Bad Astronomy by Phillip Plait

Source of book: I own this.

If you haven’t already discovered Phil Plait, you really should. Seriously. Plait has worked as an astronomer (including research work on data from the Hubble Space Telescope), teacher, and writer. I read his other book, Death From The Skies a couple of years ago, and it was outstanding. I have even introduced kids to that book, because it is - in addition to an entertaining read - a fairly good basic introduction to astronomy and astrophysics.

I also should recommend Plait’s excellent video series, Crash Course Astronomy. These videos take the viewer from moon phases through neutron stars, black holes, and dark energy in a tour of the universe in 46 episodes. I plan to use them for my kids when we next do an astronomy unit. 

Bad Astronomy is actually Plait’s first book, and grew out of his blog by the same name where he debunked bad science and pseudoscience in the area of astronomy. These range from his opening chapter on balancing eggs on the equinox to bad science in movies. Along the way, he discusses questions such as why the moon looks bigger near the horizon, whether toilets swirl different directions in the northern and southern hemispheres (no), astrology, young earth creationism, whether the moon landing was faked (no), and which common idioms are actually based on truth.

Plait tackles two related phenomena in this book. The first is a general lack of scientific knowledge in the United States. It isn’t just that we do not know our science, but that we think it is okay to be scientifically illiterate.

To illustrate this point, Plait describes a news broadcast back in 1994 when Matt Lauer read a story about an experiment that the space shuttle was conducting in space. The experiment wasn’t that complicated (dragging a shield to clear small particles, then conducting tests in that ultra-vacuum environment), but Lauer clearly was just reading without having a clue what he was talking about. The other persons on the broadcast, Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel, made a joke about it. As Plait points out, these are three of the most famous journalists -  household names everyone knows. “Think about that for a moment: three of America’s most famous journalists, and they actually laughed at their own ignorance in science! How would this be different if, say, the report had been about Serbia, and they laughed at how none of them knew where it was?”

This is the problem. It is “cute” to be scientifically ignorant. (Also to be ignorant in math  - and the two are related.) I have found it frustrating when discussing topics which involve science, from “alternative” medicine scams to the age of the earth, that many, many people do not know basic high school level science, and don’t care. Shouldn’t this be as embarrassing as not knowing how to read?

The second phenomenon is that of blind acceptance of ludicrous claims. Plait is a big advocate for “scientific skepticism,” the practice of questioning whether claims are supported by actual empirical evidence. Don’t confuse this with philosophical skepticism (questioning our ability to have any knowledge of the world),  methodological skepticism (dating from Descartes, a doubting of one’s beliefs as a method of thinking about them), or even religious skepticism. I am, I am suspecting, a bit of a rare bird, because I myself am a big fan of scientific skepticism but am also a religious person. I believe my type was more common in the past, but things have gotten polarized as of late, alas.

Just for fun, I should mention that in addition to Plait, I am a fan of Mythbusters, the television show that tests urban myths and other claims using the scientific method. But scientific skepticism isn’t just a modern phenomenon. Sir Thomas Browne (17th Century), Michel de Montaigne (16th Century), Antoine Lavoisier (the chemist who named the elements oxygen and hydrogen), and Benjamin Franklin. The key essence of the philosophy is “prove it.” But it isn’t just skepticism. Scientific skepticism also fights against pseudoskeptics, like AIDS denialists and others who pretend to just be “asking questions” while really pushing an alternative to scientifically established facts.

Chief among these at this time are the anti-vaxxers, who Plait has done his best to debunk.

The point of Bad Astronomy isn’t to mock those who believe silly things. If anything, Plait is more generous, granting a certain sort of common sense to some myths. After all, things often do look a certain way, until one applies the scientific method to them. (For example, holding a pencil eraser against the moon at arm’s length demonstrates that the moon is the same size wherever it is.) One can particularly see this in Plait’s approach to young earth creationism. Here in the book - and also on his blog - he states up front that he is non-religious. But he doesn’t attack religion. In fact, if all my religious friends were as generous toward atheists as Plait is toward religious people, the world would be a far better place. Plait limits himself to debunking the scientific claims. His problem is when YEC believers misuse and misstate science to “prove” their points.

I have no intention of discussing their arguments based on the Bible. I leave that to experts on religion and interpreting various ancient texts. I also have no desire to insult, denigrate, or argue against anyone’s religious beliefs, as long as they do not use scientific data incorrectly to support these beliefs.

And then he goes on to tackle a few of claims made by YEC advocates, showing that they leave out crucial information, lie about what the data says, and fail (or refuse) to acknowledge any evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

I’ll admit that I firmly agree with Plait on this. I once embraced the YEC viewpoint. What changed for me was when I got far enough along in my science education to start evaluating the claims. I had already embraced an old earth by the time I graduated high school. Once the internet became available to me, I was able to search out additional sources, and the whole thing fell apart. There were too many outright lies in the YEC information. (Similarly, despite my family’s embrace of “alternative” medicine, I found that the materials often couldn’t even get high school chemistry right. It was obvious at some point that the whole thing was a highly lucrative scam.)

In a way, then - and this is the lawyer speaking too - what this world needs is a lot less credulity and a lot more skepticism. This political season has been ample demonstration of that fact, with so many willing to just accept what someone says without thinking it through and checking out the actual facts.

In summary, then, what this book does is make a compelling argument for actually testing and looking stuff up before accepting claims. Depending on one’s prior knowledge, this book could either be a revelation, or just a confirmation of one’s own research. In my case, I did learn some things. For example, I had not thought through exactly why there would be no visible stars in photographs of astronauts on the moon. (It’s all about photography and how bright the astronauts were in direct sunlight.) There are lots of fun tidbits for everyone. However, I think that the real strength of this book is going to be sharing it with my kids and with others who wish to understand why some things are simply not credible. One hopes it can be an antidote to the culture of “post first, question later - or probably never.”

And maybe, one can only hope, it can at least convince a few people that scientific illiteracy isn’t funny.

***

A few random things:

Seriously, Death From the Skies is really great. One of my 11 year old friends read it and discovered a thirst for more knowledge about relativity and astrophysics. Science is great stuff!

On a related note, Crash Course Astronomy is very, very good. I thought I had a pretty decent grasp of the basic concepts, but Plait includes so many things discovered just since we put the Hubble in orbit that prove the universe is even more amazing than I knew. Plait has that rare and invaluable gift of taking complex topics and making them understandable without dumbing them down. Obviously, this isn’t a graduate level physics course or anything, but for those of us outside of the scientific world, it is a great introduction to important concepts.

Also, Plait’s blog (Bad Astronomy) is now hosted by Slate Magazine. It is worth following for the astonishingly beautiful photographs of the universe he posts.

I also cite Plait to my friends who think all atheists are abrasive like Richard Dawkins. (No diss on Dawkins’ scientific work - he’s legit. But he is abrasive, and even other atheists consider him sexist.) Plait has such a sense of wonder that his love for his topics is contagious. He also is great at keeping his focus on things that can be proven or disproven, a distinction that all of us of whatever faith or no faith should keep in mind. There is far more we have in common anyway.

I read this book during our recent camping trip at Pinnacles National Park. Although I didn’t do a post about this particular trip, I have written several posts about past trips. Pinnacles is fairly close to where I live, and it is a truly magical place. From the soaring condors, so close to extinction when I was a kid, to the atmospheric talus caves, to the rocks and spires of a volcano, extinct for 20 million years, and displaced from a part of itself by 180 miles due to the movement of the San Andreas Fault. I have written about it a few times before, and you can find those posts here, on my National Parks and Monuments page. The geology of Pinnacles was one reason I rejected Young Earth Creationism. The natural history of the rocks is visible, and the forces necessary to drag the plates so far would have been too cataclysmic to have occurred instantaneously. 

This too is on point - particularly in light of the history presented in The History of Pi. Recently, this person was elected to the Texas Board of Education. Fact: I am a Christian. Also Fact: this is disturbing to me beyond belief, that someone who so flagrantly denies the validity of empirical evidence would be put in charge of determining curriculum. Phil Plait is right about the widespread acceptance of scientific ignorance. 

I have to mention this as well: Plait gives a shout out to the a number of great sources for further information. Among these is none other than Nick Strobel, who teaches Astronomy and other stuff here at our local junior college, Bakersfield College. The kids and I have attended some of Strobel’s lectures at the planetarium. He is great with kids, and an educator in the best sense of the word. My wife took a unit from him on the physics of Star Trek back when she was in nursing school. For anyone who believes the community college system - or state schools in general are inferior, I submit Nick Strobel, and many other outstanding educators who devote their lives to doing the hard work of individual education in places that give them no glory and often inferior pay. These are the good guys, and what they do for humanity deserves far more credit than it gets. (For what it is worth, Strobel is also in my camp on the YEC debate. He is a Methodist who vehemently objects to the teaching of literalist/fundamentalist doctrine as science.)

Death From the Skies! by Phillip Plait

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

I first discovered Phil Plait from his own astronomy blog, Bad Astronomy. It is a great place to get stunning celestial photos, and other astronomy related updates.

This site happened to mesh well with our science study this year, which was astronomy. As I noted in an earlier post, I chose to take the kids to the Bryce Canyon National Park astronomy festival this year to wrap up our course. Prior to that, during a camping trip to Pinnacles National Park, we ran into a family from northern California who were seriously into astronomy, and possessed both a telescope and (in the case of the mother), an outstanding knowledge of the sky. That was our first chance to view nebulae and galaxies through a telescope. We later met them out in the desert for clearer skies and a view of Saturn. Bryce was just another chance (and bigger telescopes) to explore the universe. It is amazing how it worked out for us.

I decided to bring this book along on our astronomy related trip because, well, why not? In another coincidence, we ended up attending a ranger lecture on some of the same topics. So it all tied together. 

The title and the cover art are intentionally provocative - and tongue in cheek. Plait is a not primarily a media figure, but an actual professional physicist and astronomer. He got his start working on the analysis team for the Hubble Telescope, and went on to other interstellar research, before being tabbed by NASA for public outreach due to his writing and speaking skills. Even understanding his area of research takes a decent background in astronomy.

Thus, the title is really a dig at the way the media loves a crisis and bold, ludicrous headlines; but rarely if ever stops to learn about and understand the underlying facts. Like the title, the book is filled with delightfully dry humor, and parody of the hyperbole used in news stories.

This book discusses the threats to human existence from space. This ranges from the common, but survivable (and potentially avoidable) scenario of a large meteor or small asteroid to the inevitable and catastrophic, but extremely distant fact of the death of the universe. In between are such “fun” possibilities as a neighboring star going supernova, and a small black hole passing through the earth.

In order to explain these potentialities, Plait engages in a surprisingly detailed explanation of stars and their life cycles, the birth of stars, the formation of solar systems, the ways that different stars die, the interaction of gravity, and so on. If you want a quick education on all of this and more, this is actually a pretty good book to start with. Pop Science may not be a substitute for a full mathematical education, but for those of us who wish to know without making a career of it, books like this are enlightening - and fun.

In what should come as absolutely no surprise, I found Plait’s dry sense of humor to be delightful. Just one example from the second chapter, which discusses solar flares and coronal mass ejections, is a good start. (If you have no idea what a coronal mass ejection is, get this book!) Crucial to understanding these events is a knowledge of the sun’s magnetic field. (Since the sun has little iron, how does this occur? Another reason to get the book.)

When taken all together, the Sun more closely resembles a ball of writhing worms than a single sphere of gas. It’s like a street map of Tokyo, but in three dimensions and changing with time as well. Because of this, the magnetic field of the Sun is a nightmare as well, making it ferociously difficult to understand. On the positive side, though, it also keeps a lot of solar physicists off the streets.

There are too many fun facts to mention many of them, so I will limit myself to a few.

The first one is an epiphany regarding black holes. We tend to think of black holes as being huge, with enormous event horizons. Get even a few light years away, and you are a goner.

Not so. First was the obvious: a black hole with a mass of, say 5 solar masses, exerts the same gravity as 5 suns at the same distance. (Plenty of stars in our neighborhood are close to 5 solar masses. These will eventually go supernova and become a black hole.) So a planet could easily enough orbit around one without falling in.

In fact, five solar masses, give or take, is the most common size of black hole, resulting from the death of a star.

How big is such a black hole? And what is the diameter of its event horizon?

18 miles. That’s all.

I guess this should have been obvious. In order to get matter dense enough, it would have to fit in a really small space.

Even supermassive black holes, like the one at the center of the Milky Way, aren’t really that “big” in terms of size. Mass, yes, as in millions of times the mass of our sun. Size, not so much. The event horizon wouldn’t even reach to the orbit of the earth around our sun. Even the biggest detected anywhere, hundreds of billions of solar masses, would still have an event horizon merely a couple times as big as the size of our solar system. Two light hours across.

Considering that the nearest star to our own is 4 light years away, even the largest event horizon is chump change compared to the actual distances out there. Crazy stuff.

See why I liked this book?

One more tidbit. At one time, the universe was believed to be infinite in both dimension and time. In other words, the stars continued on forever in all directions, and the universe had always existed. If this were true, then the sky would be equally bright in all dimensions. Which it isn’t.

Oddly, it was, of all people, Edgar Allan Poe who first solved the conundrum. Poe posited that the universe must be finite in one (or both) dimensions. Either you run out of stars as you get far enough away (the universe is finite in dimension), or the universe was formed recently enough that the light from the most distant stars hasn’t had a chance to reach us yet.

The research that showed that the universe was expanding came decades later, and led to the conclusion that the universe had a definite beginning (14 billion years, give or take), and that it is also finite in extent.

One final bit, which may be a preview of a future post.

Plait is publicly opposed to a few ideas that he views as counter to science and dangerous in effect.

The first is the anti-vaccination movement. I could spend a whole post on this, but suffice it to say that the entire movement is founded on one fraudulent study by a certain Andrew Wakefield, who concocted a scheme along with an unethical trial attorney to win huge settlements from vaccine manufacturers while selling chelation treatments. This information came to light years after the study, and it has since been withdrawn. This information is easy to find from reputable sources on the internet, as is the fact that no study that had controls, a reasonable sample size, and the bare minimums of proper conduct has ever shown a correlation (let alone causation) between vaccines and autism.

And yet the myth persists.

Obviously, I agree wholeheartedly with Plait on this one.

Plait also rails against global warming denialists. I don’t feel like touching this one right now, so I will avoid it completely.

The final one is Plait’s opposition to Young Earth Creationism.

This really needs to be a future blog post. I’ll just give a teaser by saying that I am solidly Old Earth. I have looked deep into the heavens, and even with a small scope, it is pretty dang obvious that the deeper you look, the more you see. With the Hubble, it is possible to see many billions of light years away (and therefore into the past.) The YEC “explanations” for this are insulting to anyone who has a working high school level of knowledge in math and science. One textbook we used even tried to claim that the speed of light (despite ALL evidence to the contrary) must have been different in the past. Not using that publisher ever again.

Places like Bryce have on display evidence of the age of the earth (geology) and of the universe (astronomy). The more I read YEC “explanations” for what I see, the more I am convinced that they are making stuff up to fit a hyper-literalist view of the creation account. There are just too many contradictions necessary to support a 6000 year old universe. 

One further point that Plait makes, which I believe is important, is that within the scope of what it can explain (what, how, where, and when, but not the ultimate why), science leads to an ever-increasing knowledge of the truth. It isn’t always right, but it gets more right with time, experimentation, and further data. As Plait puts it, science asymptotically approaches reality, although it is hard to know exactly how far up the curve we are at this time.

YEC, on the other hand, sits at one place, which it believes to be the truth, despite all evidence to the contrary. The core of the belief is a hyper-literalist approach to a few passages from an ancient document, written before even ancient Greek science, and hardly intended as a science textbook.

As I said, fodder for a future post.

I should also note that, unlike certain prominent atheists (ahem, Richard Dawkins), Plait makes a distinction between religion in general and old earth creationism (and its relative theistic evolution) and young earth creationism. Plait is, in general, not anti-religion, but against those who wish to ignore those things that science can show (the how, not necessarily the ultimate why).

Anyway, perfect timing for this book. I recommend it for fans of science, and for anyone who loves to learn. It is fascinating stuff.

Note on other books and posts:

For more on the question of the ultimate “why?” I recommend Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt.

For some provocative information on genetics and mutation, The Violinist’s Thumb by Sam Kean is a great read.