, but originated in a suggestion from the editors - and Fake Physics is in this category. It arose when an editor at Springer Books drew my attention to the ArXiv website, which is normally home to serious physics papers but has a tradition of publishing spoof papers on the first day of April each year. Some of the more fortean-sounding examples include "On the Influence of the Illuminati in Astronomical Adaptive Optics" (2012), "Conspiratorial Cosmology: the Case against the Universe" (2013) and "Astrology in the Era of Exoplanets" (2016).

I chose the title Fake Physics to echo the "fake news" that everyone was talking about at the time, but it's very much about fakery for the purposes of entertainment rather than deception. The scope is made clearer in the book's subtitle, which is "Spoofs, Hoaxes and Fictitious Science". In the latter category are science-fictional creations ranging from the carefully explained (but entirely made-up) Blackett-Dirac equations of James Blish's Cities in Flight novels to the throwaway technobabble - "subspace field stress" and the like - of Star Trek.

As for hoaxes - in the world of academic physics, their most common purpose is to catch out gullible editors while amusing fellow scientists. These include such things as littering papers with references to popular culture from Star Wars to Rick and Morty, or using an AI-style computer program to generate convincing-looking technical jargon. As an example of the latter, specially created for this blog post, I used an online tool called MathGen to produce a paper on abstract mathematics by Charles Fort and H. P. Lovecraft. The result is 9 pages long, highly academic-looking and incomprehensible in a thoroughly realistic way. I won't inflict the whole thing on you, but I'll attach a screenshot of the opening to the bottom of this post.

Perhaps the most amusing items in Fake Physics are the numerous scientific spoofs, whether done specifically for April Fools' Day or not. These include an entire book called Mathematical Modelling of Zombies, published by the University of Ottawa Press in 2012 and featuring chapters with titles like "When Humans Strike Back: Adaptive Strategies for Zombie Attacks" and "An Evolvable Linear Representation for Simulating Government Policy in Zombie Outbreaks".

Even the most upmarket journals aren't above printing the occasional April Fool piece. A case in point is Nature, which Wikipedia describes as "one of the world's most-read and most prestigious academic journals". In April 2015 it printed a short article called "Here Be Dragons", which begins as follows:

Emerging evidence indicates that dragons can no longer be dismissed as creatures of legend and fantasy, and that anthropogenic effects on the world's climate may inadvertently be paving the way for the resurgence of these beasts.

The authors back up their claim with a graph - based on genuine, unaltered statistical data - showing a definite correlation between global temperature and the occurrence of dragons in fiction. This is an example of another category of "fakes" discussed in the book - ones that use valid data, but deliberately misinterpret it to humorous effect. There's a whole website devoted to such things - Tyler Viglen's Spurious Correlations - which is packed with bizarre relationships that his software has found while trawling through a vast database of statistical data. Here's an example, showing an indisputable correlation between UFO sightings in Massachusetts between 2011 and 2021, and patents granted to the Sony Corporation over the same period:

Despite the website's name, correlations like this aren't "spurious" - they're perfectly real. Where the error arises is in assuming (as is common among conspiracy theorists, for example) that, if two quantities are correlated, there must be a cause-and-effect relationship between them. As Viglen's strapline puts it, "correlation is not causation". If you go to the page where I found that graph, he gives a detailed explanation of what's shown, where the data came from, and what can and can't be deduced from it. You'll also notice that, just below the graph, he seems to imply that he's in the process of developing an AI that can fabricate its own explanations for all these correlations!

Finally, before I forget, here's the snippet from that maths paper by Fort and Lovecraft that I promised:

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")

Gravitomagnetism - book review

 

In looking for things I could post on this blog, I found quite a few book reviews I've done that might be of interest here. I'll start with this review of Gravitomagnetism - Gravity's Secret by Ronald A. Evans, which originally appeared in Fortean Times #426 a year ago:
 
Back in 2015 I reviewed Ron Evans’s first book, Greenglow & The Search for Gravity Control (see this blog post), about his involvement in the now-defunct BAE Systems project that dipped its toes into that distinctly fringe area of physics. This follow-up book covers similar ground, but from a different perspective and with a somewhat different aim. Rather than recounting the specific history of the Greenglow project, Evans presents the reader with a pretty comprehensive and methodical account of all the physics – generally standard textbook stuff, but occasionally more speculative – that might be relevant to the holy grail of gravity control (like most serious researchers in the field, Evans dislikes the term “antigravity”, but there’s no escaping that’s essentially what he’s talking about).

I suspect this is the book Evans really wanted to write all along. His real passion is to instil an enthusiasm for the subject in others, and inspire top-class scientists and engineers to get into it. He’s unusual, possibly even unique, among the “alternative gravity” community in not having strongly held pet theories of his own. So you won’t find any really way-out ideas here, or a blanket denunciation of mainstream physics as “wrong” – just an indication of where there may be gaps in the latter that might lead to some kind of breakthrough in the future.

Evans explains in the introduction how the book evolved out of a lecture written for the general public, and a trace of this remains in the PowerPoint-type slides around which each chapter is written. But don’t expect a book where everyone is going to understand every word. Evans doesn’t hide the fact that physics is a difficult subject, and he isn’t afraid to give technical details where they’re needed. But it’s all good science, not made-up technobabble, and it doesn’t just focus on trendy topics like black holes, gravitational waves and quantum theory. There are chapters on older branches of physics that rarely make it into the public consciousness, such as thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and electromagnetism. That’s because Evans thinks these topics may be relevant to extended gravity, not so much directly as through analogous mathematics.

The technical asides notwithstanding, Evans keeps the ideas flowing in a way that makes for a surprisingly easy read. His aim, from the first page to the last, is to be thought-provoking – and he certainly succeeds in that.

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.

Scottish Skepticism

I met up with my Canadian relatives for a few days in Scotland last week, and while I was waiting for them to arrive in Glasgow I walked over to Kelvingrove Park to see the statue of Lord Kelvin pictured above. Despite his high-sounding name, Kelvin wasn’t really an aristocrat – he was born plain William Thompson, and only acquired his title at the age of 68 in recognition of his scientific achievements (he took the name Kelvin from the river that flows past Glasgow University, where he worked). Today – rightly or wrongly – Lord Kelvin is best remembered as the archetype of the arrogantly self-confident scientist who refuses to believe anything that isn’t already enshrined in a textbook.

This reputation is only partly deserved. It’s true that Kelvin was overly skeptical about technological advancement – for example in 1902, the year before the Wright Brothers’ first flight, he confidently predicted that heavier-than-air flight would never be practical. However, his most famous pronouncement was actually cleverer and more perceptive than it appears at first sight. In 1900 (at the age of 76) he gave a speech suggesting that scientific theory was virtually complete except for what he described as “two little clouds in the sky”. With hindsight, given the huge revolutions in quantum theory and relativity that would turn physics on its head over the next few decades, Kelvin’s assertion looks ludicrously pompous. Yet the two clouds he was talking about – the Michelson-Morley experiment and the ultraviolet catastrophe (or lack thereof) – were pretty much the only phenomena known at the time which couldn’t be explained without relativity or quantum theory. So Kelvin’s only mistake was to assume that these “two little clouds” would turn out to have simple explanations, rather than domino-toppling, paradigm-shifting ones.

Personally I don’t believe Lord Kelvin was the blinkered and close-minded skeptic that history makes him out to be. If you’re really looking for the patron saint of skeptics, you need to go back to the 18th century and another Scotsman – David Hume. I wrote about him in some detail five years ago (David Hume: a skeptic in the 18th century) so you can just click on that link if you want the details. To put it in a nutshell (and again this is just a personal opinion), Hume was a nasty piece of work who pioneered the aggressively hardnosed “If I haven’t seen it with my own eyes, it doesn’t exist” brand of skepticism.

Anyway, I spotted a statue of Hume a couple of days later in the centre of Edinburgh. Amusingly, it shows him dressed like an arty-farty ancient Greek philosopher – somehow I doubt that it’s a depiction Hume himself would have appreciated!

Popular Science with a difference

Yet again I’ve been working so hard on my book about Pseudoscience and Science Fiction that I haven’t left enough time (or energy) to do a proper blog post this week. So I thought I’d just give a quick plug to three books by Brian Clegg that I’ve found very useful as reference sources:

• Final Frontier – the pioneering science and technology of exploring the universe
• How to Build a Time Machine – the real science of time travel
• Extra Sensory – the science and pseudoscience of telepathy and other powers of the mind

Despite their subject matter, all three of these books are about real, reputable science – even if they take pseudoscience and/or science fiction as a starting point for the discussion. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to understand the facts behind the speculations!

(Another of Brian’s books in a similar vein, Ten Billion Tomorrows, was mentioned in an earlier blog post)

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

What Makes a Great Physicist?

The latest issue of Fortean Times (FT338, March 2016) includes my review of the book pictured above (the one in the middle – the other two are shameless self-promotion): Ten Physicists Who Transformed Our Understanding of Reality by Rhodri Evans and Brian Clegg. As I say in the review, it’s an excellent choice of title. Far too many people dismiss physics as boring and irrelevant, without stopping to think how much it’s changed the Western World’s collective view of reality. If you think of a “planet” as a world like the Earth, rather than a tiny dot of light in the sky, then you’re subscribing to a worldview that simply didn’t exist before Galileo and Newton came onto the scene. The everyday technology most people take for granted – wifi, capacitive touch screens, GPS, fibre broadband, lithium-ion batteries – could never have been developed without the groundwork laid by physicists like Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein.

One thing I nobly refrained from doing in my review was to criticize Rhodri and Brian’s choice of “top ten”. I honestly don’t think that’s a particularly worthwhile thing to do. On the other hand, once a challenge like that has been laid down it’s difficult to resist – so I’m going to rise to it anyway (this is my blog, after all).

As it happens, the ten physicists in the book weren’t chosen by the authors – they’re taken from a top ten list published in the Observer newspaper in 2013. If the aim is simply to produce a list, rather than to write a book, then maybe you can just go for the people you think did more than anyone else to “transform our understanding of reality”. Even by that criterion, though, I’m not sure I agree with everyone on the list (and neither does Nobel-prizewinning physicist Steven Weinberg, in his foreword to the book). When you’re writing a book, however, there are potentially other criteria to consider besides how important a person’s contribution was.

Another thing I said in the review was that “any book of this type is going to involve a mix of biography and popular science” … and if anything, this book is biased toward the former rather than the latter. If you’re writing biographies, you really want subjects who are “interesting” as well as “important”. The two physicists in my Pocket Giants books – Newton and Einstein – certainly fall in both categories. I can’t imagine they would be missing from anyone’s top ten – and the same is true of Galileo, Faraday and Marie Curie.

The only name that is unambiguously up there with those five in terms of importance is James Clerk Maxwell. As I pointed out not long ago, Maxwell is strangely unknown to the public at large, even though the modern high-tech world arguably owes more to him than any of the other five. The fact is, though, Maxwell simply wasn’t very interesting. He didn’t argue with the Pope (like Galileo), didn’t dabble in alchemy (like Newton), wasn’t the son of a blacksmith (like Faraday), didn’t have a sex life that made tabloid headlines (like Marie Curie) and wasn’t an outspoken political campaigner (like Einstein).

Boring or not, no top ten list can seriously omit Maxwell. On the other hand, I would replace another notoriously boring physicist – Paul Dirac – with his much more exciting contemporary Erwin Schrödinger (who I wrote about for 30-second Quantum Theory). Not only was Schrödinger a nicer and more interesting person than Dirac, but I can just about understand his version of quantum theory (which is more than can be said for Dirac).

Replacing Dirac with Schrödinger addresses another mildly embarrassing thing about Rhodri and Brian’s list – six of their ten are from English-speaking countries. Partly for that reason (and also because he wasn’t so much a great physicist as “in the right place at the right time”) I would ditch Lord Rutherford. It’s not obvious who to replace him with, but Steven Weinberg’s suggestion of Ludwig Boltzmann is as good as any. That would address another deficiency of the list, namely that it focuses exclusively on reductionist physics rather than the equally important physics of macro-systems.

Finally, I would reinstate the person who is most conspicuously absent from the list – Stephen Hawking. He is far and away the best known physicist of modern times, even if not the most significant (the authors say “there are a whole host of other physicists who didn’t make the cut who would be placed above Hawking by anyone who knows the field”). But as I said, my criteria include “interesting” as well as “important” … so Stephen Hawking pushes Richard Feynman out of the chronological tenth spot.

To summarise (if anyone cares) my list is: Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Marie Curie, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Hawking.

From Newton to Einstein

Devotees of Isaac Newton and/or Albert Einstein have got several new books to look forward to this year. June 2016 sees the U.S. version of Isaac Newton: Pocket Giants (the British edition of which was published last year). The companion volume on Einstein (pictured above, alongside Newton) is scheduled for March in the UK and August in America. In a different series, 30-Second Newton is due out in February, with 30-Second Einstein following a few months later (no exact date yet). Both these books are edited by Brian Clegg, with contributions from several authors including myself.

Einstein and Newton are two of the most famous scientists who ever lived. They were both theoretical physicists, who came up with new models of the physical world using mathematical equations. So did many other people, but Newton and Einstein are pretty much the only ones that non-scientists have heard of. There was a TV documentary last month about James Clerk Maxwell, which started from the premise that hardly anyone has heard of him (including people interviewed in the shadow of his statue in Edinburgh). Yet Maxwell formulated the fundamental equations of electricity and magnetism, just as Newton had done for gravity, and Einstein (an admirer of both Newton and Maxwell) was to do for space and time. Maxwell’s obscurity simply emphasizes the obvious – that most people don’t give a toss about the fundamental equations of anything.

So it’s even more extraordinary that Newton and Einstein are such household names. Einstein in particular is often used as a shorthand symbol for scientific genius. Before the 20th century, Newton fulfilled a similar role. There’s a good example of this at Montacute House, a few miles from where I live. Back in 1770 the then-owner of the mansion used a diamond stylus to scratch a Latin inscription, of his own composition, onto the library window (that may seem a pathologically bizarre thing to do, but apparently it was the fashion among the upper classes in those days). Translated into English, the inscription begins: “Happy is the man who has a sharp mind and a spiritual passion to reveal the innermost secrets of Nature, who can grasp the causes and relationships of things, who can walk in the footsteps of Newton.”

Both Newton and Einstein did other things besides science. Newton put at least as much effort into alchemical research and Biblical analysis as he did into physics, and most of his time after the age of 50 was devoted to administrative work at the Royal Mint. Einstein is almost as well known for his pronouncements on politics, pacifism and philosophy as for his scientific work. Personally I find these extracurricular activities just as fascinating as the mainstream ones. My contributions to 30-Second Newton include entries on Newton’s Theology, Biblical Science and the Royal Mint as well as subjects like Tides, Comets and the Reflecting Telescope. For 30-Second Einstein, I contributed items on Einstein’s pacifism and his letter to President Roosevelt about the atom bomb, as well as observational tests of relativity and similar topics.

I should stress that these “30-Second” books are really excellent, despite the rather glib title and unspectacular packaging (the cover of the Newton book is shown below). I’ve worked on four of them now, all edited by Brian Clegg. Besides the Newton and Einstein titles, there was 30-Second Quantum Theory, which appeared last summer, and 30-Second Physics due out next month. The contents in all cases is absolutely first rate, with none of the dumbing down you might expect from the “30-Second” title. And the copious internal illustrations are much more striking and informative than the cover. You can see some sample pages from 30-Second Physics here and from 30-Second Newton here (first click on the small grey squares to get the appropriate thumbnail, then click the thumbnail for an image large enough to read). The last of the Newton samples is my piece about Comets.

Several of the books mentioned above are available for pre-order from Amazon.com and/or Amazon UK. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the options:

• Isaac Newton (pocket GIANTS) – U.S. edition
• Albert Einstein (pocket GIANTS) – British edition
• 30-Second Newton
• 30-Second Physics

Cambridge Oddities

Cambridge is one of the few tourist hotspots that it actually makes sense to visit in August. There are crowds of tourists, of course, but that’s offset by the fact that there aren’t any undergraduates (and if you stay in your old college, you don’t have to share the lavatorial facilities with half a dozen barely housetrained students). That’s why I decided to spend a couple of nostalgic days there last week. Here is a quick rundown of some of the more unusual sights in the town:

One of the oldest buildings in Cambridge, dating from circa 1130, is the Round Church opposite St John’s College. Round churches are often associated with the Knights Templar (as with the Temple Church in London), but this one seems to have been built by a lesser known order, active at the same time, called the “Fraternity of the Holy Sepulchre”.

As I mentioned a few months ago in Isaac Newton and me, I spent my undergraduate years at Trinity College – as did Newton himself. Standing outside his old rooms in Great Court is an apple tree, pictured below. There probably wasn’t an apple tree there in Newton’s time (it’s clear from his account of the falling apple that it took place at his home in Lincolnshire), but Newton did keep a small private garden on this plot of land. He also had a large wooden shed which he used as a laboratory for his alchemical experiments – it may have been here, or inside Great Court itself.

(For more about Newton and alchemy, see my book Isaac Newton: Pocket Giants).

Sometimes erroneously associated with Newton, but actually nothing to do with him, is the Mathematical Bridge at the back of Queens’ College. The present bridge is the third to occupy this site, all using same timber-framed design. The first was built in 1748; this one dates from 1905. The mathematical nature of the bridge lies in the ingenious way the wooden ribs are arranged so that “each member is in compression with little or no bending moment”.

Cambridge has seen more than its fair share of scientific discoveries, and even one of the pubs claims to have played a part in one of them! Outside the Eagle in Bene’t Street there is a plaque that reads:

DNA Double Helix 1953: “The Secret of Life”. For decades the Eagle was the local pub for scientists from the nearby Cavendish Laboratory. It was here on February 28th 1953 that Francis Crick and James Watson first announced their discovery of how DNA carries genetic information.

One of the newer oddities in Cambridge is the Corpus Clock, dating from 2008 and belonging to Corpus Christi College. It stands at the end of Bene’t Street right opposite King’s College, giving it one of the highest tourist footfalls in England. The clock is unusual for several reasons: it has circles of LEDs instead of hands, and it only tells the correct time every five minutes (the rest of the time it runs erratically fast or slow). It also has a monstrous, animated insect called a Chronophage squatting on top of it.

It was somewhere near Corpus Christi College, back in the 16th century, that a man named Thomas Hobson used to rent out horses from a large livery stable. Although he had dozens of horses, customers always had to take whichever horse he wanted to hire out next. This gave rise to the phrase “Hobson’s Choice” – still used today to mean “no choice at all”. In his old age, Hobson helped to set up a new water supply to the town, which became known as “Hobson’s Conduit”. Cambridge doesn’t seem to have a monument to Hobson’s Choice, but it does have one to Hobson’s Conduit – on the corner of Lensfield Road and Trumpington Street:

From a Fortean point of view, the Haunted Bookshop – tucked away in a narrow alley called St Edward’s Passage – sounds highly promising. I had visions of shelves packed with occult and paranormal books – or horror fiction, at the very least. Unfortunately, however, the stock turned out to be predominantly antiquarian children’s books. The name comes from the fact that the building (previously an alehouse) is supposed to have its own ghost in the form of an occasionally glimpsed “White Lady”.

Cambridge has numerous free museums, of which by far the largest is the Fitzwilliam Museum on Trumpington Street. The quirkiest thing I spotted there was a pair of paintings by William Hogarth called Before and After, dating from 1731. At first sight they look innocuous enough – partly because the eye (my eye, anyhow) tends to be drawn to the girl rather than the bloke. But the latter is worth a second look in both pictures. In Before there is the distinct hint of a “bulge in his trousers” (I’m quoting from the official blurb), while in After “the man’s unbuttoned breeches reveal a tuft of pubic hair and his penis, chafed red from its exertions”. Sleazy stuff for the genteel 18th century!

Here’s Before...

... and After:

Project Greenglow

 There’s another book review by myself in the latest issue of Fortean Times magazine (FT 328, pictured above). This time the subject is Greenglow and the Search for Gravity Control by Ronald Evans. I also reviewed the same book, from the perspective of a different audience, for Brian Cleggs’s Popular Science website. I gave the book a rating of 8 out of 10 for Fortean Times and (after a bit of negotiation with Brian) three stars for Popular Science, which translates as “Good solid book, well worth reading if you are interested in the topic”.

Having reviewed the book twice, I’ll just refer you to those reviews rather than reviewing it again here. Instead, I thought I’d say a few words about my own peripheral involvement in Project Greenglow (which, if you’ve read one or both of my book reviews, you will know was a long-running “blue skies” research initiative led by Ron Evans when he worked for BAE Systems).

Until a month ago, I’d never seen my name mentioned in a book (apart from ones I wrote or contributed to myself). Now it’s happened twice in quick succession! The first was in the introductory note to David Clarke’s How UFOs Conquered the World, which I wrote about last week (I’m one of a long list of people that David thanks “for their input both past and present”). And then I’m mentioned twice in the Greenglow book – first in the introduction, where Ron says I provided “additional backing for the Greenglow venture” (which is true, albeit only in the form of encouragement from the sidelines, rather than active participation) and again in the acknowledgements at the end, where I’m listed as one of half a dozen people who read and commented on an earlier draft of the book.

In May 1996, around the time Project Greenglow got underway, I was seconded to the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall for three years as a scientific adviser (this was the high point of my career – it’s been downhill ever since then). This put me pretty close to the centre of things. If I crossed the corridor to my boss’s office and looked out of the window, I could see the gates of Downing Street (John Major was still Prime Minister when I arrived, replaced by Tony Blair a year later). For some even more impressive name-dropping, a couple of floors higher up the building, almost immediately over my own office, was none other than Nick Pope himself! As I said in a previous post, “by that time Nick had moved on from his stint on the UFO desk, but he had already become a major celebrity within UK ufology”.

As I also mentioned in that earlier post, my own job was concerned with advanced air vehicle research. Like Nick Pope, I was what they called a “desk officer” – which in my case meant monitoring a large number of other people’s research projects without actually (ahem) doing any real work myself. The most futuristic of the projects in my remit was a collaborative effort with BAE Systems (or British Aerospace, as it was called in those days), and that’s how I met Ron Evans. But as “futuristic” as this project was, it still used well-established textbook physics. That wasn’t the case with another of Ron’s interests, Project Greenglow, which deliberately set out to discover brand new physics in the realm of gravity control. Greenglow was purely a BAE initiative (I mean it was funded and directed by them, and carried out in various university departments around the UK), so I didn’t have any active involvement in it myself. However, I made no secret of my interest in the subject, and Ron was good enough to treat me as a kind of honorary member of the Greenglow team.

As I said in the Fortean Times review:

One of the biggest events in the field of “gravity control” during the Greenglow years was the announcement by the Russian scientist Evgeny Podkletnov of a possible gravity shielding effect caused by rotating superconductors. This made mainstream headlines when the news first broke in 1996, and an attempt to duplicate Podkletnov’s experiment was one of the main strands of Project Greenglow itself.

I was lucky enough to see the latter at first hand, when Ron invited a couple of colleagues and myself to visit the Greenglow experiment at Sheffield University in May 1998. This is certainly the closest thing to “weird science” I’ve ever seen in a university laboratory! Unfortunately the experiment failed to reproduced Podkletnov’s gravity-defying results – although it was done on a shoestring budget, so it wasn’t able to reproduce the original experiment exactly (for example the superconducting disc used in Sheffield was much smaller).

One of the things Ron was very good at was networking, and he put me in touch with a lot of fascinating characters, including several people involved in NASA’s “Breakthrough Propulsion Physics” program – which was similar in its objectives to Project Greenglow, if higher profile. At one point I got a call on my office phone from the American science fiction author – and science speculator – Robert L. Forward (who sadly died a few years later). Definitely the closest thing to a cold call from a celebrity I’ve ever received!

After I moved back to my old job following the temporary posting to MOD, Ron continued to keep me in touch with the Greenglow “network”. I talked about one of the weirder experiences to come out of this a few years ago in Stranger than Fiction. After Ron’s retirement in 2005, he sent me an early draft of his book to look through. It’s taken a long time, but I’m glad to see he finally got it published.

The book may be a little on the technical side for some people, but it ought to be essential reading for anyone who is seriously interested in the subject of “breakthrough physics”. To get your copy, just click on the appropriate link below!

Get Greenglow and the Search for Gravity Control from Amazon.com (paperback)

Get Greenglow and the Search for Gravity Control from Amazon.com (Kindle)

Get Greenglow and the Search for Gravity Control from Amazon UK (paperback)

Get Greenglow and the Search for Gravity Control from Amazon UK (Kindle)

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.

The Natural Law Party

There’s an interesting article in the current issue of Fortean Times called “Westminster Weirdos”, all about the nuttier fringes of British politics. The main focus is on the parties contesting next month’s General Election, but there’s a brief mention of a very nutty fringe party that fielded a number of candidates way back in the General Election of 1992: the Natural Law Party.

All the policies of the Natural Law Party centred around the practice of Transcendental Meditation (that’s a special kind of meditation devised by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, best known as the Beatles’ guru in the 1960s). When they first appeared on the British political scene in 1992, I happened to be particularly interested in wacky New Age beliefs, reading lots of books on the subject and attending lectures at the Theosophical Society and Buddhist Society and places like that. So I was fascinated by the Natural Law Party, and I’ve kept their campaign leaflet (pictured above) ever since. According to Wikipedia, William Stevens of the Natural Law Party got 92 votes in the 1992 General Election. I think one of those was mine, although at this distance in time I can’t be certain!

As you can see from the back cover of the manifesto, Transcendental Meditation would be good for the economy (by making people more creative), good for education (by increasing intelligence), good for defence (by creating an “invincible national consciousness”) and good for law & order (by eliminating the cause of crime, i.e. “the inability of the population to think and act spontaneously in accord with natural law”). You may say that’s all a load of unworkable idealistic nonsense, which of course it is – but no more unworkable than the idealistic nonsense purveyed by the mainstream political parties! There’s a difference, too – the mainstream parties have an annoying habit of talking down to the electorate, as if we’re all a bunch of ignorant yokels. That certainly wasn’t the case with the Natural Law party, as you can see from this interior page from the leaflet:

“Time to Bring the Light of Science into Politics”. That sentiment appealed to me, since I was working as a scientist at the time. But for most people it would have had the opposite effect – an instant turn-off! Especially as the science in question was fundamental physics, which is one of the most abstract, mathematically complex disciplines of all. Just zoom in on the left-hand side of the page and look at all those symbols and equations! Admittedly they’ve been annotated with user-friendly words like “FREEDOM”, “SIMPLICITY” and “OMNIPOTENCE”, but they’re still pretty daunting for the non-mathematician.

The thing that is depicted, as it says at the bottom, is “the Lagrangian of the superstring”. Now, how many people know what to do with a Lagrangian? I used to know, but I’ve forgotten – and I expect that most people who studied physics at degree level will say the same thing. To everyone else, it’s just so much mumbo-jumbo... which I guess is why only 92 Battersea residents voted for them!

It’s not mumbo-jumbo, though – it’s real science (the equation, I mean – not the bits about omnipotence and freedom). The image below shows, on the left, a zoomed-in view of the bottom line from the Natural Law manifesto. On the right is a closely similar equation from the book Why Does E = mc²? by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. They describe it as “one of the most wonderful equations in physics”, and go on to say: “It really is possible to get a flavour of what is going on just by talking about the symbols without knowing any mathematics at all.” Sadly, however, they don’t say anything about “IMMORTALITY” or “INVINCIBILITY”.

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.