Fortunately, I don’t listen to overpaid athletes’ opinions on physics

Shaquille O’Neal said some incredibly stupid things five years ago, claiming to believe the Earth is flat. Those stories died down a while ago — I suspect a publicist took him aside and explained “Ouyay oundsay ikelay anyay idiotyay, ixnay ethay atflay earthyay BS” — but it has flared up again with recent remarks on a podcast.

The NBA legend, 50, was asked during an appearance on The Kyle & Jackie O Show if his former comments about the conspiracy theory were a “joke” or if he did, in fact, believe the notion to be true.

“It’s a theory,” O’Neal told hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson. “It’s just a theory, they teach us a lot of things. It’s just a theory,” he repeated.

“I flew 20 hours today, not once did I go this way,” O’Neal said, noting he “didn’t tip over” or “go upside down.” He added that he’s also unsure about whether the planet is spinning.

It’s OK. If you don’t mind that I’ll forever after disregard everything you say about anything, just announce that you believe the earth is flat, or only 6000 years old, and I’ll happily file you away in my mental bin labeled “bollocks”. That stuff is so stupid that O’Neal might convince me that basketball must be imaginary.

Physics is an atavistic form of biology, then

I have addressed the nonsense about cancer as an atavism multiple times here, and I even made a video about it. Paul Davies is a medical crackpot, and his pal Charley Lineweaver is just as goofy, but it seems they noticed me, and I got a nice polite email from Lineweaver about it.

Hi PZ,

I just came across your video

I plead innocent of subscribing to the Haeckelian view that

“Development stages recapitulate adult evolutionary stages”

at 14:38 of your video.

If you remove the word “adult” then I would agree more with the statement.

You might be interested in our two recent papers (attached).

Also, as a biologist, you might be interested in an online video course
I just put up at arewealone.us

It’s got a lot of biology in it.

If you find any egregious mistakes, please let me know.

Yours for better science,

Charley Lineweaver

First, I would note that removing one word doesn’t help: “Development stages recapitulate evolutionary stages” is just as bad as “Development stages recapitulate adult evolutionary stages”. Development does not recapitulate the evolutionary history of the organism. Are we going to claim that mammals evolved from an ancient ancestor with a trophoblast that attached to a larger organism to leech off its fluids? Of course not. Mammalian extra-embryonic membranes are great examples of an evolutionary novelty appearing at a time in development that does not reflect a phylogenetic sequence.

As for his claim that cancers are atavistic reversions to a primitive state, see the links I posted above. Enough said. It’s garbage science. I’m just mildly horrified that yes, he sent me two more papers on the subject, published in 2021, and the idea is still getting published in respectable journals. Maybe I’ll dig into those papers some other time, but I think it’s sufficient to dismiss them out of hand since they provide no new information, and are just more exercises in frantic handwaving. Flap, flap, flap, oh look, we made another paper. Flap, flap.

I was mildly intrigued by the web site he mentioned, calling it an “online video course”, which it isn’t. It also doesn’t have much biology in it. But you be the judge: visit arewealone.us for yourself.

It was very nice of him to include a video summary of the “course”, titled “The Course in 7 Minutes”. Great, I can spare 7 minutes!

I didn’t even give it 7 minutes, I’m afraid. I skipped a lot, missing nothing of substance, because all it is is an excerpt from Beethoven’s Fifth played while random images flash by. There is no content there. There are no words, no explanations, not even an attempt to stitch any kind of story or explanation to it. It’s an incoherent mess. It is an accurate summary of the “course”, I’ll give him that.

I dug deeper, and he does have kind of a syllabus.

Week 1 – What does “Are We Alone?” Mean?
Week 2 – Our Evolution Over 20 Million Years
Week 3 – Our Evolution Over the Past 500 Million Years
Week 4 – Our Evolution Over the Past 3 Billion Years
Week 5 – Our Evolution Over the Past 4 Billion Years
Week 6 – Origins of Life: What is Life?
Week 7 – Intelligent Extraterrestrials?
Week 8 – More Conversations with Experts

Each of those entries is a link to more videos, and once again, we descend into chaos. Lineweaver’s approach seems to be to ask various of his science friends to let him interview them, and he drops by and sets up a camera in their office and asks a bunch of questions, like these:

This video-based course probes the question “Are we alone?” Unlike SETI scientists, Mars rovers and planet-hunting astronomers, we take a biological approach and ask: “How did WE get here?” Like salmon swimming upriver to the pond where they were born, we are led upstream from whence we came. We take a pilgrimage into the past to the origin of life 4 billion years ago. During this evolutionary odyssey with astrobiologist Charley Lineweaver, we ask: Who is “we”? Why did our brains get so big? How did life get started? Are viruses alive? What is life? Answers to these questions may help us get from How DID life start? to How DOES life start?

This leads to a confusing collection of short (typically 5-6 minutes) video interviews. There is no synthesis. There are no answers, not even an attempt to assemble some kind of consensus. I watched a few and then gave up.

If I were asked, “are we alone?”, my answer would be something like, “I don’t know, but probably not. I think the prebiotic chemistry that led to life is probably universal, so it could be common, but we’ve got an n of 1 so far. If we found signs of ancient life on Mars, though, that would increase the probability of life of some sort being common.” That’s all we’ve got so far. I also think that anyone who says yes, absolutely, or no, absolutely, isn’t worth talking to further.

I would turn the questions about, though, and ask how Charley Lineweaver, an honorary associate professor at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Research School of Earth Science at the Australian National University, a man with an advanced education that is entirely in physics, who has a PhD in physics from Berkeley, gets to call himself an astrobiologist, and does that mean I get to call myself an astrophysicist, despite an education that was almost exclusively in biology, and despite having a position as a biology professor?

Oh, wait. He also says he is “the son of a high school biology teacher”, so I guess he inherited his parent’s qualifications. With that logic, that means that my father’s line of work means I get to call myself a diesel mechanic now. Or maybe an astro diesel mechanic?

Physics so bad it offends a biologist

The local theater has been running a nominally SF movie for going on two weeks, and I have been tempted. I do love a glossy, shiny science fiction action movie with spaceships and derring-do and all that, but I have resisted, for two reasons.

It’s a Roland Emmerich movie. He’s a hack whose every movie has been an insult to the viewer’s intelligence, and while I can enjoy mindless entertainment, I cannot stomach anything as stupid as the trash he churns out.

It’s called Moonfall. I saw the trailer, and I swear to god, the premise is that the Moon…falls…into the Earth. I’m a mere biologist, but I am educated enough in basic physics to know that the idea is absurd. The whole idea of the movie smacked me hard in the brain, erasing all desire to actually see it.

But then, a third reason to avoid it popped up in my browsing. The Moon falling into the Earth? Ha ha. Do you think that was idiotic enough for Emmerich? No it was not. Here’s more.

When the moon’s orbit is found to be getting closer to Earth, it sets off tidal waves, upsets gravity, and interferes with the atmosphere. The moon is discovered to be an artificial megastructure, rather than an organic body, that is hollow inside, with the Apollo 11 mission having discovered its abnormalities and kept it secret. It transpires that a hostile artificially intelligent nano swarm has been drawing energy from the megastructure’s energy source – a captured white dwarf at its centre – which is the cause of the moon’s destabilization.

A small team including John Bradley’s conspiracy theorist, Halle Berry’s NASA executive, and Patrick Wilson’s disgraced former astronaut, heads inside the moon with the intention of destroying the nano swarm using an EMP device. While there, they discover that the megastructure was built by humanity’s technologically advanced ancestors as a way of conserving life and repopulating after their AI became sentient and intent on destroying them. The trio learns that the moon – and other megastructures like it – was constructed and seeded with their ancestors’ genetic code as a kind of ark designed to seek out new hospitable parts of the universe in which to rebuild life. The nano swarm, we are told, is programmed to seek out organic matter in electronic environments, its primary purpose to seek out humanity and destroy it.

Did I just spoil the movie for you? Too bad. Tough. I’ve done you a favor. You don’t really want to see it anyway, do you? Unfortunately, someone read that script and decided to plop down millions of dollars to actually make it. The only question I have is whether it will out-stupid The Core.

Further spoilers: I haven’t seen it, and haven’t read any other plot summaries, but I predict that at the end our intrepid heroes will stumble across a techno-gimmick that abruptly and completely ends the threat, and everyone lives happily ever after. I don’t need to see it to know that. It’s a Roland Emmerich pile of shit.

Why did it have to be physics?

Tom Levenson has a new book, The Hunt for Vulcan:…And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe, and it’s getting interesting and positive reviews. I’ve also got two flights coming up at the end of this week, so I need something tasty to read.

But it’s physics. There are a heck of a lot of good physics books coming out all the time — one of my colleagues here at UMM, Chrissy Kolaya, also has a new book, Charmed Particles: A Novel, also about physics, wouldn’t you know it. I’ll have to read both, I think.

But people! Don’t you know that developmental biology is the most interesting subject in the universe?

Spiderman at the intersection of physics and biology

We’ve all noticed that, in the Spiderman movies, the hero ejaculates tremendous amounts of protein constantly to make those spider threads he’s swinging on and splattering all over the bad guys. Part of that is plausible; spider silk is amazingly strong stuff, and if you could produce it, sure, thin strands would support your weight. The problem is the volume. Mark Lorch calculates how much protein Spiderman would have to consume to make the thread for one scene in the movie.

[Read more…]

That big physics announcement explained

You want more on the discovery of gravity waves from the Big Bang? It’s beyond my pay grade, so you’ll have to mosey on over to SciAm for the plain English summary.

Physicists have found a long-predicted twist in light from the Big Bang that represents the first image of ripples in the universe called gravitational waves, researchers announced today. The finding is direct proof of the theory of inflation, the idea that the universe expanded extremely quickly in the first fraction of a second after it was born. What’s more, the signal is coming through much more strongly than expected, ruling out a large class of inflation models and potentially pointing the way toward new theories of physics, experts say.

And why should we care?

The timing of inflation, in turn, tells physicists about the energy scale of the universe when inflation was going on. BICEP2’s value of r suggests that this was the same energy scale at which all the forces of nature except for gravity (the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces) might have been unified into a single force—an idea called grand unified theory. The finding bolsters the idea of grand unification and rules out a number of inflation models that do not feature such an energy scale. “This really collapses the space of plausible inflationary models by a huge amount,” Kamionkowski says. “Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, we’ll be looking for a needle in a bucket of sand.” Grand unified theories suggest the existence of new fields that act similarly to the Higgs field associated with the Higgs boson particle discovered in 2012. These new fields, in turn, would indicate that other, heavier Higgs boson particles also exist, although with masses so high they would be impossible to create in any traditional particle accelerator. “This measurement is allowing us to use the early universe as a lab for new physics in energy ranges that are otherwise inaccessible to us,” Kamionkowski says.

Aren’t “Superman” and “physics” incompatible?

This afternoon, at 3pm EDT, James Kakalios, Sean Carroll, and E. Paul Zehr are going to do a live chat about the Science of Superman. I’d say it needs MOAR BIOLOGISTS except just the physics of that movie alone ought to fully occupy the panel.

I’m a little afraid that the movie will get praised (it provides so many “teachable moments”!) rather than reamed out, but we’ll see.

Physics!

Oh, look. A homeopath explains physics to us all.

I’m sorry. Did I break your brain?

Here’s a non-homeopathic cure. It takes an hour of Lawrence Krauss to counter 8 minutes of that kind of lunacy, I’m afraid.