There have been searches for life on other planets. Two spacecraft named Viking landed on Mars in 1976 searching for the building blocks of life. The Viking landers conducted biological experiments. Some of the results were promising but not conclusive. A recent Phoenix lander detected perchlorate salts on Mars. But the question of microbial life on Mars remains unresolved. The latest Mars probe, the Curiosity rover, may come closer to answering the question about life on other worlds (see question 91).
Decades ago, very few scientists believed there was any life beyond Earth. The prevailing view was that we humans were alone in the universe and life was a chemical quirk that happened only once—an act of God, if you will.
Now the pendulum has swung the other way. The current belief is that the conditions for life are not that hard to duplicate. Life on Earth is based on five elements: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Those elements are known to be plentiful in the universe.
Astronomers have already discovered planets around other suns or stars. NASA recently announced that the Kepler spacecraft found several planets similar to the size of Earth orbiting distant stars. Some of these planets are about the right distance from their sun to possibly support life.
Our own Milky Way Galaxy has between two hundred billion and four hundred billion stars. There are an estimated one hundred to two hundred billion galaxies in the known universe. So just based on probabilities, life should be plentiful “out there.” But mathematical probabilities do not constitute proof. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the name of a scientific project being conducted by groups that are listening for radio transmissions from outer space.
Our most likely contact from any intelligent alien life forms will come from listening to their radio transmissions. The book Contact, by astronomer and writer Carl Sagan, and the movie by the same name, seems to be the most realistic scenario of what that detection and interaction might look like. Which direction to look in, which radio frequencies to listen on, and which method of communication to use are all unknown. The search has been uncoordinated and sporadic.
Brainwashing is the process of changing the thoughts and beliefs of another person against their will. In psychology, brainwashing is often referred to as “thought reform” or “thought control.”
We frequently hear about brainwashing in our everyday lives. Are advertising and infomercials brainwashing? What about political rhetoric? Or rightist talk radio? Most people view these as persuasion, propaganda, education, or campaigning, not as brainwashing in the narrow sense of the word.
Let’s look at some of the more famous cases of so-called brainwashing. A few American soldiers captured in the Korean War confessed to their North Korean captors to waging germ warfare, and a few reportedly pledged allegiance to Communism. At least twenty-one refused to return to the United States after 1953. Patty Hearst, heiress to a publishing fortune, was kidnapped by the left-wing Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. The group isolated and brutalized her, and she ended up joining the group. A famous photo from a surveillance camera shows a gun-toting Hearst robbing a bank.
Lee Boyd Malvo assisted John Allen Muhammad in killing ten people in the 2002 Washington, DC, sniper attacks. Malvo, age seventeen, was abandoned by his mother in Antigua, picked up by Muhammad, brought to the United States, and brainwashed into believing there was an impending war between the Islamic religion and the United States.
Lawyers used the “brainwashing defense” in both the Hearst and Malvo cases. In both trials, the defense claimed their client would not have committed such crimes under normal situations.
Some infamous religious cults could fall into the brainwashing category, too, including the People’s Temple with Jim Jones in Guyana; David Koresh and the Branch Dravidians in Waco, Texas; and Heaven’s Gate, founded by Marshall Applewhite, out in San Diego. Some people consider these cases to be brainwashing because the adherents engaged in activities that are out of the mainstream of accepted societal behavior. Examples include isolation, suicide, and total adherence to a single leader.
The Manson family, the Ku Klux Klan, the Unification Church, and the Hare Krishna movement are sometimes put in the brainwashing category, but not everyone would agree.
True brainwashing is an intense form of influence, requiring complete isolation and dependency of the brainwashee. This kind of brainwashing takes place in prison camps or cultist compounds. The practitioner has complete control over the victim’s sleep and eating patterns, and even bathroom privileges. Through this forced total dependency, the brainwasher breaks down the person’s identity to the point where there’s nothing left. The brainwasher then replaces that identity with another set of values, beliefs, and attitudes.
The 1962 psychological-thriller classical movie The Manchurian Candidate, starring Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury, is a good depiction of brainwashing. In this political thriller, the son of a prominent US family is brainwashed by his Communist handlers to assassinate a potential political opponent. They remade it in 2004 with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. The critics said it was bad, and they are probably right.
This is a classic magic trick first performed in London in 1920, later executed by Harry Blackstone, Doug Henning, David Copperfield, Criss Angel, and a host of lesser-knowns.
There are several variations on this illusion. The basic trick is one in which the woman lies down in a box. The box, with the woman inside and her head and arms sticking out one end and her feet out the opposite end, is sawed into two halves. Each half is on a dolly or wheeled table. The halves are separated, showing the lady has been sawn into two parts. Then, with great fanfare, the two separated boxes are joined back together. With immense flourish and thunderous applause, the woman rises up out of the box and stands beside the magician.
How is it done? The box is deeper and wider than it appears. The woman climbs in the box, but she folds her legs up into a fetal position, with her head sticking out one end of the rectangular box. Fake legs stick out the other end. So her entire body is actually in one half of the box. She can wiggle the legs with ropes. Some newer illusions even use remote-control radios and motors to operate the legs. And some versions use a second scrunched-up woman on the other side of the box to provide the legs.
The magician, with loud music, much noise, fog, smoke, and wild gestures, “saws” through the box and the woman with a large circular buzz saw or a chainsaw. Metal plates are inserted into grooves, one on each side of the saw cut. The magician pulls the two halves apart and swirls them in circles. The woman smiles, waves her hands, and wiggles her feet. The two halves are joined together, the two metal plates are removed, and the agile young miss pops out of the box, waves again, and bows. The appreciative audience lets out a sigh of relief.
Some magicians actually saw through a piece of wood to enhance the effect and heighten believability. Some station a doctor or nurse nearby. Horace Goldin, in the 1920s, would have an ambulance parked outside or bring one onto the stage if the facilities could handle it. It was Goldin who also made the mistake of taking out a patent on his illusion. In so doing, he revealed how he did the trick. Patents are in the public domain and open to anyone who wants to read them.
Some feminists have criticized the “sawing the lady in half” trick, and a few magicians have responded by placing a male assistant in the box. Magician Dorothy Dietrich uses a male assistant and bills herself as the “First Woman to Saw a Man in Half.”
In India, the magician P. C. Sorcar used a buzz saw to cut his wife in two during a televised show. Just as he finished the dastardly deed, the television host quickly signed off and the show ended. The shocked and horrified viewers thought she had accidentally been killed. But the time had simply run out on the live broadcast.
Very big! In the 1700s and 1800s, there were people who made wings from wood and fabric, attached them to their arms, and then tried to fly. You see some of those old Movietone News reels from the 1920s and 1930s of guys, wings attached, jumping off bridges and splashing into the water. I say “guys” because women are way too smart to try such stuff!
In order to fly, wings have to create as much lift upward as the person’s weight pulls downward. There is a minimum forward speed and a minimum wing area to create the needed lift. The equation for lift is: Lift = ½ρv 2A, where ρ = density of the air, v = velocity of the wing or plane, and A = area of the wing. So the bigger the wing (A), the faster the airfoil must move (v). But v, the velocity, is squared, so the power needed for the minimum speed for lift increases more rapidly than the weight of the machine. For example, for a given-size wing, if the weight were doubled, the power would more than double to attain the minimum speed for lift.
When you do the calculations, you find that for a person of average size to fly, their chest muscles would need to project out to about four feet, and their legs would have to be spindly stilts. Not practical at all. Humans were clearly not meant to fly! Remember, we weigh a lot more in proportion to our size than birds, which have hollow bones.
However, human-powered flight is possible. In 1977, Paul MacCready won the one-hundred-thousand-dollar Kremer prize for designing the Gossamer Condor, which flew a figure eight, one-mile-long course. MacCready calculated that a good bicyclist could develop, or generate, one-third horsepower almost indefinitely. All he needed to do was find a design that kept the weight down and provided a huge wing, sort of like a super-hang-glider.
Athlete-bicyclist Bryan Allen powered the Gossamer Condor on August 23, 1977. He sat in a cockpit of 0.016-inch-thick see-through Mylar, pedaling a bicycle-like mechanism that turned a propeller. The wingspan was ninety-six feet and the plane weighed a mere seventy pounds. The flight took him 7.5 minutes.
Two years later, MacCready designed the carbon fiber Gossamer Albatross, which flew the English Channel and won a new $214,000 Kremer prize. The twenty-two-mile distance was covered in a little less than three hours, with a top speed of 18 mph, five feet above the waves. The Gossamer Albatross now hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Yes, theoretically, it is possible to travel forward in time, but not backward in time. We can travel faster through time by changing our relative velocity or speed, an idea rooted in Einstein’s special theory of relativity (see question 208). To do so would require us to travel as close as possible to the speed of light, which is about 186,000 miles per second. So far, the fastest humans have traveled is seven miles per second, when astronauts were going to and coming back from the Moon. There’s a long way to go!
The faster you travel, the slower time moves relative to a stationary observer. Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest star we see in the night sky, is about nine light-years away. If you traveled at 99.99999999 percent of the speed of light, the relativistic effects are seventy thousand times normal. Mass increases by seventy thousand, time slows down by the same amount, and length contracts by same amount. You could go to Sirius in the morning and get back late at night. You would be less than a day older, but everyone else on Earth would be eighteen years older. There is no magic here, no voodoo of any sort. However, we simply have no way at the present time of getting to those speeds.
A telescope is a kind of time machine. It allows you to look into the past. If you see the Andromeda Galaxy in the night sky, you are looking two million years into the past. The light that you see tonight left Andromeda two million years ago. The Andromeda Galaxy may not even be there now. All we know is how it looked two million years ago.
We can’t see or look into the future because it hasn’t happened yet, but we can make predictions and conjectures about it. Of course, most of those guesses are predicated on what we already know. And no matter how good we are at predicting it, all of us should care about the future, because we will spend the rest of our lives there!
The term “time warp” originated in science fiction. A time warp is an anomaly, discontinuity, or distortion in the passage of time that would allow events from one time period or era to move to another era. A time warp is an eccentricity in which people and events from one age can be imagined to exist in another age.
Sometimes it refers, sort of jokingly, to the way people live. For example, “Nothing in their lives has changed since the 1950s; they’re living in a time warp.” Let me tell you, as a teacher who works with teenagers all the time, many teens think their parents are living in a time warp! And they think their grandparents are hopeless!
At times, people are referring to Albert Einstein’s concept that time and space form a continuum, which folds, warps, and bends from an observer’s point of view. But most of the time the idea of “time warp” refers to the concept that people or a spaceship can travel faster than light travels. Recall those segments in the Star Trek television series, where Captain Kirk asked the crew to bring the spacecraft Enterprise up to Warp 5. “Warp 5” meant they were traveling 125 times the speed of light according to the old warp table formula.
That’s all good in a television program. The reality is quite different. One of the things that Einstein’s special theory of relativity shows is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
So just as there is no such thing as teleportation, no “beam me up, Scotty,” there is also no way to travel faster than light travels. Light travel is the ultimate speed limit of the universe. If you’re going faster than the speed of light, you can forget about the Wisconsin State Patrol. God will pull you over!
Albert Einstein wondered what the world would look like if he could travel on a beam of light. It took him ten years to find out. Answer: He never could, because at the speed of light, time stands still, mass increases to infinity, and length contracts to a narrow line. The warp in space is actually the curvature of space-time, which we commonly refer to as gravity. Isaac Newton explained how gravity behaves, but Albert Einstein explained why gravity is responsible for why any two objects in the universe attract each other.
Time Warp is a science television program on the Discovery Channel featuring an MIT scientist-teacher, Jeff Lieberman, and camera expert Matt Kearney. And “The Time Warp” is a song from the 1975 movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
ESP, or extrasensory perception, is the ability to know something by means other than our five senses. Clairvoyance is the ability to gain information about the location of something or some physical event beyond the normal senses. Psychokinesis, or telekinesis, is the moving of an object by mental power. Mental telepathy, or mind reading, is communication by means other than the five senses. “Paranormal” is an umbrella term for all scientifically inexplicable phenomena, of which there are many. Solid proof of any paranormal powers is very elusive; evidence is largely anecdotal. There seem to be no scientifically accepted cases of mental telepathy, despite many scientific tests.
Many people have had a “telepathic experience” at some point in time. A mother is instantly aware her son has been killed in war. A person has an overwhelming feeling that the phone is about to ring, and it does. Someone thinks about a friend they have not seen in years, and later they run into each other at Walmart. Are these cases of mental telepathy or random coincidences? Scientists don’t seem to be able to come up with any repeatable scientific tests to confirm or disavow these phenomena.
There are some people who claim they can move or bend objects using just their thoughts. Uri Geller, an Israeli-British citizen, is famous as a spoon bender, but Geller has been proven to be a fraud. Spoon bending is a common stage trick. Geller was unable to bend any tableware on a Johnny Carson appearance in 1973. Carson, an amateur magician, knew something about trickery.
A lot has to do with what people want to believe. Many people want to believe that there is something out there, that there are powers or forces greater than us. It gives them meaning and purpose for living. For some, it’s almost like a religion.
So there will always be folks who think that there is a bigfoot or a Loch Ness monster, that UFOs landed at Roswell, or that planes and ships mysteriously disappear in the Bermuda Triangle (see question 65). There are people who believe that the landing on the moon was faked. Some still think the Earth is flat.
What about mental telepathy? There may be something to it. But for now, there is not a shred of credible evidence that a person can know what someone else is thinking.
The joule is a unit of energy. It was named after James Prescott Joule, son of a British brewmaster. Joule measured how much mechanical energy, or work, is required to heat water. He found that 4.2 joules of energy is equal to one calorie of heat energy (see question 178).
So how much is a joule worth? A joule is enough energy to heat up a gram of water 1°C. A joule is the energy needed to lift a small apple up one meter, and it’s the energy released when that same apple falls one meter. In electricity, a joule is one watt per second. We pay about nine cents for a kilowatt hour. A kilowatt hour is 3,600,000 joules.
Which gets us around to the question: How many joules can send you to eternity? Some sources state that a discharge of ten joules into the human body can be fatal. Such a source could be from a capacitor used in flash photography or from an electrical wire. Other sources say as little as one joule can be enough to kill a person.
It depends on whether the electricity is delivered to dry or wet skin or under the skin, such as from a cut or open wound. When the skin is wet, it conducts electricity much better (see question 196). If the electricity is delivered across the heart, say from one arm to the other arm, or if it is applied under the skin, very little current is enough to be fatal—as little as twenty milliamperes.
Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are those portable devices placed in airports, schools, convention centers, and wherever large numbers of people congregate. The idea is that any layman trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation or first aid can use them quickly. Now they even give instructions to walk you through the process. The first AEDs gave a single, powerful shock of 360 to four hundred joules, but this was too strong and injured some patients. The newer ones are designed to give two sequential lower-energy shocks of 120 to two hundred joules. Each shock moves in the opposite polarity between the pads. The application of the shock from the pads is supposed to stop the arrhythmia, allowing the heart to reestablish an effective rhythm.
Those power strips we buy in stores are now rated in joules. A typical label on an outlet strip might read “Six-Outlet Surge Protector—Rated at 840 Joules.” Surge protectors are also rated in joules. The rating tells you how much energy the surge protector can absorb before it fails. A rating of one thousand joules or more is considered good protection. Surge protectors have a component called a metal oxide varistor (MOV) that diverts the extra voltage of a spike or surge to the ground connection.
Yes, spontaneous combustion does occur. Common examples are rags soaked with gasoline, kerosene, paint thinner, varnish, or car engine cleaners that get tossed into a pile or trash can. The liquids evaporate, and the surrounding air is filled with fumes that are easily combustible. All it takes is some spark or sun beating down of them for a fire to break out.
Another kind of spontaneous combustion is the so-called “grain dust” explosion. These occur around grain elevators, sawmills, and ships being loaded with fertilizer. The air gets filled with microscopic pieces of grain, wood, or powder. Billions of tiny particles provide a huge surface area for burning. Any little spark and kaboom!
But humans spontaneously combusting? A lot of people may think so, but scientists aren’t convinced. A human can’t burst into flame from a chemical reaction within.
But what of the persistent stories, well over a hundred accounts, of finding human remains that appear to have spontaneously combusted? Most, if not all, of these cases were of people who were discovered already dead. In other words, they weren’t sitting there in the easy chair watching the Packers game and all of a sudden turned into a human torch. All the cases have a familiar pattern. The victim is almost completely consumed. The coroner discovers a sweet, smoky smell in the room. The extremities often remain intact. The head and torso are burned and charred beyond recognition. The room around the person exhibits little or no sign of any fire.
One of the more common theories is that the fire is caused by methane gas build-up in the intestines. Proteins in the body that are used to speed up chemical reactions (enzymes) ignite the methane gas. Another, more up-to-date theory proposes the wick effect. A candle works by having a burning wick on the inside surrounded by wax made of flammable fatty acids. The wax keeps the candle burning. The wick effect is basically an inside-out candle. In the human body, the body fat supposedly acts as the flammable material, and the victim’s clothes act as the wick. As the fat melts from the heat, it soaks into the clothing and acts as a wax-like substance to keep the wick burning slowly. This theory jibes with the fact that the victim’s body is destroyed and yet the extremities are hardly touched and the surroundings do not catch on fire.
There is no conclusive proof of spontaneous human combustion. There is, however, much anecdotal evidence. Most scientists say there are likely explanations. Many of the cases have been smokers who fell asleep with a lit cigarette or pipe. A number were under the influence of alcohol, and some had diseases that restricted their movement. Some were fires set by criminals to cover up their dastardly deeds.
Charles Dickens wrote a serialized novel from 1852 to 1853 called Bleak House. One of his characters in the book, an alcoholic by the name of Krook, is done away with by spontaneous human combustion.
This phrase refers to astrology. The claim of astrology is simple: a person’s character and destiny can be understood from the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets at the moment of their birth. Interpreting the location of these bodies using a chart called the horoscope, astrologers claim to predict and explain the course of people’s lives and help them make decisions. Predictions and advice like these for the coming month are also commonly called horoscopes. Astrology arose at a time when humankind’s view of the world was dominated by magic and superstition, when the need to grasp the patterns of nature was often of life-and-death importance. Astrologers believe that the important constellations are the ones the Sun passes through during the course of a year. These are the constellations of the zodiac.
Simply put: astrology doesn’t work. Many careful tests have shown that, despite their claims, astrologers really can’t predict anything. French statistician Michel Gauquelin sent the horoscope of one of the worst mass murderers in French history to 150 people and asked how well it fit them. Ninety-four percent of the subjects said they recognized themselves in the description. Researcher Geoffrey Dean reversed the astrological readings of twenty-two subjects, substituting phrases that were the opposite of what the horoscopes actually stated. Yet the subjects in this study said the readings applied to them just as often (95 percent of the time) as people for whom the original phrases were intended. No wonder astrological predictions are written in the most vague and general language possible.
We see a lot of TV psychics and tarot card readers willing to part us from our money. I don’t think we should be tied to an ancient fantasy, left over from a time when humans huddled by the campfire, afraid of the night. Have fun by reading your horoscope in the daily newspaper, but don’t take any stock in it. Have you noticed that the horoscope is often placed on the same page as the comics? Remember that line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, spoken by Cassius: “Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”