A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing

October 28, 2009

Just in time for Halloween, we bring you a terrifying pseudoscientific YouTube video, courtesy of a 2007 Wellness Seminar in Bozeman, Montana. (h/t: PZ Myers of Pharyngula -- perhaps you know him by his hip-hop moniker, P-Zeddy.) The woman is attempting to "explain" the "scientific" basis for homeopathy by invoking the name of Albert Einstein, among other luminaries. Her (highly disjointed and rambling) argument appears to boil down to this:

[pseudospeak on] Einstein said that light times mass is energy in his famous equation, E=mc<2>. But how much mass are we, really? Compress all the mass in the universe so that there is no space at all, and you'd get something the size of a bowling ball. So, really, our body's mass is an infinitesemal amount! Which means we can just cancel out that pesky "m" expression in Einstein's equation to conclude that light is energy. How amazing is that? And since our bodies have almost no mass, really, that means we are made of energy. Energy can't be created or destroyed, only transformed from one state to another state. That is the definition of disease: we have transformed our healthy energy state into a diseased energy state. Homeopathy just transforms one form of energy to another to "heal" disease.

And hey, speaking of vibrations, there's a physicist name Stephen Hawkings who invented the string theory that says the particles in the universe are tiny strings that work by vibration -- those very same vibrations picked up by our eyes and ears. If none of us having any real mass, and everything is energy, that means everything has a vibration to it. We just need to encase some form of energy for later use! Homeopathy is teh awesome! [/pseudospeak off]

Sigh. Really, there's so much wrong or misguided here, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Seriously, would it have killed her to look up "Stephen Hawkings" on Wikipedia to learn that there is no "s" in his surname, and that he actually works on general relativity? And that string theory was invented in the 1970s by numerous theorists, including Gabriele Veneziano and Leonard Susskind, among others? (Veneziano is the one who first unearthed a long-forgotten equation by Leonhard Euler 200 years earlier, and Susskind found the equation could describe not just the strong nuclear force, but also vibrating elastic particles.)

This is a prime example of how well-meaning but misguided people learn a few cool-sounding physics terms -- thermodynamics! string theory! relativity! -- and try to twist otherwise perfectly valid science around to justify their personal beliefs. But that isn't science, people; it's the classic definition of pseudoscience. Watch the whole scary thing... if you dare! Don't be surprised if your head goes all 'splodey.

Imagine the Possibilities

February 03, 2009

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with one of the writers on the new TV series, Fringe, about what it was like working on a show known for taking wild and wacky flights of fancy when it comes to near-future science and technological inventions. Apparently it's never a dull moment, because they never know what to expect from week to week. Quoth the writer: "The showrunner comes in and says, 'I need exploding heads! How can we make that happen?' And we have to figure out a plausible explanation." It's easier said than done, to be sure, but I assured him he has one of the coolest jobs on TV. And he agreed. C'mon -- exploding heads!

If you saw the episode that aired a couple of weeks ago, you have some inkling of the explanation they eventually came up with. (If you didn't, I'm certainly not going to spoil it for you.) But honestly, they could have just showed the intended victim(s) this YouTube video (h/t to Greg Laden) which attempts to take the viewer through all 10 dimensions of string theory. It could pretty much blow the most hard-headed of minds:

It starts out simply enough, by defining a single point (0 dimension), then a line connecting two separate points (1 dimenson), then two intersecting lines (2 dimensions), and finally the three dimensions in which we live. That's pretty much basic geometry.

Things start to get complicated with the introduction of the fourth dimension of time. My head started to hurt around the 5th or 6th dimension, although I confess to being intrigued by the prospect of completely altering the course of my life's path, preferably ending up in a future where I am fabulously wealthy from all my best-selling books, and therefore able to (a) pay off my mortgage, and (b) donate huge amounts to scientific education and literacy around the world. If I could also look like Angelina Jolie, that would be nice, too. If string theory, with its 10 dimensions, is correct, and the disembodied voice in the video is to be believed, hypothetically, I could have that alternate life. It's just a simple matter of folding the 5th dimension into the 6th dimension, enabling me to "jump" from one branching timeline to another.

Since nobody seems to be doing that -- not even string theory king Ed Witten -- I suspect the devil is in the details. But that's okay, because according to the voiceover, by the time we reach the 10th dimension, "all possibilities are contained" therein -- including my own imperfect, yet pretty nifty existence down here in the lowly third dimension (as well as an alternate branching existence where I do indeed resemble Ms. Jolie, because a girl can dream).

BOOM! That would be the sound of heads exploding at the end of this 11-minute tutorial. Death by YouTube video. That's a nefarious scenario worthy of Fringe mad scientist Walter Bishop.

"At 8:03, My Brain Exploded"

September 17, 2008

When most people hear the phrase "string theory," they probably don't think, "comedy gold." But stand-up comedian Brian Regan dares to venture where many of his cohorts fear to tread in this bit describing his first viewing of a NOVA special on string theory (I assume it was The Elegant Universe): [UPDATE: The embedded video link seems to have broken overnight. You can find the routine here, and here (at 1:22 mark).]

For all his posturing as the big, dumb, chip-devouring couch potato, it's obvious that Regan has a bit more on the ball than that. First, he was watching NOVA; it's a popular show, but ratings-wise, it doesn't even begin to compete with network television staples like C.S.I. I'm not saying he's a techno-geek or anything, but I'll go out on a limb and say he's got a healthy curiosity about science and how the universe works.

Second, he grasps at least one of the essential concepts behind string theory: the fact that our current Standard Model of particle physics manages to merge three of the four fundamental forces -- at least at ultra-high temperatures, of the sort that only existed in the first fractions of a second after the big bang -- but physicists haven't yet figured out where gravity fits into the grander scheme of things. And Regan also remembered (and riffed upon) the fact that this was something that eluded one of the greatest minds of physics: Albert Einstein.

Einstein managed to unify space and time, energy and mass, and gravity and acceleration, but he got hung up on unifying gravity with all the other forces.  Physicists are still struggling to reconcile general relativity -- which applies to objects and physical systems on the macroscale, from missile trajectories to planetary motion -- and quantum mechanics, which governs the behavior of objects and systems at the subatomic level.

We have two different "rule books," and each works very well so long as they stick to their respective realms. All hell breaks loose when one tries to venture onto the other's turf: relativity breaks down at the atomic level, and quantum phenomena don't materialize at the macroscale. When was the last time you saw someone walk through a wall (Kitty Pryde from the X-Men movies doesn't count)? But at the quantum level, electrons "tunnel" their way through seemingly impenetrable energy barriers all the time. Getting these two to work together is a bit like mixing oil and water.

I won't even attempt to make sense of the more complex mind-boggling technical details -- we can't have people's brains exploding all over their computer monitors first thing Wednesday morning, can we? Employers take a very dim view of that. Basically, string theory attempts to solve the conundrum by re-envisioning point particles as tiny vibrating strings. (Nifty historical detail: the inspiration came from a long-forgotten equation by 18th century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, dismissed by his contemporaries as a bizarre curiosity of no real significance. Boy, are their faces red!)

So, any particle, when sufficiently magnified, wouldn't look like a solid fixed point, but like a one-dimensional filament, or string, resembling a rubber band. The strings can stretch, contract, and wriggle like violin strings. And the different ways in which they vibrate determine why elementary particles have the masses and other properties that they do.

That's the more poetical aspect of string theory that has so captured the popular imagination; those of us who work with words and metaphors for a living are suckers for that sort of thing. If only it were really that simple! In reality, string theory is incredibly complicated and it's easy for a non-scientist to lose the narrative thread. It's also become increasingly controversial, with critics dismissing it as just pretty math that doesn't make testable predictions. And without something to test, the theory can't really be verified -- making it "not even wrong," in the words of one well-known critic, Peter Woit.

Maybe the Large Hadron Collider will discover something useful to give string theory some much-needed bolstering -- a supersymmetric particle or two would be nice, or even evidence for extra dimensions. Maybe the LHC won't find anything at all. Or maybe it will find something completely unexpected that will blow our minds and make string theory and everything else obsolete. In the meantime, that sure is some pretty math.