The Ore Themed Western Musical

Has everyone else been loving Mike Stoklasa (aka Mr. Plinkett's) savage reviews of the prequels? I sure have, but he also did some other really cool stuff like this fun rock and geology themed musical. The main character is a Geologist.

Overall good fun, but a few geology nitpicks...gypsum is mentioned as a hard mineral, but actually it's a 2 on the Mohr hardness scale - your fingernails are about 2.5! Diamonds are a 10. A good mnemonic device for remembering Mohr's scale is "The Green Clawed Ferocious Aardvark Ordered Quick Tasty Chinese Dinners."

Also, Quartzite actually isn't related to good old SiO₂ at all, but is just a metamorphic sandstone.

Cobalt is an element and lucite is clear white stuff used instead of glass that's not found in the earth at all.

Like black diamonds? You’ve been bamboozled, sucker!

Never underestimate the power of a slick marketing campaign to hornswaggle and bamboozle people into thinking a worthless product is attractive and valuable. Black diamonds, or carbonados, have historically been viewed as ugly and cheap and not of gem quality, for a very simple reason: they don’t have much clarity so they lose the optical properties and luster we associate with diamond gems.

However, thanks to aggressive salesmanship and advertising, black diamonds are now selling at prices equal to those of “white” diamonds, despite the fact, in all honesty, close up they’re pretty ugly: they typically have the consistency and color of dark sunglasses lenses, a smoky, oily near-transparent gray-black.

I could be wrong, though: here’s Carmen Electra sporting a tasteful and not gaudy at all black diamond engagement ring, and as we all know, Carmen’s both a supergenius and armed with so much taste she’s like the reincarnation of Jacqueline Onassis.

First things first, my lovelies: there’s no such thing as a “black” diamond.

Diamonds are typically single crystals of carbon atoms that are arranged, at the atomic level, into a tetrahedronal (four-sided) crystalline lattice – an arrangement that is called an allotrope, and graphite is another allotrope of carbon atoms. In crystallography, it’s important to remember that something maintains the exact same shape, proportions and series of angles no matter its actual volume or size. That is, a diamond crystal, if not broken, will have these exact same proportions and geometry if it’s an eighth of a centimeter or as big as a fist.

This is called the law of constancy of interfacial angles, or Steno’s law, or, if you prefer, the first law of crystallography, and was discovered in the 17th Century by the great Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno, who helped create the field of modern geology by his discovery of the properties of natural crystals, not to mention other stellar achievements like the idea fossils are the remains of long-dead organisms.

Diamonds are naturally clear, but often when they form, there are occasionally impurities on the level of one part per million – for instance, superheated titanium gas, when caught inside a diamond, forms what’s called an inclusion and often turns the diamond a vivid and unusual color. Boron gases are the source of blue diamonds like the Hope Diamond, for instance.

Colored diamonds are all the rage these days, and have increased in price five-fold: a colored diamond that cost $50,000 in 1970 would be worth several million today. As a result of this, various processes have been created to turn diamonds unusual colors as a result of heat and irradiation. This ends in hilarity and tragedy when a supposedly colored diamond is superheated as a part of repairs only to have it lose its color! The lure of colored diamonds is a relatively recent phenomenon, though! For the majority of history non-colored diamonds were viewed as deficient and cheap.

Black diamonds are not like that, though. Black isn’t a color diamonds come in. Black diamonds are created not by unusual impurities...but by the fact they’re not single crystals, but a polycrystalline aggregate, or more simply, a combination of many individual crystals. Many metals are polycrystalline aggregate, including steel. As a result of this combination, they look an oily black because all the crystals in front of each other prevent the light from going through.

While carbonados may be ugly, the theory about their formation is pretty interesting stuff. They may form in supernovas that compress and expel carbon into polycrystalline aggregates and arrive on earth as meteorites.

In fact, because of their structure and how they form, the largest diamond ever discovered was a black carbonado at 3,147 carats. For comparison, the Hope diamond is 45 carats.

In other words, black diamonds are just repackaged carbonados of dubious non-gem quality that marketing makes you think are cool, sold at high prices because of the demand among the tacky, newly rich demographic, which includes Carmen Electra and most reality show contestants.

The thing that bothers me about marketing is how it can sometimes create an Ouroboros of non-logic and non-causality that could make a time-travelers’ head spin. Black diamonds are viewed as valuable because of aggressive salesmanship, yet their high price is due to demand caused by that aggressive salesmanship. It’s like a paradox used by Captain Kirk to destroy an evil supercomputer.

I don’t get the point of colored diamonds and I particularly don’t care for black diamonds. After all, isn’t the greatest and most beautiful thing about a diamond its clarity and luster and shimmer?

This often surprises people, but not all diamonds are of gem quality – in fact, fewer than half are not used for jewelry at all: most have flaws or problems with clarity and imperfection. In fact, diamonds are a downright miraculous material because of their resistance to heat and hardness used for things like industrial diamond drills and even computers, as any reader of Michael Crichton’s Congo would know.

Here’s another diamond misconception: diamonds form from the compression of coal under intense pressures. Superstrong superheroes like the Thing and the Incredible Hulk regularly squeeze coal hard enough diamonds form. Actually, coal is a type of sedimentary rock left by dead plant matter that was super-compressed, whereas diamonds typically form deep, deep within the earth, in the mantle at depths of several hundred miles in the interior.

The formation of coal is actually extremely unique and interesting. Most people believe that coal is remains of dead dinosaurs. Actually, coal is just compressed peat material from 360 million years, the aptly and descriptively named Carboniferous era, where swamp algae was compressed through a process of lithification, the process by which sedimentary material turns into rock. People know about the supercontinent of Pangea, but Pangea was only the last of several epic supercontinents in the incredible history of the earth. In the carboniferous, most land on earth was at the equator in a supercontinent called Gondwanaland, where it was constantly wet and swampy. Dense, stagnant swamps of non-moving water are typically stripped of oxygen by living things and bacteria, creating anoxic, sulfuric wastes that kill off the bacteteria that result in decomposition, so peat built up in layer after layer for hundreds of feet before it began to lithify.

By the way, no matter how big a nerd you think you are, I know for a fact I'm a bigger one: while cleaning up I found an old "Reunite Gondwanaland" t-shirt.

Also, coal is not entirely carbon at all, which is why it can’t turn into diamond. The composition of bituminous coal (a soft version that leaves an ash residue behind), for instance, is 75% carbon but also includes sulfur, hydrogen and nitrogen, and can also include benzene-like compounds. There are so many different classes of coal that labeling them into categories was a bone of contention among anal retentive petroleum scientists. In fact, burning coals can result in sulfur dioxide, which is the source of “acid rain.”

While I’m at it, let me clear up a common misconception right here: diamonds are not totally indestructible, and they can be broken by enough force and pressure. It is true that only a diamond can cut or scratch another diamond, but given enough pressure diamond can shatter like any other stone. In fact, diamonds, like any carbon allotrope, can even burn at enough temperature. Lavousier, the chemist best known for the discovery of oxygen, discovered that diamonds were principally carbon by measuring what was released from a burning diamond.

In fact, scientists have, under conditions of immense pressure (over ten million pounds per square inch), caused diamond to liquefy. Indeed, there is some speculation that part of the composition of Uranus and Neptune are oceans of liquid diamond. I practically had an orgasm when I heard about that!

You know who would make a good science teacher? Yoda, because he put it best when he said that in science, knowledge is unlearning a lot of what you have learned.

What’s the point of all this? Well, it just goes to show how an understanding of Geology can help people navigate through important purchases and important decisions, because many things we think we know are actually untrue or wrong. One big problem is how many garnets, a pinkish and cheaper stone, are often mislabeled as rubies. This was especially common in the past, where there was no x-ray crystallography and other methods to definitively identify gemstones. Just like diamond is a crystalline form of carbon, rubies are a typical form of the silicate mineral corundum, which incidentally, also is the source of amethysts.

Finally…what’s my favorite gemstone, you may ask?

Well, ask any rockhound that and you’ll get a hundred that come to mind, but that depends if you mean precious gemstone or not.

My favorite non-precious stones are a variety of crystalline quartz found in upstate New York called Herkimer County Diamonds. The reason I like these the best is that they’re photogenic, huge and clear and terminate at either end in points, and also because I had the good fortune of finding one on my first rockhound trip to upstate NYC. It’s not a protected resource so you can just pluck ‘em off the ground if you like, and they’re super-photogenic; when I show people my rock collection eyes immediately migrate to them. Also, they are found by just cracking open rocks, just like in the movies!

As for my favorite precious gemstone, I would have to say a beautiful, rare and unusual variety of burnt-orange garnet called spessartine, a manganese aluminum silicate that was mostly unknown until deposits were found between Nairobi and Angola. Even today it’s as hard to find as it is gorgeous.

Some Great Video Debunkings

One of my personal heroes, James Randi, debunks a mineral dowser.

The thing I find the most disappointing about mineral dowsing is that it doesn't work, actually. For a rockhound like me, I'd be the first to sign up for classes if it did! I've been rockhunting for some time and I've yet to find some natural New York State gemstones like flourite and sphalerite.

The depressing part here is that despite the fact that it was all well and truly debunked, this English fellow nonetheless finds work to this day as a mineral dowser despite being told his power just doesn't work. He seems like a nice older English "chappie." I strongly suspect he actually believes he has a power and isn't aware of the "ideomotor effect."

Another YouTube poster devotes himself to explaining the truth behind so-called "true" supernatural tales like the Bell Witch of Tennessee and the Philadelphia Experiment, stories that have long since been shown to be false but still remain in circulation for whatever reason. They're fun to watch.

This one is my personal favorite, the story of the Bell Witch:

In general, stories of this type don't do any harm (unlike, say, creationism, which is poisonous to scientific understanding). However, while fantasy and ghost stories are normal, healthy and lots of fun, it is vital to distinguish between the real world and fantasy and not confuse the two.

A Wizard Did It: Creationism's Trojan Horse

If you're at all curious about the discussions of Intelligent Design vs. Creationism, check out "Creationism's Trojan Horse" by Barbara Forrest.

The main points of the book are as follows:

1. "Intelligent Design" is a public relations movement as opposed to a scientific one.
   
2. "Intelligent Design" is a fundamentally religious and philisophical position, not a scientific one;
3. ...and that's the point. It is aimed at bamboozling and convincing non-specialists, designed to sabotage the teaching of evolution for religious reasons.
   
4. The research isn't enough to change the mind or convince a single scientist or create new fields of research or testable hypothesis, but rather, is all designed to use public relations to sabotage and subvert the normal process of science.
5. When having a dialogue with science, creationists and IDers create a "heads-I-win/tails-you-lose" scenario. If they are ignored by scientists, they yell about how science is unable to respond to their "A Wizard Did It" claims, and when scientists give their books criticism, they trumpet that science is finally giving them some attention.
   

The book often trotted out as Intelligent Design playing science with the big boys, their heaviest hitter, would be Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box. For those that haven't read it, the jist of his book is that there are some biological structures so complicated that if you remove one part, it stops working and thus, according to Behe, couldn't have evolved, like the bacterial flagellum "motor." It's essentially a rehash of the old rejected creationist argument that something like the eye couldn't have evolved on its own because it needs to be in its current form to work.

Behe in particular I always found especially silly. Consider that his book was written in 1996. I entered college in 2004, where I took Molecular Biology and Organic Chemistry. Since 1996, Genomics (the science of protein structure) has made wild contributions to evolutionary biology. Almost all the points Behe brings up in his 1996 book have since been explained (with satisfactory and more importantly, testable explanations), like the development of blood clotting and yes, even the flagellum motor.



That seems to be the Creationist/ID response to science: seize on an area that nobody knows much about and then say "A Wizard Did It." This is what happened when Creationists seized on the so-called "Cambrian Fossil Explosion," about the "sudden" and "unexplained" development of life in the early Cambrian. Since very few fossils exist from that period, there were a lot of gaps in our knowledge. Since the Creationists made that claim, new fossils have revealed what truly happened: slow leaps instead of a sudden explosion. But that's no big deal to these guys: move on to the next gap, which can easily be explained by A Wizard Did It. The genius here is that there will always be huge gaps in knowledge, which is the whole point of science. Let's be honest here: these folk don't really care about science. Not really.

The point of the book is this: "Intelligent Design" is creationism rebranded and not a true scientific position. There is zero real scientific controversy about evolution and natural selection, and the aim of the Intelligent Design movement is an end-run around science to directly influence public opinion among non-scientists and non-specialists by creating an ambiguity as to which theory is correct among laymen, an ambiguity that just doesn't exist. This, incidentally, is the tactic of choice among global warming deniers: insist that scientists aren't sure so you can just pick any theory you like. Tragically, it takes some extra type of self-deleusion to deny physical reality.

Incidentally, here's Kenneth Miller, a deeply religious Christian as well as a cellular biologist, and his instructive lecture that takes down Intelligent Design. The video is a little long but worth watching in its entirety as a companion to the book.

Politicians telling scientists what to do: the Deutsche Physik movement

My favorite moment in the entire tragicomic saga of the Nazi-era "Deutsche Physik" movement was this: Heinrich Himmler was a grade school friend of Germany's greatest quantum and particle physicist, Werner Heisenberg. Yes, that Heisenberg.

So, Heisenberg's Mom called Himmler's Mom on the telephone and politely but firmly asked if she would please tell her son to leave Heisenberg alone! Not bad from someone that, because of his concern for his nation's loss of talented scientists, was labeled a "White Jew" that ought to be made to "disappear."

"Aryan Physics" was a movement in Germany to create a muscular breed of physics that eliminated the "Jewish" influence of Albert Einstein and his paradigm-shifting work with relativity. The thing I find shocking about all this is that it began with old-guard, reactionary old scientists that were outraged by Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics (in other words, what today we'd call modern physics), paradigm shifters that did away with many darling and pet theories, like the Luminferous Aether, that many old-guard scientists were outraged by in a way that mirrors old geologists of the 1960s opposed to plate tectonics and continental drift. Quantum Mechanics, in particular, was a theory less than a decade old that explained that within an atom, the laws of classical physics don't apply but their behavior can only be described with probabilities.

Under the Nazis, old guard physicists found an ally, because science could play into the sort of political tropes the Nazis liked. The effect was astounding: out of the 26 known German nuclear physicists, almost half left Germany and defected. Many were Jewish, as under Nazi laws Jews were forbidden from holding posts in Higher Education, a position that echoes the paranoid, conspiratorial fears of anti-intellectuals on the right, who see centers of learning as hives of indoctrination. At the risk of Godwinning myself and thus failing the internet, the parallels just write themselves.

The American Operation: Paperclip, as well as the Soviet efforts to recruit disenfranchised German scientists, meant that Germany's loss was ultimately the Manhattan Project's gain. Otto Robert Frisch, for instance, was a Jewish refugee that after leaving Germany calculated the exact amount of Uranium needed to reach critical mass.

In the end of course, the Nazis eventually came around and realized they scared away an entire generation by putting political loyalty and ideology over the independent conclusions of science, but the damage was done: they suffered a colossal brain drain that cost them the atomic bomb.

Suddenly, the necessity for tenure becomes clearer: part of the reason it exists is that the only environment that honest science can be practiced is one with academic freedom and the ability to reach conclusions that are occasionally inconvenient to government and industry alike.

PAHs and the development of life

If you've ever been curious about the origin of life and how it arose from nonliving molecules, for the past few years there's a mindblowing new scenario on how that could have happened centered around Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons as an intermediate "starter" stage that leads to life. Not because of PAH's complexity, but because of how durable they are, how simple they are.

PAHs, in short, are polycyclic because they are typically carbon atoms that form into extremely durable ring structures, connected to each other. As anyone that's ever played with a molecular model kit knows, carbon atoms connect at angles that result in a cyclic shape. Because the carbon atoms double-bond to each other over and over, they have a real toughness by sharing bonds, a property in chemistry known as "aromatic."

PAHs are found over and over on earth, and in fact are even one polycyclic aromatic molecule (though not a hydrocarbon), C₆₀, was the first soccer-ball shaped buckminsterfullerine ever discovered in nature, a sexy kind of molecule that gets a lot of attention because of unique properties. Flatten a buckyball out into a sheet of graphene (well, more or less), curl it up and you get carbon nanotubes, a molecule with the primary property of creating tons and tons of work for sensationalist science writers prone to jumping the gun.

Amusingly enough, one PAH is Naphthaline, C₁₀H₈, which is the primary ingredient of mothballs.

Not only is C₆₀ as well as PAHs found in interstellar space where the primary components of life are believed to be found, the strong bonded structure means it can tolerate resistance and survive untouched in space, surrounded by UV light that would break up and destroy more fragile components of organic chemistry, like amino acids. Likewise, they're far simpler, just basic ring-shaped hydrocarbons that because the cyclic shape repeats over and over, it remains intact even if blown apart. It is believed they could have formed primitive membranes that protected life, helped in metabolism, and can even hold genetic information...the only material known in the interstellar medium that meets all three criteria for life.

Because of their stability and resistance to temperature and radiation, if PAHs played a role in the development of life on earth, it would change the conditions that are required for life to form, which may mean that life can develop in environments more deadly and dangerous than previously thought.

Futurama's Math Jokes

Those that love math will probably get a kick out of Futurama and their blink and you miss it math jokes.

Aleph-Null Plex as a theater name instead of a "multiplex." Now that's good. For those that don't know, Aleph-Null is a part of Set Theory, a mathematical concept described in the 1870s by Georg Cantor, a concept that is taught even at simple levels by the use of Venn diagrams (remember those?). According to him there are various types of infinities, and because Cantor was Jewish, he described by the Hebrew letter Aleph.

Aleph-Null (or Aleph-Zero) is used to describe the set with the smallest cardinality (or size of the elements in a set). It measures an infinity according to natural, ordinary counting numbers (excluding zero, negative numbers, and irrational numbers). Cantor made a distinction between transfinite and absolute infinity, in the sense that transfinite numbers are sets bigger than any finite set, yet they fall far short of absolute infinity. In fact, it's been demonstrated at least in classical cardinal mathematics that the sum of all ordinal numbers can't possibly exist, something called the Burali-Forti Paradox.

Think of the Burali-Forti Paradox like this. Take something that is meant to represent the sum of all ordinal numbers. Cantor was partial to the Omega symbol for religious reasons. Now, the concept you just created has all the properties of a number that can be listed in a set! There are some interesting ways to resolve this paradox, notably through use of different principles of set theory.

The cranks were right!

Well, it doesn’t happen that often, but there are occasions where crackpot science is right on the money...or perhaps a better way of putting it is there are occasions here and there that crackpot science coincides with what real science discovers.

I find it amusing when this happens. It’s like when paranoia turns out to be correct. I’m pretty young, but most of these went from crackpot pipe dream to real substantiated fact within my lifetime.


The King Cheetah – a Cryptozoologist actually caught something real

It’s like if Charlie Brown finally kicked that football. Good work, guys!

The first time I ever heard of the King Cheetah was on A&E reruns of “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World,” a documentary series hosted by Arthur C. Clarke, who took time off to perform series duty from his primary career as an author of autistic hard-SF novels, and his secondary career as a loathsome, lecherous pederast. It was on a show about weird and mysterious animals that have been sighted all over the world, and what made it special is not just the usual emphasis on giant ape-men and tourist-magnet lake monsters, but on weirder, less famous and more interesting creatures like the King Cheetah.

A cheetah with stripes along the spine and a giant black mane have been spotted in Africa since 1925, and one was even caught on a grainy home movie in the 1970s. Were they a figment of the imagination or an undiscovered species?

Eventually the conflict was resolved when a pair of Cryptozoologists, Lena and Paul Bottriell managed to photograph one in the 1970s.

In 1981, a cheetah in captivity in South Africa gave live birth to a pair of King Cheetahs. This resolved the species status of the King Cheetah: they weren’t a separate species, but some unusual mutation within the Cheetah family. Since then, a handful of King Cheetahs have been found (tragically, most were in the form of pelts).

Now, be honest: would you have expected something you first heard about on an Unsolved Mystery show turn out to be a star zoo show attraction? What next? Unicycle-riding Bigfoots?





The Vikings Were in America

Theories about how (insert culture here) reached America before Columbus are a dime a dozen and worth that, too…wispy and insubstantiated. The first time I ever read about Vikings in America was in an unsolved mystery casebook, and the cases right next to it wondered if there might be some truth to the Curse of Tutankhamun and if the Tunguska blast was from a crashed UFO. Considering the context, the idea that the Vikings might have been in America didn’t inspire confidence.

Then at some point in my middle school or high school years, it went from a crank theory to something “everyone knows,” that’s in every single textbook. New waves of artifacts at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland suggested to even the most hardened cynic that the Vikings reached America, including sod-buildings identical to those in Denmark and remains of shops for blacksmithing iron, something that was never practiced by Native Americans. And even more, scholarship for the Norse sagas improved and are being actively reread and taken seriously as historical documents instead of just as literature.



Zombies do exist!

I’m getting advising for it now, and man, I sure wish Wes Craven would turn my Masters Thesis into an awesome horror movie the way he did for Wade Davis when Wes made “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” one of the most terrifying films ever made.



Anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis discovered there was a truth to all the stories of the Zombie in Haiti: Houngan witch doctors in Haiti created a powder where the primary ingredient is from a fugu fish, a muscle relaxant that makes a person fall into a deathlike coma state. While in this state where they felt no pain, body functions were slowed and they could be mislabeled as dead by non-trained observers, the victim was buried alive. Later on the person exposed to the poison is dug up, and the witch doctor convinces them they died and were brought back from the dead. With other pharmaceuticals, witch doctors in Haiti often kept people as their “zombie” slaves for years and years, a combination of trance drugs, suggestion and cultural beliefs that created true mind control.

The fundamental conservatism of anti-science cranks (or, how we know for a fact the earth isn’t hollow)

Never underestimate the power of projection!

The most insufferable and sanctimonious thing about crackpot and fringe theorists is the insistence that they are new, daring, revolutionary, and rebellious, opposing the stodgy authority of science…when in reality it's pretty startling how downright traditionalist and conservative fringe theories are, and how little they change.

Two of the major fringe theories about the structure of the earth are very, very old theories that have since been superseded...yet cranks earnestly strive to keep them in circulation. In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to find a crank science theory that isn’t some old, recycled idea from science’s past.

Example #1: The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

Cranks aren’t experts. They don’t keep up with the literature, with changing scientific ideas and trends. Check out this TED talk by this extra-cute old lady about the Aquatic Ape Theory. The basics of the Aquatic Ape theory is that the reason human ancestors are so different from the other apes is that we went through a stage that involved life extremely close to water.



…did you get all that? It’s a trippy theory, but it’s not scientific, because how can it be tested? Falsafiability is the single most important attribute in determining whether something is scientific or not. Every major theory in science has a way in which it can be proven untrue. Even something as central and bedrock to the biological sciences as the theory of evolution: as Neil “Tiktaalik” Schubin once put it, the one thing that can throw evolution out the window is finding “bunny rabbits running around in the Precambrian.”

But the single most revealing comment in her entire analysis is that scientists are still treating the Savannah Model of human evolution as if it’s still gospel. I’m surprised no one called her out on that. The Savannah Model was taken down as we learned more about Oligocene paleoclimate...way back in the 1960s.

The point is, since the 1960s, paleoanthropologists have come up with totally different models for human evolution that don’t involve the drying out of the Savannah at all. But the Aquatic Ape hypothesis exists because of flaws in the Savannah model, which science doesn’t use at all anymore. In other words, the field had moved on since the 1960s but the fringe theory hadn’t.

Example #2: The Hollow Earth

The absolute apotheosis of how traditionalist and resistant to change crank theories are, has to be the Hollow Earth . This is exactly what I mean when I say how clingy and unsinkable crank theories are, since the Hollow Earth model was more or less abandoned by real science as early as the 18th Century. At one point, it was a real scientific theory, created by none other than Sir Edmund Halley. Yes, that Sir Edmund Halley. He was so proud of his Hollow Earth theory that when it came time to take his portrait at age 80, the diagram in his hand was that of his theory of planetary concentric circles.



In brief, the Hollow Earth theory is one that claims the earth is an empty shell, with living things on the inside. There have been tons of great novels dealing with fanciful subterranean worlds (which usually have dinosaurs and lost civilizations), which makes this one of my favorites. This theory is sweetly endearing just because of how fanciful and over the top it is; in order to make sense of it one has to pretend the 20th Century didn’t happen. Just because it’s cool doesn’t mean it’s true, though.

With theories of this type, it is true that science and science education take some of the blame. (I said SOME of the blame, because the responsibility and onus for education falls on the individual.) Science isn’t some kind of magic, and while kids are shown the sliced apple core diagram of the earth from a very early age, it’s not explained how it is that we actually know the structure of the earth. Science, like math, is a process, and it’s more important to “show your work.”

Hollow Earth supporters are quick to point out that we haven’t gotten very far into the earth at all, a mere 7.6 miles. This does not however, mean that the structure of the deep earth is a mystery at all. Since lots of people show up to this place for professional wrestling style debunking of crackpots, here’s how we know that the earth is solid:

Seismic Evidence. Earthquakes are essentially kinetic energy, and like all forms of kinetic energy, they travel in waves through the earth. There are two major types of seismic waves: P-waves and S-waves. P-waves, or primary waves, are produced by the alternation between expansion and compression and travel the fastest from an earthquake. P-waves travel out the fastest, can move through solid, liquid and gas, and their shape is changed as they move through heterogeneous substances. By analyzing the velocity of primary waves, it’s possible to learn about the density and composition of substances by the reflections and refractions of p-waves within the earth, without having to drill miles and miles into the earth at all. Sweet, eh?

Now, take S-waves, or secondary or shear waves, another, more slower-moving type of wave transmitted only through solids. If you’ve ever grabbed a rope and yanked it, you’ve seen how an s-wave propagates. Obviously, these only move through matter in the solid state; through liquids and gases, they attenuate, which means they lose intensity very quickly.

Check out the visual aid to the right. It is possible to receive primary waves from an earthquake. If the earth was a shell instead of a sphere, transverse p-waves would not move in direct polarity from the point of origin THROUGH the earth, would it? Likewise, the fact there is a shadow zone where no secondary s-waves can be received was the first clue that there was a level of the inner earth that was entirely molten and liquid.


The observable operation of gravity and centrifugal motion. Why are objects of sufficient mass in the universe round, anyway? Planets and stars and so on. Carl Sagan put it best when he explained that roundness is a property of gravity distributing matter evenly, because it pulls matter with more or less equal strength in one direction; because of this, planets and stars are more or less spherical. In fact, the more extreme heights are only possible on smaller, lighter worlds with lower gravity. Mars has an extinct volcano, Olympus Mons, the size of the state of Missouri that is five times taller than Mt. Everest. On earth, gravity would have flattened a mountain like that out and spread it evenly.

What’s more, gravity pulls things toward a center of mass. There’s no way a person could walk on the “inside” of a shell. Isaac Newton proved this way back when, when he demonstrated that a shell can’t exert force pushing something to the inner mass of a shell. If you love math and physics, check out this explanation of the Newtonian shell theorem.

As any high school geometry student can tell you, a sphere is the shape with the highest ratio of surface area to volume. It’s for this reason that hot air balloons are round, for instance. Compression due to internal gravity acting evenly would by necessity turn a world spherical because of hydrostatic equilibrium. A hollow-shell earth would simply collapse.

And then there’s the property of centrifugal motion. Earth’s outer crust is composed principally of lighter elements, like silicon and aluminum, whereas the heavier elements like iron and nickel are mainly drawn to the center, as in a centrifuge, swirling as in the early earth, while the mantle remains silicate-poor. This real world observable phenomenon is consistent with p-wave readings. Why would gravity turn the earth into a shell when it doesn’t work that way?



The earth’s mass is consistent with it being solid-through and not a shell. Try to imagine this: the force of gravity is a constant 9.8 m/s, and the force of acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2. The entire mass of the earth is required to pull down a ping-pong ball, and everything on earth falls at the same rate. If we know the force of gravity something exerts it’s possible to calculate the mass. Visit this link for an explanation on how the mass of the earth is calculated. In fact, visit it anyway, as it is one of the more extraordinary calculations in the history of science.

Example #3: The Expanding Earth

The landmasses of the earth fit perfectly together? Gee whiz, thanks for telling us, Neal Adams! Oh, if only there was theory in geology that would explain why that is…!

Did I say that the Hollow Earth was my favorite crank theory? I change my mind, this one is, because its most visible defender is a comic book artist best known for his work on Batman, Neal Adams. Visiting Neal Adams’s website is great because the “amateur geology” stuff is placed side by side with great Batman concept art.

Like the Hollow Earth, this is another theory that was originally scientific but science discarded its usefulness and utility when it just moved past and beyond it. Once again, it is the fringe theorists that are the ones that are stodgy and resistant to change. The idea that the earth is expanding was first proposed way back in the 1950s by the Australian geologist S. Warren Carey as a pre-plate tectonics way of explaining some of the overwhelming evidence that would later be shown as proof of plate tectonics. S. Warren Carey, despite his stubborn insistence and clinginess to his pet theory, was not a crank: he was a real geologist and a real scientist at the University of Tasmania, a member of the last generation that could produce opposition to plate tectonics with any intellectual honesty, but science eventually moved past him and all the proofs he provided for his expanding earth eventually made the acceptance of continental drift over the static model that much easier.

Watch this video by Neal Adams where he makes the case for the expanding earth:



My favorite is the part where he explains that India just broke off and crashed into Asia but there was no explanation why. Neil even makes fun of this idea by asking if there were rocket motors placed on the end of the Indian subcontinent that jetted it up there. This is the best evidence yet for this theory as another conservative holdover from pre-plate tectonics days. One of the reasons it took so astonishingly long for the consensus in Geoscience to turn toward continental drift was that there was no sign of the mechanism by which drift took place. However, eventually the engine for it was discovered: seafloor spreading from the mid-oceanic ridge system. Saying that there’s no explanation for why India moved is a woefully out of date statement out of step with current geology. In fact, the Mid-Oceanic Ridge System that pushed India away is still there off the coast of Africa!

Neil goes in detail from his website, here:

“India, Geology says, tore itself off of Africa, rode up the Indian Ocean and crashed into Asia, against all laws, and Geologists show us this in books and on TV everywhere.

Tore itself off!! Just imagine. Took a trip like a plow goes from one side of a field to the other plowing up the Earth, and yet if you look at the oceanic plate there is no evidence of this happening. None! Then it crashed into Asia. Ah, crashed.”

Actually Neil, yeah it did, because there is evidence of deformation at collision boundaries for the Himalayas. By the way, there’s plenty of seafloor sediment that was upraised by the continental collision consistent with dating for the subcontinent’s movement.

The earth, is not in fact growing at all. No increase in the earth’s size has been reported through any geodesic technique. (Remember that?) On the other hand, the movement of continents have been measured by satellite observation. At no point in history has it ever been demonstrated that the earth is growing. What’s more, mass accretion produces heat, which has never been measured or found.

No other body in the universe is growing at a measurable rate. Have a look at this video from NASA Lunar Reconnaissance about how the Moon is actually shrinking.

Subduction is in fact, happening. Take the proof from satellites at points of subduction, which show often 60 miles or more of oceanic crust vanishing. Island chains form at (most) subduction points in arc-shapes, because of accretionary wedges where magma bubbles up only from subduction zones. Take the magmatic rock and date it if you like, and you’ll see that the source of magma that produces them is pretty consistent.

Example #4: Lemuria

Lemuria is an idea with a closely related history to the expanding earth, in that it began as a legitimate scientific hypothesis that ended when it was eventually superceded by continental drift…before it fell into the hands of crackpots.

One of the greatest proofs that living things were not created at a single point by a designer but instead are produced by modification and descent from other living things is that even in similar habitats, the living things there are more like the animals from the surrounding era. Take for instance, caves: there is no environment more similar than caverns. Two caves on other sides of the planet have more in common with each other than the environment outside. However, species of cave fish are more likely to be related to fish in streams near the caverns than the cave fish in more distant caverns.

When evolution first became accepted, it became necessary to explain similar fossils found in different regions of the world for the first time. Take lemurs, for instance. Though lemurs are only found alive in Madagascar, fossil lemurs were discovered in India and Africa. A provisional, tentative hypothesis was proposed in 1864 by Phillip L. Sclater, who said that a whole bunch of coincidences between wildlife between these areas could be explained by a long-lost land bridge that he called “Lemuria,” where presumably the lemurs crossed over. By the way, Philip Sclater was a great ornithologist and one of the first to advance a few models of ancient biogeography. In the end, the similarities between the ancient regions, including lemurs, were explained by continental drift.

That didn’t stop crackpot believers in Theosophy and other trendy 19th Century spiritualists from jumping to conclusions about Lemuria and making things up about it, though! All this from a barely-there bit of biogeography that was abandoned by real scientists as far back as the 1880s. Does anyone still think that crank science isn’t overly traditionalist?

Inventing a continent out of thin air to explain the absence of fossils is a time-tested tradition. To explain the (then) “abrupt” appearance of Cro-Magnon man, it was conjectured by crackpot supreme Lewis Spence in the 1920s that Cro-Magnon must have evolved on Atlantis. The Nazis liked this idea a little too much, and it’s possible to see it appear here and there on white power and racist websites.

The one guy inspired by the idea of Atlantis as the home of a stone age Cro-Magnon culture was Robert E. Howard, in my view the second-best Weird Tales writer after Clark Ashton Smith. He created his hero Kull the Conqueror as a stone age Atlantean!

Example #5: Michael Behe, the bacterial flagellum, and the evolution of blood clotting




It’s possible to write entire books to explain where Michael Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box” went wrong…and some people have! Ken Miller, for instance. As the embarrassing and at times laughable “Darwin’s Black Box” is the closest thing to an actual scientific challenge that evolution has received in some time, it has been over-scrutinized out of a desire to set the record straight.

The book was written in 1993, and at the time, there had been absolutely no work done explaining the evolution of the blood clotting mechanism, which Behe explained was far too complex to naturally evolve and required a designer. Since that time, real, legitimate science has explained how something like that could have developed naturally. Check out Ken Miller’s website for an explanation. The point isn’t that this is how it happened though, the point is this is how it could have happened, which demolishes the entire idea of the necessity of a supernatural force.

And yet, despite the fact biology has changed, to date Michael Behe has never rewritten his 1993 book to take into account any new findings by science, including those spurred by his own criticisms of it. "Darwin's Black Box" is still published in more or less the same form now as it was in 1993 without retractions.

The next time someone talks about how stodgy and authoritarian and slow to change science is, that person should take a long look in the mirror. Science changes all the time. Crank science reuse the same ideas over and over.

How might people keep time in the future?

As a student of geochronology, dating and timekeeping is something that I think about a lot.

Right now the scientifically accepted length of a second is defined by the rotation of an atom of Cesium-133 as read by an atomic clock. The reason that particular isotope is used is because all atoms release energy when heated or otherwise excited (often in the form of visual light, a phenomenon called incandescence) and Cesium-133 gives off energy in a very narrow range of frequencies: 9,192,631,770 Hz, which can accurately be detected by a very sensitive piezoelectric crystal oscillator that vibrates in tune with the energy released by an excited Cs-133. Therefore, the internationally accepted length of a second is a 9,192,631,770 rotations of a Cs-133 atom.

(By the way, if you like science fiction with a heaping helping of science like I do, check out the Science of Superman, a book written by a scientist and baby-boomer that tries to explain how that old-school hero's powers work. Though the book is otherwise impeccable, the one real error I can see in the book is that it calls the universally agreed on length of time for a second to be arbitrary, when actually there is a really good reason why that specific number is used: the Cesium atom gives off energy in that narrow, near microwave frequency.)

Amusingly enough, though the definition of a second may be internationally accepted, the spelling of "Cesium" is not: UK scientists spell it "Caesium." This is why I love science, by the way: you can argue about stupid stuff like spelling but not about an immutable physical property of reality.



Anyone that doubts the absolute necessity of defining a supersmall unit of measurement in science like a second should be directed toward the field of particle physics. One of the more successful attempts at testing and proving Einstein's theory of relativity was made with a particle called a Muon, that only exists for several one-millionths of a second before breaking down. The time dilation effects of relativity are invisible at an everyday scale, but even a slight slowdown in the existence and breakdown of a Muon can be registered. Therefore, the effects of going faster can be seen in the breakdown of these tiny particles.

There are a few ways, though, that timekeeping can be kept in the future.


1) Pulsar rotation.

Pulsars are a type of superdense star that are all that remains after a supernova. This star that is too light to collapse and result in a black hole. Because the star still has the superhigh angular momentum left over, it turns superfast, functioning as something like an electric dynamo, with each rotation releasing a colossal amount of electromagnetic radiation that can be detected from earth. The energy given off by the rotation of a pulsar is done with such regularity and precision that it rivals and matches that of atomic clock. Pulsar rotation is so precise that when they were first discovered by astronomers they thought they might be artificial in origin!



One of the shortest rotational periods of a pulsar detected thus far has been 8 seconds. Sure, Pulsars eventually slow down as their angular momentum decreases, but that takes 10-100 million years so there's plenty of time a pulsar can be used reliably.

I firmly believe that it is human destiny to explore the universe, something only temporarily thwarted by shortsighted politicians that oppose our space program. Because pulsars can be detected over colossal distances, they can be detected in space and in space are a lot more meaningful a unit of measurement of time than terrestrial units based on earth's solar system like days, weeks or months. Because it's based on something cosmic and non-humanocentric, it is a system of measurement of time that can be shared with aliens. Yes, don't look at me like that, that's exactly what I said! I'm thinking big here, long term.

Hey, science fiction writers reading this! You can use this one if you want to, free of charge. Just invite me to your book-signing. It'd do wonders for my rep as a prestigious science genius!


2) Hexadecimal Clocks.



There was always something arbitrary about the 24 hour clock, with its 60 minute hours and 60 second minutes. This awkward system comes to us from the Babylonians, who did their mathematics in base-60.

Remember "metric time" from The Simpsons? Sure, we all thought it was a joke, but there was actually a real effort for a short time during the French Revolution to keep time in decimal units of 10, with 100 decimal seconds in 100 decimal minutes, and 10 decimal hours from noon to midnight. This lasted for a grand total of one year, from 1794-1795, when everyone forgot about the whole thing because it was a monster to convert, with a decimal second being .864 of a traditional second. Incidentally, I'm not a materialistic person, but if I was super-rich, the one place I'd indulge myself is in getting an antique post-Revolutionary decimal clock. Well, that and maybe getting William Defoe's Goblin Glider from the first Spider-Man movie...



Hexadecimal notation on the other hand, has advantages that French decimal time doesn't. For one thing it's a 24-hour clock, with the 24 hour day divided into 16 units, which also makes it a cinch to convert, making one hexhour about 90 traditional minutes and a hexminute around 90 seconds. The number is given as a fraction of the passage of a day in hexidecimal notation. Therefore, the moment before midnight is given as ,FFFF and midnight is ,0000. The hexhour can even be broken down into quarter-units too, at the 0,4,8, and C positions when slipped into the second digit.

Though something tells me this might not catch on among non-math majors...

Visit "Vintage Science" on Flikr!

Science of the past is something best expressed in the visual arts, mostly because as William Gibson pointed out in his short story, "the Gernsback Continuum," the 1920s and up were the first era where visual artists were involved in defining science and technology. As Gibson put it:

"At the turn of the century, most pencil sharpeners looked like pencil sharpeners, a basic Victorian mechanism. After the 1920s many looked like they were designed in a wind tunnel."

I have the good fortune to live in New York City, which has a ton of buildings that look like Ming the Merciless designed them. This futurism was an art style that, like Film Noir, another American creation, that we didn't even know realized we had created until long after the fact.

Read the Gernsback Continuum here at American Heritage. I'd actually list it as one of the ten most important American short stories, actually. Gibson actually mentioned Frank R. Paul, an artist that was forgotten and then rediscovered two generations later, like Zora Neal Hurston.

And while you're at it, visit this gallery of vintage science illustrations and concepts on Flikr! Some of these are absolutely perfect for rainy days when you have nothing but a computer. I think I've found a new way to vaporize time online, other than Wikipedia, of course.

These designs have to be seen to be believed. Being a Masters student in Geoscience, my mind immediately went to the Victorian era diagram on minerals.

Hooray for Helium!

The single most extraordinary thing about helium is this: it was discovered on the sun before it was ever discovered on the earth, way back in 1868, when the lines on the emission spectrometer turned on it gave back a result that, at first, solar-observing scientists thought was sodium until they realized what it was they had. In fact, that's where the name for the element comes from: helium, like Helios, Greek god of the Sun.

(Incidentally, whatever happened to Helios, anyway? Come Roman times, Apollo was god of the Sun. The best answer ever came in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians young adult books: poor Helios was "downsized" by the efficient Romans and his job palmed off to an already overworked god.)

As point in fact, there is almost no helium on earth; it is light enough that it evaporated during the planet's formation, and any new helium tends to float off into space. The occasions where helium exists on earth, it's produced by the breakdown of radioactive elements like uranium and thorium and trapped in the earth.

This late discovery - Helium was only discovered on earth in 1895 - is all the more incredible because Helium is the second most common element in the universe. In fact, there is more helium than there is every heavier element put together.

More Helium facts:

Helium is one of the few elements to have no "solid" state, remaining a liquid even up to absolute zero.

Helium (and an isotope of Helium) are one of the few elements to be created by the Big Bang, along with hydrogen, lithium and beryllium. Most of the helium in the universe was created by the big bang, though many more from stellar processes.

The primary use of helium is, believe it or not, in cryogenics and supercold, especially the temperatures needed for powerful magnets. Helium is the second-most chemically inert, nonreactive element and in the column with the Noble Gases, so it makes a great purge gas as it doesn't bond with anything. In fact, there are no known compounds that exist that contain helium. The stability of helium is why it is often created by nuclear processes.

80% of the world's helium comes from refining natural gas in the United States. It was us Americans denying helium as a lifting gas to the Nazis that made them use the more dangerous and flammable gas hydrogen...and led to the Hindenburg disaster.

Why does inhaling helium make your voice higher? Well, here's an involved answer: sound is made by vibrating AIR, not by a vibrating object. Sound, like everything else is a wave, and the faster the number of peaks go by in the wave, the higher the frequency (the more frequent - get it?) and the higher the timbre of a noise. Frequency = Speed/Wavelength, or F = S/W. So, the faster something moves, the greater the number of waves and the "higher" a sound is. Since helium is less dense than air, sound goes through more quickly, and therefore the frequency is higher. Don't worry, helium is inert: the only danger comes from possible oxygen deprivation. There are some gases heavier than air that make vibrations travel more slowly, of course, like sulfur hexaflouride and krypton, but unlike helium these may be dangerous to try. They stay in your lungs as they "sink" in air.

Upcoming movie about the real Hypatia

Hypatia is my hero and it's not hard to see why. In the world of Hellenistic Greece, she stood out as a great thinker and teacher, a pagan in a time of mostly Christians, one of history's greatest mathematicians.

Rachel Weisz is going to be playing Hypatia, the single most obvious and appropriate casting choice in the history of Hollywood. I wait with eager anticipation to see "Agora," a movie about the life and challenges of Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria. It's not very often that Hollywood does a movie about a mathematician...the last one I can think of is A Beautiful Mind. It doesn't hurt that Hypatia was supposedly one of the world's most beautiful women, or is at least romanticized as being that way by poets. Carl Freidrich Gauss and Paul Erdos may be great mathematicians, but they definitely don't have much in the way of sex appeal.

I have no idea how it is that I didn't hear about this movie until today. It totally blindsided me, and I usually keep my pulse on movies about math and my hero, Hypatia.

Feast your eyes on the trailer, spuds:



By the way, after several years of text flying at the screen and quick cuts passed as movie trailers, isn't it great to hear an old-fashioned Voice of Doom trailer again? "In a world of conflict and torment...one woman will rise to lead a nation..." It's like the movie trailer was made in 1994!

"New Horizons" Space Probe to Explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt

Astronomers have more of a sense of humor than any other kind of scientist I know. Take for instance, the "New Horizons" space probe, which in five years will reach Pluto, the first manmade object to study the only truly unexplored region of the solar system, not to mention the Kuiper Belt, the distant and massive asteroid belt beyond Neptune where Pluto and at least several other dwarf planets of its type reside...including several that are much larger. By July, 2015, the probe will reach Pluto.

Visit the official website for the "New Horizons" at nasa.gov.

Not only was the space probe named after a Moody Blues song, the telescope and multispectral imager is named "Ralph," and the ultraviolet image spectrometer is named "Alice." What's even more amazing is that the Dust Counter used by the New Horizons was designed and built by graduate students...who I am colossally envious of to the point of murderous rage.

Words can't express my excitement at this visit to the only unexplored world in the solar system. THE HUMAN ADVENTURE IS ONLY BEGINNING. The only down side is they can't make a flyby past Eris, the recently discovered Trans-Neptunian Object...which is, in many ways, like Pluto's cooler sister. Amazingly, the probe will even leave our Solar System in 2029!