The April 2013 issue of Scientific American has the latest ("The Low-cost Ticket to Space" by S. Alan Stern) in a long series of articles predicting that the era of cheap and easy spaceflight is just about to break out. These stories usually have a "manned" bias. Explicitly or implicitly they assume that it is important for people to have direct access to space. I found the story just sad. It saddens me to see how little has changed in the past 50 years.
Fifty years ago the Apollo moon landings had just wrapped up and it was early days for the Space Shuttle. Some things have changed. The Shuttle has been retired. Some things have not. We haven't sent a man (or woman) to the moon since. We are yet again full of wide eyed plans to revolutionize access to space. Fifty years ago it was the Shuttle. Today it is private space launches. That's a change but not that big of one. And, depressingly, the sales pitch is still the same. Then the Shuttle was going to make it cheap and reliable to get to space. Why? Reusable components. Now private launches are going to make it cheap and reliable to get to space. Why? Reusable components. Sheesh.
Then the Space Shuttle was supposed to be the gateway to manned exploration of the moon and beyond. Guess what? The same is true for private space launches. It is nice that the Scientific American article does have another pitch. It says it is important for scientists to have access to space. Cheap and reliable (both pitched and predicted in the article) launches by private companies would actually be helpful to scientists if they ever come into being. And I truly hope it happens. But remember the International Space Station. Well, it's still there and it's still gobbling great chunks of NASA's budget. The justification for the ISS was all the great science it would enable. It never happened.
The premier technical journal of the science community that is published in the U.S. is called Science. It is published by the AAAS (American Academy for the Advancement of Science). I have subscribed to it for years. Several times a year it publishes a cluster of articles based on some space based scientific program. Recently, for instance, they published a cluster based on scientific returns from the MESSENGER probe orbiting Mercury. Scientists have found out some very interesting things about Mercury that completely justified the Science coverage.
And it's not just Mercury. They have also published clusters based on various probes to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and other parts of the Solar System. Science has published several clusters based on findings of the Hubble Space Telescope (no surprise). But they have also published clusters based on other "Astronomical Observatories". Several missions featured in Science packages are unfamiliar to most of the public. (Quick - what's the "Dawn" spacecraft up to?) My point is that Science does these packages frequently (several times per year) and on a wide variety of space missions. But they have yet to do a package based on science produced on either the Space Shuttle or the ISS. (I recall no Scientific American articles based on scientific research hosted on the Shuttle or ISS either.) "Supporting more scientific research" is an argument that has never had any traction when it comes to increasing support for space related activities. But I have digressed.
The main argument in the Scientific American article is one about cost. "Private companies will make space flight really cheap" paraphrases the article's main point nicely As I mentioned before, this argument parallels the previous argument that "the Space Shuttle will make space flight really cheap" that was propounded in the '70s while the Shuttle was under development. In the Shuttle's case it never really worked out. During its midlife the Shuttle had a cargo capacity of about sixty thousand pounds. And a launch cost (not counting Shuttle development costs of many billion dollars) about six hundred million dollars. This works out to a cost of ten thousand dollars per pound. That's really expensive and explains why space flight has always been a low volume operation. And remember the Shuttle was supposed to deliver low cost access to space.
Cost figures are hard to come by in coverage of the space program aimed at the general public. The Scientific American article is no exception. It is full of gee whiz and "trust me, it'll be really cheap" but it's short on actual numbers. A rare exception is the information that Virgin Galactic intends to (but hasn't actually) charge $200,000 to take 200 pounds on a suborbital mission. That's only a thousand dollars a pound, a 90% savings over the shuttle, right? But the Shuttle delivered its pound to low earth orbit and Virgin Galactic is only delivering its pound to "suborbital". Figure at least a doubling of cost to achieve LEO (low earth orbit - e.g. to the Space Station). In fact, Space X, one of the companies featured in the story, claims their costs figure out to be just under $2,000/lb. However, a Space X mission is costing NASA $133 million to deliver 29,000 lbs. of cargo to the ISS. This figures out to about $4,500/lb., a modest improvement over the older Shuttle costs. (Late stage Shuttle flights after all the safety fixes and allowing for general inflation penciled in at over a billion dollars per flight to deliver only about 50,000 lbs. of payload, about $20,000/lb.). The Shuttle carried all that extra "man rated" weight and overhead plus all that purported "government inefficiency" overhead, so this is not as impressive an improvement as it might otherwise seem. So what's the story?
It turns out the basic science of rocketry was figured out by Robert H. Goddard in the 1930s. He developed the first rockets that were not toys. And he almost single handedly developed the science of rocketry. The Nazis were almost the only ones who paid any attention. They used his work as the starting point for the design of their V-2, the first military rocket of any practical value. The V-2 opened the eyes of the rest of the world to the potential of rocketry. This led to the first successful satellite launch in 1957 and the first successful manned space flight a couple of years later. By the end of the '60s rocket science had reached a level of maturity that permitted the first manned moon landing. Unfortunately, since then not much has changed. The only big improvement has been the development of light, cheap, reliable computer technology. Coupled with great advances in instrumentation, helped greatly by the same advances in computer technology, it has since become possible to create very sophisticated robotic vehicles, some of which are quite small. But the basic "rocket" part of "rocket science" has changed very little.
Goddard figured out in the '30s that hydrogen/oxygen was the best rocket fuel in terms of efficiency. No one has come up with anything better since. By the '60s solid fuel rockets had been developed. These were less efficient but the fuel was a lot less expensive. This has led to a number of hybrid designs consisting of a solid fuel lower stage or solid fuel strap-on boosters combined with liquid fuel upper stages. (BTW, Goddard also pioneered the multistage rocket in the '30s.) This is a small advance in technology driven by cost considerations. The third type of rocket motor is one where the hydrogen is replaced by something cheaper and easier to handle like kerosene. This is intermediate in efficiency and cost between a solid fuel rocket motor and a hydrogen/oxygen rocket motor. Goddard pioneered kerosene/oxygen rocket motors in the '30s.
By the '60s most rocket designs were based on a 90/10 ratio. The rocket consisted of 90% fuel (by weight) and 10% everything else (structure, tanks, motors, guidance and control etc., and payload). As far as I can tell this ratio still holds. You can figure that a typical rocket on the launch pad is 90% fuel. And that "everything else", well there is a 90/10 rule here too. It turns out that the payload usually represents about 10%. Combining these two factors leads us to the conclusion that it takes about 99 lbs. of fuel to put one lb. of payload into LEO. So there is an absolute limit to how much you can reduce the cost of a rocket launch. You have to pay for all the fuel, which gets all burned up by the launch.
This leads me to ignore 99.9% of what I read about whatever the new idea is about how launching rockets into space is all of a sudden going to be real cheap. A hydrogen/oxygen rocket motor burns two lbs. of hydrogen and 8 lbs. of oxygen to produce ten lbs. of water. Those ratios are just chemistry. I showed above that it takes about 99 lbs. of fuel to provide the boost to put one lb. of payload into LEO. So tell me, how much does it cost to deliver 11 lbs. of liquid hydrogen and 88 lbs. of liquid oxygen to the fuel tanks of a rocket on the launch pad? That's the absolute minimum cost it is going to take to get that single pound into LEO.
A quick Internet search finds liquid hydrogen in large quantities running about $2.50/lb. and liquid oxygen (again in large quantities) running about $0.10/lb. I don't know how good these numbers are but I am going to use them for the rest of this article. They would translate to a cost of about $36 for our 99 lbs. of hydrogen/oxygen fuel (mostly for the hydrogen). Now the rest of it (structure and other components, design, launch services, etc.) is going to cost something. But figure it in multiples of the cost of our 99 lbs. of fuel. The current Space X contract of $4,500/lb. works out to 145 times fuel costs. It looks like there is room for improvement. Space X itself apparently thinks that it can improve the situation as it works down the learning curve. If it can deliver an improvement to $2,000/lb. this would work out to 55 times fuel.
The article denigrates the Atlas V, a vehicle developed and operated in the standard NASA / Military Industrial Complex environment. The article pegs Atlas V launch costs as being in the $150 million to $350 million range. Wikipedia lists the lift capacity of an Atlas V to LEO as 64,000 lbs. (a little more than the capacity of the pre safety fix Shuttle). This pegs the cost at $2350 - $5500 per lb. This translates to 65 to 150 times fuel cost. That puts it in the same range as Space X. So where's the big cost savings of Space X (and other "new and more efficient" vendors) over NASA? It looks like unmanned rockets save significant costs over a manned rocket like the Space Shuttle. But that's hardly a surprise. And it also looks like the new vendors like Space X have yet to come up with some great new way to get launch costs down to the point where they are way below an Atlas.
So, if we ignore history, ancient and new, what is the lowest feasible cost multiplier using fuel cost as our base and LEO as the target of our benchmark? An old article in Science in support of a now discontinued NASA program to develop a cheap efficient booster (it was discontinued not because it failed but because it never garnered any political support) thought that a target of $300/lb. was feasible. That was a few years ago so let's round the figure up to $360/lb. to allow for inflation (this probably underestimates inflation but it makes the math simple). This would work out to a cost of 10 times fuel. I have certainly seen no one suggest that a more aggressive target is feasible. Anyone who can deliver a cost of 10 (or even 20 or 30) times fuel cost is someone who has found a way to build a better mousetrap. But especially if the cost is 100 or more times the fuel cost "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain". What's going on is pure flimflam (or perhaps just good marketing).
Now let me focus for a few minutes on why I have been fixated on LEO. It turns out that if you don't have to be in a hurry (e.g. because you have people aboard) LEO gets you most of the way to anywhere you want to go in the solar system. We have already noted that it costs about half as much to get to "suborbital" (usually a "ballistic" flight with a peak altitude of about 100 miles but not enough oomph to get you into orbit at 100 miles) costs about half as much as LEO. So, if your rocket can put one pound into LEO it can put two pounds into suborbital. Similarly, if your rocket can put 1 lb. into LEO it can put about 0.7 lbs. into GEO (Geostationary orbit where all the communications satellites live). I don't know what the ratio is but I think the same rocket could put about a half a pound into the vicinity of the moon. Note: It takes extra energy to translate "vicinity of the moon" into lunar orbit).
"Vicinity of the moon" will also get you to the surface of the moon. But you would be going at a pretty good clip when you got there. If you want to survive the experience, you need extra energy to slow down. It goes without saying (that's why I am saying it) that it would take more energy to get you off the moon and back home too. I don't know how much energy it takes to get you to the vicinity of other planets but I think it's mostly pointing in a different direction rather than applying more energy. So let's say you could send about 0.4 lb. wherever you wanted in the rest of the solar system. Again, going into orbit or landing takes more energy. And the trip can take years. The "New Horizons" Pluto flyby mission was launched in 2006 and will finally fly by Pluto in 2015, about a decade later.
To summarize, when you are reading one of these gee whiz stories about how we are about to crack space wide open ask yourself "how much progress are we making on the cost front?" The Shuttle was billed as a giant cost saver. It wasn't. We are currently saying bad things about the Atlas V, Delta IV, and other traditionally developed and operated unmanned launch vehicles. But the new "cheaper and better" alternatives like the Space X Falcon don't look like a big improvement. Maybe these new options will get a lot cheaper as time goes by. We'll see.
Finally, if you want a web site that is chock full of hard core "this is how it really is" information then go here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php. The site is maintained by Winchell Chung who does art work for various SciFi projects and comic books. The whole site is a lot of fun. But the link sends you to a lot of technical material. Subjects include the real world (e.g. how much energy does it take to get from here to there) to various fantasy/scifi subjects (e.g. if it was possible to build a nuclear rocket how would it work and how well would it work).
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Paranormal Activity
I have recently been reading some old Science Fiction by an author called Andre Norton. I used to read a lot of Science Fiction. Now I still read some but mostly I read fantasy. Somehow the whole NASA Moon Landing thing took a lot of oomph out of Science Fiction. Now Fantasy has mostly displaced it in my reading. But nevertheless, Science Fiction colored my perception of a number of things. A number of authors invented religions. Seeing what went into inventing a religion for fictional purposes caused me to reexamine "real" religions in a new light. The result was not pretty. I can't really tell a "real" religion from one that was made up solely to make a story more interesting. That eventually turned me into an atheist. Many would say that was a negative outcome.
But another subject that was popular in Science Fiction then was what is now referred to as "the paranormal". I was reminded of this because Norton used it frequently in her stories. I read a lot of her work when I was younger. She was the first popular female author in the genre. She was very popular at the time I was reading her stuff (the '50s and the '60s) and she remained popular for many decades to follow. She died in 2005 at the age of 93. And Norton wasn't the only one. Heinlein used it in several stories as did many others. This made me very receptive to the idea of paranormal phenomenon or Psi, as it was generally referred to at the time. Norton and other authors presented situations in which their characters demonstrated various paranormal abilities as a routine part of the story. This gave me an understanding of what the various talents might be and how they could be used. Now Science Fiction is fiction. So while Science Fiction opened me up and made me receptive to the possible existence of these abilities it did not prove their existence.
I have never been a practicing scientists. But many people who were practicing scientists had a similar experience. Exposure to Science Fiction or other life experiences made them receptive to the possibility that paranormal talents were real. And certainly positive proof by a scientist of the actual existence of one or more paranormal talents would have resulted in vast amounts of fame, glory, and very likely riches. (I know some people reject this characterization out of hand but bear with me. I will get back to the subject of the "war between science and the paranormal" below).
So anyhow I looked around to see what scientists had found and there was not much. So I waited and I waited and I waited. After waiting a decade or so I decided it was all bunk. And along the way I found out that there was a long history of people investigating paranormal talents. One of the oldest I am familiar with is Mark Twain. Twain got interested in "miracle works" at tent revival meetings. He quickly determined that they were fraudulent and went on to make fun of them. This was in the 1800's. Later Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, got interested in the subject. Now you can scour the Holmes cannon for any support for the existence of paranormal phenomenon but you will come up dry. But later in life Doyle became a believer. And, also later in life, he and Harry Houdini became friends. Houdini, as a result of the credulity of Doyle and for other reasons, got interested in mediums. He was very successful at exposing them for frauds. But Houdini was never able to convince Doyle that mediums were bunko artists.
So far I have talked about fraud, people who knew that what they were doing was dishonest, but pretended to be believers. There is a whole other group of people. These are people who are honest but believe in the paranormal for one reason or another anyhow. Again I want to dip into the annals of history to discuss a case that will demonstrate what I mean.
Clever Hans is a horse that lived in Germany around the turn of the 20th century (e.g. 1900). Hans could do arithmetic. Hans' owner, a fellow named Wilhelm von Osten was honest as the day is long. Everyone who investigated him came to that conclusion. If Hans was a fraud then Osten was not in on the con. This led a lot of people to conclude that Hans was the real deal. Then along came a man named Carl Stumpf. He did a very thorough and very careful investigation of Hans. Since Osten was completely honest he co-operated with Stumpf and his associates. For a long time they were stumped. It looked like Hans was the real deal. Then Stumpf noticed something. Hans got the wrong answer every once in a while. This was important because every time Hans got it wrong Osten also got it wrong. This caused Stumpf to conclude that Osten was unconsciously signaling Hans to tell the horse what the right answer was. This was easy to verify. Hans was tested in situations where he could see Osten and when he could not. Hans got the correct answer when he could see Osten and acted like a normal horse, arithmetic-wise, when he couldn't. (BTW, it turned out to be important to make sure that Hans could also not see any of the regular stable crew too.) Anyhow, the moral of the story is that it is possible to fool ourselves about whether paranormal phenomenon are happening, even if everyone is completely honest.
Returning to more modern times, by the 1960's some scientific work had been done on paranormal phenomena. Most of it was negative but some of it seemed to be positive. But the positive results were never clear cut. The typical experiment showed something happening at a rate above what pure chance would predict. These "confirmations" would come and go but they were never 100%. If something would be projected to happen 50% of the time based on chance then maybe it would happen 60% of the time. And only a few investigators were able to get any positive results at all. In many cases another scientist would reproduce the same experiment exactly as it had been reported and not be able to reproduce the positive result. This was very troubling. This caused scientists to carefully review the reported experimental technique and also the actual experimental technique. They found problems.
What the "Clever Hans" case demonstrates is that a lot of care needs to be taken when doing these kinds of experiments. Honest people can fool themselves into believing something that ultimately turns out to be false. Beyond that there is the problem of con artists. In many cases it is very hard to catch these people in the act. In many of the cases that Houdini investigated reputable scientists had vouched for the validity of the paranormal activity. Magicians are professional con artists. They know what to look for when evaluating whether someone is on the up and up. Scientists are equipped to deal with a nature that guards its secrets well. But they are not equipped to deal with people actively trying to pull the wool over their eyes.
In the past few decades various investigators have reported "encouraging preliminary results" a number of times. But a bigger more thorough investigation never seems to improve the situation. The results stay at the "intriguing" level or go away altogether. Other investigators are unsuccessful at reproducing the results. Interest fades. Then someone starts the cycle over a few years later. The new setup always is different than the old one. Careful investigation uncovers different but equally serious methodological or other problems. But otherwise, things follow the same trajectory. The science community in general has become fatigued with the process. So funding has dried up and interest has dried up.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since I first got interested in paranormal phenomenon. Many of the kinds of phenomenon Science Fiction writers wrote about back then have gone out of style. We have actually regressed. The people that are currently active resemble the medium of old, the kind of person Houdini was investigating. Now the modern practitioner no longer gathers people around a table in a dark room so they can experience things that go bump in the night. Instead we have the "ghost hunter" traipsing around in a darkened house at night trailing a bunch of gear that looks very scientific. (What the gear is actually measuring is another question.) These shows are cheap to produce and popular enough to turn a nice profit so they are all over the place on cable. Although the TV people pretend to be scientists they do such a poor job of it that only the believers are fooled.
There is a popular explanation for what I have laid out above. It contends that paranormal phenomena are real but scientists have a bias, some would say a hatred for this sort of thing. "It's a conspiracy. These results would rock the foundations of science. So scientists cover up the results in order to save their skins (or their funding)." This perspective fundamentally misrepresents what science is. The idea is that "science" is what's in the science books and, if it's not in a science book then scientists would not be able to handle it and they would "do whatever it takes" to cover it up. But let's see what a real scientist thinks.
Richard P. Feynman is one of the outstanding scientists of the twentieth century. He worked on the Atom Bomb project at Los Alamos. He has won two Nobel prizes in Physics. He is one of the founders of something called Quantum Electrodynamics. For many years he was a Physics professor at Cal Tech. Just before he died in 1988 he was a member of the committee that investigated why the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up and killed everyone aboard. If you want to get a feel for the man I would suggest reading his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman". It is completely nontechnical, quite funny, and full of insights about the human condition.
Feynman's most noted piece of professional writing is three volume series called "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". It is based on a series of lectures he gave over a period of two years to freshman and later sophomore students at Cal Tech. It was designed to be an introduction to Physics for the kind of very smart students who got into Cal Tech. The "Lecture" books became very popular, both among people with a deep interest in physics but also with the general public. They have since been reprinted a number of times, including a "Definitive and Extended" edition in 2005. My point in going on a bit is to emphasize the point that the material in these books was intended to represent mainstream thinking by scientists, specifically physicists. Here is an extended quote from chapter 2:
Scientists have been especially intrigued by a concept called entanglement for some time now. One of the properties of an electron is called "spin". An electron can be either "spin up" or "spin down". It is possible to entangle two electrons (the technical details don't matter). Then it is possible to separate the two electrons by hundreds of feet, all while maintaining the entanglement. Then the spin of either electron (it doesn't matter which) can be measured. When we measure the spin of the other electron a short time later it will always be the opposite. Scientists sometimes call this "spooky action at a distance". And it's not just one scientist or one lab. Dozens of scientists have done dozens of experiments involving entangled particles. It's gotten to be a cottage industry. And there are other particles you can do this with besides electrons. And there are other properties you can measure besides spin. And you can even do experiments involving more than two particles. And these particles can be entangled in very complicated ways. The result is always the same. If you measure one entangled particle and it comes up "heads" then the other particle will come up "tails". Now that's truly weird.
The fact that scientists call this "spooky action at a distance", even if only sometimes, tells you something. Scientists find it weird too. But scientists hew to "the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment". They do experiments. They sometimes get truly weird results. Frequently they will go back over the experiment and find something wrong. When they fix it the weird result goes away. But sometimes no matter how hard they examine the experiment or its result they can't find anything wrong. And sometimes what their experiments tell them is that no sensible idea explains all the results. That's when they come up with weird theories. Twentieth century physics is littered with example after example where experimental results show that all sensible theories are wrong. But then a scientist comes up with a truly weird theory that does fit all the experimental results. It's almost gotten to the point where the fact that a theory is weird is considered a point in its favor.
The reason scientists reject the idea that paranormal activity is possible is not because it is too weird or too unbelievable. It is because there is no valid experiment that demonstrates the existence of paranormal activity. There are many experiments that point to weird and unbelievable phenomena. In many cases these phenomena are now considered part of mainstream science. And none of these phenomena emerged from the community of believers in paranormal phenomena. And scientists have now been burned over and over by claims of experimental confirmation of paranormal activity. Some of these experiments have been done by otherwise reputable scientists. And just because an experiment is done by someone without "proper scientific credentials" doesn't mean that the result is not scientifically valid. But the actual experiments done to date that purport to support the existence of paranormal activity have not been done in a scientifically valid manner.
This history of claims of experimental proof of the existence of one or another paranormal phenomenon later turning out to be bad scientific technique or on all too many occasions outright fraud, has resulted in most scientists who will address this area at all to fall back on "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof". It is important to remember that several examples of extraordinary claims have actually been followed by extraordinary proof in the realm of what is now mainstream science.
The Geologic theory now called "plate tectonics" was laughed out of the room when it was first proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegner. But evidence slowly built up in its favor (and against the alternatives) and it came to be widely accepted within the community by about 1970 and more broadly accepted thereafter. Another example, also from Geology, is the theory first propounded by Louis Alvarez in 1980, that a giant meteor impact wiped out the Dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. When it was first floated it was greeted by a great deal of skepticism. But again many different kinds of evidence built up in support of the theory (and damage alternative theories) and it is now widely supported within the scientific community. Closer to home, the theory of Quantum Mechanics was subjected to a great deal of criticism when it was first developed. One thing that speeded its acceptance was that all sensible theories had been disproved by the time it came along. So given a choice between a truly weird theory that got the answers right and other theories that were either equally weird and less successful or not weird and totally unsuccessful the physics community came to accept Quantum Mechanics. But I think that too this day most scientists working in the field wished there was a less weird theory that worked. Unfortunately, no one has come up with such a theory.
Wegner, Alvarez, and the pioneers of Quantum Mechanics are now celebrated in the scientific community. Wegner did not live long enough to see his reputation rehabilitated. But Alvarez did. And so did many of the pioneers of Quantum Mechanics. Scientists understand how hard it is to do truly groundbreaking (i.e. weird at the time it is first proposed but later accepted as valid) work. So they try to identify and publicly support such people. Einstein is the classic example of this. When he began publishing groundbreaking work in 1905 he was not even a working scientist. He was a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. Einstein's 1905 work was profoundly weird. But, like the Quantum Mechanics people a couple of decades later, he proposed solutions to problems that were generally accepted to have no "normal" solution. He also provided the thinking behind his solutions. Aside from its weirdness and profound originality, it was remarkably straight forward. And scientists were quickly able to devise and execute experiments based in his thinking that supported his conclusions.
Einstein went on to come up with other weird and original ideas that also worked out. So he became the model for what a scientist should be. A scientist should be able to think up weird and original ideas then provide straight forward reasoning for why they might be right. Scientists embraced weirdness in the post-Einstein era. It was seen as the fast track to success. So a scientist who came up with some piece of paranormal activity that actually passed the "experiment" test would see that as an opportunity. He could become the new Einstein, or at least the new Wegner or Alvarez. The problem has not been with the weirdness of paranormal phenomena. It has been with getting experimental verification.
Finally, let's say you are not and don't want to become a scientist. But you would like to do something to confirm the existence of paranormal phenomena. My recommendation to you is to do an experiment. But, you say, we already agreed you don't want to become a scientist. That's ok. My suggestion is that you perform your experiment in a decidedly nonscientific way and in a decidedly nonscientific environment. And, if your experiment works, you immediately get a whole lot of money. Many people, given a choice between fame and money, would be happy with the money. And you don't have to wait years for the Nobel committee to decide you are deserving before you get the prize money. Instead, you get the money right away. Does that sound like a deal you might be interested in? Good! Let's go to Las Vegas. Really? Really.
Many paranormal abilities can quickly, and legally be transformed into cold hard cash. Let's say you can read minds. Get yourself to a poker table. Texas Hold 'em is a game that involves a lot of bluffing. With a little study, however, it becomes easy to win and to win big if you just know if the other guy is bluffing or not. You bluff him if your mind reading tells you he thinks he has a weak hand. He will usually fold and you will win big. If you have a good hand and your mind reading tells you he's bluffing stick around. He'll either eventually fold or lose at the showdown. Easy peasy.
Now let's say you can read minds but only co-operating minds. Then the game for you is Bridge. You and your partner can play killer defense if each of you knows exactly what cards your partner holds. And Bridge is played for money all over the place. It also may be possible to win at Poker by placing your partner behind an opponent where your partner can see his cards. This is hard to do because your partner could just signal you without using any kind of mind reading. But I'm sure you can come up with other "tag team" strategies that would turn mind reading ability into cash.
Let's say you can't read minds but have telekinetic abilities. In other words, you can move things around at a distance. How about moving the roulette ball around. You don't have to make it drop in "17" all the time. You can just bet red or even and get it to drop into a red or even slot more often than it should. You can even just settle for it not dropping into a green slot. This won't win you any money but it will give you a chance to break even. Similar ideas will allow you to win big at craps by adjusting the fall of the dice.
Similarly, let's say you can read the future. Well, read which number the roulette ball is going to drop on before bets are closed off. Again, if you know which number a shooter is going to roll it is easy to clean up at craps. And, if you can read as much as a day into the future, then Wall Street is the place for you.
Other approaches are possible with other paranormal abilities. A ghost partner can be a big help, for instance. They can read cards instead of a corporeal partner, for instance. And they are much harder to catch, either physically or on tape. The point is that the real world is actually running millions of paranormal experiments each day. The fact that casino owners (and Wall Street bigwigs) do very well, thank you, argues that most paranormal abilities don't exist. Usually it is possible to quickly figure out how to make money, a lot of money, by applying a paranormal ability appropriately. But no one seems to be doing it.
People come up with various "morality" rules that prohibit using paranormal talents for monetary gain. But lots of people "read minds" or "hunt ghosts" on TV and make a lot of money doing it. Somehow the morality rule is ineffective in their case. There are a lot of people who have found many different ways to make a buck off of someone else's belief in the paranormal. And there seem to be no paranormal police whose job it is to step in and shut down the frauds. There is just no reason to believe that paranormal activity is possible and every reason to believe that it is not possible.
But another subject that was popular in Science Fiction then was what is now referred to as "the paranormal". I was reminded of this because Norton used it frequently in her stories. I read a lot of her work when I was younger. She was the first popular female author in the genre. She was very popular at the time I was reading her stuff (the '50s and the '60s) and she remained popular for many decades to follow. She died in 2005 at the age of 93. And Norton wasn't the only one. Heinlein used it in several stories as did many others. This made me very receptive to the idea of paranormal phenomenon or Psi, as it was generally referred to at the time. Norton and other authors presented situations in which their characters demonstrated various paranormal abilities as a routine part of the story. This gave me an understanding of what the various talents might be and how they could be used. Now Science Fiction is fiction. So while Science Fiction opened me up and made me receptive to the possible existence of these abilities it did not prove their existence.
I have never been a practicing scientists. But many people who were practicing scientists had a similar experience. Exposure to Science Fiction or other life experiences made them receptive to the possibility that paranormal talents were real. And certainly positive proof by a scientist of the actual existence of one or more paranormal talents would have resulted in vast amounts of fame, glory, and very likely riches. (I know some people reject this characterization out of hand but bear with me. I will get back to the subject of the "war between science and the paranormal" below).
So anyhow I looked around to see what scientists had found and there was not much. So I waited and I waited and I waited. After waiting a decade or so I decided it was all bunk. And along the way I found out that there was a long history of people investigating paranormal talents. One of the oldest I am familiar with is Mark Twain. Twain got interested in "miracle works" at tent revival meetings. He quickly determined that they were fraudulent and went on to make fun of them. This was in the 1800's. Later Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, got interested in the subject. Now you can scour the Holmes cannon for any support for the existence of paranormal phenomenon but you will come up dry. But later in life Doyle became a believer. And, also later in life, he and Harry Houdini became friends. Houdini, as a result of the credulity of Doyle and for other reasons, got interested in mediums. He was very successful at exposing them for frauds. But Houdini was never able to convince Doyle that mediums were bunko artists.
So far I have talked about fraud, people who knew that what they were doing was dishonest, but pretended to be believers. There is a whole other group of people. These are people who are honest but believe in the paranormal for one reason or another anyhow. Again I want to dip into the annals of history to discuss a case that will demonstrate what I mean.
Clever Hans is a horse that lived in Germany around the turn of the 20th century (e.g. 1900). Hans could do arithmetic. Hans' owner, a fellow named Wilhelm von Osten was honest as the day is long. Everyone who investigated him came to that conclusion. If Hans was a fraud then Osten was not in on the con. This led a lot of people to conclude that Hans was the real deal. Then along came a man named Carl Stumpf. He did a very thorough and very careful investigation of Hans. Since Osten was completely honest he co-operated with Stumpf and his associates. For a long time they were stumped. It looked like Hans was the real deal. Then Stumpf noticed something. Hans got the wrong answer every once in a while. This was important because every time Hans got it wrong Osten also got it wrong. This caused Stumpf to conclude that Osten was unconsciously signaling Hans to tell the horse what the right answer was. This was easy to verify. Hans was tested in situations where he could see Osten and when he could not. Hans got the correct answer when he could see Osten and acted like a normal horse, arithmetic-wise, when he couldn't. (BTW, it turned out to be important to make sure that Hans could also not see any of the regular stable crew too.) Anyhow, the moral of the story is that it is possible to fool ourselves about whether paranormal phenomenon are happening, even if everyone is completely honest.
Returning to more modern times, by the 1960's some scientific work had been done on paranormal phenomena. Most of it was negative but some of it seemed to be positive. But the positive results were never clear cut. The typical experiment showed something happening at a rate above what pure chance would predict. These "confirmations" would come and go but they were never 100%. If something would be projected to happen 50% of the time based on chance then maybe it would happen 60% of the time. And only a few investigators were able to get any positive results at all. In many cases another scientist would reproduce the same experiment exactly as it had been reported and not be able to reproduce the positive result. This was very troubling. This caused scientists to carefully review the reported experimental technique and also the actual experimental technique. They found problems.
What the "Clever Hans" case demonstrates is that a lot of care needs to be taken when doing these kinds of experiments. Honest people can fool themselves into believing something that ultimately turns out to be false. Beyond that there is the problem of con artists. In many cases it is very hard to catch these people in the act. In many of the cases that Houdini investigated reputable scientists had vouched for the validity of the paranormal activity. Magicians are professional con artists. They know what to look for when evaluating whether someone is on the up and up. Scientists are equipped to deal with a nature that guards its secrets well. But they are not equipped to deal with people actively trying to pull the wool over their eyes.
In the past few decades various investigators have reported "encouraging preliminary results" a number of times. But a bigger more thorough investigation never seems to improve the situation. The results stay at the "intriguing" level or go away altogether. Other investigators are unsuccessful at reproducing the results. Interest fades. Then someone starts the cycle over a few years later. The new setup always is different than the old one. Careful investigation uncovers different but equally serious methodological or other problems. But otherwise, things follow the same trajectory. The science community in general has become fatigued with the process. So funding has dried up and interest has dried up.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since I first got interested in paranormal phenomenon. Many of the kinds of phenomenon Science Fiction writers wrote about back then have gone out of style. We have actually regressed. The people that are currently active resemble the medium of old, the kind of person Houdini was investigating. Now the modern practitioner no longer gathers people around a table in a dark room so they can experience things that go bump in the night. Instead we have the "ghost hunter" traipsing around in a darkened house at night trailing a bunch of gear that looks very scientific. (What the gear is actually measuring is another question.) These shows are cheap to produce and popular enough to turn a nice profit so they are all over the place on cable. Although the TV people pretend to be scientists they do such a poor job of it that only the believers are fooled.
There is a popular explanation for what I have laid out above. It contends that paranormal phenomena are real but scientists have a bias, some would say a hatred for this sort of thing. "It's a conspiracy. These results would rock the foundations of science. So scientists cover up the results in order to save their skins (or their funding)." This perspective fundamentally misrepresents what science is. The idea is that "science" is what's in the science books and, if it's not in a science book then scientists would not be able to handle it and they would "do whatever it takes" to cover it up. But let's see what a real scientist thinks.
Richard P. Feynman is one of the outstanding scientists of the twentieth century. He worked on the Atom Bomb project at Los Alamos. He has won two Nobel prizes in Physics. He is one of the founders of something called Quantum Electrodynamics. For many years he was a Physics professor at Cal Tech. Just before he died in 1988 he was a member of the committee that investigated why the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up and killed everyone aboard. If you want to get a feel for the man I would suggest reading his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman". It is completely nontechnical, quite funny, and full of insights about the human condition.
Feynman's most noted piece of professional writing is three volume series called "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". It is based on a series of lectures he gave over a period of two years to freshman and later sophomore students at Cal Tech. It was designed to be an introduction to Physics for the kind of very smart students who got into Cal Tech. The "Lecture" books became very popular, both among people with a deep interest in physics but also with the general public. They have since been reprinted a number of times, including a "Definitive and Extended" edition in 2005. My point in going on a bit is to emphasize the point that the material in these books was intended to represent mainstream thinking by scientists, specifically physicists. Here is an extended quote from chapter 2:
We stated it in the first chapter: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment. If it turns out that most experiments work out the same way in Quito [Ecuador] as they do in Stockholm [Sweden], then those "most experiments" will be used to formulate some general law, and those experiments which do not come out the same we will say were a result of the environment near Stockholm. We will invent some way to summarize the results of the experiment, and we do not have to be told ahead of time what this way will look like. If we are told that the same experiment will always produce the same result, that is all very well, but if when we try it, it does not, then it does not. We will just have to take what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual experience. (emphasis in original)That's how actual scientists think about science. The basic argument of a lot of the paranormal crowd is "these paranormal results are just too weird for scientists to accept so they reject them even though they are true". This perspective is just wrong. It is wrong first of all because paranormal results are not very weird. As I indicated above, Science Fiction writers have been incorporating them into stories for decades. None of the ideas about paranormal activity are very hard to wrap your head around. On the other hand scientific results can be breathtakingly weird. Let me give you an example.
Scientists have been especially intrigued by a concept called entanglement for some time now. One of the properties of an electron is called "spin". An electron can be either "spin up" or "spin down". It is possible to entangle two electrons (the technical details don't matter). Then it is possible to separate the two electrons by hundreds of feet, all while maintaining the entanglement. Then the spin of either electron (it doesn't matter which) can be measured. When we measure the spin of the other electron a short time later it will always be the opposite. Scientists sometimes call this "spooky action at a distance". And it's not just one scientist or one lab. Dozens of scientists have done dozens of experiments involving entangled particles. It's gotten to be a cottage industry. And there are other particles you can do this with besides electrons. And there are other properties you can measure besides spin. And you can even do experiments involving more than two particles. And these particles can be entangled in very complicated ways. The result is always the same. If you measure one entangled particle and it comes up "heads" then the other particle will come up "tails". Now that's truly weird.
The fact that scientists call this "spooky action at a distance", even if only sometimes, tells you something. Scientists find it weird too. But scientists hew to "the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment". They do experiments. They sometimes get truly weird results. Frequently they will go back over the experiment and find something wrong. When they fix it the weird result goes away. But sometimes no matter how hard they examine the experiment or its result they can't find anything wrong. And sometimes what their experiments tell them is that no sensible idea explains all the results. That's when they come up with weird theories. Twentieth century physics is littered with example after example where experimental results show that all sensible theories are wrong. But then a scientist comes up with a truly weird theory that does fit all the experimental results. It's almost gotten to the point where the fact that a theory is weird is considered a point in its favor.
The reason scientists reject the idea that paranormal activity is possible is not because it is too weird or too unbelievable. It is because there is no valid experiment that demonstrates the existence of paranormal activity. There are many experiments that point to weird and unbelievable phenomena. In many cases these phenomena are now considered part of mainstream science. And none of these phenomena emerged from the community of believers in paranormal phenomena. And scientists have now been burned over and over by claims of experimental confirmation of paranormal activity. Some of these experiments have been done by otherwise reputable scientists. And just because an experiment is done by someone without "proper scientific credentials" doesn't mean that the result is not scientifically valid. But the actual experiments done to date that purport to support the existence of paranormal activity have not been done in a scientifically valid manner.
This history of claims of experimental proof of the existence of one or another paranormal phenomenon later turning out to be bad scientific technique or on all too many occasions outright fraud, has resulted in most scientists who will address this area at all to fall back on "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof". It is important to remember that several examples of extraordinary claims have actually been followed by extraordinary proof in the realm of what is now mainstream science.
The Geologic theory now called "plate tectonics" was laughed out of the room when it was first proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegner. But evidence slowly built up in its favor (and against the alternatives) and it came to be widely accepted within the community by about 1970 and more broadly accepted thereafter. Another example, also from Geology, is the theory first propounded by Louis Alvarez in 1980, that a giant meteor impact wiped out the Dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. When it was first floated it was greeted by a great deal of skepticism. But again many different kinds of evidence built up in support of the theory (and damage alternative theories) and it is now widely supported within the scientific community. Closer to home, the theory of Quantum Mechanics was subjected to a great deal of criticism when it was first developed. One thing that speeded its acceptance was that all sensible theories had been disproved by the time it came along. So given a choice between a truly weird theory that got the answers right and other theories that were either equally weird and less successful or not weird and totally unsuccessful the physics community came to accept Quantum Mechanics. But I think that too this day most scientists working in the field wished there was a less weird theory that worked. Unfortunately, no one has come up with such a theory.
Wegner, Alvarez, and the pioneers of Quantum Mechanics are now celebrated in the scientific community. Wegner did not live long enough to see his reputation rehabilitated. But Alvarez did. And so did many of the pioneers of Quantum Mechanics. Scientists understand how hard it is to do truly groundbreaking (i.e. weird at the time it is first proposed but later accepted as valid) work. So they try to identify and publicly support such people. Einstein is the classic example of this. When he began publishing groundbreaking work in 1905 he was not even a working scientist. He was a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. Einstein's 1905 work was profoundly weird. But, like the Quantum Mechanics people a couple of decades later, he proposed solutions to problems that were generally accepted to have no "normal" solution. He also provided the thinking behind his solutions. Aside from its weirdness and profound originality, it was remarkably straight forward. And scientists were quickly able to devise and execute experiments based in his thinking that supported his conclusions.
Einstein went on to come up with other weird and original ideas that also worked out. So he became the model for what a scientist should be. A scientist should be able to think up weird and original ideas then provide straight forward reasoning for why they might be right. Scientists embraced weirdness in the post-Einstein era. It was seen as the fast track to success. So a scientist who came up with some piece of paranormal activity that actually passed the "experiment" test would see that as an opportunity. He could become the new Einstein, or at least the new Wegner or Alvarez. The problem has not been with the weirdness of paranormal phenomena. It has been with getting experimental verification.
Finally, let's say you are not and don't want to become a scientist. But you would like to do something to confirm the existence of paranormal phenomena. My recommendation to you is to do an experiment. But, you say, we already agreed you don't want to become a scientist. That's ok. My suggestion is that you perform your experiment in a decidedly nonscientific way and in a decidedly nonscientific environment. And, if your experiment works, you immediately get a whole lot of money. Many people, given a choice between fame and money, would be happy with the money. And you don't have to wait years for the Nobel committee to decide you are deserving before you get the prize money. Instead, you get the money right away. Does that sound like a deal you might be interested in? Good! Let's go to Las Vegas. Really? Really.
Many paranormal abilities can quickly, and legally be transformed into cold hard cash. Let's say you can read minds. Get yourself to a poker table. Texas Hold 'em is a game that involves a lot of bluffing. With a little study, however, it becomes easy to win and to win big if you just know if the other guy is bluffing or not. You bluff him if your mind reading tells you he thinks he has a weak hand. He will usually fold and you will win big. If you have a good hand and your mind reading tells you he's bluffing stick around. He'll either eventually fold or lose at the showdown. Easy peasy.
Now let's say you can read minds but only co-operating minds. Then the game for you is Bridge. You and your partner can play killer defense if each of you knows exactly what cards your partner holds. And Bridge is played for money all over the place. It also may be possible to win at Poker by placing your partner behind an opponent where your partner can see his cards. This is hard to do because your partner could just signal you without using any kind of mind reading. But I'm sure you can come up with other "tag team" strategies that would turn mind reading ability into cash.
Let's say you can't read minds but have telekinetic abilities. In other words, you can move things around at a distance. How about moving the roulette ball around. You don't have to make it drop in "17" all the time. You can just bet red or even and get it to drop into a red or even slot more often than it should. You can even just settle for it not dropping into a green slot. This won't win you any money but it will give you a chance to break even. Similar ideas will allow you to win big at craps by adjusting the fall of the dice.
Similarly, let's say you can read the future. Well, read which number the roulette ball is going to drop on before bets are closed off. Again, if you know which number a shooter is going to roll it is easy to clean up at craps. And, if you can read as much as a day into the future, then Wall Street is the place for you.
Other approaches are possible with other paranormal abilities. A ghost partner can be a big help, for instance. They can read cards instead of a corporeal partner, for instance. And they are much harder to catch, either physically or on tape. The point is that the real world is actually running millions of paranormal experiments each day. The fact that casino owners (and Wall Street bigwigs) do very well, thank you, argues that most paranormal abilities don't exist. Usually it is possible to quickly figure out how to make money, a lot of money, by applying a paranormal ability appropriately. But no one seems to be doing it.
People come up with various "morality" rules that prohibit using paranormal talents for monetary gain. But lots of people "read minds" or "hunt ghosts" on TV and make a lot of money doing it. Somehow the morality rule is ineffective in their case. There are a lot of people who have found many different ways to make a buck off of someone else's belief in the paranormal. And there seem to be no paranormal police whose job it is to step in and shut down the frauds. There is just no reason to believe that paranormal activity is possible and every reason to believe that it is not possible.
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