Dr. Pamela Gay: This is our second anniversary edition coming to you live from Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I am here [Applause - Cheers] with the wonderful Drs. Phil Plait and Kevin Grazier. How are you guys doing?

Dr. Plait & Dr. Grazier: Cool, great…..We're at the only place here that's cool. It's like sweltering out there.

Pamela: It is about 100 degrees in each room and each room is filled with a bunch of IR radiation systems called human beings. They are all happily heating the room up large amounts. But, we are not here to discuss IR radiation today. Well, we could but we have to tie it in to the realms of science fiction TV, movies and books.

We're going to start with what gets done right and move on to what is done wrong. And those of you who saw Phil Plait speaking earlier, already got a hint of some of the things that are really bad in the Universe of bad Astronomy. [Laughter]

Dr. Phil Plait: All of them.

Pamela: Not all, because we have Kevin Grazier who is a ????? 2:03 scientist working on studying Saturn at the Jet Propulsion Labs in California. Besides having a really cool day job, he also helps make sure that there are a few TV shows out there that do a few things right. I'm going to give him a chance to brag about what he will.

Dr. Kevin Grazier: Thanks. We have an hour right? [Laughter] In what passes for my spare time, I also work as the Science Advisor on the TV series Battlestar Galactica and Eureka, an upcoming show called Virtuality and also [laughter] Phil and I both work on a children's animated series, a science education series called the Zula Patrol.

Pamela: For those of you who are out in the pod casting audience who cannot hear the audience of this room, I'm going to remind this room's audience there is a microphone, Swoopy has the microphone, save your snarky comments for when she walks up to you and hands you the microphone.

Snarky comments allowed but they must be amplified and recorded. We had a wonderful man who is not quite five years old say, "Oh, Zula Patrol," which is what both Kevin and Phil work on.

Phil: The Zula Patrol is a science-based program for little kids. Actually Kevin was one of the Science Advisors. We met at World Con and then Dragon Con two years ago. He asked me if I wanted to be on the show and so after awhile I got on too.

Kevin: Well actually I met Phil at World Con and then struck up a conversation and you are….and so.

Phil: Yeah, that was funny. I just sat down and we started talking and decided we have a lot in common. Except he does a lot more shows than I do.

Kevin: And having spoken to Phil and realizing he's a pretty reasonable guy and I've been to his website and pointed hundreds of people to it in the past, we had another Science Advisor on Zula at the time that I didn't get along with very well and I suggested that maybe one of us needed to go. And the show is now a lot better for Phil's input.

Phil: It's actually quite fun doing that sort of thing. I was quite surprised.

Pamela: So what this brings up is the fact that there are TV shows out there with writers who are willing to say "Hey, I write really well, maybe not so well with the science."

What is the process by which TV shows decide they need a Science Advisor and go out and hunt a PhD, hire them to get things right and how are you able to herd the writers into doing things that work?

Kevin: Wow that's a long question. Well, you know how Phil got the job, but for me, when I was in graduate school, a buddy of mine and I weren't really happy with the first couple of seasons of Star Trek Voyager. We thought it had so much potential and we decided to write a script and sent it in. Long story short, seven months later we were invited to come in and pitch stories.

They said we love your script, going in a direction we don't really want to go with the series (which I should point out they eventually did) [Laughter] So we pitched a few times primarily to two people, one named Brian Fuller who is known for "Pushing Daisies" and "Dead Like Me". Another was Michael Taylor who is now on the writing staff for both Galactica and Virtuality.

I got to know them and stayed in contact a little bit and when Galactica came on-line, Brian was having lunch with Ron Moore (for fellow Trekalons, Ron is executive producer of Battlestar) and Brian said if you need a Science Advisor, I know this guy at JPL. They called me in and essentially hired me on the spot. They gave me the first two scripts, gave m the series Bible. Then a few days later Richard Hatch who had been a buddy of mine for about seven years at the time, [Laughter]

Pamela: He was my first childhood crush.

Phil: Not the guy from Survivor Richard Hatch?

Kevin: No, the Richard Hatch from Battlestar Galactica and I had been buddies for 7 or 8 years at the time. He had been in talking to Ron a few days later about his role as Tom Zarek on the new Galactica and Richard said to Ron, "Oh, by the way if you need a Science Advisor, I know this guy." Ron said, "Oh no, we're already talking to somebody." And they were referring to the same person. So, that's how I got on Galactica and then a little while later, Galactica and Eureka which is a new starting series, shared an office building – the Rock Hudson building – at Universal and all the writers were having a lunch, a little team building exercise or whatever.

The writers assistants were saying they had some technical issues that we have to deal with on Eureka, how do you get yours solved? The Galactica team replied, "We have this guy at JPL and an hour later I got a call and I'm on Eureka." And also Virtuality simply because there are a lot of Galactica people who are doing Virtuality. As to Zula Patrol, it was even better. Somebody on a planetarium website said "Hey, they're hiring a Science Advisor on this show called Zula Patrol." I sent them an e-mail and told them what I do on Galactica.

By the time I got home I had a phone message on every phone I owned, e-mails, and I interviewed the next day. It was actually very amusing because Zula is about a lot of things Science, dedicated to principles of non-violence and worthwhile goals. It teaches more than just Science. It teaches good values. And so they asked me to come in at 0800 next morning for an interview and asked me to bring some of my notes [Laughter] from Galactica. Now, if you've seen Galactica, it's not a child-friendly show.

So I think I had taught that night so I couldn't go back to JPL and get notes that are on my computer at work. I had to rely on what's on my home computer. Our fourth episode was about a flight deck accident and there was a scene (that originally got cut) where Chief Tyrol was referring to during the investigation he said he'd never had a death on his flight deck. He was talking about a guy who got sucked into a Viper turbine and how he lost a leg but he never had a death.

This was the only set of notes that I had. [Laughter] So, as I'm interviewing for the producer of the show dedicated to things like non-violence she said at the very beginning of the interview, which was going very well and I'm hoping that she doesn't ask for any notes, she says, "Do you have the Galactica notes you've written?" Oh, here. "Oh, thank you." [Laughter]

Pamela: The look on Kevin's face depicts a woman getting more and more disturbed as she reads.

Kevin: That was pretty much it. But, they hired me anyway. The rest is as they say history.

Pamela: So you're working with a group of writers, what sort of educational backgrounds do a lot of these people have? Do they come from science backgrounds? Do they come from writing backgrounds? Are they people who just started writing out of High School?

Kevin: They're usually from writing backgrounds, the creative, right-brained people. Certainly on Zula our writers are right-brainers who are increasingly educating themselves. On Galactica we have a very dramatic range of people. Some are really into science, in particular Bradley Thompson, David Wettle who are both very scientifically oriented. They consult me early on but they have a good idea of what they want to do from the onset.

We have other writers who aren't really scientifically oriented and they are more character oriented. Usually when they write a script there's not that much tech in them because it's a character-oriented story. But we have some people on Galactica who are technically oriented. On Eureka, again same thing we have some people who are really into the tech and some who are into character and sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't.

Pamela: How often do they come and how much do you get this on Zula as well that they come to you with this really great script that is physically impossible no matter how you try to manipulate technology, physics won't allow it? How do you deal with circumstances like that to prevent your shows from becoming Armageddon? [Laughter]

Phil: Keep Michael Bay away from them. [Laughter] I think that the first rule on Zula, the show itself is Science-based but it's an educational program so there are various topics. We'll have episodes about Planets and different Astronomy topics but also Ecology, Oceanography, History, Paleontology, all sorts of topics.

So, instead of having one Science Advisor like Battlestar can get away with it because typically it's more of a Physics-based show if you want to call it that. Zula covers everything. So, there is a team of Science Advisors. I don't even think we need two Astronomy Advisors, but who am I to argue since if they get rid of one, it's gonna be me. [Laughter]

The scripts can run from anything so we actually have as opposed to a fiction show like Battlestar or Eureka, we have brainstorming sessions at the beginning of the season where all of the advisors come in and ask what topics do we have that we want to see covered? We would talk about them and have secondary topics.

Then those are handed to the writers and in fact, we covered last season a lot of the shows that we discussed. They put out a draft, a two-page summary then we get the first, second, fourth draft with all the changes in it. You see it evolving. I don't think we had a single script that I looked at that I thought we couldn't do, that it was totally wrong. There were some that had some basic errors but they were all fixable.

It is a fun process. We go back and forth, I would disagree with one of the Biologists on one topic but at some point I had to admit I'm an Astronomer so maybe I'll back down. [Laughter] But Kevin and I didn't agree on everything, but that's okay, we worked it out. It's like at some point one of us would decide it's not that important. That was usually me.

Kevin: Not only that, it's also that we tend to have complementary skills. While Phil is correct that we've covered a lot of Science at the same time it really is a Space Science show, more Space than anything else.

I'm a Planetary Scientist and Phil is a Stellar Astronomer, so there are areas where I wouldn't even begin to question his advice and vise versa. It's really powerful when we haven't discussed something and we both come in with the exact same point and say, "This needs to be changed."

Phil: All the Science Advisors get a draft and we make our edits and change the name with our initials after it or something so that when we send them back to the writers and producers they can keep everything straight.

There were a lot of times when I would see the notes: "Kevin and Phil both agree on this so we need to change it." It's awesome, it's pretty cool. So, he goes out to Neptune and stops and then I take the rest of the Universe and it works out pretty well. It's the only thing I've got on him because he's doing all these other shows that I don't want to do.

Kevin: And you should probably make sure you drink from closed bottles of water while you're sitting next to me. There are those who never know what I'm going to put in your glass. You're probably not going to get the opportunity to work on Battlestar. We've been done since June.

Pamela: Well if only the episodes would air SOON! All of us are quivering with anticipation and our hearts will explode if we wait.

Kevin: Well, your heart may explode when the season starts too.

Phil: Yeah, you know, I've known Kevin for a couple of years and he keeps dropping hints like that: "Wait until you see the episode three months from now!" Bite me. "We have an episode that may appeal to you," he says. And I'm thinking okay, I'm guessing exploding star but that's all I know and then finally that episode aired…..

Pamela: So tell me about the evolution of that wonderful star that led the way to so many coolnesses and ….14:50

Phil: La, la, la…..I haven't seen that yet.

Pamela: Nevermind, moving on…We're not going to spoil things for Phil. So they're all down on the planet, standing there Temple, Star, and Super Nova in the painting. Tell us the evolution of that storyline from the scientific side.

Kevin: The scientific side of that was actually kind of fun. What happened is I had been asked to come into Universal to give a PowerPoint presentation to the writers of Galactica on potential signs and portents and things that would be good to find along the way and things that wouldn't be so good.

For example: Constellations – bad. Constellations are so dramatically different from different orientations, different distances and things like that. We don't want to be looking for Constellations. We do want to be looking for things like Pulsars. Pulsar is good. We find a Pulsar.

Clusters are hazardous. Clusters have a lot of radiation passing through – bad. I did this long presentation about good and bad and then afterwards I was sitting there talking to Bradley Thompson. I made the comment that you don't have to have a Star a whole lot bigger than ours that the lifetime drops to about a billion years. Our Star will live ten billion years. We say it's a medium size Star. It's actually bigger than 95% of the Stars, it just happens to fall in the middle of the major diagram of how we classify Stars.

So our Star is actually fairly large, but it has a fairly long lifetime – 10 billion years. The lifetime of a Star equals one over Mass squared. If you get a little bit bigger than ours, you have a lifetime of about a billion years, which sounds a long time but it took 800 million years for life to spring up on Earth.

So, I wonder how many times in the history of our Galaxy has the first sign of bacteria, the first life to spring up on the Planet – we were here – BOOM is eradicated by a Super Nova. Or anyway it is eradicated by its Star. They go ooh. [Laughter]

You notice they land on the algae planet where they're getting the algae and I will assume in that episode that any other form of vegetation was not indigenous. Maybe it was brought by the thirteenth tribe or whatever.

So, we have algae and we have hopes that the algae are eradicated by the exploding star. That actually off-handed comment became the two episodes: Rapture and I Jupiter.

Pamela: Very cool. So, I'm going to just assume that the things you guys work with are mostly correct and move on to ask hasn't there been at least one time that you've lost to the writer? I mean on Eureka, there are things that I just sorta laugh at. I love the show, watch it regularly but it does cause giggling.

Phil??: Well, even the producer was talking about that. We did a panel with him and he was talking about one particular episode where the science wasn't so good and even the plot was kinda silly.

Pamela: But that's why you watch Eureka. It's the anti-Battlestar Galactica.

Phil?: Particularly, the irony is for that particular episode Jaime Paglia was the episode where we have a bunch of Nanobots.

Kevin: I wasn't going to bring up the exact episode…. [Laughter] but okay.

Phil: Well he said it was on-line. He's over there recording us. So if he says that in an episode primal that we have a bunch of Nathan Starks……18:15 that are made of Nanobots. At the same time he'd made earlier references to the fact that some of our episodes are homages18:23 to other SciFi shows that we enjoyed and Eureka does whatever Killer Tomatoes, we actually discussed that by the way. I said I personally didn't have a whole lot of problem with that episode because I thought it was homage to the Michael Creighton's "Prey".18:38 which had that happen in "Prey". I didn't see the issue there. There is some suspension disbelief required. There are other episodes that I….. [Laughter]

Kevin: He's pulling his hair out there.

Phil: But you know it's a balance between the science and the dramatic dictates of the episode and in some, science is better than others. That's going to happen in any Science Fiction show.

Kevin: Just to continue with that thought, it's kinda funny on Zula Patrol, which is a kid's show. First of all, it's about Aliens who are basically Intergalactic Cops and they chase after their goofy Super Villains. But they go outside of their spaceship and they can breathe and they can talk.

There are all these basic sounds in Space and there are all these basic rules they are breaking and yet we have to talk about sometime Space being a vacuum. Or, you need air to breathe and you have to kinda go, "Yeah." [Laughter]

We have to really ignore the basic premises of the show itself while we're giving a Science lesson and that's a form of double-speak that's interesting. We had some issues with that just talking about how to do this. It's a kid show so we work it out.

Pamela: So what are your favorite really good things that other people have done?

Kevin & Phil: Firefly.

Kevin: They get away with things that we had intended to do on Galactica and I don't know why eventually we went away from this. Firefly – no sound in Space.

Pamela: Yeah, it's wonderful. And there isn't a brown coat in this room. This is the only room in all of Dragon Con where no one is wearing a brown coat.

Phil: That show was great. There was even a show where they have to fire a gun and that was really fun because a lot of bullets actually use their own oxidizer so you could in fact sometimes fire bullets in Space. It depends on the ammo you are using.

But they made a point and said no, this powder needs an oxidizer. They had to wrap a spacesuit around a gun. I was really amused by that because they didn't really have to do that. I think it may have been a misunderstanding on their part that they even did it at all but it was so cool when they did that. [Laughter]

Kevin: We have actually had discussion on Galactica about having an oxidizer in the charge for the weaponry. We had established that they are bullets. They actually had Tyrol tear one apart and dump out the gunpowder or the equivalent and a person could not do that but good thing he's a Cylon. [Laughter]

Phil: I have to agree on Firefly. That was such an awesome show and the idea of traveling between planets, the idea that there was a Solar System of this many world in it and we could terraform them that easily. Josh Wheaton has gone and said does not drive this show, I'll make it right when it's good and when I can.

In fact it makes a lot of the Science really good; they did a Crazy Ivan in the pilot which was great and all kinds of stuff like that. I enjoy that. Every show has its ups and downs. I'm a big Star Trek fan, always have been and when you're watching Star Trek, you just kinda say well…. What I like to see is a show that is consistent. If you are going to say we cannot go faster than light, then you stick with it.

Kevin: Or like what Galactica does which I really like is we have a form of Space travel where you pop out of Space and that's where you pop out. You may not know exactly where you're going to be, they have to do a triangulation to figure it all out. I love that.

In Star Trek, people ask me, "how fast is warp drive?" I say it is precisely as fast as the writers need it to be to get to a Planet just in time to do whatever it is they need to do. I actually wrote, and it is one of the few pieces of fan23:00 fiction I've written, just sitting on my computer and I've never published it using that idea, twisting it and getting the Enterprise to a place right after they need to be there. So they get there too late but their speed is actually part of the plot line.

At some point you just have to swallow and say, yeah warp drive and everything. But then Larry Niven, the Science Fiction writer talks about this. He says the problem is you have a really advanced technology; you have a list of them. In his world you've got Stasis Fields which are basically impenetrable Force Fields. Time doesn't move inside the field so you have that.

You have transport booths where you walk into the booth and poof you're someplace else and as he creates these great devices, he found that writing a plot became impossible because you could always solve the mystery or solve the crisis using one of these gadgets. He said that's why he wrote a lot at first and slowed down as time went on because he couldn't think of anything to do this.

In Star Trek there is an episode where in the second season, Dr. Pulaski gets the aging virus and they take a hair from her brush, stick it the transporter and poof! She's relatively young again. I'm thinking, hello, twenty-two was a good year for me. You could have set the clock back a little bit more! [Laughter]

So, why doesn't everybody do this? They say well, it wouldn't be right for us to take away the human equation. It's the inconsistency like that that makes me nuts. I'm a huge Dr. Who fan and I don't think Dr. Who shows are consistent even within the plot lines themselves.

Pamela: No.

Phil: I love how now in the new revamped show they will talk about time travel and he'll say well, it's complicated. I love that when they do that. "Here's how we're going to get out of this plot hole." Or he says time doesn't flow like that. It's a wibbly wobbly timey wimey thing. [Laughter] And I was just like dancing when I heard that.

They went out of their way in one episode this last season to say that there are fixed events in Space and time. Everything else can change, but like Mt. Vesuvius blowing up – fixed event, has to happen. I was like that was very cool. That is a get out of plot hole free card forever.

Kevin: And one example I use like Phil said in the beginning, we did a similar discussion in Comic Con a few weeks ago and Phil and I were joined by Jaime Paglia of Eureka. At the time I made an analogy that as far as fixed points goes, let's look at Earth's history. There will come a point where our Sun will expand and swallow Earth. That's going to happen no matter what happens on Earth….

Pamela: Not necessarily, it depends on the Mass loss rates of the Sun.

Phil: She's right. [Laughter] There will come a time a time the Earth will get fried either way.

Kevin: The Earth will get fried eventually and the Sun is going to do it unless we move it. It turns out there are ways to do that as well. My point was going to be that Earth will get fried eventually and no matter what happened on Earth leading up to that point, no matter how human history has advanced, it's going to get fried.

The day after Earth gets consumed the state beforehand is not going to matter. It's not like you're trapped there in chaos. That will happen. That's your fixed point. Phil of course goes and points out that except for in Dr. Who they've actually constrained the Sun from doing that.

Phil: Yeah and they sold tickets to the day the Earth destroys. They used devices [Laughter] to keep the Sun from expanding and then turned them off and let it expand and eat the Earth. I thought that was cool. [Laughter]

Pamela: So we clearly adore Dr. Who despite all the terrible things it does to the consistency of everything. Even the Doctor can't stay constant. What is the thing that is scientifically wrong the most but is still a guilty pleasure?

??: Dr. Who.

Pamela: Okay, so that one was asked and answered.

??: Space 1999?

??: I love Space 1999 and every science fiction show, you have a couple of conceits. A couple like on Galactica for example if you can handle faster than light travel, artificial gravity which is a standard in Sci-Fi……

Pamela: It will never happen unless we do really weird things that are never going to happen.

??: Like turn on the LHC? Right?

Pamela: I don't think we're ever going to capture and control gravitons. It's not going to happen.

??: Well you're assuming gravitons exist and that's one model of gravity that you're already ascribing to that may or may not be true.

??: Anyway, we digress.

??: I'm glad Pamela wasn't the Wright Brothers' advisor. No, I'm kidding. Actually, as far as Physics goes today I agree with her but we'll see what happens in the next couple of hundred years. [Laughter]

Phil: I'm sure on Galactica you have a couple conceits? And also there's the whole sound in Space thing that we hadn't planned on doing from the outset. Apart from that, everything else we get pretty much right and they actually listen to their Science Advisor.

On Space 1999 if you can get past the whole Moon being pushed out of Earth's orbit, then the rest is actually not that bad. Have you ever seen a more functional spacecraft than an Eagle?

Kevin: The Eagle is the single coolest that is ever been invented for Science Fiction. I love it.

Phil: So the movie itself is depicted as pretty good. From a Science standpoint when it first came out, they called it Science Faction.

Kevin: I remember that. In 2000, I did a Science Fiction convention for Space 1999 and that was very cool. It was one of my first Science Advisor gigs at a Con. I had to watch the show again. I hadn't watched it in 15 years or whatever. It came out in 1977 I think.

They sent me a bunch of copies of the show, the pilot, the one with the Black Hole and a few others. I realized watching them that as a Scientist I actually had prepared a talk to say if you're going to push the Moon out of the Earth's orbit with an explosion, you're going to vaporize the Moon. The amount of energy you have to give the Moon to move at that speed would vaporize it.

Then you watch these episodes and you realize there is this sort of mystical power that is behind a lot of this. You don't know what it is. They don't actually say God, they kinda tip in to make that it's God but you never really find out.

These Aliens seem to know about it as they go and it seems like the Moon's path is random to them. When you look at the big picture there is a Force behind their reasoning and all of this. I'm not big into the Mysticism and that sort of thing, but it was a cool idea. It wound up tying all of these episodes together and they weren't that bad.

I was actually really impressed with the writing. I have to say that Victor Bergman, the Scientist on the show was a hero of mine when I was a kid because sometimes they would say Victor come to the Command Center and he would come down there and Commander Konic would say: "What is that thing?" Victor would tap his teeth with his pen and say: "I don't know."

What the hell did Spock ever say? I don't know. "Why it's an energy field Captain and it's being held together by….." So, I loved that about Bergman. He was a good role model for Science.

Pamela: The key to being a good Scientist is being able to say "I don't know" but that isn't always the key to good/bad Sci-Fi. Its part of the campiness of so much of what we see in Science Fiction and it's the camp of "I know everything" is the quintessential Scientist in a lot of these shows.

You need your Mr. Data; you need your Mr. Spock to get the campy, move forward quickly paced. It's the retrospective darker things that you start to get in Battlestar, that you had in Babylon 5, that you had in 1999. Its different genres. Is it required with the campiness to always have the genius?

Eureka has many, many flocks of geniuses [Laughter]. How is it that the "I don't know" gets associated with the darker Science Fiction and the campy Mr. Spock gets associated with the happy uplifting world is perfect Science Fiction?

Phil: Eureka is like the anti-Star Trek. Because Star Trek has Data and then everybody else, but in Eureka you've got all the geniuses and then you've got Sheriff Carter the one who doesn't understand anything is the one who winds up solving [Laughter] everything.

Kevin: Well we had different kind of geniuses and Carter obviously makes connections. That's what Carter does. He says "I have this over here", and he somehow connects it. That is his goal in life. Genius is what are you genius of what topic and he obviously makes connections well. He doesn't know about Quantum Physics or DNA or about Magma. My point being is Carter obviously makes connections better than others.

We as scientists may not make connections in an interdisciplinary way. There are areas of Science that I'm not as well-versed in as others and so I may not make a connection as a Scientist.

Someone who has a little bit of indoctrination to all of this because he has been asking questions may make connections that I wouldn't. He's actually there asking the questions of the people and he gets enough information from the people that he makes those connections. I don't think it's all that big of a stretch that he solves the problems. He has the questions he's been asking. That's what he's trained to do.

Pamela: So we do have these two species of Science Fiction. There is the happy bouncy world is perfect, we're aspiring to coolness bouncy people. Then there is the dark oh no Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica darker mysterious, the world is scary the Universe is a scarier place trying to kill us where there are much more things we don't know.

How is it that we somehow end up with the things we don't know are dark and scary and Scientists knowing everything in the happy bouncy Universes? Why is mystery not happy and bouncy?

Kevin: I think that's always been true. It's mysterious, that's the nature of this area of the unknown. We're afraid of the unknown. You mentioned Galactica as being depressing; I'm going to just drive Phil nuts here.

Phil: La, la, la…….

Pamela: So the three of us though are Scientists. We went into this because we love the mystery; we're excited by the questions. I love sitting down and trying to tear apart why the heck a Variable Star is doing what it is doing; why the heck an Evolving Galaxy is doing what it is doing in the environment it is doing it in and it sometimes feel like running jubilantly with scissors. Whatever you stab is hopefully the truth.

??: But you know at the same time I refer back to Dr. Who. There was an idyllic episode years ago where there was a couple, a man and woman who were Scientists, one is a Doctor. They are about to be killed maybe, they are in prison and the doctor says: "You forget I'm a doctor. I'm going to know the name and function of every organ that pops out of me." [Laughter]

??: I guess you've put your finger on a basic conundrum, a basic paradox about humanity and that is that the mysterious is scary but we've evolved to understand that if we don't know something maybe we shouldn't stick our faces in it.

When you walk into the dark cave there is a saber-tooth tiger in there and it bites your head off. So, if you're brave, you get killed and your genes are removed from the population and so the scaredey-pants live on…. [Laughter]

On the other hand, you'll never learn about your environment, you'll never grow and spread if you don't look over that cliff or around the corner or in the cave.

Pamela: What you're telling me is people like me who like the mystery, who like the question, who like the unknown……

??: You're removed from the gene pool.

Pamela: Right. I am a mutant who someday will die by sticking my face in a cave.

??: Yeah, you're the kind of person on the airplane who wonders:" What does this button do?" Not a good idea.

Pamela: But nowadays we luckily have shotguns as we approach caves. But how do we communicate that asking questions is cool? Not knowing something keeps me employed.

The fact that there are things that we don't understand about our Universe makes the Universe worth studying and it is fun. How do we get this excitement back into the Science Fiction as well as the plot devices?

??: I think you had mentioned Star Trek as an example of a happy bouncy where they know everything. Well, they don't and the extent of exploration was part of that. In fact, look at Voyager. From a management standpoint in the real world didn't figure out its direction in the few years, it was one thing one season and another one the next. Eventually they found their direction the last four seasons and they stuck with it.

One of the things Janeway said is "I'm done and we're done collectively whining about our fate in life. We're going to enjoy exploring on the way home because that's what we do." So, she's acknowledging there is a whole boatload of things that are on our way between here and home that we don't understand and we are going to start collecting data about. Right there is the sense of we don't know but we're going to find out.

Pamela: As we move forward with you two out there taking over the Universe and advising so many different things and probably mentoring writers as you go, how do you instill in them a sense of wonder?

Phil: Enthusiasm. Ever since I was a kid, I've loved this stuff. I will always walk outside of my house and whenever I walk outside and go to my car to go to the store to pick up a gallon of milk or whatever, if it's dark out I look up. It's the first thing I do. It's a habit. It's like, oh, there's Jupiter, oh there's Venus, over the mountains.

Pamela: Hopefully there are no stairs between your front door and the car.

Phil: Somebody told me that every Astronomer they know has twisted an ankle or broken a nose tripping while walking out of their door and getting eaten by a saber-tooth tiger. But I think that's the point. I love this stuff. I just finished a book about every possible depressing Cosmic catastrophe you can think of. Gamma ray bursts, Super Nova.

My book is "Death From the Skies" and it is coming out in October. Pamela has read it. The point is these were all massively depressing scenarios but they were fun to research and fun to write about and so just having a native enthusiasm about it is really what a lot of these people see.

I do Coast-to-Coast A.M., which is kind of a paranormal radio show. I love it. They have ten million listeners and that's a lot of potential book buyers. The host is a really nice guy and I think he was surprised that when a Scientist came on, he was making jokes and was having a good time.

I have some other friends who do the show and they do the same thing. I think that goes a lot farther showing that this stuff is cool because IT IS cool.

Pamela: Part of what we're doing is we're also dispelling the mythology of what a Scientist is. Especially, as we start creating new well, Baltar, oh my God that is not the way Scientists, the way we have them depicted in our textbooks look like. I might have decided to become a Scientist much earlier had I had Baltar as a role model. Sorry, I'm admitting I am a total Battlestar Galactica fan.

I had a fascinating interaction earlier today. I was waiting in line to go get coffee, standing next to a security guard. He looks me up and down and asks me what I'm dressed up as. I'm thinking, this is what happens when I steal my husband's credit card and go to Macy's. So, I look at him and say, I'm a Scientist; I'm an Astro-Physicist. He looks at me, looks up and down. I said to him: "Really I'm an Astronomer here giving talks." He said I didn't know Scientists were shaped like that.

Kevin: I on the other hand, have been aware of this for many years. [Laughter]

Pamela: I'm not sure what he was expecting but I'm okay with it and now maybe he'll pay more attention to Science. If it works, I'm okay with that. We need to change how people look, how people question and Science Fiction is a great way to tap into audiences that might not be otherwise Science inclined. They're more like the world is ending inclined or go and explore Aliens inclined.

Don't take that the wrong way. There is Science embedded in all of this. I passed a college Astronomy exam because I watched Next Generation and learned about Dyson Spheres instead of studying my textbook. I learned enough to pass my exam.

??: I would really like to hear how you passed by knowing what a Dyson Sphere is.

Pamela: Because I didn't even know what the term was. I'd missed that part of my book because I decided that wasn't possibly ever going to be on the exam. [Laughter] I at least knew the term and then I could calculate the flux hitting it and figure out all……It worked. I at least knew the term. I wouldn't have known the term had I not watched Star Trek: Next Generation I would have sat there with the question and not known the answer. Kevin is staring at me like I am a freak! [Laughter]

Kevin: It's more like, you so dodged a bullet. The Gods were smiling on you that day.

Pamela: Sometimes a girl gets lucky. [Laughter] So we've told you all far too much than we should have I think. What questions do you have for us?

Audience: I have a Babylon 5 related question for all 3 of you but particularly for the Planetary Scientists. I'm impressed with the way that they did the spaceships. I think they did a very good job depicting Space battles in free-fall and having to work that around, but what do you feel about the way they depicted planets and planetary surfaces?

Kevin: I thought it was fantastic. I thought they did a great job with the planetary surfaces, their orbit around a habitable Planet. Not every Planet was habitable, there were gas Planets, colonies on Gannemead 44:10 ______ If I didn't make a big deal of it and thought hey, that's wrong then they did a good job of it. I'd never even given it that much thought until now.

I had with the Space battles idea thought because we had to think about that on Galactica and you notice our Vipers move similar to the Star Furies, the only difference being the Vipers are aerodynamic because they're designed as dual role to Atmosphere and Space. That means they have to be ______44:31 and the Star Furies never intend to go into an atmosphere so they're _____44:36 and can get away with that.

The Space battles in B5 were really good. Something else that was really good which was never really done right in Science Fiction is you'll notice that if somebody fires a laser from a blaster or from a spacecraft, you'll see it as a bolt whereas it would be given the speed of light being what it is, it would connect and unconnect. What you see is the shadow of it. They just fire and slice through things like a __________45:06 often would. That's a small detail that gets lost but that's how they would.

Even the original ballast on Galactica 45:12 did it fairly well where you don't see a bolt. You wouldn't see it in an atmosphere unless there is smoke to see the beam. You pull a trigger and the explosion is at the other end. That's actually reasonably well done.

Pamela: Yeah, and it saves money on the Sci-Fi budget.

??: I was thinking that because in the original Star Trek, sometimes the phasers had beams and sometimes you would shoot somebody and there would just be a light and they would fall over. I thought yeah their budget must be running short that month. They got the Science right because they ran out of money. [Laughter]

Pamela: By any means possible. Other questions?

Jack Jaffe: I'm a creative comment writer and I could never afford you guys. Is there a resource for us as amateur writers to get real Scientists so that we're writing correctly?

Pamela: bautforum – It stands for Bad Astronomy Universe Today Forum and we hide AstronomyCast there as well. It is filled with a ginormous population of people discussing all aspects of Astronomy, Space Science, Astro-photography and sometimes random crap.

There are Forums there where you can go and ask questions of people with all education levels participating in dialogue, mentoring one another, asking and answering questions. It's a community of people you can and dialogue with.

??: Check the show notes for more.

Audience: I'm curious. Just ruling in all different kinds of media, written as well as video and all that, what's the most heinous use of Science in any show or book that you remember?

Pamela, Kevin, Phil: Armageddon. [Laughter]

Kevin: A friend of mine said that movie was like having a steel pail put on your head for two hours and somebody banging it with a wrench. [Laughter]

Pamela: I have to admit my friends who love me dearly and protect me and I love them back for the protection they give my psyche, forbid me from seeing this movie when it came out. I have never been allowed to see it and this is good, I think. I went to a teacher training workshop about a month ago for the GLAST now named FERMI Mission and they were going through and talking about the bad Science in it.

I'd been happily sitting in the back of the room working on things for the International Year of Astronomy, minding my own business, wallflower watching the teacher training going on and I became a heckler. The evil Pamela inside of me emerged and ranted at the screen! Oh my God!

??: Yeah, yeah….[Laughter] I'd like to say that it has one thing correct. It's a movie about an Asteroid and Asteroids exist. [Laughter] After that, yeah…..

???: I'm all about suspension of disbelief 48:24 and I am serious when I say that movie lost me in the first 30 seconds. You see the impact that wipes out the Dinosaurs and the shock-wave going all around the Planet and I said, no.

??: And they also said that was the equivalent of 10,000 nuclear bombs blowing up and actually it was like 300 million. They grossly underestimated it.

Pamela: And if you want to come up with a big number, overshoot! Don't undershoot by orders of magnitude. That's just silly.

??: No, I think you can do that incorrectly too. I remember War of the Worlds they tried to wrap it up in the last episode. They said what brought the Aliens to Earth were the first Nuclear Tests. The flash of energy from the first Nuclear Tests were detectable from far, far away. So overshooting is not always good.

???: I think the x-rays emitted from atmospheric tests are actually detectable from a long way off.

Pamela: But if you consider the Sun, you're….

??: You're swamped by the Sun.

Pamela: And Coronal Mass Ejections – how do you differentiate between the two?

Phil: That whole show was based on the fact that the Martians invaded in the 1950s as the movie depicted. The wonderful George _____49:45 movie. I heard there was a remake but….La,La,La – yeah, I ignore that. And then the Aliens come back and in the intervening four decades, everybody has forgotten. If you watch the movie "War of the Worlds" the Earth is flattened. So it's just the whole premise of that show is ridiculous.

Kevin: Well that's true but it's not always good to over or under…… [Laughter]

Phil: I actually kinda liked the Tom Cruise "War of the Worlds". It was kind of an amalgam of the original book, the '38 radio programs and the 53 movie. It had elements of all of those.

Kevin: I have to admit that there was a scene where the train goes by. That made it one of the best scenes I have ever seen filmed. They're all like "oh, a train's coming yah". All the refugees are walking out – I think it was Boston – and they hear the train coming and they all stand there and it's very quiet.

Then the train goes by and at full speed it goes by and it's on fire. Then it just passes by and ding, ding, ding…. And the gates go up and everybody just keeps walking. [Laughter]

Phil: That was depressing. It was really well done.

Pamela: Next question.

Audience: I really hate to ask you all to comment on something that none of you all probably have ever worked on, but just because I'm curious, would you care to comment on the Stellarizing of Jupiter in 2010 and…..

Pamela: Not going to happen.

??: Jupiter – you need the small Stars ………..51:12 Jupiter masses.

???: Right so Jupiter … you know I said in Science Fiction you get one conceit? That's your conceit. Actually I thought 2010 from the Science standpoint wasn't bad. The small details, we had Discovery in orbit around IO51:25 for years and its covered in Sulfur because the IO is volcanic and it spews out Sulfuric Lava – well Sulfur anyway.

There are a lot of things that were really recommended ………51:36 the whole capture sequence was pretty well done. The L…..51:43 spinning through Gravity was fairly well done. There were a lot of things that were I think very good. I would hope 2010 has fairly good Science.

Kevin?Phil?: That's your …….51:51 is adding mass to the Aliens and whoever we don't see adding mass to Jupiter to turn it into a Sun which would have melted all of its icy Moons. But the fact of the matter is it was actually fairly insightful when the Alien said: "All these Moons are yours except Europa". Attempt no landing there because the Aliens who did this – which we don't see had put life on Europa.

That was an experiment they didn't want humans to screw up. It turns out Europa may be one of the places in the Solar System that has life maybe even over and above Mars.

Pamela: It's cool when the real world turns out to be just as funky as the imagined Science Fiction world and in this case, they aligned.

Phil: It's even better than that because in the original version of 2001, this all took place on Saturn not Jupiter. The Monolith was on the Moon Iapetus around Saturn. Of course, Kevin would know about this studying Cassini.

But evidently when Voyager passed by Iapetus it showed some strange features on it that were somewhat reminiscent of what Arthur C. Clark had originally written in 2001. I assume the story is true that Sagan sent a picture of this Moon to Clark with a note on it that said: "Thinking of you."

Kevin: I hadn't heard that one but it turns out Iapetus, the Moon where the Monolith was instead of the Jupiter system in the book.

Iapetus – half light and half dark. We used to say half of it is as dark as freshly laid asphalt and half is bright as freshly fallen snow. Well, the asphalt part is true but since we've been there with Cassini the other part is more like snow in Detroit in March. [Laughter]

Pamela: And on that cheerful note we'll take one more question and then we're going to have to say Good Night.

Audience: Hi Pam – you're even cuter in person than I thought you'd be. [Laughter] And hi to those other guys up there. I have more of a concern or maybe you can comment.

There is a lot of mystery – I think that's what keeps Science Fiction in business – if we ever do find anything out there, any other life, is the mystery gone? And do we search elsewhere?

Pamela: No. No. I have to say, and this is something that Fraser and I talk about and one of these days we'll have to do a debate – not as a normal show. With our shows we try and stay fact-based.

He and I both are on opposite sides of this. He'd love it if life's out there and we discovered it in our lifetime! I don't want that to happen. Not because I'm anti-Alien but because I'm anti what Humanity will do when we find the Aliens.

The movie Independence Day where you have all the people on the roofs – come get me. And then you have all the doomsday people with their signs and their clans and Kool-Aid and all of that. Really finding Aliens will cause a bit of insanity I don't want to experience.

There are all sorts of different ways to think about it, worry about it. It doesn't destroy the mystery – it does do interesting things to Religion. That's a discussion for a different track.

??: But if we do find life in our Solar System which is where we'd find it first, it would be bacterial. When you look at the time scales involved, the Earth was actually bacterial for several billion years before multi-cellular life evolved.

???: The Earth is still mostly bacteria.

Pamela: Your bodies are mostly bacteria.

??: Now we're finding out that our human bodies are estimated to be over half bacteria. If you remember the Star Trek animated series from the 70s there was an episode called BEM – which is funny because it stands for Bug-Eyed Monster – that was a colony creature like a jellyfish. Its arm was one creature, its leg and its torso was something else. Turns out that's what we are – a colony of bacteria. We're jellyfish. Ewh.

Pamela: Bags of water.

??: Ugly bags of mostly water, right. I think that when we do that, it will enhance the mystery. When we find this life, it's going to be like what Jody Foster's character in Contact said that we'll find out how unlikely and how rare and precious and wonderful life is.

The vast majority of Planets we find in the Galaxy will be covered in goo. For something to be advanced – if you want to use that word – like we are, is going to be that much more precious. I think it's going to be a good thing.

Pamela: It changes our whole idea of the forms life can take. Peter Ward has written several really magnificent books that discuss life, how rare it is, how rare the Earth might be…. One of the cool things he has done is he's made room in the taxonomy of life for there to be life that has evolved on other planets.

Let's take life on Earth, give it it's own up above Kingdom division and then start making branches for life that evolved on other Worlds in other ways perhaps with a slightly different subset of Amino Acids. Nucleic Acids – I get that one wrong every time! I'm not a Biologist, but an Astro-Physicist. They're different.

There's lots of mystery in the Universe and every new piece of information we find gives us a little bit more understanding and just makes the picture we're trying to paint a little bit bigger and requires a lot more paint. It's a wonderful miraculous Universe – miraculous is a bad word – it's a wonderful marvelous Universe filled with Science that we're still trying to understand.

Because we don't understand it, people mistake it for magic. As Scientists it is our job to describe the magic and give it equations and give it math and give it graphs, computer models and basically be able to beat things into a bloody pulp of understanding.

??: That's too long for a bumper sticker but I like it. [Laughter]

Pamela: You guys have been a wonderful audience and this was the second anniversary episode of AstronomyCast and I'm glad I had a chance to share it with my good friends Phil and Kevin and share it with all of you as well.

This transcript is not an exact match to the audio file. It has been edited for clarity. Transcription and editing by Cindy Leonard.

Fraser Cain: We're going to take a bit of a break this week and talk about some of the interesting research you picked up while you were there – some of the latest breaking news, the stuff that's going to make you have to go at your textbook with a pen to fix them.
 
[laughter]
 
So, you've got a bunch of topics, there's going to be no theme to this. Just to warn people in advance, in some cases the audio quality is a little hard to understand, so we apologize in advance and we'll take better equipment to the future conferences.
 
Where are we going to start?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I think starting with the very first press conference for the meeting might be a good place.

Fraser: What was that about?

Pamela: The first press conference, right off the bat, we had a young post-doc from your neck of the woods, from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Jorge Penarrubia presented on the first virgin dwarf galaxy we've ever found, and if that title doesn't peak your interest, I think the fact that it just sort of came out of nowhere and is headed straight toward Andromeda… well, violence always attracts attention.

Fraser: All right, so where did this come from?

Pamela: Well, as near as we can tell, this small dwarf galaxy formed on its own and it formed away from the local group. As the Andromeda galaxy grew and grew and grew and became the large galaxy we know today when we look through binoculars, its gravity eventually got to the point that it was able to start sucking stuff from the nearby Universe toward it. One of the things it started to suck in is this new dwarf galaxy called Andromeda 12.
 
This is the first dwarf galaxy that anyone has ever found that hasn't already interacted with a giant galaxy. This is where the whole idea of it being a "virgin" galaxy comes from: it hasn't been touched gravitationally and hasn't had any of its stars, its dark matter, nothing with it has been disturbed. For the first time we can look at what a building block of a galaxy looks like before it's been incorporated into being used to build something.

Fraser: So every galaxy that we see has already had some interactions and has changed the way it looked. What role does the dark matter play in that?

Pamela: Rather than having me explain it, why don't we have Jorge explain it?
 

Dr. Jorge Penarrubia: So the dark matter from dwarf galaxies forms what are called tidal streams, and these tidal streams follow the orbit of the dwarf galaxies initially. Sometimes this dark matter gas distributes around the host galaxy and contributes to the dark matter halo of the host galaxy.

Fraser: Oh I see, so the dark matter is stripped out of these dwarf galaxies and added to the halo of the larger galaxy. All the dwarf galaxies we've already seen have already had this process happen to them.

Pamela: They've already been pillaged – and it's not just the dark matter that's been pillaged. Let's listen to some more of what Jorge had to say:
 

Dr. Jorge Penarrubia: For instance in the Milky Way you have the stars that were born here, and the stars that were born in other systems (like dwarf galaxies) – you have both things, and actually they're not isolated. For instance the in-fall of dwarf galaxies can actually trigger star formation. So it's quite complicated process and we're starting now to learn about – well, it's not really learn, we have a clear picture as to it.

Fraser: Right okay, so the dwarf galaxy slams into one of the larger galaxies, contributes its stars, gets dark matter torn away, you get star-formation and goodbye galaxy.

Pamela: Goodbye galaxy, and all that's really left behind is the stuff that forms our galaxy and occasionally when we're lucky we get to see some tidal streams, but we're going to be talking more about that later.

Fraser: Now is this going to happen to this galaxy?

Pamela: It's just a matter of time; it's currently on a heading that is sending it straight toward M31, the Andromeda galaxy. It's going to get there eventually and whip around, get its dark matter stripped out, get shredded into a tidal stream, and it also will eventually become part of our galaxy when our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy merge. It's all a matter of timescales. I have to admit I didn't catch the timescale that Andromeda 12 is going to get to M31, the big Andromeda galaxy, so I'm not sure if we're going to merge first or if it's going to merge first. Eventually, all these galaxies are going to form one much, much larger system.

Fraser: Yeah, can we call it Milk-dromeda?

Pamela: [laughing] Something like that.

Fraser: Milk-dromeda Way? Yeah.
 
Okay, so what else did you learn?

Pamela: Later on in the week, there was a press conference on spinning black holes. Everyone gets excited about black holes, and these weren't just normal, run of the mill black holes, they were talking about what happens when you take two galaxies (say, the Milky Way and Andromeda), slam them together and you observe the super-massive black holes in their cores hopefully merging into an even more super-massive black hole.

Fraser: Okay, and so what were they expecting to see?

Pamela: Well, let's listen to what one of the researchers had to say. Laura Brenneman was kind enough to sit down and explain a little bit of their physics to us.

Laura Brenneman: Basically what we've done is we've created a new model that allows us to look at the x ray spectra from the accretion disk very close to the black hole. We're interested in the disk in particular because of the space-time that is as close to the black hole as we can get and still observe electromagnetically.
 
So when we look at spectral signatures from this material close to the black hole, what we expect to see is that rather than seeing narrow void profiles that you would expect to see in spectral lines in a laboratory, what we're actually thinking we're going to see is signatures of relativity. Special relativity, general relativity, also Doppler shifting within the disk.

Fraser: So they're actually seeing effects on the elements around the black hole that match predictions from relativity?

Pamela: They're seeing special relativity, they're seeing general relativity, they're seeing massive Doppler shifting. All of these things are communicated through the line shapes of the elements that make up the accretion disk around these black holes.

Fraser: When you say "line shapes" what does that mean?

Pamela: When you take the light from something (anything, the Sun, say), and spread it out, you can create a rainbow. We've all seen this happen: bits of glass hanging in windows will end up casting bits of rainbows onto walls.
 
If you spread that light out enough, what you can start to see is dark lines where an element has absorbed the light out of the Sun. You might see a line that corresponds to a transition in hydrogen. You might see a line that corresponds to a transition in iron, where the atom absorbs the light and an electron jumps to a different energy level; lots of neat physics is happening.
 
Well, if you're dealing with something that's just like the Sun and hanging out near-by, not moving a lot relative to us, the lines are symmetric: they are the same shape on the red side and on the blue side, and they're just nice, gaussian profiles. When you start to add in all these other effects, what you end up with instead is a line that is really skewed toward the blue. You see massive peak in the blue and then you see it slowly tapers off, tapers off, tapers off, toward the red. This is because you have all sorts of other effects from relativity, from just the fact that the accretion disk is rotating really fast.

Fraser: How fast?

Pamela: That's complicated! First of all, there's the minor problem that we're moving, it's moving, time's relative. Ignoring that, with a 10^7 solar mass black hole, you end up with a rotation rate where it goes all the way round once every ten minutes for an accretion disk that is on the verge of spinning itself apart. This is where it's spinning so fast that the centrifugal force wins out over gravity and everything just sort of blows itself apart and you're left with a naked singularity.

Fraser: And that's where it has no accretion disk around it, because it's spinning so fast?

Pamela: Exactly. That means in reality, they're going to be rotating slower than that. But, we're looking at something that is rotating as fast as it can without blowing itself apart, and the inner parts are going around every ten minutes. Things are going significant fractions of the speed of light. It's scary physics in there.

Fraser: Okay. What's next?

Pamela: What is next is more tidal tails. This was a meeting that I have to say made me and my love of small things that are in the process of getting destroyed, very, very happy.

Fraser: I didn't know that about you!

Pamela: [laughing] Well, when it comes to celestial objects, they're much more interesting when they're getting destroyed.

Fraser: Okay.

Pamela: The next thing that was up was more discussion of tidal tails. This is sort of also a running joke in the press room of every meeting there seems to be a new press release on tidal tails.

Fraser: Hold on! What's a tidal tail, then?

Pamela: Instead of me explaining it, why don't I have one of the researchers explain it. Carl Grillmair of Caltech and IPAC was kind enough to sit down and talk to me for a while about this, and he had some really neat things to say:

Dr. Carl Grillmair: Well they're the relics of whatever was there. I think a lot of people are actually surprised right now that they're actually there. People had always assumed from the beginning that even if the galaxy cannibalizes dwarf galaxies and globular clusters and so on, it will quickly precess or be scattered into giant molecular clouds and random orbits, and it will just be this big soup of stars, which is what everyone assumed was what the halo was, and the bulge and all these things.
 
In fact, we've seen, like today I showed (well, maybe I didn't actually show you, but it was on my poster) there's an 84 degree – absolutely narrow, quarter of a degree wide for 84 degrees across the sky. That would've taken billions of years to form and it was still in tact. There was no obvious sign of scattering in any direction. The halo has to be extremely smooth.

Fraser: Okay, so we've got these long streams of stars and globular clusters in huge arcs across the sky – he said 80-something degrees. How much of the sky is that?

Pamela: So imagine something that stretches from looking at the constellation Gemini all the way up to the north star. They stretch from the horizon to zenith as you look out across the sky.

Fraser: Zenith is the… point straight up?

Pamela: The point straight overhead.

Fraser: Right, okay. So if I look down at the horizon, I would see the beginning of the tail, and then I could look straight up and see the end of the tail, and that is a dwarf galaxy that has been spaghetti-fied.
 
[laughter]

Pamela: Well, spaghetti-fication is reserved for black hole destruction.

Fraser: Right, right, right – but I think it's appropriate here.
 
But yeah – torn into a long stream.

Pamela: Idly disrupted.

Fraser: "Idly disrupted" that's a very fancy word for it
 
[laughter]
 
So what's the process then, that makes this happen?

Pamela: Tidal disruption! As they come in, their ability to hold themselves together is lost as they're getting pulled on by the Milky Way's gravity. As they fall in, the leading edges are going to accelerate forward, the back ends are going to be slower at falling in, and everything stretches out as they fall down the potential well.
 
What's really neat about these is as they go, they're falling downhill, basically. If you imagine our Universe as this four-dimensional thing where we see three dimensions and that fourth dimension is traced out by everything rolling around, the arcs, the streams these things shape on the sky… that is the path of rolling around in the bowl made by our galaxy.

Fraser: So what was the new research that they had come up with this time around?

Pamela: In this case, what he was primarily talking about was we found another one. As he and I sat down and talked, he also brought up the fact that as we trace these things further and further out, we're finding things that don't entirely make sense. They're turning up at the ends, so that implies maybe there's bumps (but not often) out in the halo of our Milky Way. Those bumps would have to be made out of dark matter.
 
So yes, the halo seems to be smooth, smooth, smooth. But occasionally, there is a little bump here or there. That was kind of neat to hear him talk about.

Fraser: All right: moving on. What's next?

Pamela: What's next is how life around M-type stars might not be quite as cushy as we would've thought a couple weeks ago when we started having all these press releases about Gliese 581.

Fraser: What's an M star?

Pamela: An M star is a little tiny dwarf star. In some cases, they're just 10% the size of our sun. They're really red, they're really cool and they basically live forever. They live sometimes as much as 40 billion years while still just burning hydrogen in their core.

Fraser: So in theory, that would give a planet a long time for intelligent life to happen.

Pamela: Exactly. The problem is these stars don't start out nice and calm. In fact, life's a little bit rough, but rather than me describe it, let's listen to Ed Guinan sit down and talk with us about it:

Dr. Ed Guinan: We found the relationships between coronal x ray machine. With age the young ones are very active – they have flares and lots of x rays. By the time they get to the age of Proxima Centauri, which is 6 billion years old, they've died down by a factor of 2 or 3 hundred, and then beyond that even more. This is mainly because the stars are spinning down; they're losing their angular momentum.

Fraser: Okay, so the stars start out quite violent, but then they settle down over time?

Pamela: And life could still be possible if you could find a way to get a strong enough magnetic field to create a strong magnetosphere around these planets. The problem is that to have a habitable world around an M-type star, you have to place the planet right next to the star. When you do that, you end up with tidal locking. Just like we have the Moon always shows its same face at the planet Earth, these planets always show the same face to their star. To get a magnetic field, you have to be rotating quickly. To be rotating quickly, you can't be tidally locked to your star, so there's this weird conundrum of how do you make something that survives this violent 1.2ish billion years of the star's early life so you can have a civilization that then stretches on for just about 40 billion years? It's problematic.

Fraser: Okay, so the planet might get that tidally locked really early on, and not get a chance to build up the magnetosphere and then just take it on the chin for millions and millions and millions of years with these bouts of radiation.

Pamela: These bouts of radiation don't just destroy any DNA of any life in the process of trying to form. These bouts of radiation also blow away chunks of the atmosphere. We're able to hold onto our atmosphere because our magnetosphere protects us from having all of these high energy particles raining down on the upper parts of our atmosphere. Without it, bad things would happen, things would get blown away.
 
Mars is representative: poor Mars has no magnetosphere, it's core already cooled off and its magnetic field already faded out as the core froze. So it's losing its atmosphere not just because its small and can't hold onto the fastest moving gas particles, but also because the solar wind is blowing away parts of its atmosphere.
 
So these planets, if they form, would have the star blowing away the atmosphere and they'd get blasted by radiation. Neither of these things is particularly inspiring toward the formation of life.

Fraser: So what were the results of this research, was it good or bad on that direction?

Pamela: The results were sort of like, "oh dear, we need to find a different way to get these planets into the habitable zone other than they form there initially."
 
One of the possible solutions is: if you have a planet that forms far away from the M star, and stays there for the initial few billion years, or creeps in very slowly and enters the habitable zone after the M star has stopped having these huge flares, these huge blasts of x ray and gamma ray energy, then (if it migrates in later), life can develop later.
 
So you have lots and lots of time, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get everything where it needs to be in the proper timescales.

Fraser: These are some planets around some of the smallest stars, but you actually looked at someone who was looking at planets around some of the largest stars too.

Pamela: In the exact same press conference where they were talking about these flaring M stars that can be potentially dangerous for planets, they also had John Asher Johnson talking about how you can find planets around really big, bright, A-type stars (or at least, around the relics of really big A-type stars). Let's listen to what he has to say about it:

John Asher Johnson: So we decided to look for planets around stars that are more massive than the Sun, commonly called A stars. You can't search for planets around A-type stars when they're on the main sequence.

Fraser: Okay, so these A stars are larger than the Sun. What kind of mass are we looking at?

Pamela: They're typically 2-4 solar masses, so they're bigger but not hugely bigger.

Fraser: If I understand the way astronomers search for planets, they use this spectroscopic method where you've got the gravity of the planet yanking the star back and forth and back and forth and we're able to calculate the velocity of the star moving toward and away from us, to be able to get a sense of what the mass of the planet is. So you get a more massive star, that's got to be hard.

Pamela: That's got to be hard, and it's even more complicated than that. But let's listen to how he explains it:

John Asher Johnson: What few lines they have are smeared out by their rotation. Broad, smeared out lines contain much less Doppler information than narrow lines. So the end result is you can only do it by the 100 meter precision. To give you some context, a hot Jupiter planet has an amplitude of about 100 meters per second. So you can't even see the hot Jupiter planets around these A stars.

Fraser: Okay, so he said that they're looking at stars outside of the main sequence. Why is that?

Pamela: Outside of the main sequence, these stars expand out. If you think of an ice skater, when she pulls her arms in, she starts spinning faster. Conversely, if you watch her put her arms out, she slows down. When these stars move off the main sequence, they bloat out and slow down their rotation. The lines they have become narrower – they're not Doppler spread out anymore.
The stars also cool off, and when they cool off there's more atoms that still have electrons available to create spectral lines. In a really hot star, everything's ionized. When an atom is ionized, it doesn't create spectral lines, it just sort of sits there going "ahh, I have no electrons!" Cool it off, let it collect an electron or two, and now those electrons are available to grab bits of light and create dark lines. Those dark lines we can measure using our spectrograph.

Fraser: So while the star is going strong, you won't be able to see the effect of the planet in the light.

Pamela: It's too hot to have a lot of lines to look at, and what lines you have to look at are spread out by how fast the thing is rotating.

Fraser: Now if you had a planet going around a star that was three times the mass of the Sun, would that be fun?

Pamela: As long as you move it out from the star, it's just fine. It's all a matter of placement. Where the Earth is in our system, we have liquid water. If you replaced our Sun with an A-type star we'd have boiling water (and that would be a kind of bad thing). If you replaced our Sun with an M-type star instead, then we'd freeze. So, where the appropriate place is varies with star. With an M-type star, you'd want to get in closer to where Mercury is. If you have an A-type star, you're going to want to move further out. So find your planet, put it in the appropriate location, and you can build a habitable zone for every star.
 
The other question is how long is that habitable zone a safe place to be? M stars… once you survive that first billion years or so, you're good for another 40 billion years. A-type star? Much shorter lived, so even compared to the Earth, you're just not going to have as much time to develop a civilisation before your sun starts doing things that just make life impossible.

Fraser: Right, but I guess it's just a new area of investigation, that up until now, astronomers didn't even think they could look at.

Pamela: No, and there are theorists out there who are making their living calculating where the habitable zone is for this type of star if you have this type of planet with this type of atmosphere and how long does that habitable zone stay there… it's really a fascinating question because you have to take into account so many different things, but we think we know what a lot of the things you have to plug into your models are. Now it's just a matter of writing the complicated software and getting enough time on the supercomputers.

Fraser: That was great Pamela, sounds like you had a lot of fun there.

Pamela: It was a really good meeting, and it was a smaller meeting than normal, so people took the time to sit down and really talk about what they had to say. There's very little that can be said about going to Hawaii that's negative. So, really – great location, people willing to sit down and talk, and it was just pleasant and fun and I learned a lot.

Fraser: So where's the next one at?

Pamela: The next meeting is in Austin, Texas, where I went to graduate school, and that one's going to probably not be so pleasant, but it's certain to be a lot of fun. Hopefully next time you'll be able to make it. The meeting after that is in St. Louis where I'm currently located.

Fraser: That'll be good. I'd love to. All right, we'll talk to you next week.

Fraser Cain: Pamela was away at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Hawaii last week, so she's recovering but I've got a special guest, Dr. Stephen Novella, host of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Hi Stephen.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Hi Fraser, good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Fraser: Thanks for having us over on your show – it's only fair.

Dr. Stephen Novella: It was a pleasure.

Fraser: All right. On this show, you were talking a bit about astrology and UFOs and came up with the idea that we might get your help with those topics over here on Astronomy Cast. So here you go.
 
So we've got a couple of topics that range outside of astronomy and really, science, so I thought we'd bring in a ringer this week to help us debunk them. So Stephen, let's get started with astrology first.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Sure.

Fraser: According to the true believers, what's astrology all about?

Dr. Stephen Novella: At its core, astrology is the notion that the objects in the heavens, the planets and the constellations – the arrangement of stars as seen from the Earth, have an influence over human affairs. They influence the personality of individuals and they also influence the events of one's life. They can bring you good luck on one day, they might make you… most people have read their horoscope where it says "today's a good day to make investments," and things like that. The notion goes back to at least several thousand years BC, this is a pre-scientific notion that our destinies are somehow tied up with things that we see happening in the heavens.

Fraser: Let's say there was some kind of underlying scientific rationale for this. What do they think is going on, the true believers?

Dr. Stephen Novella: They don't really have much to say that's cogent about that. For a long time, they didn't even really dare to propose a specific mechanism, they'd just say either that it's mysterious or say something fairly vague and vacuous such as "everything is tied together, the Universe is all tied together, it's all one" – things that don't really have any scientific meat to them.
 
More recently what I hear from the astrologers is an appeal to quantum mechanics, which is always a red flag when you hear someone defending a paranormal claim, or a fantastical claim by saying "well, quantum mechanics shows that things can have action at a distance or that we're all one, we're all tied together." They don't know what they're talking about, it's really just an appeal to a poorly understood branch of science.
 
Quantum mechanics is the science dealing with objects at the very small end of the spectrum, atomic and subatomic particles and how they behave at that level. And yeah, at the subatomic level, a lot of really strange things happen in quantum mechanics. The problem that the astrologers in particular (and paranormal enthusiasts in general), make is taking that quantum weirdness that we observe experimentally at the atomic and subatomic level and applying that to the macroscopic world, the world of planets and people and stars. It doesn't apply; it's a complete misreading and abuse of quantum mechanics. It's just an attempt to attach a scientific sounding term to their spiritual and paranormal beliefs.

Fraser: So, I guess in my opinion (and in yours), astrology is worthless: it doesn't actually make any kinds of predictions for what's going to happen in your life and so on. Why do people believe it?

Dr. Stephen Novella: Belief is partly cultural – the ideas have been around for thousands of years and ideas tned to have a sort of cultural inertia. Also, there are lots of mechanisms by which people fool themselves. Our brains are very powerful instruments but they are also incredibly flawed. There are multiple ways in which we can be led into believing things that are not true.
 
One that I think is pertinent with astrology is pattern recognition. Our brains tend to work on the basis of pattern recognition, we're actually very good at it, it's one of our cognitive strengths. We can see how things connect up and are connected. We can make associations between seemingly disparate events. However, we're too good at it, basically, so we can see patterns that are not really there. Any random noise, whether it's visual or an event or whatever can present apparent correlations, apparent patterns.
 
While we're very good at seeing those patterns, we're not inherently very good at deciding which ones are true, are real, and which ones are an illusion. We apparently did not evolve an intuitive sense of how to distinguish true patterns from illusionary patterns. That's what we need science for.
 
Science basically evolved to systematically, methodologically, distinguish between those things which only seem to be true and those things which actually are true. The problem with astrology is it just takes these patterns at face value, attaches a spiritual significance to them, a meaning to them, and the science really isn't there to support the notion that these patterns are actually real.

Fraser: I guess to take the devil's advocate position for a second here, I think a lot of people don't necessarily believe astrology but they enjoy their horoscope in the paper and get some entertainment value from it. What's wrong with that?

Dr. Stephen Novella: There's nothing wrong with reading your horoscope for pure entertainment, it's like reading your fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant – it's for entertainment, and I do that all the time. You're wrong in your premise that a lot of people don't believe it. You know 40-50% of Americans believe astrology has some validity to it, has some basis in reality. That's, you know, 40-50% too many.

Fraser: So have there been any sign of experiments that have attempted to get to the bottom of it?

Dr. Stephen Novella: A ton! There's been a lot of scientific experiments in astrology. It's one of those fields like ESP for example, it's very similar in that for decades and decades there have been attempts at proving that astrology is real by looking at either statistical data or conducting actual observational experiments, and what we see is time and again either the well designed, well controlled studies are completely flatly negative, there is simply no signal there whatsoever.
 
Then there are those who are previously believers in astrology (so they come to their experiment with a belief in astrology), who claim to find correlations or statistical/scientific evidence to prove astrology. When you look at it closely, in every single case it's an example of bad science; they have made some glaring statistical error in the way they have either collected or looked at the data.
 
The problem is that when these mistakes are pointed out to them, they don't seem to get it. They don't recant their support for astrology, they'll just go on to the next claim. They're not behaving like responsible, honest scientists. They cling to their belief in astrology, they cling to their bad methods, the bad methods that are necessary in order to create the impression of evidence for astrology because the bottom line is it's not real and there is no signal. It's just noise.

Fraser: I guess this is one of those situations where you might have a researcher or a true believer who is perfectly willing to believe a shred of evidence or maybe even an experimental mistake that proves it in their favour, but utterly refuses to believe or listen to the overwhelming evidence that goes the other way.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yeah, and what you're saying is they cherry-pick the evidence, which is another one of those things you're not allowed to do in legitimate science. If you tried getting away with that in a mainstream scientific journal on any topic, you'd be called to the carpet on that. You can't only cite those three references that support your contingent and ignore the 20 which refute it. You'd get absolutely slammed in peer-review if you tried to do that. Astrologers though, that's their bread and butter, that's their meat, that's what they do. They cherry-pick the studies that seem to support it, ignore the ones that refute it, and dismiss or ignore the criticisms of the study they support in favour of astrology.
 
Let me give you one example (and this ties back with the pattern recognition I talked about): one of the things astrologers do is what's called "data-mining". Not the legitimate corporate datamining people do to find legitimate patterns. What they might do is, for example we recently spoke on our podcast about looking at actuarial tables of driving accidents, and saying "let's look at all the Sun signs (Cancer, Leo, Libra) and see who has the most car accidents. Look at this, Virgo, they have more car accidents than all the other astrological signs".

Fraser: Well somebody's going to!

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yeah, right – somebody's going to be the worst, right?
 
So what they do is they look for any pattern, and then see a pattern in the noise of the data and declare that a causation. They couple that with the logical fallacy of assuming causation from correlation. They found a correlation which is just random, they then totally botched the statistics by not accounting for the fact that they're looking for any possible correlation, and then they make the logical fallacy of assuming there's an astrological causation there. Every step of the way they kind of made a mistake scientifically, they just don't see that when it's pointed out to them.

Fraser: Now as you mentioned, this stuff must just get hammered in peer-review. They must not even go through the peer-reviewed journals.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Well, it's hard for them to get published in respectable peer-reviewed scientific journals because the work is so shoddy they just don't pass muster. Then they complain they're being discriminated against, which is true in that discrimination is appropriate scientific discrimination. Just like anything, you have to pass a certain hurdle of evidence and scholarship and legitimacy in order to pass that hurdle of peer-review. That hurdle should be there – that's one of the quality control mechanisms of science. They interpret that as a bias against their revolutionary claims that we're just too cowardly to admit exist (that's the propaganda spin they put on it).
 
So they also have their own journals and peer-review each other, which is pointless. If you're going to have pseudo-scientists peer-reviewing other pseudo-scientists, you could publish anything. It becomes this worthless, parallel scientific literature where you can really literally get any nonsense whatsoever in print.

Fraser: I guess one of the things I don't understand as well, then, is you get newspapers or CNN and on the one hand, they'll report the latest science in astronomy or something like that, and then they'll have a psychic on or they'll have an astrologer on who's talking about what the stars are going to be doing this year. How can they have that kind of dissonance in the media?

Dr. Stephen Novella: There's a very conscious double standard in the media, and I have encountered this directly multiple times. For regular, mainstream news or political news, there are certain journalistic standards in terms of fairly presenting all points of view and all sides, basic fact-checking, etc. Not that journalists always uphold that standard, but at least there is that standard within journalism.
 
When journalists who are not science writers (and unfortunately the percentage of science that's being done by science writers is going down, it's more just generic journalists dealing with the science issues – there are fewer and fewer dedicated science journalists), what they typically do with a science story is if it's a mainstream science story they still treat it the same way, which is inappropriate because the premise is that all sides are equal. They present one lone crank as having an equal point of view to the consensus of the broader scientific community. They miss the fact that science is not a democracy, it's a meritocracy and not all ideas are equal.
 
That's a mis-application of the journalistic standard, but then they have a completely separate standard for what they consider to be "fluff" pieces or "interest" pieces. When they're dealing with astrology or psychics or demons or UFOs, they see that as really just a freak sideshow for entertainment purposes purely, that requires zero journalistic integrity. They don't have to check facts, they don't have to give the alternate point of view, if they do it's token scepticism but they don't really represent the scientific point of view. They see it as entertainment and not in the same category of journalism.

Fraser: It's bizarre to watch because you can see sometimes medical pieces butting right up against something really bizarre, like someone thinks their house is haunted, and they'll cover it – this person thinks their house is haunted, that's that, moving on.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Right, and they think if you believe it you're stupid, it's just for entertainment, so they don't have to provide both sides of the story.

Fraser: In the evolution vs. intelligent design movement, you've got the intelligent design people evolving their theories to try and be more palatable, I guess, for science. Is there something similar going on with astrology, or have they found their sweet spot and they're just hanging on?

Dr. Stephen Novella: One quick nitpick: ID is not a theory, they don't really have theories because they're not testable scientific theories, they have models. They sometimes consciously will use the term "model" because they don't want you to think that what they have is actually a scientific theory.

Fraser: Send them my apology.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yes.
 
[laughter]
 
Astrology… has evolved somewhat. They've cloaked it in some of the more modern scientific jargon like quantum mechanics, but the underlying claims really haven't evolved. There are different flavours of astrology that it's important to recognize, there is (just to give the two big categories) Sun-sign astrology, which just refers to which of the 12 zodiac signs were you born under (are you a Leo or a Virgo?), and then there's star or stellar astrology which they claim is more precise because they base their astrological reading on the moment of your birth and where the stars were at the moment of your birth. They need to know when you were born down to about four minutes. It's kind of arbitrary, but it correlates roughly to a degree of arc, so they figure the stars have shifted another degree, that's a new stellar astrological situation.
 
So those are the two big flavours of astrology, and they criticize each other. Whenever you disprove one, the other says "that's not us, you just disproved Sun-sign astrology, that's not the real astrology," so they always have their excuse when it wasn't their particular brand that was disproved. That's really it. There isn't this constant evolution in terms of the sophistication of the claims they're making.

Fraser: It's almost like there's a schism going on.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yes.

Fraser: In the field – can I call it a field, should I send my apology right away?

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yeah, I guess so, it's an ideology.

Fraser: Ideology, okay. So let's… we're kind of hitting the half-way point here, and we could go on about this all day long. I think we want to switch to the other topic, just because I want to knock 'em both out in one show, and that's the UFO belief.
 
What has been your experience in that field?

Dr. Stephen Novella: Well, this has certainly been an interesting sub-culture within astronomy, and in fact it's been astronomers all along that have been the main scientific critics of belief in UFOs. Carl Sagan, obviously, was a prominent astronomer who took it on and wrote a very eloquent book about it. It's actually a very good read, now it's about 35 years old.
 
It's interesting because you can see in the 1960s the UFOlogists, the UFO believers were saying the same kind of reasoning and justifications they're saying today, but the cases they were pointing to were completely different from the ones they were pointing to today. There's been an almost complete turnover in terms of the evidence the UFO people are putting forward, but all of their rationalizations are the same.

Fraser: What kind of evidence were they putting forward back then?

Dr. Stephen Novella: The evidence is always similar in that it is mainly anecdotal, eyewitness testimony. People either saw something that they couldn't identify. Starting in the late 60s with Betty and Barney Hill, and then taking off in the 70s and later, people believing they actually physically encountered aliens and were abducted by them… and occasionally there are claims that are based upon some physical evidence like a burnt circle in a field or an alleged artifact (some melted piece of metal or something). The evidence is always scanty, blurry, ambiguous, unreliable… but in 100 years of the claims and beliefs in UFOs, not a single piece of anything really even remotely compelling. There's nothing demonstrably alien, there's nothing that is even a clear, unambiguous photograph.
 
So, again sometimes if you focus too much on the minutia, you miss the forest for the trees. Sometimes you have to look at the big picture. If we were being visited by an advanced technological race from outside our solar system, what would we expect there to be in terms of evidence. I think by now we would have something unambiguous, or at least a little bit more compelling.

Fraser: How do what people think they're seeing, or think they're experiencing… I guess it kind of breaks down. On the one hand you have people seeing lights in the sky, strange objects, burns on the ground, mutilated cattle… and the on the other hand, you've got personal experiences "I met them, I was on their spaceship, they did abusive things to me." How are those explained?

Dr. Stephen Novella: There are a number of phenomena that conspire together to create the UFO phenomenon. I wrote an article about it I called the psycho-cultural phenomenon, rather than a true alien phenomenon. It's a combination of things: one, as you mentioned, people see things in the sky they cannot identify. They make the logical fallacy of what we call the argument for ignorance: "I don't know what that light in the sky is, therefore it's an alien spacecraft." They're too quick to dismiss the fact that it could be something else, something mundane, something terrestrial they're just not aware of. It could even be something unusual and bizarre. It's impossible to rule out everything.
 
People commonly mis-identify objects that are known. I think the most common object to be mistaken for a UFO is the planet Venus. People are not used to seeing it there. The Moon is commonly confused with a UFO: people see it under strange conditions, don't know what it is and report it as a flying ship. That has certainly always been one of the biggest contributors to this entire phenomenon of belief in alien visitation: people seeing stuff they can't identify.
 
There's also lots of other optical illusion components to this that people can't really judge distance, size and velocity when you're looking at something against the sky because there's no background, there's nothing for reference. Your brain can mis-interpret that stimuli and to you it may seem as if you're looking at something huge, far away and very fast moving, when in fact you're looking at something small, close-up and slow moving.
 
Sometimes this is very dramatic. In fact there's a case of two pilots who thought they saw a UFO when it turned out to be a wheat stalk blowing in the wind, and they didn't realize it until it moved in front of the treeline that was about 100 yards away. When it's just against the sky, they had no reference, thought it was a UFO. It drifted in front of the treeline and they realized "woah, it's way close up and it's something small just drifting in the wind."

Fraser: I think there are a bunch of examples like the iridium satellites which can flash and then as they move, and then there's the International Space Station which can be very bright and move very quickly. There are a lot of really interesting objects.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yes, absolutely. Our skies are filled with stuff that's terrestrial and technological. There are satellites that re-enter and can be very impressive looking as the re-enter the atmosphere and come crashing down. There are satellites now that create very bright flares, as you said, the iridium satellites. People don't realize you can see satellites from the ground, that you can look up at the sky on a clear night you can focus on dots often times you can see them moving quite quickly across the sky – those are satellites, and people don't realize that and leap to a much more entertaining and interesting conclusion than what's probably true.

Fraser: What about the people's personal experiences though?

Dr. Stephen Novella: That's another very interesting phenomenon, interesting psychologically and neurologically. For people who believe they've been abducted by aliens, a review of these cases suggests that about 60 or 70% of them just had an experience that we call sleep paralysis, which is a known, well described, neurological phenomenon. It happens in people who have certain neurological diseases like narcolepsy, and it also happens in about 15% of the normal population, usually triggered by sleep deprivation.

Fraser: I've had it

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yeah, I've had it too, when I've gone sleep deprived

Fraser: You just wake up, and you can't move but you are awake and you can see in the room (or you think you can)

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yeah.

Fraser: Then you go back to sleep and some period later you wake up again and your'e able to move. It actually freaked me out the first time it happened.

Dr. Stephen Novella: It's very freaky.

Fraser: I figured out what it was and from that point on, it's never bothered me. "Oh, I'm having sleep paralysis, this'll go away."

Dr. Stephen Novella: Exactly, if you understand it, you can get through it. Although sometimes there can be an involuntary fear component to it, and it's a kind of fear it's hard to talk yourself out of, just a sort of primal neurological fear centre being activated, and it probably has something to do with another phenomenon we know of called night terrors.
 
People frequently hallucinate about there being a malevolent entity in the room with them. So if you imagine I can't move, I'm paralysed, and there's something bad in the corner of my vision, that also can cause a lot of fear and anxiety.
 
Sometimes people can wake up from this, and it's basically a fusion between sleep and wakefulness. You may wake up, or you may also drift back to sleep, and sometimes people drift back to sleep and the dreams are an extension of this waking dream they had, so they may think "I'm in a room, I'm paralysed, there's an entity at the other side of the room" and then they dream a typical abduction scenario – floated through a wall, brought into a flying saucer and anally probed, for whatever reason. They've had that experience – it was a real experience they had, but it was a neurological experience, it wasn't a physical, external experience. That, and there are certain details to the waking dream, a feeling of pressure on your chest, the paralysis, the timing of it (it usually happens as you're falling asleep or just as you're waking up in the morning), and the fact that it occurs out of sleep that are tell tale signs that tell us that's what it was.
 
Other times people tell different stories. The thing about anecdotal stories is there's no way, without any external validity, to validate them. People tell stories for their own personal reasons that we can't always know.
 
Again if this phenomenon is a psychological and cultural phenomenon, we'd expect there to be stories without physical corroboration. If there were aliens really abducting people out of Manhattan and floating them through walls and having them for hours, we would expect eventually somewhere, somebody would catch them on a cell phone, would get some kind of piece of physical evidence, that there would be something tangible that would come out of that, and nothing has.

Fraser: Somebody would've disappeared from their bedroom and been returned hours later, there would've been frantic calls to the police while that person was gone.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Right, and there would've been an extensive search and then they'd turn up out of nowhere. There's stories of those things happening, but never the things themselves. There's never been any kind of real documentation you could sink your teeth into, ever. So the simplest explanation for that is we're not being visited by aliens.
 
As much as I would love that to be true, and it's not inherently impossible, we don't know how plausible it is because we just don't know how much life is out there, we don't really know what space travel is going to be like in a thousand or a million years, so it's hard to asses it's plausibility, but it certainly isn't impossible. I'm perfectly willing to be convinced it's happening, I just haven't' seen anything I would consider even slightly compelling.

Fraser: What about some of the strange photographs that people have been bringing up, like face on Mars, pyramids on Mars, and some of the strange objects that are being seen by the Mars Rovers. This stuff drives me crazy, so I'm setting this question up for you.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yeah, you're giving me a softball.
 
The face on Mars is a classic one. A lot of people who are looking for something strange to find are poring over hundreds of thousands of NASA photographs and when they see things (again they're data mining in a way), when they see patterns they assign significance to those patterns. The most common pattern we like to see, by the way, is the human face. Our brains have a huge part of our visual cortex dedicated to looking at human faces, so it's not surprising we tend to see that pattern everywhere in random noise.
 
So yeah, in the Cydonia region of Mars, a very low-resolution photograph from the 70s, somebody thought it resembled the human face: boom. Face on Mars – it's an ancient alien race, maybe our ancestors built it… later on there are high resolution photographs from subsequent Mars missions, and guess what: it looks like a mountain, a mesa. The details that made it look like a face turned out to be a trick of shadows or lighting. Sometimes it was even just an artifact of the photograph, you know those little dots that are dropouts of data points in low-res photograph, and one happened to look like a nostril, just by coincidence.

Fraser: I think it still looked vaguely face-like, but you figure with the number of mountains there are on Mars, something's gotta look like something.

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yeah, well you look at it and first of all it looks like a naturally formed formation. It does not look like anything that's been carved: there's no straight lines, nothing unnatural about it at all. You can kinda see a human face in it, but again that's just our brain's hardwiring at work. It's trying to impose our most favoured and familiar pattern onto the random noise that we're seeing.
 
It's just like the old man in the mountain in New Hampshire. It's just a bunch of rocks, but if you look at it from one side (it's fallen down now, but up until a few years ago) it looks like a face of an old man. It's just a jumble of old rocks, but our brain likes to see it as a face.
 
The high-res photographs clearly show this is not a structure. It is not something built by an intelligent being. This is a mountain that happens to have some features which happen to evoke a vague human face, which is very easy to do given our predispositions.

Fraser: Now there's one general complaint that I hear from pseudo-scientists, which is (and I think it could be applied to both UFOs and astrology), why are sceptics not open-minded?

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yeah, you do hear that a lot: you hear it so often I had to write an article…

Fraser: Why can't you just be open-minded?

Dr. Stephen Novella: Yeah, I had to write an article just about that claim, to really put it to rest at least in writing because we hear it so often. It depends on how you define open-mindedness. From my perspective we are completely open-minded because I have the same criteria and threshold for evidence and logic for any claim. I don't discriminate in the bad sense of being biased against any idea a priori.
 
You can convince me of anything as long as the evidence and the logic are a match to the claim. If something is demonstrated to be true, I'll apportion my belief according to the evidence. If something is shown not to be true, then I'll withhold my endorsement of it.
 
It is actually the true believers, the people who believe in the paranormal, who are closed-minded. They are absolutely and utterly closed to the possibility that their belief is wrong, and they demonstrate that closed-mindedness by dismissing evidence they don't like, by not accepting what the evidence is really saying.

Fraser: I guess that's one of the real advantages of science, this open-mindedness. Your'e hoping for some kind of evidence that proves you wrong. I would love for there to be evidence of UFOs, and the moment there's an artifact, the moment there's some good photographs, the moment there's some verifiable stuff out there, I'm a believer.

Dr. Stephen Novella: The scientific community will be all over it. The fact that they're not is very telling, because it's just not up to the work-a-day, every day standards of logic that scientists have come to respect.

Fraser: That's great Stephen, thanks a lot. I think we put both of those to rest.

Dr. Stephen Novella: For once and for all right?
 
[laughter]

Fraser: For once and for all! Case closed! But hopefully we can point people at that when we get the questions in the future then, that's great.