Bus arguments, Boredom and Bunkum

At school I was bored. I can remember praying for earthquakes, floods or storms anything to dull the persistent mind-numbing of the classroom routine. Lightning storms at primary school where a source of great fear for almost all my classmates and they huddled under their desks with our young teacher, Miss Spencer's voice quivering that there was nothing to be afraid of. I meanwhile had my nose pressed to the window overjoyed that my prayers had been answered at last!

Later as an adult in Greece, I experienced earthquakes and found them much more disturbing than storms. The firm Earth beneath you should just not move and shake. Your mind is flummoxed by the sudden lack of a stationary frame of reference. I drove my children in the middle of the night to the ancient stadium for safety. It had stood for well over 2000 years through a multitude of earthquakes great and small. It seemed the wisest choice. I parked in the open far away from structures that could fall and waited for the aftershocks to stop. The first tremor is confusing and startling. You're not sure what is happening. The longer it goes on the more the fear swells. The after-shocks are almost scarier than the original shake as you are already jittery with foreboding.

Floods are a part of life in the Mediterranean. It's perverse really. I'm from Ireland where rain is like a permanent state of the weather. Not having rain is more unusual there. It is if a tap has been left flowing above. Usually, it is what we call a soft rain. A never-ending drizzle. Sometimes it can lash mercilessly in wind-driven whips. But in the Mediterranean floods follow the rain. Here rain feels like an open-ended bucket on your head. No gradual Irish soaking over hours of gentle drizzle. Instead, a torrent falls upon you as if a bath is emptied from above. Instantly soaked to the skin the excess of even more rain seems an overkill. But it continues unabated. Then suddenly the roads turn into rivers. Hard flowing rivers that are deepest near the pavements. There are common videos on the news of cars floating down roads like boats and pedestrians up to their thighs wading across junctions. It seems as if southern European infrastructures are designed only for sunny days. The sudden heavy storm is always bewilderingly unexpected despite its usual yearly appearance.

I still watch floods and storms nose pressed to the window. The sound of a good thunderstorm is I wondrous thing. Surely as soothing as the pitter patter of rain on an overhead canvas. You are delighted at being sheltered on such days and hug yourself in glee at such good fortune.  (I only realised today that people go sleep listening to such soundtracks)

Here on Malta I usually walk everywhere. Carless after a lifetime of driving I loathe waiting for buses. It takes me back to school longing for the final bell to end my misery. But when it rains the bus becomes a necessity. Yesterday, standing reluctantly at the bus stop, a young man in his 20s approaches me. He asks if a certain bus has already gone.  I lift my shoulder in a shrug and say "I'm not sure, I've just arrived”.He consults the timetable on the bus sign and is reassured. After being on Malta for six years I have no such confidence in the bus timetable. Sometimes they come early, occasionally late and often they are completely full so they drive past without stopping at all. Being impatient I have grown accustomed but not resigned to this. I am smouldering in resentment at having to wait. The young man introduces himself. He is wearing a suit and works for a real estate company and is from Eastern Europe.

The conversation develops and introduces his positive attitude theory. "You must see 'The Secret’ “ He tells me,”it explains everything about life!” He gives proof of this theory.  Apparently, he left his wallet on the bus by accident the previous week, with all his cards and money but did not cancel them. Instead, he used positive thoughts to will his wallet’s return. Sure enough, a week later it was returned by post to his address with all his cards including his bus card, ID and money. Positive thinking brings good things to his life and he says it is negative thinking that brings bad stuff to everyone else.

I beg to differ. I cite examples of Bangladesh where the plains that routinely flood are filled with the poor who are driven to occupy that place because they simply have no choice. It's the only place they can afford to live. These treacherous lands killed tens of thousands each year and no amount of positive thinking by any one of them will alter either the monsoon, the rains, the floods and the death that occur. 

He thinks the Chinese the Russians and the Americans are altering our weather with an instrument called HAARP. This can even influence creatures 80 km below the ground he tells me. Perplexed, I tell him I have never heard of this.  He shows me an internet description of HAARP on his iPhone. He has googled HAARP and it seems radio waves are the culprits and the article goes on at length about this powerful weather changing diabolical machine.

I am not convinced.I discuss the electromagnetic spectrum with him and speak of radio waves ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, UV,  gamma rays, x-rays, microwaves etc and point out that even the highest frequency waves (which are gamma waves) can be stopped by a couple of metres of concrete so how unearth can radio waves which are the lowest frequency manage 80 km penetration? Even the ionosphere can manage to reflect radio waves! My new friend is not convinced by my arguments. 

I point out that recent research has highlighted that people will routinely cling to false facts out of emotional attachment despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.  

A lack of education is understandable, all of us only know our own little mine of information but I am amazed that erroneous, crackpot theories spread faster and more effectively than facts.  When did the contagion of nonsense become the drug of common usage, shared widely with indiscriminate glee and mind-numbing enthusiasm?

I cite the example of vaccination deniers. He, however, is one of them! He is of the opinion that the big pharmaceutical industry has made up the usefulness of vaccines in order to weaken everyone's immune systems. As a result, he claims,  we are all more dependent on medicine but not cured. He gives the example of his dandruff. His doctor prescribed a medicated shampoo for the condition which stops the problem. "For this I pay money. Note, he does not heal me, he gives me the medicine to stop the problem but when I stop buying the shampoo the dandruff comes back. It's just a way for him to make money! It doesn't pay for him to cure me!”

I try to empathise with him. I say, ”Look, I have no sympathy with big pharmaceuticals. They spend millions on medicine for diabetes but refuse to fund Third World medicine needs because there's more money to be made from the affluent developed world. But smallpox was a killer, we're talking millions of dead over the millennium and with vaccines, we have wiped it off the face of the Earth. People have forgotten how many routinely died before vaccines. Those who choose not to have them survive because of the herd protection of the rest of us. They survive only on the altruism of others and if more for us followed their selfish example more of humanity will start dying again. Is that a wise choice?”

Our discussion has become more heated. I'm in really praying he does not bring up chemtrails or I shall lose the will to live! When did we have to start spending energy dismissing crackpot theories instead of tackling the really urgent problems facing humanity? I have to leave the bus and say my goodbyes. He's a nice young man.  I have three sons his age and feel benevolent towards him. He asks for my email when I get up to go. I hope he gets in touch. I may come across as a bit argumentative and in your face but I do mean well. My intent is not to offend but I do get a bit heated under the collar at times. If you happened to be on the bus yesterday as I pontificated my deepest apologies. I have a low boredom threshold and a lack of tolerance for pseudoscience.

PS Having blasted into my fellow bus traveller about radio waves incapacity to penetrate solid ground and waxed lyrical about Xray crystallography (wavelengths of X-rays are of the same order of layers of atoms within solids making them useful for determining the molecular shapes of crystals) elaborating that microwaves are used for mobile phones and Wi-Fi etc I get home eventually and look up HAARP.  Imagine my embarrassment to find that electromagnetic signals can be used to induce current flow in conductors within tunnels and these generate secondary EM fields which in turn can be used to determine some underground structures.  So my enraged response was perhaps incorrect?   In fact, the technique has been successfully used to detect tunnels in the Demilitarised Zone in Korea and tunnels crossing into the US from Mexico.  However, the notion that HAARP is some sort of military weapon to control the weather is like the chemtrails sheer rubbish.  That is the problem with science it is a tricky subject to get right and it much easier to misunderstand and go off on a tangent to the truth instead.  The perverse thing is the crazier the notion the more traction in the social media it is likely to get. 

For an account of HAARP and tall tales

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/08/16/weather-conspiracy-theories-scientifically-unjustifiable/?utm_term=.a1c5b7e069e1

For using HAARP to determine underground tunnels

Mackie, R. L. (1999). Imaging of Underground Structure Using HAARP (No. GSY-99/001). GSY-USA INC SAN FRANCISCO CA.

Wonderful Science Mistakes

Science makes mistakes, big ones. This doesn't tie in with how it is conveyed in the media nor taught in schools and universities throughout the world. Instead, it is presented as fundamental truths that should be absorbed much as religious dogma is. Not only does this do our educational establishment a disservice but it also acts to the detriment of science itself. Scientists perversely know quite well that the field progresses on the basis of crisis and victory. It is inbuilt in the scientific method and to deny the possibility of errors also impedes progress. We make mistakes, we are human that does not tarnish science it makes it more dynamic and strangely more engaging.

Being taught physics at University I found the most interesting part was the discovery that science did not know it all. Einstein for all his great genius failed to solve the Unified Field Theory. He like others wanted an explanation for all the forces (electromagnetic, gravitational, weak and strong forces) that would simply cut to the fundamental truth that they were actually the same force. Hints in that view abounded. Take the electrostatic force between two charges Q1 and Q2 the formula  looks like this. 

Where F is the electrostatic force and Q1 and Q2 are the charges and k is a constant, and r is the distance between the charges. Then compare it to gravity’s force between two masses.  

Here M1 and M2 represent two masses, G is the gravitational constant while r is the distance between the two masses. These two forces just look similar don't they? You almost feel there has to be some equation relating mass and charge which would explain both of these in a single formula. Einstein got a heck of a lot further than most and found the relationship between energy and mass ( and c the speed of light) with his famous  

. 

This was an important milestone and recent discoveries in the world of physics seem to back up yet another of Einstein's beautiful predictions. The fact that 100 years later experimental physics is eventually coming up to speed with his theoretical and elegant equations is indeed breathtaking.

But we have been stunned before at the underlying beauty in science. When Einstein’s relativity is applied to the Maxwell’s equations as if by miracle you are able to describe electricity, magnetism, and light in one uniform system. Lorentz transformations of Maxwell’s equations is startling in its beauty. You feel not only as a scientist its elegance emergence of truth but also as an artist surprised science and mathematics could manage such a masterpiece. It feels right, complete truth discovered. Illuminating and fascinating. Perhaps not everyone has the mathematical tools to appreciate this but they can still sense they are in the presence of a work of genius.

Having discovering a link between the forces between electrostatic charges and currents it seemed a similar link should exist between the four forces of physics. You sense that it is there. The fact that Einstein died trying to solve this puzzle just adds to its appeal. Sitting in the lecture theatre, having spent years day digesting the basic physics and tools, I felt the excitement of the hunt call to me, as something unfinished needing attention. This search for excellence felt like an awakening of sorts. The the excitement was tangible. Here was something we didn't yet know and the realisation too that here is what real science is all about.

Getting to that stage of inventiveness we have to go through a process of coming up to speed with important tools and knowledge. But education has prioritised such fundamentals at the cost to its real purpose and character. Ask any student studying physics and somewhere along the way usually the mundane wipes the floor of any desire of investigation. The closest they get is repeating scientific experiments done for generations. They don't have time to investigate further they must memorise and repeat and then carefully vomit up properly at exam time their digested fodder. Somewhere along the process the system cultivates not elegant beauty but bulimic effectiveness. Truths become secondary to results, grades, and publications. Our universities which should be centres of excellence have largely become devoid of the art of science but effective commercial science incubators. Those who churn out publications are admired and courted. Personal agendas dominate senates, meetings, departments, agendas and even fields to be studied. Stultifying real research they have become clones of the dairy herd. Effective in milk production but deformed until even walking normally is no longer viable. Look closely in departments throughout the country and you will see the same deformities afflict other fields. The beauty goes, the search becomes joyless. We have settled for soulless science when it was always so much much more.

Some decades ago a body was discovered in Düsseldorf Germany and was thought to be a French army officer who died during Napoleon’s campaign. It took years for him to be discovered as a Neanderthal.  Mind you we have made mistakes like this before. In 1908 the remains of a Neanderthal was found inside western France. This was a nearly complete skeleton of a man who would've been elderly by Neanderthal standards. The bones were analysed and a description created of what Neanderthals look like which remains in common usage today. They were pronounced dull witted, brutish, ape-like creatures who walked hunched over with a shuffling gate. This was accepted for decades by paleoanthrologists. It also became the reason why we had so many popular images of stupid looking cavemen in cartoons and movies. The truth was this was a 40-year-old Neanderthal, an elderly man of those times, he was hunched over in posture because of severe arthritis in his spine. The bowing of his legs was probably from Ricketts disease in his childhood and he had lost most of his teeth and part of his jaw. In fact, Neanderthal man looked much more like us in appearance and intelligence than anyone suspected and probably exceeded us in physical strength. In fact some modern scientists begin to suspect a healthy Neanderthal could lift an average North American football player over his head and throw him through the goalposts!

In another well known mistake in carbon dating techniques, one expert had dated prehistoric human remains as 21,300 years old. Subsequently the “Bischof-Speyer” skelton was found to be a mere youth at 3,300 years old.  Another error involved an allegedly prehistoric skull discovered near Paderhorn in 1976 and thought to be the oldest human remains ever found in the region. The skull was dated 27,400 years old. Recent research however indicates it belongs to an elderly man who died around 1750.  Germany’s Herne Anthropology Museum which owned the Paderborn skull was so upset by the findings that it did its own tests. “We had the skull cut open and it still smelt,” the museum’s director Barbara Rushoff-Thale ,said last week “We are naturally very disappointed.” Such disappointment is not restricted to this field of research.

The earth receives radiation from the sun on its surface and a certain proportion is reflected back. We have very effective formula to try and describe this exchange. Strangely the earth is emitting too much energy for the story to be true. Some have speculated we may have a huge nuclear fission reactor deep inside the earth to explain the discrepancy. “According to high school science books at the centre of the earth there should be a liquid iron alloy core and a smaller solid inner core at the centre. For ten years, geophysicist J. Marvin Herndon has presented increasingly persuasive evidence that at the very centre of the Earth, within the inner core, there exists a five mile in diameter sphere of uranium which acts as a natural nuclear reactor.” The truth is we can suspect but as yet we simply don’t know.  But doesn’t it make you want to find out?

We think of scientists as all knowing and incredibly smart.  We can also be slightly intimidated by their cleverness. They are however humans like us and they make mistakes. The Mars climate orbiter was a satellite designed to collect data. It was launched in December 1998 and was due to arrive at the red planet later in the next year. On September 23, 1999 NASA announced the orbiter was lost. Investigation showed the disaster was due to a confusion in mathematical units. One team working on the spacecraft had used standard US measurements (like feet), while the other had used the metric system. That's why they lost the spacecraft. It's horrific that something so simple could could cost us $125 million dollars.  Don’t you feel suddenly less stupid?

Hubble telescope’s main mirror  was ground down too much (only by roughly 1/50 of the thickness of a human hair). Nevertheless this tiny error resulted in blurry images. The cost of repairing it entailed a trip to space and and a bill of $1.5 billion dollars.

The Ariane 5 rocket was designed by the European Space Agency to push Europe to the head of the space exploration industry. It's guidance system was running on the same computer code as it's slower predecessor Ariane 4. 36.7 seconds into the launch the guidance computer attempted to convert the sideways velocity of the rocket from a 64-bit ‘floating point’ format to 16-bit ‘signed integer’ format. However, with Ariane 5’s faster rocket the velocity generated a number too big to be represented by the 16-bit ‘signed integer’. As a result the nozzles of the two solid boosters swung out of position nearly detaching the boosters from the body of the rocket and triggering a self destruct mechanism. The rocket disintegrated 39 seconds into its maiden flight destroying several extremely expensive satellites in the process.  This time the the bill came to $370- $500 million dollars.

For reasons I don't yet understand such facts make us more not less excited and interested in science. I expect it is because were all inherently curious and want to find out stuff. It appeals to that stage in childhood when we ask “why”, so often of our parents, about every single thing around us. That healthy curiosity get damped by education rather than enhanced. Somewhere along the way we stop asking because being told a lot of stuff is not as exciting. If you were told everything in a room there is a part of you that no longer is interested in going in there. We filled the room with staff, employed experts about tables, history and types of wood. Created courses in each nuance and failed to notice that our students have lost interest in this inventory. Even those involved in its conveyance have lost their joy and purpose. Because we focused on just how much we know and not on what we don’t, we managed to spoil the mystery of science. That's why we must celebrate the search and the questions, until students start asking “why” again. Until our education system produces people who get to do what they love our science will languish in the hands of the scientific illiterates who cannot appreciate the beauty to be found just out of our reach.