News Feeds

Paradoxically, even though we produce more scientific output than ever before – each year, researchers around the world publish millions of academic papers – the pace of scientific discovery is slowing down.

There are several factors behind this general slow-down of scientific advancement, but the most important factor is the simple maturation of any field.

As time goes on fields of science become more mature and sophisticated. This is a good thing, as we take small threads of newfound knowledge and develop them into full-fledged theories of the workings of the universe. But this process ironically slows the pace of future discoveries in that same field.

This is because our questions are becoming more sophisticated, more targeted. In any field of science, the pace of discovery is quite rapid, as individual researchers are capable of making amazing breakthroughs with just their minds or a few simple laboratory experiments and observations. But once those easy questions are answered, all that are left are the hard ones; the problems that require collaborations of humans working together and pooling their resources, the ones that require massive investments in time or money, the ones that require intense effort, years of investigation, to chip away at some small corner of the overall problem.

For example, consider cosmology. A century ago, barely anybody was concerned with the nature and fate of the universe. Even after Hubble’s discovery of an expanding universe, cosmology was considered a niche subject. But its small set of practitioners were able to make astounding leaps, cementing the Big Bang’s place as the key theory of the history of the universe. Today, advancement in science is slowing, with teams of hundreds spending millions of dollars to develop a single survey.

Cosmology is not alone.

Imagine fields of science like a growing soap bubble. The volume of the bubble is knowledge we have already acquired, and the edge of the bubble represents the frontiers of that knowledge. At first the bubble is small, with both a small volume and small surface. When we learn new knowledge about the surface, we expand that surface area, and the volume correspondingly grows.

When the bubble is small, it doesn’t take much to radically increase its volume – even the work of one human is enough to double or triple our total human knowledge of a subject. But as the bubble expands, the volume becomes much bigger than its surface. New knowledge, pushing at the boundaries, only supplies proportionally less new information. Progress becomes harder and harder, and advancement slows down – sometimes grinding to a halt.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Fields of science emerge, grow rapidly, and mature. We can still learn new things in any field, but this general tendency means that we shouldn’t expect rapid leaps and bounds. We just have to manage our expectations.

The post Is Science Slowing Down? appeared first on Universe Today.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss460_Joshua_Blu_Buhs_2024_08_25.mp3 Download MP3

Flying saucers. Bigfoot. Frogs raining from the sky. Such phenomena fascinated Charles Fort, the maverick writer who scanned newspapers, journals, and magazines for reports of bizarre occurrences: dogs that talked, vampires, strange visions in the sky, and paranormal activity. His books of anomalies advanced a philosophy that saw science as a small part of a larger system in which truth and falsehood continually transformed into one another. His work found a ragged following of skeptics who questioned not only science but the press, medicine, and politics. Though their worldviews varied, they shared compelling questions about genius, reality, and authority. At the center of this community was adman, writer, and enfant terrible Tiffany Thayer, who founded the Fortean Society and ran it for almost three decades, collecting and reporting on every manner of oddity and conspiracy.

In Think to New Worlds, Joshua Blu Buhs argues that the Fortean effect on modern culture is deeper than you think. Fort’s descendants provided tools to expand the imagination, explore the social order, and demonstrate how power is exercised. Science fiction writers put these ideas to work as they sought to uncover the hidden structures undergirding reality. Avant-garde modernists—including the authors William Gaddis, Henry Miller, and Ezra Pound, as well as Surrealist visual artists—were inspired by Fort’s writing about metaphysical and historical forces. And in the years following World War II, flying saucer enthusiasts convinced of alien life raised questions about who controlled the universe.

Buhs’s meticulous and entertaining book takes a respectful look at a cast of oddballs and eccentrics, plucking them from history’s margins and spotlighting their mark on American modernism. Think to New Worlds is a timely consideration of a group united not only by conspiracies and mistrust of science but by their place in an ever-expanding universe rich with unexplained occurrences and visionary possibilities.

Joshua Blu Buhs is a scholar of the overlap of politics, biology, and ecology in twentieth-century America and has written articles that have appeared in Isis, Environmental History, The World of Genetics, and Journal of the History of Biology. His Ph.D. is in the history of science from Penn State. He is the author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend and The Fire Ant Wars: Nature, Science, and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century America, both published by the University of Chicago Press. His new book is Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers.

Shermer and Blu Buhs discuss:

• How he got into researching and writing about weird things
• The Fire Ant Wars and how Americans thought about nature in the second half of the 20th century (Rachel Carson, E. O. Wilson)
• Bigfoot
• Charles Fort (1874–1932)
• Fortean followers
• Tiffany Thayer
• Fortean Society
• Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and other magazines
• The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort
• Anomalies and anomaly hunting
• frogs and fishes falling from the sky, ball lightning, UFOs, cryptids (like Bigfoot), talking dogs and vampires, poltergeist events, spontaneous human combustion, levitation, unexplained disappearances, out-of-place artifacts, and highly unusual coincidences
• science fiction
• aesthetic modernism
• UFOs and UFOlogy
• Ancient aliens and von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods
• The Day the Earth Stood Still as a Christ allegory
• Dianetics, Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard
• Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods
• Skeptics and Humanists
• Conspiracies and conspiracy theories
• “modernity released the marvelous, expanded the possible ways in which humanity came into the presence of the awesome. The death of God and the rise of science as the preeminent process for creating truth opened new provinces, provided new materials for imagining, inventing, experiencing enchantment.”
• Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled “The Hermit Scientist,” about what we would today call pseudoscientists, and in 1952 he expanded it into a book titled In the Name of Science:
  • “(1) He considers himself a genius. (2) He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads. (3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. (4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. (5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.”
  • “If the present trend continues, we can expect a wide variety of these men, with theories yet unimaginable, to put in their appearance in the years immediately ahead. They will write impressive books, give inspiring lectures, organize exciting cults. They may achieve a following of one—or one million. In any case, it will be well for ourselves and for society if we are on our guard against them.”
• Of Fort, Buhs reveals, “His was a radical skepticism that refused to accept anything as absolutely true or absolutely false.”
• Buhs: “Fort and Forteans played their part in the creation of this world. They eroded the distinctions between truth and falsity, undermined the authority of experts and expertise. They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness.”

A Residue of Anomalies

Review of Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers by Joshua Blu Buhs, University of Chicago Press, pub date June 24, 2024

by Michael Shermer

The “residue problem” in science means that no matter how all-encompassing a theory is there will always be a residue of anomalies for which it cannot account. The most famous case in the history of science is that Newton’s gravitational theory could not account for the precession of the planet Mercury’s orbit, subsequently explained by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Many paradigm shifts happen, in fact, when enough anomalies build up to justify a new explanatory model.

Unfortunately, residues of unexplained anomalies open the door to autodidacts to jump in with their alternative theories to mainstream science. The widely-viewed 2023 Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, for example, follows alternative archaeologist Graham Hancock around the world as he exposes anomalies he asserts are unexplained by science and best accounted for by the lost civilization of Atlantis. Every episode of the popular History Channel series Ancient Aliens features alleged anomalies that scientists purportedly cannot explain without invoking extraterrestrials. And what were those UAP videos screened in the halls of Congress last year but Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena?

This tradition of collecting anomalies and cataloging them into paranormal, supernatural, extraterrestrial, mystical, and magical worlds just beyond the horizons of science can be traced back a century to Charles Fort (1874–1932) and his Fortean followers, which in turn shaped science fiction, avant-garde modernism, Surrealist art, and UFOlogy throughout the 20th century, skillfully recounted in a compelling narrative by cultural historian and author Joshua Blu Buhs, whose previous book, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, set the tone for this deeper dive into who and what gave rise to the original New Age.

Fort’s research methodology—more fully developed and proselytized by the writer and adman Tiffany Thayer, who went on to found the Fortean Society—is what today is called “anomaly hunting.” Intrepid would-be researchers rummage through scientific books, journal articles, magazine features, and newspaper stories for anything that doesn’t quite seem to fit with mainstream science. Fort’s original anomaly hunting expeditions netted him a plethora of weird things for which scientists had no explanation: frogs and fishes falling from the sky, ball lightning, UFOs, cryptids (like Bigfoot), talking dogs and vampires, poltergeist events, spontaneous human combustion, levitation, unexplained disappearances, out-of-place artifacts, and highly unusual coincidences.

Fort and his followers—Forteans, as they called themselves—“had their largest effect on the practices of science fiction, aesthetic modernism, and UFOlogy, pursuits seemingly peripheral to the mainstream,” Buhs explains in embedding his subject in time and place, and contrasting the movement he traces with that of the world of early 20th-century science. Buhs’ thesis—well supported and cogently argued—is that the belief in “modernity” as a coldly secular and mechanically scientific worldview devoid of wonder is wrong. On the contrary, “modernity released the marvelous, expanded the possible ways in which humanity came into the presence of the awesome. The death of God and the rise of science as the preeminent process for creating truth opened new provinces, provided new materials for imagining, inventing, experiencing enchantment.” The anomalies compiled by Fort and Forteans served as “inspiration for those who tried to imagine the future,” one that they could create “rather than having it thrust upon the world.”

Not everyone was so influenced by Fort and Foreanism. In 1950, the science writer Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled “The Hermit Scientist,” about what we would today call pseudoscientists, and in 1952 he expanded it into a book titled In the Name of Science with the descriptive subtitle “An entertaining survey of the high priests and cultists of science, past and present” (later republished as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science and now considered a classic in modern skepticism). Said cultists were none other than Forteans and their ideological offspring, about whom Gardner upbraided as cranks, which he characterized thusly: “(1) He considers himself a genius. (2) He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads. (3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. (4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. (5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.”

This mid-century encounter established a tension between believers (represented by Fort and Forteans of all stripes) and skeptics (represented by Gardner and others worried not only about Fortean claims but additional paranormal and occult beliefs). “If the present trend continues,” Gardner concluded, “we can expect a wide variety of these men, with theories yet unimaginable, to put in their appearance in the years immediately ahead. They will write impressive books, give inspiring lectures, organize exciting cults. They may achieve a following of one—or one million. In any case, it will be well for ourselves and for society if we are on our guard against them.”

Nevertheless, as Buhs notes, Garnder was a “mysterian”—those who believe there are some mysteries that will never be explained by science, such as consciousness, free will, and God—unwilling to completely dismiss all Fortean claims outright. And this opened the door to a different form of skepticism. Of Fort, Buhs reveals, “His was a radical skepticism that refused to accept anything as absolutely true or absolutely false.”

The problem with such enchanted thinking in which there is no clear boundary between science and pseudoscience, between the natural and the supernatural, between truth and falsehood, is today’s collapse in confidence in our institutions, from science and medicine to politics and the media. “Fort and Forteans played their part in the creation of this world,” Buhs concludes his cultural history. “They eroded the distinctions between truth and falsity, undermined the authority of experts and expertise. They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness.” Fort’s playful anomaly hunting “had been replaced by Thayer’s acerbic nihilism, which became omnipresent and decoupled from any need to compile evidence or craft arguments.” As a result, a century after Fort’s swerve away from the scientism of the modern world, we have theories that consist of only two words, “Fake News!”, one word, “Rigged!” and even one letter, “Q”.

In the end, science needs outsiders and mavericks who poke and prod and push accepted theories until they either collapse or are reinforced even stronger. But it also needs standards of evidence and norms of objectivity, truth telling, accountability, and professionalism. Unfortunately, outsiders like Forteans and their modern descendants tend to fall far short of these standards and norms.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Did you spot the young crocodile in yesterday’s post (South African time)?

Here’s the reveal:

And a close-up photo of the basking reptile:

This is a young Nile Crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus), a species found throughout Africa, and greatly feared by humans and wildlife alike.  Some information from Wikipedia:

Generally, the adult male Nile crocodile is between 3.5 and 5 m (11 ft 6 in and 16 ft 5 in) in length and weighs 225 to 750 kg (496 to 1,653 lb). However, specimens exceeding 6.1 m (20 ft) in length and 1,000 kg (2,200 lb) in weight have been recorded. It is the largest predator in Africa, and may be considered the second-largest extant reptile in the world, after the saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus). Size is sexually dimorphic, with females usually about 30% smaller than males. The crocodile has thick, scaly, heavily armoured skin.

Nile crocodiles are opportunistic apex predators; a very aggressive crocodile, they are capable of taking almost any animal within their range. They are generalists, taking a variety of prey, with a diet consisting mostly of different species of fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. As ambush predators, they can wait for hours, days, and even weeks for the suitable moment to attack. They are agile predators and wait for the opportunity for a prey item to come well within attack range. Even swift prey are not immune to attack. Like other crocodiles, Nile crocodiles have a powerful bite that is unique among all animals, and sharp, conical teeth that sink into flesh, allowing a grip that is almost impossible to loosen. They can apply high force for extended periods of time, a great advantage for holding down large prey underwater to drown.

Oy!

This one was small—less than a foot long, I’d guess—and was hard to spot among the rocks, both being gray in color.  It was pointed out by our guide on a river trip, and was taken from a moving boat.

The croc is young and still subject to predation. I hope it make it to adulthood!

Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili is having trouble with her memory:

Hili: I can’t recall.
A: Recall what?
Hili: Which year the Battle of Waterloo was.

Hili: Nie mogę sobie przypomnieć.
Ja: Czego?
Hili: W którym roku była bitwa pod Waterloo.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and the merging of political pandemic narratives

The post Great Barrington Declaration Author Joins COVID-19 Lab Leak-Pushing Group first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

In his famous novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein describes a future lunar settlement where future lunar residents (“Loonies”) send payloads of wheat and water ice to Earth using an electromagnetic catapult. In this story, a group of Loonies conspire to take control of this catapult and threaten to “throw rocks at Earth” unless they recognize Luna as an independent world. Interestingly enough, scientists have explored this concept for decades as a means of transferring lunar resources to Earth someday.

Given that space agencies are planning on sending missions to the Moon to create permanent infrastructure, there is renewed interest in this concept. In a recent paper, a team of scientists from China’s Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering (SAST) detailed how a magnetic launcher on the lunar surface could provide a cost-effective means of sending resources back to Earth. This proposal could become part of China’s long-term vision for a lunar settlement known as the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) – a joint project they are pursuing with the Russian space agency (Roscosmos).

According to a recent article in the South China Morning Post, the catapult would utilize magnetic levitation (maglev) technology and operate on the same principle as the hammer throw in athletics, “but rotating at increasing speeds before throwing the launch capsule towards Earth.” On the lunar surface, the near-vacuum environment and low gravity – roughly 16.5% of Earth’s gravity (0.165 g) – would facilitate the ejection of payloads. According to the SAST team, the proposed system could conduct two launches a day at one-tenth the cost of existing transport methods.

Visualization of the ILRS from the CNSA Guide to Partnership (June 2021). Credit: CNSA

As noted, the concept of a magnetic catapult on the Moon is a time-honored idea. Previous versions of the concept include the Slingatron proposed in 1998 by noted physicist Derek A. Tidman, which called for a circular magnetic accelerator rather than a rotating arm. Similarly, the launch system proposed by the Chinese research team would consist of a 50-meter (165 ft) rotating arm and a high-temperature superconducting motor. It would be powered by solar panels and a nuclear reactor and is designed to convert kinetic energy into electricity during the deceleration phase. This would allow it to recover more than 70% of the energy consumed after each launch.

After accelerating for ten minutes, the arm would achieve the Moon’s escape velocity of 2.4 km/second (1.5 mps) and release the payload on a trajectory toward Earth. The team also emphasizes that the main payload would be helium-3 harvested from lunar soil, which could be used to power fusion reactors on Earth. “The system’s technical readiness is relatively high,” they wrote. “Since it consumes only electricity and does not require any propellant, it will be relatively small in scale and straightforward to implement. The main goal is to extract and return helium-3 to help address Earth’s energy crisis. The project will also boost the development of space mining technologies, heavy launch vehicles, and artificial intelligence.”

While only 0.5 metric tons (0.55 U.S. tons) of this element can be found on Earth, an estimated 1 million metric tons (1.1 U.S. tons) are contained within the Moon’s regolith. According to the team’s paper, 20 metric tons (22 U.S. tons) would be enough to meet China’s annual electricity needs, whereas 1 million metric tons would be enough to meet the world’s energy needs for over a thousand years. They also estimate that the system will weigh about 80 metric tons (88 U.S. tons) and could remain in operation for at least 20 years.

However, construction of this system will have to wait until China has finished developing its Long March 9 (CZ-9) and Long March 10 (CZ-10) super-heavy launch vehicles. These rockets are vital to creating the ILRS, which is expected to be completed by 2035 with the help of other national space agencies. In this respect, the proposed launch system could become a part of China’s long-term plans for lunar development during the late 2030s or 2040s. The team’s proposed timelines are consistent with this: they hope to complete the development of the system’s key components by 2030 and anticipate full-scale implementation by 2045.

An artist’s concept of Hyper V Technologies Corp.’s Slingatron launch system, a 200-300 meter wide railroad into space. Credit: Hyper V Technologies Corp.

Naturally, as with all other proposals for lunar construction and development, there is the issue of cost. According to the research team, the cost of building the launch system would be an estimated 130 billion, equivalent to 18.25 billion USD. However, at last year’s meeting of the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), team member Chu Yingzhi stated that mining three to five tonnes of helium-3 annually could bring in revenues of 100 billion yuan. There are also a lot of technical and logistical challenges that need to be addressed before this system can be constructed.

For starters, the research team’s paper does not address how Helium-3 will be extracted from the local regolith. As Chu noted, there’s also the challenge of installing it on the rugged lunar surface, ensuring the rotating arm remains stable at high speeds, and ensuring it can operate in the lunar environment, which is subject to extreme variations in temperature, cosmic rays, and increased levels of solar radiation. But as a long-term vision, a magnetic launch system is an elegant proposal and a relatively cost-effective alternative to spacecraft launching from the surface.

Further Reading: South China Morning Post

The post China Proposes Magnetic Launch System for Sending Resources Back to Earth appeared first on Universe Today.

A team of researchers has discovered a set of methods that enabled the first successful CRISPR-based genome editing in Nile grass rats.

A monument in southern Spain that dates to between 3600 and 3800 BC appears to have been built with an understanding of geology and physics

A monument in southern Spain that dates to between 3600 and 3800 BC appears to have been built with an understanding of geology and physics

A multi-institutional team of scientists has developed a new superconductor material that could potentially be used in quantum computing and be a candidate 'topological superconductor.'

A multi-institutional team of scientists has developed a new superconductor material that could potentially be used in quantum computing and be a candidate 'topological superconductor.'

One of many photos taken over the last two days around Hoedspruit and the Blyde River Canyon, a fantastic canyon not far away. Can you spot the baby crocodile?

I’ll provide a reveal tomorrow South African time, though this one shouldn’t be too hard. Click to enlarge the photo.

(There will likely be a photo post tomorrow, though perhaps from Manyeleti.)

A new study provides insights on the geophysics behind asteroid formation and evolution.

To guide future research into solar geoengineering, an international group of scientists is making specific recommendations for evaluating proposals in order to identify the most feasible and legitimate scenarios for stratospheric aerosol intervention.

When the fever, pains and pus-filled lesions of an mpox infection strike, how dangerous is it and how can it be treated?

Computers made from DNA have previously only been able to store information or perform computations on it – now a new device can do both

A 3D quantum spin liquid has been discovered in the vicinity of a member of the langbeinite family. The material's specific crystalline structure and the resulting magnetic interactions induce an unusual behavior that can be traced back to an island of liquidity. An international team has made this discovery with experiments at the ISIS neutron source and theoretical modelling on a nickel-langbeinite sample.

Superconductivity theory proposed by physics team validated in international experiment: Cooper pairs display wave-like distribution in Kagome metals, enabling new technological applications like superconducting diodes.

A team of researchers has created a digital pathology platform based on artificial intelligence. The platform uses new algorithms developed by the team and enables fully automated analysis of tissue sections from lung cancer patients. The platform makes it possible to analyze digitized tissue samples on the computer for lung tumors more quickly and accurately than before.

Building on a landmark algorithm, researchers propose a way to make a smaller and more noise-tolerant quantum factoring circuit for cryptography.